MAKING SURE CRIME DOESN'T PAY

Officers Use New Forfeiture Law To Keep Cash And Jewelry

Returning cash and jewelry to a suspect after she beat federal drug
charges didn't sit well with the two Delta police officers who worked
the elaborate trafficking case for months.

"No way," thought Det. Bob Eden and Sgt. Harj Sidhu, who felt
strongly the return of the items would not serve the interests of justice.

This wasn't chump change either -- and it was no ordinary jewelry.
Eden, the primary investigator, executed a search warrant at a bank
on No. 3 Road in Richmond and found a safety deposit box stuffed full
of cash -- nearly $500,000 -- as well as a two-carat diamond
encrusted ring and a gold Piaget Dancer watch.

The ring was worth an astonishing $74,000 (the bill was in the box),
while the watch came in at $13,400.

"It was so full of cash I had trouble opening the box," Eden recalled.

Eden and Sidhu were some of the first officers in B.C. to take
advantage of the new Civil Forfeiture Act, a provincial law that came
into effect last year. Their application was successful earlier this
summer, as the B.C. Supreme Court ordered the remaining cash and
jewelry forfeited to the province.

"The unique thing about this act is it is retroactive to 10 years.
That's how our file came into play because our file started in 2002,"
Sidhu, a supervisor in Delta's criminal investigation branch, explained.

And what a file.

As Sidhu said, it started in November 2002 when Eden, then a patrol
officer, found a marijuana grow-operation at a Tilbury Industrial
Park warehouse with an estimated street value of $500,000.

"No evidence was found directly at the scene," Eden recalled.

Nor did he find anyone there he could link to the operation.

But that didn't deter Eden, who is now seconded to the Combined
Forces Special Enforcement Unit. Eventually the Delta detective was
able to link the warehouse to the 38-year-old Richmond woman.

From there, the investigation snowballed to what became an elaborate
cross-border and cross-provincial drug trafficking and money
laundering operation.

Eden was able to connect the woman to a major organized crime group
in Ontario. He also came across information that connected her to a
man (believed to be her husband) in California.

Eden believes the woman was shipping about 1,600 pounds of marijuana
monthly to the U.S. in return for large quantities of cocaine
imported into Canada.

"We arrested her twice and brought her into headquarters for
questioning," Eden said.

Throughout the investigation, Eden executed 20 search warrants,
collecting a total of $724,400 in cash and luxury jewelry items, a 9
mm handgun and another $95,000 US stuffed into a kid's knapsack at
her Woodwards Road home.

Eden also seized nearly $4 million in marijuana plants. Four grow-ops
were in Delta, while three were discovered in Richmond.

Charges were laid against other individuals in connection with some
of those grow-ops in Delta, but charges didn't stick to the Richmond woman.

"She wasn't a low level person in the food chain. She was smart
enough not to be hands-on," Sidhu explained.

In other words, she left much of the dirty work to underlings. For
instance, even though it was her name on the lease at the Tilbury
grow-op, it couldn't be absolutely proven she was aware of the drug
operation. As a result, the 13 charges recommended by Eden were never
acted upon.

"It was a lot of circumstantial evidence,"