CALIFORNIA ALBUM : San Francisco Tries to Retain Lure of Fisherman’s Wharf : Attacks on tourists have merchants worried that trade will drop. But most visitors seem unaware of the concern.

On a balmy evening at Fisherman’s Wharf, three visiting engineers from Alabama were on their way to score some crab cakes. One carried a loaf of sourdough bread in his hand, a souvenir for home. All three were fresh from a trip to Alcatraz Island; the mass trek past Al Capone’s prison cell had left them hungry.

They did not notice the undercover police officer, a tall man in a 49ers cap and sunglasses, chomping on a wad of gum. They also did not see the patrol car a block away and said they had never heard of the recent attacks on tourists at Fisherman’s Wharf.

They were right where the merchants would like them to be: in the tourist bubble, oblivious, happy and ready to spend. “We love this place,” said Earl Reed, one of the engineers. “I feel great.”

Feeling great is the whole idea of Fisherman’s Wharf, the No. 1 tourist destination in this city where tourism is the No. 1 industry. Every year, hordes of visitors come to San Francisco and spend $3.9 billion feeling great or trying to. A huge 87% of them go to the wharf, according to the San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau.

That’s a lot of shrimp cocktail, Alcatraz T-shirts and trips to the Wax Museum to see the life-size replica of Michael Jackson.

So when reports of three tourist attacks in rapid succession at the wharf began making the news, merchants shuddered. First, two Japanese women were mugged and beaten near the cable car turnaround that is a drop-off point for the wharf.

Then Los Angeles comedian Larry Miller was attacked and robbed coming out of a comedy club in the Cannery. The next night, an Irish student was wounded in her back by a gunshot during an attempted robbery after dinner near Pier 39. Police made arrests in all three cases.

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“When this crime thing happened, it just devastated the merchants’ morale,” said Bob Dean, publisher of the San Francisco Tourist Guide. “They’d gone through the earthquake and the (Persian Gulf) war and the recession. Now this.”

You don’t get to be the city’s leading attraction without making some friends in high places. Mayor Frank Jordan, the former police chief, once walked the beat at the wharf. He knows the merchants and knows that as they go, in some ways, so goes the city. Crime may march on in the seedy parts of town, but Jordan was not going to let the good-time ambience of the wharf be impugned.

Late last month, police beefed up patrols, adding an extra patrol car and a highly visible transit officer at the cable car turnaround. This was in addition to patrol cars on duty and two beat officers who walk the wharf area.

Police went out of their way to dispel any impression that tourists were being targeted, as they had been in Miami in a rash of crimes against rental car drivers. “Certainly we’ve seen some violent incidents in the Fisherman’s Wharf area,” Police Chief Anthony Ribera said at a briefing for reporters. “But we are convinced these are sporadic, random-type things.”

He said crime is lower this year in the 30-block area that includes the wharf. Releasing the crime statistics, he said: “We want to bolster the confidence of tourists in our city and reassure the merchants and residents.”

Two days later, two teachers from France became lost walking downtown, west of City Hall. A young man ran up to them, snatched one woman’s purse and knocked her down, while her friend screamed for help. The story made the front page of one of the local papers, which took the opportunity to rehash the fact that an elderly woman from Brooklyn, N.Y., had recently suffered a broken hip and elbow when her purse was snatched in front of the St. Francis Hotel in Union Square.

Damage control is going full blast at the San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau. First of all, said Sharon Rooney, the bureau spokeswoman who has spent many unpleasant minutes talking to reporters about the tourist incidents, “if I was shot in Fisherman’s Wharf, it probably wouldn’t make the paper.” And another thing, said Rooney. The Irish student who was shot wasn’t a tourist: She had been living here for five months. “When I was living here for five months, I was a resident,” Rooney bristled.

Indeed, on the waterfront streets of the wharf, the merchants seem to be the ones who are the most skittish. Amid Mehrdad, owner of Daddio’s Caffe e Deli, sat outside sipping coffee. “At this time of year I should not be sitting here drinking coffee,” he said. “It’s too quiet.”

He is convinced that most of the tourists at the Holiday Inn across the street are in their rooms, watching television news accounts of violence against tourists. “What else do they have to do?” he asked. “They turn on the TV. When they see something like this happens in Fisherman’s Wharf, they don’t want to walk around at night.”

But many tourists professed scant knowledge of any attacks or spoke little English. And even among those who had heard scattered reports, there seemed to be a certain level of acceptance that cities can be dangerous.

“All over the world is trouble now,” said Peter Siegriest, a tourist from Switzerland. His wife, Heidi, said: “We can’t stay in our house all the time, can we?”