Gang Gains Reluctant Respect From Some

As young gangs harden, they become part of the social fabric. They learn how to parlay their violence into grudging respect. Many Armenian American youth, always conscious of being a minority, tell stories of the burgeoning Armenian Power gang coming to their rescue.

“They come faster than 911,” said a girl named Sonya, a 17-year-old student at Hollywood High.

She remembered an incident two years ago when a large group of Salvadoran students and a smaller group of Armenian Americans got into a heated argument over a trivial matter. Sonya’s friend, sensing a fight was about to break out, called an Armenian Power member on her cellular phone. Within a few minutes, 20 members showed up and quickly diffused the conflict, she said.

“I am not a fan of AP,” Sonya said. “I think they cause troubles for Armenians. But at that moment, I was very, very proud of them.”

Though many young people tell such stories, others in the Glendale and East Hollywood areas where the gang is headquartered complain that its mere presence can adversely affect their lives. “I used to bring my children to work with me, but now, with all the shooting, I’m afraid,” said a merchant who owns a dry-cleaning business on Hollywood Boulevard. The fear of her children being caught in a cross-fire has forced her to spend extra money on a baby sitter at home. “It’s just not safe around here,” she said.

Authorities agree, saying the 120-member gang has been responsible for at least 12 deaths.

Even so, Los Angeles Police Officer Sam Salazar tells a story about a problem the gang solved--self-servingly--for the police.

The corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Normandie Avenue had become a mecca for transvestite prostitutes. “Sometimes there would be 10 drag queens there,” Salazar said. “We tried to shoo them away, but they’d come back.”

Armenian Power members, seeing a chance to make some money, told the transvestites they would charge them $25 a night for protection from beatings.

The drag queens objected, pointing out that they weren’t having any trouble with beatings.

“I told those freaks, ‘Oh, no one’s jacking you?’ Then we jacked them up,” said Bizzy, a 19-year-old gang member. Salazar confirmed that the transvestite problem disappeared.

In a small visiting room at a correctional facility in Shafter, a San Joaquin Valley farm town down California 99 from the childhood home of legendary Armenian author William Saroyan, a powerfully built Armenian American gangster talked about the protection gang members provide.

“Look, I know a lot of people don’t like us,” said 24-year-old Armen Petrossyan, one of the founders of Armenian Power who, like many gang members, emigrated from the ancient city of Yerevan and distinguished himself in countless street battles. “They say bad things about AP. But, I tell you, when their kids are in trouble, when their kids are getting hurt at school, they call me. They call me and my homeboys and we protect their kids.”

The name of Armen Petrossyan, who earlier this month was released from state prison after serving a three-year sentence for armed robbery, will not ring a bell with most of the members of the Armenian gang. But mention his gang nickname, “Silent,” and everyone becomes interested.

If the gang has a single leader--now that another founder, Vahag “Boxer” Hagopian, is back in Armenia, hiding from murder charges--it is Petrossyan, many gang members say.

“Armenian people who put AP down, that say we are a disgrace, they don’t know this life,” Petrossyan said in a prison conversation. “This gangster’s life.”

On a spring evening, five AP members were living that gangster’s life in all its grim, unrewarding glory, hanging out on Normandie Avenue, sipping 22-ounce green bottles of Mickey’s Big Mouth in the drizzling rain, pouring some of the malt liquor onto the sidewalk and grass, a symbolic tribute “for the boys that couldn’t be here,” the dead and the imprisoned.

The five--Toto, Sniper, Panda, Clever and Weasel, ages 17 to 21, showing off tattoos in spaghetti-strap T-shirts--talked about how they got “jumped” into the gang, beaten to test their courage, and boasted of their fearlessness. Tales of daring escalated with each sip.

Every car that drove up or down Normandie was checked out. It might be full of their homeboys with news of a party or a fight. It might be full of rivals driving by to shoot at them. Two men walked by across the street. Clever, dressed in a massive black Oakland Raiders jersey, sprinted out to the middle of the avenue then suddenly stopped, like a wide receiver running a quick pass pattern. False alarm: The two men were not rivals.

“You never know when something is gonna go down,” Clever said.

The dramas, the battles, they are rare, set between long lulls in the action when gang members simply hang out together after a day at school or at home or at a job. They drink a little and talk about old fights and new girls, about who got busted and who was set free. They might smoke a joint or two, laugh about last week’s joy ride and fantasize about making millions. Though some members sell drugs on their own, the gang’s policy, they say, is no drug sales and no street robberies. On this evening, they brag about how they back down from no one.

“It don’t matter to us if they are black or white or Mexicans,” said another. “If they mess with us, we will fight back. If they get along with us, we’ll get along with them. We ain’t prejudice.”

Then the police swooped.

Three marked LAPD cars full of Hollywood Division gang detectives descended on the group, ordering everyone up against an apartment wall, hands interlocked over heads, feet spread wide.

“This happens every night,” whispered Toto.

For nearly 30 minutes the group was lined up and individually interviewed and photographed.

“We check them for new tattoos, things to see if they match the descriptions of any new crime suspects,” said Officer Danny Pesqueria. He appeared to have a good rapport with the gang. “If they treat me with respect, I’ll respect them.”

While the gang members were lined up, Pesqueria began joking with one of them, the recently paroled Sniper, a 5-foot-3 gang member notorious for stealing cars.

“You stole a Buick, didn’t you?” Pesqueria sarcastically asked. “Man, if you’re gonna get popped, at least get something cool.”

Everyone, including Sniper, laughed.

Armenian Power is old enough to have reached a tenuous, occasional accommodation with the men and women who try to keep it off the streets. From prison, “Silent” Petrossyan remembered Officer Salazar fondly.

“I like that fool,” he said, and told a story about the time Salazar came to him because the officer had lost his wedding ring on the street.

“I had all the guys looking for that damn ring,” the gang leader said. “We looked for hours. I really wanted to find it, ‘cause he is cool. He’s good people. Then, that fool comes by the next day and says he found it in his police car.”

Reminded of the story, Salazar smiled.

“One of the AP guys had a brother who worked at the jewelry market downtown and he told me, ‘Don’t tell your wife you lost it. We’ll make you another one and don’t worry about the cost.’ ”

Sharkey Klian, the man who taught a handful of Armenian boys martial arts and cringed as he watched them plant the seeds of what became Armenian Power, looks to the future with apprehension.

His nightmare, and the nightmare of many in the community, is that this first generation of Armenian gang members is only the beginning--that AP, like long-established Mexican American gangs in Los Angeles, will spawn generations of young people who fight for turf they don’t own, who kill other children they don’t even know, who break the hearts of countless families.

“We need to get these kids off the streets, get them in the right direction, or else the 12-year-olds are going to follow in the tradition,” said Klian. “We need to have an Armenian” on the boards of government anti-gang programs. “Someone who can talk to the gang and their families.”

Los Angeles Police Det. Charles Uribe, who estimates that Armenian Power has been involved in at least 10 shootings in the North Hollywood area in the last two years, looks at the gang’s evolution with astonishment.

“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,” he said. “When an Armenian kid drifts 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.”

Community members note that for every Armenian boy who joins Armenian Power, there are hundreds who never feel the pull, or resist it.

Hovik, a 16-year-old East Hollywood boy, is one.

Hovik said he’s never thought of joining for fear of what might happen to him. “If I joined AP,” he said gravely, “I’d be dead soon. I know it.”

But death would not come from a bullet launched by the trigger finger of a rival gang member or a shootout with police, he explained. “My father would kill me.”

A few, like Sokrat Adamian, who used to call himself “Dreamer,” grow out of the gang.

“Dreamer could have been a black belt, he could have been a teacher,” said Klian, who once taught the boy martial arts.

These days Dreamer, 18, stays home with his parents and younger brothers when he’s not going to the Armenian Pentecost Church on Van Ness Avenue in Hollywood, a church for born-again Christians.

“I would never go back to the gang,” he said.

He can credit Armenian Power’s rival, MS, for helping him find the Lord.

Three years ago, in a fight in an East Hollywood parking lot, a Salvadoran rival smashed a stick over his eye. Dreamer was taken to the hospital where two dozen stitches closed the gash.

His family was warned not to let him sleep on his stomach. But family members, exhausted from the ordeal, all fell asleep themselves. And Dreamer rolled over.

The eye wound hemorrhaged, sending blood to his brain and Dreamer into a critical, unconscious state.

“I was gone, but God sent an angel to save me,” he said.

God selected a rather unlikely angel: Armen “Silent” Petrossyan, the gang leader who would soon be sent to prison for robbery.

Silent, who had heard of the street battle, had come to visit Dreamer. Walking into the unlocked house on New Hampshire Avenue, he found Dreamer passed out and rushed him to the hospital, Dreamer said.

“God saw that I was doing wrong and he slapped me,” the boy said.

Dreamer still sees his old homeboys, who hang out a block away.

“I try to talk them into going to church,” he said. “That’s my job now.”

Miro Khanzadian, the volunteer chairmen of public relations of the Armenian Center in Glendale, believes that some Armenian parents are to blame for gang membership because they are too focused on getting ahead in business.

“Armenians are proud to have a reputation as hard workers,” Khanzadian said at a City Hall exhibit of photos of survivors of the Armenian genocide. “But some families are so concerned about establishing themselves, that in many cases they have forgotten the importance of family values.”

Khanzadian is helping organize a series of town hall-style meetings to inform immigrant Armenians of the seriousness of the gang problem.

“We need to inform the community,” he said. “We need to understand the problems of blacks and Mexicans so we don’t isolate ourselves. The problems they face, we face. The problems are available to everyone. Hopefully, so are the solutions.”

Not for Yogi.

In May, Krikor “Yogi” Telian, a 22-year-old AP member, pulled up to a stoplight in North Hollywood. The people in the car next to him shaped their hands to form the letters V and B, the sign of the Violent Boys, a 300-member Latino gang from North Hollywood. Yogi flashed his AP sign. A moment later, he was shot dead.

At his funeral, an Armenian priest gave a long eulogy. Yogi’s mother mumbled incoherently behind his words in an aching monotone, while the boy’s father sat silent and dazed.

Unlike blacks and Latinos, L.A.’s Armenian parents have no support group where they can console each other over losing their children to the streets.

The way things are going, they will.