‘CATs’ Crack Down on Truck Hijackers : Law enforcement: Sheriff’s cargo theft unit tries to curb criminals who steal half a billion dollars in merchandise annually.

At high noon on a hazy day last fall, Sheriff’s Department Detective Larry Thompson pulled his unmarked car onto a freeway on-ramp in Long Beach and ran into a cop’s bad dream.

Just ahead of him, a big-rig truck was stopped. As Thompson started to pass, a man with a semiautomatic pistol sprang from behind the truck’s fender, bolted to the cab and aimed the pistol at the driver’s head.

“Do I stop, jump out of the car and draw down on the guy? Or run him down?” Thompson thought.

Deciding to play it smart, he radioed for help. By then the gunman and an accomplice had forced their way into the cab, and the big-rig was heading into traffic. As the deputy followed, broadcasting his location, a pickup with three accomplices pulled alongside.

“They probably thought I was some John Doe citizen calling the police and they tried to run me off the freeway,” said Thompson, who was running an errand when he happened upon the brazen hijacking.

Finally, Thompson and the backup deputies managed to corner the truck at an off-ramp and arrest the hijackers, who later confessed that they had planned to park the rig somewhere and peddle its contents--$116,000 worth of camcorders and compact disc players.

Although the scene resembled something out of a movie, it was cold reality. And, ironically, no one knew that better than Thompson and the deputies who joined the chase: They are members of a specialized, multi-agency team created to crack down on truck hijackings, a crime that has reached epidemic proportions in Southern California.

“This is really the cargo theft capital of the world,” said Sheriff’s Sgt. Dewayne Shackelford, one of a dozen members of the Cargo Criminal Apprehension Team. “There are so many, we can’t keep track. There are weekends when we come back to work (and) get reports that we have had 20 trailers stolen.”

Members of the so-called Cargo CATs estimate that thieves in Southern California are raking in more than $1 million in merchandise every night--half a billion dollars annually--by commandeering trucks at gunpoint, by stealing them off streets and from storage yards and by bribing truckers to give up their loads.

Police say that cargo thefts are becoming increasingly violent, leading to the death of at least two people last year. In October, a truck driver was shot to death during an attempted hijacking at a freeway on-ramp in Carson. A month earlier, a security guard was shot in the head, execution-style, during the robbery of a La Mirada storage yard from which two truckloads of clothing and other merchandise were taken. There have been numerous abductions and at least one rape connected with cargo thefts.

The reason that the Los Angeles area has become a hijacker’s paradise, authorities say, is simple: The pickings are plentiful. More freight moves through the Los Angeles and Long Beach harbors than anywhere in the nation, an estimated $83 billion worth each year. What’s more, a conviction for stealing a load of televisions from a storage yard may not bring a stiffer penalty than stealing a single TV from a store.

Most of the thieves do not seem to be overly discriminating, ripping off a mind-numbing variety of goods, including computers, frozen pastries, motorcycles, hay, fax machines, dog food, light bulbs, prune juice, in-line skates, frozen shrimp, hair spray and anything else that can be moved on the street or sold in volume at cut-rate prices to independent stores.

But then there are choosy hijackers such as Jiles Byron Gray, who owned two Mercedeses, three new vans and a $500,000 house in the hills above Pomona before he was arrested by the special team and sentenced to 21 years in federal prison in 1992.

Gray and his gang would don ski masks, tie up security guards at truck storage yards, cut the locks off big-rig trailers with bolt cutters and place a sample of merchandise behind each one. Gray would make his selections, and the thieves would steal the trucks, leaving the rest of the big-rigs behind with the samples on the ground.

Because of the growing severity of the problem, the Legislature passed a bill, which took effect last month, authorizing the California Public Utilities Commission to pay $3 million a year for cargo security and truck driver safety programs.

In addition, because of the regional nature of the crime, Cargo CATs was formed, combining officers from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the Los Angeles and Vernon police departments, California Highway Patrol, Los Angeles Port Police and the FBI. Created in 1990, the team made 367 arrests and recovered nearly $52 million in stolen property during its first two years.

More recently, the team was instrumental in the indictments of 31 people and the recovery of nearly $14 million in stolen goods in a sting operation that lasted for more than a year.

The team’s efforts are directed not only at the thieves--who steal trucks at gunpoint or plunder them in storage yards--but also the so-called brokers. Like drug kingpins, the brokers keep themselves isolated and above the fray, setting up deals to store and sell stolen goods to independent retailers or ship them to Mexico.

A couple of years ago, Cargo CATs set its sights on a veteran broker named Jose Oliberio Garcia, 37. Like most brokers, Oliberio let flunkies do the stealing. He frequently provided warehouse space for cargo thieves and, if they were unable to find a buyer for their loot and pay a storage fee during a specified period, he would take possession of the goods, according to police.

Operating in much the same way as undercover narcotics officers, members of the team used one informant to introduce Oliberio to a second informant, who posed as the owner of a warehouse in Carson.

Using hidden audio devices and cameras, the team recorded hours of conversations between the warehouse “owner” and Oliberio, who agreed to rent the building for $2,000 a week per truckload of stored merchandise. During the tape-recorded conversations, the savvy Oliberio avoided using such incriminating words as “stolen goods.”

What unfolded next was testimony to the magnitude of the cargo theft problem.

The Carson warehouse that Oliberio rented from the undercover operatives started filling up, beginning with toilet paper, clothing, food and Christmas ornaments. As more stolen goods arrived, the hijackers began quarreling among themselves.

“There’s a lot of thievery between thieves,” sheriff’s Detective John Langley said. “They were taking each other’s samples and running off to find buyers.”

Before long, the warehouse was out of control. “They were trying to bring in more stuff,” Langley said. “We couldn’t handle it. We were on overload.”

Obtaining the incriminating information they needed, the officers arrested Oliberio, who pleaded guilty to grand theft and receiving stolen property. He was sentenced to three years in state prison.

Many brokers, however, treat prison time not as a deterrent but as a price of doing business.

Pokey Eddie White, for one, has been in and out of custody for 25 years, several times for receiving stolen property. Police describe White, 44, as one of the biggest brokers in Southern California and allege that he uses members of the Crips gang to pull jobs for his well-organized theft ring.

Here is an example of how he and his cohorts did business.

Early on Aug. 20, 1992, two long-distance truckers backed a $250,000 load of CDs up to the platform of a Chatsworth warehouse. The exhausted truckers settled down in the cab to sleep, but about 5:30 a.m., two gunmen rousted them, locked them in a trailer and drove away with their rig.

What the thieves did not know was that the truck had been equipped by the freight company with a “satellite responder,” enabling authorities to track its general location. Later that morning, LAPD investigators using a helicopter saw the truck in a warehouse storage yard at 87th Place and Mettler Street in Los Angeles. Police found the load of stolen CDs stacked in the warehouse.

The owner of the building told officers that White had rented the warehouse. The two long-distance truckers identified Gary Villand Harris as one of the men who robbed them. White, Harris and a third man, Willie Lee Beamon, were charged with receiving stolen property. Harris also was charged with armed robbery. But White was soon out on $20,000 bail.

Three months later, two cargo thefts occurred in the South Bay--a trailer load of computers was taken from the Unisys Corp. storage yard in Compton and a truckload of Sony compact disc players was hijacked at gunpoint in Carson.

Augustin Enriquez was hauling the load of CD players. It is a night he will never forget. After leaving the Sony warehouse, he pulled to a stop at a traffic light at an on-ramp of the San Diego Freeway.

“That’s normally the place to get hijacked if you’re pulling a Sony load,” Thompson said. “We have frequent thefts there.”

As Enriquez waited for the light to change, the door to his cab flew open and a man in a black ski mask shoved a gun in his face.

“Roll over,” the gunman said as another hijacker climbed in the passenger door.

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The hijackers threatened to kill the terrified trucker if he did not tell them what he was hauling.

“I told them I didn’t know,” Enriquez said. “I was sweating and my heart was beating so fast I thought it was going to fly out of my chest.”

Finally, the gunmen pulled a ski cap over Enriquez’s eyes, drove the truck to Santa Fe Street in Carson, dumped him out and drove off with the CD players.

A month or so after the Thanksgiving weekend thefts, computer dealer William Narkunas was asked by a stranger if he wanted to buy several hundred Unisys computer monitors. The price was reasonable enough, but Narkunas got suspicious when the seller insisted on being paid in cash.

“The alarm went off when he said he wanted to be paid in dead Presidents,” said Narkunas, who called the sheriff’s office. “Five minutes later I got a call from Cargo CATs. They asked me if I would participate and we set up a buy for cash.”

Within days, a jittery Narkunas was standing in the rain, waiting to meet the thieves in a parking lot in an unfamiliar neighborhood of Los Angeles. He had $30,000 in cash provided by police stuffed in his pockets and second thoughts running through his head. An undercover CHP officer was with Narkunas and had brought along a truck for the thieves to use.

Finally, two strangers showed up and took the truck. The deal was that the thieves would return it with computer monitors and collect the $30,000. The team followed the suspects to a cellular phone business in Los Angeles. At an apartment house garage in Norwalk, they began loading the truck with Unisys monitors.

The team swooped in and put three men under arrest. A search warrant was issued for the cellular phone business, which turned out to be operated by none other than White, who was out on bail. Inside, officers discovered 171 computer monitors stolen from the Unisys yard and nine Sony CD players taken from Enriquez’s truck.

White insisted that the merchandise had been left at his business by a son who went to the East Coast, and a Superior Court judge dismissed the charges of receiving stolen property, infuriating the team.

“He takes the word of a crook,” Thompson said of the judge, “instead of letting us testify.”

But White did not escape prison. He was convicted in September of receiving stolen property in connection with the load of CDs hijacked from truckers in Chatsworth. White was sentenced to four years in prison. With good behavior, he will be out in two.