In 2018, burglary squads began raiding homes in nice neighborhoods in and around Thousand Oaks.
When Ventura County Sheriff’s investigators began their investigation, they found the cases had three things in common: The suspects they arrested were foreign nationals, most from Chile, in the U.S. on short-term tourist visas. They targeted homes that bordered open space and broke in through sliding glass doors. And they were all driving cars they rented from the same car rental company, a parking lot in Pacoima called Driver Power Rental.
That was the beginning of a six-year investigation that culminated Wednesday morning with the arrest of six people. Among them was a Santa Clarita couple who owned the car rental company Driver Power Rental and who authorities said were masterminds of a “crime tourism” network that stole at least $35 million worth of goods and cash from homes and businesses across the United States.
The six suspects were indicted by a federal grand jury on August 1, as was the car rental company itself. The indictment was unsealed on Wednesday after the suspects were arrested.
They face a total of 46 charges, including wire fraud, money laundering and conspiracy to transport stolen property across state lines. Each of the wire fraud and money laundering counts carries a prison sentence of up to 20 years, while the other counts carry lesser penalties.
Hours after these arrests, senior Ventura County law enforcement officials stood alongside Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass at a press conference at the FBI offices on Wilshire Boulevard in West Los Angeles. Also in attendance were police and prosecutors from Los Angeles and Orange counties, as well as the top federal prosecutor and FBI official for the region.
Breaking up the thieves’ ring will help make homes and businesses safer from a wave of burglaries that will continue for years, it said.
“Neighborhoods have been terrified by what has happened,” Bass said. “This is a big step forward and I hope it brings relief to our neighbors in the greater Los Angeles area and Southern California.”
The main defendants in the case are Juan Carlos Thola-Duran, 57, and his girlfriend Ana Maria Arriagada, 41, who live together in the Canyon Country area of Santa Clarita.
Four other people have been charged with helping the couple operate the theft ring: Thola’s son, John Thola of Canoga Park, Patricia Enderton of Northridge, Miguel Angel Barajas of Northridge and Federico Jorge Triebel IV of Woodland Hills.
The company, Driver Power Rental, owned by Thola and Arriagada, was “not an ordinary car rental company,” said U.S. Attorney Martin Estrada, the top federal prosecutor for the greater Los Angeles area. “This company exclusively served fraudsters.”
Most of the thieves who used Driver Power Rental were from Chile, the only country in Latin America whose citizens automatically receive a 90-day tourist visa to the U.S., Estrada said. They always provided false identification to rent cars and often chose luxury models to better blend in with wealthy neighborhoods while scouting out the homes and businesses they wanted to rob.
Ventura County District Attorney Erik Nasarenko described the operation as essentially “a Hertz car rental business for thieves, providing them with cars to enter Ventura County for one purpose only: to rob homes and businesses.”
According to the federal indictment, the company also operated at locations in Van Nuys under the names “Car Deals and More” and “Enterprise LA Rental.”
When the investigation began in 2018, an undercover agent posed as a legitimate car rental customer and entered Driver Power Rentals. The company refused to rent to him, the indictment states, “after learning that the customer had not been referred by someone in the scheme and that the customer had a valid driver’s license.”
A few years later, an FBI informant visited the rental car lot and learned from an employee that the cars cost $500 a week and that the business owners were buying gift cards worth 75 percent of the store’s value.
Prosecutors allege Thola and Arriagada did much more than just provide getaway cars. They “acted as quarterbacks for a huge team of eager thieves,” Estrada said. They directed people to travel all over the U.S. to steal cash, luxury handbags, jewelry, credit cards, gift cards and other goods, then sold the goods and paid the thieves a percentage of the profits.
In one case, thieves broke into a jewelry store in the San Francisco Bay Area and stole more than $5 million worth of jewelry and watches, the indictment says. They also broke into private homes, usually in the absence of the owners, and stole cash and jewelry.
They stole credit cards from cars and purses and immediately took them to stores like Target and Best Buy to buy electronics, gift cards and other expensive goods before the cards could be canceled, the indictment says. In one case in 2021, they broke into a car parked along a walking path in Newbury Park, stole credit cards and tried to use them to buy $1,600 worth of jewelry at The Oaks shopping center.
The stolen goods were delivered to the ringleaders and their accomplices or sent to a FedEx store in Sherman Oaks, where Barajas picked them up, the indictment says.
Prosecutors have identified at least 120 thefts linked to the group, although there could be many more, Estrada said. Ventura County Sheriff Jim Fryhoff said 130 people have been arrested in Ventura County alone for crimes that fit that pattern, and “the vast majority” of them were driving Driver Power Rental cars.
Most of the cases listed in the indictment occurred in California, but there are also alleged thefts in Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, New Jersey, Missouri and Colorado.
The total value of the stolen goods is at least $35 million, Estrada said. The indictment states that Thola stole about $5.5 million from the sale of the goods, including $5.1 million that he transferred to bank accounts of the other people arrested on Wednesday.
The indictment says Thola and the other defendants used the money to buy four properties in Los Angeles and Santa Clarita, as well as cars and horses. Thola’s property in Canyon Country is on the outskirts of town and appears to be across the street from a horse ranch.
Akil Davis, FBI assistant director in charge of the Los Angeles field office, said the federal government is in the process of seizing “25 vehicles, several properties and possibly even some horses.”
Thola, Arriagada, Barajas and Enderton are also charged with defrauding the federal government by submitting false applications to receive about $275,000 in COVID-19 business relief loans. They wrote checks to their employees and passed them off as payroll expenses. When their applications were rejected, they immediately submitted a new application with other false information about their businesses, the indictment says.
The Ventura County burglaries were among the first crimes linked to Driver Power Rental. Fryhoff said that after discovering the connections between its suspects, his agency alerted the FBI, which led to the formation of a multi-agency regional task force to oversee the case.
“These investigations are usually about one spoke in a very large wheel. In this case, we targeted the entire wheel, and that’s why an investigation like this takes many years,” said Davis, the head of the FBI presence in the region.
“We have a fantastic team,” Fryhoff said during the press conference. “That’s what happens when no one cares who gets the credit.”
Tony Biasotti is an investigative reporter and observer for the Ventura County Star. Reach him at [email protected]. This story was made possible by a grant from the Ventura County Community Foundation’s Local Journalism Fund.
