‘It makes me sick. They are Armenians supposedly acting on behalf of Armenians, and things are not done right.’
Judge Snyder had overseen the genocide litigation since 2000, and she was clearly exasperated when the French board raised concerns to her in 2011, saying the problems “should have been brought to my attention much earlier.” “Let me be blunt,” she said after the board suggested that up to $5 million might be missing and that it was up to the judge to sort it out. “I have 350 other cases, and I am not going to undertake a general audit of what has occurred.”
That was one of at least five times that Yeghiayan, the French settlement board or heirs of policyholders asked Snyder to order a head-to-toe review of the settlement.
She resisted, saying some of those audit requests deviated from proper legal procedure and citing concerns that the cost of a fulsome investigation would eat up what remained of the money intended for Armenian heirs or charities. She was encouraged in this view by Kabateck and Geragos.
“They would like to go back and peel back this onion. We don’t know how far to keep peeling it back,” Kabateck told her at a 2011 hearing, where he argued against further investigation and urged the judge to “get this process resolved so that we can then, you know, close this claim process down.”
Snyder greenlighted some investigative efforts, ordering banks to turn over records and signing off on depositions of the settlement administrator and others. At one point, she permitted an accounting firm to analyze about 200 approved claims. The review was limited — it did not look at whether individuals should have been approved in the first place — but it uncovered significant problems. Checks totaling more than $1.4 million had been issued but never cashed, while checks for $500,000 due claimants had never been issued, according to the accountant’s report filed with the court.
Snyder considered involving law enforcement, but explained at one hearing, “I don’t take lightly the matter of making referrals to prosecutors.”
She was also cautious about reporting Boyajian to the State Bar, the public agency responsible for policing the legal profession, despite evidence that he had misappropriated hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to transcripts and court filings.
Agency officials were ready to investigate if Snyder made a formal referral, according to a joint filing in 2013 by Kabateck, Geragos and Yeghiayan. They said that as a group they supported her doing so. But Snyder stated at a hearing that she didn’t “know enough of the facts to tell any of you at this stage that I’m prepared to do anything.”
When the issue came up a few months later, Snyder ordered the attorneys to give her written assessments of Boyajian’s misconduct with an eye toward referring him to the State Bar, according to court documents and transcripts. The judge sealed the lawyers’ recommendations, as she had with dozens of other sensitive documents in the case.
The Times successfully petitioned Snyder last year for access to the records. Geragos was the lone attorney who opposed making the documents public.
The newly unsealed documents show that Geragos argued against referring Boyajian to the State Bar, writing that “allowing an investigation at this point” might hinder efforts to recoup money from him. The judge appeared persuaded, ruling that “a referral should not be made at this time.”
As the proceedings dragged on, the deadline to file charges against Boyajian related to the AXA money drew closer. By the time the L.A. County district attorney’s office looked into the allegations in 2016, the statute of limitations for fraud and other serious counts had passed, according to a State Bar filing by Boyajian’s attorney. Boyajian pleaded no contest to a felony and a misdemeanor charge in connection with making false claims to the State Bar and ultimately served no jail time.
“We thought [the misappropriation allegations] should have been referred to the U.S. attorney to investigate,” recalled Lee Boyd, a former Pepperdine Law School professor who was the attorney for the French board. “Once the judge said no, it is over. And I had to accept that.”
In spring 2014, as Kabateck and Geragos were pushing to close out the settlement process, they asked the French board to sign a release that would prevent the board from ever suing the lawyers. The board members refused, to the annoyance of Geragos, a transcript shows.
“The settlement board, as they’ve continued to do throughout this, has caused even more problems, and it’s almost the tail wagging the dog at this point,” Geragos complained to the judge. As a consequence of their refusal, he suggested, the judge should slash a planned $30,000 reimbursement for their travel, legal and administrative costs.
Snyder gave them $3,000, noting that she had been “trying to avoid appeals and wrap things up.”
At the same time, the judge awarded the lawyers an additional $1 million in legal fees and costs for what she described as extra work to ensure “a proper accounting and recoupment of misdirected settlement funds.” Geragos’ firm alone received $450,000. Snyder officially closed the case in 2016. Two years later, Kabateck presented her an award on behalf of the Armenian Bar Assn.
“Every judge should take lessons from the Honorable Christina Snyder. She is patient with everyone but still has control of her courtroom, and she knows the law inside and out,” Kabateck said at the 2018 banquet.
After applause, Snyder called presiding over the genocide litigation “a remarkable experience.”
No community had been more excited about the AXA settlement than the approximately 600,000 ethnic Armenians who lived in France. In a victory tour to Paris after signing the agreement, Geragos, Yeghiayan and Kabateck told French Armenian charities that they would receive at least $3 million under the settlement, according to interviews and published accounts. “I really thought they were heroes,” said Ara Toranian, a journalist and leader of a consortium of Franco Armenian civic groups.
The L.A. attorneys told nonprofits to draw up proposals for how they might spend the windfall and eventually received more than 100 pounds of paper applications, recalled Shnorhokian, the French board member.
The promises the L.A. lawyers made were consistent with the terms of the settlement agreement. It specified that the charity portion of the settlement — an initial $3 million plus whatever was left over from compensating the descendants — would be sent to a foundation set up in France to “advance the interests of the Armenian community.” AXA would write the bylaws for this new charity and the L.A. lawyers would nominate an oversight board to distribute the money.
But the French foundation was never set up. The L.A. lawyers instead handpicked charities to receive the funds intended for the foundation, according to court records and emails among the lawyers turned over to authorities.
There was no amendment of the settlement agreement. At one point, the three attorneys acknowledged in a court filing that they were deviating from the settlement terms, explaining that there was “difficulty” and “confusion” about setting up a French nonprofit, which made it “too costly” to pursue. But they quickly withdrew the filing and did not publicly revisit the matter.
Kabateck’s law partner, Karnikian, contended that the withdrawn motion “explicitly notified” the judge of the lawyers’ decision to depart from the settlement agreement, and the judge “had no issue with this publicly filed plan” since she did not object. He added, “Neither the court, AXA, the general public, any organization, nor anyone else ever challenged this solution.”
More than $1 million did make it to France-based charities, including hundreds of thousands of dollars to prominent nonprofits such as the Paris chapter of the Armenian General Benevolent Union, or AGBU, as well as smaller grants to cultural groups and schools.
Organizations with no connection to the Franco Armenian community also received payouts.
Kabateck directed $25,000 to Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles County, a nonprofit on whose board he sat, according to a 2010 accounting ledger later turned over to authorities. This gift was not included in the lists of charity donations the lawyers submitted to the judge.
Kabateck’s partner, Karnikian, confirmed that he made the donation without informing the judge, and said he was not required to file a report under the terms of the settlement. Those terms envisioned all of the money being sent to the French foundation for distribution. Karnikian said those served by Neighborhood Legal Services included “the lowincome Armenian community.”
Another major recipient of AXA funds was Loyola Law School, a downtown L.A. institution with few ties to France but close ties to the attorneys involved. Geragos and Kabateck were alumni who appeared frequently at campus events and whose firms hired students as clerks and graduates as associates. Kabateck has served for years as the chair of the law school’s board of directors and is a trustee of its parent university, Loyola Marymount. Children of Geragos and Yeghiayan also earned law degrees there.
The law school said it received about $1.4 million from the New York Life and AXA settlements, more than any other single institution. Yet in lists submitted to the judge, the attorneys disclosed $400,000 in donations to Loyola.
The contributions flowed to the school in fits and starts over a nine-year period, arriving in amounts as small as $10,634.68 and as large as $350,000.
In one case, a $350,000 donation identified in court papers as going to well-known Armenian charity AGBU wound up at Loyola. Kabateck’s law partner said AGBU “independently decided” to donate the money to Loyola “upon receipt of the funds.”
Emails later turned over to law enforcement show that the attorneys had worked out in advance that the money they told the judge was going to AGBU would quickly be forwarded to the school. AGBU President Berge Setrakian told The Times the funds were sent to Loyola with the “guidance” of the lawyers. The charity “did not know how this disbursement was reported to the court,” its chief financial officer, Mark Gitlen, told the newspaper, adding, “we were not concerned since we believed this contribution would service a worthy cause.”
The cause at Loyola became known as the Center for the Study of Law and Genocide, but its director said it started with smaller ambitions. Stanley Goldman, a criminal law professor who had taught both Geragos and Kabateck, said he had been trying for years to raise a modest sum for a course on the Holocaust, genocide and the law.
When he floated the idea to Kabateck around 2002, the lawyer responded that it was possible he could arrange a charity disbursement of “as much as $50,000 left over” from the anticipated genocide settlements. Goldman said he was surprised when contributions many times that amount kept arriving. More than a decade later, Goldman is still drawing down that money to operate the center. It supports recent graduates who work in human rights and operates a legal clinic where students help draft amicus briefs in international law cases.
Kabateck’s law partner, Karnikian, asserted that donations to Loyola and other nonprofits without a connection to France were permitted for a certain “tranche” of AXA money. The Times could not find such a provision in the agreement and Karnikian did not provide support for the claim.
What happened to other charity funds remains unclear. The Times could not account for more than $750,000 that the lawyers told the judge had gone to specific religious organizations.
That amount includes $100,000 the lawyers told the judge they were splitting between the Armenian Catholic and Armenian Protestant churches. Officials from both told The Times they had no record of such a donation.
Kabateck’s law partner confirmed that “the money never left the accounts” and said it “was distributed to other charities at a later date.”
There was also a $450,000 donation to an overseas entity of the Armenian Apostolic Church that Geragos listed in a 2010 court filing.
Officials at the denomination’s Paris office and its headquarters in Armenia confirmed they had received other AXA money disclosed in court records: checks totaling $300,000 that Kabateck signed in 2008 and a $50,000 check signed by Geragos in 2010.
But the French church and Armenian headquarters found no record of the $450,000 donation, according to letters given to The Times and separate correspondence previously provided to law enforcement.
Geragos maintained in an email to The Times that he wrote checks on a settlement account and gave them to the church’s local diocese in Burbank, which then transferred the money to Armenia, writing that “all of the money earmarked was accounted for over 10 years ago.” He offered as evidence two redacted statements that showed transfers of $450,000 from a diocese account at Pacific Western Bank with the memo line “Catholicos of All Armenians,” the English term for the Armenian-based leader of the church.
The statements did not identify the recipient of the transfer nor AXA as the source of the funds, and Geragos did not respond to a question about why the church in Armenia said it never received the money.
The Burbank diocese’s executive director declined to provide information about settlement money it received or handled, saying only, “All funds were directed appropriately.”
Geragos had a long relationship with the Burbank-based diocese, and served two decades as its general counsel. About this time, the banquet hall at a diocesan church in Pasadena was renamed for Geragos’ parents, an honor a local newspaper reported was the result of a contribution he had made.
Yeghiayan was concerned that Geragos used settlement proceeds to secure the hall name and outlined those worries to the French board in an email later turned over to authorities, writing, “Now he wants to buy his parents with Axa charity money?”
Markarian, the former Pacific Western banker who was account officer for both the settlement and the Burbank diocese, said in an interview that it did not make sense for settlement checks to be routed through the diocese. The money, he said, could have been wired in a single transfer directly from the AXA account to the church overseas.
Last year, after decades of pressure, the U.S. formally recognized the Armenian genocide. In a statement on April 24, the anniversary of the 1915 arrests of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders, President Biden praised the “strength and resilience” of the survivors and their descendants. “They have never forgotten the tragic history that brought so many of their ancestors to our shores,” he said.
On his weekly podcast a few days later, Geragos said Biden’s move was more than a political symbol. He said it potentially opened the door for him to file new lawsuits against the Turkish government or banks.
“It’s an interesting place that we are going to be,” he said. Questions about the insurance settlement money still linger. The French board and a handful of descendants took their frustrations to the State Bar. The agency suspended Boyajian from the practice of law in 2018 and he later resigned his license.
The State Bar filed disciplinary charges against Yeghiayan and made an unsuccessful attempt to disbar his wife. It took no action against Kabateck and Geragos, with a bar supervisor telling one alleged victim that “suspicion is not a basis for investigation.”
Shnorhokian, of the French board, has continued sending the State Bar and law enforcement agencies what he sees as evidence Geragos and Kabateck mishandled settlement funds.
“I simply want justice,” Shnorhokian said. “I will fight to the end.”
Yeghiayan did not get a chance to defend himself against the State Bar charges. The architect of the genocide cases died Sept. 29, 2017, at age 81.
In an interview posted on YouTube the year he died, Yeghiayan tried to rally the Armenian community to investigate the settlement.
“It’s a typical Armenian concept that we shouldn’t tell other people about our dirty laundry,” he said. “The more quicker we show our dirty laundry, the next generation, other people will not dare to try and steal money from Armenian organizations.”