Luger defends controversial police tactic

Several times each year, an unusual scene plays out at Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. Acting on a tip, federal agents approach someone in the terminal, ask to look in their luggage and find bundled wads of currency. The passenger gives a dubious explanation. A police dog detects the scent of drugs, the agents seize the cash and send the suspected drug courier on his way.

Andy Luger, the top federal prosecutor in Minnesota, knows about the swirling controversy over law enforcement taking people's property without charging them with a crime. That's why he said he has set a high bar for this practice, called "civil forfeitures."

"Four lawyers in my office review every one of these cases before they're filed, including me," Luger said last week. "I do that because one, Minnesota has a discussion and debate about this practice going on. Two, I saw a forfeiture practice that I found appalling, and said so."

He was talking about the disbanded Metro Gang Strike Force, whose wanton seizures of property were documented and denounced in a blistering report in 2009. The co-author of that report? Andy Luger.

The Strike Force scandal prompted lawmakers this year to outlaw state forfeiture in cases without a criminal conviction or admission of guilt.

The feds still have that power. In February, the U.S. Senate confirmed Luger as the new U.S. attorney for the Minnesota district, and now he's the one signing off on this increasingly controversial police tactic.

"We are in a somewhat unique situation in that the practice no longer exists at the state level," Luger said. If a local or state law enforcement agency tries to get around the state ban by taking a case to him, "I won't allow it," he said.

Still, he defends the practice as a tool to disrupt major drug trafficking organizations, which are often based elsewhere but use the Twin Cities as a transit point. Why not arrest the people with the dirty money? The feds want to take out the leaders, who typically aren't the ones transporting the drugs and the cash, he said.

That could be the reason that DEA agents allowed a man named DMar Ontrell Tucker to get on a plane in June, after keeping $25,895 in cash found in his possession. A civil action filed by Luger's office on Oct. 21 lays out how the confrontation took place in an airport bar in Terminal 2.

The airport police special investigation division got a tip about a different traveler, but agents saw that man talking to Tucker. Two agents approached the men and asked them about their travel plans. One of them asked Tucker if he was carrying a large amount of money.

Tucker said he had about $3,000 in his pocket but did not mention the $22,000 that one detective found in his carry-on, the complaint said. Tucker, who said he was a music producer, told conflicting stories about what he was doing in Minnesota, and said the majority of the money was given to him by a musician he barely knew to package and print compact discs, the complaint said.

The agents could not find any record of Tucker's company or the musician, but they did find "multiple narcotics arrests and various convictions" on Tucker's record, the complaint said. They brought in Brio, a certified "narcotics detector dog," who "alerted to the odor of narcotics" on the cash.

Luger makes no apologies for these kinds of civil forfeitures.

Still, no matter how they're done, these forfeitures turn the presumption of innocence on its head, and force people to prove their property is not guilty. Luger said these cases will be pursued with the "highest level of integrity." He knows that a state that no longer grants that power to its police will accept nothing less.