Bad Luck on Display at Hologram Exhibit Hit Twice by Thieves

The curators of a Santa Monica holography exhibit say they are haunted by the feeling that a menacing black cloud is raining misfortune down on them at every turn.

And who can blame them, said investigators and spectators on hand to view the holograms on Monday. The exhibit, part of a collection billed as the largest and “most significant” in the world, has been burglarized twice in the last 10 days, to the tune of about $100,000.

“I figured I’d better come see it before they steal the rest of it,” said Steve Kaplan, a Santa Monica attorney viewing the “Images in Time and Space” collection at a Third Street Promenade gallery.

The burglaries followed a heist last summer in which three holograms--lifelike three-dimensional images captured on film with the use of a laser beam--were stolen while the exhibit was on display in San Francisco.

To top it off, sometime within the last three weeks, $10,000 worth of televisions, videocassette recorders and other electronic goods used in the exhibit were stolen from an Inglewood warehouse, according to J. William McGowan, chairman of the board of Associates of Science and Technology, a Canadian nonprofit organization sponsoring the exhibit.

It gets worse. Just after talking to Inglewood police last Friday about the warehouse theft, McGowan’s wallet was apparently lifted by a pickpocket. That same night, another group member’s vintage 1963 Chevrolet Impala was stolen in an apparently unrelated case, along with his architecture portfolio, outside a Hollywood nightclub. Robert A. Amezquita said it was the second time his car been stolen since he joined the group.

“I have to laugh. It is just unbelievable,” McGowan said. “If anyone were to make up this story, people would say, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’ ”

McGowan, as well as other holography organization members and the local police, regard the thefts as anything but funny. “It is just devastating, quite frankly,” McGowan said.

At a news conference Monday at the exhibit gallery, McGowan appealed to the public to help find 25 holograms that were stolen during break-ins the last two Sunday mornings. The entire exhibit had about 200 holograms.

Program director Robin Scott fought back tears Monday, without success, as she pointed to blank spaces on the walls of the darkened gallery where the holograms had been ripped from their mountings. She said some, like one about world peace by a local artist known as Alexander, had taken months to produce, were worth about $15,000, and were masterpieces unlike any others in the world.

“These artists,” Scott said, “have lost pieces of themselves.”

There are no suspects and police are pursuing some “very limited information,” said Lt. Robert Thomas of the Santa Monica Police Department.

One possibility, authorities said, is that the burglaries were an inside job, since it appears that there was no forced entry to the building in either break-in. The robbers may have had keys and may have known what they wanted beforehand, police said.

Authorities said the works were insured, but there was “nothing to suggest any kind of insurance fraud.”

Thomas, who is coordinating the investigation, said police are increasing their surveillance of the site and trying to determine why someone would steal holographs and where they could sell them. “We learn about art in a hurry when something like this happens,” Thomas said.

Authorities said they did not know whether the Santa Monica and Inglewood burglaries were related.

“It could be lot of coincidences,” one law enforcement official said of the tribulations befalling the group’s members, “but if it is, we wouldn’t recommend they buy any lottery tickets.”

The Santa Monica exhibit and a display that opened in Pasadena this week are both drawn from the Associates of Science and Technology’s collection of works by artists from 17 countries. The group uses its entire collection, valued at $1.5 million, to get youngsters interested in the ties between the sciences and the arts.