IT’S COME TO THIS: CA sheriff orders raid on Indiana Batmobile garage, allegedly as favor for friend.

We interviewed the San Mateo County Deputy District Attorney, prosecuting this case.

Dan Noyes: “You wrote a letter to Racop in September of last year saying that there would be no criminal charges. What changed?”

Marie McLaughlin, San Mateo County Deputy District Attorney: “Additional investigation, the detectives were able to obtain search warrants and obtain additional evidence.”

McLaughlin would not discuss that additional evidence or the sheriff’s unusual step of sending four investigators across the country, for what Racop argues is a simple business dispute.

Noyes: “After the case went nowhere with the first criminal case, the civil case, is the sheriff stepping in for a friend here?”

McLaughlin: “I can’t speak to that, I have no knowledge about what relationship if any the sheriff has with the victim.”

We wanted to talk to Sheriff Bolanos about Anagnostou and about the use of public funds – four round-trip airline tickets, hotels for three nights, meals, overtime.* He didn’t return our repeated calls and texts to his personal cellphone. His office confirmed he’s away on a month of vacation; he leaves office in January after losing the election. The undersheriff now in charge, Mark Robbins, and the department’s spokesman, Lt. Eamonn Allen, refused our request for an interview citing the ongoing investigation.

We ran the case by Tony Brass, former prosecutor for San Francisco and the US Attorney’s Office. He told us, “I just can’t imagine why it’s in criminal court. It shocks me that it’s in criminal court.”

He says this squabble over a luxury item, the Batmobile, belongs in Indiana civil court – with no involvement by the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Department.

“It simply defies reason, in my view, why so many people, so many high-ranking members of law enforcement, would have to go and enforce something so unnecessary? And so trivial?”

* California’s in the very best of hands.