COLUMN ONE : Guns Add Horror to Car Thefts : The taking of vehicles by armed robbers is on the increase in Southern California. In some incidents, victims have been killed.

Vividly, they remember the guns.

“All I saw was the muzzle,” said Lou Joffred, an Encino real estate businessman. “I could see my whole life in that hole.” Without protest, Joffred gave the young gunman the keys to his 1986 BMW 635CSi.

“Two guys jumped out with a very large gun,” recalled Kirk Hallam, a Beverly Hills business attorney. “It was an automatic . . . but it looked like it was about six feet long.” The terrified lawyer backed away from his 1985 Porsche Carrera cabriolet and watched the robbers drive it off.

In Southern California--where thieves have towed, hijacked and hot-wired everything from a 1970 Volkswagen bug to a Peterbilt big rig--there’s a new low in highway robbery: auto theft at gunpoint.

Last year 70,000 vehicles were stolen in Los Angeles--a city with a reputation for the finest in cars--making it the nation’s leader in having them ripped off. Of those, there were 4,188 robberies in which, said Los Angeles Police Sgt. Bill Lovold, a 19-year auto theft detective, cars were taken “by fear or force . . . by handgun, by knife, machete, blunt instrument, simulated gun, even a broken bottle.”

The figure represents 6% of all auto thefts in Los Angeles last year.

“That’s a hell of a lot,” Lovold said.

In Orange County, nearly 20,000 cars were stolen in 1990, about 50 each day. Many of the larger cities in the county, among them San Ana and Anaheim, showed increases in vehicle thefts.

But Orange County law enforcement officials had no breakout of the number of cars stolen at gunpoint or other force. Such an act would be considered a robbery, police said, a crime that has been on the increase in the county.

Some drivers were killed for their cars.

Last month in Los Angeles County, a man pointed a gun at Camille Gibbs. She wrenched away from the robber. The gun fired. Gibbs, 45, a Canoga Park insurance adjuster, was shot in the head and died on the parking lot at Topanga Plaza mall. The killer drove off in her 1978 Silver Anniversary Corvette.

In January, it was a 36-year-old South-Central Los Angeles man, beaten with a baseball bat and shot to death by robbers who took his 1964 Chevrolet Impala.

Last year, a catering service chef was killed and her companion, a lawyer, was wounded by two gunmen who stole their Mazda in Los Angeles’ Mid-Wilshire area. Two months earlier, a Fountain Valley woman died after being shot in the head during the theft of her Toyota MR2.

None, said Lt. Bob Stemples, head of the Los Angeles Police Department’s auto theft division, was the victim of a professional auto thief, who is rarely armed with anything deadlier than a Slim Jim and wire cutters. The motorists were killed, he said, by ordinary street robbers searching for transportation to commit other crimes.

Attorney Hallam’s Porsche became the getaway vehicle in an armored car robbery. Joffred’s BMW was used in an armed holdup 20 minutes after being stolen.

Gibbs’ Corvette showed up the next day in a liquor store holdup.

“Her robber simply wanted a vehicle,” Stemples said. “If she had been driving a dump truck he’d have stolen that.”

The rich and famous are regularly held up. Comedian Don Rickles, parking in West Hollywood with his wife, had his white Jaguar XJ-6 stolen at gunpoint. Rocker Rod Stewart, returning with his daughter to their car parked on Sunset Boulevard, lost his Porsche Carrera the same way.

The assaults do not always begin with an ambush in a downtown parking garage, a bumper nudge at a mid-town stop light, or a shout in a suburban driveway.

In December, robbers broke into a Sherman Oaks home while its residents were pouring morning coffee. Two young men armed with automatics were interested in a car before cash. Demanded one: “Where are the keys to the black Lexus?”

Police well know the difficulties of stopping professional auto thieves who concentrate solely on unattended cars. These veterans work smoothly, quietly, quickly and know as much about disabling or working around car alarms as those who installed them. Their infrastructure is a network of chop shops or an overseas distributor for stolen exotic cars.

The countermoves of the career auto thief are usually only days behind the introduction of any anti-theft device, even the newer electronic tracking systems. In Los Angeles, a vehicle is stolen every seven minutes.

“Professional auto thieves don’t need guns,” Stemples said. “They’re making a fortune without them. You know, there are only 10 keys that fit a 1963 Chevrolet Corvette. I knew one pro who had them all.”

Rewards are high. Risks are light. Said California Highway Patrol Lt. Chuck Shipley, commander of an investigation unit that includes 17 auto theft detectives: “The professional knows that the chances of getting caught for auto theft or possession of stolen property are not that great . . . and the chances of doing time even less.”

Stealing a car at gunpoint, however, is armed robbery. It is no less a crime than holding up a Brink’s truck. And in California the statute is blunt: Use a gun, go to jail.

So why steal a car at gunpoint?

Because those sophisticated anti-theft devices that barely slow the professional are more than a match for the inexperienced and occasional car thief.

Ignition locks are armored against tampering. Keys to many expensive cars--including Cadillacs, Corvettes and other GM models--wear a tiny blister that is an electronic link to a black box in the engine. If an incompatible key is used, or if the ignition is punched and hot wired, the car’s fuel and electrical systems will not function.

“Therefore . . . the only way (for armed robbers) to get the car is while the person is still in it,” said Ken MacKenzie, vice president of the 18-nation International Assn. of Auto Theft Investigators.

MacKenzie, an officer with the Richardson, Tex., Police Department, recently visited South Africa, where motorists must equip their vehicles with immobilizers or alarms as a requirement for obtaining auto insurance.

“So they (thieves) are killing people to get their cars,” MacKenzie said. It may be, he said, that more cars are stolen at gunpoint than are taken when unoccupied.

Police say gunpoint auto thieves in the United States are not making fine distinctions between one class of luxury car and another. “They wouldn’t know a BMW from a Mercedes,” explained Stemples, “only that it is a valuable car with items they can convert to cash. So they steal it at gunpoint, out of desperation, often to be used in other crimes but mostly for money for drugs.”

Neither the FBI’s National Crime Information Center nor the Chicago-based National Auto Theft Bureau has statistics on auto theft at gunpoint. Spokesmen for both organizations said their computers have not been programmed to separate the crime from other forms of armed robbery.

But officers on the streets are seeing the change, especially in New York and Texas, states ranking second and third to California in auto thefts.

“It used to be one or two cases a month,” reports auto theft detective Sgt. Albert Cargile of the Dallas Police Department. “Now it’s up to 10 or 13 a month.”

LoJack Corp. of Los Angeles, developer of an anti-theft system that allows police to track stolen cars equipped with an electronic bug, says 38 customers have lost cars in Los Angeles County since its program began in July. Two were stolen at gunpoint.

“Thirty-seven were recovered but two (gunpoint thefts) out of 38 . . . that’s a pretty fair percentage,” noted John Raber, marketing director for LoJack.

Many luxury cars are grabbed as “quick strips” for the cash value of their up-market Alpine sound systems, Recaro seats, BBS alloy wheels or Mitsubishi telephones.

Michael Scott, 28, a reformed cocaine addict and former Los Angeles car thief who counsels auto theft investigators, says that in his six years of crime (“40 to 50 cars stolen . . . about 23,000 car burglaries”) he never used a gun. But he knew thieves who did. All are “hard cases” comfortable with firearms and who see violence as the easy and “accepted means of getting what they want.”

The Los Angeles Police Department’s Lovold says he is developing information on a three-man ring believed responsible for half a dozen gunpoint auto thefts in Marina del Rey, Beverly Hills and Westwood in the past two months.

The ring works exclusively on special orders, stealing particular cars for dismantlers shopping out parts and equipment. “They usually sell a (complete) car for $2,000, depending on demand,” said Lovold, a 19-year veteran of auto theft investigations.

A preliminary hearing is scheduled today in Van Nuys Municipal Court for three men accused of heading a ring that sold stolen Mercedeses, BMWs and Cadillacs worth more than $1 million. Twenty-two cars were taken, three at gunpoint.

“One incident involved a woman and her child driving a Mercedes in San Marino,” said DMV Senior Investigator Bill Hall. “The robber pointed a sawed-off shotgun at the boy’s head and told the woman: ‘Give me the keys or I’ll kill your son.”

High and quick returns are the continuing lure of gunpoint auto theft. The take for sticking up a convenience market, say police, is rarely more than $200. Compare that to $1,200 for the radio, seats and telephone in a car, $2,000 for a car headed for dismantling--or sometimes $10,000 for a new Mercedes 300 if there is a customer in Mexico or Hong Kong who has ordered just that make, year and color of car.

Pickings and prey are easy. There are no surveillance cameras in a Jaguar. The owner of a BMW 535i is probably not accustomed to violence and probably won’t fight back. Unlike liquor store owners, dentists and stock brokers generally don’t carry 12-gauge shotguns under the seat.

Real estate agent Joffred, although fit and an ex-Marine, did not once consider challenging the man who faced him as he stepped out of his BMW in the driveway of his Granada Hills home. It was just before Christmas, 1989. Joffred was ordered to place his keys and wallet on the seat of his car.

“There I was, presented with this gun in my face in very much the same physical position that the police use . . . two hands on the gun, arms stretched out, straight ahead and pointing at my head.”

He thought the man might be a police officer and the situation a matter of mistaken identity. Then Joffred was told to remove his Rolex.

Joffred, a husband and father, decided not to make eye contact. He didn’t want the gunman to think he was memorizing his face. Then Joffred took the initiative, turning his back on the robber, walking toward the garage door and effectively breaking the confrontation.

“There was dead silence, an eternity, as I was walking towards the garage door, wondering if he was going to plug me in the back,” Joffred said.

No shot came. A car door closed. The engine started. “I watched in horror as he stripped the gears and backed out of the driveway and drove off. . . . “

Police recovered the BMW a week later in a Pacoima parking lot. The body was dented, the windshield kicked in. Stereo, telephone and seats were gone. Repairs cost $13,000.

Joffred still has the car--his way of retaliating.

“I refused to sell it because I’m not going to let anybody else handle my life that way,” he said. “And I’m still wearing a Rolex.”

The couple in the Sherman Oaks robbery do not wish to be identified. They have moved but still fear retaliation. Their Lexus was recovered and the robbers are in jail.