AND THE CROWN RUNS AWAY WITH THE COIN

Your Property Can Be Seized On Circumstances Alone

Randy Ryan lost $25,000, but you probably won't feel sorry for him. You
might think what happened to him can't happen to you.

A court hearing two weeks ago to take Ryan's cash shows just how easily the
state can seize your property.

You don't have to be charged with a crime, and the property does not have to
be gained as the result of a specific crime, but simply bear the taint of
one.

Ryan, 32, was a passenger in a pickup pulled over last May for speeding and
tailgating on Highway 102 near Millbrook, Colchester Co.

It wasn't a random stop: someone tipped off Const. Guy Roy to look for the
speeding pickup on its way out of Halifax.

When Roy came to the window, Ryan, in the passenger seat, didn't take his
eyes off the road. That was his first mistake.

"When I stop a vehicle, usually everybody in the car is looking out at me.
But this guy here, he looked straight ahead and stared," testified Roy, who
has 23 years with the RCMP and a lot of kilometres as a member of its
mobile-traffic unit.

Roy smelled alcohol on driver Richard Todd Keleher and inside the cab. He
ordered Keleher, Ryan and a third Saint John, N.B., man, Christopher George
Dorbyson, out of the truck to search it.

Keleher passed a roadside alcohol test, and wasn't charged with speeding or
tailgating.

In a pat down, Roy felt something bulky in Ryan's pants pocket. Ryan reached
in and handed him a roll of $3,235 in cash.

The Mountie then searched under the seats and noticed the men's discomfort.
That would be Ryan's second mistake.

"I saw some signs of nervousness, being agitated, pacing, especially the
accused," said Roy, referring to Ryan, although he was not charged.

Inside the pickup, Roy found two cellphones, two pagers and Ryan's third
mistake: $25,000 in a clear plastic bag that was inside a white shopping
bag.

The bag was in a compartment under the backseat that usually stores a spare
tire. Roy had to unscrew a lug nut to get at it.

"I put my head out of the truck and I asked them who owned the money," said
Roy. "There was a five-to-10 second pause as they looked around to each
other. Then Mr. Ryan spoke up and said, 'I do.'"

Ryan said he was planning to buy a car, and a bank lent him $60,000 to pay
bills.

Roy checked for criminal records and discovered Ryan had an 11-year-old
conviction for drug possession, and one of the other two had been convicted
of trafficking.

He added up the cash, the criminal records and the pagers and concluded the
money must be the proceeds of a drug crime.

The cash was in five elastic-bound bundles, each containing five more
bundles of $1,000.

There were 853 20-dollar bills.

"(That's) common currency for gram buys of marijuana, $20 pieces of crack
cocaine or $20 pieces of hash," testified Const. Blair Hussey, who leads
drug investigations for Halifax Regional Police.

The packaging and the concealment were telltale signs of the drug trade,
too, Hussey said. Most legitimate businessmen don't make deposits in grocery
bags, the money in badly sorted bundles with nary a Queen's head facing the
same way.

An Ionscan test showed cocaine traces on the money, but it was not part of
the evidence at the hearing. Nor was Ryan's criminal record.

"There's no obligation on the accused to explain (the money)," said Ryan's
lawyer Kevin Coady, who didn't call witnesses. "There's the issue of whether
you call evidence; the second issue is, if you call it, is it going to be
believed?"

The onus is on the Crown to prove the money was gained through a crime. But
it does not have to tie it to a specific one.

In Ryan's case, both federal Crown attorney David Schermbrucker and Judge
John MacDougall agreed the evidence was all circumstantial -- and the
circumstances were obvious.

"There's no evidence that Mr. Ryan has been involved in the drug trade,"
conceded Schermbrucker. And then, "Maybe Mr. Ryan had cash from some
legitimate source, but you'd hardly carry it around in a shopping bag."

The judge said the only reasonable conclusion is that it was drug money, and
forfeited it to the Crown.

Ryan did get his $3,235 cash roll back. Because without the bag, elastics
and hiding place, it would be hard to prove that he's not just a guy who
likes to carry a wad in his pocket.