Unfortunately for the L.A. County Sheriff’s Office, it turned out Scott had friends in high places. Among them was the District Attorney of neighboring Ventura County, and he was not pleased. It seems Trail’s End Ranch is not in L.A. County in the first place—it is across the line in Ventura. The Ventura D.A. wanted to know why the raid had gone down behind his back.  And since the shooting had taken place on his turf, he took over the case. This awkward turn of events led to an unprecedented investigation of one county sheriff by another, and when the report was released five months later it went off like a grenade. The last page was a map taken from Deputy Spencer’s files with the note: “80 acres sold for $800,000 in 1991 in same area.” At a packed press conference in Ventura, the D.A. said, “Clearly one of the primary purposes was a land grab by the Sheriff’s Department.”^[25]

The Scott case will no doubt see some kind of rough justice at the taxpayers expense one day, but in the vast majority of forfeitures, the suspect is simply relieved of his assets and sent on his way.  Guilt or innocence has nothing to do with it.  Eighty percent of the people are never even charged with a crime.^[26]  They just lose their possessions.  Minorities are particularly susceptible to this form of institutionalized piracy since everybody knows that a non-white with a wad of dough is probably dealing.  This realization led the sheriff of Volusia County, Florida, to start using the forfeiture law as a toll gate on I-95. His men began stopping Miami-bound suspects on the basis of skin color—eighty percent of the cars they searched were driven by blacks or Hispanics—and if the people in the car were carrying more than $100 in cash it was assumed to be drug money and it was confiscated.  Since fighting to get it back in court could cost as much as ten grand, few people bothered to try. When public outrage began to attract press attention,