If you’re a cop, you can pretty much do whatever you like forever. Shoot anyone, take anything, you have to screw up pretty damn bad as an officer of the law to see any sort of consequences for your actions. Yet, improbably, one now-former police chief in Wayne City, Illinois pulled it off with a truly outrageous scheme: Selling off seized motorcycles for his own personal gain.
Anson Fenton, chief of police for Wayne City from 2022 to 2023, had a profitable little side gig for himself. According to a Department of Justice press release, he would take motorcycles that had been seized by the police force he administered and just sell them off to random buyers, pocketing the change for himself. Fenton ran this scam at least three times, once even riding a seized Suzuki Hayabusa across state lines to Virginia, where he traded for a Mustang he wanted.
Cops can take anything, but they can’t just sell it for themselves
Of course, given that Fenton ran the local police, it naturally leads one to wonder whether his little impromptu dealership formed an incentive for the department to seize more motorcycles. Under civil asset forfeiture laws, police can steal property they believe was involved in a crime without anyone actually ever being charged — and without any proof or evidence that the seized property was even tangentially related to any wrongdoing. So long as a cop says something bad happened, they have free reign to take whatever they like.
Where Fenton went wrong, legally speaking, was keeping the funds. Had he sold off the bikes with department approval and given the funds back to the cops, everything would’ve been totally in the clear — all his motorcycle thefts would be completely above board. But because he kept the cash and the Mustang for himself, Fenton could see the inside of a jail cell for the next ten years and have to pay out $250,000 per sale. A bad apple if ever I’ve seen one. We’re lucky the saying ends there, and has nothing to say about spoiling the bunch.
