Spandex: It’s Hot, Hot, Hot

The masked intruders burst into Ace Knitting Co. just before 11 p.m. They stuck a pistol to the head of the lone employee, bound his wrists with shoelaces, then sped away with a truckload of booty.

The target of their carefully woven scheme: bolts of spandex fabric.

Long the bane of the fashion police, the body-hugging fiber is now bedeviling local law enforcement. Armed gangs have stolen more than $2 million worth of the springy yarn and fabric from downtown textile mills over the last year, police say, making Los Angeles the nation’s capital of spandex banditry. Industry veterans and insurance officials peg the regional numbers even higher, noting that the crimes have spread to surrounding communities such as Vernon and Carson.

For those whose knowledge of spandex is limited to “Sweatin’ to the Oldies,” its theft might seem more like a public service than a felony. But thanks to advances in textile making, the stretchy stuff has shed its cheesy image to become one of the fashion world’s most coveted fibers.

Designers adore it because it adds comfort, shape and wrinkle resistance to almost any fabric. Thieves prize it because the specialty yarn is worth six times the value of some commodity fibers. It is hard to trace and easy to fence in L.A.’s rough-and-tumble garment district, where some buyers are willing to look the other way.

“Fabric stolen tonight will be in some cutting room by morning,” said Los Angeles Police Department Det. Gil Escontrias. “By the time we’re notified, somebody is already wearing it.”

Apparel making is an $11-billion industry in Los Angeles County, accounting for nearly 100,000 jobs. But authorities say fierce competition, shrinking profits and good old-fashioned greed have helped fuel a multimillion-dollar black market in everything from purloined machinery to filched Armani suits.

Many of those crimes end up on the desk of the LAPD’s Escontrias, a garment gumshoe first assigned to the district in the early 1990s to crack down on sewing-machine theft. Such exploits helped earn him his detective stripes, along with the nickname “fashion police” from wise-guy colleagues.

Cruising the district’s pot-holed streets in an unmarked car, Escontrias frequently works undercover posing as a buyer or seller of stolen merchandise. He says criminals follow fashion trends every bit as closely as designers, which explains their current zeal for stretch fabric.

“These guys know what’s selling,” Escontrias said. “Right now that’s spandex.”

Spandex is the generic term for a man-made fiber invented in 1958 by DuPont Co., which remains the world’s leading producer. In technical jargon it is known as a “segmented polyurethane” whose molecular structure combines soft, rubbery segments of polyether glycol with hard segments of urea for strength and retraction. For those of us who flunked chemistry, it simply means that the fiber has the cartoon-like ability to stretch up to seven times its normal size and snap back like nothing happened.

First used as a rubber substitute in girdles, spandex gradually expanded into pantyhose, swimwear, bike shorts and other form-fitting apparel--leading to its tight-and-tacky reputation.

“Scary fuchsia disco pants,” said L.A. apparel designer Melanie Apple. “That’s what I used to think” about spandex.

But she and others are now putting it into everything from blue jeans to tailored suits, thanks to the growing prowess of textile makers. Blending mere trace amounts of the fiber with cotton, linen, wool, even leather, yields comfortable fabrics that give gently without that sausage-stuffed look of old.

And in contrast to its cheap reputation, spandex is anything but. Expensive raw materials and a complex manufacturing process mean that DuPont Lycra, the gold standard, fetches around $9.50 a pound compared with $1.50 for run-of-the mill synthetics such as polyester.

Now a proud spandex convert, Apple chose a Lycra-silk material to craft capri pants for her latest line. The imported fabric alone cost about $35 a yard, but she didn’t blink.

“I won’t even look at a fabric unless it contains Lycra,” said Apple, whose fashions can be found in upscale boutiques such as Fred Segal. “My customers can’t get enough of it.”

So valuable is the Lycra franchise, in fact, that it became the target of an extortion attempt in 1989. Five employees at a DuPont plant in Argentina swiped manufacturing secrets, threatening to sell them to competitors unless the company coughed up $10 million. Authorities nabbed the culprits before they could make good on their threats, but only after a globe-trotting pursuit that involved the FBI and enough intrigue to fill a Tom Clancy novel.

Local spandex crooks may not be as sophisticated, but so far they’ve been a lot more successful. The Los Angeles area is teaming with hundreds of textile mills cranking out knit fabric for up-to-the-minute fashions. Most are mom-and-pop operations run by Korean immigrants, which so far have proved easy pickings for wily bandits.

LAPD Det. Steve Koman said armed gangs have committed about 30 heists in the last year. But industry veterans suspect the figures are much higher.

Knitting equipment salesman David Choi calculates that 20% of his 100 or so Korean customers have been hit for a total of nearly $5.5 million worth of inventory, much of it spandex, since he began keeping track last year. “And those are just the ones I know personally,” said Choi, president of Gardena-based Sumter Textile Machinery.

Glendale insurance adjuster Byron Hubanks, who investigates claims for insurance companies, figures he has worked at least 50 such cases around Southern California over the last three years. With individual claims running as high as $600,000, he says insurance companies have raised premiums and tightened underwriting standards considerably. Some are requiring mill owners to install expensive security systems while limiting payouts to $50,000 or less.

Hubanks suspects some of the “heists” may have been staged by struggling mill owners hungry for insurance proceeds. But with claims continuing to mount despite the hefty restrictions, he says he’s convinced the crime wave is no hoax.

“It seems like we’re getting at least one new claim of this type a week,” said Hubanks, owner of Hubanks & Kendall Inc. “I don’t see any slowdown.”

Authorities say at least two organized gangs, as well as opportunistic textile mill employees, may be behind the spree.

Working with rented or stolen trucks in small teams of three to six people, they usually strike at night when few workers are on duty. Startled employees are sometimes forced at gunpoint to help load heavy boxes of yarn and 40-pound bolts of fabric into the getaway vehicle. Intruders have threatened and roughed up some factory workers, but so far no one has been seriously injured.

Yong Chul Park suspects a former employee may have had a hand in a recent spandex burglary at his small Los Angeles mill. In late July, someone circumvented his alarm system, broke into his locked plant and made off with more than $300,000 worth of yarn, fabric and spare knitting machine parts.

So brazen were the culprits that they brought along a six-pack of Corona beer to wet their whistles while they worked. Park found little more than the empty bottles in his cleaned-out factory the next day. Insurance will cover only $40,000 of his loss. Authorities have made no arrests.

“This is very hard on a small company like ours,” said Park, president of Buil Textile, U.S.A. Inc. through an interpreter. “The police have done nothing.”

LAPD officers say recovering stolen fabric is difficult because buyers convert it so quickly into clothing. Likewise, suspected insiders often vanish before police can question them, a job made tougher in an industry that employs many undocumented workers using aliases and phony documents.

Still, there are threads to follow. DuPont Lycra is shipped from the factory wound on spools or “cones” coded to identify the mill that purchased it. Receiving a tip that its yarn had turned up in a competitor’s plant last year, Vernon knitter GreenOrange Design Inc. contacted authorities. They discovered that one of the firm’s own employees had pilfered “a large amount” of Lycra for resale on the black market, according to Mosen Yousefpour, chief operating officer of GreenOrange.

“The yarn may not look like much,” said Yousefpour of the milky thread that resembles fat spools of fishing line. “But a single box is worth a couple thousand dollars.”

Local police also caught a break last December when they arrested Arturo Santos Lopez on suspicion of vehicle theft. A truck rental receipt in his wallet led them to a U-Haul bulging with 400 rolls of spandex fabric missing from a Los Angeles textile factory where he had once worked.

Lopez was subsequently convicted in the Ace Knitting Co. heist and sentenced to four years and eight months in prison. Accomplices Raonel Jaimes Rosalio, Victor Dominguez and Antonio Morales Flores each got four years in a plea agreement.

But even with those four safely in the slammer, local textile makers aren’t resting easy. Los Angeles knitter Tae Yi says he has been hit three times in the last few years, losing almost $700,000 in spandex yarn and fabric. He has fortified his latest business, Evergreen Textile Inc., with razor wire, window bars, two metal gates and an alarm system equipped with video cameras that he has rigged up to watch from home.

A serious, bespectacled man who speaks little English, he said he regularly wakes up in the middle of the night to check video images of his factory.

“One more time and I’m going to give up,” said Yi, fingering a scrap of maroon stretch fabric. “ . . . I never imagined so much trouble over spandex.”