Who is remington chase

The U. The pair have hired high-profile crisis lawyer Howard Weitzman , who is no stranger to controversy with a clientele that includes O. Universal, which distributed both films, declined comment, but producers Randall Emmett and George Furla , who secured financing on 2 Guns and Lone Survivor , are distancing themselves from the duo and their Envision Entertainment.

Damon declined comment. They intend to continue their involvement in the production of great films. The pair was hit with more bad news in the new year. His sentence was reduced to three years. Condemned twice to nine-year sentences, he served a grand total of just five. In , he was again a free man. By the time he was 34, Remington Chase had been to several colleges without getting a degree, and had gone by several names.

Friends just called him Bill. He says his multiple aliases stemmed from his career as a child actor. It was absurd. As a young man he became a pilot. He also racked up a record of petty offenses. In , Chase was arrested for allegedly passing forged checks to pay for airplane repairs. In , he was caught shoplifting glue at a building supply store, according to an LAPD report. Then, in January , he flew from Los Angeles to Atlanta, and then caught a connecting flight to Jacksonville.

He picked up two items at the Delta ticket counter, went to his hotel and made a phone call. That night, he and a friend boarded a yacht on the St. Johns River. If the deal worked out, Chase had agreed to fly with him back to L. Chase and his friend returned to the yacht after midnight, with one kilo in two plastic bags.

Chase and his friend disembarked. But before they were even off the docks, they were in handcuffs — accused of selling to undercover DEA agents. According to his plea agreement, Chase quickly admitted his guilt and volunteered to cooperate. Asked about it now, however, Chase has a recollection of events vastly at odds with the court record.

That money was used for an illegal narcotics transaction. I wasn't involved. Martirosian and Chase might have spent the rest of their lives getting in and out of legal scrapes were it not for a wealthy Armenian friend. Vitaly Grigoriants is an oil man who has supplied the capital for their legitimate business ventures, including their foray into film production. Martirosian met Grigoriants at Moscow State University. In the privatization scramble that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, Grigoriants became one of Russia's minor oligarchs.

He accumulated his wealth trading in oil and gas, and later moved into banking and real estate. For the last 15 years, Martirosian says, he has acted Grigoriants' point man in the United States, which has given him entree to elite circles in Moscow and Yerevan, the Armenian capital. Chase also considers himself a partner in the enterprise. In Armenia, as in Russia, the worlds of business and politics are intertwined.

Success depends to a great extent on maintaining friendly relations with powerful people. For decades, Grigoriants has been a good friend of the Armenian president, Serzh Sargsyan, who came to prominence in the early s as a commander of Armenian military forces during the Nagorno-Karabakh War. Following the cease-fire, Sargsyan became the country's defense minister.

In , Martirosian hired an American public relations firm, Burson-Marsteller, to help promote Sargsyan's image abroad. The contract filed with the U. Sargsyan was elected president of Armenia in Though he has been a reliable American ally, the U. His election was marred by clashes between demonstrators and security forces that left 10 people dead, as well as by the subsequent prosecutions of opposition figures for instigating the protests.

In , the U. As for the president's oligarch friend, Grigoriants, he has kept a low profile in Armenia and Russia. He received some media attention for his role in funding a new Armenian cathedral in Moscow, but otherwise he is rarely mentioned. His biggest controversy surrounds the collapse of Ukrprombank, which he owned. Ukraine was hit hard by the global recession, and Ukrprombank was badly over-leveraged. In addition to the bank, Grigoriants and his partner owned Alfa-Nafta, a chain of gas stations in Ukraine.

According to an article in Kontrakty , a Ukrainian business publication, a sizable portion of the bank's bad loans had been made to Alfa-Nafta. The Ukrainian government could not afford that, and instead liquidated the bank and sold its assets and liabilities to another financial institution.

Grigoriants also lost Alfa-Nafta. Chase adds that he was especially proud of Alfa-Nafta and sorry to see it go. By that time, Martirosian had been overseeing Grigoriants' enterprises in the United States for at least a decade. According to a deposition he gave in a real estate bankruptcy case in , Martirosian convinced Grigoriants to invest in condo projects in California as a hedge against his Russian portfolio. Virgin Islands. One of the reasons we got into the movie business was the uncertainty of real estate.

In October , a year-old Hungarian man was arrested at his home in Vienna. Istvan Kele had a long criminal history, including the murder of a New Jersey bank guard during an armed robbery.

For that crime, he was sentenced to life in prison — but he was paroled in According to federal prosecutors, Kele detailed his plan to a confidential informant. He's not gonna say fucking shit. He's probably going to shit in his pants. Kele had met Chase a few years before, through Martirosian. Kele and Martirosian went way back, to their days in prison together at Terminal Island in Los Angeles in the early s. When Kele was arrested, he realized that Chase had set him up.

That call was recorded and later obtained by the Weekly. You know that you and your boss and him are probably going to spend the rest of your life in a gulag.

And I don't give a shit if I go with you guys. Martirosian said he did not know what Kele was talking about. He wanted Kele to know he had nothing to do with setting him up.

Kele wasn't buying it. Earlier in , Chase had been arrested in Nevada after being indicted on charges of Social Security fraud. While in custody, he had once again volunteered to cooperate with the government. Chase was released within a few weeks and eventually pleaded guilty to using a false Social Security number on a mortgage application.

He was given probation. Kele believed that Chase had set him up in order to reduce his own sentence. He blamed Martirosian for not warning him about it.

He was adamant that Martirosian pass on a message. Three months later, Kele wrote a letter from jail to the Russian Embassy in Washington. In the letter, also obtained by the Weekly , Kele alleged that Martirosian and another man, whose name is redacted, had hired him in to travel to Moscow to murder a Georgian businessman.

Based on the context of the report, and other documents and interviews, it is clear that the other man is Chase. The businessman, Kasca Kalandarishvili, had been in the oil and gas industry, and Kele said he had run afoul of Martirosian's Russian boss. Kele claimed that he never intended to carry out the murder, and that at some point Martirosian and Chase called it off. Further, Kele said that he had told all of this to the FBI, but they showed no interest in investigating their own informant.

Kele's allegations found their way to the desk of Moscow police detective Dmitry Mironov, who opened an investigation.

Kalandarishvili had, in fact, been murdered on a snowy street near his apartment, in a wealthy district of Moscow, in February According to Russian news accounts, the year-old man was out walking his dog just before midnight when an assailant ran up and shot him in the head. He wanted them to find out whatever they could about his relationship with Martirosian, Chase and the Russian oil business. In fact, Martirosian and Chase burst on the Hollywood scene just six weeks later, in September , with an announcement at the Toronto International Film Festival.

The announcements, made in a press release, were not exactly true. But Chase and Martirosian were pumping serious money into production. Soon they were getting executive producer credits on big-budget films. As recently as , Chase was arrested for social security fraud, and is thought to have turned informant again to secure a quick release.

LA Weekly explains how Chase helped police uncover a robbery plot in Los Angeles, whose prospective perpetrator then accused Chase and Martirosyan of having hired him to kill a man in Russia. The accusations proved unfounded. In , Chase and Martirosyan broke into the film business with the launch of their firm Envision Entertainment, which has since backed more than 10 movies, including Lone Survivor and two other Mark Wahlberg projects.

The company is also helping develop screen adaptations of the Hasbro board games Monopoly and Hungry Hungry Hippos. Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies. Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later?