The Columbo of Appliances : Zefferino Lopez Has Spent 23 Years Busting Crooked Repair Shops

It is a lonely beat that Zefferino Lopez pounds, a singular life that other cops might regard as . . . well . . . funny.

But if you repair appliances or electronic gizmos, you’re not laughing when Lopez walks through the door of your shop. You give him the grudging respect you would a Columbo or a Kojak.

Because Lopez is a policeman of sorts. He’s a gray-suited investigator for the tiny state Bureau of Electronic and Appliance Repair, a Joe Friday-like gumshoe on the lookout for screwdriver-packing tricksters who each year rip off thousands of unsuspecting Californians through fraudulent appliance repairs.

One of eight such investigators statewide, Lopez uses tactics right out of the police book: He conducts undercover stings of suspect repair shops, planting bogus TVs that have been previously dismantled in a state lab, each part marked as evidence for a possible court trial.

He’s a hound on the trail of the Repairmen From Hell--unscrupulous operators who do business from post office boxes, slipshod workers who bungle jobs so badly they turn refrigerators into steamy saunas where soda cans explode like blasting caps.

Lopez even talks in cop jargon, using phrases like video cameras or stereos “coming up dirty” and saying that if good repairmen go bad, he’s going to have to “take them down.”

Because when it comes to phony fix-it jobs, this detective trusts no one, not even the Maytag repairman.

“I get around,” he says of a patrol territory stretching from West Hollywood north to Santa Barbara. “And I tell these electronic and appliance repair guys that they had better watch their backs. Because the next television they repair might be one of mine.”

Often, he plays the sucker, the suburban homeowner who doesn’t know a picture tube from a volume control, rigging TV sets and appliances with simple defects that should be spotted and fixed in minutes.

Trouble follows if he gets a bill for an elaborate repair the appliance didn’t need.

Lopez, a former TV repairman, is retiring this month after 23 years of looking over the shoulders of technicians paid to make gadgets work right again--a career in which he returned to his former industry to play double agent.

“This industry has a bad reputation, right there above auto mechanics in the professions people mistrust,” he said. “There’s a small percentage of fly-by-nighters willing to rip anybody off. They keep me in business.”

Indeed, electronics is big business. American consumers last year spent an estimated $30 billion on new home electronic equipment--including televisions, VCRs and video cameras. In California alone, according to electronic industry statistics, consumers spend about another $1 billion a year on repairs.

And when their equipment fails, owners look for quick solutions: They scan the telephone book for an easy reference to a neighborhood repair technician--not all of whom are Boy Scouts.

That’s where Lopez comes in.

Unlike the public--known as laymen in the electronic and appliance repair industry--Lopez does not hear some difficult foreign language when technicians start talking about circuit breakers and display monitors.

“My background in the business puts the shop owner at ease, he knows that I know what I’m talking about,” says the 60-year-old Arizona native. “On the other hand, he can’t pull any fast ones. I’ve caught so many repairman in misstatements, where their eyes get real wide and they say ‘Oh, so you know about repairs.’ ”

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Operating on a shoestring $1.6-million annual budget, the appliance repair bureau employs no taxpayer dollars--instead using funds from the $130 annual registration assessed the state’s 8,260 repair shops.

Still, investigators like Lopez--all of whom have a background in electronic repair--get results.

Acting largely on complaints, the bureau last year claimed $113,000 in refunds for overcharged consumers. Misdemeanor criminal charges were brought against 15 people. Three of them went to jail, with sentences ranging up to three years. An additional nine had their operating licenses revoked due to incompetence or negligence.

Begun in 1964 in response to pressure from electronic and appliance repair specialists looking for government help in policing themselves, the bureau has the backing of an industry that applauds the arrests of crooked operators.

“People should realize these types are a minority who give the rest of us a bad name,” said Eloy Fierro, president of the California State Electronics Assn. and owner of Consumer Video Service in North Hollywood.

“Those guys should be hung, no doubt about it. . . . We want them closed down as badly as consumers do.”

That includes operators such as Joseph Jacob Arnold, whose “A Speedy Major Appliance Repair” of Studio City was the object of at least 37 complaints from consumers.

Last year, the bureau revoked Arnold’s license for allegedly collecting “non-refundable” down payments for repair work that was never completed. He has since fled the state, officials say. Complaints became so commonplace that investigators nicknamed Arnold’s business “A Seedy Major Appliance Repair.”

Lopez is on the trail of other alleged electronic ne’er-do-wells, including several Valley repair businesses who solicit money up front for work never done, leaving behind only a post office box and scores of duped customers.

“There’s got to be some ethics involved, some standards,” he says. “If not, who can blame the public for not trusting anyone?”

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Decades after he dismantled and rebuilt his own transistor radio at age 10, Lopez is full of consumer tips on how to avoid becoming a repair victim.

First, avoid appealing to the first technician you find. “TVs and refrigerators, these are emotional products,” he says. “People want them fixed right away. And so they open up the Yellow Pages and scan to the first good-looking ad they see.

“Much of this advertising is misleading. More often than not, you’re making a mistake by relying on these ads. Because you’re bound to meet the Repairman From Hell.”

Instead, consult product manufacturers for a referral to an approved repair technician--most of whom are better trained than workers at mom-and-pop businesses. While there are many reputable small repair shops throughout Los Angeles, larger businesses who pay technicians an hourly salary have less incentive for dishonesty than smaller owner-operated concerns, he says.

“The thing you don’t want to fall prey to is the mentality that the thing has to be fixed today, the repairman at your home who says ‘Ma’am, I got the part right out there in my truck. All you have to do is say the word.’ ”

A call to the Better Business Bureau--or to friends who have frequented the repair shop--can also steer a would-be victim away from trouble. Better yet, Lopez says, a visit to the shop without the broken item is a good way to get the feel of a technician’s knowledge of a particular problem, by asking questions about the problem and looking over the operation for signs of slipshod habits.

“The point,” he says, “is to do your homework.”

Consumers should budget funds ahead of time for such repairs: “Repairs are not cheap, even for work done by honest businessmen,” he said. “A television picture tube that might have cost $200 a decade ago can run as much as $1,300 today.”

With many television repairs, however, there are two sides to the story.

In more than one-third of the 30 complaints he investigates each month, Lopez says, he finds that the consumer has been unreasonable--like the woman who badgered both a manufacturer and the repairman for so many months over a faulty TV that they gave her cash and a new TV set just to get her off their backs.

“There are Consumers From Hell, too,” he says. “Much of the time I am caught in the middle of unresolvable problems where I can’t make either party happy. There are threats of consumer lawsuits, repairmen who are offended because I questioned their ethics.

“It’s like being a mediator. It’s a mess.”

Lopez and fellow investigator Larry Moore--who operates out of Orange County--follow a simple principal: Most repair workers are honest Joes. Some make stupid mistakes. And a small minority are thieves waiting for the victim to walk through their door.

For Lopez, the most satisfying aspect of the job is conducting sting operations to catch the real lawbreakers, playing the rube who doesn’t know the first thing about electronic repairs.

Or cases like the Woodland Hills caper in which the bureau used its own employees to play the role of a couple with a hopelessly broken television, a sting that eventually led to criminal charges.

Shop owner Fierro says the public has a critical role in keeping his industry clean.

“Lots of people are quick to respond to these flyers and come-ons that guarantee some rock-bottom price, the ones that literally promise to do the job for free as long as you let them inside the house,” he said.

“Much of that is just plain fraud. But if you’re a consumer just out to save a buck, you become prey to these guys. And you’re gonna get zapped.”

Lopez is handing over the investigator’s baton to another former-repairman-turned-detective, teaching him the ropes, the lessons he learned in two decades of ferreting out soldering-iron bandits.

“There’s some things I’ve tried to get across to him,” Lopez says with a smile. “For one, not everything is as it seems. And another is not to jump the gun. Listen to both sides.”

And how about the oldest adage of all: There’s a sucker born every minute?

“It’s true,” he says. “And that includes myself. Nobody is immune.”