How The Government Steals Property
It's Kelo with the smell of weed.

William Griggs writes at Lew Rockwell of the government-perpetrated crime against the owner of Missouri's Camp Zoe:

Entrepreneur and musician James Tebeau, whose Camp Zoe concert venue was one of Shannon County, Missouri's largest employers, has accepted a plea agreement in which he will forfeit his 350 acre property and serve a prison sentence for "maintaining a drug-involved premises."

Tebeau played bass in an ensemble called the Schwag Band and hosted a number of concert events including the annual "Schwagstock" festival. The agreement stipulates that Tebeau neither participated in drug sales, nor did he profit from them. Yet he faces a prison term of two and a half years and the loss of his property.

According to the Feds, Tebeau's crime was to permit the sale of marijuana, LDS LSD and mushrooms, while instructing employees to evict people who sold heroin, cocaine, crack, meth, and nitrous oxide. However, the same can be said of the Missouri State Highway Patrol, which abetted the sale of many controlled substances for four years following an August 2006 arrest of two people at the camp for selling hallucinogenic mushrooms. Over that four-year period, informants employed by the State Police conducted hundreds of undercover purchases, including many of the hard drugs Tebeau was seeking to ban from his premises.

The "Justice" Department's press release (which was reproduced nearly verbatim by the few media outlets that covered the story) made a point of noting that Tebeau "was aware that the term `schwag' was a slang term for low-grade marijuana and he purposely adopted that name for his music festivals and band." If this is evidence of evil intent, the Feds should begin criminal proceedings against the Doobie Brothers and the management of any venue where that classic rock band performs.

At about 7:30 a.m. on November 1, 2010 - a few hours after the finale of the annual "Spookstock" music festival -- a multi-jurisdictional task force invaded Camp Zoe. According to one eyewitness, "Every letter of the alphabet was represented.... There were people from the DEA, the IRS, the Highway Patrol, from Homeland Security, the local police and country Sheriff's Office. There was a group from the Rolla Police Department, which is two counties away from here."

One camp staffer was briefly stopped by police on nearby Highway 19 as he was driving his children to school. He was separated from his wife and children at the point of an M-16 rifle. The detainee was taken into the camp and briefly questioned before being released.

Camp Zoe was placed under lock-down while the raiders rummaged through every corner of the campground, intimidating staff and visitors and seizing personal items (including cash). As this was going on another federal contingent was dispatched to clean out the personal and business accounts of Jimmy Tebeau, the musician and entrepreneur who owns and operates the campground.

The Feds "just siphoned away all of his money, and then filed a civil asset forfeiture lawsuit seeking to seize his property," protests attorney Dan Viets, who has volunteered to represent Tebeau. "This would mean that he wouldn't have the money needed to fight the seizure in court." The Feds clearly sought to confiscate Camp Zoe from the beginning, and they took exceptional care to guarantee that Tebeau couldn't mount an effective defense of his property.

Details on Stealing Camp Zoe here, at Pro Libertate:

Witnesses estimate that as many as 200 law enforcement officers took part in the assault on Camp Zoe. Given the size of that mobilization, some would expect that the police were dealing with a heavily armed gang that posed an imminent threat to public safety. Yet no criminal activity was found during the raid, and not a single person was led away in handcuffs.

This should come as a surprise only to those who persist in believing that "law enforcement" is connected in some way to the protection of life, liberty, and property. Those who invaded Camp Zoe didn't find criminal activity because they weren't looking for any. They weren't there to arrest criminals; they were preparing to steal the property in the name of "civil asset forfeiture."

"From what I saw, it looked like the people from the IRS were in charge initially," Mike Johnston relates. "The original search warrant was for business records, and I saw the IRS personnel hauling off boxes full of papers, computer drives, and other materials of that kind. Apparently they didn't find what they were looking for right away, so the DEA guys were next in line."

...Missouri state law dictates that forfeiture proceeds be given to the School Building Revolving Fund, which is administered by the state's Department of Revenue and subject to official audits. However, this isn't the case when the assets are seized as part of a joint (or "hybrid") operation with the Feds.

The Justice Department's manual on asset forfeiture describes this as "equitable sharing" of revenue proceeds, and explains that it is intended "to increase or supplement the resources of the receiving state or local law enforcement agency" and can be used by the recipient "for any permissible purpose as long as shared funds increase the entire law enforcement budget." This helps explain why practically every federal agency represented by an acronym -- as well as every local police agency -- joined the Gadarene rush to invade and occupy Camp Zoe.

If, on the other hand, the raid had been a purely local affair, it could have been "adopted" by the Feds after the fact. In congressional testimony, former deputy assistant attorney general Joe Whitley described how such an "adoption" takes place: "We receive a case which is in every aspect a local case, been worked on pretty much by the local agencies all the way from beginning to end, and we put our cover on it."

Under either approach,police agencies are typically permitted to keep at least eighty percent of the haul. The objective "is to reward the help we get from our brother and sister law enforcement" agencies, explained former Justice Department official Jerry McDowell in 2000.

Since these "rewards" are doled out in explicit and willful defiance of state forfeiture laws, what McDowell is describing is a criminal syndicate, one far larger than any of the private criminal gangs whose depredations supposedly justify the forfeiture racket. Steve Kessler, a former prosecutor and recognized expert on forfeiture laws, has described the practice of asset forfeiture as "unquestionably the largest, most lucrative business in the United States."