In 1992, Donald Scott, the eccentric owner of a large Malibu estate, was killed in his home by an ad hoc team of raiding cops. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department led the raid, but a panoply of state and federal police agencies participated too. Police claimed Scott was operating a large marijuana grow on the property. Scott, who always feared the government would take his land, actually repudiated the use of illegal drugs.

No marijuana or any illicit drugs were found on his property. A subsequent investigation by the local district attorney confirmed Scott wasn’t paranoid: The LA County Sheriff’s Department was motivated by a desire to take Scott’s property under civil asset forfeiture laws, auction it off, and keep the proceeds for the department. Bizarrely, Scott’s home wasn’t even in LA County. Despite recent reform efforts, the promise of forfeiture continues to be a major motivating force in drug policy across the country.

Transcript

Radley Balko: In the early hours of October 2, 1992, a wealthy, eccentric Californian named Donald Scott and his younger artistic wife Frances were up late drinking, as they often were. The couple eventually passed out in the bedroom of their large cabin in Malibu at around 2 or 3 a.m.

As they fell asleep, they may have heard the waterfall that splashed down onto their sprawling 200-acre property. They called it “Trail’s End Ranch.” And then just before 9 a.m., Frances Plante Scott awoke with a start.

Frances Plante Scott: We were in bed asleep, and the house started shaking, and the dogs were going crazy and … [sigh]

Radley Balko: That’s Plante in an ABC “20/20” interview from 1993, describing the morning that ruined her life.

Frances Plante Scott: I got up as fast as I could to get dressed. And I was going to the door, and I see this face looking at me. At that point, the door burst open, and I just saw all these guns. These men had guns, and I didn’t know who they were or what they were doing.

Radley Balko: As Plante threw on a shirt and pair of overalls, a team of 30 law enforcement officers loomed near the entrance to her home.

The raid team was an alphabet soup of police and government agencies, including officers from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, the Drug Enforcement agency, the California Bureau of Narcotics, the U.S. Forest Service, the Los Angeles Police Department, the National Park Service, the California National Guard — and there were even a couple of researchers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. Notably, the raid team didn’t include a single police officer from Ventura County, where the ranch was actually located.

The motley crew of heavily armed officials had made their way up the winding road to the ranch in 15 different vehicles. Now they were inside Plante’s home, with their guns drawn.

Frances Plante Scott: I just screamed, “Don’t shoot me, don’t kill me,” and I was backing into my living room. My husband heard me. He came running out of the back of the house into the living room. I heard him say, “Frances, are you all right?”

Radley Balko: Unsure of what was causing all of the commotion, Plante’s husband Donald Scott grabbed the .38 revolver on his nightstand. He was groggy, and his vision was likely still foggy from recent cataract surgery.

Frances Plante Scott: He had his gun pointed above his head. He looked at me, and the next thing, someone yelled, “Put your gun down, put your gun down, put your gun down.” Bang, bang, bang. My husband fell down right in front of me.

Capt. Richard DeWitt: Looks like 927D here.
Dispatch: At the location?
Capt. Richard DeWitt: Yeah.
Dispatch: Some bodies there?
Capt. Richard DeWitt: No, we put ’em down.
Dispatch: We killed him?
Capt. Richard DeWitt: Yeah.

Radley Balko: That’s Capt. Richard DeWitt of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, on the phone with his commanding officer. You can hear the surprise on the other end of the line, as the commander learned that someone had been killed.

What had Donald Scott done? What merited this sort of overwhelming police response?

Scott wasn’t a murderer or an arms dealer. He wasn’t an escaped felon or a dangerous fugitive. Instead, the police claimed on their search warrant affidavit that he was growing marijuana.

Bill Aylesworth: They couldn’t care less about the weed if there was any there. Basically, they wanted the land.

Radley Balko: In the years leading up to the raid on his home, Donald Scott’s friends and family said that he had grown increasingly paranoid that the government wanted to take his property from him.

Frances Plante Scott: He had a feeling that, it was just a feeling that they were going to try to get the land from him somehow. He thought that they wanted the land to the point of where they would kill him for this land.

Radley Balko: It turns out that Donald Scott was right. The government really did want his property. A lengthy Ventura County District Attorney investigation confirmed Scott’s suspicions and concluded that seizing his ranch was one of the motivating factors for obtaining and serving the search warrant.

The lead LA County Sheriff deputy on the case filed an affidavit claiming that there was a marijuana grow on the property. If the agency uncovered it, they might be able to seize all 200 acres of Trail’s End Ranch under civil asset forfeiture laws, and then they could auction it off. The millions of dollars in proceeds would go right back to the LA Sheriff’s Department and the other participating agencies. The raiding officers would be heroes. It was the sort of bust that could make a cop’s career.

Except that isn’t what happened. There was no major marijuana operation. In fact, there wasn’t a single marijuana plant anywhere on the property.

Dan Alban: At the end of the day, they were just looking for an excuse to invade his ranch, search everything, and find some basis for the seizure — which, in this case, they didn’t find.

Radley Balko: For the next decade, the dispute over what exactly happened that morning at Trail’s End would fuel countless national news stories, lawsuits, and defamation claims. It would pit the Ventura County district attorney’s office against the LA Sheriff’s Department and the state attorney general’s office. Those latter two agencies would issue their own findings exonerating the sheriff’s deputies for Scott’s death.

It would also spur a furious debate over the policy of civil asset forfeiture, and would become just the latest in a series of corruption and brutality scandals to rock the largest sheriff’s department in the country.

From The Intercept, this is Collateral Damage.

I’m Radley Balko. I’m an investigative journalist who has been covering the drug war and the criminal justice system for more than 20 years.

The so-called “war on drugs” began as a metaphor to demonstrate the country’s fervent commitment to defeating drug addiction, but the “war” part quickly became all too literal.

When the drug war ramped up in the 1980s and ’90s, it brought helicopters, tanks, and SWAT teams to U.S. neighborhoods. It brought dehumanizing rhetoric, and the suspension of basic civil liberties protections. All wars have collateral damage: the people whose deaths are tragic but deemed necessary for the greater cause. But once the country dehumanized people suspected of using and selling drugs, we were more willing to accept some collateral damage.

In the modern war on drugs — which dates back more than 50 years to the Nixon administration — the United States has produced laws and policies ensuring that collateral damage isn’t just tolerated, it’s inevitable.

This is Episode Eight, “Legalized Takings: The Land Grab That Killed Donald Scott.”

Donald Scott led a privileged life.

He was raised in Switzerland, attended elite prep schools in New York, and he lived off of a trust fund.

The Scott family fortune was fueled by his grandfather’s invention: Scott’s Emulsion, a cod liver oil supplement marketed as a cure-all. It took off in the U.S. and Europe, and it’s still popular in parts of Asia.

Scott’s Emulsion ad: Scott’s Emulsion, I like you. You help me to grow. Mmm, I like it!

Radley Balko: Scott’s jet-setting life was eccentric, worldly, tumultuous, and saturated with booze. He consorted with Hollywood stars and starlets, raced Ferraris, and generally relished the role of an international playboy. He bounced all over the globe.

In the 1960s, he had a six-year relationship with the glamorous French actress Corinne Calvet. That relationship ended badly, as did his next marriage. But later in life, Scott settled down with Frances Plante, an aspiring country music singer 23 years his junior.

Frances Plante Scott’s song “Drunk on Pain” plays: I’m drunk on pain. / It’s driving me insane.

Bill Aylesworth: Frances was from Texas, Galveston. She was a red-headed, hot-fired, wild, high-energy lunatic and absolutely gorgeous as well. Just an amazing person.

Radley Balko: That’s Bill Aylesworth. Nearly a decade after Donald Scott was killed, Aylesworth met and became romantically involved with Plante, Scott’s widow. And from her, Aylesworth became intimately familiar with the story of Trail’s End.

Bill Aylesworth: Spending that much time with her, four and a half years. I wrote a treatment for the whole thing. All I would hear is her all day long talking about it. She was obsessed with it.

Radley Balko: Aylesworth also collaborated with Plante professionally and produced some of her music.

Frances Plante Scott’s song “I Tried It” plays: I wanna shake more than your hand, Tammy Wynette.

Radley Balko: Donald Scott bought the lush Malibu property known as Trail’s End in the 1960s. Over the years, he’d converted it into a hideaway, transforming it into a surrogate of the grand mansion he grew up in Geneva. It was also a sanctuary for his eclectic collection of books, Persian rugs, and ancient maps.

Friends said Scott could also be incredibly generous to those he trusted. For example, gifting a collector’s model 1959 Cadillac Eldorado to a friend and family attorney named Nick Gutsue. But Scott was also worn down by years of legal fights with his ex-wives over money. He grew reclusive and began drinking more heavily. He also became increasingly distrustful of the government. Scott had stopped filing federal income tax returns, and he was worried that the government had designs on the property that had become such an important part of his identity.

Bill Aylesworth: So it’s 200 acres. I mean, just unbelievable, right? And it’s so attractive that the park service, National Park Service, owned all of the property on either side of Donald’s property.

Radley Balko: Trail’s Ends Ranch was hidden by a dense thicket of heavily vegetated forest dominated by oak and sycamore trees. It sat in the Santa Monica Mountains, about 4 miles from the Pacific Ocean.

Scott and Plante lived in a 1,000-square foot stone and wood ranch-style cabin about a quarter mile in on the property. It also included a bunkhouse and a barn. On three sides, Trail’s End was framed by towering cliffs, streams, and a 75-foot waterfall. But amid all of that canopied tranquility, the creeping border of federal parkland was causing Scott persistent anxiety.

The Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area had acquired parcels bordering Scott’s ranch. His relationship with the park’s administrator, the National Park Service, had been contentious. Scott complained that visitors were harming his property. He said hikers would throw or kick rocks into the waterfall. Scott also suspected that the government wanted to absorb Trail’s End into the parkland.

Bill Aylesworth: It wasn’t paranoia because they were actually coming up, making offers to buy it. That’s not paranoid, saying, “They want to take my land.” They want to take your land!

Radley Balko: The National Park Service denied it offered to buy the ranch or had any plans to seize or condemn it. Additional reporting over the years hasn’t supported that claim. But a former park ranger and a superintendent of the park revealed Scott’s land was of interest.

Bill Aylesworth: They wanted his land, and he didn’t want to sell it. So they came up with a scheme to get it for free: Just take it from him.

“They wanted his land, and he didn’t want to sell it. So they came up with a scheme to get it for free: Just take it from him.”

Radley Balko: And Scott’s land wasn’t just beautiful; his 200 acres in Ventura County was worth millions. And according to a subsequent report by a Ventura County district attorney, police agencies in the area had also taken notice.

Dan Alban: This is pretty classic policing for profit.

Radley Balko: Dan Alban is a senior attorney at the libertarian law firm the Institute for Justice. He co-directs the firm’s national initiative to end forfeiture abuse.

Dan Alban: There was a $5 million estate. There was an eccentric millionaire who was suspected of somehow being involved in growing marijuana plants. And the idea was, if we can catch him in the act — catch him with these marijuana plants — then regardless of what the penalty would be for having 50 to 100 marijuana plants, we could seize the entire estate and then sell it off to someone and pocket the $5 million.

Radley Balko: The LA County Sheriff’s Office spent nearly a year investigating Scott’s alleged marijuana operation. In the end, they found nothing. Not a single plant.

At the core of their strategy was a legal concept called civil asset forfeiture.

Dan Alban: Asset forfeiture law has its origins in 17th-century English maritime law. England was in a trade war at the time with various other countries, including Spain.

Radley Balko: England passed laws saying they could seize ships or cargo that had been involved in smuggling or piracy.

Dan Alban: And the reason was if a ship was smuggling goods into your port, and you’re England, you want to prosecute the owner of the ship, but the owner of the ship is very rarely on the ship. The owner of the ship is back in Lisbon or Madrid or somewhere. And so there’s no way to actually exact justice on that person or deter them from behaving badly in the future. And so, because you didn’t have jurisdiction over the actual people committing the criminal acts, or at least not all of them, the way to resolve that and to enforce these various customs laws that England was trying to enforce was to seize the ship, or to seize the goods, or both, and forfeit them to the crown.

Radley Balko: The early American colonies adopted similar asset forfeiture laws. And while the Supreme Court expanded them during the Civil War, they were used only sparingly. But that changed with alcohol prohibition in the........

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