Young Urban Panhandlers Hit With 22 Counts

Yvonne Clark felt sorry for the handsome, well-dressed young man, who said he hoped to enroll at UCLA, and his pretty blonde wife, who was two months pregnant and had not eaten all day.

The two said they had lost all their money when their car was burglarized, and so Clark, who met them last December in the parking lot of a Sherman Oaks supermarket, promptly wrote them a check for $25.

The couple’s tale of woe also touched Anne Broyles, pastor of the Malibu United Methodist Church, who drove 20 minutes along Pacific Coast Highway one Saturday last February just to cash a check so she could give them $53.

“God bless you,” they said, promising to pay her back.

When Times columnist Jack Smith met the same desperate couple in Pasadena in May, the woman was still two months pregnant and the earnest young man still UCLA-bound. Smith gave them $20, wrote a column about it and the letters poured in.

That, in short, is how police came to discover that Jeffrey Duayne Allman, 31, is not going to college, and Tracy Chris Hartland, 24, is not going to have a baby.

Authorities say the two are aspiring actors who received free rent for managing their West Hollywood apartment building, while earning as much as $200 an hour playing upon the emotions of generous Los Angeles area residents.

Los Angeles City Atty. James K. Hahn said they ran their scam for as long as three years in parking lots from Malibu to Pasadena.

The “yuppie panhandlers,” as they have been dubbed, were each charged Thursday with 22 misdemeanor counts of petty theft. Each count carries a maximum six-month sentence and $1,000 fine. Hahn said he will seek jail terms for both defendants, as well as restitution for their victims.

“These people were hardly down on their luck . . . ,” Hahn declared. “I don’t know anything about their professional acting ability, but they were pretty good at what they did. . . . They had turned this into their regular way of going out and making money.”

The couple’s story was elaborate, and always ran along the same lines, according to more than 40 letters written to Smith, which he turned over to the Los Angeles Police Department’s bunco-forgery division:

The man approached first. He said they had come from up north--Lodi or Visalia or Modesto--and were trying to find an apartment when all their money was stolen from their small, battered red-orange car. His pregnant wife had morning sickness. Their dog needed veterinary care. No agencies could help them. They would pay the money back.

Police tracked down Allman and Hartland--who often gave out their real names--through the letters, some of which contained their car’s license plate number. The couple were arrested Aug. 10.

The arresting officer said Hartland told him profits had dropped to $35 a day after Smith’s column appeared.

Hartland posted $250 bail and was released. Allman, who also was wanted in two 1985 drug cases and a 1987 petty theft case, remains jailed. Neither could be reached.

According to Hahn, so many people lost money to the yuppie panhandlers that police have set up a hot line for those who want to file complaints. The number is (213) 680-0546.

But beyond the money--as little as $9 and as much as $100 from the 26 victims police interviewed--some say the couple took something that is both more intangible and precious.

“They have fixed a lot of people so that they will be so much more careful and will not feel like being generous to somebody else,” said Clark, who wrote to the couple at a Modesto address they gave her, asking them to either return her money or pass it along to others in need. The letter came back unopened.

“It’s very painful,” she said. “They make me wonder if it pays to be kindhearted.”