It's not just a capture I'm looking to do here. I want to first capture the packet, then in real time, check the payload for specific data, remove it, inject a signature and reinject the packet into the stack to be sent on as before.
I had a read of the ipfw divert sockets using IPFW and it looks very promising. What about examples in modifying packets and reinjecting them back into the stack using divert sockets? Also, as a matter of curiosity, would it be possible to read the data from the socket using Java or would this restrict me with packing mangling and reinjecting etc?
I was going to echo other responses that have recommended iptables (depending on the complexity of both the patterns that you're trying to match and the packet modifications that you want to make) - until I took notice of the BSD tag on the question.
As Stephen Pellicer has already mentioned, libpcap is a good option for capturing the packets. I believe, though, that libpcap can also be used to send packets. For reference I'm pretty sure that tcpreplay uses it to replay pcap formatted files.