Following Terror's Forgotten Trail
An explosives case raises ghosts of a bloody past
The Bedford Self-Serve Mini Storage Facility sits unobtrusively in a Cleveland suburb, next to a day-care center, an elementary school, and a gas station. It was four years ago that its manager, frustrated at six months of unpaid bills, sheared off the lock of unit J-2. He then called the police.
Pete Elliott, an agent with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Fire-arms, hustled over to Bedford and was stunned by what he saw: a 16-year-old cache of high explosives--100 pounds of dynamite, blasting caps, and more--plus 13 firearms, a shopping bag full of ammo, and a dusty trench coat. The dynamite was leaking and extremely dangerous.
That day, Elliott launched what became a four-year investigation leading to a host of forgotten crimes, to a web of extremism that began a quarter century ago and ended in a federal courtroom last week. It would take America's proud Armenian community back to people and events many would prefer to forget--to bombings and coldblooded murders--and to still-heated charges of genocide that date back 85 years.
A man called Moose. Elliott's first task was finding who paid for the locker all those years. He grabbed the paperwork and found three renters going back to 1980, all paying in cash, all named Louise: Louise Sardella, Louise Fischel, Louise Seyranian. Everything about the records appeared false. One address was for an Open Pantry convenience store; a phone number led to a local sports club.
A storage employee vaguely recalled a woman who paid the rent, and she agreed to help an ATF artist on a composite drawing. Elliott, meanwhile, ordered traces for the 13 aging weapons. Only one came back positive: a 20-gauge shotgun tied to a woman in West Virginia. She was a former Cleveland resident, it turned out, whose son had sold the gun to her boss at an Open Pantry store, the same one as on the application. The boss, she recalled, was an Armenian fellow named Moose.
Elliott pulled the papers on the convenience store and found it was owned by Topalian Enterprises. He then acted on an old investigator's hunch--"When people lie, they lie close to home"--and ran searches on the names he'd found: Sardella, Topalian, Fischel, Seyranian. Sure enough, he found a Michelle Seyranian and a Mourad Topalian residing at the same address in a nearby town. But the woman's driver's license photo and the composite drawing looked nothing alike, and the couple now lived in Florida.
Elliott, though, found another Topalian was still in town, a Lucy Topalian. And Lucy's photo was a dead ringer for the composite. Moreover, her age fit, and her handwriting matched that on the rental agreement. Confronted by Elliott, a frightened Lucy admitted that years ago she rented the locker but said she knew nothing about the contents. She was told to do it by her former husband--Mourad Topalian, whose nickname was Moose.
Mourad Topalian was no ordinary suspect. At the time, he was chairman of the Armenian National Committee of America, one of the nation's two leading Armenian associations. Tall and charismatic, he was well known in the halls of Congress and had met with President Clinton a half-dozen times. Although smaller than the Irish or Jewish American communities, the nation's 1 million ethnic Armenians back one of the best-organized ethnic lobbies in politics. Topalian and his allies have helped make tiny, landlocked Armenia one of the top per capita recipients of U.S. aid. Most of all, they have focused national attention on the Armenian genocide.
Starting in 1915, an eight-year campaign of massacres, murders, and deportations by the Ottoman Turks left dead up to 1.5 million Armenians, a calamity scholars widely agree was the 20th century's first genocide. In October, a resolution recognizing this nearly passed the House of Representatives but was withdrawn after White House pleadings that it would wreck relations with Turkey. Topalian, among others, was incensed. His grandparents had perished in Turkey, and his impassioned speeches on the genocide are legendary within the Armenian community.
Unsolved thefts. As Pete Elliott looked into Topalian's background, he learned the ATF had traced the Bedford explosives to an unsolved 1976 theft from a Michigan drilling site. The FBI had long suspected that those explosives ended up in the hands of Armenian terrorists; some of the dynamite later turned up at an Armenian youth camp in Franklin, Mass.
Elliott began reading up on Armenian terrorism. In the 1970s, a wave of terror fell upon Turkish officials, engineered by Armenian extremists furious over Turkish denials of the genocide. The attacks included 160 bombings and assassinations of 22 Turkish diplomats worldwide. The terror ebbed by the mid-1980s, but many attacks went unsolved.
Elliott soon found himself plunged into an aging Armenian underground. Once militant youths now had kids and mortgages; some broke down and cried as he interviewed them. After an investigation that spanned 25 states and Canada, the leaking bomb cache ultimately led Elliott to suspects in a string of terrorist attacks from a generation ago. He would come to believe that Mourad Topalian had led a double life, that the respected community leader had been a key figure in the world of Armenian terrorism. For many of Topalian's alleged compatriots, the statute of limitations had expired--but not for the man left holding the explosives.
By the fall of 1999, Mourad Topalian had turned 56, moved back to Cleveland, and taken a job as a vice president of Cuyahoga Community College. That October, Elliott helped arrest him in the college parking lot; Topalian was indicted for conspiracy to traffic in firearms and explosives and to commit acts of terror "against persons of Turkish descent." Prosecutors accused him of ordering the theft of the explosives, sending followers to Beirut for weapons training, and directing the 1980 car bombing of Turkey's mission to the United Nations, which badly injured three passersby. In other documents, they alleged that the stolen explosives were used in two 1981 bombings--of the Turkish consulate in Beverly Hills and the Orange County Convention Center--but officials say they have no evidence of Topalian's direct involvement in the California attacks. Investigators also believe he served as a top leader of the Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide, a terrorist group that took credit for those attacks and more.
Topalian has maintained his innocence of any terrorist activity, and his trial drew over 60 letters to the judge from doctors, priests, and others attesting to his character. In a plea agreement last May, the conspiracy counts were dropped, and he pleaded guilty only to explosives and weapons charges. His backers suggest that pro-Turkish elements in the U.S. government have singled him out for persecution, and the Armenian community has raised over $300,000 for his defense. Topalian insists that he believed the storage locker held only supplies for relief efforts in Beirut, and that he pleaded guilty to spare his family the ordeal of further legal proceedings. "He was used," argues his attorney, Mark Geragos.
Federal officials remain unconvinced; they say that since at least 1983, the FBI has suspected Topalian of ties to terrorist activity. But this raises another troubling issue: How, then, did Topalian become a regular guest at the White House? According to official logs, Topalian visited the White House 17 times from 1993 to 1996, where he met with national security staff and had at least two sit-downs with President Clinton just months before the explosives were discovered. Only after Elliott alerted the Secret Service in 1996 was Topalian's access cut off. "Somebody dropped the ball," says one official.
Last week, a federal judge in Cleveland sentenced Topalian to 37 months in prison, the maximum allowed under sentencing guidelines. Jail takes him away from a wife and six children, including a 7-year-old daughter recovering from leukemia. His case, meanwhile, may open new investigations into acts of terror long forgotten, including the 1982 murders of diplomats in Boston and Ottawa. It was shortly after those murders that a Cleveland newspaper asked local Armenians how they felt about attacks on Turkish officials. "There are two victims," a young Mourad Topalian told the paper, "the one who got shot and the one who was pushed to that extreme."
This story appears in the February 5, 2001 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.