Four people affiliated with San Fernando Valley street gangs were arrested and charged with participating in an alleged murder-for-hire plot against an Armenian organized crime boss who was allegedly involved in a power struggle to control territory, the U.S. Department of Justice announced on Tuesday, Sept. 30. Instead of killing the organized crime boss, the plot ended with his wife being shot and injured in front of their two children, authorities say.
Robert Amiryan, a 47-year-old Hollywood resident and an Armenian Organized Crime leader, has allegedly been involved in a power struggle with another local leader, Ara Artuni, a 41-year-old Porter Ranch resident, since 2022, according to the DOJ. The rivals’ desire to control their local territory has led to multiple assaults, murder attempts and a kidnapping. In retaliation for Artuni ordering him to be murdered multiple times, Amiryan conspired to kidnap and torture an associate of Artuni’s in June 2023, authorities said.
“According to affidavits filed with the complaints, Armenian Organized Crime, a Russian Mafia and Mexican Mafia-affiliated transnational criminal organization, has made Los Angeles County a center of its U.S. operations,” reads a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles.
Artuni is charged with ordering Amriryan’s murder multiple times in 2023, but it is an effort to do so that took place in March 2025 at the center of a federal criminal complaint that led to other arrests.
After being arrested and charged with various crimes earlier this year, Amiryan and Artuni are in federal custody awaiting trial.
Carlos “Spanky” Armando Ochoa Grimaldi, 47 of Sylmar; Christopher “Hits” Ayala, 29, of Sylmar; Edir “Temper” De La Cruz, 34 of Van Nuys and Maria “Mary Oceans” de Jesus Mares, 39, of Van Nuys; were arrested on Sept. 30 on the complaint, charged with taking part in the murder plot allegedly ordered by Artuni. They are members and associates of San Fernando Valley-based gangs the Vanowen Street Locos and Elmwood Rifa 13, according to the U.S. DOJ.
They have been charged with use of interstate commerce facilities in the commission of murder-for-hire and would face a statutory maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison if convicted.
At the beginning of 2025, Grimaldi, Ayala, De La Cruz and others reignited the effort to kill Amiryan and stalked him, authorities said.
On March 14, 2025, Amiryan’s significant other drove home with their two children, where she was shot at and wounded by Grimaldi and Vahagn Stepanyan, 40, of Burbank, who is now in federal custody, “charged with racketeering, fraud, and firearms offenses,” according to the U.S. DOJ.
Court documents showed that Mares called De La Cruz after the shooting to say that “job [was] done,” and that she would be paid $50,000 by Stepanyan for being the getaway driver. But, because “it was the wife not him,” she told De La Cruz she thought she would not get paid in the days following the shooting. In the end, she was paid a lower amount by Stepanyan, since Amiryan was not killed.
A Vanowen Street Locos member, 49-year-old Jesus “Listo” Gonzalez, Jr., of Llano, was arrested on a separate complaint on Tuesday, Sept. 30 and charged in connection with the August 2023 shooting of Vahan Harutyunyan, a 49-year-old resident of Hollywood, Florida, who was arrested in May as part of a group of 13 alleged members and associates of Armenian organized crime syndicates that included Amiryan and Artuni. He is currently in federal custody on kidnapping charges.
Search warrants resulted in the seizure of “approximately five firearms, a silencer, firearm parts, and over 1,000 rounds of ammunition,” according to the U.S. DOJ.
Gonzalez has been charged with conspiracy to violate the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, also known as the RICO Act.