TWA May End Plan to Aid Young Offenders : Rehabilitation: A CYA inmate working as a reservation agent used ticket buyers’ credit cards to steal thousands of dollars of merchandise. Airline customers are angry.

Trans World Airlines says it may stop using California Youth Authority inmates as telephone reservation agents because at least one former inmate stole credit card numbers and racked up thousands of dollars in personal charges.

Since it began in 1986, TWA’s program at the Ventura School near Camarillo has been touted as a high-tech tool to help young criminals learn a trade and repay their debt to society.

It has raised more than $500,000 for victims’ restitution and the cost of incarceration. And the program’s 213 graduates, many of whom now work at airlines and travel agencies, are one-tenth as likely to commit new crimes as nongraduates, CYA officials said.

But the inmates have access to TWA customers’ credit card numbers. And dozens were found in the possession of program graduate Carl Simmons, 20, who is now serving two years in state prison for theft with the cards.

CYA officials tightened security after Simmons’ arrest, calling his case an isolated one. Yet Simmons and another inmate still at Ventura School said the program’s security won’t stop inmates from stealing card numbers or illegally charging airline tickets.

And TWA corporate counsel Mark Buckstein said he thinks the program “needs to be evaluated . . . in its entirety.”

The company, however, is “not aware of any customer having to pay any amount out inappropriately as a result of improper use of their credit card,” Buckstein said. “I would hate to see a program that’s designed to rehabilitate the youth of California doomed because of the transgressions of one of its participants.”

Some TWA customers said they lost faith in the airline after their credit card numbers were stolen through the CYA program. They questioned the wisdom of entrusting teen-age convicts with such sensitive information.

“I don’t want to begrudge someone a chance to make it back into a productive life,” said New Hampshire businessman Phillip Parker, whose American Express card Simmons admitted using to buy $3,419 worth of custom car wheels.

“But giving them a chance where there’s a significant amount of potential for financial fraud or risk--maybe there’s other things that would make more sense,” Parker said.

Simmons was serving two years for petty theft at the Ventura School when he joined the TWA program in September, 1989.

During 15 weeks of intensive training, he learned how to use the computer system tied by phone lines to the TWA mainframe computer in Los Angeles.

He learned how to enter the codes used to identify cities of departure and destination, how to be courteous and swift on the phone with customers.

And, Simmons told the Times, he learned that the credit card number is the key to making successful sales. Each sale earns an extra 25 cents on top of the $5.67 hourly wage paid to inmates in the TWA program.

“When you book a reservation, in order for me to be a good salesman, I would get your credit card number,” Simmons said in an interview at Chuckawalla Valley State Prison, near the California-Arizona border. “And that would be considered an automatic sale.”

About three months after joining the program he began collecting credit card numbers for himself, Simmons said. He later reversed himself, denying guilt.

“He had in excess of 60 credit card numbers in his possession at the time of his arrest,” said Santa Barbara County Deputy Dist. Atty. Hilary Dozer, who prosecuted Simmons. “It appears that most were from TWA.”

Inside Simmons’ apartment, Santa Barbara police said they found a folder containing TWA literature and a list of 64 credit card numbers.

Working with credit card companies and using telephone records found in Simmons apartment, detectives contacted three other people who had been victimized, Lt. Richard Glaus said.

The bills for a Hemet man’s American Express Gold Card showed that Simmons had charged $6,500 worth of airline tickets, car wheels, phone calls and jewelry, all within two days, police said.

The man said he was shocked to learn from The Times that TWA was employing juvenile inmates as reservations agents.

“They actually do? And they have the numbers routed right to the reform school?” asked the man, who did not to be identified. “I thought I talked to somebody who was actually in the TWA ticket office. . . . I didn’t think that was good protection of my assets and my privacy.”

American Express made good on the bad charges. But JC Penney, from whom Simmons allegedly ordered a TV and VCR, continued to bother the Hemet man, he said. “They bugged my mother-in-law for three weeks.”

Another victim was Augustus Pisano, a supervisor for the U. S. Postal Service in Eagle Rock. He said he opened his American Express bill one day to find $10,200 in mystery charges. Police said Simmons got Pisano’s number through the TWA program, and used it to buy computers.

American Express covered both that charge and a second for $4,000 worth of custom car parts, Pisano said.

“I was quite surprised that I could get that much credit,” Pisano said. “You would think that a purchase price at that amount, the person taking the number over the American Express lines would check it.”

Lt. Glaus said Simmons then conned a Northern California computer analyst into believing he was a representative of a Milpitas computer company. Just after his parole in November, 1990, Simmons persuaded the analyst to buy equipment he had bought with Pisano’s card number, Glaus said.

The analyst, Anna Sepasi, said she had struck up a telephone friendship with Simmons after she charged TWA tickets through him.

“We were laughing and having so much fun on the phone,” she recalled. “He said, ‘Can I call you at home?’ I said, ‘Why not?’

Simmons had two computers delivered to Sepasi in January, and told her to pay him $9,000 whenever she could, she said.

One month later, Simmons visited Sepasi and her daughter for a few days. “My daughter’s finished college. He was telling her how to handle herself in the corporate world,” Sepasi said. “Who would ever suspect anything? He’s handsome, too.”

Simmons left Sepasi with a $600 telephone bill, she said.

She thought she was dealing with a 27- or 28-year-old TWA agent until police told her otherwise. Police called her on the day she was trying to get a second mortgage to pay for the computers, she said.

Simmons was not alone in ripping off TWA customers, said Jackie Walker, 22, who is serving time in the Ventura School for murder. She said she has overheard inmates--and one Ventura School employee--discuss buying airline tickets for themselves on the card numbers of TWA customers.

“There was one incident (where) someone on staff asked me if it was possible for them to get an airline ticket charged on somebody else’s credit card,” Walker said.

Walker was fired from the program on May 20 after stealing several of the 25-cent credits that her TWA classmates had earned for making reservations, CYA’s Fred Mills said.

Mills said Walker’s charges are “sour grapes” because she had been thrown out of the program.

Walker said she was dropped from the training because of personality conflicts with the staff.

“As far as the state is concerned, this is like their little puppy,” she said. “They love this program. They can say, ‘This is what the wards in the California Youth Authority do.’ ”

Since Simmons’ arrest, CYA officials have searched TWA inmates and their rooms more often--sometimes even strip-searching them--for credit card numbers, Mills said.

CYA will continue screening TWA candidates to keep out inmates with a record of credit card theft or fraud, he said. Inmates have always been forbidden from taking pen and paper into the computer room, and now not even instruction manuals can be taken out, he said.

And TWA officials at the school are monitoring reservation calls more frequently, Mills said.

Mills said the Simmons case is the only breach of security in the program since its birth five years ago. He said he knows of no case where inmates bought airline tickets for Ventura School staff members.

“There’s always going to be an exception, but 99.9 times out of a hundred in a program you’re not going to get that,” Mills said. “For every person we can keep out of the institution for a year, that’s saving the state about $31,000. That’s the thing we have to look at and balance.”

But Glaus said: Giving card numbers “to anybody on the end of the line . . . just leads to an open opportunity to be fraudulently used. Yet, every day we see those commercials. ‘Have your credit card ready.’ ”