Everytime a huge drug organization gets brought down, you hear about the millions of dollars in real estate, cars, jewels and cash that are seized or forfeited. Ever wonder where it goes and how you can get your hands on it cheap? No, me either, but you can and it is not as hard as you may think.
Thanks to a federal program called Equitable Sharing, you have law enforcement agencies all of the country seizing any assets they can. The Justice Department’s Equitable Sharing Program, allows local and state police to keep up to 80 percent of the assets they seize.
While administrative seizure and civil forfeiture are technically not criminal actions, they are intimately connected to criminal actions and often precede or accompany them. The government’s burden of proof in a forfeiture proceeding is much lower than in a criminal proceeding. Moreover, the burden of proof may even be shifted to the claimant, who must then prove he has a legitimate claim to the property. Because the government’s burden of proof is much lower than in a criminal proceeding, courts may hold that property is forfeited by illegal activity, even when the government cannot raise enough evidence to obtain a criminal conviction. If this sounds ridiculous to you… It is because it is. You can’t convict me, but you can take my property?
Police agencies have used hundreds of millions of dollars taken from Americans under federal civil forfeiture law to buy guns, armored cars and electronic surveillance gear. They have also spent money on luxury vehicles and travel. Scores of departments spent money on vehicles. Many of them were typical police cruisers, but dozens were new and used sports and luxury cars, including at least 15 Mercedes, a dozen Mustangs, a handful of BMWs and two Corvettes.
The U.S. Marshals Service (USMS) offers property for sale to the public which has been forfeited under laws enforced or administered by the United States Department of Justice, its investigative agencies (Drug Enforcement Administration, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms), and certain other federal law enforcement agencies. More than 9,000 items of forfeited property are sold annually with gross sales in excess of $99 million. The property offered for sale consists of residential, commercial real estate, Land, business establishments, Financial Instruments and a wide range of personal property such as motor vehicles, boats, aircraft, jewelry, art, antiques, and collectibles.
Read this list of national sellers who are contracted to liquidating/selling the seized assets. You never know you may catch one of Big Meech’s Ferraris for the low low.
Other resources to check out:
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