Americans Setting Records in Barcelona’s Crime Games : Olympics: Crooks as well as tourists and athletes have swelled the city, and innocents abroad are prime targets.

Americans are setting off-the-field records here, too. No medals, though, and most of the records are not worth bragging about:

* Fastest to have $2,000 pinched from his belly bag on a moving subway: Lewis B. Johnson of Los Angeles, on his first ride.

* Quickest to lose his luggage and documents from a rented car: Hank Tenney of Lebanon, N.H., within an hour after driving in from France.

* Most replacements for stolen or lost passports in a single day: U.S. Consulate, 24.

Behind all the glamour is a seamy side of the Olympics that TV cameras seldom record and most visitors never see.

Big-city Barcelona, which has its share of crime in normal times, is enduring the predictable extra dose that comes when the world drops by for a gigantic fiesta. The Olympic magnet has drawn crooks as well as athletes and tourists. Americans, innocently abroad in large numbers, are prime targets.

Ruined vacations there are, but nobody is crying crime wave. Sports fans, in fact, are 60 times more likely to be murdered in Los Angeles than in an Olympic city where people stroll downtown streets in the wee hours.

“I think what we are seeing is an increase in proportion to the numbers: A similar percentage of Americans get robbed in Barcelona every summer,” said U.S. Consul Clyde I. Howard Jr.

By the consulate’s estimate, about 30,000 Americans visit the Barcelona region each summer. This year, it is thought 40,000 Americans will have come just in the two weeks of the Games.

There are probably 200,000 visitors staying in the city, according to Albert Montagut, a spokesman for the mayor. They are watched over by blue-shirted Barcelona police, massively reinforced by white-shirted national police--a total of 14,000 by one insider’s estimate.

As the national police began arriving in advance of the Games, crime rates dropped sharply across the board, although they have risen in recent days, in tandem with the increase in visitors, Montagut said.

“There is actually less crime than there was a year ago on the same dates,” Julian Delgado, Barcelona’s police chief, said Thursday.

Theft from cars is way up, but most other categories are down. Last year on July 28, a total of 92 people were arrested in Barcelona. This year on the same date, there were 81 arrests, about one-third of them foreigners. On July 29, only two violent street crimes were reported, compared to 23 on the same day last year, Delgado noted.

There have been three murders in Barcelona since the Games began--all of them crooks settling accounts with kindred spirits, Delgado said. Murder, in fact, is an infrequent visitor to Barcelona.

According to a booklet prepared for police patrolling the Games, in Barcelona, with 1.7 million people, there were 33 homicides and 121 reported rapes in 1991. In Los Angeles, which the booklet lists at 3.4 million people, there were 983 homicides and 2,014 reported rapes.

Howard says the consulate has reports of one sexual assault against an American since the Games began, and that two American visitors have died--the father of swimmer Ron Karnaugh and a 90-year-old tourist, both of natural causes.

As the Games go into full stride, police are among the city’s most visible landmarks. Their numbers alone make being a crook a high-risk profession. On the eve of the competition, a mugger stole a gold medal awarded to an 81-year-old Swiss artist within half an hour of its presentation. Half an hour after that , the mugger was headed to jail and artist Hans Erni had his medal back.

Erni was awarded the honor, known as the Olympic Medal, by International Olympic Committee President Juan Antonio Samaranch for artistic services to the Olympic movement. The services included the creation of murals for the Barcelona athletes village.

Barcelona has always been a red-light port city, but for the Games, police have driven transvestites and prostitutes away from their traditional downtown haunts to areas away from the center, and a lot of the drug crowd with them.

But the cops win some and lose some. A Russian athlete who incautiously left his possessions unguarded on the beach this week while he went for a swim was picked clean. Police did recover his gold watch and some of his clothes.

Anecdotal evidence, however, suggests that the bad guys are making a bigger dent on visitors than official figures suggest: A lot of street crime goes unreported.

When Jill Dwyre of Los Angeles went to a police station to report the loss of her passport, she was waved into a waiting room filled with about 25 people, most of them other Americans. After an hour in which nothing happened, she left.

“A lot of people don’t want to fight the language and the bureaucracy, although we urge Americans to get police reports on the losses of any possessions covered by insurance,” Howard said.

The consulate, which said Friday that it issued 70 new passports during the first week of the Games, compared with 21 the week before, will provide a new passport even without an official complaint of loss reported first to the Spanish police.

Lewis B. Johnson has a new one. Johnson, who trains in Santa Monica, said he failed to make the U.S. track team in the 800 meters but got a chance to come to Barcelona as a spotter for NBC. On his first day, he went down into the subway and, a few stations later, came up $2,000 poorer.

“There were a lot of people, and I had both hands up on the overhead rails,” he said. “Somebody obviously reached around from behind me and unzipped my pouch. I felt it but I didn’t want to believe it.”