Drug dealers' stuff comes in handy for police

St. Petersburg Times
May. 29, 2006

BROOKSVILLE - Daymond E. Taylor Jr. is the Brooksville Police Department's biggest benefactor.

His 50-inch television sits squarely in the conference room.

His plush leather sofas decorate Chief Ed Tincher's office.

His sport utility vehicle, with $30,000 of stereo equipment inside, is parked in the motor pool, repainted with police slogans and insignia.

But there's no plaque at the station honoring Taylor, and he's not really in a position to complain.

The convicted drug dealer won't be out of federal prison until February 2012. All his "gifts" - that's what Tincher calls them - came through forfeiture and seizure.

In the war on drugs, police have found that it's not enough to take away a drug dealer's freedom. They have to take away something more valuable: his possessions.

"You've got to understand there are consequences," Tincher said. "If the biggest consequence is 60 days in jail, that's a loss of doing business, but here you see all the things he created are taken away."

Beyond the pedagogical reasons, there are practical ones, too.

The money and materials can go toward defraying the cost of expensive investigations, purchasing technical equipment or putting up matching funds for federal drug-use prevention programs - anything other than the day-to-day budget of the department.

The Brooksville police use seized camera equipment in their surveillance operations and drive around a seized SUV as part of a youth outreach program.

In the conference room of the red brick station on Veterans Avenue, Lt. Richard C. Hankins takes out a military-issue, $7,000 Raptor 6x night vision scope that can see about 2,700 yards.

"This is from a man who never paid a dime in his life to the IRS," Hankins said. "What's a drug dealer doing with a rifle scope?"

Hankins unrolled wads of $10- and $20-bills - $10,000 in all - taken from a Tupperware container in another drug dealer's car. He estimates that a "street level" dealer in Brooksville rakes in about $2,000 a day.

Before police began aggressively seizing property in the past few years, they would just watch the drug assets go from one person to the next after an arrest. Drug money could even be used to pay bail.

"We would arrest them, and within a couple hours, they would call their buddies to bond them out of jail," Hankins said, as he arranged a diamond necklace and a gold Rolex watch on the table. "They would even brag about it. That sent flags up saying we needed to take their assets at the same time we arrested them."

The seizures are executed under the Florida Contraband Forfeiture Act, which allows law enforcement to take possessions that are used in drug trafficking or purchased with drug money.

Hankins walks into a room in the police station garage, a cabinet of curiosities where the possessions of three drug dealers have been dumped in one place.

A $2,000 air compressor stands about 5 feet tall in the middle of the room. There are two boxes full of DVDs. There is a circular saw, a number of TVs, a bicycle, a pair of brass knuckles with a blade attached, and a large, triangular light fixture used for growing marijuana indoors.

Some of the items border on the bizarre, like the airplane propeller leaning in the midst of the clutter.

Hankins said that when addicts run out of money they're often told to go out and steal in exchange for drugs.

When Taylor's house was raided, police found lots of Tampa Bay Buccaneers memorabilia. It wasn't until a few days later that they found Bucs playoff tickets - too late to use.

Hankins pointed out that the police are not heartless. When they raided one house, they did not take the video games belonging to the drug dealer's son.

Some drug dealers have learned to take advantage of the rules by putting their valuables in a friend's or a girlfriend's name, Hankins said.

Large seizures like Taylor's are not common in a small city like Brooksville.

City Attorney David LaCroix said there had been just six of them in the last few years.

But Tincher said there are many smaller ones - cases where only a few hundred dollars are at stake - and the drug dealer will just turn over the property voluntarily to spare his family the anxiety of litigation.

LaCroix remembers one case where a defendant turned over a house to authorities to save his girlfriend the legal hassle, and the city just gave it back to her because the house's mortgage had eaten up its equity.

City Manager Richard Anderson said that, compared to his former experience in Florida City, near Miami, the forfeitures in Brooksville are not that large. Florida City was a bottleneck for drug trafficking in a way that Brooksville is not.

"Not being in a port or an airport, it limits what you can interdict," Anderson said.

Sometimes, the police just hold on to the property and let the drug dealers buy it back in lieu of forfeiture, he said.

But no mater which way they deal with the property, Tincher thinks it's fitting.

"New drug dealers are making more and more money," he said. "They ought to somehow reimburse the system."

--Jonathan Abel can be reached at 352 754-6114 or [email protected]