LAW DENTS DEALER'S LIFESTYLE $300,000, LAND SEIZED FROM MARIJUANA GROWER

For the second time in six years, Jerry Hartman has to find a new way
to make a living.

When foot ailments made it impossible for Hartman to continue working
as a machinist in 2000 after 25 years on the job, he learned how to
grow marijuana and sold it to a few of his friends.

"Unfortunately, Jerry was too good at growing marijuana and he
realized financial profit," a consultant hired by an attorney for
Hartman said in a recent memorandum filed in Waukesha County Circuit
Court. "When he purchased land to grow the marijuana, both the plants
and his profits flourished."

When narcotics investigators got wind of his flourishing enterprise,
they jailed Hartman on charges that recently sent him to prison with
a four-year term. But it's not just the prison time that will leave
Hartman looking for a new line of work when he regains his freedom in 2010.

Hartman will be starting from scratch at age 56 because investigators
scooped up more than $300,000 that he pocketed over the last few
years and took title to 9 acres that he cultivated in rural Waukesha County.

The seizure could be a textbook example of how authorities use potent
asset forfeiture laws to force drug dealers into a new livelihood
when they get out of prison.

"The ability of the government to forfeit property connected with
criminal activity can be an effective law enforcement tool by
reducing the incentive for illegal conduct," the FBI says on its Web
site. "Asset forfeiture can remove the tools, equipment, cash flow,
profit, and, sometimes, the product itself, from the criminals and
the criminal organization, rendering the criminal organization
powerless to operate."

Attorney Michael Sperling said this week that Hartman's decision not
to contest the seizure of his land and money in federal court
reflected his desire to end a wearying uphill battle.

"I think he's just trying to bring this whole thing to an end," Sperling said.

But even as Hartman begins his prison term and federal prosecutors
close their files on the seizure of his land and cash, a state
prosecutor still has her eyes on a plasma television, a 2002 Subaru
and a 1962 Alfa Romeo that investigators took from Hartman when they
arrested him last year. Those items are still the subject of a
forfeiture case in state court that contends they were bought with
money Hartman made peddling pot.

Hartman was sent to prison recently by Waukesha County Circuit Judge
Donald Hassin Jr., who also ordered him to pay fines and court costs
totaling about $25,000.

Hartman was arrested in November when investigators seized about 40
pounds of marijuana, $204,000 and three vehicles with the assistance
of a self-admitted drug dealer who was arrested on suspicion of
speeding and drunken driving, according to court records.

After the dealer, a friend of Hartman's, was found to have $15,000
and one-half pound of marijuana in his car, the dealer cooperated
with investigators from the Waukesha County Metropolitan Drug
Enforcement Unit. Cash and plants

A raid that night on a home Hartman rented for $1,200 a month in
Waukesha yielded $12,900 that had been given to the cooperating drug
dealer for the 3-pound transaction, roughly $75,000 in additional
cash, about 10 pounds of marijuana and marijuana-growing supplies,
according to an inventory attached to an affidavit filed in Circuit
Court by investigators.

From a storage facility on Merrill Hills Road, investigators seized
about $129,000, about 30 pounds of marijuana and a 1996 Chevrolet truck.

When narcotics officers visited the plot of land, on Holiday Road in
the Town of Genesee, four days after Hartman's arrest, they found the
remains of several marijuana plants still in the ground and holes
"where the entire root system had been torn out of the ground,"
according to the documents. Seizure protested

To preserve his right to fight the land and cash seizures in federal
court, Hartman, through Sperling, filed documents contending the
seizures violated various constitutional rights, were not supported
by sufficient evidence and were overly punitive.

"The land in question was purchased for private, legitimate use and
any alleged use for illicit purposes was incidental and limited to a
small portion of the property and forfeiture of the entire property
is inappropriate," Sperling wrote in the three-page document, which
amounted to the only fight Hartman put up in the federal court case.
In it, he agreed recently to a settlement in which the government was
awarded the land and roughly $304,000 of the seized cash.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Lisa Wesley this week declined to explain how
the government settled on those terms, and Sperling declined to say
why Hartman decided to end that fight shortly before pleading guilty
to the criminal charges in federal court.