L.A. Leads the Nation in Travel Agency Robberies

Los Angeles has become the focus of a $300-million black market in stolen airline tickets and a rash of escalating dangers for travel agents, according to law enforcement authorities.

Southern California is already the bank robbery capital of the nation, and now Los Angeles County has become No. 1 in travel agency heists as well, the authorities said.

Thieves are well-organized, stealing thousands of blank tickets at a time, forging them and typically reselling them for $200 to $10,000 apiece.

Demand for stolen tickets is high among illegal immigrants who use Los Angeles International Airport as a gateway to the nation’s interior, authorities said.

Hot tickets, which sell for a fraction of real fares, are sometimes part of a package deal provided by coyotes, the people who lead illegal immigrants over the border. For the last two years, Los Angeles was the nation’s No. 1 destination and departure point for travelers using stolen tickets, statistics show.

A report last month by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, found that losses from stolen airline tickets in 1997 and 1998 totaled $300 million.

Although such tickets constitute a fraction of those issued and the losses are small compared with overall revenue, fears have grown in the business as armed robberies have surged.

While losses from all kinds of airline ticket thefts dropped 40% nationwide from 1997 to 1998, such losses from armed robberies of travel agents rose 300%, according to an airline industry group that tracks a portion of stolen tickets.

The most recent incident ended in the fatal shooting of two suspects by a controversial Los Angeles Police Department unit that was investigating more than two dozen travel agency robberies since January.

The detection of forged tickets seems as though it should be relatively simple. The GAO report suggested several ways to prevent ticket theft, such as the use of optical scanners. But airline industry officials say such technology is too costly to deploy at all terminals.

Travel agents counter that they are paying dearly for the airlines’ frugality.

“The airlines, in my humble opinion, could stop this,” said a Westlake Village travel agent who was recently held at gunpoint and tied up while robbers ransacked his business. Officials with the American Society of Travel Agents, which represents more than 11,000 agencies nationally, agree.

“If you ask an agent who understands the problem, they would say that airlines have not done enough to eliminate the market value” of stolen tickets, said Paul Ruden, a senior vice president at the association.

“We’ve testified before Congress to that effect,” he said. “We’ve written the Department of Transportation. Nothing changes. We still have robberies.”

Jim Manning, director of security for Airlines Reporting Corp.--an organization representing 140 airlines and three railroads--said the industry is doing the best it can, such as cooperating with police, warning agents about the danger and advising them how to heighten security.

Most airline tickets are printed on “ticket stock,” each with its own serial number. Industry experts compare ticket stock to the paper sheets used for printing U.S. currency. Travel agents print each ticket’s particulars on the blank stock.

But many airlines do not keep track of the serial numbers, and those that do seldom have the means to detect stolen tickets efficiently, according to the GAO report.

British Airways is the only major airline using its database and optical scanners at most terminal gates to detect fraud, Airlines Reporting said. And federal officials say marketing--not security--was the main motivation behind deployment of the scanners.

“They used the scanners to keep track of frequent flier miles, customer profiles, revenue stream,” said GAO researcher Kathleen Turner. “They bought them for other reasons and then found out that they had this other benefit. But now they’re detecting enough stolen ticket stock that it pays for itself.”

Better detection of stolen tickets would eventually cut off demand and prevent travel agency heists, experts said.

Hot airline tickets reach the street through loosely organized rings of thieves, forgers and fencers, law enforcement officials said.

The thieves sell the blank tickets to counterfeiters, who use personal computers and printers to forge the ticket text. The counterfeiters then sell the tickets to fencers, who find customers through classified advertisements and word of mouth.

“They stay with a particular ethnic line,” said Gary Yallelus, an airline industry fraud investigator.

Many of the customers, investigators say, are foreign nationals who wish to visit family abroad or illegal immigrants who have crossed the border and are trying to avoid immigration officials. The GAO report said Immigration and Naturalization Service investigators rarely scrutinize domestic travelers and concentrate their resources at U.S. points of entry.

Of 8,330 stolen tickets that Airlines Reporting tracked in 1997 and 1998, about 54% (4,476 tickets) were for flights originating from one of three U.S. locations: Los Angeles, San Diego or Phoenix. Similarly, about 28% (2,342 tickets) were for flights destined for one of five U.S. locations: Los Angeles; Charlotte, N.C.; Chicago; Atlanta; or the New York City area.

In February, the INS caught 162 illegal immigrants--many of them with stolen tickets--on three domestic flights at the Phoenix airport and deported them.

In Los Angeles, the number of travel agency robberies continues to grow.

In the January robbery of the Westlake Village agency, three men were arrested after they led police on a televised freeway chase. They were convicted in a series of robberies at travel agencies and sentenced to state prison terms of one to 15 years.

Since late last year, robbers have targeted travel agencies in the San Fernando Valley. The two men killed in the Aug. 14 incident, and two others charged with robbery and conspiracy, are believed to have been responsible for as many as 25 travel agency holdups this year, according to police.

The most recent victim, say police, was a Granada Hills travel agent. Lady Moon of Fly Moon Travel Services said she had heard about the string of heists but was caught with her guard down.

Two armed men, later identified by authorities as Jose Rafael Figueroa and Mario Guerrero, went into her agency at 9 a.m., and for the next 20 minutes, Moon said, she negotiated for her life with the commodity her attackers wanted most: blank airline tickets.

“I need $1,000 and 1,000 tickets,” Moon recalled one of the men saying repeatedly.

“This is my last day,” she thought. “This is the way it’s going to end.”

One of the men pulled up his T-shirt, revealing “a big gun, sophisticated and high-powered,” she said, adding that she also noticed that the gunman, a heavyset man with a shaved head, was trembling.

Sometimes weeping, sometimes defiant, she distracted her attackers with sympathetic words and obedience, she said.

Unknown to Moon, the robbers were under surveillance by Los Angeles Police Department detectives, who said later that they believed the business was being cased, not robbed.

As police waited outside, the two men prepared to leave, one holding a gun to Moon’s temple, she said.

“I don’t want to shoot you,” he said, warning her not to move. “But if you [do anything], I’m going to kill you.”

They left. Before Moon finished her call to 911, a plainclothes detective appeared at the door.

“I was thinking, ‘Why are they so damn fast?’ ”

Minutes later, two of the suspects were fatally shot in a confrontation with police.