Thefts Plague Scrap Dealer Despite High Fence, Alarms : Crime: He criticizes police for not patrolling area enough. But they say there is a lot the owner can do to protect his business.

A 10-foot chain-link fence, topped by triple scrolls of razor wire, surrounds Errol Segal’s property in South Los Angeles.

The grounds have intrusion alarm systems, and the windows are covered with steel bars--the heavy, cylindrical kind used in prisons.

To get to Segal’s office, you must pass through a wire-mesh gate and two steel doors, each of which must be unlocked by remote control after you have satisfied someone via microphone that you have legitimate business inside.

“This place is like Ft. Knox,” Segal said.

But all the fortification, he said, is not enough to protect him from thieves, who have made his one of the most burglarized businesses in the city. He said his business was hit 80 times in the last year.

“We get broken into almost every single night,” Segal said.

It is not gold bullion or stacks of cash that they are after. It is scrap metal, heaped in piles and bales about his salvage yard.

Somehow, and it is not quite clear how, the thieves manage to scale the fences, get by the razor wire and alarms and escape with an average haul of a few hundred pounds of copper or aluminum, Segal said.

Police say stolen scrap metal is easy for thieves to resell, with no questions asked, and Segal says that over the last six years, he has lost about $150,000 worth.

Segal says the Los Angeles Police Department does not give his four-acre Active Recycling Co. yard on West Slauson Avenue enough protection. He says officers should keep his place under better surveillance and arrest people as they break in, rather than waiting to respond to his alarm system.

But police, although not arguing about the number of thefts Segal reports, say they do not have the personnel to keep his yard under constant watch. Besides, they say, preventing the thefts is primarily up to Segal, not the Police Department.

“I’ve told him if he’d just get dogs or a security guard, he’d never have to call the Police Department again,” said Capt. Bob Hansohn, commander of the 77th Street Division units that patrol the streets around Segal’s property. “It’s his problem. We’ll try to help him solve it, but the real answer is a security guard or dogs.”

The police captain said other scrap dealers and retail businesses in the area employ guards “and we never hear from them.”

Westec Security, which set up the alarm system at Segal’s yard, agrees with Hansohn’s suggestions.

“We’ve actually been out there numerous times, . . . suggesting additional protections, such as standing guards and dogs,” said Phillip Sontag, a Westec spokesman. “He has a few areas unprotected (by alarms) and we’ve encouraged him to get those protected.”

Segal said he has thought about such recommendations, “but they’re expensive,” estimating that a guard would cost about $100 a night. He said he has spent $200,000 on the fences, gates, alarms and razor wire.

A police official, who asked not to be named, said that another $100 a night should be affordable for Sontag, who once told him that Active Recycling grosses about $50 million a year.

Sontag, who initiated contact with the news media about his theft problems but later retreated into his barricaded office and declined to discuss the matter further, said that the gross figure quoted by the police official is inaccurate, but he refused to provide one.