-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">
</A> -Cui Bono?-
In a message dated 01/24/2000 1:18:22 AM Eastern Standard Time,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
<<
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. >>
I don't really approve of heavy drinking, but it's never been a capital
offense. I'm wondering here about the supposed 4,000 pot plant words. When
I read and heard about this, the wild-eyed raid by all the government
agencies that could grab a gun, was because some helicopter pilot said he saw
fifty pot plants hanging in a tree. Such vision. As for Scott's not
trusting the government, is someone out there saying he should have? Don't
forget, the raiders had already talked with a real estate developer who
wanted the land, and apparently they were already negotiating a price. Kind
of sounds like tax farming to me.
And did they return the millionaire's assets and the land along with the five
million? I'm sure the estate was worth ten times the settlement figure.
People were taking up collections for the poor widow, because the government
grabbed everything and she had no money for the lawyers. They should give a
new name to that area--Nottingham.
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