Quitting Time for Watch Dealer : Violence: Shopkeeper says he has been driven out of business by media attention and threats after killing five robbers.

Inside his tiny apartment--protected by a burglar alarm and bulletproof glass and with a 9-millimeter pistol in his waistband--Lance Thomas says he has found a measure of peace.

In a little more than two years, the watch dealer killed five armed robbers and wounded another in a series of shootouts at his West Los Angeles store that made him a hero to some and a vigilante to others.

Thomas was wounded five times, and always returned to his Santa Monica Boulevard shop with the vow that armed robbers would not drive him out of business.

But the climate changed after the last shooting in February, which left two robbers dead. He decided to close the store after threats from gang members and an onslaught of media coverage.

“They ran me out of business,” Thomas said in his first interview since the last shooting. “There’s got to be a truce. There’s got to be a time when you walk away from the war zone.”

Thomas, who by his own estimation has killed more armed robbers than any shopkeeper in America, feels no remorse for the lives he has claimed. Los Angeles police have ruled that the shootings were justifiable.

Neither is he troubled by critics who question how one man could kill so many. “I was right and they were wrong,” he said. “If everyone were like me, there would be no wrong side.”

But Thomas, a bachelor, said he is tired of the debate, the media hype and the threats.

“I can’t even stand on the street anymore,” he said. “I’m getting more and more anxious, more and more hyper.”

Since retreating to his one-room apartment, he has settled into a new life, growing a beard to mask his identity. He has avoided contact with the press, agreeing to an interview with The Times only in hopes that the publicity will help him land a deal for a movie about his life.

“I want what happened to me to be a lesson both to the criminal element and to law-abiding citizens,” he said. “I want people to learn that violence doesn’t work. It didn’t work for me because I lost the business. It didn’t work for them because they lost their lives.”

Now he sells vintage American pocket watches exclusively to longtime customers and other dealers. He no longer trades in the flashy Rolexes that made his shop a target.

Thomas expresses an odd mixture of pride and bitterness over his fate. While he mauls the media for turning his life into a carnival of headlines, he also keeps a scrapbook of stories written about his exploits and paid to have a videotape made of television news accounts about the violence at his store.

Swelling with pride over his stand against crime one minute, he lashes out at what his life has become: “Why do you think I’m alone tonight? Why do you think I’m holed up like this? I hate this. Look at me: I’m 52 and I have nothing.”

Thomas, a former IBM salesman with the sinewy build of a long-distance runner, said he only wanted to run his business in peace.

The son of a former Navy chief warrant officer and professional boxer, he remembers himself as an Anglo kid in a Latino neighborhood who was always picked on.

At 11, he said, he repeatedly asked his father to teach him how to fight, and was always told to walk away. But after he continued to press for advice, his father told him what to do when people push him too far, when they threaten his life. “Kill them,” Thomas recalls his father saying.

“If you’re pushed and your life is in danger,” Thomas said, “then you have to kill.”

His father’s advice changed his life, he said. From then on, he engaged his challengers with detachment and a sense of purpose.

“Overnight, I became extremely effective,” he said. “I became emotionless. I became a lethal weapon.”

Thomas worked as a salesman for Carnation and then IBM after graduating from San Diego State University with a degree in economics. But years before he embarked on his business career, he had begun collecting old clocks, an interest sparked by his father’s gift of two vintage watches.

In 1973, he took a leave of absence from IBM and began selling what had grown into a collection of timepieces. He did better than he ever imagined at flea markets and opened the shop on Santa Monica Boulevard.

Thomas believes that his troubles began when he decided to sell Rolexes. He always had dealt in antique watches, but his Los Angeles customers clamored for the make of watch that has become a symbol of success.

On Aug. 10, 1989, a little more than a year after he installed a six-inch, neon Rolex sign in the window of his business, he shot his first armed robber.

The watch dealer said he would not have been prepared for what was to come if he had not bought a small, .38-caliber pistol for $250 after reading about a series of robberies in which Rolexes were taken.

He had little doubt what he would do, he said, if a gunman came into his store.

Quoting his philosophy then and now, he said: “I have the right to live and the right to bear arms. When you pull out that gun, you and I will battle to the death over meaningless valuables, whether it is a dollar or a million dollars.”

It was 10:30 a.m. when the first incident began. He said two men waited quietly in line behind a customer while he faced them, working at the counter.

Thomas said he was looking down when he heard a thud. It was the sound of his customer’s body hitting the floor. The man had been hit in the back of the head with a revolver.

The watch dealer reacted quickly: He grabbed the .38 and shot the robber in the face from 18 inches away. “I was very calm,” he said. “I was beyond fear.”

The second gunman threw up his hands and pulled his companion into the street, Thomas said. Police found the wounded man at a hospital. The robber recovered and was sentenced to prison.

Thomas said he was guilt ridden after the shooting, playing the incident over and over in his mind. “I couldn’t live with it for days,” he said.

But after the next shooting three months later and the third one in December, 1991, he grew less disturbed by the violence. After the fourth shooting in February--his total at five dead and one wounded--he felt nothing.

“I was ice,” he said. “A frightening thing about this is that it all becomes easier.”

The day after the last shooting, he walked out the front door of his shop, through the pools of blood on the floor and into a cheering crowd that had gathered on the street. He raised a fist in triumph.

But at the same time, Thomas said, he realized that he could no longer operate the Santa Monica Boulevard business. “I knew that was the end,” he said. “I’m not the fastest gun in the West.”

Police had warned him that street gangs had targeted him for revenge, and he was afraid that the next time there was shooting it would be a drive-by attack that he could not defend himself against.

“Wild Bill Hickok got shot in the back . . . Jesse James, shot in the back,” he said. “And, frankly, I was next.”

Thomas returned alone to the shop early the next day to clean up the blood. A salesman who was in the store at the time of the shooting said he would never return.

He closed the shop and has returned only to move out his merchandise.

As he was talking to a visitor, there was a knock on the door. Thomas tensed, dimmed the lights and looked past the bulletproof shield on his front door.

Seeing who was there, he opened the door just a crack. Thomas held a pistol in his hand as he greeted a neighbor.