Suspect in Forgery Ring Arrested : Crime: Police say Marlene Olive ran a sophisticated ID-counterfeiting operation that victimized businesses throughout the Valley with bogus checks.

Investigators say she may be the queen of the “trashers” in the San Fernando Valley, a woman who could take a voided check or bank statement culled from a trash dumpster and turn it into a lucrative enterprise.

For years, investigators say, Marlene Olive made her living and fed an expensive drug habit by creating new identities and assuming the names of others. They call her a “cut-and-paste” artist, an expert at taking stolen or thrown-out checks, counterfeiting them and creating false identifications for passing them at businesses across the Valley.

Olive, who was arrested two weeks ago, is believed to have been one of the leaders of a ring of as many as 20 thieves. Police say she was the main supplier of phony checks and credentials to the group.

The victims were banks, small businesses, check-cashing companies, office equipment suppliers, supermarkets and mom-and-pop stores--any place that accepted the checks.

In the network of motel rooms that police say Olive used, they found typewriters, color copiers, portrait cameras, laminating machines and computers that helped her perfect the art of creating false IDs and phony checks. Los Angeles Police Detective John Metcalf said there was evidence that she had even attempted to forge California’s new driver’s license that was designed to be counterfeit-proof.

Investigators said there were 268 pieces of stolen or forged identification in the new Cadillac in which she was arrested.

Police say they have rarely come across a street-level forger believed to be as prolific or as skilled as Olive. The 33-year-old woman is the focus of an ongoing investigation by local and federal authorities to try to determine the extent of fraud attributable to her. But Metcalf, a veteran forgery detective, believes that the losses will never be totaled.

“We will never, ever figure out how much damage she has done,” Metcalf said. “It certainly is very substantial. She is one of the premier--one of the biggest--forgers. She is way above the watermark.”

Olive was arrested Feb. 25 at a Van Nuys motel and charged with possession of stolen credit cards, counterfeit identification and a forged check. She has pleaded not guilty. Because of her record of prior arrests and using false names, prosecutors deviated from the routine bail and persuaded a judge to hold Olive in lieu of $500,000 bail.

She remains jailed while detectives from Los Angeles and Glendale, along with a team of U. S. postal inspectors, work their way through thousands of documents and other items seized from her, attempting to determine which are bogus, which are real and which have been stolen. Metcalf said more charges will probably be filed against Olive, but putting together evidence will take weeks.

Under one name or another, Olive has been in and out of jails since she was 16 and was arrested with her boyfriend in the slaying of the Marin County couple who had adopted her as an infant. Her mother was killed with a hammer and her father shot to death. Their bodies were incinerated in a fire pit afterward.

The case was dubbed the “barbecue murders” by local newspapers and was later chronicled in two books. Olive was held responsible under juvenile laws for aiding in the deaths, and the boyfriend was convicted of both murders. He told police that he killed the couple at Olive’s urging because she felt rejected for failing her mother’s standards.

Olive was ordered held in the custody of the California Youth Authority until she was 21. The judge who sentenced her, according to the book “Bad Blood,” said to her: “When you are released from custody, my advice is to change your name, move to another part of the country where people do not know about your crime and start all over again.”

Police say that after Olive was released from a CYA facility in Ventura County, she came to the Los Angeles area and began changing her name often. Her arrest record continued in Hollywood and the Valley, with forgery and drug-related charges being filed against her at least seven different times. Metcalf said that twice she served one-year stints in jail, once for forgery and once for violating parole for using drugs.

In 1991, she was arrested three times on forgery-related charges, each time providing false identities to authorities. Each time, she posted bail and was released by the time fingerprint checks revealed her true identity.

“She had many, many, many IDs,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. James Baker, who filed the recent charges against Olive. “She was always able to bail out before they really knew who she was. They would then have to go out looking for her.”

“She went right back to what she was doing and it took us until now” to catch up with her, Metcalf said.

He said police got a line on her in early February when a man was arrested with a “spread”--what phony-check artists call a package or wallet containing a complete set of bogus identification documents along with legitimate or counterfeit credit cards and checks. The man told detectives that he had bought the spread from a woman named Mendez, which investigators recognized as one of the aliases used by Olive.

Information from the man and other sources gave detectives a picture of some of Mendez’s habits. Metcalf said she moved often to avoid arrest and kept two or three motel rooms in the Van Nuys and Glendale areas.

Metcalf said he learned that in addition to making and selling spreads, she provided members of the loosely connected theft ring with forged rental authorization sheets that allowed them to rent cars from Avis. They used the cars to travel throughout the Valley, cashing forged checks and using stolen credit cards.

Police began watching motels Olive was believed to frequent. Metcalf began cruising the motels on Sepulveda Boulevard, looking for 12 different cars Avis reported had recently been rented in the Valley with forged documents believed to have been fabricated by Olive. On Feb. 25, Metcalf said, he got lucky. While driving down an alley off Sepulveda, he spotted a 1992 gold Cadillac with a license plate on his list.

The Cadillac pulled into the parking lot of the Voyager motel and Metcalf moved in. A woman who was a passenger in the car told the detective that her name was Lotus Perez. She showed identification proving it. But by then, Metcalf had gathered mug shots documenting the many arrests of Marlene Olive and was familiar with her face. She was placed under arrest on suspicion of forgery along with the car’s driver, her 37-year-old boyfriend, Gary (Pinkie) Glynn.

After the arrests, police searched the Cadillac and three motel rooms traced to Olive. Metcalf said authorities have recovered an enormous amount of material, including stolen mail, credit cards and checks, business machines purchased with forged checks, dozens of forged birth certificates, Postal Service ID cards and more than 1,000 other pieces of identification. Many documents seized were in the process of being forged, they said.

“She was just starting to work on the new California driver’s license,” Metcalf said.

U. S. Postal Inspector Mike Rions said preliminary investigation shows that many of the checks recovered were stolen from the mail or trash as long as 10 years ago, indicating that members of the group held onto them and were using them to create counterfeits.

“They were holding onto this stuff and using it as a guide,” Rions said. “They would use these checks as prototypes to make their own.”

He said the copiers and other business machines found in the motel rooms were used for “cut-and-paste operations” in which bogus checks were manufactured but carried the legitimate account numbers of the prototypes.

In a Glendale motel room traced to Olive, police found a pack of “flash cards” on which were handwritten instructions on how to pass forged checks, right down to what type of nondescript four-door car to rent. The packet also contained instructions on what to do if an associate was arrested. Members of the group were instructed to leave their motel rooms, split up and meet later at a secret location.

“You rarely find that kind of organization,” Metcalf said. “But she goes way above and beyond the norm.”

Four other suspects believed to have been involved with Olive in forgery scams have been arrested as the investigation continues. Metcalf said he and other investigators will attempt to trace the source of each document seized during the investigation to determine how many people and businesses were victimized.

Rions said Olive and others could face federal charges involving mail theft. He said he believes that the network of thieves in which Olive was a leader was only one of several that operate in the Los Angeles area.

“On a scale of 1 to 10, she was a top five,” Rions said. “She is definitely one of the main players.”

Metcalf, who after five years as a forgery detective can spot a counterfeit check or credit card in a matter of seconds, described Olive’s skills as a forger as substantial but not extremely high. “She’s good enough that she has caused us a lot of grief,” he said.

That grief is shared by the businesses that accepted the checks and are stuck with the losses. Metcalf said Olive and other members of the ring are believed to have used forged checks to make purchases ranging from small amounts of groceries to expensive color copying machines and computers. He said there is no way to estimate the total losses.

“We have all kinds of victims,” Metcalf said. “The victim ends up being the person out the money. As the check is out there bouncing around, whoever ends up with it, that’s the victim.”

Also victimized were the people whose identities were assumed or whose checks were counterfeited after thieves rifled their mail or found voided checks or receipts in trash dumpsters.

Metcalf said he assumes that the number of those victims will grow as the investigation continues. He said most of the suspects, including Olive, are believed to have plied their forgery trade full time in a never-ending pursuit of money for drugs. He described Olive as being addicted to methamphetamine--”speed”--and having used almost all the money she made to buy either drugs or forging equipment. She has few other belongings, he said.

He said it was a never-ending cycle.

“It just goes on and on,” he said. “They’d never take a day off. They were out there going like crazy every day. The only thing that mattered was the drugs.”

Olive could not be reached for comment. Metcalf said that after her arrest, she declined to talk to investigators other than during one brief aside when he asked if she was tired of her life as a drug-dependent trasher and cut-and-paste artist.

According to Metcalf, she said: “I am getting real tired of this.”

Troubled History

Police say the criminal career of Marlene Olive, 33, photographed above in 1985, 1989 and 1991, began 17 years ago with the deaths of her adoptive parents in Marin County. She was convicted under juvenile laws of urging her then-boyfriend to kill the couple and then helping him afterward. She remained in custody of the California Youth Authority until she was 21. The judge who sentenced her advised her to change her name and start over in a new area upon her release. After moving to Los Angeles in the 1980s, police said, Olive became a skilled check forger who was arrested at least seven times--often under phony names--and was sent to prison twice. She was arrested Feb. 25 in Van Nuys in a Cadillac containing 268 pieces of allegedly forged or stolen identification. She was being held in lieu of $500,000 bail.