Who Knew? The Lost Kids of Armenian America, Part 4

This is the fourth part in The Lost Kids of Armenian America series, which explores the difficulties facing Armenian-American youth in the Los Angeles area (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3).

It seems that everyone knows about our woes except us. The first three pieces in this series came mainly from my own experience as a youth work professional. I thought it might be interesting to look into what other people know and so the pseudo-academic in me thought that we should do some research. I spent a little bit of time on the Internet and found a few things.

This series is about youth, but most of what I found on the Internet is about crime. Stories about crime are youth stories that are a few years too late.  Every crime story you see is because there wasn’t a story five years before it about a youth outreach program getting started in that neighborhood. If that outreach program had been functioning, those crime stories wouldn’t have been in your paper. You see, youth programming is crime prevention. Of course, youth programming should be done (and done extensively) because we love our youth, not because we hate crime. But having professionally run, well-funded, stable youth programming has the massively beneficial side effect of also preventing crime.

When we think of crime, however, we think of police, not youth programming. Police are crime intervention tools. They can catch criminals while they are committing crimes or after they have committed crimes. They can also push crime elsewhere by their presence but they are not well suited for crime prevention. Youth programming is crime prevention. Because, when you bring kids into the community, when you make them full members of society with knowledge of what roles and (more importantly) what responsibilities they have, when you speak to them in ways that make sense, they do not go into crime. When you ignore them, you have (among other things) a crime problem.

One of the things we try to communicate to the kids in our mentoring program is a strong sense of self-confidence. True self-confidence comes from self-love, and self-love comes from self-knowledge. That being said, let’s see how knowledgeable we, as Armenians, are about our Armenian problems.

Let’s start with our Armenian news media. My search, which wasn’t by any means exhaustive, found very little in the Armenian news media about the issues that our youth in Southern California (SoCal) are facing. There were a couple of articles in an Armenia-based website called Hetq, one of them titled “18,000 Armenians in California Prisons.” That 18,000 number comes to us in 2007 from a group called Armenian American Christian Outreach — the only program working with Armenians in prison in SoCal. Also in winter of 2005 this publication, Ararat, published an article in its print version discussing Armenian mafia crimes in Glendale. Besides that, you don’t see much in the Armenian news media (out of sight, out of mind).

On the other hand, Armenian entertainment media has had a recent flourishing in mafia soap-operas and movies. That doesn’t mean much though, since most ethnic media worldwide take their lead from American media which is full of mafia and gangster stories.

My line of work is filled with gangster stories too. Back in 2001 or so, I was with a kid in court; let’s call him Aram. He was up on a charge of carrying a concealed weapon (a knife with an 8” blade). The kid was already on probation so he was looking at time in Juvenile Hall. I remember standing in the hallway of the courthouse, talking to Aram when he introduced me to his cousin:

“This is my cousin. He’s an actor. He’s gonna make it.”

“Hey, good to meet you. You workin’?” I ask the cousin.

“Yeah,” he responds. “I’ve got a part in this new cop show.”

“What are you playing?”

“An Armenian gangster.”

“Seriously? An Armenian gangster?”

“Yeah, we speak Armenian and everything,” he said with a laugh.

While one cousin was being a gangster in the streets, the other cousin was playing a gangster on film. The show in question is The Shield, where although they get some of the cultural nuances wrong — you know, those things that we as Armenians cling to so dearly such as the all-important differences between Eastern and Western Armenians, etc. — they do show us some things about ourselves that we’ve managed to miss. It’s certainly sensationalized because it is TV, after all. The show about crooked cops in LA features a story line about Armenian mafiosi, names Glendale by name, and is filmed in Los Angeles’ Little Armenia neighborhood. There’s even a scene with strippers dancing to duduk, dhol, and accordion.

A few months after that court date, the cops raided Aram’s house. They found cocaine, a triple-beam scale and an unregistered 9-millimeter semi-automatic pistol. They took Aram in immediately. He sat in jail for a few months. I later found out that the stuff didn’t belong to Aram but to his father. The dad let Aram take the rap for him — he never told the cops that the stuff was his. His explanation was that, as a minor, Aram would face more lenient sentencing than he, the father, would have. I was furious when I found out. I got all in the dad’s face, yelling at him. His lawyer had to get in between us. (It’s an occupational hazard. You rarely have trouble understanding the kids, but the parents will drive you nuts.)

Besides The Shield there’s also Showtime’s Weeds. The Armenian gangsters in the second season of Weeds grow and sell marijuana. When the main character, Nancy, horns in on their operation, they hold her at gunpoint and murder a DEA agent before settling the matter by selling Nancy’s debt to another gangster.

Where did all these Hollywood writers get their inspiration? Maybe just the neighborhoods where they live — Glendale, Hollywood, Burbank, North Hollywood (all with substantial Armenian populations); or maybe the Los Angeles Times. Searches in the LA Times archive using the terms “Armenian” along with “prison” “gang” or “mafia” will return scores and scores of articles.

Let’s start with the most widely known name — the street gang, Armenian Power. An August 1997 Times article by Michael Krekorian (part 1, part 2) quotes LAPD Detective Charles Uribe, who in the mid 90‘s was after Armenian Power for about 10 murders:

It’s amazing with the tight family structure Armenians have, and their concern for education, that they are losing these kids to gangs as fast as Hispanics and blacks … When Armenian kids drift into a gang at an early age, they can’t bring them back. They get in the gang and never come back. When they come back, it is on a gurney at the coroner’s office.

Earlier that same year, the paper told of a self-proclaimed “Godfather of the Armenian mafia” who was sentenced to 14 years, along with 29 others caught in a “ring of drugs, prostitution and black market fuel,” (LA Times, 3/26/97, 4).

In December of 1999, the paper reported on the one-billion-dollar (billion is not a typo) defraud of MediCal organized by Armenian criminals. Six months later, the former head of Armenian Power was slain by a member of a rival Mexican gang, White Fence, (LA Times, 2/2/01, B1). Then in May of 2000 a 17-year-old Latino youth was bludgeoned and stabbed to death by Armenians in front of Hoover High School in Glendale. The following month  a 20-year-old Latino was shot and killed at a high school graduation celebration in Hollywood, (LA Times, 06/19/00, 6).

In October 2001, five Armenians were arrested for the attempted extortion and kidnapping of a well-to-do Armenian immigrant, (LA Times, 10/17/01, B3). A later article reported that an Armenian American at the other end of the crime and punishment spectrum, US District Judge Dickran Tevrizian, was involved in putting those criminals away, (LA Times, 04/26/02, B4). Then, in March of 2003, five other members of Armenian organized crime were arrested for plotting to kill rivals. The article proclaims:

A probe into Armenian organized crime … Glendale police, the FBI, sheriff’s detectives and the National Insurance Crime Bureau began investigating what authorities described as a Glendale-based crime ring (LA Times, 03/27/03, B4).

In June of the following year, an article discussing the same case asserts:

Neither the scope nor the viciousness of the plan surprised authorities. The alleged scheme, they say, is part of a recent surge in violence among the Armenian crime rings that have already transformed Glendale into a hotbed of insurance, medical and credit card fraud, (LA Times, 06/01/04, B1).

In April 2006, a Latino graffiti tagging crew member became the victim of a drive-by shooting by four Armenian teenagers between the ages of 14-15. They weren’t even old enough to drive. An August 2008 article in the LA Times told us that Armenian Power is involved in identity theft, (LA Times, 08/12/08, C1). If you needed an article to tell you that Armenian criminals in SoCal are involved in identity theft, then you just haven’t been paying attention.

On April 3, 2010 a 28-year-old Armenian man shot 6 other Armenians in a restaurant in North Hollywood. Four of those six men died. The suspect was arrested later that month near Seattle. This was reported in all the major Southern California news outlets.

In addition to the news media, the US government is also deeply aware of the issues plaguing the Armenian community. A March 2006 CNN article reported that Armenian Power was one of the targets of a Department of Homeland Security federal crackdown, which included some of the world’s largest street gangs: MS-13, Surenos, Bloods, Crips, Asian Dragon Family and Armenian Power. Oh, and by the way, the LAPD website currently has five Armenians named among their most wanted list.

All of this shines a light on a sad, sad truth that we must accept: Armenians have tragically little self-awareness. Self-awareness involves the negatives, as well as the positives; it includes an aspect of self-criticism. Lord knows that we have little trouble acknowledging and accepting positive aspects of ourselves. Self-criticism, unfortunately, is not our strong suit.

We excel at criticizing each other, but never each to himself.

Consider the following statement:

“I have faults. I work hard at being aware of my faults. I accept my faults and am willing to describe them openly amongst my family and my colleagues. I am working at improving myself. I need your help in doing that.”

It’s hard to even imagine a typical (whatever typical means) Armenian or Armenian American uttering those words with any true degree of sincerity. It’s hard to imagine, if we have a narrow idea of what an Armenian is — and most of us do.

Because of this, everyone except us is able to point out our faults. Everyone knows about our problems, but we don’t. Self-knowledge is power — power to act. These problems are ours and they are ours to solve.

Often we don’t even see our problems. If we see them, we don’t look; we pretend they’re not there. If we know they’re there, we expect others to do something. We expect the police, the schools or the government to do something; we don’t act. If we act, we do it half-heartedly. We build another church or another school, or get a basketball team together. Don’t get me wrong, schools and basketball teams and churches are great. I think we need them. They are not enough, however. They might be the right hook to get the kids in, but once we get them in, we have to care about what they have to say. We have to bring them into the community, the family. We have to spend time and money. We have to come up with creative ways to address new problems. The police cannot do it for us. Schools cannot do it for us; the public ones aren’t going to do it because they can’t, and the private ones can’t do it because they only serve a tiny fraction of the Armenian students in the US. We, as a community, must come together and decide that we are going to do something proactively.

Instead we point fingers at each other. We think, quite wrongly and to our own peril, that we can separate our already tiny people into groups called “us” and “them.” Many of you reading this article were probably jumping to conclusions as to whether the Armenians in question were from Armenia, Iran, Lebanon, etc. Maybe you thought to yourself, “He’s talking about Hayastantsis [Armenians from Armenia],” or “He’s talking about Beirutsis [Armenians from Beirut].” What we fail to understand, however, is that in real terms, it is impossible to divide our tiny people into even-tinier subsets of “us and them” and still aspire to any modicum of national strength.

If you find yourself thinking “We don’t do these things. Those Armenians are giving us a bad name,” you are probably a patriotic person who would like to see a strong Armenian nation and a strong Armenian people one day. What you fail to realize is that your mentality and national strength are mutually exclusive of one another.

If we are to find our strength, it will be together. If we are to care for our youth, it will be because they are Armenian youth, not because they are Beirutsi, Hayastantsi or whatever other label belongs to you. This is far beyond some naïve theoretics about unity. This is the only practical way forward. No other approach has any hope of working. The choice, my friends, is ours. If we change our minds, we can change our reality. If we do not, we cannot.