Calling In the Marshals

New guardians take over the Government's bothersome booty

In 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."

Since 1978, federal agents have had the legal authority to strike at the lifeblood of organized crime and drug 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.

The traditional duties of 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, 123 beef hindquarters in Pennsylvania and 1,700 cases of toothpaste seized in New Jersey.

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 tons of marijuana into the Lone Star State during the late 1970s. Cauble's corporate empire was so complex that agents felt he was the only person who could manage it efficiently. So while he was out on bail, the DEA paid Cauble $10,000 a year to run his business. They fired Cauble, however, when they discovered he was running the company into the ground. He was eventually convicted and sentenced to five years in prison.

The U.S. Marshals Service hopes to avoid such embarrassing quandaries by hiring experts from the private sector to oversee confiscated businesses. In addition, legislation currently in Congress would create a revolving fund to cover the costs of maintaining and disposing of seized property. Proceeds from the sale of confiscated items would be returned to the fund.

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." -