In late September, after a months-long investigation by special agents, a federal grand jury charged the L.A.-area developer Arthur Aslanian with some of the most explosive criminal allegations ever imposed against a real estate professional: conspiracy to murder for hire.
Aslanian, a 53-year-old who lived in the wealthy enclave of La Cañada Flintridge, had accrued millions of dollars of debt to a business partner and a former attorney, and eventually orchestrated a plot to have the two men killed, negotiating a price of $20,000 per hit, according to prosecutors. He was eventually caught through a sting operation, after undercover agents showed him a photo — staged with the help of a makeup artist — of one of the dead men he had ordered murdered.
“It was real to him,” prosecutors later wrote. “He wanted [the victim] dead and was satisfied when the murder appeared to have been accomplished.”
Aslanian has repeatedly maintained his innocence in the criminal case. On Monday he pleaded not guilty, and he remains in custody ahead of a criminal trial scheduled to begin next month.
Tenant lawsuit
But even as that court date draws closer, additional cases involving Aslanian are getting underway. The developer is also a longtime landlord who for years has abused and neglected his tenants, they allege, as part of a larger saga that’s been unfolding for years at one of his properties in North Hollywood.
The North Hollywood apartment saga reached one inflection point last week, when federal prosecutors alleged that a fire that tore through the complex last year was an arson job ordered by Aslanian in an effort to drive out tenants ahead of a planned development project.
On Monday, five of those same tenants struck back, filing a 53-page civil suit against Aslanian and three companies involved in the property.
“We’re traumatized by our previous landlord,” one of the tenants, Clare Letmon, said earlier this month. But Letmon and her partner, JonPaul Rodriguez, also have no plans to leave. “We are staying in solidarity with our disabled and senior neighbors,” Letmon added.
Contacted about the new civil suit, Aslanian’s lawyer, Melanie Killedjian, reiterated her client’s stance.
“Mr. Aslanian denies all the allegations against him and maintains his innocence,” she said in response to an inquiry about the new civil suit. “Unfortunately, at this juncture I cannot comment any further.”
The suit, which demands a jury trial, lists more than a dozen claims, including assault, intentional infliction of emotional distress and negligence. It also offers a detailed chronicle of a years-long saga of abuse, perpetrated by a man whose parallel murderous scheme allegedly unfolded partly in the same neighborhood.
“That landlords must provide a safe and habitable home in exchange for rent is a basic covenant that comprises a landlord-tenant relationship,” the lawsuit states. Aslanian and the companies “not only betrayed that covenant, but actively caused uninhabitable conditions in the [tenants’] units while fostering an environment of intimidation and fear.”
As a result, it adds, the tenants have “suffered years of terror.”
NoHo property
The property involved consists of three lots located in the 11000 block of Hartsook Street, just east of Lankershim Boulevard and the center of the booming NoHo Arts District, a part of Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley that for years has hosted commercial and residential development.
Part of the existing residential complex, which includes both a free-standing house that’s divided into apartments and several connected bungalows, dates back to 1925. Its low-rise structure and interior courtyard, shaded by several large California pine trees, offers a striking old-L.A. contrast to the modern towers sprouting up in the area. Some tenants at the rent-stabilized Hartsook property have been there since the early 1980s.
In late 2018, Aslanian’s entity bought the two lots that house the complex for $5 million and the adjacent vacant lot for $1.6 million, according to property records. But under his companies’ management the property quickly fell into disrepair, the suit claims. Trees became overgrown. Trash services stopped. Debris began piling up.
The situation in the units was much worse. Garbage disposals clogged for weeks, and plumbing issues caused sewage to flood into bathtubs and hallways. Black mold appeared in bathrooms, and driers, ovens and heaters remained dysfunctional for months at a time. Rodents and cockroach infestations became frequent, and at one point a family of raccoons took up residence in Letmon’s crawl space, damaging the ceiling.
The tenants complained, and the problems reached the Los Angeles Housing Department (LAHD), which issued a litany of citations, including for fire safety issues, broken doors and unsanitary conditions. At one point the department issued an urgent sewer leak repair notice.
LAHD eventually placed some tenants into the department’s Rent Escrow Account Program, which reduces tenants’ rent by as much as 50 percent as an incentive for owners to resolve serious safety and habitability issues. But rather than fix the myriad problems, according to the suit, Aslanian told the department his tenants were only complaining for their own financial benefit.
He also carried out a retaliation campaign, the suit alleges.
As the tenants’ complaint continues, they allege Aslanian and his employees broke and removed some exterior property locks, which created security risks, only to add a bad lock to the apartments’ shared laundry room door, locking tenants out. Sometimes workers began demolition and construction work while tenants were inside, frightening tenants who noticed their buildings shaking. One morning Aslanian himself showed up outside Letmon’s and her partner’s apartment and started smashing a neighbor’s porch support column — to demonstrate how unsound the building was, he told the startled couple.
Fire hazard
At one point the developer’s workers, or “agents,” as the suit calls them, moved into vacant units, caused havoc and proceeded to threaten tenants Aslanian was trying to push out, even as the tenants declined repeated financial offers to leave.
“Bitches like you end up dead,” one agent told a tenant. “The building is old and so are you,” they told another longtime tenant, Cathy Livas, who was over 65 years old and is one of the plaintiffs. “It’s time to move on.”
The agents referred to their boss, Aslanian, as “el diablo.”
The on-site workers had their own issues with authorities: One morning in late 2020 an L.A. Police Department SWAT Team stormed the property, and ordered terrified tenants to the ground. The SWAT Team returned the next month, this time making arrests.
Aslanian, who has developed numerous apartment projects around L.A., filed his most recent development plans for the site in early 2021. The plans, which would use L.A.’s popular Transit Oriented Communities density incentives, called for the demolition of the existing structures and then the construction of a 112,000-square-foot apartment building, called SoFi, that would rise six stories and include 138 total units and two levels of underground parking.
But as the tenants held their ground, and the developer presumably grew increasingly anxious to begin redeveloping the prime property, the harassment and abuse only escalated, tenants say. Bad construction work and boarded up vacant units made the place look derelict, drawing complaints from neighbors and inviting squatters, who created a new safety risk.
That year Aslanian’s affiliates, without warning tenants, staged one fire in the empty lot for a television show, a stunt that for tenants began to increasingly feel like a dress rehearsal. By early 2022, they say, Aslanian’s agents “regularly hinted at the possibility of a fire at the property,” referencing a blaze at a nearby property and the squatters, suggesting their actions were unpredictable. They also disabled a garden sprinkler system and removed batteries from smoke detectors in the vacant units.
One small blaze broke out on the property last February, spooking tenants and leaving char marks around the building’s foundation. A few weeks later, in March, tenants woke up to sirens. This time a much larger blaze left multiple units badly damaged, tearing new holes in roofs and ceilings.
Fully entitled development
Aslanian was arrested on the murder for hire charges in late September. That same day, Rodriguez said, he also visited the Hartsook property. By then the project had been fully entitled for months — the city granted approvals for the six-story build in April, just weeks after the major fire — and the developer was still trying to push out tenants. “Time to move out,” Rodgriguez remembers him saying.
After the arrest, the accused murder conspirator was briefly out on bond, and managed to transfer management of the property to a new company, Glen West Management. In late February the company issued Ellis Act notices, which amount to 120-day eviction notices, and the same day a new prospective owner and his team showed up at the apartments.
The prospective owner “played polite and sympathetic, offering to ‘reward’ tenants to move out … and implying the city has determined these buildings must come down,” Letmon wrote in an email. But Letmon also noticed the same prospective new owner appears on a planning document for another project down the street, NoHo Moderna, that was designed by Aslanian’s architect brother.
“There’s not enough degrees of separation,” she said, “for us to trust anything that comes out of anybody’s mouth.”
As of this week, no property sale appears to have gone through. The existing apartment complex, still occupied by Letmon and several other tenants, remains badly damaged from the fire. Insurance hasn’t paid out, and with a new project entitled, Los Angeles authorities haven’t compelled Aslanian to make repairs.
“All the city can do is say, ‘Sue your landlord,’ Letmon said. “Look at the target it puts on your back.”
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