Property-Seizure Law Gives County Edge in Drug War

In the aftermath of the biggest seizure of suspected drug profits in Ventura County history, law enforcement officials said this week that scattered groups of Colombian cocaine dealers are using the county as a base of operations.

“We don’t have a problem on the scale of Los Angeles or Orange County, but we are going to be seeing more Colombians,” said Lt. Paul Anderson, head of the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department narcotics squad. “As we develop our own resources, we’ll be uncovering more and more.”

Anderson and other local and federal drug officials discussed the scope of Ventura County’s drug problems following the arrest of three Colombian nationals and one Guatemalan national and the seizure of $2.5 million by the Simi Valley Police Department.

Officials identified the suspects as members of Colombia’s Medellin cartel, the drug ring suspected of distributing virtually all the cocaine smuggled into Southern California. In the Los Angeles area alone, 4,000 Colombians are involved in the cartel’s operations, authorities estimate.

While police said they didn’t have enough evidence to charge the Colombians who were arrested in Simi Valley, the cash was seized under a state forfeiture statute that no longer requires prosecutors to obtain criminal convictions before confiscating cash and other property believed to be the proceeds of drug dealing.

Termed Effective Tool

Officials this week cited the use of that law by the Ventura County district attorney’s office in the Simi Valley case and 80 others during the first half of 1989 as one of the most effective tools in keeping local drug problems at manageable levels.

Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Vincent O’Neill Jr. said Ventura officials have aggressively used the law--which was amended as of January to make it easier to seize houses and small amounts of cash--primarily against low- and mid-level dealers.

O’Neill said the district attorney’s office has one prosecutor, Stephen J. McLaughlin, assigned full time to forfeiture cases and is considering adding another.

“I can’t imagine anybody doing any more to use the new law than we are,” he said. “We were obviously lucky to get such a large amount this early, but we expect to get a lot more in the coming months. We already have investigators running down leads from the Simi Valley case.”

Under the state law, according to McLaughlin, 10% of the confiscated money goes to the state for a variety of mental health and drug education programs. About 76% goes to the police agency making the arrests and the remainder goes to the prosecuting agency.

U.S. Law Was Model

McLaughlin said the state law, modeled after a federal forfeiture statute adopted in 1984, enables county officials to move more swiftly in seizing the assets of suspected drug dealers, even when they are not charged with criminal activity. He said the standard of proof required to keep confiscated assets is lower than that needed to obtain convictions.

In the Simi Valley case, legal sources said the courts probably would require only the facts that the suspects were Colombians in possession of a large sum of cash and that trained police dogs detected cocaine at several locations during the investigation.

The state law recently was challenged in Monterey by Cesario Moraza, a laborer who protested that police illegally confiscated $28,000 from his pickup truck while investigating a domestic quarrel. A Superior Court judge initially ruled in Moraza’s favor, but on May 15 the 6th District Court of Appeal overturned that ruling, saying cocaine residue on a razor blade in Moraza’s house was sufficient to link the money to drug dealing. State and local prosecutors throughout California have hailed the ruling.

While agreeing that there is increased activity by Colombians in Ventura County, local officials stressed this week that the primary thrust of the country’s drug enforcement activity continues to center on local dealers.

Problem Said Worsening

They said the problem remains manageable in comparison to the cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles and Orange counties, but added that drug trafficking is clearly on the increase.

“We don’t have it as bad as they do for a lot of obvious reasons,” said Lt. Anderson. “For one thing, Westlake and Thousand Oaks and Agoura make a nice buffer area to Los Angeles. I think education levels on the whole are higher here, and that helps. Another thing is we have more community participation in anti-drug programs.

“We’re not having our streets overrun and our parks shut down, but we do have a drug problem that is severe, no doubt about it,” he added. “What we’re seeing now is a lot of local dealers who are pure profiteers. A few years ago, most of the dealers were users. Now there are more and more who are just in it for the money.”

A dramatic increase in drug prosecutions in Ventura County reflects the growing drug problem, O’Neill said. There were 420 prosecutions for possession of either cocaine or heroin in 1988 compared to 128 in 1983, and 216 cases of possession with intent to sell, compared to only 38 such prosecutions five years earlier.

“We’re not having the drive-by shootings and the weekly killings, but we definitely feel the effects of being next door to Los Angeles,” O’Neill said. “We are seeing our own cocaine epidemic in Ventura County, and it shows up in every other category of crime from burglary to homicide. Cocaine is a factor in about 60 to 70% of our crime.”

Drop in Federal Manpower

While county officials have increased anti-drug resources in the last two years, there has been a reduction of federal manpower in Ventura County, reflecting the view of federal officials that most drug agents can be better used in Los Angeles and Orange County, where the cocaine problem is severe.

In the early 1980s, a joint task force of 14 FBI and U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents operated in the county out of a headquarters at Point Mugu. Presently, however, the FBI has only one agent in Ventura County working part-time on drugs, and the DEA normally only has one agent in the field in Ventura as liaison to the Sheriff’s Department.

Gary Auer, agent in charge of the FBI’s Ventura office, said the lack of federal manpower prompted his decision last year to shy away from full-scale drug investigations, instead assisting county officials by tough enforcement of federal forfeiture laws.

Working in his spare time, Auer, an attorney and former counterintelligence agent, launched what amounted to a one-man crusade against dope dealers operating out of private homes. Working closely with county officials, Auer was involved in the seizure of 20 houses in Ventura County, almost half of all those seized under federal laws in the seven-county area that makes up the U.S. Central District of California.

‘We’ve Slowed Pace’

“We were relying mainly on the federal statute in 1988, but we have slowed the pace this year because the district attorney’s office is so active now in using the state forfeiture laws,” Auer said. “Michael Bradbury is, I think, the only D.A. in California who is trying to make use of this in a big way.

“While he’s taking my personal little baby, I’m kind of proud that we have been able to play a role,” Auer said. “We’re not talking about major suppliers here. We’re talking about local distributors. Those are the guys we want to hurt. Even if the problem isn’t at the level of Los Angeles, it’s the number-one crime problem in the county.”

Joining Auer in praising Ventura County officials for their drug enforcement efforts was Jerry Carr, head of a five-man DEA office in Goleta that covers Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties.

“From our point of view, the most positive part of the picture is the close cooperation of everybody involved in this,” said Carr. “We all help each other out whenever we can. There’s more than enough dope and money out there in the hands of the drug dealers for all of us.”