COLUMN ONE : Air Tickets Rival Cash as Booty : The lure of free trips is making travel agents as vulnerable to armed robbers as bank tellers.

NEW YORK —  Jesse James and John Dillinger would fit right in. But today, instead of waving guns at stage coaches and bank tellers, they might well be getting the drop on travel agents--and stealing airline tickets.

The taking of blank ticket stock in armed holdups has become a major menace to the nation’s travel agents and a big worry to the airlines, which are losing millions of dollars as a result. Bandits are not the only problem, however, as ever-increasing numbers of counterfeiters, con men, corrupt travel agents and credit card cheats are also stealing ticket blanks.

The blanks are extremely valuable because thieves can simply fill in the amounts they want to steal. A blank ticket is even better than blank check, because no signature is necessary. The thieves sell them for expensive travel at huge discounts--often, but by no means always, to unsuspecting customers. Sometimes they are brazen enough to try to turn them in for cash “refunds.”

Most stolen tickets are written for international flights in first class. It is estimated that the average stolen blank is used for $1,000 worth of travel. Many such tickets are used for even more expensive trips--on the supersonic Concorde, for example.

“There’s a lot of incentive to take blank ticket stock,” said Kenneth D. Gilbart, a corporate security official with United Airlines. “Blank ticket stock can be diverted into a lot of value. It is more or less like cash--in fact, maybe better than cash in a way. If you rob a bank you get $300, but you can take a blank ticket and bump it up to any figure you want to.”

John D. Boggs, managing director of ticketing and terminal services for American Airlines, said: “It doesn’t take a lot of tickets to get something negotiable for a significant amount of cash.”

In the first nine months of 1989, the latest period for which figures were available, United confiscated stolen tickets that had been filled in for trips worth $232,000.

The illegal acquisition and use of airline tickets increasingly cuts into the carriers’ profits. If it is correct that the average stolen blank is used for $1,000 worth of travel, then in the last year about $100-million worth of airline tickets were taken illegally, at gunpoint or in other ways.

That is almost enough to buy one of the Boeing 747-400s that have just come on the market. It is an amount also equal to the net profits of USAir, the nation’s sixth-largest airline, in the first nine months of 1989. And no one knows how many tickets stolen in previous years but not yet used are still out there. There have been estimates that these might represent $500-million worth of travel.

“Such losses are passed on to airline stockholders (in the form of reduced dividends) and to the traveling public in higher fares,” said Voit Gilmore, operator of Four Seasons Travel Service in Pinehurst, N. C., and president of the American Society of Travel Agents.

The problem has taken on more serious proportions because so much violence now accompanies the crimes. In 1989, one travel agent was killed in a holdup and another in Southern California was knifed. Both were attacked while trying to protect their blank airline tickets.

And, while the taking of tickets through violence has been growing steadily throughout the nation, law enforcement officials, airline executives and travel agents say the problem is most serious in Southern California.

In 1989, there were 23 armed robberies in which airline ticket stock was taken, a record number, according to the Airline Reporting Corp., a ticket clearinghouse in Washington that is owned by the U.S. carriers.

Most of those robberies occurred in California, which has more travel agents--5,591 or 16% of all agents nationwide--than any other state.

In all of 1988, tickets were taken in just eight armed robberies. The number of blanks taken in these incidents jumped from 423 in 1988 to 4,318 in 1989.

And these figures don’t tell the whole story. Law enforcement officials pointed out that the Airline Reporting Corp.’s numbers do not include robberies of agencies in which no tickets were stolen.

Although people caught with stolen tickets invariably plead that they did not know their origin, law enforcement officials scoff at such claims.

A Detective’s View

Charles Schmidt, a detective with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, said that some famous entertainers and sports figures have been caught trying to get on planes with tickets acquired improperly.

One well known Hollywood couple--both are in the movies--recently bought stolen tickets and were about to use them on Air France. The airline found out about it and warned them. They subsequently purchased legitimate tickets and claimed that their production company had unwittingly purchased the stolen tickets.

Schmidt, who is one of half a dozen police officials who work full time on ticket fraud (others are in Miami, Los Angeles and at Britain’s Scotland Yard) said that few people who use bogus tickets are innocent. “If you get a $7,000 ticket for $3,500, and it says $7,000 right on it,” Schmidt said, “there is a presumption that something is wrong.”

The tickets are often sold through newspaper classified advertisements or in bulk quantities to rings that arrange travel for illegal aliens who have been smuggled into Southern California and are headed for destinations throughout the United States. Bad tickets have also been traced to Europe, where they are sold and seldom detected.

For holdup men, blank tickets are higher on the most-favored-items-to-steal list than blank checks. Indeed, armed robbers at travel agencies have frequently demanded tickets without even asking for cash or other valuables.

Another popular method of stealing tickets is to divert the attention of a travel agent or airline ticket clerk and simply grab some blank tickets. These sneak thieves might bring along a boisterous group of fellow “customers” or have screaming children in their arms. Feigning sudden illness is another favorite trick. Often the loss of blank tickets is discovered only days later.

During lunch hour or early or late in the day--a time when few employees are around--is when thieves most often strike.

Ralph E. Conner Jr., owner of the El Monte Travel Center in El Monte, Calif., said that his wife, Jean, was alone in the agency office when three people held her up for 188 tickets. That occurred Sept. 11, four days before 46-year-old Van Nuys travel agent Hernan Vacha was shot to death in a robbery at Excelsior Travel and Tours.

While stolen tickets cause most of the trouble, airlines also must cope with forged or altered tickets, counterfeit tickets, and tickets bought with stolen or otherwise unauthorized credit cards.

Often, in what in travel agency vernacular is called a “bust out,” agency owners in financial difficulties close up shop and abscond with the ticket stock. Agencies might be sold to crooked individuals who want them just to get their hands on unused tickets. Employees of airlines have been known to point out agencies in financial difficulties to such individuals. Prosecutors recently charged an Alitalia employee with helping to identify failing agencies.

Once tickets are stolen, it takes a certain expertise to prepare them for undetected use. Because airline tickets are generic, they must be properly filled in and validated with special stamps denoting the name of the airline and a travel agency.

Since many travel agents now use tickets prepared by machine, a thief must also have the proper hardware, such as a personal computer, to make a stolen ticket look authentic. Validating stamps also are often stolen.

“I don’t want anyone to be under the impression that you can go and hold up a travel agency and that you immediately have something that is convertible to cash,” said David R. B. Collins, president of the Airline Reporting Corp. “Lots of know-how is needed in order to make it look like the real thing.”

Plenty of Criminals

But one law enforcement official said that there are plenty of criminals around with such practical knowledge.

“They read the travel magazines and get information from them,” said Gail Coutts, a detective with the Los Angeles police airline ticket forgery squad. One such “bad guy,” she recalled, “had an article from the Airline Reporting Corp. about fraudulent tickets.”

Many thieves are insiders, or at least people with a working knowledge of the travel business, law enforcement officials say. United Airlines, for example, lost more than $60,000 last year because an employee of a Chicago company that had a travel agency’s computerized machine in its office stole a large amount of ticket stock. The employee took the tickets after after he learned that he was about to be fired.

Some of the people who prepare stolen tickets for sale are not the robbers or burglars, who are hired to do the dirty work. “I think that this is a core group with interchangeable parts,” Coutts said.

The rash of crimes involving airline tickets has put the airlines and the travel agents at odds over who is responsible for the losses and how they can be prevented.

The airlines claim that travel agents are frequently negligent in protecting their ticket stock. If it is determined that the travel agent has not safeguarded tickets properly, the airlines hold the agent responsible for the travel when it takes place and charge the agency accordingly.

Airline Reporting Corp. rules limit an agency to ordering no more than a three-month supply of tickets at a time, with the specific amount determined by the agency’s past level of business. An agency may not keep more than a week’s worth of blanks on the premises, and those must be kept in a safe overnight. The rest must be stored elsewhere.

Paul G. Davidoff, owner of Belair Travel Consultants in Bowie, Md., and president-elect of that American Society of Travel Agents, said he keeps only an immediate supply at the agency. The rest, he says, he keeps across the street in a trunk in the vault of a bank. “When we need tickets,” he said, “I walk across the street and fetch them.”

Even with the Airline Reporting Corp.’s stringent rules, the group does not want travel agents to risk injury to protect tickets. It instructs agents not to resist robbers.

The travel agents, for their part, say that the airlines are not doing enough to catch ticket criminals, especially at the time they try to board flights. The airlines counter that such procedures would slow airport check-in procedures and require hiring more people.

Detective Schmidt said, however: “We find the airlines at fault for not screening tickets. It is not true that it would slow things down. It would take 15 seconds a passenger to check each passenger.”

Airlines Use Profile

The airlines concede that they do not check every ticket, but they say that their employees at airport gates are under orders to look out for passengers who fit descriptions of terrorists, ticket thieves and other undesirables. If a passenger fits such a profile, he or she is kept under close scrutiny.

Also, once a ticket theft is reported to the Airline Reporting Corp., the ticket numbers are immediately put into the airlines’ computerized “black lists.” But airline gate personnel often don’t have time to check the computer; to encourage them, some airlines pay a bounty, usually $25, for catching a bad ticket.

The travel agents are demanding that the airlines come up with new technology for detecting stolen tickets. For example, magnetic strips, similar to those on credit cards, could be used to verify tickets.

But Joe Whitby, a security official with British Airways, said a magnetic strip procedure would be difficult to use, since there are so many ticket formats in the world. The only “sure fire” way to block the use of stolen tickets, he said, is to have airline gate workers check the black list.

“We want to encourage the airlines to develop procedures that would make the use of stolen tickets more difficult,” said Davidoff, the Maryland travel agent. “If they are harder to use, the incentive to steal them would decline greatly.”