Word: deas
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Stanley Morris, director of the Marshals Service, says that other agencies are relieved to be rid of the loot-keeping burden, which had led to charges of theft and corruption. "We want to come up with a system that assures a high degree of integrity," he says. Notes DEA Agent William Coonce of Los Angeles: "We're glad to hand it over to them...
...Florida and Texas, expensive vessels seized by the Drug Enforcement Administration clutter waterways and marinas, accumulating barnacles. Along the Cape Fear River in North Carolina, a drug dealer's former Xanadu called Castle Hayne, complete with swimming pool and 22-horse stables, sits uninhabited. In the DEA'S Los Angeles office, a huge, garish oil painting decorates the squad room. "We don't know where to put the thing," an agent says of the confiscated treasure. "It won't fit in the vault...
...cartels by confiscating property or assets that can be traced to illicit profits. The program has been so successful that it has resulted in an administrative nightmare: the costly storage, maintenance, sale and disposal of the valuable but unwieldy booty. This month that bureaucratic burden was lifted from the DEA and other law-enforcement agencies and placed on the shoulders of the U.S. Marshals Service...
...federal marshals include apprehending fugitives, guarding dangerous prisoners and protecting witnesses in organized-crime cases. Their new job may be as challenging as any of the others. Some 49 pieces of real estate worth $8.4 million and 36 airplanes worth $7.3 million were confiscated last year by the DEA, roughly twice as much as the year before. The Justice Department last year seized more than $100 million worth of property and other assets. Among the diverse booty that must be managed and eventually sold: a jewelry store in Mississippi, a grain silo in Iowa, a floating dry-dock in Hawaii...
Skeptics wonder whether the Marshals Service can cope. It certainly cannot do worse than the DEA and other agencies that lacked the resources necessary to handle the goods. Congress's General Accounting Office found that property seized during fiscal year 1981 had been so poorly maintained that cars and trucks brought only 58% of their true value, boats 43% and aircraft 35%. (Drugs are burned.) Confiscated businesses have presented a particular problem. Consider the strange case of Rex Cauble, millionaire rancher, owner of the wildly successful Cutter Bill western-wear stores and kingpin of the "Texas Mafia," who smuggled...