Police Departments Enjoy a Boom From Their Drug Busts : Roving Narcotics Squads Capture Cash, Cars, Homes With Traffickers

For two years, Sgt. Mike Messina drove one of the hottest police cars anywhere.

After his Brea Police Department seized a new red Corvette from a Colombian cocaine trafficker in 1984, Messina used it to cruise Southern California while posing as a high-rolling drug dealer. The car helped Messina and a partner make dozens of drug busts as far away as Santa Barbara, resulting in substantial seizures of cash and property.

“Everybody thought it was a cool car,” Messina said. “It was great for me.”

Eventually, before drug suspects could learn its true identity, the Corvette was sold for a few thousand dollars, ending a highly profitable business cycle for the Police Department. Soon after, Brea officials doubled the size of their roving drug task force.

About the same time, other small and mid-size police departments in the Los Angeles area similarly were finding that such drug squads make sense--and dollars.

Federal Approval

Spawned by federal legislation that allows local law enforcement agencies to claim assets they seize from criminals, nearly a dozen departments have created squads of up to eight officers who specialize in high-stakes drug investigations, often well beyond their communities’ boundaries.

Along with sports cars, they have seized big-rig trucks, homes, jewelry, electronic recording equipment and millions of dollars in cash. Such hauls, in turn, have helped create some of the best-equipped police departments around, financing helicopters, computers, night-vision goggles and other high-tech crime-fighting gear.

“Whenever we narcs got together we used to talk about how much dope we seized,” said Sgt. Joe Klein, head of the Fullerton Police Department’s drug detail. “Now it’s how much car did you get? What kind of money? Did you get a phone?”

Burbank officers struck it rich in a cocaine raid June 19. Assisted by U.S. Customs Service agents, they seized $1.75 million in cash, furs, three Mercedes-Benzes and a 1987 Ferrari Testarossa equipped with a $9,000 stereo and worth about $140,000. All the seizures and seven resulting arrests were made outside Burbank.

West Covina’s eight-officer detail since 1986 has placed $2.6 million into the coffers of the city of 92,000, and its claims for another $3.4 million are being processed.

Glendale and Torrance, which have among the most active roving drug squads, are awaiting claims for $7.2 million and $5 million, respectively.

Concluded Montebello Sgt. Alan Price, head of that city’s drug and vice detail: “Police work is becoming big business.”

To some critics, however, the practice is turning police officers into bounty hunters.

The squads are an outgrowth of the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, which allows local agencies to claim as much as 90% of the assets they seize through criminal investigations. The law not only put up for grabs property used directly in a crime, such as cars that transported cocaine, but also any assets bought with illegal proceeds, such as homes or yachts.

Under the new rules, police need merely show in a civil procedure in federal court that the seized cash or property was derived from crime--with a standard of proof that can be met even in the absence of an arrest.

Although California adopted an asset forfeiture statue in 1983, it allowed local police to keep only 65% of the value of the seized assets and prohibited them from keeping vehicles. As a result, most police departments have arranged for their seizures to be processed under the federal law by getting the federal Drug Enforcement Administration to “adopt” their cases.

Just last month, however, Gov. George Deukmejian signed a strengthened version of the state law that allows police departments to keep up to 76.5% of seized assets and includes other incentives for them to process forfeitures through state courts.

Before such laws, the Franchise Tax Board was the sole state agency able to claim seized property--and then only for unpaid taxes. Police could hold cash or property for use as evidence in court, but then had to return it to the owners.

The asset forfeiture laws were designed primarily to punish drug dealers by hitting them in their pocketbooks. A side effect, however, was encouragement of a new mission for some police departments whose anti-drug efforts traditionally focused on street dealers within their municipal borders. Suddenly, mid-size cities were undertaking investigations normally associated with federal task forces or huge police agencies such as the Los Angeles Police Department.

Federal authorities were unprepared for the flood of claims that the 1984 law brought in, according to Brad Cates, director of the Department of Justice Asset Forfeiture Office in Washington. The backlog grew so quickly that it soon was taking the office 250 days merely to begin processing a claim.

“It’s taken us a while to gear up,” Cates said.

Today, with the help of a new computer system, the federal office has reduced to 150 days the time it takes to consider a claim, Cates said. But it still takes an average of 18 months for local police agencies to receive the money and property they confiscate.

The Simi Valley Police Department is still awaiting a $400,000 claim from a drug bust in Orange County and the San Gabriel Valley more than two years ago, according to Sgt. Fred James.

In that case, Simi Valley’s four narcotics officers joined forces with two federal drug agents and six LAPD officers to investigate suspected Colombian cocaine traffickers in La Puente and several surrounding cities. Under the law, the agencies would split any confiscated assets based on the resources they contributed to the investigation.

For three months in early 1986, the Simi Valley officers worked in 12- to 14-hour shifts watching the suspects’ houses from parked cars, then followed the drug dealers to what later turned out to be drug “stash pads.”

“It was a long and tedious investigation,” James recalled. “I didn’t eat dinner with my family for six weeks straight.”

The payoff came when the team raided rented houses in La Puente, El Toro, Anaheim Hills and an apartment in Hacienda Heights. They arrested five suspects and found duffel bags stuffed with $1.7 million in cash and cardboard boxes containing 370 pounds of cocaine.

How did arrests more than 40 miles away tie in to Simi Valley? Officials were hesitant to detail how they got on the case, other than to say they were following a tip from someone caught in an earlier investigation. Under California law, a police officer can make an arrest anywhere in the state.

Torrance police similarly said a tip from a separate investigation alerted their seven-officer drug team and federal agents to a case that culminated in June with two arrests in Glendale and the seizure of a suitcase stuffed with $800,000, so heavy that the drug dealers had to drag it.

Despite the potential profit, such investigations have little appeal to many police departments.

Pasadena’s four-officer drug squad, for instance, focuses exclusively on cases within its community.

“You’ve got to remember what our primary role is--to get the dope dealers off our street in our city,” explained Lt. Jerry Schultze, head of the unit. “If I’ve got all these people calling me up complaining about dope dealers and my crew is 20 miles away on a case that has nothing to do with Pasadena, how am I going to explain that? It’s just a different philosophy.”

But when one of the roving drug units appears into his area and makes a splashy raid, Schultze conceded: “You get a little jealous. It wouldn’t be normal if you didn’t.”

Leaders of the most aggressive squads defend their long-distance work as part of the local fight against drugs. Most of the roving units also keep an eye on local street dealers; only the Glendale and West Covina police departments have totally freed their specialized teams from that duty.

“The way we work now, the smugglers have control of the case and it’s up to them where we go. We’re just along for the ride,” explained Marsden, whose Torrance squad in recent years has tracked suspects to Santa Barbara, Las Vegas, San Diego, Riverside and “everywhere in Orange County.”

The trail always starts in Torrance, he insisted, perhaps with a raid on a drug stash house that uncovers deposit slips from an out-of-town bank. “We will continue that investigation until its concluded, wherever that takes us--within reason,” he said.

Although the team does not leave the country, “just today my sergeant is waiting at the border for some suspects who went into Mexico,” Marsden noted.

Other department heads say, however, that they will take up a good case just about anywhere in Southern California. Sometimes the DEA passes on tips to the roving squads about cases outside their cities, or will invite them to help federal investigations elsewhere.

“When we have narcotics problems in town, they take priority,” Price of Montebello said. “But it’s our chief of police’s stance that we aggressively go after major violators dealing in the hundreds of kilos because eventually that dope is coming back into our city. If we can knock those dealers down, seize their dope and assets and put them out of business, it’s a twofold feather in our cap.”

From the adoption of the federal law through last year, California law enforcement agencies received $57.3 million in criminally generated assets, more than a third of the national total, said Tim Virtue, management analyst for the U.S. Marshal’s Office in McLean, Va.

The statistics do not distinguish drug cases from others, but Virtue said that almost all of the seized cash and property comes from drug cases. Most of the California claims come from the Los Angeles area, where the Colombian and Mexican cocaine cartels are well entrenched.

Not surprisingly, the two largest law enforcement agencies have been the greatest beneficiaries: The LAPD has received about $18 million and has claims pending for another $24 million, a spokesman said; the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department reports receipts of $13 million--$3.5 million in one record check presented last week--and is expecting another $21 million.

In Northern California, by contrast, most police departments have opted for a task force approach to major drug investigations, with each department in a county contributing one or two officers, said Tom Gorman, assistant chief for the state Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement in Sacramento.

The results, however, are far from dazzling. The state’s 18 task forces seized only about $7 million in cash and property through 1987--less than Glendale police alone.

The federal law requires that confiscated property and cash be used for law enforcement. So, after paying their details’ annual operating costs--in Glendale’s case, three years into the future--California police departments similarly have gone after various items on their wish lists, buying high-tech equipment for their drug details and boosting crime-fighting capabilities in ways never before affordable.

Seizures by Glendale’s 3-year-old detail have bought the 182-officer department infrared night-vision goggles for helicopter pilots as well as a high-tech laser device that can read nearly invisible fingerprints, Lt. Mike Post said.

In Simi Valley, drug money bought a mobile crime lab, updated equipment for the SWAT team, 9-millimeter handguns for all officers and $200,000 to upgrade and expand the police computer system.

The Burbank Police Department bought its first helicopter thanks to drug dealers. “The ultimate irony is not only are they stripped of their ill-gotten gains,” said Sgt. Don Goldberg, “but their drug profits are being turned against them.”

Other departments have spent their cash on drug-sniffing dogs, bulletproof vests and cellular telephones.

But the great rewards of the forfeiture process trouble some legal scholars.

“What concerns me is the injection of a profit motive into our system of justice in which the enforcers have an interest in the outcome,” said Gerold F. Uelman, dean of the Santa Clara University School of Law. “It’s like converting all of our police officers into bounty hunters.”

Although he supports the gist of the forfeiture law, Uelman says the seized money should go to the U.S. Treasury.

“Then, if it were returned to the department, it would be indirectly and we’d have less of a problem than with the direct profit motive,” he said. “The courts have generally prohibited arrangements where undercover informants are paid on a contingent basis, because that creates a motive to exaggerate or falsify testimony.”

Attorneys for people who have had property seized argue that the law erodes basic rights.

“In effect, you’re punishing the person first and having the trial afterward,” said Joel Maliniak, spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California.

Las Vegas attorney David Z. Chesnoff criticized the procedures while representing James Morris of Compton, who is free on bail pending trial on five felony counts of selling cocaine and heroin, but has not been able to return to his $1-million home.

According to the DEA, Morris bragged to an informant that he built the house and earned millions of dollars through 45 years of drug dealing.

In court hearings, Chesnoff said Morris works as a machinist and bought the house for $60,000, using his talents as a “skilled carpenter” to legitimately improve it.

“It’s terribly oppressive,” Chesnoff said. “My client is on bail and cannot live in his house . . . prior to there being any decision that the property was acquired illegally or that he committed any crime.”

Under the federal law, confiscated property is held by federal marshals while the U.S. attorney’s office notifies potential claimants of the seizure and places public notices in newspapers. If the property or cash is worth less than $100,000 and no one claims it, it can be distributed to the seizing agency without a hearing.

But a hearing in U.S. District Court is required when the property is worth more than $100,000, whenever real estate is involved, or when someone claims legitimate ownership.

In practice, most drug suspects decide not to go through the rigorous and sometimes self-incriminating hearing process. Only about 10% of all forfeitures, accounting for about half of the property seized, are contested, Cates said.

To keep the property, police must merely show the drug link by “a preponderance of evidence,” a lower standard of proof than the “beyond a reasonable doubt” required for a criminal conviction.

Some police agencies report, however, that suspects are beginning to adjust to the rules of the game in an attempt to make seizures more difficult.

“Rental cars and lease cars are becoming the big things,” said Brea’s Messina. “The crooks are getting smarter.”

The investigations often test not only the wits of the roving police squads, but also their diplomacy.

Although the specialized officers know the advantages of going it alone--”the less you rely on other agencies, the more the pie is yours,” Messina noted--the quest for the big raid inevitably requires some coordination with other police departments. For reasons of safety and courtesy, it is standard procedure for officers who travel into other cities to inform hometown police.

“For one thing, it eliminates getting burned on surveillance,” said Burbank’s Goldberg. “If we’re in a quiet neighborhood . . . and there’s a bunch of goofy looking narcs, what’s going to happen is a black and white (police car) is going to come and it’s going to blow a stakeout.”

That almost happened when Fullerton detectives followed a suspect to an expensive home in a secluded West Covina neighborhood, and did not have time to contact local police.

In addition, the Fullerton squad was not aware that a DEA task force was watching the same house, Detective Kevin Hamilton recalled. “We show up crawling through the bushes and they’re there scratching their heads not knowing whether we’re cops or crooks,” he said.

When the suspect sped away in a blue station wagon, both teams of undercover officers followed in their unmarked cars. And quickly, Hamilton said, he noticed an officer from the hometown West Covina department chasing him in a regular police car.

“I saw him coming up super fast behind me, so I flashed the guy with a stream light flashlight and badged him,” he recalled. “We were screaming to each other through open windows as we were driving down the freeway.”

The teams ended up joining forces and arresting several suspects, Hamilton said.

But at least once, competition destroyed a case, said Torrance’s Marsden, calling it “the downside of asset forfeiture.” He refused to name the other departments involved in that incident, explaining, “Don’t want to start any range wars, you know.”

Marsden said his detail was working outside its border and bumped into another team investigating the same major drug suspect. The two agencies worked together for more than a month, he said, and just as they were ready to move in and make an arrest, a third team--also operating outside its city--became interested.

“We had been working the principal violator for six weeks, we had the search warrant in hand and we knew everything there was to know about the violator,” Marsden said.

The newcomer team, by contrast, had been tailing the suspect for only part of that day after buying 2 kilograms of cocaine from him, he said. Yet that team insisted on searching a house that the Torrance squad had already determined was empty of cocaine, cash or incriminating evidence.

Marsden said he asked the third team to hold off, but to no avail.

“The other agency was overly aggressive--greedy is a more appropriate word,” he said. “They went in and got zero and we ended up with no charges on the guy. It’s a very rare example of what can happen.”

ROVING DRUG SQUADS

Listed below are some of the Los Angeles-area police departments that have specialized squads of officers who concentrate on investigations of high-level dealers, often going beyond their cities’ borders to make arrests and seize drugs.

ADDITIONAL POLICE DRUG UNIT NO. OFFICERS MONEY RECEIVED CLAIMS DEPARTMENT FORMED IN UNIT FROM SEIZURES PENDING BREA 1984 4 $250,000 $400,000 BURBANK 1985 6 $1.3 million $2.3 million FULLERTON 1986 5 $200,000 $900,000 GLENDALE 1985 5 $1.3 million $7.2 million MONTEBELLO 1984 4 $689,000 $1 million + SIMI VALLEY 1984 4 $915,000 $2 million TORRANCE 1985 7 $400,000 $5 million WEST COVINA 1986 8 $2.6 million $3.4 million

POLICE ANNUAL COST DEPARTMENT OF UNIT BREA $300,000 BURBANK $380,270 FULLERTON $500,000 GLENDALE $330,000 MONTEBELLO $186,000 SIMI VALLEY $400,000 TORRANCE $533,000 WEST COVINA $500,000

Source: Police departments named

DRUG SEIZURES--THE LEADING STATES

Here are the five states that have received the greatest amounts of cash and property seized in raids and returned to local police departments under a 1984 federal law administered by the U.S. Marshal’s Office. The totals cover cash and property disbursed through Dec. 31, 1987.

STATE CASH RECEIVED VALUE OF PROPERTY TOTAL CALIFORNIA $39.9 million $7.5 million $47.4 million TEXAS $8.7 million $1.9 million $10.6 million NEW YORK $8.9 million $1.9 million $10.8 million NORTH CAROLINA $2.8 million $3.2 million $6 million FLORIDA* $1.7 million $1.9 million $3.6 million

* Figures for all states cover only cash and property returned to police departments under the federal asset forfeiture law. In Florida, most seizures by police departments are processed under a state law and are not counted here.