COLUMN ONE : The Latest in Exports--Stolen Cars : Bands of thieves are sending vehicles to Mexico, Europe and the Middle East. The booming practice is hitting Southern California the hardest.

In an impound lot on a dusty hill in Mexico sits a weather-beaten converted Chevrolet motor home, its window curtains blowing in the warm Pacific breeze. Stolen a year ago from Las Vegas and never recovered, it is now one of the makeshift homes used by attendants who work at the lot.

In Bremen, Germany, international police finally have located four Chevrolet Corvettes stolen with the aid of fraudulent loan papers from several small California dealerships.

A touch of Beverly Hills turned up in Guatemala this year with the recovery of several Jeep Cherokees--one of which had been stolen in February from entertainers Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme.

All these vehicles and thousands of others are part of a phenomenon that is costing Americans an estimated $1 billion a year, according to the National Auto Theft Bureau, and confounding law enforcement agencies all over the world.

Through U.S. ports and porous border crossings, bands of thieves are operating a booming export business in stolen, high-priced American cars. No longer content to strip them for parts or disguise them for resale locally, they are sneaking the vehicles out of the country--in caravans along remote, unpatrolled roads or in deliberately mismarked shipping crates--and delivering them for resale worldwide.

Nowhere are there more victims of international auto theft than in California, and Southern California is the hardest hit area.

Lt. Bob Stemples of the Los Angeles Police Department’s auto theft unit said he believes that most of the 7,000 to 9,000 unrecovered stolen cars in Los Angeles during 1989 have been exported.

“None of the law enforcement agencies are really geared for the outflow of cars from the country,” he said. “It’s almost a license to steal.”

The volume of stolen cars and their delivery to such destinations as Europe, Central America and the Middle East have made the vehicles so difficult to recover that insurance companies have units dedicated to the task. The phenomenon has created a lucrative spinoff business: Bounty hunters who, for a hefty fee, will help car owners try to get their vehicles back.

Even when the cars are located in foreign countries, bureaucratic red tape, conflicting international laws and corruption make them virtually impossible to retrieve. Frequently, insurance companies must declare them total losses, paying off victimized owners.

While many of the stolen cars are sold, others fail to attract a buyer or are recovered by foreign authorities and left stacked in dusty impound lots. This is often the case in Mexico and Central America--the most popular destinations.

NATB executive Charles Evans said “hundreds and hundreds” of cases are being investigated by his office in Dallas in which stolen American Jeeps, Ford Broncos, Nissan Pathfinders and Isuzu Troopers have been found on the streets of Guatemala City and Belize. Before the Persian Gulf crisis, “there was a tremendous amount of stuff going to Kuwait,” he said.

With offices throughout the country, the NATB is supported by 660 insurance companies and works exclusively in the recovery of stolen automobiles.

California, known for its passionate love of the automobile, leads the nation in the number of reported stolen cars--298,445 in 1989--with New York a distant second at 171,007. Including the illegal exports, NATB officials estimated the loss involved in all car thefts in 1989 at $7 billion.

Two Southern California cities--Los Angeles and San Diego--are among the top 10 cities in numbers of stolen vehicles last year. Together they have lost 89,574.

National authorities estimate that of the 1,564,800 vehicles stolen last year, more than 200,000 were transported to countries in Western Europe, the Middle East, Central America and Mexico.

The volume of illegal international traffic has captured the attention of authorities in Los Angeles, Orange County and San Diego, where Stemples and officers from the California Highway Patrol, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and FBI are investigating a ring that feeds on the state’s large supply of luxury cars, pickups and four-wheel drive vehicles.

Participants in this organization, which Stemples said could number in the hundreds, fly into Southern California from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala to pick up stolen vehicles at designated locations. Stemples said the cars are then driven through U.S. border crossings.

“These people are flying in with the vehicles already identified,” said Sgt. Vincent Calderon, head of the CHP’s liaison office, adding that other favorite target areas include New Orleans and various cities in Texas.

At the Port of Los Angeles, Stemples said, his office is setting up a task force involving the U.S. Customs Service to police for stolen vehicles.

Generally, the most sophisticated thefts work like this:

The vehicles are stolen from car dealerships, shopping centers, airport parking lots and residential areas. They are driven to warehouses and outfitted with new vehicle identification numbers, phony ownership documents and new license plates.

Drivers take them to local ports, where they are crated for shipment overseas, or drive them through remote regions and across international borders.

Before their departure, drivers are supplied with road maps and often load the vehicles with other stolen goods such as televisions and electrical appliances. Others have been found carrying computer equipment used to print the counterfeit documents. Fake rental car agreements printed in English and Spanish also have been recovered by authorities.

Some Central American drivers are paid $1,000 per trip and make as many as three trips each month.

“If everything goes right, a driver can make it (from Southern California) to Guatemala in three days,” said Detective Efrain L. Quezada of the CHP’s Mexico Liaison Unit.

In months past, thieves bound for Mexico from Los Angeles avoided direct routes, driving in caravans east on Interstate 10 and through the less-populated desert regions of Arizona, New Mexico and Texas in search of less-congested border crossings.

More recently, officers have recovered maps showing travel through Tijuana down to La Paz. The maps indicate that the vehicles are then put onto ferries to Mazatlan, where their journeys continue.

Because U.S. Customs officers do not perform identification checks of outgoing vehicles, it is relatively easy for thieves to cross the Mexican border.

In 1981, the United States and Mexico signed a treaty to speed the return of stolen U.S. vehicles and aircraft recovered in Mexico. It is widely acknowledged that some corrupt Mexican federal police and government officials have been involved in procuring stolen vehicles for their use. It is still customary to pay bribes of between $400 to $500 to police officials in addition to storage fees and other charges to arrange the recovery of stolen cars, law officers confirm.

Quezada said U.S. law officers routinely make arrests in international theft cases, but many defendants easily make bail, ignore court appearances and return to their home countries to continue their illegal activities.

In a case that Quezada considered a victory, a man was sentenced in October to 150 days in jail and two years’ probation after he was nabbed by Mexican police in a car reported stolen from Pasadena and heading south from Tijuana. Still, charges were dropped against a passenger who helped drive part of the way.

It was a small success given Quezada’s effort: He drove two hours from San Diego to testify in the Pasadena case. He waited there eight hours and then learned that the defendant had decided to enter a plea of guilty.

Recovery of stolen cars in other countries is more difficult than in Mexico.

Earlier this year, Stemples said, his office, with the help of foreign police, located four stolen Chevrolet Corvettes that had been exported to the port city of Bremen in northern Germany. The autos were taken from dealerships through the use of fraudulent loan applications, with the thieves providing phony identities and enough in down payments to move the cars off the dealership lots.

Recovery has been slowed because of differences between German and U.S. laws regarding fraudulent documents. The cars have not been confiscated and are still being driven around Germany.

Authorities also have identified a group of German nationals who have been active for a couple of years in the export of Porsches and Mercedes-Benzes stolen from California for delivery to Germany and Belgium.

Bo Kohler, a manager for the Swedish Insurance Investigation Unit in Stockholm, said he communicates with his U.S. counterparts twice each week to trade information and help track vehicles illegally exported from the United States. “There is an enormous demand in Eastern Europe today for cars from the Western world,” Kohler said.

Recent political changes there have brought a desire for goods long enjoyed in the West, including luxury automobiles.

To satisfy that demand, Kohler said, rental cars are being taken from the streets in Europe and there has been an increase in the number of stolen U.S. vehicles exported there. The illegal trade often involves recent immigrants to the United States who have maintained business contacts in their homelands. Kohler said some buyers in Eastern Europe pay for stolen cars with drugs or precious artworks.

The amount of illegal traffic is incalculable given the sheer number of cars that flood Europe’s shipping ports for export and delivery, Kohler said. More than 25,000 automobiles pass through the port city of Rotterdam every day.

“Boatloads leave Rotterdam and go to Lebanon, where there is a large demand. They want the more expensive cars. It seems they are never satisfied.”

In Canada, Jean Claude Cloutier of the Canadian Auto Theft Bureau said his country, like Mexico, serves as a transshipping area and destination for stolen U.S. vehicles.

So serious is the problem that Cloutier said his colleagues in Sweden, France, the Netherlands and United States last summer formed the International League of Theft Bureaus, which allows for the exchange of information.

“It used to be that the only people buying stolen vehicles were among the lower strata,” Cloutier said. “Now, we have a different class of people who would very much like to drive a Mercedes-Benz. They will buy it from a thief if they know they can hide its true identity and especially if it’s from another country.”

Countless stolen cars never make it to Europe or the Middle East but languish in impound lots scattered across Central America and Mexico.

At a Mexican government impound lot just south of Tijuana in an area called La Gloria, the steep hillsides are covered with more than 3,000 cars, trucks, motorcycles, buses and motor homes. Some are junk vehicles towed from Mexican streets, but hundreds have been stolen from the United States and await identification and recovery. Some have been there for more than two years.

One of the vehicles, tucked away on a steep hillside and covered in dust, is a four-wheel drive Toyota pickup with a Colorado license plate. The truck is in fairly good condition with about 48,000 miles on the odometer. It was stolen last summer from Lloyd Parker and Delita Carlstron’s driveway just after they moved to San Diego from Walden, Colo.

Parker said he did not learn until three months after the truck was stolen that it had been found in Mexico. He received a call from an unidentified Tijuana bounty hunter who offered to bring the car back for a fee of $200 to $300. Parker rejected the offer, and was compensated by his insurance company, before he knew the exact whereabouts of his truck.

Theresa Beboy, an Allstate Insurance Co. spokeswoman, said that, on average, clients whose cars have been stolen and cannot be located or returned for other reasons are paid on their claims within 22 days. She said the company works through three NATB agents in California and one in Arizona to identify and win release of their clients’ automobiles.

After claims have been paid, Beboy said, the search continues in the company’s name through the NATB. If later recovered, cars are taken to a company yard in San Diego, where they are generally sold for salvage.

One answer to the illegal international trade in autos may be an answer to all car thefts: Make cars more secure. Law enforcement officials are encouraging that. “We had a representative from Nissan here a couple of weeks ago,” Stemples said. “We’re talking about hardening the target.”

Another answer may lie with better cooperation between Mexico and the United States, some authorities say.

“The amazing fact is that we simply have not attempted to address the issue at the border,” Evans said. “Rather than take the chance to solve these problems, we are looking the other way. The Mexican government is saying, ‘It’s not our problem. Why do you allow them (stolen cars) to come here?’ ”