Pawnshops Drawn Into Police Net

Sam Rosenfeld’s pawnshop on a busy street in suburban Reseda has the feel of 1940s film noir.

Merchandise climbs the walls of the cluttered shop--cameras, light meters, tools, guitars, banjos, statues, vintage radios and TVs, drain gougers, swords and rifles. Plus scores of watches and rings, one with a Sultan’s head he’ll sell you for $2,000, negotiable.

The place is so teeming with goods that even Brunhilda, his store mannequin mascot, is loaded with scuba gear for sale. You can buy her too.

Rosenfeld’s place remains largely unchanged by a world of computerized inventory and the Internet. It still does business the old-fashioned way--with handwritten pawn slips and ballpoint pens.

But a new state law will require all of California’s 750 pawnshops, including the few technology holdouts like Rosenfeld’s, to electronically link their pawn tickets directly to police agencies. The law took effect Jan. 1, but compliance will not be required until the state Department of Justice develops software standards for the program.

With the new law, which also applies to thousands of secondhand stores, a police officer in one city will be able to scan through pawn slips from dozens of different locations throughout the state, saving hundreds of hours of police time searching for stolen merchandise.

Traditionalists like Rosenfeld feel that the law intrudes on their business. But other pawnshop owners support it, hoping that it will erase the somewhat sleazy image of their work that has long been perpetuated in movies and television shows.

“I’ve been in business 18 years. We do everything the law requires of us and more,” said Don Luce, who owns Beach Boulevard Pawn in Stanton. “And yet we get that attitude that we’re somehow less than legit.”

In a business that hasn’t changed much in 50 years, a statewide link of all pawn transactions represents a revolution for shop owners and law enforcement.

Currently, pawnshops in most cities pack up all their pawn slips in boxes and ship them every few days to their local police departments. But most of those boxes remain unopened, police admit, because they simply don’t have the staffing to review the thousands of invoices, let alone somehow to tabulate them in a usable way.

A statewide computer database will change all that. And backers point to voluntary computer programs in Los Angeles and San Francisco as examples of how such data can be effectively used to solve crimes.

Take the case of the gold fillings.

On a recent afternoon, Los Angeles Police Det. William Longacre was scrolling through a list of pawn items on his computer screen when one caught his attention:

A young man had sold a few ingots of dental gold to a pawnshop in the Rampart Division. No great value--five transactions of less than $30 each--but it seemed strange to Longacre. Gold fillings from teeth are sold all the time. But packaged dental gold? In a few more computer hours, using keyword searches, Longacre discovered that the same man had made more than 120 dental gold sales at three pawnshops in the last two years.

It turns out that he was stealing from his bosses, who were dental gold manufacturers.

Two years ago, said the city’s pawn detail leader, Sgt. Dennis Cicioni, no one on his staff would have found time to pore through boxes of pawn tickets to search for similarly suspicious transactions.

A Pasadena murder a few years ago helped highlight the need to change the law statewide. The killer in a home invasion had stolen several items that the police thought might end up being pawned somewhere. They were right, but it took them hundreds of hours to track down which pawnshop, in what city. A computer could have done the same thing in less than a day.

“The ability to share information is critical to us,” said South Pasadena Police Chief Mike Berkow, who is a vice president of the Los Angeles County Police Chiefs Assn., which proposed the rules.

Although most pawnshops now have computers, some still don’t. All pawnshops will be required to be linked to the database within six months after the Justice Department finalizes its plans.

Rosenfeld and a few other owners among the city of Los Angeles’ 118 pawnshops fought for years to avoid participating in a similar city system. But they will be required to hook up to the state database.

“We’re a mom-and-pop operation,” said Rosenfeld, 69, who works in T-shirts and wears glasses that he keeps tied around his neck. “We’ve always cooperated with police, but this is an expense we just don’t want to get into.”

Pawnshops can be a place of last resort for people in need of quick money, and those skeptical of the new law question whether their customers’ privacy can be ensured.

Robert Manley, who runs Uncle Bob’s pawnshop in Garden Grove, worries that sending his pawn tickets electronically will afford unauthorized people access to his customers’ private information. “Once it’s out there in cyberspace, you don’t know who’s going to get their hands on it,” he said.

Then there is the more practical issue of learning to use the database.

Paul “Doc” Kilgore, who owns three pawnshops in Orange County, said he will leave compliance with the law to his son Rex, who already uses a PC to keep track of the businesses’ accounts. But Kilgore remains unconvinced that there is a need to track merchandise electronically, or that it will help police in a business steeped in instincts.

“I’m not a computer-type man,” he said.

Despite the grumbling, much of the pawnshop industry appears ready to make the leap.

Boost in Image Anticipated

Indeed, the Collateral Loan and Secondhand Dealers Assn., which represents most of the state’s pawnshops and secondhand dealers, lobbied in favor of the new law.

“Anything that will keep crooks from using pawnshops is a good thing for our industry,” said Curt Chapman, a Westminster pawnbroker who serves on the state group’s board of directors.

Others see the modernization push as a way of removing what they consider the unfair taint that has long hovered over pawnshops.

The shady reputation comes in part from gritty urban dramas such as “The Pawnbroker,” the 1965 Rod Steiger movie. Steiger’s title character, Sol Nazerman, works behind the wire-cage counter of a crowded, dingy shop, doling out a few dollars to poor people for items worth 10 times what he pays them.

“Oh, you is a hard man; God pity ya,” one customer tells him icily.

“We’ve never been like that, but it’s a tough image to crack,” said Sam Shockett, owner of King’s Jewelry on Vermont Avenue, just west of downtown Los Angeles. “We treat our customers well, because we want them to come back.”

Shockett and others acknowledge that, in the short run, the computerized database might cause losses for pawnshops, because police will be able to more easily identify stolen property, which the owner must give up without compensation. But they believe that cleaning up their industry’s reputation will benefit everyone in the long run.

Investigators say it’s hard to know exactly how much stolen merchandise passes through California pawnshops. In Los Angeles County, police recover about $700,000 worth annually but believe that the figure for what is actually stolen may be much higher. Pawnshop owners estimate that only 0.1% of their inventory is stolen property.

Some people may be unaware that pawnshops operate two separate businesses:

* The pawnbroker can buy an item from a customer, then sell it after a 30-day waiting period, which gives police time to check to see if the item has been reported stolen.

* The pawnbroker essentially loans the customer money, holding the item as collateral. The customer has four months and 10 days to reclaim the property. Only if it is unclaimed can the item be resold. But a high percentage of these pawned items are reclaimed, pawnshops say, with the customer paying a fee (usually about 6%, but sometimes much higher) for the loan.

“I’ve had one fellow who has been bringing me the same set of bagpipes for years,” said Luce. “I have no idea what it’s really worth, or if it even works. But I’ve never had to worry about trying to sell it. He always reclaims it.”

You don’t have to see Luce’s outdoor sign to know he runs a pawnshop. Where else would you find a rhinoceros head hanging above a motley assortment of tools, guns, jewelry, TVs, VCRs, CD players, golf clubs, drain cleaners, drum sets, guitars, dolls and stuffed emus?

Luce says pawnshop owners use their instincts to prevent crime. But still, it happens. Even Luce’s crystal ball--his gut--is wrong on occasion.

Take the recent, regular customer who was 76, looked like a church elder and wanted $750 for a diamond ring. It turns out that the ring was stolen. The police recovered it, and Luce had to eat the loss.

“I mean, 76--who would have thought?” he said.

For more than a dozen years, Luce ran his business the old-fashioned way, with handwritten pawn tickets. But a few years ago, he decided he had to make the change.

“A woman from Las Vegas wanted to pawn a diamond ring. I pulled out a pen and a pawn slip and started to take down her information. She said, ‘You mean you don’t use a computer?’ She picked up her ring and said she’d rather take it somewhere else. I realized then--hey, it was time for me to get with it.”

Even Rosenfeld, the veteran Reseda pawnshop owner, broke down a few days ago and purchased a computer, though he isn’t using it yet.

“I still don’t like being forced into this,” he said. “But if they’re going to put a noose around my neck, I figured I’d better at least be ready.”