BRAZEN ACTION FEARED AS SIGN OF GRIM FUTURE : DRESSED FOR BATTLE.

Byline: Reed Johnson and Glenn Gaslin Daily News Staff Writers

They moved with an eerie, almost zenlike calm, squeezing off thousands of rounds of ammunition with chilling, murderous disdain.

Though utterly outnumbered and shortly to die, the two armed robbers betrayed no obvious panic. Having shown no reluctance to terrorize an entire city, they clearly weren't about to back out of this final, lethal minuet with the Los Angeles Police Department.

Watching Friday's bank-robbery drama unfold on television, Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block felt a profound sense of unreality. He was aghast at the suspects' sheer indifference, both to the havoc they'd unleashed on sunny North Hollywood, and to their own imminent destruction.

``Just the nonchalant way they were firing this semiautomatic weaponry was mind-boggling,'' Block said, speaking just a few hours after the Friday morning firefight that ended with two suspects shot dead, and 11 police officers and at least six civilians injured.

Likening the robbers' brazen recklessness to ``something you'd see in some class-B film,'' the sheriff insisted that this violent episode was unprecedented, ``an aberration.''

``This is a huge leap from where we've been, and let's just hope this isn't the start of a new level of violence,'' Block said.

If the suspects' serene contempt for human life is being cloned on the city's streets, in gang hazing rituals and drug-infested neighborhoods as police believe, then the darkest days may yet lie ahead for the world's bank robbery capital.

Some police officers on the beat fear the worst for Los Angeles.

``This is a war, and frankly, we're losing,'' said Sgt. Bruce Cowan of the LAPD's Devonshire Division. ``This is a wakeup call.''

To the uniformed men and women who patrol L.A.'s streets, the bungled bank takeover robbery's most ominous feature may have been its high-tech gadgetry.

When the suspects burst from a Bank of America branch in North Hollywood around 9 a.m., they wore ski masks, body armor and bulletproof vests. They bristled with handguns and automatic rifles. They sported ammunition belts with armor-piercing rounds. A back-up arsenal rested in the getaway car's trunk.

Summoned to the scene, LAPD officers found themselves trading small arms fire for blasts capable of tearing apart a truck.

``You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that when these guys are going to heavy caliber, and all we can carry around is a puny 9 mm handgun, we're not going to be able to protect the citizens of Los Angeles,'' Cowan said.

``It's like going up against a tank,'' said Sgt. Daniel Carnahan of the LAPD's West Valley division.

A disregard for life

Yet perhaps even more alarming than the suspects' weaponry was their cavalier, irrational behavior in the face of a no-win situation.

Pinned behind a line of parked cars, with little protection other than his body armor, the first suspect chose to stand his ground - AK-47 blazing - until he fell under police fire and took a bullet to the head. The second suspect met his fate after playing a deadly game of duck-and-cover between cars as officers closed in from all sides.

FBI officials have said they believe the suspects also were responsible for two similar bank takeovers last year, the first in Van Nuys, the second in Winnetka.

In all three holdups, the suspects terrorized bank customers and officials by opening fire with automatic weapons. The masked robbers were described as men with large builds, 5 foot 11 to 6 foot 1 - descriptions matching those of the men shot dead Friday.

Though the pieces appear to fit, Block thought that Friday's bizarre, suicidal antics didn't look like the work of seasoned criminal pros.

``People who commit robberies . . . understand that you don't compound the degree of your crime by doing these crazy things,'' Block said. ``I would say the closest parallel to this was probably the Symbionese Liberation Army shootout 23 years ago, where people were prepared to fight it out until the end, with total disregard for their own life or anybody else's life.''

Nobody's folk heroes

Criminologist W. Garrett Capune, a professor at California State University, Fullerton, and the University of Southern California, spotted something troublingly familiar about the robbers' attitude, look and method. Something redolent of blazing tommy guns, double-breasted suits and bathtub gin.

``When this thing broke today and I saw it on TV, I sincerely thought that it looked like these documentary movies on John Dillinger,'' Capune said.

In the late 1930s, Dillinger and his gang became cult heroes and America's Most Wanted by robbing scores of banks across the Midwest, consistently outgunning and outrunning the police, the FBI and the Treasury Department.

``The parallel would be in the attitude of the participants,'' he said. ``If you look at Dillinger and his gang as they're pulling off one of these brazen daylight robberies, their faces say: We have nothing to lose.''

Capune saw the same attitude in the North Hollywood suspects, looks of strangely gleeful desperation, and of not only being above the law, but packing bigger barrels.

``Dillinger's gang, like what happened (Friday), they had a lot more firepower,'' he said. ``Not necessarily automatic weapons, but they had tommy guns, whereas the police were just carrying revolvers.''

No one, however, is prepared to wrap the North Hollywood suspects in the mantle of Robin Hood-esque folk heroism. Nor was any militia or paramilitary group stepping forward to claim the commando-clad assailants.

``This is not a militia group,'' LAPD spokesman Cmdr. Tim McBride said Friday. ``These are brutal killers who were robbing and taking these people's money.''

By late Friday afternoon, some law enforcement officials were reminiscing about the good old days when thugs holding Saturday night specials would hand crude notes to startled bank tellers, then flee with the goods without firing a shot.

Others were sensing that, once again, a paper-thin threshold had been crossed.

One of these, Block, was fishing for causes that might explain the extraordinary brutality witnessed worldwide on Friday.

Could drug abuse, so often a factor in violent crimes, have been involved?

``It's difficult to say,'' the sheriff replied. ``It's certainly possible, but it's difficult to say. I'll tell you, these days you can't assume anything.''