Civil Asset Forfeiture:

Legitimate law enforcement tool or vicious threat to the future of music?

Jimmy Tebeau

On the first of November, according to St. Louis Today, concertgoers camping at Spookstock, an annual music festival at Camp Zoe in Missouri, were awoken by the tramping boots of over 70 agents from the DEA, FBI, IRS, Homeland Security, the Highway Patrol, and local police agencies. The authorities descended en masse, taking financial records, computers and gate receipts, but little else. A press release from Camp Zoe noted that one man was arrested for outstanding warrants not related to the raid. Later that day, the Camp Zoe bank account, amounting to over $200,000, was also seized.

One week later, authorities filed an application to take the 352-acre property owned by Jimmy Tebeau, bass player in the Grateful Dead tribute band The Schwag. According to the complaint, agents had witnessed numerous instances of drugs being bought, sold and consumed on the property over the previous four years. Later, they accused Tebeau of tax evasion and issued an arrest warrant; he pled Not Guilty.

Federal and state laws allow authorities to seize any assets that have been used in the commission of a crime. The law was formulated to be used against racketeers but has grown into a fundamental weapon in the war against drugs. In its current form, it effectively allows the Feds to shut down a drug operation without filing any charges. 

Under Federal law, it is the property itself that has committed the crime by being made available for drug sales and use, one of the reasons no conviction is necessary for the asset to be seized. Instead, the owner must prove a negative—that the property in question was not involved or that there was no crime. Missouri law is slightly different, requiring a conviction before forfeiture and not allowing the seizure of real property. It also requires that all income from seized assets go towards education, while Federal law prefers to kickback 80% to state law enforcement agencies and keep the remainder for themselves.

The amount taken in by the Department of Justice has become a significant portion of their budget. River Front Times offers the following information from a 1992 Cato Institute study on the Comprehensive Crime Control Act.

The Justice Department's forfeiture fund (which doesn't include forfeitures from customs agents) jumped from $27 million in 1985 to $644 million in 1991; by 1996 it crossed the $1 billion line, and as of 2008 assets had increased to $3.1 billion. According to the government's own data, less than 20 percent of federal seizures involved property whose owners were ever prosecuted.

Asset forfeiture has become big business, and it will certainly keep growing. In the meantime, in the vast majority of cases, there has been no prosecution, much less conviction.

The authorities obviously targeted Camp Zoe because the behavior of visitors and staff had become a little too egregious. Drug sales and use were rampant, the Highway Patrol was making more and more traffic stops of people heading to the festival, and even some of the bands that played there had become disillusioned by the drug-addled “Trust-afarians” that littered the ground in front of the stage. Add to all that the failure to pay sales tax and you have a classic case of pushing the envelope a little too far. 

But still, the extreme action by public safety authorities raises some red flags. As budgets get tighter and tighter, will more and more festivals held on private land get raided? Will we loose Bonnaroo? Will concerts at Madison Square Garden suddenly get less smokey? Will large festivals and concerts simply disappear in favor of smaller, more intimate and easily regulated venues?

The wise consumer, or anyone interested in maintaining the guarantees of of personal liberty enshrined in the Constitution, will keep a weather eye on the situation. For my part, I’m no longer going to hold large festivals on private property because I am well aware that trying to keep festival goers from consuming the substance of their choice is a fool’s errand. I have better ways to spend my time.