Time Runs Out in Meter Thefts : Crime: Couple are arrested on charges of stealing from parking machines. Police say up to $10,000 may be missing.

Two Santa Monica parking meter collectors were assigned to the stakeout. Their quarry: a bandit who apparently struck at night, made off with the day’s catch of coins, and disappeared without leaving a scratch on the meter.

Late Monday night, during their third stakeout at the parking lot next to the main branch of the Santa Monica Public Library, the meter collectors appeared to strike pay dirt when a baby-blue Lincoln Town Car drove slowly around the empty lot.

“They saw a well-dressed man and woman get out of the car and extract coins from three meters,” said Sgt. Bill Brucker of the Santa Monica Police Department. “Then they called police on walkie-talkies assigned to them for that purpose.”

Minutes later, the fashionable couple, he in a business suit and she all in black with a blond bouffant hairdo, were arrested by Santa Monica police. Regina Enger, 47, and Daniel Edward Mahoney, 48, of Van Nuys were booked on suspicion of grand theft and conspiracy in what police suspect may be a series of profitable meter thefts over the past year or longer in Southern California. They were released on bail of $5,000 each, Brucker said.

“We sent out a Teletype to other jurisdictions to see if they had had similar thefts because this couple had a ring of unmarked keys,” Brucker said.

Found in the 1988 luxury car were numerous crudely cut meter keys and $154.03 in coins, police said. Brucker said a receipt was found in the car indicating that Enger had paid $23,000 cash for the Lincoln.

One jurisdiction, it turned out, knew about them. In December, the same couple was arrested in Newport Beach and convicted of grand theft in what police described as a similar scam.

“They were walking along the main roadway by the beach, appearing very casual,” said Sgt. Andy Gonis, spokesman for the Newport Beach Police Department. “We would never have suspected them if we hadn’t been staking out the area.”

Gonis said the couple, who then gave different addresses, were fined and placed on probation. Gonis said police there estimated that the couple had taken several thousand dollars or more from parking meters along the beachfront in a one-month period.

The Santa Monica stakeout began after sharp-eyed meter collectors began to notice a drop in the take from meters. City treasury officials planted marked coins in meters that never turned up, confirming their suspicions that the curbside collectors were being looted. According to Santa Monica City Treasurer Ralph Bursey, $5,000 to $10,000 was taken in the last nine months.

Bursey said the city’s 7,700 parking meters are expected to bring in $5.1 million this year. He and other officials said such parking thefts are relatively rare because of the difficulty in making keys to fit the meters.