Eh Wah is a 40-year-old US citizen and refugee from Burma (AKA Myanmar). A volunteer manager for the Klo & Kweh Music Team, a Burmese Christian rock group; the Burmese band was touring the US to raise money for an orphanage in Thailand and a Christian college in Burma.
As manager, he took care of the band’s earnings and kept the cash raised from ticket and merchandise sales at their concerts. When he was stopped in Oklahoma, they had already performed in 19 cities across the US, and Wah had 33,000 dollars from ticket sales and donations.
On top of that, he had 1,000 dollars sealed in an envelope for a Thai orphanage, 8,000 dollars from CD and souvenir sales, a 9,000 dollar cash gift from family and friends to one of the band members, and 2,000 dollars for the band’s incidental expenses for a total of 53,000 dollars.
Sheriff’s deputies in Muskogee County, Okla. stopped Wah at 6:30PM on the 27th of Feb, ostentatiously for a broken tail light. However, their intentions became clear when they started interrogating Wah and proceeded to bring out a drug-sniffing dog, which (of course) alerted on the car. They (of course) found no drugs, paraphernalia or weapons; instead they found the cash.
They then bid him good night and sent him on his w- of course not, and no, the tooth fairy doesn’t exist.
They took him in for questioning, grilled him for several hours, threatened him with jail time, dismissed his explanations as “inconsistent stories” and most importantly kept the cash.
“I just couldn’t believe it,” Eh Wah said in an interview. “An officer was telling me that ‘you are going to jail tonight.’ And I don’t know what to think. What did I do that would make me go to jail? I didn’t do anything. Why is he saying that?”
English isn’t Wah’s first language, so he had the officers call one of the band’s leaders, Saw Marvellous Soe.
“The police officer started asking questions,” Marvellous said. “I explained: ‘We are a music team. We came here for a tour.'”
“He kept telling me, ‘You are wrong, you are wrong,'” Marvellous said. “Everything I said, [he said,] ‘You are wrong.’ I said: ‘We are doing a good thing! And now you are accusing us of being like a drug dealer or something like that.'”
Nothing he said could convince the officer, who had either already made up his mind on their guilt… and on the various uses of 53,000 dollars.
“I realized that they were seizing all of the money. I was like, ‘This can’t be happening.’ But I didn’t know what to do.”
“Possession of drug proceeds,” the property receipt reads, despite the fact that no drugs were found:
Although he was released, police later issued a warrant for his arrest in April for “acquir[ing] proceeds from drug activity, a felony.” They claimed the false-positive from the drug dog,”inconsistent stories,” and Eh Wah’s inability to “confirm the money was his” as probable cause.
“Eh Wah doesn’t even know how to smoke. Eh Wah doesn’t know how to drink beer,” Marvellous said. “He’s a very simple man, simple and straight.”
Wah’s case is not an isolated one; we reported on a virtually identical incident awhile back, when a Federal officer was stopped while driving home from his grandfather’s out-of-state funeral.
The police followed the very same playbook: from the arbitrary stop to the drug-sniffing dog falsely “alerting on” the car, to the blatant search for cash, to the use of a made-up drug-related “reason,” to explain why they had to loot the vehicle. It is telling that law enforcement officials have looted more from Americans than actual burglars.
“Just like a child, you can make a child say anything you want. You can make a dog do whatever you want to if you train them the right way,” said the Federal officer, which explains why the drug-sniffing dog reacted to the smell of cash rather than drugs.
Civil asset forfeiture allows law enforcement officials to seize property such as cash, or even cars, without having to prove the owners guilty of any crime. The sheer number of cases have even caused the mainstream media to take notice.
The logic behind it is that the police would be able to eliminate the profit-motive behind drug-trafficking. But as with all “noble” endeavors, it has been corrupted so that seized property can be used by police officers to fund their own departments. It places the burden of proof on the property owner, turning the concept of “innocent until proven guilty” on its head.
Disturbingly, an Oklahoma branch of the American Civil Liberties Union’s investigation has revealed that authorities are focusing on routes that those carrying cash from drug sales travel, rather than routes that those carrying drugs follow.
As such, civil asset forfeiture, far from combating drug use, has created an incentive for cops to ignore drugs until they have been sold for cash, after which they take their cut of the proceedings. Other groups across the nation have reported similar findings.
While Marvellous said he was grateful that the US had opened its doors to refugees like Eh Wah, he also noted that US police are no different from those of his home country.
“We thought America was the best in the world,” he said. “But unfortunately this happened, and it made us [think] like American police are the same as our police in Burma.”
On Monday, the Muskogee County District Attorney has backtracked on the charges brought against Eh Wah.
Sources: RT, Washington Post, The Atlantic
This article (Police Steal $53,000 Meant for Church and Orphanage from Refugee-Managed Christian Band) is a free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author(CoNN) and AnonHQ.com.
