Thieves Zero In on Bank Employees’ Cars

Sherman Oaks bank secretary Cheryl Cowgill doesn’t head for the coffee machine when she takes a break from her job these days. She hurries instead to the parking garage beneath her high-rise office building.

“I go down every two hours and check on my car,” she said. “I move it to a new parking place. I don’t want to leave it in the same place for long.”

There’s nothing unusual about Cowgill’s Volkswagen Jetta.

But there is something very unusual about the way car thieves are apparently singling out her and her co-workers who park in the garage.

Cowgill and other bank workers say they are being victimized by thieves who seemingly return daily to a six-story parking structure to search out the employees’ cars and loot them of valuables.

“It seems like every day they come into my car and look for something to take,” said Donna Owen, a vice president at the Imperial Bank branch. She said her car radio, a portable tape recorder and cash have been stolen from her Volkswagen Cabriolet.

She said she leaves coins as a gauge to see how many times her car is entered.

“I’ll leave a quarter or 75 cents, and it will be gone. One day, they took seven cents.”

Senior bank secretary Marlene Sostman said thieves have taken her car’s radio and--on one occasion--the whole car. Her Mercedes-Benz was recovered later in East Los Angeles.

“Every afternoon when I leave, I wonder if my car’s going to be there,” Sostman said. “If a bigger car is parked in front of mine when I walk up, I just hold my breath.”

The string of break-ins has puzzled security officers who patrol the 3,500-space parking structure, shared by high-rise workers and shoppers at the Sherman Oaks Galleria at the intersection of Ventura and Sepulveda boulevards.

“It’s really got us baffled,” said Lt. Ron Moore, who helps oversee 31 private security guards. “Why workers at only one office are being worked over, I don’t know.”

Moore said he grimaced when Cowgill approached him last week to report the third break-in of her 4-month-old imported car. She lost her car radio and stereo tapes, and her car sustained major damage in the incidents.

“As soon as I saw her, I said, ‘Oh, no, not you again,’ ” Moore said.

Mall security chief Jack Feaster said other high-rise employees and Galleria shoppers are not being plagued by the thefts. He claimed that the parking structure averages only about three or four car break-ins a month, although he declined to show crime reports for the garage.

“Why them and nobody else, I don’t know,” Feaster said. He said the theft of Sostman’s car was also unusual. “Usually, we have the opposite problem. We find cars that have been dumped here.”

Los Angeles police say they do not keep statistics on car thefts and break-ins at the mall parking structure. They said theft victims have the option of reporting the crime either to them or to the mall’s security staff.

Police Officer Brian Mathews, who helps coordinate patrols in the Sherman Oaks area, said the community’s affluence and its proximity to the Ventura and San Diego freeways are making the area an increasingly popular target for thieves.

He said police routinely drive through the Galleria parking structure, and a special anti-crime task force is occasionally sent there. But he said interior garages are more difficult to patrol than the conventional flat shopping center parking lots.

Feaster said the mall will increase garage security during the Christmas shopping season.

Bank workers, meantime, are installing alarms in their cars and replacing stolen radios with the removable, pull-out kind. They carry them into their office with them.

Some are taking even more drastic steps, Owen said. She said one regional bank executive switches cars when he visits the Sherman Oaks branch.

“He’s nervous about his Porsche. He drives his wife’s Buick,” she said.