-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">
</A> -Cui Bono?-
This story is mentioned in the beginning of "A License to Steal" : The
Forfeiture of Property, by Leonard W. Levy
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0807822426/stillpointhealinA/
I haven't finished the book yet - it was recommended as a definitive work on
asset forfeiture laws. The definitive website is http://www.fear.org which
seems pretty appropriate when "law enforcement" turns goon
squad-in-search-of OPM other people's money.. or their homes.. and getting
away with murder.
Dave Hartley
http://www.Asheville-Computer.com/dave
---------------
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/bluesky_exnews/20000123_xex_ranchcovetin.shtml
SUNDAY JANUARY 23, 2000
-------------------------------------------------------------------
ARMED AND DANGEROUS
Ranch-coveting officials settle for killing owner
Five police agencies staged bogus drug raid on rich eccentric
to acquire 200-acre spread
----------------------------------------------------------------------
By Paul Ciotti
© 2000 WorldNetDaily.com
Recent revelations about rampant police perjury have made Los Angeles juries
so mistrustful of law enforcement that attorneys for Los Angeles County are
in some cases offering plaintiffs multi-million dollar settlements, rather
than risking the possibility of far larger damage awards should the cases
ever go to trial.
In one of the more infamous instances of alleged law enforcement misconduct
-- the killing of the reclusive Malibu millionaire and rugged
anti-government
individualist Donald Scott in his ranch house by Los Angeles sheriff's
deputies in 1992 -- county and federal government officials tentatively
agreed last week to pay Scott's heirs and estate a total of $5 million in
return for their dropping a wrongful death lawsuit.
Furthermore, they made the settlement despite the deep conviction, says
deputy Los Angeles County Counsel Dennis Gonzales, that the deputy who shot
Scott was fully justified and -- even though the sheriff was never able to
prove it -- that the heavy-drinking Scott was growing thousands of marijuana
plants on his remote $2.5 million Malibu ranch.
Early on the morning of Oct. 2, 1992, 31 officers from the Los Angeles
Sheriff's Department, Drug Enforcement Administration, Border Patrol,
National Guard and Park Service came roaring down the narrow dirt road to
Scott's rustic 200-acre ranch. They planned to arrest Scott, the wealthy,
eccentric, hard-drinking heir to a Europe-based chemicals fortune, for
allegedly running a 4,000-plant marijuana plantation. When deputies broke
down the door to Scott's house, Scott's wife would later tell reporters, she
screamed, "Don't shoot me. Don't kill me." That brought Scott staggering out
of the bedroom, hung-over and bleary-eyed -- he'd just had a cataract
operation -- holding a .38 caliber Colt snub-nosed revolver over his head.
When he pointed it in the direction of the deputies, they killed him.
Later, the lead agent in the case, sheriff's deputy Gary Spencer and his
partner John Cater posed for photographs arm-in-am outside Scott's cabin,
smiling and triumphant, says Larry Longo, a former Los Angeles deputy
district attorney who now represents Scott's daughter, Susan.
"It was as if they were white hunters who had just shot the buffalo," he
said.
Despite a subsequent search of Scott's ranch using helicopters, dogs,
searchers on foot, and a high-tech Jet Propulsion Laboratory device for
detecting trace amounts of sinsemilla, no marijuana --or any other illegal
drug -- was ever found.
Scott's widow, the former Frances Plante, along with four of Scott's
children
from prior marriages, subsequently filed a $100 million wrongful death suit
against the county and federal government. For eight years the case dragged
on, requiring the services of 15 attorneys and some 30 volume binders to
hold
all the court documents. Last week, attorneys for Los Angeles County and the
federal government agreed to settle with Scott's heirs and estate, even
though the sheriff's department still maintained its deputies had done
nothing wrong.
"I do not believe it was an illegal raid in any way, shape or form," Captain
Larry Waldie, head of the Sheriff's Department's narcotics bureau, told the
Los Angeles Times after the shooting. When Scott came out of the bedroom,
the
deputies identified themselves and shouted at him to put the gun down. As
Scott began to lower his arm, one deputy later said, he "kinda" pointed his
gun -- which he initially was holding by the cylinder, not the handle
grip --
at deputy Spencer who, in fear for his life, killed him.
Although attorneys for Los Angeles County believed Scott's shooting was
fully
justified, they weren't eager to see the case go to trial. Recent widespread
revelations of illegal shootings, planted evidence and perjured testimony at
the Los Angeles Police Department's Rampart Division were making the public
mistrust the police.
"I've tried four cases (since the Rampart revelations)," said Dennis
Gonzales, a deputy Los Angeles County counsel. And in each case, he said,
jurors have told him that the possibility that police officers were lying
was
a factor in their vote.
"You have to be realistic as to public perceptions," he said.
Nick Gutsue, Scott's former attorney and currently special administrator for
his estate, put it more bluntly: "(Gonzales) saw he had a loser and he took
the easy way out."
Ironically enough, the county might have had a better chance of winning a
court battle if it had allowed the case to go to trial when Scott's widow
and
four children first filed their lawsuit back in 1993. The county blew it,
says Gutsue. It adopted a "divide and conquer strategy." It prolonged the
lawsuit's resolution with a successful motion to throw legendarily
aggressive
anti-police attorney Stephen Yagman off the case. Then it filed a
time-consuming motion to dismiss the estate from the lawsuit.
In the process, says Gutsue, new revelations of police misconduct began
appearing so frequently that the public's attitude toward law enforcement
began to change. "It was one scandal after another," says Gutsue. "(County
attorneys) stalled so long that the (Rampart scandal) came along and their
stalling tactics backfired."
Although county officials still maintain that Scott was a major marijuana
grower who was just clever enough not to get caught, his friends and widow
maintain that his drug of choice was alcohol, not marijuana. As a young man,
Scott lived a privileged life, growing up in Switzerland and attending prep
schools in New York. Later he lived the life of a dashing international jet
setter who was married three times, once to a French movie star, and who had
gone through two bitter and messy divorces by the time he moved to his
Malibu
ranch, called Trail's End, in 1966.
Although well-liked and generous to friends, Scott drank heavily, could be
cantankerous and deeply mistrusted the government, which he suspected of
having designs on this ranch, a remote and nearly inaccessible parcel with
high rocky bluffs on three sides and a 75-foot spring-fed waterfall out
back.
"You know what he used to say," his third wife, Frances Plante, told writer
Michael Fessier Jr. in a 1993 article for the Los Angeles Times magazine,
"He'd say, 'Frances, every day they pass a new law and the day after that
they pass 40 more.'"
To Los Angeles County officials, the fact that Don Scott got killed in his
own house during a futile raid to seize a non-existent 4,000-plant marijuana
farm is just one of the unfortunate facts of life in the narcotics
enforcement business. It doesn't mean that sheriff's deputies did anything
wrong.
"Sometimes people get warned and we don't find anything," Gary Spencer, the
lead deputy on the raid and the one who shot Scott, told an L.A. Times
reporter in 1997, "so I don't consider it botched. I wouldn't call it
botched
because that would say that it was a mistake to have gone there in the first
place, and I don't believe that."
Someone who did believe that was Ventura County District Attorney Michael
Bradbury. Although Scott's ranch was in Ventura County, none of the 31
people
participating in the massive early morning raid, which included officers
from
the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, the DEA, the National Park Service,
the
California National Guard and the Border Patrol bothered to invite any
Ventura County officers to come along. Furthermore, once Scott was shot, Los
Angeles County tried to claim jurisdiction over the investigation of Scott's
death, even though the shooting occured in Ventura County.
To Bradbury, it was easy to see why. L.A. County wanted jurisdiction. In a
64-page report issued by Bradbury's office in March of 1993, Bradbury
concluded that the search warrant contained numerous misstatements, evasions
and omissions. The purpose of the raid, he wrote, was never to find some
evanescent marijuana plantation. It was to seize Scott's ranch under asset
forfeiture laws and then divide the proceeds with participating agencies,
such as the National Park Service, which had put Scott's ranch on a list of
property it would one day like to acquire, and the Los Angeles Sheriff's
Department, which heavily relied on assets seized in drug raids to
supplement
its otherwise inadequate budget.
For something written by a government agency, the Bradbury report was
surprisingly blunt. It dismissed Spencer's supposed reasons for believing
that the Scott ranch was a marijuana plantation and accused Spencer of
having
lost his "moral compass" in his eagerness to seize Scott's multi-million
dollar ranch. As proof of its assertions, the report pointed to a parcel map
in possession of the raiding party that contained the handwritten notation
that an adjacent 80-acre property had recently sold for $800,000. In
addition, the day of the raid, participants were told during the briefing
that Scott's ranch could be seized if as few as 14 plants were found.
In order to verify that the marijuana really existed, at first Spencer
simply
hiked to a site overlooking Scott's ranch. Discovering nothing, he
subsequently sent an Air National Guard jet over the area to take
photographs
of the ranch. When this also failed to reveal anything, he dispatched a Drug
Enforcement Administration agent in a light plane to make a low level
flight.
The DEA agent, whose name was Charles Stowell, said he saw flashes of green
hidden in trees which he believed were 50 marijuana plants. At the same
time,
Stowell was uncertain enough about his observations -- which he had made
with
the naked eye from an altitude of 1,000 feet -- to warn Spencer not to use
them as the basis for a search warrant without further corroboration.
In an effort to confirm the marijuana sighting -- Spencer by this time had
decided that Scott was growing marijuana in pots suspended under the
trees --
Spencer asked members of the Border Patrol's "C-Rat" team to make a
night-time foray into the ranch. Despite two separate incursions, they
failed
to find anything except barking dogs. The following day a Fish and Game
warden and Coastal Commission worker went to the ranch to investigate
alleged
stream pollution and do a "trout survey" on the dry stream bed. They too
failed to see any marijuana. Two days after that, a sheriff's deputy and
National Park ranger visited the ranch again, this time ostensibly to buy a
rottweiler puppy from Scott. The Scotts were friendly and gave them a tour
of
the ranch. Once again no one saw any marijuana.
This lack of confirmation notwithstanding, four days later Spencer filed an
affidavit for a search warrant saying that DEA Special Agent Charles
Stowell,
"while conducting cannabis eradication and suppression reconnaissance ...
over the Santa Monica Mountains in a single engine fixed wing aircraft ...
noticed that marijuana was being cultivated at the Trails End Ranch 35247
Mulholland Highway in Malibu. Specifically Agent Stowell saw approximately
50
plants that he recognized to be marijuana plants growing around some large
trees that were in a grove near a house on the property."
To attorneys with a lot of experience with warrants, Spencer's affidavit
didn't look like much. "On a scale of one to ten," says former district
attorney Longo, "I would give it a one."
Despite the affidavit's deficiencies -- among other things, Spencer didn't
mention that none of the people participating in any of the previous week's
incursions had reported any marijuana -- Ventura Municipal Court Judge
Herbert Curtis III issued a search warrant which, in the words of the
Bradbury report, became Scott's "death warrant." After Scott's death, a
helicopter hovered over the area in which the marijuana plants were believed
to have been growing. There were no pots, no water supply, no marijuana.
There was only ivy and even that wasn't in the location where the marijuana
was supposed to be.
Larry Longo, a friend of Scott whose children used to play with Scott's
children, says it's absurd to think that Scott had marijuana plants hanging
from the trees.
"I went up there right after the shooting. The trees were 200- or
300-year-old oak trees. The leaves under them hadn't been raked in a hundred
years." If Scott had been growing marijuana under the trees, the leaves
would
have been disturbed and the tree bark broken. "There wasn't a single mark on
the trees. There was no water supply."
Besides, says Longo, "Donald might have been a lot of things, but he would
never be so dumb as to cultivate marijuana on his property." If for no other
reason, he didn't need the money. Any time he needed cash, all he had to do
was call New York and they'd withdraw whatever was necessary out of his
trust
fund. At the time of Scott's death, there was $1.6 million in his primary
trust account.
The Bradbury report caused a huge ruckus in Los Angeles County. Sherman
Block, the sheriff at the time, denounced it and issued a report of his own
which completely cleared everyone, and California Attorney General Dan
Lungren criticized Bradbury for "inappropriate and gratuitous comments."
Cheered by his apparent exoneration by Sheriff Block and Attorney General
Lungren, sheriff's deputy Spencer subsequently sued Bradbury for libel,
slander and defamation. After a long and bitter fight, including allegations
that Bradbury suppressed an earlier report which concluded that Spencer was
innocent after all, a state appeals court declared that Bradbury was within
his 1st Amendment rights of free speech when he criticized Spencer. The
court
also ordered Spencer to pay Bradbury's $50,000 legal fees, a development
that
caused Spencer to declare bankruptcy. According to press reports, the stress
from all this caused Spencer to develop a "twitch."
Spencer wasn't the only one affected by Scott's killing. Scott's wife,
Frances, was so strapped for cash, she subsequently told a judge, she
considering eating a dead coyote she found on the side of the road.
According
to her attorney, Johnnie Cochran, as quoted in the Los Angeles Times, she is
currently living on the property while she holds off government claims to
seize it for unpaid taxes. In 1996, the massive Malibu firestorm destroyed
Scott's ranch house and the outlying buildings. As a result, Frances Scott
currently lives in a teepee erected over the badminton court, albeit a
teepee
with expensive rugs and a color TV.
Scott's old friend and attorney Nick Gutsue recently said he had mixed
feelings about the settlement. While he was glad that Scott's widow and
children didn't have to go through the horror of reliving Scott's death in a
jury trial, at the same time was disappointed that he never got a chance to
clear Scott's name.
"I asked for an apology and exoneration of Scott," said Gutsue. "I never got
one. I was told it was against their policy." That's one reason, said
Gutsue,
he always wanted a jury trial. In a settlement, no one has to admit any
guilt.
"Of course," said Gutsue, "$5 million is a pretty good sized admission."
----------------------------------------------------------------------
<A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A>
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic
screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soap-boxing! These are sordid matters
and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright
frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects
spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL
gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers;
be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and
nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
