But Score Stands at Apartment Dwellers 1, Criminals 1 : Residents Don’t Just Watch Crime, They Fight It Too

Residents of a Sherman Oaks apartment building climbed to the highest heights in the citizens’ war on crime this week. Then they slipped to the deepest depths.

Their triumph officially entered the annals of crime Thursday when Giovanni Claudio Leone of Beverly Hills was arraigned in Van Nuys Municipal Court on four counts of burglary.

History of Arrests

Leone, 29, who also uses the name Jonel Radu, has a history of arrests for burglaries and car thefts, from the San Fernando Valley to Santa Catalina Island, but has never been successfully prosecuted, Deputy Dist. Atty. Larry Diamond said.

Leone has been charged with breaking into the apartment building in the 5000 block of Sepulveda Boulevard on Monday and stealing a television set that resident Jack Lindine received as a gift from his mother.

That was a mistake.

Lindine, a 35-year-old actor who was on his way home from a lunch engagement just then, said he saw the crime take place, or at least part of it. He said he was driving into the building’s subterranean parking lot and saw a man standing beside a gold Datsun 280Z with Massachusetts license plates.

“Thinking he was a new tenant, I said ‘Hi,’ and he looked me right in the face,” Lindine said. “Unbeknownst to me, he had just cleaned me out.”

Police filled out a report but advised Lindine not to be too optimistic, he said.

That wasn’t good enough for him.

“The next morning, I got up and started driving the streets,” Lindine said. “I don’t know what possessed me to do it in a town with this many cars.”

Lindine said he drove around for six hours before he spotted the gold Datsun at about 2 p.m. Tuesday outside an apartment house on Riverside Drive. He said he told the manager his story and they called police.

Detective Showed Up

According to the police report, a detective showed up in time to find Leone walking out of the apartment building with a VCR and a white plastic bag containing several bottles of wine.

He was arrested on suspicion of burglary. He was later charged with burglarizing two units of each apartment building, with the added accusation that he committed those crimes while free on bail on a car-theft charge. He is in Los Angeles Central Jail in lieu of $50,000 bail, Los Angeles police said.

The night of the arrest, by coincidence, residents of Lindine’s building had scheduled a meeting with a Los Angeles police officer to form an Apartment Watch group.

Program Begun Recently

The Apartment Assn. of the San Fernando Valley recently launched a program to get apartment dwellers into crime-watch groups modeled after the Police Department’s successful Neighborhood Watch program for homeowners.

Lindine’s apartment building was one of the first to give it a try.

When Lindine walked into the meeting Tuesday he received a hero’s ovation.

The group elected an Apartment Watch captain that night, resident David Churchill.

While all that was going on, a Buick Skylark was stolen from the garage below.

It belonged to Churchill.