58 Units in One Night : Employee Arrested in Computer Thefts

Police said a friend explained Richard Jones’ arrest this way: “He gets hooked up with women and then they take advantage of him.

“He could go into a bar with a full paycheck and could come out with nothing. If any woman wanted money, he would give it to them. And he made good money. . . .”

The 5-foot-9 computer programmer had slimmed down from 400 to 250 pounds, police said. He had a topless dancer for a girlfriend and was helping to support an ex-wife.

What Jones did to meet these expenses, according to police, was to steal a personal computer now and then from his employer, Towne Advertiser’s Mailing Service in Santa Ana, where he had worked for 15 years and was “a trusted employee.”

He started in November and over the next 4 months took eight new Toshiba T-5100 laptop computers, which list for $7,199 each but usually sell for around $5,800, police said.

He sold them to acquaintances and to customers of his moonlight computer business for $1,000 to $2,000, said Santa Ana Police Investigator John Burger. “I know of one guy in Compton who bought one for $100.”

According to Burger, Jones finally threw caution to the wind 3 weekends ago. He used his company keys to turn off the company’s burglar alarm, open the doors, fire up the forklift and truck away 58 more computers.

Management, which had ignored the previous missing computers as inventory errors, began to take notice, Burger said.

Police arrested Jones on Tuesday on suspicion of grand theft and possession of stolen property. He was being held in Orange County Jail in lieu of $10,000 bail and was still in custody late Thursday.

Thirty-three of the computers were recovered in the garage of a woman in Diamond Bar, who was storing them for Jones but was unaware they were stolen, Burger said.

Eleven more were retrieved from people who had bought them from Jones, Burger said.

“It’s kind of unusual recovering them like this,” Burger said. “It was just cooperation from Jones that enabled us to recover the computers. He’s old friends with the owner of Towne Advertiser’s and didn’t want to hurt him. He just wanted him to get the computers back. He’s a kind of strange guy.”

Burger said most of the buyers have returned the computers voluntarily. “In most instances, people have been very cooperative. I think we’re going to have trouble with about seven or eight of them, but that’s about it,” Burger said.

Cipriano Perez, operations manager for a distributor of janitorial supplies in Fullerton, said he bought one of Jones’ computers last October.

He said Jones had been the company’s computer consultant for 8 or 9 years and had always seemed competent and reliable. So when Perez was in the market for a home computer, he mentioned it to Jones. Jones sold him one of the computers for about $1,200, about 80% off the going retail price.

“I didn’t question his integrity,” Perez said. Besides, he added, “I don’t know much about personal computers.”

Another man who got one of Jones’ computers said Jones gave it to him in payment of an $810 debt. That amounts to buying the computer at 14% of its usual retail price.

“He said it was a promotion item,” said the man, who asked not to be identified. “He said it was left over from some sort of promotion.”

Police said Jones’ employer considered Jones to be “a computer whiz” who, as far as anyone knew, had no drug or drinking habit. “He didn’t do any of this stuff for his own gain,” Burger said. “The guy lived like a pauper. Who knows what motivates these people?”

Said one of Jones’ customers: “I can’t understand a guy with a good job and moonlighting a little bit doing something like this.”

Another added, “I’ve known this guy for a long time. He was never a fancy dresser, and he lived in a motel. What’s he doing with all that money?”