Mover Accused of Dumping Goods

When Joe and June Smolarski hired a Lancaster company to move their Wurlitzer piano, they never expected it to end up in a muddy Antelope Valley field. But after months of delays and empty promises, they said that’s where they finally found it--dumped alongside the belongings of dozens of others who had hired the moving company.

In what state authorities are calling one of the worst cases ever in the California moving and storage industry, the owner of the company, Larry John Phillips, 51, has been charged with a string of felonies for failing to deliver what authorities estimate to be more than $1 million worth of his customers’ possessions.

Many of the belongings--including refrigerators, sofas and boxes of family photos--were simply dumped in the field, authorities allege. Even the piano sat under the desert sun, they said.

Phillips has been charged with 21 felony counts, including grand theft and embezzlement, with each carrying a maximum penalty of three years in prison. He has also been charged with two misdemeanors for allegedly operating without a license and for false advertising. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

On Monday, Lancaster Municipal Judge Chesley McKay refused to lower Phillips’ $750,000 bail. He remains in a Los Angeles County jail in Valencia, where he has been since his arrest at his Palmdale home March 15.

The state Public Utilities Commission, which regulates the moving and storage industry, contends that Phillips--operating mainly under the name Almond Blossom Moving and Storage--failed to deliver more than $1 million worth of goods.

Phillips’ attorney, Marc Herbert, said the delivery problems were the fault of employees, adding that he is “negotiating with the D.A.’s office regarding the resolution of the case.”

The possessions of 36 separate parties have been identified, and the PUC believes it has found the belongings of another 17 families, individuals or businesses.

In some cases, said Larry McNeeley, supervisor of the PUC’s special investigations section in San Francisco, Phillips would pick up the goods and then tell customers he wouldn’t make the delivery unless they sent more money.

Even when customers did pay more, McNeeley said, the items sometimes never left Southern California, and were kept in storage facilities in the Antelope Valley. When Phillips was evicted from one warehouse last fall, McNeeley said, he moved some of the items to the Lancaster field.

The field was discovered by Maurice Trudell, the owner of a Palmdale U-Haul rental agency. Trudell rented some trucks to Phillips, which also were never returned. Trudell had combed the Antelope Valley and followed Phillips in search of his trucks.

Trudell said he tracked Phillips and a few of his workers to the field, where he saw them unloading goods. He also saw boxes, sofas and refrigerators “pretty much just thrown on top of each other. There were broken pictures on the desert dirt floor. It was heartbreaking.”

Trudell began calling people who had hired Phillips to move their goods, including the Smolarskis, who hired Phillips to transport their piano from their home in Thousand Oaks to their son in Sacramento in December.

When the Smolarskis finally found the piano, it was so damaged that they gave it away.

Phillips did deliver some customers’ possessions, McNeeley said, but many times they arrived broken, crushed or dirty with rat feces.

Other customers tracked down their belongings themselves.

When Pearl Gelman handed a check for $1,000 to Phillips in October, she was told that her belongings would be delivered from Encino to her daughter’s home in New York in three weeks. Four months later, Gelman’s furniture, clothes, dishes and family memorabilia had not arrived.

With the help of an attorney, Gelman’s family located the items in a Palmdale storage facility and the 82-year-old widow ended up paying $1,700 to another moving company to recover the possessions--although some were broken and others were missing.

Another Phillips client, Jerry Rhoten, said that in September he found some of his business equipment, which he had paid Phillips to store while he moved his waste-water treatment company from Palmdale to Lancaster, sitting outside the storage facility.

Rhoten said Phillips told him that he was reorganizing the warehouse and put the equipment outside only temporarily. But a few weeks later Rhoten drove by to find that the items had not been moved. Then Rhoten, too, came across the open field and found the rest of his belongings sitting in storage trailers or lying in the muddy soil.

Rhoten figures he lost about $14,000 in damage to the machinery, plus the $4,000 he had paid Phillips. What really made him angry, Rhoten said, were the boxes of other peoples’ personal belongings, including children’s toys.

“It hurt me deeply to see this kind of stuff sitting in the field,” he said.