Village council members indicated they are willing to fight the sanctions, and voted unanimously to hire the law firm of Gelber, Schachter & Greenberg to challenge the Justice Department’s findings.

Treppeda said the village was awaiting receipt of about $9 million in forfeiture funds when the sanctions were announced this week. He said the independent attorneys will be tasked with helping the village get those funds from the government.

The Department of Justice’s objections to the activities of the Bal Harbour Police Department seem to be that 1) funds were managed and spent without proper accountability and 2) that the funds were managed and spent in illegal ways, including the use of forfeiture dollars for salaries (which is directly prohibited by the DOJ’s Equitable Sharing guidelines, with limited exception). The DOJ has not indicated if any forfeitures might have vested from cases where innocent or third-party owners are concerned, although we know that Bal Harbour didn’t care so much about building criminal cases as seizing cash:

However, several experts said the village’s practices raise disturbing questions about cops targeting cash rather than criminals — and operating thousands of miles from Bal Harbour.

In 2010 alone, village cops took part in 23 cases leading to $8.2 million in seizures — all outside of Florida — without law enforcement agents making a single arrest, records show.

“You lose sight of the law enforcement purpose when you’re concentrating on the money,” said Neal Sonnett, a Miami attorney and former president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. “The profit purpose is very dangerous.”

This kind of situation has happened before. In his October 2000 Miami Law Review article (“A Discussion on Why the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act Will Not Significantly Reform the Practice of Forfeiture”), Brant Hadaway described similar problems with the South Florida Impact Force:

Perhaps the most egregious example of the effects of such funding is the creation of Multijurisdictional Task Forces (“MJTFs”), mostly under the auspices of federal law, and which rely largely on asset forfeitures to fund their operations. A MJTF called “South Florida Impact” (“Impact”), which operates in cooperation with various South Florida police departments, depends entirely on seizure of laundered money for its operating budget. Impact has to launder drug money itself in order to attract money launderers to its accounts. This technique, which Impact officials call “pickup,” allows Impact to identify money launderers and seize their assets. In a telephone interview, an unidentified Impact official explained that Impact’s ratio of funds laundered to funds seized was one-to-one, a ratio which the official called “the best in the industry.”

It is not just Impact’s reliance on forfeiture as an organization that raises suspicions about its motives; the compensation arrangement with one of its founders appears to have been facially corrupt. Woody Kirk, a retired customs officer and full-time consultant to Impact, originally had a deal by which he received a twenty-five percent commission on all assets he helped seize. While the Justice Department put a stop to Kirk’s commissions, it apparently was unable to prevent him from arranging for kickbacks from his network of informants.

Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey has cited Impact as an effective law enforcement operation, but other law enforcement experts have stated that Impact is an example of what has gone wrong in the pursuit of criminal money. Impact does not appear to be accountable to any elected government body. Available information only indicates that Impact is supervised by a “steering committee of state and local officials,” and that its books are audited by the City of Coral Gables. It is thus not clear whether any political body, such as the governing bodies of Miami-Dade County or Coral Gables, would have the authority to “pull the plug” on Impact. Especially in light of Impact’s broad and amorphous jurisdictional sweep, the circumstances seem to add up to a law enforcement task force that bears greater resemblance to a band of roving “executive privateers” than it does to a law enforcement agency or police department.