Cops Seize $40K from Man Going to Buy Truck - Ep. 7.409

welcome once again to lato's law here's steve lato civil asset forfeiture a topic i talk about quite often is one of the two topics to get people fired up the most on this channel of course the other being qualified immunity i did a video on that a couple days ago but uh a story involving civil asset forfeitures popped up in the news recently down south and uh jonathan sent me the story and you know there's so many of these stories i'm always torn as to which ones i should do i'm not going to sit here and do nothing but civil asset forfeiture stories day in and day out because it kind of loses its impact that way but once in a while i got to talk about this because each one is is crazier than the last it seems and again civil asset forfeiture is the notion that if you come into contact with law enforcement and you've got money or something of value they can take it from you and say we think this is the proceeds or fruits of a crime and if you want it back you can sue us otherwise just let us keep it and they often do this to people traveling with cash and the most common question i get is people ask me steve you know you're a lawyer you talk about this enough if i'm traveling with cash and i'm going to get it taken from me through civil asset forfeiture what could i do to avoid that and the answer is i don't know there might not be much you can do now there's things you could do that depend on the circumstances so for instance if you have a bank that has branches around the country you might be able to go to where you're going determine you want to make the purchase and the person come to your bank branch but that's not gonna work on a sunday uh it's not gonna work if you bank at a smaller a credit union or something and so there might not be much you can do what needs to be done is civil asset forfeiture needs to go away they need to actually end this practice because this is the government stealing from people and this is one of those things where i still get pushback people go steve this can't be happening you must be describing this wrong you must be exaggerating you must you must hate cops from fox 46 out of charlotte exclusive charlotte trucking company owner fights to get 40 000 seized at airport back and this is uh a little stranger even than that the man's name is jerry johnson he did what is legal to do last summer he hopped on a flight at charlotte douglas international and took cash with him okay so he gets on the plane he's got cash so the owner of a charlotte trucking company says nearly forty thousand dollars in cash was seized from him at the airport even he did nothing wrong and wasn't charged with a crime he said i definitely don't think it's fair it's very upsetting that people can just steal your money so he flew from charlotte to phoenix in august his plan was to buy a tractor trailer for his small company uh he was uh going through some ads and he found an auto auction out there so he said oh i'm gonna go out there and buy myself a truck he said they're very competitive thousands of people go it's basically you bring your cash and you put a deposit down and there are places like that auctions and so on where they say that unless you're some kind of qualified buyer with us or whatever you better have cash don't bid unless you've got cash as you can imagine if you jack the bidding up and go oh i haven't got the money i felt like bidding so johnson made a lot of money uh with his business transporting vital stuff around during the pandemic he has two employees and he wants to expand his operation he got to phoenix so he actually got on the plane to charlotte fine and he got to phoenix an undercover officer approached him in baggage claim and asked him if he had any money or drugs on him now if a totally unmarked person walks up to me and says do you have any drugs or money i'd be tempted to call the cops hey this guy's this guy's trying to get drugs everybody this guy's a criminal turns out it was a cop hey you got any drugs or money on you got any drugs or money so he was then interrogated and then they presented him with a piece of paper and said sign this or you're under arrest uh he said they were going to take my money because it was part of a money laundering operation so they discovered that he had the 40 000 cash on him he's traveling uh he got off the plane he made it where he's going so we've heard stories of people who go through tsa and they get pulled out because they got money in their carry-on for instance and then they get turned over to local law enforcement who then takes the money so what appears to happen here if i'm guessing on this i'll admit it but i think i'm right is that somebody saw the money go through tsa and they're like well i don't know and they just called ahead and said hey you know we didn't grab it but if you want it you can have it so the guy gets off the plane an undercover officer is waiting for him because he's traveling with cash which by the way is perfectly legal uh you may know that if you leave the country or are crossing the border with cash you're required to report it i believe it's over ten thousand dollars and i've crossed the border before and if you're coming in through like an international airport they'll actually give you a form on the airplane and say fill this form out and it says you know where you're coming from where you said this enough one of the questions are you you know are you bringing in cash and it's something they do to track it so they can tax it if necessary so this guy's traveling domestically he didn't cross any international borders you are absolutely within your rights legally to travel with cash inside the united states the problem is that you do that you make yourself a target for the pirates i mean i mean the police who will seize your money so um he was asked by a reporter did they have any evidence that you were doing money laundering did they tell you what their basis of this claim was and the man says he did not present any to me so they then took thirty nine thousand five hundred dollars but they let him keep 500 bucks even though he was never charged with a crime the report filled up by the officer says that the money was borrowed from people and stated the money did not belong to him referring to johnson so when asked is this money yours they say he told them no it's not but again he's going to buy a vehicle for his company the point is according to him they handed him a piece of paper to sign this or you're under arrest and the question is if the man's money laundering and the 40 000 is money laundering why do you let him keep 500 bucks i mean that that does not make any sense if if all the money is tainted you take all of it if none of it's tainted you leave all of it so the fact that they take some of it leave some of it implies they know that what they're doing is wrong paul avalar a managing attorney with a non-profit law firm institute for justice is helping johnson try to get his money back and said unfortunately what happened to jerry is common nationally it is not illegal to carry cash avalar says if authorities suspected johnson of committing a crime they should have taken him to court oh this you know what a complex idea if the government suspects that jury was involved in money laundering they can seize his money as evidence and maybe they can even seize it for future forfeiture but then they actually have to show that he's involved in a crime there's only one way to do that in this country and that's through a criminal trial and a criminal conviction and of course none of that has happened here so what the government will do is they'll take the money never charge you with a crime and you say i want my money back and they say oh sue us but when you sue them to get your money back the burden of proof is on you you've got to prove that you are not involved in a crime which is backwards from how most people think of the burden of proof when it goes being accused of something we have what's called a legal fiction and they say oh we're not accusing you of anything we're accusing the money we think the money is guilty uh johnson did previously serve time in prison for drugs and intent to distribute and he's also arrested for marijuana possession in 2012. he says he's turned his life around and in 2015 opened his trucking company so i know there's many people who are skeptical i say oh wait a second steve now we know what's going on here the guy's a drug dealer no no he wasn't charged with anything involving anything to do with any of this um i wouldn't be surprised if after the guy got in the plane they ran as information oh my gosh we could have grabbed his stuff and said he's a drug dealer i mean we could have right i mean he's he's got the rap sheet for it now again the last arrest was nine years ago and he started his trucking company six years ago and i've been around on this earth for a couple of years and in my travels throughout my life i've met people who've turned their lives around i've met a lot of people who've turned their lives around and so you encounter somebody who owns a company and they're working real hard and they appreciate life and you get to talking to them and they go yeah while back i had some trouble woke up one morning in a jail cell and thought if i ever get out of here i'm gonna do it right i'm gonna straighten my life out it does happen and so people like that should be rewarded for what they've done not punished for it so phoenix police did not respond to a request for comment johnson's money has not been returned and he's not been charged with a crime now tv stations in the media been reporting on civil asset forfeiture cases for years and it's quite common that passengers have money seized at airports especially by the dea they view traveling with large sums of money to be suspicious so because it's suspicious they take it and force you to sue them to get your stuff back the institute for justice has filed a class action lawsuit against both the tsa and the dea they want to stop the practice and they call it unconstitutional and that is the most common comment i get to these videos people say steve isn't this unconstitutional well it it is to the average person unfortunately the supreme court has ruled us not so our u.s supreme court has said that civil asset forfeiture is not unconstitutional so long as you let the person whose money you took sue to get it back and if you give them their day in court and that's that the problem of course is that suits get your money back when you're fighting somebody with unlimited resources i.e our government they will make the process as expensive as possible so that let's suppose they stole ten thousand dollars from you i mean seize ten thousand dollars from you you want your money back you go to an attorney and say i want to sue the u.s government for ten thousand dollars the attorney's gonna go we can't do that you go why not because it's gonna cost more than ten thousand dollars and it would and they know that so they're hoping that the guy with the forty thousand dollars won't fight because well he'll have to pay an attorney ten twenty thousand dollars but the good news is that the institute for justice has stepped in and they're handling this so how much you want to bet they're going to roll over and pay because they'll be like oh now the guys actually got a fighting chance of winning and they'll often call up people like this and say hey look we can go to court for a year or two fight over this we'll give you 20 grand back today do you want 20 grand today or the chance of 40 grand a year from now what do you want to do and some people will take that they need the money so it's it's crazy that our government does this to us a judge has now ruled this case can move forward in federal court despite the fact that the tsa and the deoa both filed motions to have the case dismissed they actually brought motions and said no don't even let the guy come to court uh the money was seized properly and he shouldn't be allowed to fight that the tsa will not respond to requests seeking comment and the dea said the drug enforcement administration does not have a comment this time because the case is still being litigated fox 46 that's the tv station reporting this originally out of charlotte asked if the dea could comment generally about the practice of seizing money and if cash can be taken without probable cause of a crime the dea insisted it could not comment due to ongoing litigation money seized goes into a federal forfeiture fund which can be used for any law enforcement purpose including daiquiri makers up armored humvees super bowl rings popcorn makers and all of this stuff's widely documented and if you think i'm making this up search civil asset forfeiture daiquiri maker and you'll find out all about it the attorney at the institute for justice the senior attorney says we're trying to shut this down because the government should not be treating travelers like atms and that's not that far off because any time you incentivize someone to act badly that is if you act badly you'll be rewarded that should be something our society should frown upon and right now the police if they seize your money and they keep it which they're going to do 99 of the time uh they have to split it with the feds quite often or with somebody else but they're often told you get to keep a portion of it do it whatever you want with it as long as you can kind of make it look like it's police related so you'll find these little police departments out in the middle of nowhere that have a road traveling nearby and they uh civil asset forfeiture the heck out of people as they pass by and they use that money to buy all kinds of stuff that they really don't need but hey they got some money laying around why not spend it and you get this where they actually got all kinds of cool vehicles and the you know they got all kinds of neat stuff in the in the police station daiquiri makers is one that seems to be popular uh and you go wait a daiquiri maker for a police station sure why not uh super bowl rings tickets super bowl jackets that kind of stuff it's better if the super bowl is in your town if you do that but yeah you know whatever whatever floats your boat as they say so it's a crazy story but this one in particular is sad because the guy is trying to you know build up his company uh hard-working guy and he's traveling domestically with forty thousand dollars and his mistake was he assumed that as a law abiding citizen that he could actually just go about his business and the police don't see it that way so charlotte trucking company owner fights to get 40 000 back seized at airport in fox 46 published it jonathan70 thanks a lot questions your comments put them below let's talk to you later bye-bye thank you for watching latos law there's a great power in words if you don't hitch too many of them together

Channel: Steve Lehto

Views: 381,638

Rating: 4.9296565 out of 5

Keywords: lemon law, michigan lemon law, lemon law attorney, lemon law lawyer, http://www.lehtoslaw.com, steve lehto

Id: c6n5fyFfhWU

Length: 14min 50sec (890 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 09 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/hyperinflationUSA]

it will take him 2 years to get it back via the courts. by that time inflation will make it worth much less.

[u/Lemons81]

Yes, with bitcoin it would be:

Cops seize bitcoin wallet but doesn't have the keys...