Posted on 03/16/2005 10:12:18 AM PST by BurbankKarl
Wednesday, March 16, 2005 - Members of a Russian-Armenian organized crime ring, including six suspects from the San Fernando Valley, have been charged with plotting to smuggle $2.5 million in black-market military weapons into the United States, federal officials said Tuesday.
The suspects sold the weapons -- including rocket-propelled grenade launchers, shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles and other Russian military weapons -- to an FBI informant who posed as an arms trafficker with connections to al-Qaida, officials said.
Although the weapons are of the type that homeland-security experts fear could be used by terrorists, officials said the suspects were smuggling the arms for profit.
"They didn't care who they were selling to," said Paul Browne, a spokesman for New York Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly. "They were motivated purely by greed, and they'll go to jail for that."
Browne said the investigation into the weapons operation began about a year ago as part of a probe into medical-insurance and credit-card fraud schemes being run by an organized crime syndicate.
Using wiretaps on seven phones and intercepting 15,000 conversations, investigators tracked the suspects to South Africa, Armenia and the Georgian Republic, according to a criminal complaint unsealed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.
The two accused of being ringleaders -- Artur Solomonyan, an Armenian, and Christiaan Dewet Spies, a South African, both living illegally in New York -- and 15 other suspects were arrested Monday night and Tuesday morning in roundups in New York City, Los Angeles and Miami, officials said.
Among those arrested were Garegin Gasparyan, 28, of Burbank; Tigran Gevorgyan, 21, of Glendale; William Thomas, of Los Angeles; Artur Solomonyan, 26, who has homes in New York and Van Nuys; and Solomonyan's brother Levon, 24.
Police still were searching for Armand Abramian, 27, of Glendale.
According to the criminal complaint, the smuggling ring sold the informant eight illegal weapons -- most of them military assault rifles, including two AK-47s and an Israeli-made Uzi machine gun. The dealers delivered three of the guns in New York City, three in Los Angeles and two in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
In recent weeks the suspects made a $2.5 million deal to sell the informant more powerful weapons, mainly Russian-made, officials said. The suspects were accused of giving the informant photographs of the weapons and saying they were holding them somewhere in Eastern Europe and were ready to get them shipped to the United States.
The photographs of the weapons were displayed at a news conference held Monday in New York City.
Los Angeles Police Department officers say they have noticed a spike in Russian-Armenian organized crime, especially in medical-insurance and credit-card fraud, but not in military weapons.
"We've never had this type of case in Los Angeles," said Cmdr. Mark Leap, the second in command in the LAPD's Critical Incident Management Bureau.
"It's certainly a concern that people would sell these types of weapons strictly for profit, and they don't care who they sell them to. That's one of the challenges of law enforcement -- to uncover these kinds of conspiracies and make sure the weapons don't fall into the hands of terrorists."
I find this sooo hard to believe given the ethnicities involved...then again anything is possible. Very disappointing if true
Similar to what the PLA/COSCO/Hutchison-Wampoa/Triads attempted a few years ago.
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