PREVIOUSLY: DOLLISON’S DOCKET: Humboldt, Murder and the Death Penalty

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So if you are a movie buff like me, you probably enjoy quoting famous lines from movies and attempting to put them into context. One of my favorites was from 1987’s Wall Street. Michael Douglas’ legendary Gordon Gekko character says the following: “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right…”

Douglas won the Academy Award that year, and many people believe that line from that speech played a decisive role in the win. The other day I started to think: Does our infatuation with greed color our own views of particular issues we encounter? Here in Humboldt, the obvious one is the marijuana issue. Now many would agree it does, and they stop at the marijuana growers in the community as the only folks here who are accused of being greedy.

I think such a simplistic analogy is not fair. The marijuana industry in Humboldt alone is worth in excess of $1 billion dollars and thus it is a fallacy to focus on just one group of folks to determine whether or not greed motivates their activity. The growers are merely the farmers. Then there are the customers — the buyers, if you will — who hope to make money by selling the high-quality Humboldt crop in other locales for a significant increase from the wholesale-retail markup. Lastly, there are the “asset forfeiture seizures” by law enforcement that even in a bad year typically top $1 million. So there really is this tripartite alliance that desires to keep the status quo in place. Is greed the central motivating factor of each of these separate groups, who admittedly all have very different and separate biases?

Recently the California Court of Appeals affirmed a murder conviction of a case that I had prosecuted called People v. Brian Fiore. Although the appeal centered around an arcane jury instruction issue and a legal interpretation of the felony murder rule, I am sure it was very interesting for the justices of the Court of Appeal to read the actual facts of the case, and how that effected their analysis of the legal issues.

Fiore and his partner wanted to buy approximately 14-16 pounds of marijuana. This occurred in 2009, when wholesale prices were higher, at about $3,500 a pound. The opinion revealed that the case involved a vehicle pursuit, and money was discovered after the vehicle crashed over the side of a hill, but what was interesting was the money was in several rolls of currency that only had a $100 bill on the outside and single dollar bills on the inside. They were about $48,000 short. There was an automatic weapon involved, an AK-47, the murder by Fiore of his partner, David Fields, and an unsuccessful suicide attempt by Mr. Fiore, who self-inflicted a gunshot wound to his head.

Many of my friends outside of Humboldt whom I described the facts of the case to said it sounded like the movie Thelma and Louise. Older friends said Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. However, was the basic motivation of Mr. Fiore and Mr. Fields none other than greed, and to what extent did these bizarre set of facts play a role in the ultimate successful conclusion of this case and the decision to publish the appellate opinion? So it appears that at least a plausible case of “greed” can be argued for those who are “purchasers.” (Even though in reality they were nothing more than thieves).

In Humboldt County, there is no disagreement that the economy has been foundering for many years. Traditional industries such as commercial fishing and of course the timber industry have dramatically declined. Other than certain positions within the government and a few very select professions, the most obvious way to make large amounts of money here is by growing marijuana – although that is truly under assault as well, as the floor has dropped out from underneath the wholesale market. Some estimate that the price has dropped to about $1,000 to $1,500 a pound, although the wholesale purchasers make considerably more when they sell Humboldt’s famous crop on the retail market – either illegally, or now legally in places like Colorado and Washington. The sale of it through medical dispensaries in California is significantly more legally murky due to a conflicting patchwork of legal opinions on that very topic. (I’ll save that for another article.).

There is one more economic engine driving the economy here: tourism. I have friends who live all over the country, and whenever I tell them where I live, they all say how majestically beautiful our Redwood Coast truly is and how much they want to come visit here. However, those of us who actually live here talk more about the explosion of violent crime.

So the last question is: Does the violence and crime that comes with the marijuana industry here in Humboldt threaten our remaining and only true growth industry, tourism? A case could be made that our lousy and very expensive air service probably does more harm, but if the ultimate extension of greed connected to this one product, marijuana, also delivers violence and a concomitant drug culture then eventually people will start to ask this question for themselves.

During the recent DA campaign, one of my oft repeated lines when I was speaking to Southern Humboldt types was that law enforcement didn’t really care about their marijuana, they just wanted their cash (and vehicles and other belongings and in very rare circumstances their houses). Of course the avenue to obtain those items is to find and seize illegal marijuana (or other drug activity). If law enforcement at least indirectly benefits from these seizures, then does some semblance of greed play a role? If that statement is true, and very few ever disagreed with me, then does at least greed play a role in the aggressive seizure practices? The best argument for this was when the State of California decided to shut down our Drug Task Force, we said, nope, we’ll gladly operate it on our own, because it pays for itself, quite handily. We have done so successfully now for several years.

Like most here in Humboldt, I read the Lost Coast Outpost quite a bit and it seems that most all of the stories on the site are about law enforcement going after this grow, the seizure of these drug related assets and, sadly, violence. Lots of violence. Now, a social anthropologist using a proper scientific method could spend the better part of a year studying these trends and could come up with the answer as to whether or not they are related. Or you can answer that question with a hunch and say, “Yep. It is obvious they are related.”

So just like I started this piece with a line from a movie, I will end it with one. The legendary Lee Strasberg, playing Hyman Roth in Godfather II, said rather angrily to Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone “This is the business we have chosen for ourselves!”

Michael, of course, promptly had him killed at the end of the movie.

Allan Dollison is a local attorney.