CARGO THIEVES PREY IN VALLEY; CARGO THIEVES PICK L.A.'S STREETS CLEAN.

Byline: Jesse Hiestand Daily News Staff Writer

Ketchup, Asian pears, Budweiser, toilet paper and computer hard drives - they're disappearing from the streets of Los Angeles at a $1 million-a-day clip.

The city leads the nation in cargo theft, with the San Fernando Valley a prime hunting ground for bandits like the ones who just two weeks ago made off with big rigs full of pears and beer in Van Nuys.

The most coveted cargo is computer gear because it has high value, is difficult to track and easy to fence.

``Those guys are driving like a Brinks truck, sometimes carrying $1 million, $2 million of cargo in there and they go home for a minute to visit the wife or whatever, and it's real easy to steal one of those'' trailers, said Los Angeles police Detective Marc Zavala of the LAPD's cargo theft detail.

A trailer with 400 NEC computer monitors worth $250,000 recently disappeared when a trucker left it unattended for a few hours near his Van Nuys home. And in another major heist, thieves brazenly cleaned out a trailer on the loading dock of a Woodland Hills company in July, making off with $150,000 in computer gear.

Police say the Woodland Hills caper was among a string of cargo thefts by a sophisticated ring of thieves who prey on nothing but computer gear.

A key member of that group, Juan Carlos Cali, 35, of Baldwin Park, was arrested last month after a surveillance videotape caught him stealing from a truck on the loading dock at Sun America International in Woodland Hills on July 9, Zavala said.

Cali also has been charged with the theft of $100,000 in computer equipment in Inglewood on June 25 and $300,000 in Toshiba computers in Monterey Park on Aug. 3.

Detectives say more arrests are possible as they target the ring and its 100 members, who have been active in the Los Angeles area for at least a decade.

``They're probably the biggest ring in the nation,'' Zavala said. ``Ninety percent of them live here in Los Angeles. They go from here to Portland, Oregon, to San Jose, to Silicon Valley, to New York, and that's all they do is these computer thefts.''

Cali's arrest will deal only a temporary setback to the group, which still has a vast network of thieves, fences and money launderers across the country, he said.

Nationwide, cargo thefts cost the transportation industry an estimated $6 billion a year, said Gail Toth, executive director of the American Trucking Association's Transportation Loss Prevention and Security Council.

In Los Angeles, there have been 57 such thefts so far this year, compared to 37 at this time last year, and just 47 such thefts in all of 1996.

``It's a very heavily transportation-oriented community where you have several ports, railroads and international airports,'' making Los Angeles the preferred hunting grounds for cargo thieves, Toth said. New York and Miami are also plagued by this problem.

Zavala is one of six Los Angeles Police Department detectives who investigate cargo thefts full time. Earlier this year, another 12 officers were assigned to help them target violent truck hijackers, he said.

As a result, the number of robberies, kidnappings or other attacks on truck drivers has sharply dropped, from 35 at this time last year to 11 in 1998, even as the total number of truck thefts continue to rise, he said.

Police also credit the decline in hijackings on thieves opting to steal from an unattended truck - or simply steal the whole truck - instead of risk a lengthy prison sentence for robbing or kidnapping the driver, he said.

For the thieves, the prime consideration is how quickly they can fence the goods or get them shipbound for overseas.

Food, particularly meat and seafood, are the goods most often stolen around the nation because when repackaged in small quantities they are difficult to track and easy to hock in the same areas where they are stolen, Toth said.

Computer and other electronic gear are stolen the second most often, followed by luxury items like high-fashion apparel, cosmetics and perfumes, which command top dollar overseas.

Computer gear is valued because it is easy to resell to dealers who either don't know or don't care if it is stolen and can end up on the desks of unsuspecting consumers.

Computer users also pay the price every time they buy a new machine. An insurance industry study estimates that $100 in the price of every new computer offsets the cost to manufacturers of cargo stolen en route to stores, Toth said.

But just about any type of cargo is vulnerable, as long as thieves can find a market for it.

Last week, a big rig full of Asian pears was stolen from an industrial area of Van Nuys, where it had been parked overnight on its way to a Costco warehouse in Mira Loma.

Unlike most stolen trucks, which are typically found cleaned out and abandoned, the rig and its cargo owned by trucker Allan Jones were recovered quickly.

Jones' cab had a satellite tracking device that the thieves ripped out. But they didn't find a smaller, radio-based tracking system on board, which led police to Lassen Street near Woodley Avenue in North Hills, where the rig and its pears were found less than 10 hours after they disappeared.

``This guy was lucky,'' Zavala said. ``If he didn't have the tracking device, the load would have sat here and spoiled - $50,000 down the drain, and this guy would be out of work for two days.''

The same group that took Jones' truck are also suspected of taking a truck full of Budweiser in Van Nuys and in recent weeks, loads of ketchup, copier paper and motor oil.

The Bud truck, with no tracking device, vanished.

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Photo

PHOTO A truck equipped with a tracking system was found by police in North Hills not long after being stolen in Van Nuys.

Evan Yee/Daily News