A Christmas Tree For Murder Victims

The police were putting a sheet over a dead body when Ramona McClinton showed up. She scanned the growing, curious crowd for her boyfriend. She cell phoned him. A light came on under the sheet.

Ramona's story was one of the many heard Wednesday night in a meeting room with probably the highest concentration of heartache in this city. It was LAPD's 77th Street Division's "Tree Trimming", an annual event where family and friends of homicide victims gather to talk about their tragedies and how they are coping, receive toys from Santa and thank detectives.

The actual tree trimming occurs when photos of the homicide victims are secured to a Christmas tree in the lobby of LAPD's South Bureau on Broadway and 77th Street. Angie Moreno of the Los Angeles City Attorney's Office Victim Services is driving force of this somber event which  started in 2002. Some of those remembered died years ago, Many others were killed this year.

"How robbed I feel. How violated I feel," said Jackie Walker, whose 24-year-old grandson Marcus Quinten Rogers was killed in March, 5 this year on 110th and Main streets. Moments later, Jackie rushed to the podium to support her daughter, Marcus' mother. 

Patrice Morgan said she was so depressed over the death of her brother Keyonta Muhammad Ansari that she contemplated suicide. Ansari, 22, was shot in the back of the head on Van Ness Avenue near 53rd Street on his way to play basketball. Now she is forming her own victim's assistance program in his honor.

On and on the aching stories went. They talked about how the news of sudden death came to them and how it "seems like yesterday". How Christmas is so  hard. How "you can lose a mom, you can lose a dad, but when you lose a child..."

Still, there was a common thread in everyone's talk, praise for the homicide detectives handling their loved one's case, even if it had yet to be solved. 

Commander Bill Scott also lauded the murder cops.  "There is not a more determined and dedicated group of detectives in the country, probably in the world, than the men and women of South Bureau's Criminal Gang Homicide Division.  We can never say we know your pain. But, we understand it. It does matter to us."

Family and friends of murder victims at LAPD's 77th Street Division of SouthBureau

My Improbable Redemption

December 09, 2012

In 1985, I shot someone.

It happened outside the Rustic Inn, a bar in an unincorporated section of Los Angeles near Compton, which was where I spent most of my free time back then.

Moments before the shooting, I had been in a barroom brawl. My friend George and I were drinking Heinekens and taking sips off a half-pint of Seagram's VO we'd stashed atop a rickety wooden beam at the beer-only bar's side-porch entrance.

Three guys walked in and began staring at us. George, a big guy quick to unleash his fists, asked them — in Comptonese — what they were looking at. It was on.

I'm not a great brawler, but I'm a good friend, and I couldn't let George go one-on-three. The fight moved two steps down from the bar where two pool tables sat — five men punching, kicking, gouging, ducking, yelling, swinging pool sticks, hurling pool balls. My most vivid memory of the fight is an orange-and-white pool ball whizzing by my face and — amid all that chaos — thinking to myself, "That's the 13."

George and I got the upper hand and the three guys ran outside, one of them yelling, "Get the gun." That was chilling, even to a drunk.

It just so happened I had an AK-47 in my trunk that night.

Come on now? Really? It "just so happened"?

It did. Two days earlier, my cousin Lynn told me her husband did not want me to stash "that machine gun" at their Torrance house anymore. I picked it up and put it in my trunk.

As the three guys got to their car, I popped that trunk. I fired 17 rounds, I later discovered. I tell myself I fired to scare them off, not to hit or kill. But one 7.62-mm bullet hit a leg. Another busted a window and went into the wall of a room where two people were lying. I could have killed them both.

Witnesses led detectives to me. I was arrested for several crimes, including attempted murder. I faced 15 to life. I remember hoping, wishing, even praying I would only get six years in prison and do three.

But because my father paid $5,000 for a lawyer, because of a "them or me" argument, a plea deal, and because I'm Caucasian, I got 30 days in the county jail. Thirty days! If I was black and had a public defender, no doubt I'd have been Folsom-bound.

I quit drinking after that. In the 1990s, I was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times covering Watts and South Central. I've often said a political reporter should know something about politics, a medical writer should know about medicine, and a crime reporter — well, you get the idea. I became friends with gang members. When they went to prison, I'd write to them, and sometimes enclose a $20 money order or a book.

They wrote back. They were not forgotten. They appreciated it. Some shouldn't have been in prison. Others, like me, should have.

Never one to analyze my actions too closely, it wasn't until a couple of years ago that it struck me that one reason I wrote those letters was because it could've been me in there. It wasn't that I felt guilty. I was guilty.

It could have been me thinking, "I'm gone and forgotten." How good it would have been to get a letter, to get 20 bucks, to get a book that would take me outside the prison walls for 300 pages.

My sobriety lasted years. Then I decided I could handle a beer, a glass or two of red wine, and still stop. Surprise! I couldn't. So, after a few months of drinking, I'd quit again for month or two. This went on for years. I never intended to quit for good. I was just "on the wagon" and looking forward to tumbling off.

But earlier this year, I went on a wretched binge. Two 750s of Smirnoff ruined my balance. I tripped and cracked open the back of my head on the bedroom dresser. Blood spurted onto three walls. My girlfriend was out of town, but my sister, warned by worried friends, came to the house that day. She walked into that horrific scene. She got me to an emergency room. Twelve staples in my head.

That was eight months ago. I quit drinking. Again. But now I no longer say I'm on the wagon. I say, "After a long and storied career, I have retired."

Early on, I went to a few AA meetings. I don't like them. Maybe I hit the wrong meetings, but they seem to focus on backsliding, and how you can come back from it. I don't want to hear that.

I know I can't drink anymore. I also know that maybe I will. I can't even say with certainty that I won't be drunk when I read this in the paper. But don't bet on it.

I bring all this up because those letters I sent to prisons paid off recently. I heard from an inmate, Kevin "Big Cat" Doucette, a legendary shot caller for one of L.A.'s most notorious street gangs, the Rolling 60s Crips. Many years ago, police described him as one who "instills fear in the neighborhood."

He's also my friend. I've known him for 17 years. Somehow, Cat heard of my latest, inglorious Smirnoff defeat and sent a letter that inspired me to stay sober more than any AA testimony group session.

After two paragraphs describing life in federal prison, he switched his tone. Here's what he wrote, as he wrote it:

"My dude, you and drinking, yall dont go together at all.... Anything that you cant control that controls you; that aint tha set, Mike! I've got love for you, so when I speak as I do, know that I mean nothing but good: find you another high in life. A positive one ... try life itself. My Man, we both know that life is to short as it is for us to be twisted on anything, fo real it is."

I keep that letter in my wallet. It reminds me of drinking. It reminds me of prison. It reminds me of two people lying in a room my bullets invaded.

http://articles.latimes.com/print/2012/dec/09/opinion/la-oe-1209-krikorian-arrest-prison-shooting-20121209

You Hear About Sarkisian? Zocola Public Square

DEC. 9, 2013

“Sarkisian” is one of the most common Armenian last names. But when my cousin Greg called this week and opened with “You hear about Sarkisian?” I knew he wasn’t talking about Serge Sarkisian, president of the Republic of Armenia.

He was calling to tell me about Steve Sarkisian, who had been named the head football coach of the USC Trojans. Sarkisian’s hiring may be the single most brilliant move in the history of the 133-year-old South Los Angeles institution—at least, to Armenians living in Southern California.

Henry Sahakian, a salesman from Glendale, told me, “I hope this inspires the Armenian community to follow and play more football.” His wife, Margaret, chimed in, “We are all so proud.”

Growing up in Los Angeles, an Armenian-American and member of the second generation of my family to be born here (in 1954, in my case), I often heard the words “Armenian” and “proud.” I learned to be proud that Alexander the Great only “partially” conquered my ancestral land. Proud that Armenia was the first country on earth to proclaim Christianity its national religion (in 301 A.D.). Proud that TV detective “Mannix”—Mike Connors, né Krikor Ohanian—was Armenian. Proud that four-time Formula One champion Alain Prost, the main rival of Ayrton Senna, was half-Armenian.

I was also proud of singer Charles Aznavour, artist Arshile Gorky, astrophysicist Viktor Hambartsumian, chess champion Garry Kasparov, financier Kirk Kerkorian, singer Cher (Cherilyn Sarkisian), composer Aram Khachaturian, Russian MiG fighter plane designer Artem Mikoyan, writer William Saroyan, and World War II pilot Anthony Krikorian, my dad. Heck, I was even proud of the creator of The Chipmunks, Ross Bagdasarian.

And, decades before Steve Sarkisian walked a college football sideline, my Uncle Aram revered Notre Dame football coach Ara Parseghian, who led the Fighting Irish to national championships in 1966 and 1973.

Sadly, over the past decade, the image of Los Angeles Armenians has been marred by an increase in criminal activity. In the 1940s, a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputy told my Uncle Harry that no Armenian was ever in the county jail. Today, there are scores in Men’s Central. (For the record, I was there myself three times.) The Armenian Power street gang is known for credit card fraud and auto thefts.

But it is that hit to our reputation that makes this USC news so welcome.

I’m one of those Armenians who remember Sarkisian from a golden period of Trojan football. In the early 2000s, when USC was dominating college football and its head coach Pete Carroll was showered with praise, my cousin Dave and I knew the real reason. The offensive coach was Armenian. To us, Carroll was a figurehead. The real star of the sidelines was his assistant, Sarkisian.

Of course, not all Armenians see this the same way. Shant Ohanian, a lawyer and UCLA alumnus, points out some chinks in Sarkisian’s Armenian armor. “It’s funny, as soon as Sarkisian’s hire was announced, you saw all over Facebook Armenians, especially USC students and fans, celebrating the hire—not necessarily as a USC fan, but more as a ‘fellow’ Armenian,” said the self-described “die-hard UCLA fan” as he started slinging Bruin-tipped arrows. “Many, however, don’t know Sarkisian’s Armenian background; it’s mostly his Armenian last name that matters. I don’t think Steve Sarkisian himself speaks a word of Armenian; his father is an Iranian-Armenian who immigrated to the USA when he was 18. He married his wife, Steve’s mother, who is Irish-American. Steve was born in Torrance.”

Ohanian went on, “Nevertheless, as soon as he has some success with USC, you will see more and more Armenians claiming him as one of their own.”

Ohanian was married just five weeks ago to Silva Sevlian. I went to their wedding at the St. Leon Armenian Cathedral in Burbank. For their honeymoon, I gave them my list of places they should see in Paris. They had a lovely time. A fairytale wedding followed by a dream of a honeymoon. But this week, with the announcement of Sarkisian as the new Trojan head coach, that honeymoon seemed over.

Silva went to USC and didn’t like Shant’s even slight criticisms of the new coach.

“My husband’s opinion doesn’t matter. He is nothing but a Bruin,” said Silva. “Sarkisian becoming coach is second only to an Armenian becoming the mayor of Los Angeles.”

Michael Krikorian is a writer in Los Angeles. His first novel is Southside, and he’s on Twitter@makmak47.

http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2013/12/09/you-hear-about-sarkisian/ideas/nexus/

Winston Agrees With BookLoons, Reads Into the Night

Reviewed by Mary Ann Smyth    Michael Lyons is a Los Angeles gang reporter. He can walk freely in the gang controlled parts of LA. He is welcomed to conduct interviews with gang members. Why then is he shot and wounded, dropped to the sidewalk just two blocks from City Hall?

After the first shock sets in, his fellow reporters start a betting pool and wonder why it hadn't happened before. Who shot him? Lyons does live on the edge. Then Lyons is accused of organizing the shooting for the publicity it would bring him. Because of this, he is fired as an embarrassment to the paper.

Can he leave it there? Of course not. When three murders occur in LA, Lyons realizes all are tied into his shooting. He suspects a notorious, imprisoned gang leader, Big Evil, as the instigator of the shootings, his own included. Big Evil's younger brother is one of those murdered.

Southside by Michael Krikorian sports a tightly written plot that will keep you reading long into the night. Michael Lyons is invincible. Much like his author. Krikorian has reported extensively on Los Angeles' notorious street gangs 'and receives more letters from inmates in California state prisons than he does bills and junk mail combined!' He must pull extensively from his career to write such convincing dialogue. This is a book worth your time.

http://www.bookloons.com/cgi-bin/Review.asp?bookid=16599

Winston does NOT like to be interrupted when reading "Southside"

Richard Fausset on the Morning after Robert Blake's Wife Was Killed

Richard Fausset near Mexico City, Mexico   

An old but telling anecdote about the novelist Michael Krikorian: On the morning of May 5, 2001, I was cold-calling police stations from the old LAT Valley newsroom when some random desk jockey at LAPD North Hollywood--trying for cop-cool but coming off half-hysterical--mentions that Robert Blake's wife had been shot to death in her car around the corner from Vitello's Restaurant in Studio City. I had to let Google remind me who Robert Blake was: "Baretta" had been off the air for nearly a quarter century. Oh shit: *that* Robert Blake. 

I flew to the crime scene, all cub reporter elbows and knees, tongue hanging from mouth, and soon joined in the LA sunshine by a thousand vultures and buzzards and hacks and hyenas in Clarks comfort shoes who smelled a classic hunk of bloody LA noir: the scrupulous and unscrupulous were there, the NY Times and the National Enquirer, local cop-shop dorks with coffee stains on Arrow shirts, nearsighted police-scanner junkies, and, this time, hordes of well-moussed national TV hacks, salivating as they imagined the animated graphic and the whoosh and the theme music that would soon accompany this particular loss of human life, the weeks of whodunnit Hollywood scandal coverage that would allow their viewers a break from the complicated and depressing reality of places like Afghanistan, and characters like Mullah Mohammad Omar, whose followers had just dynamited the Bamiyan Buddhas: in retrospect, our generation's Bad Moon Rising. 

So anyway, anyway... eventually Krikorian gets there, fire-red eyeballs hanging out of his head and looking like he'd gone to sleep in his blazer. I worked, and as I worked, I watched Krikorian work, dancing from place to place, recreating the scene, imagining motive, footsteps, angles, collecting scraps of dialog from witnesses and neighbors. And I distinctly recall--as the scrum of reporters reached peak mayhem, as the deadline clock ticked, as assistant city editors, following orders from editors from other tax brackets, jangled our cell phones every 25 seconds for scraps of updates-- I remember how Krikorian randomly picks out this floral-print dress from a rack outside of a curio shop on Tujunga Blvd. and holds it in front of a pretty blonde. "You know, you'd look fantastic in this," he says, with that charming, napalm-strafed wreck of a voice. The blonde looks back, pauses for a second, and decides, after brief internal deliberation, to smile generously. Because he was right: The dress would have looked great on her. He noticed that it matched her eyes.

So that, for me, is the genius of Michael Krikorian: elegance amid the ugliness, an eye for beauty and detail, love and blood, sunshine and death. And now he has a crime novel out that's been well-reviewed and blurbed by the likes of Michael Connelly. I'm looking forward to reading it. You can order it on Amazon:

Suspense Magazine Calls Southside "A Good Story"

"Southside is a solid debut novel from Los Angeles Times crime reporter Michael Krikorian. Krikorian writes what he knows, spinning a tale about a Los Angeles Times crime reporter, Michael Lyons, who covers the many gangs of the City of Angels. As an editor, I would have counseled Krikorian to not give the character-clearly a fictionalized version of himself-his own first name, which gets a bit too on the nose, but that's a minor nitpick.

The novel gets off to a somewhat disjointed start, with frequent shifting of narrative viewpoint from third person to first person, but the reader settles into the format and eventually the loose ends come together. The story really gets rolling when Lyons is gunned down in the street but survives. He has made many enemies through his reporting, but none of the possible suspects really seems to make sense. As the police investigation stalls, Lyons himself digs deeper into the case.

This classic set-up takes a nice twist about a third of the way in, setting the police department against Lyons and the paper, and the paper against Lyons, ratcheting up tensions and complicating the investigation. Other victims, who don't survive, may be connected, but the evidence is slim. Overall, these plot threads are handled well. "Southside" is a thriller rather than a whodunit, since the reader is introduced to the killer fairly early, and Krikorian builds the tension effectively as you wonder if the police or Lyons are going to catch up with the murderer before there's another victim.

The good guys occasionally make some rather large intuitive leaps from thin evidence, and sometimes the narrative tries a little too hard for its gritty street atmosphere, but despite being a little rough around the edges, "Southside" is a good story populated with colorful characters. Most of those characters, on either side of the law, are not simple stereotypes, but are complex, real people, which makes for engaging reading. It's definitely worth a try and provides firm footing for additional adventures for Michael Lyons."

Reviewed by Scott Pearson, author of "Star Trek: Honor in the Night" and cohost of the Generations Geek podcast, for Suspense Magazine

Nathan ignoring the grizzly bear at the San Diego Zoo

LA. Observed

Writing what you know: crime reporter Michael Krikorian

By Kevin Roderick | November 20, 2013 11:58 PM

When we last heard about journalist Michael Krikorian, he had written a colorful and revealing op-ed piece about the night he shot some guy in a brawl near Compton. [Technically, the last mention at LA Observed was when Krikorian blogged about his annual trip to Italy with girlfriend Nancy Silverton, the Pizzeria Mozza chef. But that was just a Morning Buzz brief.] That night outside a bar near Compton, Krikorian pulled an AK-47 from his car trunk and fired off 17 rounds. Not your average LA Times crime reporter.

Now he's out with his first crime novel, Southside, in which a main character is an LA Times gang reporter in South LA. Writing about what you know and all that.

Los Angeles Times gang reporter Michael Lyons has just left his favorite downtown saloon when he is shot and wounded on the sidewalk two blocks from City Hall. After the initial shock, fellow reporters put together a betting pool. The bet? "Who Shot Mike?" There are a lot of contenders. When the LAPD's investigation stalls, the Times runs editorials critical of the police. Then, when detectives uncover an audio tape of Lyons talking to a gang member about the benefits of getting shot, they release the tape. The embarrassed newspaper editor fires Lyons, who then sets out on the streets of Southside Los Angeles with a vengeance to find the shooter. When three seemingly unrelated people are murdered on the streets of L.A., Lyons connects them to his own shooting. The tie-in? An imprisoned, notorious gang shot-caller known as Big Evil, who Lyons made famous in a gang profile and whose younger brother is among the victims. But who is doing the killing?

Bestselling author Michael Connelly, himself an ex-Times crime reporter who sets his crime novels on the streets of Los Angeles, says of "Southside:" “In a place as well traveled by storytellers as Los Angeles, Michael Krikorian blazes a unique path with this powerful first novel.Southside has muscle, insight and all the right stuff."

Pizzeria Mozza's Hot Chocolate Under Investigation

After receiving a formal complaint from the American Hot Chocolate Society, a federal investigation has been launched into the "hot chocolate" served at Pizzeria Mozza to determine if the fabled dessert is what it claims to be, or actually a chocolate sauce.

If the inquiry finds the dessert, which bills itself as "Cioccolato Calda", is, in fact,  a sauce, it could be stripped of its many awards, including Best Hot Chocolate in the World, as well as America's Most Titillating Hot Chocolate.  

"It's not fair to other hot chocolates to be compared to Mozza's, not only because it's so much better, but because it's not even the same thing," said Wilhelm Von Smithers of the Hot Chocolate Institute based in Vienna, Austria. 

The hot chocolate served at Pizzeria Mozza. is a turbocharged version of what chef Nancy Silverton learned to make more than 30 years ago in Paris at Angelina on the Rue Rivoli. Silverton, gracious in crediting the originals, said she's added spices and a marshmallow topping to the Angelina version. 

Some Pizzeria Mozza loyalists felt the federal probe was just another waste of taxpayer's money. It was unclear at press time wither the Trump Administration would continue to fund the investigation after they begin to rot in hell.

"Who cares what it is?" said Sarah Culberon, a princess from the Southside of Sierra Leone. "The main and only thing is that it is absolutely delicious."

Princess of Sierra Leone savors Hot Chocolate

The Subject of a federal probe

Camel Defies San Diego Zoo Ban, Reads "Southside"

Openly defying an official order that banned the crime novel "Southside" from the San Diego Zoo, Mongo the Camel read the crime thriller at the tourist attraction Wednesday while thousands of visitors tried in vain to get his attention. 

Zoo officials, who had banned the critically acclaimed novel Monday in an effort to keep humans from reading  it - and therefore ignoring the animals -  were dumbfounded by Mongo's blatant ignoring of zoo rules as well as his apparent fascination with the Michael Krikorian book, 

Sources within the zoo quoted Mongo, a Bactrian or "Two Hump" camel from the Gobi Desert in the  Southside of Mongolia, as saying "Southside was the best book I've read since "Life of Pi'". 

Christi Carreno, a zoo events organizer, said that while the ban is still officially in effect,  zoo officials would meet in an emergency session today to consider all possibilities. "We want what's best for the animals and if they want to read Southside, then maybe the ban will be lifted for them. But, not for humans."

A Cape Buffalo, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said "We're gonna read Southside. That's not the question. The question is are we going to read legally or illegally. Me, I don't give a damn. I'm just waiting on my copy from Amazon. You feel me?"

Mongo reads the Krikorian thriller