Page 468 - NIXBOOK

Seizing drugs from criminals is pretty cool, but even better is seizing cash. Now while it’s not illegal for criminals to carry around
huge amounts of cash, it is of course quite illegal to profit from drug dealing so if all the evidence points to drug dealing activity
with cash as the main motive, then the money can be confiscated and a judge will decide if the police can keep it or not.
Invariably, we got to keep it. Here’s Kilo with some of his finds, and yep these are hundred dollar bills:

Specifically, to establish a connection between stacks of cash and drug dealing, one of the main elements needed was the fact
that the money literally smelled like drugs. This was easily accomplished by handling the money with new disposable gloves
and setting it down somewhere far away from where the drugs were. I’d typically put the cash in a new small brown paper bag,
and also set up several other small brown paper bags that were empty. Set Kilo loose in the room, watch him run around in seek
mode, watch him sniff them all and then alert to the one bag with the cash in it. Easy.

Now some of you might be saying wait a minute, isn’t it very likely though that Kilo was alerting to the smell of the US currency
itself? You know like he’s come to associate the smell of the actual paper money itself to drugs so much that he just alerts on all
paper money automatically every time? Oh no, I’d tell you. Because we had a plan for that. It involved buying a large bag of
shredded money straight from the official US money factory. Where slightly defective money - printed with a misalignment or
something – was shredded and then sold as a novelty item. Or in my case, as a training aid. This was a common practice for drug
dog handlers.

This bag of shredded money is about 2 feet long. It’s five pounds, and it all smells exactly
like US currency. Cause it is. And most importantly; it’s all brand new clean and has
never been contaminated by anything else, including and especially drugs.

Once a month or so I’d take handful of shredded currency and hide it somewhere while
Kilo was in a training session sniffing out drugs. As a matter of routine, he ignored the
smell of the shredded money and instead home in on the training aids made of real
actual drugs. Just to be sure about everything, I handled the money and the drugs with
disposable gloves, so whatever scent my hands had would not get stuck on the training
aids. Smart drug dogs will key in on things like that and use them to their advantage.
And then I’d record the training session on an official form, so if a defense attorney in
the future ever wanted to challenge the drug dog in court, I’d be ready.

Now if you’re on the criminals’ side and want to point out that is most or all of US currency in public circulation must be certainly
cross contaminated with trace amounts of drugs, I’d tell you that most if not all of US currency that is contaminated with drug
scents is on a microgram level, which your average drug dog is not going to able to detect. Dogs’ noses are superb, but there
ARE limits. So when the dog alerts on drug money, it’s because a drug dealer was handling it.