BEVERLY HILLS—A former FBI agent was sentenced to 72 months in federal prison on Monday, February 27, for accepting $150,000 in bribes in exchange for providing sensitive law enforcement information to a Beverly Hills attorney with connections to organized crime groups.
United States District Judge R. Gary Klausner sentenced Babak Broumand, 56, of Lafayette. In addition to his six year sentence, he is ordered to pay a $30,000 fine and to forfeit $132,309 which he acquired illicitly.
Broumand was an FBI agent from January 1999 until 2018. During his employment with the FBI Field Office in San Francisco, he was assigned investigations on national security.
In 2018, he was served search warrants at his home and business, Love Bugs LLC. which is a lice-removal hair salon that Broumand and his wife started in 2007. The bribes he received were deposited into his business account.
Broumand conducted law enforcement database inquiries and used them to help the attorney identified as “E.S.” and his associates avoid prosecution and law enforcement monitoring. In return, he accepted cash, private flights, a Ducati motorcycle, hotel stays, escorts, and other items of value.
To hide the nature of Broumand and E.S.’s relationship, the defendant claimed that E.S. was working as a source for the FBI. He went to the extent of writing false reports to make it appear that he conducted legitimate law enforcement database inquiries. The pair had a coded system where if a particular person or entity he researched through the FBI database was under criminal investigation. Broumand would tell E.S. to “stay away” from that person or that they were “OK.”
After the inception of their scheme, E.S. asked Broumand to research an individual by the name of Levon Termendzhyan, an Armenian organized crime figure for whom E.S. worked with. The search revealed an FBI investigation in Los Angeles was being conducted involving Termendzhyan. In January 2015, Broumand accessed the FBI case file on Termendzhyan repeatedly and possibly again in May 2016.
Broumand interfered with an FBI investigation into Felix Cisneros Jr., a corrupt special agent with Homeland Security Investigations who had ties to Termendzhyan. Cisneros was convicted at trial in two different cases, one for corrupt acts involving Termendzhyan and the other for corrupt acts involving E.S. Cisneros was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison.
Broumand searched a confidential FBI database for information about Sam Sarkis Solakyan, a medical imaging company CEO, and later warned E.S. to “stay away” from Solakyan, who was “trouble,” and under investigation by law enforcement. Solakyan was charged in San Diego federal court, tried, and convicted.
“Every law enforcement officer takes an oath to never betray their integrity and to enforce the law with fairness and justice when they enter this profession. Unfortunately, Babak Broumand betrayed that oath and violated the trust bestowed on him by the American people” said Darren Lian, Special Agent in Charge of the IRS Criminal Investigation’s Oakland Field Office. “Today’s sentence shows that no one is above the law.”
