Gang Strike Force / Sheriff turns up missing vehiclesPolice union head says politics being played with audit
By Mara H. Gottfried
mgottfried@pioneerpress.comUpdated: 05/27/2009 12:09:24 AM CDT
Ramsey County sheriff's investigators say they've tracked down the 14 vehicles that couldn't be located in an audit of the Metro Gang Strike Force.
The legislative auditor's review of the task force released May 20 was critical of sloppy bookkeeping. Some paperwork was missing for the vehicles in question, which is why they needed to be hunted down. But "the facts demonstrate the vehicles were never missing," said Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher.
Hennepin County sheriff's Capt. Chris Omodt, Gang Strike Force commander, suspended task force operations Thursday, after he said he found evidence investigators were shredding documents at the task force's New Brighton headquarters the previous night.
St. Paul Police Federation President Dave Titus has said at least two officers present were St. Paul officers who told him the documents being destroyed "were completely unrelated to anything to do with the audit."
Fletcher and Titus asserted Tuesday that Omodt should have accounted for the cars when auditors told him about them, before the report was released.
Titus said he believed "there are political motives behind it. I don't get why anyone would go to this level or this extent, but some wanted the old regime to look bad."
The audit focused on activity during Ron Ryan's tenure as the Gang Strike Force's commander. Ryan, a former St. Paul police officer and Ramsey County sheriff's deputy, retired in October.
Omodt did not return calls seeking commentTuesday.
As the audit was under way, Legislative Auditor James Nobles said his staff shared information with Omodt when they couldn't locate cars "and he would attempt to help us in any way he could, and some vehicles he was able to locate."
The Gang Strike Force's advisory board meets today to discuss its response to the audit and how to move forward. Fletcher said he plans to present the information his office found.
The report said the Gang Strike Force couldn't locate 13 of 80 vehicles forfeited between August 2005 and October 2008 because its records and case files didn't contain documentation. The vehicles still had active titles as of April, and three "were still registered to the person they were seized from or a lien holder," the report said.
Another car that was being held as evidence pending a hearing also couldn't be located, the report said.
The report noted the Gang Strike Force had a contract for towing and impound services, but investigators sometimes had cars towed to other law enforcement impound lots. "The strike force's vehicle tracking report was not always consistent with the information contained in the criminal case files about where a vehicle was actually towed," the report said.
A St. Paul police officer and a Ramsey County sheriff's deputy assigned to the Gang Strike Force contacted the Ramsey County sheriff's office during the weekend and reported "they believed there had been no effort to locate the cars before, during or after the audit," Fletcher said.
The two strike force investigators brought information to the sheriff's office at 9 a.m. Tuesday, and the case was assigned to the sheriff's office Special Investigations Unit at 10 a.m., Fletcher said. By 4 p.m., all the vehicles had been accounted for, Fletcher said.
Investigators with the Special Investigations Unit hit the streets, visiting locations where the vehicles were thought to have passed through, and matched the vehicle identification numbers (VINs) of the cars that were listed as missing with records at the locations. Fletcher said they determined:
# Four had gone to Cars With Heart and were resold.
# Six had gone to Twin Cities Transport & Recovery, of which two were sold to new owners and four were scrapped.
# Three had gone back to the registered owners.
# One was in a police impound lot.
The forfeiture documents were in order, but the final disposition documents showing what had happened to the cars were lacking, Fletcher said.
"However, it wasn't difficult to backtrack that simply by going to those two locations and getting the documentation," Fletcher said.
Auditors couldn't find documentation for the 14 cars, but they believed they "can be found and should be found," Nobles said Tuesday. "It wasn't our job to necessarily find them, though we went to extensive effort to locate the ones we could."
The issue for the auditors "was the strike force should be able to keep track of the cars it seized and document where they are and how they're being used," Nobles said.
An e-mail sent from an auditor to Omodt on April 21 asked for information about 17 cars. Paul Meskan, a Ramsey County sheriff's deputy assigned to the Gang Strike Force, said he was given the list that day or the following day.
Meskan said he and his partner went through case files and talked to investigators. They determined where 11 cars were that same day and gave the information to Omodt, Meskan said.
On the final list, six of the 17 original cars don't appear and three others were added, said Ramsey County sheriff's Lt. Dale Sommerhause.
"It was never communicated back to us that there were still other questions," Meskan said. "We would have been happy to resolve it, but we didn't know there was anything to resolve."
Nobles said his office can "only vouch for what the records showed at the time we examined them."
"We gave anyone and everyone at the strike force an extended period of time to find the cars or show us records of what happened to them. If they show up now, that's good, but it does raise the question as to why they couldn't find them weeks and weeks ago."
Mara H. Gottfried can be reached at 651-228-5262.