They were bayoneted in their homes. Drowned in the Black Sea. Shot. Tortured in front of crowds. Forced to convert. Forced into prostitution. Burned alive. Poisoned. Driven into the desert to die of thirst. Their bodies were thrown in pits, torched, eaten by dogs and picked over by vultures.
By many estimates, a million Armenians died in the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1920, one of the first genocides in a century that would be defined by mass killings. Ignored by most of the world and denied by the Turkish government, the Armenian slaughter was considered for generations a “perfect genocide,” its victims forgotten, its perpetrators unpunished.
Then, in the mid-2000s, court cases in Los Angeles, home to one of the largest Armenian communities outside Armenia, delivered a measure of justice that history had long denied. Three Armenian American attorneys sued to collect life insurance policies on victims of the genocide, and came away with a pair of class-action settlements totaling $37.5 million. Finally, in an American courtroom, the genocide was treated as fact.
In the decade that followed, however, the much hoped-for reparations devolved into a corrupted process marked by diverted funds and misconduct that even the lawyers involved characterized as fraud, The Times found in an investigation that drew on newly unsealed case filings, other court documents, official records, and interviews.
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