Photos by Kyle Green | The Roanoke Times

The Roanoke office of the Drug Enforcement Administration has made exercise equipment obtained in a forfeiture last year available for officers to use.

Forfeitures have raised concerns of agencies "policing for profit," but "the bottom line is to deprive criminals of the ill-gotten gains," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Sharon Burnham, an asset specialist for the Western District of Virginia.

Forfeitures have raised concerns of agencies "policing for profit," but "the bottom line is to deprive criminals of the ill-gotten gains," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Sharon Burnham, an asset specialist for the Western District of Virginia.

Jerome Eugene Brown is serving a 13-year federal prison sentence, but the workout equipment he kept in his Roanoke basement is getting regular use.

The treadmill, the elliptical trainer, the weight machines -- all are enjoyed by some of the same officers who busted Brown last year for dealing cocaine. A former storage room at the Roanoke office of the Drug Enforcement Administration is jokingly called the "Jerome Brown Memorial Gymnasium."

"I now use it four times per week," said Tim Carden, the DEA's resident agent in charge.

Ownership of the workout equipment went from lawbreaker to law enforcers via a federal forfeiture. It's a process whose targets in the Western District of Virginia include a patch of secluded woods used for moonshining, a house sometimes described as the biggest in Giles County, and an assortment of clearance-sale coffee tables, among many other items.

"The bottom line is to deprive criminals of the ill-gotten gains," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Sharon Burnham, the district's asset specialist.

Each year federal forfeitures collect assets worth millions of dollars -- $135,418,480 in fiscal year 2008 in the Western District of Virginia alone. Nonmoney items usually end up auctioned or, like the exercise equipment, used to support operations. Much of the money flows back to state and local law enforcement agencies.

The practice has long raised concerns about "policing for profit" -- a catchphrase among critics. But many police agencies say their work depends on income from forfeitures.

"It critically complements our funding sources," Virginia State Police spokeswoman Corinne Geller said.

Making crime not pay

Burnham is credited by her boss, U.S. Attorney Julia Dudley, with leading an aggressive, decade-long drive to increase forfeitures.

One case Burnham is pursuing now is against Jody Alton Smith, a Franklin County car dealer and farmer who was convicted last year of dozens of charges related to illegal liquor-making. Burnham won a jury verdict awarding the government eight acres of land in Halifax County where a still was found, $70,000 found in the insulation in Smith's attic and pickup trucks that a video surveillance camera caught entering and leaving the Halifax property.

That forfeiture will be finalized when Smith is sentenced. Burnham is preparing to go to court again to seek an as-yet undisclosed amount of money -- court filings indicate it will be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars -- that Smith is thought to have gained from selling moonshine.

Smith and his attorney declined to comment on the case.

Any property used in committing one of a long list of federal crimes or acquired with the gains of a federal crime can be subject to forfeiture. When gains from a crime cannot be found -- because they've been spent or hidden, for example -- other property can be substituted as a target for forfeiture. Estimating the amount that should be forfeited can be a hotly contested issue, as it is expected to be in Smith's case.

Forfeitures can be brought even when there has been no conviction, a situation that helped prompt such a national outcry that Congress passed reforms in 2000 meant to assert more controls on the process.

There also may be forfeitures even when no financial gain is likely, such as when a crack house is seized to prevent its continued use.

In the federal fraud case against Giles County investment adviser Ted James Johnson Jr., who was convicted last year of running a Ponzi scheme that cost investors millions of dollars, prosecutors are seeking to take his house in Pearisburg. Testimony in the case indicated that the house, sometimes described as the largest in the county, likely has liens against it that exceed its value. Burnham, who is not prosecuting the case, said the government likely will let the house go into foreclosure and pursue an order granting an equivalent value of assets.

Forfeitures in fraud cases often go to compensate victims, but Johnson may not possess much else. Prosecutors have said that if he does have resources, they should go to repaying victims, not paying debts on his home.

Johnson, who is living in the house while awaiting sentencing, declined to comment on the case.

Money, guns, cars and more

In the past five years, the Western District of Virginia has collected $324 million from forfeitures, including $276 million from the 2007 settlement in the case against Purdue Pharma over its marketing of OxyContin. The Purdue Pharma payment was one of the largest such settlements in the nation.

Large cases such as those against Purdue Pharma and ITT have skewed the district's numbers, but with those cases removed, forfeitures have climbed each of the past five years.

Money, guns and cars are the most common assets targeted in forfeitures, Burnham said.

One of the largest cases recently was last year's conviction of Errol Sirjue, one of Brown's associates, for dealing marijuana. After pleading guilty, Sirjue forfeited a 9 mm pistol, a diamond-set watch and $770,000 that investigators found in a garbage bag at his home.

But prosecutors seek an array of other items.

When Roanoke businessman Jay Aneja was indicted last month on charges connected to the fire at his family's Weekend Sofa Outlet, prosecutors listed 20 pieces of furniture they wanted Aneja to forfeit. Included was an assortment of coffee tables and end tables, some listed as bearing clearance tags.

Aneja's wife has said her husband is in India and has maintained his innocence.

During the past five years, state and local agencies that assisted with Western District forfeiture cases received $55.3 million, the U.S. attorney's office reported.

The biggest part of that, $46.5 million, went to the Virginia State Police for its work in the Purdue Pharma case. Among other purchases, the money went toward building a track for training police in driving skills, funding a computer evidence recovery unit and developing a system to share investigation information more easily with other agencies, Geller said.

Other local distributions included $622,988 to the Roanoke Police Department. The department used the money to buy everything from six police cars and equipment for them, to flares, hand sanitizer and latex gloves, spokeswoman Aisha Johnson said.

The Salem Police Department used $288,830 it gained from federal forfeitures to buy a new evidence van, a radar trailer, nonlethal beanbag weapons and more, Chief Jimmy Bryant said.

Federal rules prohibit using forfeiture assets to fund ongoing expenses or to replace regular budget funds.

But like Geller, Bryant pointed to forfeitures as an important piece of his agency's finances. In Salem and elsewhere, he said, forfeiture money makes it a lot easier on the locality to keep equipment and facilities up to date.

Forfeitures researcher John Worrall, a professor of criminology at the University of Texas at Dallas, predicted that the ongoing recession will drive a jump in forfeitures as state and local budgets tighten.

He said that even in 2001, when he surveyed a national sample of law enforcement agency heads, more than 60 percent said forfeitures were necessary for their budgets.

As for whether increased forfeitures could lead to abuses such as those that led to a push for reforms in the 1990s, Alexandria lawyer David Smith said he expected it would.

Officers may be more tempted to proceed without probable cause, said Smith, the first deputy chief of the justice department's asset forfeiture office and the author of a two-volume reference work on forfeitures. Now in private practice, Smith said he still encounters an attitude of "we'll take the money and you can tell us about it later."

Worrall and Smith both pointed to recently reported incidents in Texas where local police invoked state laws to seize money from travelers as apparent examples of forfeitures taken too far.

Worrall said he thought such cases make up a tiny fraction of forfeiture activity across the country. He noted, however, that many people involved in forfeitures may not test the legitimacy of the action in court because the cost of doing so may be more than the value of the asset.

Similarly, Roanoke lawyer Tony Anderson, who has long experience in federal court, said forfeitures can cut into someone's ability to defend themselves against criminal charges by tying up resources needed to pay attorneys or expert witnesses.

Anderson is representing Johnson, but he emphasized that he was speaking generally, not about any specific case.

"It makes it hard for them to have anything left to pay for the cost of their defense. ... It makes it hard to level the playing field," he said.

Saving taxpayers' money

Carden, the DEA resident agent, said the environment for forfeitures has changed since he started with the agency in the 1980s.

"When I was a young agent, pretty much everyone drove trafficker vehicles," Carden said. That's far less common now, because of stricter guidelines and also suspects taking defensive steps such as putting assets in relatives' names, he said.

In Brown's case, the government sought to take a 2007 Honda Ridgeline truck but ended up agreeing to release it to his mother if she paid a $777 storage fee.

But authorities kept about $500,000 that investigators found in a safe in Brown's girlfriend's apartment.

And they kept the workout equipment, which Carden said is improving law enforcement without cost to taxpayers.

At midday Wednesday, a stereo thumped, a news channel ran on a television screen, and two agents sweated on the treadmill and elliptical trainer.

"We work 12 to 14 hours a day," Carden said and nodded toward the exercise room. "It's a good stress release."

Staff researcher Belinda Harris contributed to this report.