Mover Charged in Theft of Items

LANCASTER â€”  When Joe and June Smolarski hired a Lancaster moving company to transport their Wurlitzer piano, they never expected it to end up in a muddy Antelope Valley field. But after months of delays and empty promises from the moving company, that’s where they finally found it--dumped alongside the belongings of dozens of others who had hired the firm.

In what state authorities are calling one of the worst cases ever seen in the moving and storage industry, the owner of the company, 51-year-old Larry John Phillips, has been charged with a string of felonies for allegedly failing to deliver what authorities estimate to be more than $1-million worth of his customers’ possessions.

Many of the belongings--including refrigerators, sofas and boxes of family photos--were simply dumped in the field.

Phillips has been charged with 21 felony counts--including grand theft and embezzlement, each of which carries a maximum penalty of three years. He also has been charged with two misdemeanors for allegedly operating without a license and for false advertising. He has pleaded not guilty.

On Monday, Lancaster Municipal Judge Chesley McKay refused to lower Phillips’ bail from $750,000. He remains in a Los Angeles County jail in Valencia, where he has been since his arrest at his Palmdale home on March 15.

The state Public Utilities Commission, which regulates the moving and storage industry, believes that Phillips--operating mainly under the name Almond Blossom Moving and Storage--failed to deliver more than $1-million worth of goods.

Phillips’ attorney, Marc Herbert, said the delivery problems were the fault of employees, adding that he is “negotiating with the D.A.’s office regarding the resolution of the case.�

The possessions of 36 separate clients that were held by Phillips have been identified, and the PUC believes it has found the belongings of another 17 families, individuals, or businesses.

In some cases, said Larry McNeeley, supervisor of the PUC’s special investigations section in San Francisco, Phillips would pick up the goods and then tell customers he wouldn’t make the delivery unless they sent more money.

Even when customers sent more money, McNeeley said, the items sometimes never left Southern California and were kept in storage facilities in the Antelope Valley. It was when Phillips was evicted from one warehouse last fall, McNeeley said, that he moved some of the items to the Lancaster field.

The field was discovered by Maurice Trudell, owner of a Palmdale U-Haul rental agency, who had rented some trucks to Phillips that were never returned. So Trudell combed the Antelope Valley and followed Phillips in search of his errant trucks.

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Trudell tracked Phillips and a few of his workers to the field, where he saw them unloading goods. He also saw boxes, sofas, refrigerators “pretty much just thrown on top of each other. There were broken pictures on the desert dirt floor. It was horrendous. It was heartbreaking.�

Later, Trudell found one of the trucks that Phillips had rented and then abandoned, and he discovered customer invoices inside. He began calling people all over the country and delivered the startling news that their possessions might be sitting in an open field.

Among those to receive a call were the Smolarskis, who didn’t think twice when they hired Phillips to transport their Wurlitzer piano from their home in Thousand Oaks to their son’s in Sacramento in December.

Nor were they suspicious when the piano didn’t arrive as promised by the Friday after Christmas. When several weeks passed and still no piano--Phillips explained that the delay was because the truck had been routed through Canada--the Smolarskis still believed that eventually the delivery would be made.

And then came Trudell’s call. When the Smolarskis finally found their piano, it was so trashed that they gave it away.

Some other customer items were recovered, according to a PUC report, when an Agua Dulce businessman, George Sack, discovered some furniture and other items inside a truck he had purchased from Phillips. Sack told investigators that Phillips offered to let him use the goods as collateral for money Phillips owed him, the report states.

Phillips did deliver some customer possessions, McNeeley said, but many times they arrived broken, crushed, or dirty with rat feces.

Other customers tracked down their belongings themselves.

When Pearl Gelman handed a check for $1,000 to Phillips last October, she was told her belongings would be delivered from Encino to her daughter’s home in New York in three weeks. Four months later, Gelman’s furniture, clothes, dishes and family memorabilia had not arrived.

With the help of an attorney, Gelman’s family located the items in a Palmdale storage facility, and the 82-year-old widow ended up paying $1,700 to another moving company to recover the possessions--although some were broken and others were missing.

Another Phillips client, Jerry Rhoten, figured something was wrong last September. That’s when Rhoten saw some of his business equipment, which he had paid Phillips to store while he moved his waste-water treatment company from Palmdale to Lancaster, sitting outside the storage facility.

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Phillips told Rhoten that he was reorganizing the warehouse and put the equipment outside only temporarily. But a few weeks later Rhoten drove by to find the items had not been moved. Then Rhoten, too, came across the open field that Phillips used and found the rest of his belongings--a conveyor system, steel rollers, bags of fertilizer--sitting in storage trailers or lying in the muddy soil.

Rhoten figures he lost about $14,000 because of damage to the machinery, plus the $4,000 he had paid Phillips. But Rhoten said he “kind of wrote it off.� What really made him mad were the boxes of other people’s personal belongings, including children’s toys, lying in broken boxes and scattered around the lot.

“It hurt me deeply to see this kind of stuff sitting in the field,� he said.