I want a job where I get to take stuff from people at gunpoint and call myself the "good guy."

Wait. No, on second thought I don't. When I was a kid they called that armed robbery. Now it's called "police work."

"Any money seized ... is subject to forfeiture," said John Gill, special counsel to Nichols . "If we say gambling occurred, regardless of whether we prosecute a specific person, we can seize the property and the money."

In lieu of arrests, authorities still must take a detailed inventory of everything they took and who they took it from.

"If they've got 10 players around a poker table ... they have to give a receipt to each person saying, 'This is the amount we took from you,'" explained Knox County prosecutor Sean McDermott. "They can't just do a blanket total."

Then, the seizing law enforcement agency typically will file a forfeiture warrant with a local magistrate within 5 working days, laying out why there's reason to believe that the money or whatever else was being used as part of a criminal enterprise, McDermott said.

From there, the seized items may become evidence in a larger indictment. Or, in the absence of making a criminal case against someone, the DA's office files a complaint in civil court, arguing that the seizures be subject to forfeiture.

If it's the latter, things proceed much like any other civil case — the owner of said cash/property/poker table has 30 days to file an answer. If the person can prove they are, in fact, the owner (it helps if they signed that receipt,) then he or she can make their case to a judge that their cash and/or belongings were not being used as part of any crime and should be returned. And the state has the burden of proving otherwise.

That's the process, anyway.

"But they never do that," Gill said. "Most people don't want to come in and go through the public embarrassment.

Oh, I've a feeling it goes well past "embarrassment." The very people who profit from this legal theft also get to set all the rules concerning how much hassle and time the process involves - and the chances of success. Win/Win!

UPDATE: Claire reminds me that there have pretty much always been cops who were shakedown artists. True. Most of them at least used to have the grace to hide it behind figleaf rules, though. Now it's policy.