Brutality of Today’s Crimes Bewilders Veteran Convicts : Violence: The new breed of robber kills needlessly, old-timers say. ‘What’s wrong with these guys?’ one asks.

On the top tier of the maximum security unit at the state prison in Tehachapi, Robert Dacy and his cellmate hover around their 13-inch television every evening and watch the news.

They pay particular attention to stories about holdups and robberies and are continually perplexed by the types of crimes they see: Crimes that end up in shootings even if the victims cooperate. Crimes that used to be simple street robberies or car thefts or store holdups and are now murders.

In his day, Dacy said, if you held a merchant up and he gave you the money, if you wanted a car and the driver turned it over, if you clipped someone’s wallet and they did not resist, you did not shoot them. The professional criminal’s goal, he said, was to get in and out of a crime scene as quickly as possible, with as much money as possible, with the least amount of violence possible.

“When me and my cellie see what’s happening on the streets today, we look at each other and say: ‘What’s wrong with these guys?’ ” said Dacy, who is serving a life sentence after being convicted in 1968 on charges of kidnaping for ransom. “The criminals in my day would draw the line somewhere. If someone was unarmed and cooperated with us, we didn’t just shoot them down like a dog.”

But there is a new breed of criminal working the streets today, criminologists say, with an ethic, a modus operandi and a regard for life that differs greatly from criminals in previous decades. He is younger. He is more violent. And he will kill people in a manner that bewilders even old-time career criminals.

“That’s one of the reasons why there is so much fear of crime in our society--this pattern of gratuitous violence that you didn’t see in the past,” said Albert Cardarelli, a criminologist at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. “It’s this viciousness, this unpredictability on the part of the criminal that is frightening people so much.”

When Dacy was on the streets, criminals avoided violence whenever possible because it meant a longer prison sentence and more “heat” by police. The only people who shot someone for no reason, he said, were the psychos.

“In the old days, if a guy killed someone he would sometimes show some remorse in the joint,” said Dacy, who was sipping coffee in the prison visiting room. “I once had a cellie who cried every night for months. But these guys today will just look through you and say: ‘Yeah, I blew him away. So what.’ ”

Dacy, who has a four-page arrest record dating back to 1947, is doing a life sentence after kidnaping a 4-year-old boy for ransom. Before he was arrested in Los Angeles, he led police on a high-speed chase and exchanged shots with the FBI, wounding an agent.

When he was finally caught, according to press reports at the time, “he fought four agents with his bare hands” and screamed at them: “Why don’t you kill me!” After he was taken to the hospital, the mother of the kidnaped boy asked to see Dacy, and it was reported at the time that he told her: “I took good care of your boy. I gave him candy and milk.”

Dacy, 65, bears little resemblance to the notorious criminal who was once the subject of a massive FBI manhunt. He is a gaunt, old man, dressed in faded prison blues, suffering from emphysema after decades of chain smoking hand-rolled cigarettes in his cell.

Dacy does not make excuses for his crimes and acknowledges the seriousness of his offenses. But, he said, unlike the criminals of today, there were some things he simply would not do.

“If someone shot at me I shot back. . . . It was a cops and robbers type thing,” he said. “I’m not saying that was right and that I don’t deserve to be punished. What I’m saying is, in the old days the professional criminal had some kind of code. We would never consider pulling the trigger just for the hell of it.”

*

The flickering black and white images on the video screen show two armed men, their heads covered with hoods, their faces obscured by bandannas, charging through the doors of the small Pasadena market.

One of the gunmen jabs his pistol to the market owner’s temple and thrusts a paper sack at him. The owner empties the cash register into the sack and stands perfectly still, his hands up in the air. The gunman grabs the sack and heads toward the door. But before backing out, he suddenly raises his pistol, leans toward the counter and shoots the market owner in the chest.

The market owner, Hak Keun Byun, had cooperated from the beginning. He made no sudden movements. He kept his hands above his head. He could not even identify the gunmen because of their hoods and bandannas. But he was killed anyway.

“The market owner did everything right,” Pasadena Police Lt. Denis Petersen said after showing the video of the November shooting. “There was absolutely no reason for him to get shot. This was about as cold a killing as you can get.”

For days after the shooting, people dropped dozens of sympathy cards at the store, filled the front door with candles and flowers, and taped messages to the windows. Byun was extremely popular in the neighborhood and was known affectionately to his customers as “Papa-san.”

“You were one of the most caring people that it has been my pleasure to ever know,” a customer wrote in a sympathy card.

“I could walk into your store and be feeling very low, but you always brought a smile to my face and a bit of cheer into my heart,” a customer scrawled on a banner.

“We shall always cherish and love you for your kindness and generosity,” another customer wrote.

Byun’s murder might have been an impulsive action, a split-second decision to pull a trigger, but its ramifications will last a lifetime. The killing left Byun’s wife and two children devastated, confused and searching for answers.

Byun, who emigrated from South Korea 10 years ago and worked 12 hours a day, 365 days a year, refused to keep a gun in the store. He was convinced that if he cooperated during a robbery there would be little chance of anyone in the store being injured, said his daughter, Amanda. He always told her: “What’s a couple of bucks. Your life is more important.” That is why she was not surprised to learn that her father did not struggle during the robbery. And why she now shakes her head after talking about the shooting and asks softly: “Why, why, why?”

“These people did not just kill one man, they killed a family,” said Byun’s widow, Soon. “They killed a brother, a father and a husband.” She begins to cry and dabs her eyes with a tissue. “I feel like I am dying too.”

Byun’s killing, which remains unsolved, disturbed neighbors so much because it was so senseless. Sanford Bryant, who lives near the store, served four years at Soledad state prison for armed robbery, but he said there was a different attitude in the neighborhood when he committed his crime in the early 1980s.

“Today, with these young gang members, the more violent you are, the crazier you act, the more you’re looked up to,” said Bryant, 30, leaning against his car in the store’s parking lot. “These guys want to smoke someone because they think it’ll get them some respect. When I was coming up, we didn’t want to kill anybody--we just wanted the cash.”

*

Although there are no statistics that chronicle these senseless killings, the trend is reflected in the rise of “stranger homicide” statistics. About a third of all homicides are committed by strangers--three times the number compared to 20 years ago, according to statistics compiled by Marc Riedel, a criminology professor at Southern Illinois University. This means that a greater percentage of people are being murdered during street robberies, holdups and other confrontations, rather than in domestic disputes or neighborhood arguments.

“Robbery and burglary used to almost be a profession,” Riedel said. “Now you’ve got mostly amateurs doing the crimes and these amateurs are more clumsy, more impulsive and more likely to kill.”

Police began seeing a change in the nature of street crime in the late 1970s, when crack cocaine appeared on the scene and gangs took hold in many neighborhoods. In previous decades, many of the property crimes were committed by heroin addicts who were “low-key and docile,” and favored burglaries, said Sergio Robleto, who heads the LAPD’s South Bureau homicide division. But crack addicts are more “edgy and paranoid . . . people who will pull holdups and carjackings and can kill very quickly,” he said.

Cocaine trafficking created turf wars, which raised the level of violence among gangs. And now, with the frequency of drive-by shootings, there is a generation of gang members willing to pull a trigger without hesitation.

“If you do a drive-by and kill someone you don’t know just because they live in the wrong neighborhood, life is pretty cheap to you,” Deputy Probation Officer Robert Bellusci said. “So shooting someone during a liquor store robbery is no big deal to you. Dead is dead.”

More juveniles are committing violent crimes and they have a greater access to guns than ever before. These juveniles, criminologists say, tend to have less regard for the consequences of their actions than the career criminal who is in his 30s or 40s.

And the sociopath--or what psychiatrists call “antisocial personality disorder”--is more prevalent today, psychiatrist Michael Zona said. The sociopath “basically has no feelings,” absolutely no remorse or concern for other people’s suffering, Zona said.

“The disintegration of the family, drugs, poverty . . . there are more angry, disenfranchised people out there who missed their share of the pie,” said Zona, who works with the LAPD’s threat management unit. “These conditions are creating a lot of callous people.”

*

In Pasadena, a few months before Byun was killed, Douglas Lane stopped by an automated teller machine on Colorado Boulevard to pick up some money before a Saturday night date. Detective Thomas Delgado slowly rolls the bank’s video of the transaction, which shows Lane pulling out his ATM card and, in the background, a teen-ager in a T-shirt and low-slung baggy pants walking toward the cash machine.

He leans against a wall and takes a drag from his cigarette. Lane withdraws $100 and the teen-ager walks up behind him, puts a semiautomatic pistol to his head and leads him out of the range of the video camera.

Lane was later found shot to death in the bank parking lot. After studying the four bullet wounds in his chest, coroner’s investigators determined that Lane, 37, a Pasadena contractor, never resisted. Because the bullet holes were so close together, investigators concluded that the gunman quickly pulled the trigger four times before Lane could react.

After the bank offered a $50,000 reward, an informant called police and a 19-year-old with a long police record was charged with the killing. Delgado, who investigated the case, said shootings like this are “disheartening for a homicide detective.”

“Here’s a hard-working guy, a good citizen, and he gets shot--for what?” Delgado said. “There is a cruelty and coldness here that is hard to understand.”

*

Paul Allen, a bank robber who has spent the last 30 years in and out of 15 different prisons, considers himself “a dinosaur who doesn’t fit into the criminal scene anymore.” He is perplexed by this new breed of killer, whom he considers “more a terrorist than a criminal.”

When Allen was first learning his trade in South-Central Los Angeles, older criminals used to tell him: “Don’t go after any money that you can’t ease off.” The holdup man who was most respected, Allen said, was the one who could slip into a business and quietly ease the money off the clerk without having to “bust skulls.”

“There was a distinction between a thief and a murderer in my time,” said Allen, 66, taking a drag from his cigarette and slowly exhaling. “If you had to leave a lot of bodies behind, you just wouldn’t do the job. These kids today are foreigners to me--I have no idea what they’re thinking.”

Allen found this new generation of criminals so distasteful during his last “bit in the joint” that he decided, for the first time in his life, to go straight.

The thought of spending time behind bars with these young convicts, he said, is enough to deter him from ever pulling another holdup.