Federal prosecutors on Tuesday charged four reputed members of a Latino street gang with acting as hired guns in a dispute between two rival Armenian organized crime figures.
The two-year conflict between Robert “Fish” Amiryan and Ara Artuni at times turned suburban streets in the San Fernando Valley into war zones, federal authorities said. Shooters opened fire from pickup truck beds and atop ladders, used drones to spy on targets and maintained caches of automatic weapons in storage units.
In May, federal agents and local police arrested Amiryan, 47, and Artuni, 41, on suspicion of kidnapping, fraud and attempted murder. With both held in custody in the same unit, a Los Angeles Police Department detective wrote, Amiryan charged at Artuni, declaring in Armenian he would “have” Artuni’s wife.
The initial takedown in May targeted the higher-ups who allegedly called hits and equipped shooters with guns and cars, federal authorities said, while the suspects arrested Tuesday actually pulled triggers on Artuni’s behalf. Four reputed members of a small North Hollywood gang, the Vanowen Street Locos, were charged with murder for hire and racketeering.
A Los Angeles Police Department detective’s affidavit revealed that much of the evidence allegedly came from the suspects’ own mouths as they griped in recorded jail calls about not receiving payment for blown attempts to kill Amiryan and his associates.
Also taken into custody Tuesday was Maria “Mary Oceans” Mares, who is accused of driving the getaway car in a fumbled attempt on Amiryan’s life. According to detectives who investigated the March 14, 2025, shooting near Universal City, Mares complained that she would not be getting her promised $50,000 fee because “it was the wife, not him.”
Amiryan’s partner had pulled her Cadillac Escalade into a parking garage when two men wearing black opened fire with rifles, a detective wrote in an affidavit. Amiryan’s spouse was shot in the leg; her two children in the backseat weren’t hit.
The attack on Amiryan’s family marked a brutal turn in a conflict that erupted two years earlier. The night of April 3, 2023, as Amiryan returned to his apartment building on San Jose Avenue in Burbank, a man wearing a ski mask shot at him with an AR-15, a federal agent wrote in an affidavit.
Prosecutors allege Amiryan and his crew kidnapped a man who they thought was behind the assassination attempt, torturing and interrogating him inside a Sun Valley home. Police surrounded the house, and Amiryan exited with two other men, Vahan Harutyunyan and Sevak “Seco” Gzraryan.
Officers released the men after the victim denied being kidnapped and explicitly told police that Amiryan was “not guilty.”
A month later, Amiryan and his spouse were sitting on a balcony when a lifted red Ford F-150 pulled up outside their building, a Burbank detective wrote in a search warrant affidavit. A man wearing dark clothes stood up in the truck bed and opened fire. Amiryan, who flung himself over his partner, was shot in the abdomen and arm.
Burbank police learned an associate of Artuni had used a fake passport to buy the truck for $500 six hours earlier, according to the affidavit.
The following month, a gray pickup pulled into an alley that ran behind Harutyunyan’s house in North Hills. When police later searched Artuni’s phone, Det. Daniel Kaminski of the LAPD wrote in an affidavit, they found drone footage of the house, which was ringed by a large metal fence that a neighbor said Harutyunyan installed immediately after moving in.
Harutyunyan, a convicted money launderer who told neighbors he was a professional gambler, was hanging out in his backyard with Amiryan and Gzraryan when two masked men stood up in the truck bed. They opened fire with automatic weapons, shooting Harutyunyan six times. The shooters lay down in the bed as the truck sped off, Kaminski wrote.
Detectives obtained cellphone records for members of Artuni’s crew, including Vahagn Stepanyan, an alleged member of Burbank’s Elmwood Rifa gang, and Jose “Listo” Gonzalez Jr. from the Vanowen Street Locos. The records showed their phones pinged off cell towers near Harutyunyan’s home around the time of the shooting, Kaminski wrote.
In April 2024, Artuni flew to Armenia, where federal agents suspected he was reprimanded by more senior crime figures about his increasingly bloody dispute with Amiryan. He spent several months in Dubai before returning to Los Angeles in November 2024.
In February 2025, Edir De La Cruz, a reputed member of the Vanowen Street Locos called “Temper,” called his girlfriend Mares from jail, where he was held on gun possession charges, Kaminski wrote.
Mares handed the phone to Christopher “Hits” Ayala, who said he was still working “on that job.”
Ayala told De La Cruz “it was about to happen” two days earlier, but “his wife and his kids jumped out the car with him.”
The next day, Mares told De La Cruz that she’d offered to drive because she needed the money, Kaminski wrote.
In his affidavit, Kaminski claimed that Stepanyan and Carlos “Spanky” Grimaldi were the shooters who targeted Amiryan’s spouse and children the night of March 14.
Two weeks earlier, Grimaldi had cashed a $8,560 check made out by a “sham” business associated with one of Artuni’s underlings, Kaminski wrote. The detective alleged this was payment for the attempt on Amiryan’s life.
The day after the attack, Mares told her boyfriend the “job is done,” according to Kaminski. She was going to be paid “50,” she said.
But when she spoke to De La Cruz the next day, she said she’d read in the Los Angeles Times that a woman had been hit, not a man. What’s more, no one had died, she said. Mares said she didn’t know if she’d get paid, Kaminski wrote.
De La Cruz got upset, according to the detective. He told Mares that in the past, he and Gonzalez got paid “right there. Right on the spot!”
Meanwhile, police had found the getaway car abandoned in Studio City. Detectives determined that Mares had bought the silver Audi on Facebook Marketplace, Kaminski wrote.
When they spoke again, De La Cruz told Mares to demand payment. She had put her “life on the line,” he said. He told Mares to tell Stepanyan she did her part and “you guys just didn’t do it right.”
According to Kaminski, Mares told De La Cruz two days later that Stepanyan agreed to pay $10,000. De La Cruz, “audibly excited,” said Mares could post his bail, the detective wrote.
Mares, De La Cruz, Ayala and Grimaldi are now charged in federal court with murder for hire. Gonzalez is accused of racketeering. It wasn’t clear if the men had lawyers who could speak on their behalf.
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