The retired FBI agent convicted in October in a downtown L.A. federal courtroom on a slew of charges connected to trading top secret security intel to an Armenian crime family figure in exchange for lavish gifts and expensive romps in Vegas is getting some high-profile help from a former top intelligence official.
Frank Montoya Jr., who ran two FBI field offices and acted as the former director of the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, is imploring a federal judge to show Babak Broumand mercy at his sentencing, slated for February 27. Montoya wrote to the judge overseeing his case that the convicted agent’s FBI career gathering human intelligence required him to work in “tough and dangerous places with little to protect him but his own wits.”
“The kind of work Babak did, often in the shadows of a gray and treacherous world, frequently has a debilitating impact on those who do it,” Montoya wrote to the Honorable Judge R. Gary Klausner, who oversaw Broumand’s two-week trial. Testimony over that September fortnight was filled with tantalizing tales of crooked cops, partying on private jets with sex workers, and a Qatari royal who fed his Demerol addiction with the help of the Armenian mob.
Montoya assisted prosecutors in the conviction of FBI Agent Robert Hanssen, who pled guilty to spying on the U.S. for Russia in 2001. The retired high-ranking intelligence official said he was “troubled” by the federal case that has landed Broumand behind bars at the Los Angeles Metropolitan Detention Center, the federal lockup across the street from the Little Tokyo court where his trial ended with a guilty verdict on Oct. 4.
“Knowing where to draw the line and when to return to reality can become an exceedingly difficult task when your very life depends on an ability to live a lie,” Montoya’s letter, which is part of a sentencing memo filed by Broumand’s attorney, Steven Gruel, continued.
And Broumand certainly lied—over and over again, as prosecutors told the court. He lied to his FBI colleagues in L.A. about his relationship with the reputed boss of the Armenian Mafia Levon Termendyhan; to his bosses in San Francisco about his frequent travels to Beverly Hills; to his wife, regarding a trip to Vegas with escorts and criminals, and on the stand, when he testified about his relationship to career conman Edgar Sargsyan, the Armenian organized crime figure who cheated his way into a law degree and ran a decade-long credit card scheme out of his Rodeo Drive practice where he hobnobbed with Governor Gavin Newsom, City Councilor Kevin de Leon, and a slew of other high-profile politicians, as prosecutors wrote in their sentencing brief.
“[Broumand] testified to a myriad of falsehoods, and provided a plethora of convoluted explanations and versions of events, that defy logic and common sense,” prosecutors wrote.
In his letter to the judge, Gruel argues that Broumand was a decorated federal agent whose wife would find him “crying at home due to the pressures, danger, and troubles he incurred in the field of operation.” His prior service, the lawyer writes, should earn him a reduction in the sentence; prosecutors are seeking 121 months, or roughly 10 years, in prison.
“Good people sometimes do bad things,” Gruel wrote of his client.
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