Armored Vehicle Buy Backfires on Collector : Surplus: Antelope Valley man pays $14,500 for old personnel carrier, planning to rent it to movie makers. But U.S. agents confiscate the purchase, saying it is still classified as a weapon.

When David W. Wang spotted a magazine ad in July offering an armored personnel carrier for sale, he quickly flew to Colorado to close the deal. The small, tank-like carrier would make a fine addition to the fleet of military vehicles he rents to Hollywood movie makers.

Wang paid $14,500 for the vehicle, had it hauled to his home outside Palmdale and spent several thousand more fixing it up. In March, even before finishing the renovation, he got a call expressing interest in the carrier.

But the call wasn’t from a Hollywood producer. It was from a federal agent. How, the agent wanted to know, did he get the vehicle?

This month, federal agents arrived at Wang’s home and seized the carrier, saying it was not supposed to be in his possession--or retrofitted to make it possible to be used for military purposes.

“I said, ‘I hope you guys don’t think I’m a militia member,’ ” Wang recalled. “They said, ‘No, if we did, we would’ve come with a SWAT team.’ ”

Across the country about the same time, U.S. Department of Energy agents were seizing seven similar vehicles, saying they also were in private hands illegally. The carriers, they said, were supposed to be in museums and disabled.

“They told me I wouldn’t get it back,” Wang said. “It’s supposed to be demilitarized--cut up, destroyed.”

Wang, 36, who claims that he is out nearly $20,000, said he was an unwitting victim in the deal. Federal officials have called upon him to testify at a grand jury on the matter.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Kenneth R. Fimberg, who is based in Denver, said the investigation is mainly focused on whether anyone committed fraud by obtaining military vehicles as a museum donation, then offering them for sale to the public.

Fimberg declined to comment specifically on the case involving Wang. But in general, he said, “Absent some aggravating circumstances, mere possession of an item like these vehicles would probably not result in criminal prosecution, although other steps might be taken by the government to regain possession.”

Announcing the seizures in a written statement last week, Department of Energy officials said Wang and the others who were “in possession of the vehicles describe themselves as collectors of military hardware.”

The statement said those who had the vehicles were cooperating with federal agents, but that officials nevertheless are concerned “by the possibility that property disposition procedures could be used to channel military equipment into private hands.”

Energy Department spokeswoman Wilma Slaughter said the raids were not prompted by the Oklahoma City bombing. “This was an independent investigation,” she said.

Wang, born in Taiwan and raised in Northridge, learned about military vehicles during a three-year hitch in the U.S. Army and another three years in the National Guard. “I was a tow-truck driver,” he said. “They called it a ‘recovery specialist.’ ”

About 10 years ago, he began supplying military surplus clothing and props to movie and television studios. After buying a military ambulance at auction for $1,000, he expanded his rental business to include vehicles.

Today, his fleet has grown to more than 40 vehicles, mostly stored behind a chain-link fence on a cluttered lot in a rural area east of Palmdale.

The vehicles are mostly Vietnam-era cargo and troop carrier trucks, some of which were still in use during the Persian Gulf War, Wang said. They are parked close together at the remote yard, surrounded by other military surplus goods including helmets and empty missile storage cases.

Wang’s trucks, restored and generally painted in camouflage colors, rent for $250 a day. At his home he parks a new Hummer, a rugged off-road vehicle that he bought recently for $50,000 and rents for $500 a day, he said.

Back home, Wang pulled from his files a contract to show that he had provided vehicles used in the recent movie “Outbreak,” starring Dustin Hoffman.

Last year, he spotted the ad for the armored carrier in the Supply Line, a magazine for military equipment collectors. Wang said he flew to Ft. Collins, Colo., to buy it from a man named John Ferrie. Although the vehicle’s weapons had been removed and its engine did not work, Wang thought it could be renovated for movie use.

Wang said he brought $13,000 in cash, hoping that the sight of all those bills would prompt Ferrie to lower his price. It didn’t work.

“He wouldn’t take it,” Wang said, recalling that Ferrie insisted on another $1,500, so he wrote a check for that sum.

Contacted by telephone last week at his Ft. Collins home, Ferrie said he never owned the armored carrier, but was an agent for another Colorado man, William Volz, receiving a $2,500 commission--money he said he will return to Wang.

Ferrie, who works with collectors through his Vintage Military Locator Service, said the sale’s skimpy paperwork was not unusual. “It’s kind of a handshake business,” he said. “If this was a Jeep or a truck, there would be a title document. But this is not a road vehicle. It’s like a bulldozer or a forklift.”

Federal officials, however, do not consider the armored carriers harmless pieces of heavy equipment. Glenn Flood, a Department of Defense spokesman, said the three-passenger vehicles, made in the late 1950s and early 1960s, are classified as weapons and are not to be released to museums unless they are rendered unusable.

Otherwise, Flood said, surplus or outdated armored vehicles--unlike old military trucks--are not supposed to wind up in civilian hands. “They are never put up for auction,” he said. “They’re usually turned into scrap.”

The eight armored carriers seized from Wang and the other civilians were once Department of Energy vehicles used for security work at a nuclear weapons facility in Rocky Flats, Colo. In December, 1990, they were retired because of their age and a lack of spare parts.

The federal agency later donated the vehicles to the Historical Armor Museum, a division of the McLain Museum, in Anderson, Ind., stipulating that they were only to be placed on public display. But even when on museum display, such vehicles must be “demilitarized.” In this case, authorities said, the hatches should have been welded shut and the track disabled.

In a Feb. 23 interview with federal agents, Joseph F. McLain, the owner of the museum, acknowledged that he gave one of the armored vehicles to Volz, the federal affidavit said. The court document states that Volz and a partner then sold the vehicle to Ferrie, who in turn sold it to Wang.

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Wang said Ferrie showed him a document stating that a museum had released the carrier. Wang said he did not contact the museum directly or look into how the vehicle passed to Volz and Ferrie. “That was their business,” he said. “I figured that if it was stolen, it wouldn’t be in a national newspaper.”

Wang has been ordered to appear before a federal grand jury in Denver later this month. He met with an attorney last week to discuss the federal investigation and some legal steps he may pursue to try to recover the rest of his money from the Colorado men or get the armored vehicle back.

Wang insisted that he did not knowingly break any laws in his haste to add the armored carrier to his rental fleet. “My livelihood is on the line,” he said. “I’m a high-profile person in Hollywood. I don’t need negative publicity.”