19 Arrested in Sting Based in Electronics Shop

For the better part of a year, the GSR electronics shop in a tan stucco Hawaiian Gardens strip mall blended in with its surroundings, tucked neatly between a thrift store and a Hallmark card shop. Sure, its owners kept odd hours and seemed to draw a peculiar clientele, but they never made any trouble.

As its customers would learn, however, the electronics shop was just a side pursuit for its owners--they were actually full-time cops who spent 10 months there posing as fences in the market for stolen property. And on Wednesday, their foray into the business world turned a profit: 19 arrests.

The sting operation, pulled off by the 2-year-old Hawaiian Gardens Police Department and several other agencies, yielded an assortment of stolen cellular phones, VCRs, stereo components and auto parts. From their shabby storefront counter, undercover officers set up videotaped purchases of stolen property from more than 30 unwitting suspects.

“Once they saw the cash, their brains kind of shut off,” said Cypress Police Officer Matt Robinson, an undercover expert who masqueraded as a GSR owner, along with a Hawaiian Gardens officer. “Greed took over.”

To attract suspected thieves, investigators rented storefront space a few blocks from a low-income apartment complex frequented by drug users and dealers, stocked it with some donated prop electronics, then spread the word that the owners would fence stolen goods, said Hawaiian Gardens Police Lt. Steven Frazier.

The first few customers “in turn become salesmen for you,” Frazier said. “It’s a snowball effect.”

By its seventh month in business, the store, which was initially open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays, became a thriving, round-the-clock fencing operation. And by the time the police shut down the shop in December, the officers had spent $5,400 on “buys,” for about $329,000 worth of stolen property.

Many of the items, such as stereos ripped from car dashboards, were difficult to trace because there were no serial numbers on them. But in some cases, investigators matched stolen items with theft victims by listening to the taped conversations between the undercover officers and the suspects, who often bragged about their crimes. If they let it slip when and where they stole an item, police sifted through crime reports to find the victim and confirm that the property had been stolen.

“It’s like sitting around a guys’ locker room, except they’re talking about stuff that will send them to prison,” Frazier said.

Key arrests in the operation included one truck driver who allegedly offered to sell a tractor-trailer loaded with new Honda auto parts, as well as a notebook with the security access codes and the keys to more than six Los Angeles car dealerships, for $20,000.

The man also allegedly proposed to kill another truck driver and steal his haul for the officers. Fearing that he would follow through, Robinson and Hawaiian Gardens Officer Steve Judd arranged a meeting with him in a Cypress auto lot one night in November and a SWAT team took him into custody. He was convicted of receiving stolen property and is serving a two-year term in state prison.

On Wednesday, squads of officers from a few police departments and other agencies, including the Secret Service and the National Insurance Crime Bureau, fanned out across southeast Los Angeles County to round up other suspects.

Just after 7 a.m., a team wearing bulletproof vests and carrying AR-15 rifles raided a two-story duplex in Norwalk, where officers arrested twin sisters who police said sold a variety of stolen electronics to the store, and on at least one trip brought them a VCR hidden in a baby stroller. (Police could not tell the twins apart at the duplex, and had to check their fingerprints to confirm their identities.)

None of the suspects arrested Wednesday resisted. But Robinson and Judd said the majority of their customers came into the shop with weapons, and at least once they thought they would be robbed.

“There’s always a chance that they’re so sold that you’re a crook, they’ll kill you for your cash,” Robinson said.

The two officers said their customers occasionally asked about their backgrounds, but never figured out the sting. Perhaps they would have if they had done their homework--GSR is police jargon for “gunshot residue.”

“It was a complete sham,” Robinson said. “It was just a matter of acting.”