From the Los Angeles Times, July 22:
TIVAT, Montenegro — The private jet banked eastward as it ascended out of Lisbon. After passing Madrid and Barcelona, it flew over the Mediterranean and the Italian peninsula — Rome on the left, Naples on the right.
The husband and wife enjoying the plush cabin with their black dog were convicted swindlers from Los Angeles on the sixth day of a daring getaway. With police worldwide on alert to arrest them, they had slipped off to Portugal and hoped to vanish in the Balkans by nightfall.
Their destination was Montenegro, a small mountainous nation a few hundred miles up the Adriatic coast from Greece — an appealing alternative to prison in the United States.
At sunset, the splendor of the rugged shoreline came into view as the chartered Cessna Citation VI descended into Tivat, a posh town on the stunning Bay of Kotor, framed by the steep slopes of the Dinaric Alps.
There, the couple would shed their identities as Richard Ayvazyan and Marietta Terabelian, leaders of a family fraud ring that collected $18 million in pandemic relief for sham businesses in the San Fernando Valley. It was one of the many lurid scams by grifters who lied to get rescue loans during the 2020 lockdowns.
Forged Mexican passports with photos expertly embedded would clear the couple’s way into Montenegro. Rich and Mary were adopting new names worthy of a 19th century novel: Robert Niko De Leon and Nataly Rose Perez Garcia.
Yet the moment was bittersweet. Back home in Tarzana, the couple had abandoned two sons, then 16 and 14, and a daughter, 15. In his goodbye note, Ayvazyan had claimed he and their mom had no choice. “While I am writing this our tears are dripping on our breakfast table,” he wrote. He promised the family would someday reunite.
“Without saying too much, we both love you more than anything in this world.” In Montenegro, the danger of arrest would be constant. It was sloppiness that had undone the couple’s COVID-19 scam, and one small mistake was all it would take to upend their new life as rich Mexican ex-pats in Tivat.Where they stashed most of their stolen money remains a mystery, but it’s clear there was plenty left for lavish spending in a town that travel guides call the next Monte Carlo.
Within days of their Sept. 3 arrival, Ayvazyan and Terabelian rented an apartment in Porto Montenegro, Tivat’s most exclusive neighborhood. Once a rundown Yugoslav shipyard, it was redeveloped in recent years as an upscale marina with cafés, bars and restaurants, gourmet grocery stores, Dior and Rolex shops, art galleries, high-end residential buildings and a five-star hotel.
Scores of superyachts were moored at the docks one recent afternoon, many of them registered in Malta, Gibraltar and Panama. Wealthy Russians and other foreigners are a mainstay of Porto Montenegro’s clientele. For California outlaws laying down roots, the social codes of its shopkeepers — be polite, but never pry — would be an alluring amenity....
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