Travel Agents Put on Crime Alert

An airline industry group issued a crime alert Thursday to Southern California travel agents amid a string of armed robberies in which gunmen have made off with thousands of blank tickets, potentially worth millions of dollars.

The warning came hours before three men barged into Petro Shore Travel in Westlake Village with guns drawn, tied up employees and made off with an undisclosed number of blank tickets, authorities said.

Two of the suspects were arrested late Thursday morning by Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies after a wild, televised chase on the Ventura Freeway that ended in a Woodland Hills cul-de-sac. A third suspect managed to elude authorities.

The Airlines Reporting Corp., an Arlington, Va.,-based organization that accredits more than 20,000 travel agents across the country, put out an alert Thursday urging travel agents to report incidents immediately to police and to cooperate with robbers’ demands.

“The issue that is important to us in the context of the armed robberies is that travel agencies should not resist for the sake of the ticket stock,” said Allen Muten, a spokesman for the industry group.

At least 10 agencies, including offices in Sherman Oaks, Studio City, Glendale, North Hollywood, Chatsworth and Granada Hills have been victimized in recent weeks.

The LAPD’s Robbery-Homicide Division is investigating the cases, which detectives said may be connected but refused to comment further.

Sheriff’s investigators are hopeful, however, that Thursday’s arrests will put an end to the spate of robberies. One of the men arrested was identified as Eddie Mendoza, 21, of Van Nuys. Police did not immediately identify the other suspect in custody.

“It’s the same [method of operation] so we’re hoping that these are the guys,” said Sheriff’s Lt. Tom Martin of the Lost Hills-Malibu station.

Tim Walsh, manager of Crene’s World Travel in Northridge, was alone in his office Wednesday when two men, one pointing a gun, entered and demanded tickets.

“One of the guys turned around and locked the door,” said Walsh, who had been alerted moments before to a robbery an hour earlier at a Pasadena agency. “At that point, I knew I was in trouble.”

The men forced Walsh to get down on his hands and knees, tied him up and escaped with two boxes of tickets, each containing a thousand coupons as well as some blank checks.

The Airlines Reporting Corp. estimates that several hundred thousand tickets out of the 1.5 billion printed each year are either lost, stolen or misplaced.

A portion of those eventually make their way onto the black market and are sold, mostly to unsuspecting customers, Muten said.

Once tickets are reported stolen, the group places the serial numbers of the coupons on a database accessible by all airlines.

But because airlines are typically under great pressure to stick to their schedules, the tickets frequently go undetected, making the nondescript pieces of paper potentially worth millions of dollars.

“If you sold a thousand ticket coupons and you sold them for three or five hundred dollars each . . . it could be immensely profitable,” Muten said.

The tickets, which are altered by personal computer to look legitimate, are typically sold through newspaper ads that promise travelers bargain-basement prices, through phony storefronts and even on the street.

Travel agencies in the Chicago area experienced a series of nighttime burglaries several months ago, but the string of incidents in Los Angeles is unprecedented. “Armed robbery is definitely upping the ante,” Muten said.

Investigators had tentatively traced the Chicago-area thefts to a crime ring in Los Angeles, he said.

Travel agents are not held liable for tickets stolen by armed robbers, Muten said. When tickets are lost through burglary or theft, agencies must demonstrate that they had taken proper security measures, he added.