Drug Suspects Had Overdose of Dollar Bills

Standing outside a Yorba Linda apartment in the chill of a December night, Sgt. Jon Beteag shook his head at how casually the money seemed to be thrown around.

“You’d think they’d at least keep better track of it,” he said.

Moments earlier, Beteag and eight other agents with the Orange County Regional Narcotics Suppression Program had served a search warrant at a run-down, two-bedroom apartment. They were looking primarily for cocaine.

What they found were three street-wise young men with a lot of lame excuses. And a lot of money.

These days, the narcotics task force seems to find money everywhere: in drawers, in cardboard boxes, underneath the dirty laundry.

Earlier this month, county narcotics agents seized $5.8 million in just four days. And that, they say, is just a fraction of the drug money that is out there.

“It’s still just amazing to me that this kind of money is sitting around out there in closets and in cardboard boxes in pickup trucks,” said Capt. Tim Simon, Beteag’s boss and head of the narcotics task force. “You get to the point where very little surprises you. But this . . . well, it’s just a lot of money.”

On that December night in Yorba Linda, Beteag and the eight other officers arrived at the apartment they were to search just as the three suspects pulled up in a car.

One of the suspects was carrying a sack with several thousand dollars in $1 bills.

At first, they wouldn’t admit that they lived in the apartment. When they finally did, they said they had lost the front door keys. Only later, with the temperature dropping in the night-time chill, did the suspects agree to open the door by kicking it in themselves.

They claimed that the late-model Monte Carlo they had been driving belonged to a friend. But they couldn’t remember his name.

When a cellular telephone--a favorite drug dealer’s tool--was found on the back seat, they said they had no idea it had been there.

“You can have it,” one of the men told Beteag. “I don’t know where it came from.”

Once inside, the officers found a couple thousand dollars upstairs in a bathroom drawer. In a bedroom closet, $8,000 was found in a plastic grocery sack. About $2,000 more was found in a suitcase.

So what’s with all the money?

“Oh, that?” one of the suspects said, smiling. “That’s just poker money. Damn, I’m not even sure whose money it is. Somebody must have left it here.”

“You see this all the time,” said Beteag, a hulking man fond of wearing sweat pants, high-top basketball shoes and a pistol tucked in his belt. “You can tell these guys have dealt with the police before. They simply say, ‘Gee, I don’t know who this stuff belongs to.’

“Losing a car or a cellular phone is nothing to these guys, with the money we are talking about. It’s all part of doing business.”

At the end of the encounter, no drugs had been found and no arrests had been made. The money, the cellular telephone, the telephone and utility bills and other papers were impounded.

“We don’t need to really arrest these guys,” said Beteag. “We’ve put a kink in their operation. They’ll probably leave the county. But they’re going to have to answer to their higher-ups about what happened to the money and why they had to leave the area.

“It’s not TV, but it’s a little bit of progress.”