White-Collar Crimes Become a Priority for County FBI Agents : Law enforcement: Of 10 satellite offices in seven counties, the one in Ventura is the most popular among operatives.

Two Ventura businesses had been swindled out of more than $16 million, and Naomi Jerez was on the run in Guatemala, when she was lured back to the country in 1986 and arrested for bank fraud by Ventura County agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

In the case of John Stephen Wilson, the crime was industrial espionage. He was arrested by two undercover FBI agents at a Ventura restaurant in 1988, after he tried to sell them secrets about a new drug being developed by a Thousand Oaks company.

And last year, the FBI’s Ventura office moved into action again--this time in a major defense fraud inquiry triggered by a tip from a worker at a Simi Valley defense plant who said his company was falsifying test data about missile parts.

Those three cases--among the most significant that federal agents have worked in Ventura County in recent years--typify the complex white-collar crime investigations that have become top priority for the 10 agents in the FBI’s Ventura office over the past decade.

“Most citizens don’t have an accurate perception of what the FBI does,” said Gary Auer, head of the FBI’s Ventura office. “Even those who are generally familiar with law enforcement perceive us as we were 15 to 20 years ago.”

At that time, Auer said, the FBI’s priorities were less complicated, focusing on kidnapings, organized crime cases and the pursuit of bank robbers and others on the FBI’s list of the 10 most-wanted fugitives.

While the FBI still works such cases, the Ventura office has turned more of its attention toward white-collar cases such as defense fraud and bank failures in the past five years, Auer said.

Five of Ventura County’s investigative agents work exclusively on white-collar crimes. The other agents handle a variety of assignments ranging from bank robberies to assorted crimes on the area’s military bases.

The office also works counterintelligence cases, which typically include debriefing county residents after they meet officials from the Soviet Union to determine whether Soviet intelligence is trying to recruit Americans, Auer said.

Hidden away in an office building across the street from a Ventura shopping complex, the Ventura County resident agency is, among operatives, the most popular of 10 similar satellite offices in the seven-county Central District of California, all of which report to the FBI’s Los Angeles headquarters in Westwood.

The list of FBI applicants waiting for a vacancy in Ventura exceeds that of any other of the branch offices that report to Los Angeles, Auer said. One benefit of the popularity is that the Ventura office has a higher concentration of veteran agents than any of the FBI’s other area offices.

The Ventura office’s appeal stems from the fact that about 75 of the 300 agents assigned to the Westwood office live in Ventura County and would prefer not to make the commute anymore, Auer said. Many agents moved to the county in the 1970s, when houses were cheaper than in Los Angeles County.

Agent Bill Pemberton, 49, said he transferred from the Westwood office in 1982 because of the commute from his home in Newbury Park and the hassle of traveling on the job in the Los Angeles area. Agents now working in Los Angeles often tell him they wish for a shot at the Ventura locale, he said.

“They say, ‘When are you going to retire so we can have a chance to take your place?’ ” Pemberton said.

The Ventura office was opened in the early 1950s, when it was determined that the county was growing and so was crime, said Ventura County Deputy Dist. Atty. James S. Irving, who once worked for the FBI and headed the Ventura office.

The office went through several transformations, moving from Ventura to the Seabee Base at Port Hueneme, then to Oxnard and back to Ventura during the following decades. It even shut down briefly in 1971, when a break-in at a similar regional office in Pennsylvania caused concern that small offices were not secure.

After the office reopened, the staffing level stayed at three to five agents for years, Auer said. It wasn’t until the mid-1980s that the Ventura office began to grow, as the FBI shifted its priorities to white-collar crime cases.

Indeed, Auer said, he recently submitted a request to Los Angeles for more agents in Ventura. But he must compete with other regional FBI supervisors for a limited number of employees. The battle is fought by getting convictions on important cases, Auer said.

“The office is considered a success if it brings home a few major-impact cases,” Auer said.

One such case is Agent Ted Bowler’s continuing inquiry into the downfall of Westlake Thrift & Loan and its parent company, United Community Bank of Thousand Oaks.

Five people have been indicted and sentenced to prison terms already in what is now a two-year investigation, and more are targeted for prosecution in the large-scale fraud scheme, which was brought to the FBI’s attention locally when California Highway Patrol officers in San Bernardino County complained to the Riverside district attorney.

About 40 CHP officers had let Riverside businessman Walter Vladovich use their names on loan applications to his mortgage firm, Pioneer Acceptance Corp., so he could get money that was tied up and use it for another company that he owned, Leder Video. Vladovich told the officers that he needed access to the money to build his empire of 100 video stores, Bowler said. Vladovich guaranteed to make the $200 monthly payments on the loans and offered the officers $1,000 each in televisions and videocassette recorders for the use of their names.

But in reality, Vladovich, working in consort with bank officials, submitted the loan packages, each requesting $5,350, to Westlake Thrift, telling the bank it was on behalf of people who were going to launch their own video store businesses, Bowler said.

“It was an absolute classic case,” said Bowler, whose 12 file cabinets full of Westlake Thrift documents are stashed throughout the Ventura office. “It’s the kind of case an agent dreams of having.”

Bowler, 48, an affable man with an easy laugh, joined the FBI 21 years ago, assuming that he would spend most of his career fighting the Mafia in organized crime cases. But Bowler--whose career has included interviewing Ku Klux Klan members in the South and working with Hollywood stars on copyright cases--says he is now happy dealing instead with white-collar crime.

“It’s not fill in the blanks,” Bowler said. “It becomes a real battle of wits.”

It was the Jerez case in the early 1980s that established Bowler as a lead investigator in savings and loan failures.

Jerez sold people on a plan to transport apartment buildings from high-priced areas of Los Angeles--where they were scheduled to be torn down and replaced with bigger buildings--to South-Central Los Angeles for federally subsidized housing, Bowler said.

She received $8.5 million from Hacienda Federal Savings and Loan in Oxnard, $8 million from Financial Planning Consultants Inc. of Thousand Oaks and $6.5 million from Orecal of Portland, Ore., Bowler said.

As money rolled in, buildings stopped getting moved, Bowler said. But Jerez continued to lead an extravagant lifestyle, treating 40 business associates to a $1,000-a-plate dinner for President Ronald Reagan and flying people to San Francisco for business meetings.

Her scam, which began in 1982, went well for a year and a half before officials caught on and she fled the country, Bowler said.

Meanwhile, Hacienda Federal Savings and Loan was seized by the federal government. Financial Planning Consultants Inc. and Orecal went bankrupt.

A promise from an undercover FBI agent that he could launder millions of dollars for Jerez lured her back to the United States, and she was arrested when she arrived to pick up some of the money. Convicted in 1985, Jerez is serving a 10-year sentence at Geiger Correctional Institute in Seattle, Wash., Bowler said.

Another of the FBI’s major cases in Ventura County was a defense fraud investigation that was led by Pemberton in 1987, after a former employee of the Simi Valley-based transducer products division of Genisco Technology Corp. contacted agents to tell them that transducers, which are used to guide missiles, were not being properly tested.

An inside informant then came forward, feeding the FBI detailed information on the company, which was using an Atari computer to generate false data and presenting it to the government and Texas Instruments, Pemberton said.

The transducers, cylinder-shaped devices about an inch long, help control the altitude of Hi-Speed Anti-RADAR Missiles, which are designed to go in and knock out enemy radar so that fighter pilots following them are in less danger of attack, Pemberton said.

“It caused a critical weapons system to be in doubt,” Pemberton said.

Texas Instruments was forced to recall some of the missiles and have them retrofitted. Last year, Genisco’s plant manager, production supervisor and a quality-control employee were convicted. Genisco Technology Corp., headquartered in La Mirada, was fined $750,000. The corporation is still in business, but the transducer division was sold, Auer said.

Pemberton said he has worked defense fraud cases in Ventura that are as “good or better than most in Los Angeles.” In addition, the working conditions are more relaxed in Ventura, because traveling throughout the county is easier, he said.

The selection process for getting a spot in Ventura is based, in part, on expertise and seniority, Auer said. The result is an office of older white males, all with at least 15 years experience.

Auer himself is a 19-year veteran of the FBI. His last position was as head of the Soviet counterintelligence squad in Los Angeles, where he was thrown into the national limelight during the Richard W. Miller espionage case. Miller, the first FBI agent ever found guilty of spying for the Soviets, was on Auer’s squad.

The trials in the Miller case revealed that it was only after Auer took over the Soviet squad that the FBI had begun a serious effort to fire Miller for gross incompetence. Nonetheless, the machinery did not move fast enough, and Miller remained an agent until minutes before his arrest as a spy in 1984.

About a year after the second Miller trial--the first ended in a hung jury--Auer was transferred to Ventura. FBI officials said the transfer had nothing to do with the Miller case and was part of a usual rotation aimed at giving middle-management supervisors a broader background.

In addition to Auer, two other agents in the office have supervisory backgrounds, and nine out of 10 live in Ventura County.

The agents--who earn between $55,000 and $60,000 a year--are expected to be on duty 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The average workweek is 49 hours long, and all take home government cars in case they are called out in the middle of the night for an emergency.

Agent Larry Dick, an 18-year FBI veteran who investigates bank robberies, carries a Sheriff’s Department radio in his car so he can listen for robberies and respond quickly.

Dick said he works the cases with the police and uses a network of informants to help in identifying bank robbers. He said he also relies on photographs taken during the robberies and on exploding dye packs, which are hidden in stacks of $20 bills.

More than 60 of the office’s 186 open cases are bank robberies. The office, which has joint investigative jurisdiction with local authorities on bank robberies, has a success rate of convicting between 85% and 90% of its cases per year, Auer said.

In addition, the FBI works closely with local law enforcement agencies on drug-forfeiture cases and is sometimes called upon to investigate those agencies when there are allegations of civil-rights violations by police officers.

The Ventura County resident agency has investigated about 40 civil-rights cases in the past five years, Auer said. Not one of those investigations has led to prosecution, he said.

Recently, the office investigated a Ventura police officer who used a stun gun on an epileptic who had suffered a seizure and caused a minor traffic accident on June 23. The office also looked into the allegations of an Oxnard man who claimed that he and several other guests at a private party on June 15 were beaten by Oxnard police officers.

Auer said it is sometimes an uneasy role for the FBI to be a peer of the police departments in most matters and to be their watchdog on civil-rights issues.

“It would be natural for any law enforcement official to have a negative attitude toward the federal investigation of their agency or actions of one of their members,” Auer said. “However, in the case of chiefs in this county, they recognize federal responsibilities and have been supportive of the investigations.”

Both Auer and local police officials said working relationships are smooth.

“In a small office with 10 agents, we, the FBI, are not the solution to the crime problem in Ventura County,” Auer said. “We see our mission here as a productive part of the overall law enforcement.”