Crestfallen Angels : Young Crime Fighters Group Becomes Burglary Victim

The Ivar Hawks Neighborhood Watch group recently invited the Guardian Angels into their Hollywood community to help fight crime. But for at least one evening this week, it was the street-wise vigilantes with the red berets who were the crime victims.

Burglars--allegedly led by a former member of the group--broke into the Angels’ Ivar Avenue headquarters Monday night and stole two two-way radios, battery chargers and clothes worth about $2,000, said Sergio Terrazas, head of the group’s L.A. chapter.

“Somebody didn’t just pick our place at random,” Terrazas said. The office is staffed 24 hours a day, except for two hours each Monday night, when the Angels go to a local YMCA for training. It was during that time that the burglars broke in, Terrazas said.

“They knew where we were, and especially when we weren’t here,” he said.

Terrazas’ suspicion that the job was done by a disgruntled former member was bolstered Tuesday afternoon when a Hollywood teen-ager wearing a stolen Angels T-shirt walked into the group’s San Diego office and tried to enlist in the group. He explained that he had the shirt and a radio because he had been a member of the San Francisco chapter.

The youth eventually told the group that he had been hired to break into the Hollywood office by a disgruntled would-be Angel. But before that revelation, the youth told a convoluted tale that turned out to have more holes than Swiss cheese.

“He called (the San Diego office) and said he was missing his beret and handcuffs, so I said, ‘Hey, sure, come on in,’ like we just give that stuff out,” said Weston Conwell, head of the Angels’ San Diego office and the group’s southwest director. “He was definitely not playing with a full deck.”

Once 18-year-old Steven de la Cruz entered the office, suspicious Angels staff members began finding flaws in his story. The T-shirt’s serial number (all Guardian Angels shirts are marked, Conwell said) matched one of those stolen from Hollywood, and calls to San Francisco and national headquarters in New York turned up no record of De la Cruz’s membership.

Finally, De la Cruz said that he and three others were hired to break into the office by a man who they said had failed to complete Guardian Angel training and was kicked out of the Hollywood chapter.

The idea was to sell the merchandise and split the take, De la Cruz reportedly told Conwell, but not long after the burglary the youth decided to grab the whole lot and hitchhike to San Diego, where he made the mistake of contacting the local Angels office.

“It’s hard to tell what his motives were,” said Conwell, who held De la Cruz until San Diego Police arrived to arrest him on an outstanding warrant and burglary charges in the Hollywood case. “Maybe he wanted to steal more radios.”

Police said they would try to find the alleged mastermind and the other alleged accomplices.

Joseph P. Shea, spokesman for the Ivar Hawks and president of the Ivar Hills Community Assn., which is providing the Angels with free office and living space, said the burglary did not diminish his group’s confidence in the young crime-fighters.

“It taught us all that even under the best of conditions, you have to remain alert--the Neighborhood Watch had better keep watching,” Shea said.