FBI Expands Local Office to Fight Increase in White-Collar Crime : Law enforcement: The agency will add two investigators in early ’92 because of complex cases in such fields as banking and defense.

Operation Desert Storm generated a bonanza of tips for the FBI’s Ventura office from defense-industry whistle-blowers who declared that they had firsthand knowledge of fraudulent practices in the production of defense weapons.

“They’d be watching the ground warfare on CNN and realize they’d worked on a particular missile or airplane that they could see in action in wartime, and they knew they were not good products,” said Gary G. Auer, FBI supervisor for Ventura.

“They alleged there had been a lot of cheating and that type of thing,” he said. “Maybe the products had not been properly tested or had not tested up to specifications.”

Auer said that particular flurry of tips alone will keep his agents busy for months sorting out what needs to be pursued.

Typically, he said, it takes more than 18 months to complete a defense industry investigation, such as one sparked by a Desert Storm tip.

Such time-intensive investigative work speaks volumes about the FBI’s priorities in the Los Angeles metropolitan area and why the agency is expanding its Ventura operations, Auer said.

“The No. 1 priority for the FBI in Southern California is white-collar crime,” Auer said.

In this framework, financial and defense industry fraud have become major targets prompting the FBI to step up its investigative efforts, he said.

When Auer, 45, was transferred in 1985 to Ventura from the FBI’s big regional office in Los Angeles, he had seven special agents. Since then he’s added three more, and now has two more openings that will be filled early next year.

In addition to Auer’s responsibility for the FBI’s Santa Barbara office, a Lancaster operation was put under his jurisdiction in October.

He re-emphasized that much of the motivation for this expansion is the growing white-collar crime caseload.

“These are difficult cases,” he said of white-collar crime investigations, which include complex banking and savings and loan inquiries. “You might be up against some of the best attorneys in the world defending major corporations.”

So it’s no surprise that Auer’s newest investigator, Alanna M. Lavelle, is another specialist in white-collar crime.

Lavelle, 37, who has been an agent for 12 years, was transferred to Ventura from Los Angeles in July. Like Auer, she is a native of Wisconsin. She is also the Ventura bureau’s first female FBI agent.

About 10% of the FBI’s agents nationwide are women. Among the more than 500 agents who work in the Los Angeles regional headquarters, however, about 19% of the special agents are women.

Hiring female agents is a relatively recent phenomenon for the 83-year-old FBI, in which women have had special-agent status for only about two decades.

Lavelle said she has had a “good, equitable relationship” with her fellow agents. Indeed, her only career problem, she recalled with a smile, was as a young recruit at the FBI academy “climbing 20-foot ropes.”

As for her job, she said it fits her career objectives.

“I wanted cerebral type of work with some action in it,” she said about her decision to join the FBI after her graduation from the University of Minnesota. “It’s hard to find a job like that.”

The FBI’s mission covers a much wider swath of law enforcement than most people realize.

Aside from the agency’s traditional high-profile cases, such as catching bank robbers and chasing fugitives, there are a couple of hundred other areas in which Congress has authorized the FBI to apply its investigative muscle.

Just last year, Auer’s agents used an 81-year-old federal anti-slavery statute as a basis to investigate a Ventura County flower rancher accused of enslaving several dozen Mexican laborers. The Somis rancher was subsequently indicted by a grand jury on a variety of civil rights and immigration violations.

To expand operations in any part of the country, a supervisory agent such as Auer must demonstrate that there has been a proliferation of criminal activity in a specific area. One of these hot spots, he said, is fraud in the savings and loan industry.

“The reason we are getting (two) more people now is that Congress has authorized more FBI people to work savings and loan cases,” he said.

To get the extra agents, Auer said he had to sell his bosses in Los Angeles on the significance of cases with which the Ventura office is attempting to grapple.

“You can’t just generalize by saying the crooks are getting the edge on us,” he said.

In the days of the late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, he said, arguments for personnel expansion could be made on the basis of the number of cases handled and closed by agents each year. But now, he said, it’s the quality of the cases, not sheer numbers, that motivate the FBI’s hierarchy to concentrate more agents in a bureau.

As a result of a two-year investigation, the FBI last year uncovered what was believed to be the biggest bank fraud scheme in Ventura County history. In this case, $4 million in loans were channeled from now-defunct Westlake Thrift and Loan into a Riverside company. The president of the institution was sentenced to two years in a federal prison and a Riverside businessman received a four-year sentence.

In the defense industry, Auer’s agents opened an investigation last year of a Simi Valley firm suspected of failing to properly test sophisticated computer chips installed in advanced aircraft and missile systems used in the Gulf War. Search warrants were served last February at Natel Engineering Co. Inc. and corporate records were seized.

There’ll be no problem finding agents to fill the two openings in Ventura, Auer said. According to information in the FBI’s computer bank, about 60 agents in Los Angeles have expressed a desire to work in the popular office. Many of them live in Ventura County and want to shorten their commuting distance, he said.

Among the elements that FBI officials will look at in making their selection for Ventura, he said, are seniority and an agent’s interest in working on white-collar crime cases.

The importance of seniority can be seen in the age range of the 11-agent Ventura contingent. They are 34 to 53 years old, with a cluster of seven agents between 45 and 50.