Man Convicted of Murdering Relative, Extortion

An immigrant who was asked to come to Los Angeles to help in his family’s fledgling chocolate business was convicted Monday of murdering his brother-in-law and extorting life insurance money from his sister.

A Superior Court jury deliberated over two days and found Harut Truzian guilty of first-degree murder in the death of Zaren Baregamian at the Chocolate Delight candy factory in Van Nuys.

The panel also found Truzian, 40, guilty of later burglarizing the factory to steal candy-making equipment and extorting $18,000 from his sister, Manoush Baregamian.

Prosecutors said Truzian murdered Baregamian in February 1993 with a single gunshot to the head as he lighted a cigarette while preparing his taxes.

Truzian faces life in prison without the possibility of parole when Superior Court Judge Stanley M. Weisberg sentences him Aug. 29. The only other sentence possible was death, but prosecutors decided not to seek that penalty, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Steven J. Ipsen.

During the 16-day trial in Van Nuys, Ipsen said the Baregamians had invited Truzian to Southern California from Armenia to help at the chocolate factory. But, the prosecutor alleged, Truzian brought a candy recipe with him and arrived with a sense of entitlement and the expectation that the recipe would make him an equal partner, Ipsen said.

Later, after Manoush Baregamian received her husband’s life insurance money, Truzian sent her an extortion letter containing a .25-caliber bullet almost identical to the one that killed Zaren Baregamian, the prosecutor said. The letter told her if she did not pay she would die the same way her husband had.

Finally, in October 1993, Truzian and a business partner burglarized the Chocolate Delight candy factory, which his sister had been running since her husband’s death, Ipsen said. The factory made delicate chocolate marshmallow candies known in the Armenian community as ptaichye moloke, or bird’s milk.

Truzian’s motives for the crimes--greed, resentment and a thwarted sense of entitlement--became clear when he recorded conversations he had with his sister, Ipsen said. Truzian had planned to send the tapes to their mother in Yerevan, Armenia, to show how life in America had changed Manoush Baregamian for the worse, according to testimony.

“You and Zaren tricked me into coming to this country, and then you screwed me over the American way,” he said at one point. “I admired you like a saint back in Yerevan, but America has changed you.”

Later in the tape, he vowed to put his sister out of business and said he would gladly see her starve.

Ipsen had told jurors during his closing argument last week that Truzian thought that he would receive half the business. Instead, his sister and brother-in-law threw him out of the business--and out of their home--when, Ipsen said, “he sat at home and watched television for seven months and did nothing to help the business.”

Defense attorney Michael Duffey told jurors that prosecutors had no physical evidence to link Truzian to the crime scene. And he cautioned them to question the credibility of the prosecution’s star witness, Truzian’s former business partner. The partner, Serob Yanvetskyan, was placed on probation after admitting his role in the burglary.