Cargo Crooks Find Area of Easy Pickings : Trucking: Ventura County becomes a new prime target. Police cite effectiveness of crackdown in Los Angeles County.

Bold gangs of armed robbers, who rip off an estimated $1 million a day from Los Angeles-area cargo shippers, are expanding their criminal operations to a fat new target: eastern Ventura County.

In the latest incident, six bandits wearing ski masks sliced through a chain-link fence at CF MotorFreight in Simi Valley early Sunday morning and made off with two tractor-trailers filled with Packard Bell computers worth $400,000, police said.

The successful heist was the second assault at the Simi site in less than a year--and an alarming sign that cargo thieves may be stepping up their attacks on truck yards in sparsely populated pockets of Ventura County.

The racketeers have hit half a dozen times in Simi Valley, Moorpark and Thousand Oaks over the past two years, authorities said.

And that could be just the beginning.

“Not to toot our own horn, but the (gangs) have gone to outlying counties to get away from us,” said Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Sgt. Ron Layton of the Cargo CATs, a Long Beach-based multi-agency team that focuses solely on stolen trailers.

Bluntly, he added: “The victims are fresher out there.”

Mike Starkey, the manager of Wambold Furniture in Moorpark, ruefully agrees with that assessment.

Twice in the past three months, thieves have smashed their way into the Wambold distribution center and hitched stolen tractors to Starkey’s trailers.

All told, the gangs have driven off with almost $100,000 worth of dining room tables, beds and dressers manufactured in Simi Valley and shipped across the country from the Moorpark truck yard.

“We were incredulous,” Starkey said recently, recounting his horror upon arriving at work in the morning and finding his parking lot empty. “I couldn’t believe anyone would steal a whole truckload of furniture.”

Still shaken by the memory, he said, “I felt very naive.”

Working in eastern Ventura County, home of the nation’s second- and fourth-safest mid-sized cities (Thousand Oaks and Simi Valley), Starkey felt reasonably immune to big-time crime.

So when he discovered that the locks on his trucks had been broken one night, he chalked it up to a teen-age prank. When it happened again, he wired the trailer doors shut and backed the trailers up against a wall to prevent hoodlums from slipping the furniture out.

With that, Starkey thought he had taken care of the problem.

But in reality, he hadn’t even begun to anticipate it.

After casing the distribution yard by breaking the locks and peeking at the merchandise inside, the thieves returned to drive off with the best booty, police said. Starkey blames himself for not heeding the warning signs.

“Because Ventura County is typically not high in crime, we don’t have the same approach to doing business here as they do in L.A.,” Starkey said. “It’s very easy to think, ‘Oh, that’s just kids.’ I did not realize these were prowlers scouting the place for future operations.”

Audacious and ruthless, the two dozen cargo theft rings operating in Southern California have honed several techniques for picking off loaded trailers.

Scouts may case a distribution center and then drive in one quiet night and make off with the best-looking goods. That’s what happened to Starkey, and to CF MotorFreight this weekend.

Slipping through the chain-link fence around the Simi yard just after midnight, robbers overwhelmed a security guard and locked the guard and his wife in the back of an empty truck.

Police recovered one of CF MotorFreight’s stolen trailers on Monday morning in Compton, but could not confirm whether they found any of the computers inside. The other truck is still missing, Simi Valley Sgt. Andy McCluskey said.

In addition to outright thefts from distribution yards, cargo crooks sometimes hijack trailers on the freeway and throw the driver, bound and gagged, in the back of the truck.

Or, in a pattern that is increasingly frequent, the gangs will woo informants to their side. A driver or security guard will tip off his crooked buddies when he knows a trailer is carrying valuable merchandise. With the help of drivers, the criminals stage the heists to look like hijackings.

Police said they did not suspect the security guard in the CF MotorFreight heist of collusion with the thieves. Instead, they believe that the gang, emboldened by its first success last July, returned for more.

“They’ve hit the Mother Lode there,” said Los Angeles Sheriff’s Sgt. Dewayne Shackelford of the Cargo CATs. “Obviously, they know what they’re looking for and they know they can get it there. It’s a remote, desolate area without a lot of people around and probably not a lot of police at that time of night.”

Whether it’s 10,000 pounds of frozen beef, a truckload of sex toys or $22,000 worth of paper towels, cargo hijackers will steal anything on wheels.

Only rarely do they abandon their booty--like the time they unwittingly drove off with a truckload of manure.

For the most part, whether they’ve snagged chile peppers or computer discs, the crooks scramble to unload their take and stash it in abandoned restaurants, boarded-up basements or cluttered junkyards. They fence it locally, or ship it across the country or to Mexico to make it harder for law enforcement officers to track, experts said.

With police mounting sting operations to bust illegal operations in a different Los Angeles-area warehouse every week, cargo thieves seem to be turning to out-of-the-way storage sites--including lockers in Ventura County.

The Cargo CATs recently broke a Los Angeles-based criminal ring by tracking stolen clothing and electronic goods to Westlake Village Self-Storage in Thousand Oaks.

Last summer, police raided a remote warehouse on the grounds of the Anacapa View Nursery just west of Moorpark, where they recovered $300,000 worth of clothing stolen from Sears, Roebuck & Co. trucks.

And for every cache of stolen goods that they find, half a dozen loads are never recovered, Layton estimated.

“If we have attractive facilities, they’ll use them,” said Cmdr. William Wade of the east Ventura County sheriff’s office. While he emphasized that he so far does not consider cargo theft a major problem, Wade added a warning: “Criminals don’t pay any heed to county lines or city limits.”

In fact, the truck hijacking gangs may in fact be starting to pay attention to such borders precisely because they recognize Ventura County as an untapped market, according to Los Angeles Police Detective Ray Allen of the Cargo CATs.

Like Starkey at Wambold Furniture, the manager of Westlake Village Self-Storage said she had never heard of cargo heists--and it didn’t occur to her to be suspicious when several men came in wanting to store a truckload of brand-new clothing with the tags still hanging on them.

“We’re in a nice area and most of our customers out here are very nice,” said the manager, who asked not to be named. “I guess they were probably looking for an out-of-the-way place because it’s far from L.A. I had no idea that anyone would come this far out” to escape downtown police, she said.

Working with the Cargo CATs, local police have so far foiled most of the thieves’ forays into Ventura County. But the thieves themselves have largely escaped. Even when arrested, they often jump bail and flee to South America or Mexico, police said.

“It’s a low-risk crime, because judges and district attorneys tend to treat it just like receiving stolen property, which is a minimal offense,” said Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Lt. James Harris of the Cargo CATs.

Still, Harris’ team goes after the gangs with gusto, recording triumphs on an oversized memo board that lists, like a bookie’s tip sheet, scores of hijacked trailers and the dollar value of their cargo. The range of stolen goods is impressive: frozen crab, athletic socks, laundry detergent, oranges, telephones, headphones, and on and on.

In 1992, the Cargo CATs recovered $25-million worth of stolen property--including five rigs filled with Bugle Boy jeans, glassware, cameras and household goods stolen from the CF MotorFreight terminal in a daring daylight heist last July.

The Cargo CATs have success-fully cracked a few Ventura County cases this year as well, including the two raids on Wambold Furniture in Moorpark.

The first time one of Starkey’s trailers was stolen, on Feb. 20, police retrieved it almost immediately, discovering the vehicle and most of the furniture on the Santa Monica Freeway. Apparently the crooks had run out of gas.

Undaunted by the first failure, the cargo theft ring returned in early March, steamrollered over a fence that Starkey had installed just that day and grabbed two trailers, each laden with $30,000 worth of wooden furniture.

“We had been feeling pretty cocky” because of the stepped-up security, Starkey said. “But they just broke the fence down. Once again, we were angry and incredulous.”

Acting on informant tips, the Cargo CATs seized the furniture less than a week later in a Paramount warehouse. The abandoned trailers themselves were recovered on Los Angeles streets.

With cargo thefts on the rise throughout Southern California, police advise the owners of distribution centers, warehouses and trucking terminals to hire guards--and pay them well enough to make bribes less tempting--instead of relying on $2 padlocks to safeguard millions of dollars in merchandise.

But even fences and guards won’t deter all the gangs.

“Unfortunately, no matter how much money we spend, it sometimes doesn’t seem like enough,” said James Allen, a spokesman for CF MotorFreight’s parent company, Consolidated Freightways.

Of the company’s more than 700 trailer yards nationwide, only the Simi Valley center has been hit. Yet Allen knows the cargo thieves could strike again, anywhere.

“Truck heists have been around for a long time--there are some great movies from the ‘30s in black and white, starring Humphrey Bogart, about truck heists,” Allen said. “Because we ship high-priced merchandise for a living, we’re a target. We were today’s victims, but we’re not alone.”