Bungling Robbers Bring Absurdity, Fright to Family

It was a night of terror and fast thinking for Jon and Wendi Artz, who escaped from four armed robbers at their Malibu home and waited anxiously as sheriff’s deputies rescued their sleeping 4-year-old daughter.

At one point, when one of the intruders picked up the ringing telephone, told a sheriff’s deputy who was checking on Wendi Artz’s 911 call, “no problema,” and cut the line, Jon Artz realized he was not dealing with criminal masterminds.

“I’m going, ‘Whoa, these guys are not geniuses,’ ” he laughed after it was over, with two suspects in custody and detectives poking through his home for clues.

Still, it was a frightening and instructive experience for Artz, an attorney, who said he will pay more heed to the growls of Cody, his 9-month-old golden retriever, and remember to lock his garage door at night.

It was Cody’s warning that roused the couple and their housekeeper, Angelica Aguerre, about 1 a.m. Wednesday.

As he pulled a bottle of milk from the refrigerator and tried to calm the dog, four men burst into the one-story home on a dark lane less than a mile from the Malibu sheriff’s station.

Artz said he called to his wife in their bedroom to dial the emergency number, and one of the men jammed a rifle under his chin and said, “Shut up. Shut up. Give us money.”

The others armed themselves with kitchen knives and tried to tie Artz up with his wife’s bathrobe, cutting the skin on one of his hands and nicking his nose.

Using a phone with an illuminated key pad in the darkened bedroom, Wendi Artz reported the break-in. When a deputy returned the call to confirm it, one of the robbers answered.

By then, Wendi Artz had fled to a neighbor’s house. Aguerre, the housekeeper, also escaped, but only after the robbers pulled a necklace off her and threatened to kill her if they were not told where Artz kept his money.

Having only $5 on him, Artz said, he put the intruders off guard with a joke: “Had I known you were coming, I’d have brought more.”

This won a half-smile, and the homeowner directed the robbers to the four television sets and VCRs at various locations in the house, proceeding to make his getaway while they were busy carting off the electronic gear, he said.

Half-dressed, he ran to the same neighbor’s house where his wife had taken refuge, but they had locked the doors. As he ran to the next house, arriving deputies took him for a suspect, tackled him and threw on a pair of handcuffs.

“Maybe they thought I was the Underwear Bandit,” Artz quipped.

They quickly released him, however, and had him draw a map of the house, showing the location of the couple’s 4-year-old daughter, Alexandra, who was still asleep--unaware of the crisis. The Artzes said that, because of the location of the girl’s room, they were unable to spirit her out without alerting the intruders.

Although deputies were not certain whether the men were still in the house, Deputy Marty Chulack said, the circumstances favored a rescue attempt because, “it being pitch-black and the lights being on inside so we could see in.”

“If we didn’t have any of those, we wouldn’t have done what we did,” said Chulack, who crept in a sliding glass door with two other deputies. Weapons drawn, they found the girl--who awoke only long enough to ask for her teddy bear--and were out in 30 seconds.

A later search by a special weapons team found that the house was empty.

Two suspects were arrested at 3:30 a.m. about a mile away on Malibu Canyon Road. Deputies said the two awakened almost every dog in the neighborhood while fleeing along a horse path and scrambling up a steep ravine.

Lorenzo Diaz, 29, and Wilfredo Palacios, 25, were charged with kidnaping for robbery and using a deadly weapon other than a firearm.

Bail was set at $410,000 for Palacios and at $420,000 for Diaz, who was required to post the extra $10,000 because he is facing a previous felony charge.

When they were arrested, Diaz was carrying jewelry worth an estimated $20,000, deputies said. Wendi Artz later identified the jewelry as hers.

Jon Artz, a West Los Angeles criminal defense attorney, said he is not about to turn prosecutor after his brush with crime. But he has dropped his opposition to stationing a 24-hour guard at the entrance to the neighborhood, a horsy enclave whose residents include actors Dick Van Dyke and Charles Bronson.

“We sure could have used Bronson last night,” he said.