California Average : 2,986 a Day: Vehicle Theft Accelerates

It was about 3:45 a.m. and a young man and a young woman were whooping it up in downtown Los Angeles. As couples in a state of hilarity sometimes will, they decided to do something madcap. Prankish, even.

The date was Nov. 16, 1904. There was a “Great War” going on in the Far East--the Russo-Japanese War, but in Los Angeles (population 200,000) it was quiet, especially after midnight. And the young couple were looking for excitement.

They found it when a steam-driven White touring car, manufactured by the White Sewing Machine Co. of Cleveland, hissed up in front of the Morton Club (a saloon, perhaps) and the driver went inside.

The couple, unable to resist the temptation, hopped in and steamed away in the buggy-like four-seater. The steamer bore the number 372, hinting at the meager automobile population of Los Angeles of the time.

Old No. 372 was the first automobile ever stolen in Los Angeles.

And So It Starts

Since then automobile theft--more correctly vehicle theft because virtually any wheeled machine from Porsche 928 to a John Deere tractor is fair game--has become a multibillion-dollar crime of international scope.

Today’s professional thieves can steal virtually any vehicle within minutes. They strip cars in a couple of hours in a “chop shop” and sell them piece by piece for more than the worth of a whole car. They “reincarnate” stolen cars by switching vehicle identification numbers. They import and export hot cars.

They create phantom cars, then report them stolen to collect insurance. Sometimes they resort to violence and, on rare occasions, to murder.

Once the Los Angeles area was the hottest spot in the nation for auto thieves. Today Boston holds the dubious distinction of having the nation’s highest auto theft rate. But with 85,819 vehicles reported stolen in Los Angeles County last year, it still is among the leaders.

Nationally, Americans lose an estimated $5 billion annually to vehicle thieves of all kinds, according to the authoritative National Auto Theft Bureau. Capt. Steve Malone, commander of the California Highway Patrol’s investigative services section, estimates that such thieves cost Californians at least $1 billion last year, including the cost of unrecovered vehicles, damage to recovered ones and expenses of police agencies. That does not include insurance costs.

If today turns out to be an average day in California, 2,986 vehicles will be swiped--133 in metropolitan Los Angeles and 235 in Los Angeles County.

If it’s a rainy day, the figures will rise in proportion to the precipitation, according to some police, simply because some people don’t like to walk home in the damp.

For many years, joy-riding was the principal motive in auto thefts. Even today roughly half of all passenger car thefts appear to be the work of thieves who steal for thrills or because they need temporary transportation. Usually (as with old 372), joy-ridden automobiles are recovered only a little worse for the wear.

In Los Angeles, nearly 90% of stolen vehicles are recovered sooner or later. Those recovered sooner usually have been taken by joy-riders. Those found later (and stripped) usually have been purloined by pros.

Recovery rate figures, however, are misleading. Many cars counted as recovered in California are literally mere shells of once trendy new models or expensive foreign luxury jobs. Despite the fact that California defines recovery of a car differently than most states, it nevertheless leads the nation by far in finding stolen cars.

Street thieves, who frequently steal to meet a specific order, take their rolling loot to a “chop shop,” where criminal craftsmen with cutting torches and other tools perform the dissection.

Like meat packers butchering hogs, the choppers use everything but the squeal--anything salable is removed and sold to illicit parts dealers. Police assigned to auto theft details say chop shoppers are probably the biggest problem they face today. The CHP estimates that one in every four cars stolen winds up in a chop shop.

Automobiles that are never recovered often are “reincarnated” through a VIN switch (removing or changing vehicle identification numbers) from wrecked or dismantled cars of identical or similar make and model.

VIN numbers are placed in odd niches of automobiles, and most car owners don’t know they exist, let alone whether they are authentic. Very few of an automobile’s major parts are stamped with identification numbers--a situation that will change soon under a new federal law. Detectives say the lack of such identifiers permits thieves to resell stolen parts with almost complete impunity.

The ‘Safest’ Crime

Because many vehicles are covered by insurance, there are some people who view auto theft as a victimless crime.

Not so, say Malone and his colleagues. Police say that big proceeds from stolen autos help finance drug rings (and sometimes vice versa). Raids of Los Angeles “rock houses”--fortified dwellings used by cocaine dealers--have turned up a number of expensive sports cars, some in the process of being stripped.

Auto theft, Malone said, is “the safest” crime for the professional crook.

“If a thief steals a $25,000 Mercedes parked outside, it is not, psychologically speaking, as personally threatening as when a burglar breaks in and steals, say 10 Krugerrands from inside your house,” he said.

In other cases, though, the psychological and financial damage done by the loss of one’s car can be devastating. Although insurance may cover most of the monetary loss, it never compensates for the trauma and trouble caused by losing one’s principal means of transportation.

Or, as Los Angeles County Assistant Dist. Atty. Curt Livesay expressed it: “We appreciate the fact that one man’s Rolls Royce could very well be a another man’s ’62 Chevy.”

Although there had been a three-year decline in the rate of auto thefts nationally, the National Auto Theft Bureau reports that there was a slight increase in the first six months of last year. In fact, many more vehicles are being stolen, and they are substantially greater in value.

What is most ominous is the professionalization of the crime.

“Theft and fraud activities have reached the highest levels of sophistication ever encountered,” said Paul W. Gilliland, theft bureau president. “Ring operations which once were statewide now span our nation and often are international in scope.”

Or, as a veteran local investigator expressed it: “We are shoveling sand against the tide. The bad guys are winning.”

Lt. Ron Carnevale, commanding officer of the Los Angeles Police Department’s elite B.A.D. Cats, agreed. The acronym stands for Burglary-Auto Theft Division Commercial Auto Theft Section. The small, highly trained unit specializes in the most difficult vehicle theft cases, investigations that divisional detectives have neither the time nor the expertise to handle.

“I am not encouraged at all by the trends in auto theft,” Carnevale said. “I am encouraged by the new federal law (requiring identification numbers stamped into major components of many new automobiles), but (the effect of that) is years down the line.”

The federal law, in his view, will not revolutionize the difficult business of catching auto thieves. Carnevale said he believes that there can be no real progress “until we get some good (new) laws” in California.

Some new anti-theft technology coming on-line may also help. Expensive but reportedly highly effective “Star Wars” devices are now being tested. Through microprocessor “homing devices,” they will permit police to precisely locate stolen vehicles. But the technicalities of the law are a major handicap, according to Carnevale.

“Now we have to prove knowledge and intent (to steal for profit rather than for fun or transportation). We are letting people get away who are damn good (professional) auto thieves,” Carnevale said. “Getting off with tampering or joy-riding charges. They should be doing time in (state) prison.”

There will be no change for the better, Carnevale argued, until “we can convince the courts that auto theft is not a victimless crime.”

Most auto thieves wind up on probation or doing short time in county jails, according to police. The California Department of Corrections said that at last count only 212 of the 39,000 felons in state prisons were serving time for auto theft. However, this statistic also is somewhat misleading because many inmates serving time for “heavier” crimes also have been convicted of auto theft.

Judicial Leniency Claimed

Lt. Terry Richmond, commander of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department vehicle theft unit, says a thief of his acquaintance who specialized in pickup trucks was caught last year after stealing at least 60 of them, worth about $7,000 each.

“He wound up on a work furlough program,” Richmond recalled.

In general, police believe that prosecutors and courts are too lenient with auto thieves, but veterans like Richmond and Carnevale say the entire justice system is at fault. And to some degree prosecutors and judges agree.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Robert Devich, supervising criminal court judge for Los Angeles County, said: “I don’t think it is the fault of the courts, and it is not the fault of the prosecutors, and not the fault of law enforcement. . . . The prosecutors are under tremendous pressures, the police under tremendous pressures.

“You can check in this courthouse today,” Devich said, “and I would say 90% of the courts are engaged in murder, robbery or rape cases.”

And auto theft, obviously, does not receive get the same priority as murder, robbery or rape, even in some police departments.

“They (police departments) sometimes put a low priority on auto theft,” Carnevale said.

Carnevale, past president of the Southern California chapter of the Western States Auto Theft Investigators Assn., said many California departments de-emphasized auto theft investigations and cut the number of detectives assigned to the job, as a result of the Proposition 13 cutbacks that began after the tax measure passed in 1978. “In some departments,” he said, “there is such a low priority on auto theft (and so few officers assigned to it) that there is hardly any investigation, no expertise, because people don’t have the training and don’t stay long enough to develop expertise.”

“We now have seven sworn officers, including myself and an operations sergeant,” Richmond said of the sheriff’s specialized vehicle theft unit. “That means we have only five field investigators. Before Proposition 13, we had 14 investigators.”

Even in Los Angeles, Carnevale believes, the detectives assigned to auto theft in the divisions (about 40 to 50) often do not stay long enough to develop fully. This is because they are overworked and because it is a job that does not win even the best detectives much in the way of prestige and promotion.

Glamour for B.A.D. Cats

Most of the glamour auto theft cases go to the B.A.D. Cats. One team, for example, handles most of the thefts of expensive foreign cars--the Rolls Royces, the Porsches, the Mercedes-Benzes. Another handles motorcycles; another big-rig trucks. There is one technician whose esoteric specialty is VIN numbers and hidden secondary identification numbers--including those that have been burned away or altered by even more sophisticated means.

They investigate the substantial numbers of cars that are stolen here, then driven by “mules” across state borders or into Mexico to be sold. Some stolen cars and trucks, in fact, are shipped overseas.

“In Yuma, (Ariz.) last year, they stopped dozens of cars stolen from the Los Angeles area going south into Mexico, driven by mules,” one detective said. “The FBI tried to get interested at one time (for interstate transportation charges) but the U.S. attorney’s office is not interested. Our D.A. (at the time) doesn’t even get too excited. Chances are we won’t get them extradited or get a filing of criminal charges.”

There have been technical developments that have kept police in big cities more or less abreast of the increasing sophistication of auto thieves: A computerized version of the old “hot sheets” can identify a suspected stolen car within seconds. But it is mostly the “mules” or the amateurs who get caught that way.

“It is the switcher and the chopper that gets away with it,” Carnevale said. “Easy money, lots of bucks.”

In his 13 years in auto theft, Detective Sgt. Bill Lovold, B.A.D. Cats team leader for foreign cars, has seen many changes in techniques.

“When I started we didn’t have near the problem with expensive cars,” Lovold said. “Now society, I guess, is changing, the economy is splurging and status-conscious people are buying nicer cars.”

He estimated that 20% of the high-dollar autos are stolen by professional thieves using the VIN switch gimmick.

“They will buy a salvaged car from a junkyard, take the identification numbers off of that (wrecked) car. Then they will steal another car of the same make and ‘revive’ it.” By which he means that they switch the VIN tag from the wrecked car to the stolen car.

The thief who steals the car on order is paid off, and the VIN switcher does his number, then sells the car at a little below the retail price, usually through ads in newspapers or throwaway ad sheets, according to Lovold.

It is comparatively easy to obtain a hulk with a usable VIN number.

“You can go to a junkyard and buy a junked car, just a ‘sled’--what’s left after a car has been stripped down for parts--and take the VINs off it,” he explained. “A stripped-out Porsche, for example, the sled will go for $5,000 to $7,000.” By switching the VIN to a newly stolen Porsche, the thief can realize a pretty fair profit when he sells it for $30,000 or $40,000.

Legitimate Buyers

Many of the sleds are purchased by legitimate wrecking yards at so-called insurance pool auctions.

Lovold explained: Chop shoppers, usually welder/mechanics with their own “regular” repair shops or working in home garages, strip valuable cars of their valuable parts--engines, transmissions, body parts, doors, radio-tape decks--and sell the parts at nice discounts to illicit parts companies.

The chop shoppers then dump the hulks in back alleys, canyons or anywhere that seems convenient. Sometimes they do not remove the VIN numbers from the sleds.

Eventually the sled will be recovered, and the insurance company that covered the car will pay off the owner from whom it was stolen. Then, to recoup some of its loss, the insurance company will sell the sled at one of the periodic pool auctions.

At least one major insurance company, according to Lovold, is considering abandoning the pool auction, simply crushing the sleds for scrap and taking the greater loss rather than selling the VIN-numbered hulks and thereby perpetuating the cycle of thievery.

CHP Capt. Malone, whose outfit broke up a $1.3-million big-rig truck and farm tractor theft ring in mid-January, said that “the most alarming new development” among professionals is vehicle fraud--the creation of “phantom” automobiles, reporting them stolen and then collecting insurance on the non-existent autos and trucks.

‘Vehicle Never Existed’

“In fact, we’ve done a study that shows about 15% of all vehicle ‘thefts’ in California are fraud-related,” Malone said. “That is, the vehicle never existed (but) it is insured with an insurance company. The policy is carried for a couple of months (premiums paid) . . . then the vehicle is reported stolen, and a claim is made on the insurance company.

“We look at this as organized crime. There are organized rings involved in both actual vehicle theft and vehicle fraud.”

Richmond is concerned that because of the “tremendous profits” in chop shops, Eastern-style organized crime figures may move into Los Angeles. “Since 1960, there have been 30 to 35 gangland-style executions (in the East) in connection with organized crime getting into chop shop commercial theft.”

Richmond said, however, that “foreign national gangs” formed loosely organized auto theft rings here years ago. Often they are based on family or ethnic ties. “We have run into rings that go in and steal half a dozen vehicles at a time,” he said. “They run them into Mexico. Certain types are more attractive in Mexico--four-wheel-drive trucks.”

But return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear--to that first rather unsophisticated auto theft. The stolen steamer was owned by H. D. Ryas, proprietor of the White Garage on Broadway. He said the machine was worth $2,500. Or $3,500, depending on which newspaper you read.

‘A Gala Tour’

City detectives were already on the streets looking for the steamer at 6 a.m. when F. R. Silvas of the Bond Bakery Co. telephoned police headquarters to report that he had found the abandoned White steamer, boiler still fired up and whispering steamily to itself at a Santa Monica curb.

“From all appearances the machine was taken for the purpose of making a gala tour to Santa Monica,” the Los Angeles Express reported. “The persons who took the car without invitation evidently were a man and a woman, as hairpins galore were found in the car.”

Whether the crime was ever solved remains a mystery.

Research librarian Tom Lutgen contributed to this article.

AUTO THEFT RATES IN U.S. CITIES These FBI Uniform Crime Report Statistics represent vehicle thefts by city per 100,000 population for 1983.

City Rate/100,000 Total Thefts 1.Boston 3,185 18,047 2.Camden, N.J. 3,118 2,688 3.Detroit 2,998 35,288 4.Bridgeport, Ct. 2,198 3,175 5.Newark, N.J. 2,087 7,013 6.Cleveland 2,000 11,439 7.Lawrence, Mass. 1,966 1,243 8.Providence, R.I. 1,917 3,030 9.Inglewood 1,798 1,810 10.Cambridge, Mass. 1,782 1,711 15.Compton 1,599 1,356 17.Los Angeles 1,555 49,109

L.A.’s MOST POPULAR STOLEN CARS The California Highway Patrol lists the following cars as the most popular with thieves in Los Angeles in 1985.

Make Model Year Total stolen 1. Volkswagen Bug 1966-75 1,624 2. Toyota Celica 1976-85 1,466 3. Toyota Corolla 1976-85 965 4. Ford Mustang 1966-75 944 5. Datsun 210 1976-85 915 6. Toyota Corolla 1966-75 821 7. Toyota Corona 1966-75 811 8. Chevrolet Camaro 1976-85 768 9. Volkswagen Bug 1956-65 731 10. Mazda RX7 1976-85 673

THE CHANGING FACE OF AUTO THEFT IN CALIFORNIA

The following figures were compiled by the California Highway Patrol over five years, a period when the population of the state rose by 8.3% to 25.1 million.

1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 Registered vehicles (in millions) 18.8 19.5 19 19.2 19.9 Average value of vehicles $1,996 $3,200 $3,007 $3,278 $3,323 Motor vehicle theft 170,326 178,447 167,247 167,781 162,455 Motor vehicles “recovered” 142,104 146,106 139,002 140,590 139,224 Adult arrests in auto thefts 18,885 18,442 17,419 16,703 16,326 Juvenile arrests in auto thefts 13,677 11,072 8,758 6,806 5,974

% Change Registered vehicles (in millions) +6.1% Average value of vehicles +66.5% Motor vehicle theft -5.4% Motor vehicles “recovered” -2.0% Adult arrests in auto thefts -13.6% Juvenile arrests in auto thefts -56.3%

On an average day in California, 2,986 vehicles will be stolen. Of that number, 235 will be stolen within Los Angeles County and 133 in Los Angeles. It is a police superstition that if this is a rainy day, auto thefts will rise in proportion to the precipitation.