Specialists in Surveillance Get Their Man

When Sgt. John Shupe went looking for a serial thief last month, he packed his car with the tools of his trade: a night-vision telescope, high-resolution binoculars, a camcorder and a shotgun.

During the next five days, Shupe and his undercover team spent 58 1/2 hours staking out the suspect’s house in a rural neighborhood of San Bernardino County.

On the last day, they sat for 18 hours straight in unassuming vehicles parked at strategic spots around the house. Overnight temperatures dropped to the 30s, but they didn’t use their car heaters for fear their windows would fog up and give them away.

“What we do is hard on the body,” said Shupe, a 14-year veteran of a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department unit known as the North Regional Surveillance and Apprehension Team, or NORSAT. He and about a dozen other investigators on the team cope with uncomfortably cold or hot conditions while on stakeouts, hide in trees and stay alert for long periods without much food or water.

“If you can’t take potty breaks, you can’t be drinking fluids a lot,” Shupe said.

Formed in 1985 to coordinate the hunt for the Night Stalker, a serial killer later convicted of a Satanic-tinged series of murders, the unit now assists law enforcement agencies across Los Angeles County that lack the resources to conduct undercover surveillance.

The group accepts cases from detectives at sheriff’s stations and bureaus, state probation and parole officers and police departments within county limits.

Last year, the unit conducted nearly 400 surveillance operations and arrested 127 people, clearing 475 cases and recovering more than $2.7 million in stolen property, according to a report submitted to the Sheriff’s Department.

On a recent stakeout, the team was watching a man suspected of committing dozens of thefts in Los Angeles and surrounding counties. The mission: to eliminate him as a suspect by monitoring him while the real criminal struck elsewhere or follow him to the scene of the next theft and clinch the case against him.

The man eventually sensed he was being watched and fled, but Shupe’s team got enough evidence during the operation to obtain a warrant for his arrest.

“There just aren’t enough superlatives for the job they do,” said Bonnie Patton, a county probation officer who often asks the unit to arrest probationers on her behalf. “They are so smooth, so cool. . . . They just mingle with [probation violators] and put the handcuffs on them and take them away before they even realize it.”

Unit members are chosen from among the best detectives in the Sheriff’s Department. Sixty-four applicants vied for three openings on the team this year.

Part of the appeal of the unit is that it deals in the most satisfying kind of detective work, taking on cases that require legwork but are ultimately solvable.

“I won’t take a case that’s a whodunit, where we spend our time chasing shadows and ghosts,” said Lt. Mike Wenrich, who heads the unit.

Because the investigators can control their caseload, they can devote long hours to tailing a single suspect. They also can thoroughly research a person’s background, using a sophisticated network of databases that few station detectives are trained to use.

Wenrich emphasizes that his unit’s objective is to assist, not usurp, other people’s cases. “Detectives would be real reluctant to give us their cases if they never saw them again,” Wenrich said.

Det. Patrick Martinez, who works in the sheriff’s Temple Station, where the unit is headquartered, asks the investigators for surveillance assistance at least twice a week.

“The suspects that are going to be more difficult to apprehend I give to NORSAT because they . . . have the capabilities to track them down,” Martinez said. “They’re responsible for 80% of my arrests, of the [suspects] that are more difficult and hiding.”

The unit helped Martinez close a case last year against a Duarte resident who was accused of assaulting and raping his wife. In the months after the crime, the man reportedly fled to the Philippines, turned up in San Francisco and returned to Duarte.

Three months after the unit picked up the case, the suspect was in Martinez’s hands. The detective said his caseload prevented him from tracking the man and making the arrest himself.

“It’s impossible,” said Martinez, who typically works 30 to 40 robbery and assault cases a month. “I have court [to attend], I have [prosecutors] calling me,” he said.

Two years ago, the team caught a San Gabriel Valley man who had a record of indecent exposure dating back 20 years. The man was repeatedly arrested but would serve a brief jail sentence for the misdemeanor because local authorities could not link him to a series of crimes.

The unit found that the man’s criminal career had taken him as far as Northern California, Nevada and San Diego before he returned to the San Gabriel Valley. They also learned that, over the years, he was flashing progressively younger women.

As a result of the unit’s surveillance, the man received a state prison term in connection with more than 20 incidents in which he exposed himself to young girls at San Gabriel Valley public libraries.

The unit also regularly conducts surveillance against people suspected of pirating music or films or counterfeiting brand-name fashion apparel.

Despite the unit’s regional reach, it has been largely unrecognized and behind-the-scenes.

But the anonymity adds to its effectiveness, says Wenrich, who forbids photographers from taking pictures of his investigators, even for the department yearbook. “There’s [Sheriff’s] Department people who don’t even know about us,” he said.