Thieves Reap Rich Harvest of Green Gold : Agriculture: Pilfering is bolder, more organized. Avocado rustlers add to woes of growers already in trouble after successive winter freezes and a heat wave that raised prices.

It was no Brinks robbery. No gold, gems or greenbacks were involved in the heist. But the cargo was valuable enough for bandits last February to hijack a truck at gunpoint and knock its driver unconscious.

The scene of the crime was a remote road in the Valley Center area of North San Diego County. And the bounty was about 10,000 pounds of avocados.

The case is just one of scores reported by growers in Southern California this year as the price of avocados has soared because of poor weather. The pear-shaped fruit has attracted thieves--more organized than ever--intent on cashing in big on the dark-green, delicious goods.

“In days gone by there was a little petty thievery by workers. It has now become a very organized kind of effort,” said Warren Currier, executive secretary of the Avocado Growers Assn. in Fallbrook, a town in North San Diego County that is a major avocado producer.

The problem is costing California avocado growers an estimated $10 million a year at least. And it has caught the attention of the California Avocado Commission in Santa Ana, which has allocated $268,000 this year for a program to try to alert law enforcement agencies to the seriousness of avocado theft and cut off the marketing outlets for the stolen fruit.

With 74,600 acres of avocado groves and about 6,500 growers, California produces about 90% of the nation’s avocados, with an annual value of $200 million. Irvine Ranch in South Orange County has the state’s largest avocado grove with 1,250 acres.

Successive winter freezes have stunted the state’s yield of avocados for two years. If that wasn’t enough, a searing heat wave last April hit the tender young fruit. As a result the next 12-month avocado harvest is expected to be even more meager, about 23% smaller than the 324 million pounds produced in the growing year that just ended Oct. 31.

The scarce supply has raised prices that avocado growers get for the fruit from an average of almost 17 cents a pound in the 1986-1987 growing year to an average of 62 cents in the latest year. As the avocado harvest winds down, wholesalers have been paying as much as $1.60 a pound and supermarkets have been selling them for up to $1.69 each.

But increasingly, avocado growers are losing profits to rustlers, who for two years have been busily plundering the largely unprotected avocado groves in the coastal hills stretching from San Luis Obispo through Orange County to the Mexican border.

The thieves usually come at night or on weekends. They pick as much fruit as they can reach, stuff it into burlap bags and wait for it to be hauled away by a passing vehicle, according to law enforcement authorities.

Or they may not bother to pick at all. In the evening they may simply help themselves to the bins of avocados that pickers have filled and placed on the roadside to be trucked to packing houses.

Often the next day footprints, tire tread marks, holes cut into fences, broken irrigation pipes, discarded flashlights, an occasional pile of avocados missed in the dark or empty bins are telltale signs of the thieves’ work.

The stolen avocados then are sold at a substantial discount to restaurants, road stands, packing houses and fruit brokers, say growers and law enforcement authorities. Among those thought most likely to be dealing in stolen avocados are brokers and packing houses that offer to pay cash for the produce, thus leaving no record of who sold it to them.

Reuben Hofshi, a grower, grove manager and co-owner of the Del Rey Avocado packing house in Fallbrook, figures that, even if a thief, who must take a 50% discount when he sells his loot, a few weeks ago could have pocketed $150 for an hour of picking.

Although avocado theft had reared its head previously when avocado prices rose, industry observers say that this time the thieves seem to be much more organized. “There is a larger-scale operation going on,” said Robert Siemer, also a part owner at Del Rey Avocado.

In September, 1,500 pounds of avocados disappeared from a cooler at Bear Creek Ranch in Fallbrook, and some of the fruit was discovered in a packing company truck at the Los Angeles Wholesale Produce Market, still nestled in boxes sporting Bear Creek Ranch labels.

“We now believe a larger network of thieves is involved,” said Lt. William Flores, commander of the San Diego County sheriff’s substation in Fallbrook that has been spurred by the Bear Creek incident to conduct a larger investigation of organized avocado theft.

Avocado industry officials say there is no way of knowing exactly how many avocados have been stolen and resold. Estimates of grove yields are imprecise, and many avocado thefts aren’t reported or go undetected, growers and law enforcement authorities say.

Flores said that, in the past two years, his office has recorded 18 avocado thefts in Fallbrook. But he said he suspects “many more go unreported” and that some avocado thiefs are prosecuted for crimes that are easier to prove, such as for stealing a pickup truck or for drug offenses.

The sheriff’s substation in Vista, another avocado-growing area in North San Diego County, has received about 50 reports of avocado theft in the past 12 months, a patrol sergeant there estimated. And the nearby Valley Center sheriff’s substation arrested 11 avocado theft suspects in the last picking season.

Avi Crane, industry affairs director for the California Avocado Commission, an organization created by the state Legislature in 1978 to help avocado growers jointly promote avocado consumption, said a survey of state growers last year showed that at least 5% of the crop’s value was lost to theft. At that rate, he said, the avocado industry in California was robbed of $10 million during the last year. He added that he thought that estimate was low.

Groves suffering the greatest losses from theft tend to be owned by people who live and work in the city and thus can’t keep a close watch on them. “The percent of absentee owners in the avocado industry is higher than for any other commodity in California,” Crane said. He estimates that “a couple hundred” residents of Orange County, which has lost most of its avocado groves to housing tracts over the past 20 years, own avocado ranches in less-developed nearby counties.

But even some growers who live in houses on their groves say they have been plagued by repeated pilfering.

Al Vangelos, president of CALAVO Growers, a Tustin-based cooperative of 2,500 California avocado growers, said: “I have had growers call me and tell me they literally lost everything. One grower said he had lost about 20 acres over a period of a year. He felt helpless.”

Bill Hendrick, a retired engineer who with his wife owns an avocado ranch in Temecula, a city in the Santa Rosa Mountains of southwest Riverside County, estimates that in the past growing year he lost $10,000 in potential profits to thieves who probably entered his property on weekends when the grove manager is off duty.

He said that, earlier in the year, the head of the picking crew and a packing house representative toured his grove, looked at the avocados on its trees and estimated it would yield 20 bins. But, when it came time for his crew to harvest, “they went in to pick and came out with one bin,” Hendrick said. “It kind of burns you up.”

John Bartlett of Valley Center is one of a few growers who have managed to catch thieves red-handed on their property. He recollects that, on a Wednesday evening last April, he was taking an evening jog with his two dogs when the dogs darted into a group of trees.

When he followed, he said, “two pickers dropped out of the trees and ran. I also saw a third.” His wife summoned the sheriff, who caught two of the three trespassers. They were convicted of theft and sentenced to 60 days in jail, Bartlett said.

Then, in July, Bartlett said, he traced tire tracks along his grove to a car that was filled with 400 pounds of avocados in the trunk and back seat. He said the authorities “impounded the car but lost the pickers. They got away.” The very next day, he said, he found more fresh car tracks in his grove.

“I’ve become an excellent tracker,” Bartlett said dourly. Nonetheless, he estimates that this year thieves got away with 1,000 to 2,000 pounds of his avocados.

Growers in San Diego and Riverside counties frequently complain that the law enforcement system there doesn’t take avocado stealing seriously. Not enough avocado thieves are arrested, they say, and those who are prosecuted frequently receive light punishment. Under the state criminal code, the stealing of avocados worth more than $100 is a grand theft that can be prosecuted as a misdemeanor or felony.

Richard Smith, a grove manager in Temecula, said he and a friend on the evening of July 17, 1988, heard suspicious noises and saw a truck inside a neighboring avocado grove. He said the two men then armed themselves with 12-gauge shotguns, arrested the suspects and turned them in to the sheriff.

But Smith said he had difficulty persuading the sheriff’s deputies to press the case. He said he couldn’t immediately determine who owned the grove, and the deputies that him that, without a victim to file charges, there was no case. “I got the feeling they thought there were more important things to do,” he said.

Law enforcement officers concede that avocado thieves are not often apprehended because of a host of factors, including the difficulty of locating absentee grove owners and of patrolling many square miles of unpopulated orchards.

Some grove managers say they believe that some workers who are hired to pick avocados for a grove owner at the same time may be setting aside a portion for themselves. Honest workers are often afraid to turn in the dishonest, they say, because of threats of violence.

“It is my personal view that the largest amount of fruit lost is embezzled by people legally on the” grove, contends Currier of the Avocado Growers Assn.

In an effort to stem the avocado industry’s theft losses, the California Avocado Commission this year launched a program aimed at shutting down the market for stolen avocados. The program, which will also provide monetary rewards for information leading to the arrest of avocado thieves and seek to obtain more vigorous law enforcement, is paid for from an annual assessment fund on growers’ avocado sales.

The commission’s new anti-theft program has expanded the scope of the state’s longstanding consumer protection program for inspecting packing houses to make certain that avocados have been certified for proper weight and ripeness.

Beginning with a four-month pilot program that was launched in July, the state Department of Food and Agriculture’s division of inspection services has also been sending field representatives to restaurants, roadside fruit stands, farmers markets and fruit brokers to hunt for avocados that are not properly certified or receipted.

Donella Boreham, who supervises the state’s anti-theft program, said that, by state law, anyone who buys or transports avocados must have proof of ownership in the form of a receipt that shows where the fruit was purchased. If such a receipt can’t be produced, she said, chances are good that the avocados were stolen, and the state can confiscate them.

It is hoped that the threat of confiscation will deter restaurants and other businesses from buying hot avocados, purposefully or unwittingly. Between July 1, when the anti-theft inspection pilot program started, and Oct. 21, 12,765 pounds of avocados were confiscated and discarded or distributed to charities, Boreham said.

Although avocado growers say they welcome the new marketplace inspection program, they generally concede it won’t solve the problem of theft. Just six state inspectors are assigned to Southern California, a number that soon will increase to seven as a result of an additional allocation from the Avocado Commission. And the inspection program does nothing about arresting avocado thieves.

Some avocado industry officials praise a special task force set up by the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department for catching and prosecuting thieves and suggest it as a model to be duplicated by other avocado-growing counties.

Ventura County Sheriff’s Sgt. Ken Cozzens, who was instrumental in establishing the task force in 1985, said it is based on close cooperation among growers, the Sheriff’s Department, the farm bureau, the agriculture commissioner and the district attorney’s office.

Cozzens said that, although other fruit such as lemons and oranges have also been stolen from groves, “the big target has been avocados” because of their greater value.

Cozzens said the entire legal system in Ventura County has become determined to catch and punish avocado thieves. “We have sent guys to state prison for three years for theft of avocados,” he said. He also said that, in the Santa Clara Valley, which is his enforcement area, avocado theft seems to have abated significantly with the program.

Still, as California’s avocado growers prepare for a new growing year, they are putting up more chain link fences topped by barbed wire. Some are also hiring private security guards. Carl Lindgren, general manager for Treasure Farms, a farming company that operates the grove on land leased from the Irvine Co., said that, although thefts have been limited in his grove, he plans to beef up night patrolling because of the expected short crop next year.

This year more growers are also saying they will harvest as soon as possible, rather than let their avocados hang on tree limbs longer while they collect weight and size that adds to their value.

“Some are talking about picking early so there will be no fruit there for the thieves to take,” a grove manager said.