Feds Now Want to Keep Safe Deposit Box Contents

welcome once again to lato's law here's steve lato we've got an update to a story we've been following for a little while at beverly hills california those safe deposit boxes that were seized by the feds and a lot of people sent this to me so thank you very much but now the fbi wants to keep the fortune in cash gold and jewels they found the beverly hills raid and the question is is that an abuse of power answer yes michael finnegan of the los angeles times wrote the article and posed that question and remember fbi agents got permission to tear the safe deposit boxes from the walls of the beverly hills business and haul them away and a u.s magistrate actually said yes you can do this but there are limits on the raid so the business was called u s private vaults they had been charged in a sealed indictment with conspiring to sell drugs and law under money now there were no allegations against any of the customers so the magistrate said the fbi could seize the boxes but had to return the contents to the owners and this is directly from the warrant it says this is a quote this warrant does not authorize a criminal search or seizure of the contents of the safety deposit boxes unquote now the fbi is trying to confiscate 86 million dollars in cash millions of dollars more on jewelry and other valuables that the agents found in the 369 boxes prosecutors claim the forfeiture is justified because the unnamed box holders were engaged in criminal activity although they have disclosed no evidence to support the allegation so they basically say look we had this box in our possession we were allowed to open it to inventory the contents and while inventorying the contents we came to the conclusion that the owner of the box was a criminal therefore we get to keep this stuff box holders and their lawyers of course dispute this they say this is a brazen abuse of forfeiture laws and say that prosecutors in the fbi are trampling on the rights of people who thought they'd found a safe place to put their confidential documents heirlooms gold a rare coins and cash these lawyers say if the fbi wants to search the boxes they first need to meet the standard for a court issued warrant which would be probable cause that evidence of specific crimes would be found and they did not do that in fact they specifically said we don't know what's in any of these boxes we don't know so the magistrate who signed the warrant said again this warrant does not authorize a criminal search procedure the contents of the safety deposit boxes unquote so one of the lawyers said the government can't take stuff without evidence in the hopes that you're going to get it later referring to evidence the fourth amendment and the forfeiture laws require the opposite that you have the evidence first then you can take the property but we know that that's not how it always goes police routinely find money and just keep it and say well we'll figure this out later forfeiture laws enable the government to confiscate assets tied to criminal activity the generally low standard of proof makes it an appealing tool for prosecutors when criminal trials must prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt so they don't have to prove that this stuff is guilty beyond reasonable doubt they just have to prove that there's a likelihood and blah blah blah so fbi spokesperson referred questions to the u.s attorney's office spokesperson for that office denied the government was misusing its powers by trying to confiscate box holders belongings here's the quote we have some basis to believe that the items are related to criminal activity some basis some basis that sounds convincing doesn't it you've got some basis in general he said a number of factors would lead the fbi to pursue forfeiture of the boxes contents such as large stacks of cash kept by a person with a criminal record or no known source of income now here's the thing back up and just think about that following this logic if you have a criminal record and you're ever found to have cash that might be a problem that might indicate that you are up to criminal activity because why would you have money if you are a former criminal and by the way the author of this article makes the point possession of cash is legal cash is legal it is legal to possess cash u.s currency is not contraband money is something you are allowed to have in fact i i would say that society encourages you to have it in fact we want people to have money we like them to have money i like money i suspect you like money it's not illegal to have money so the full quote that michael finnegan wrote is possession of cash in any amount is legal i'm an attorney i assure you he's correct on that beyond 86 million dollars in cash the fbi is seeking to confiscate thousands of gold and silver bars uh patek philippe and rolex watches gemstone earrings bracelets and necklaces many of them in felt or velvet pouches the fbi also wants to take one box holders poker chips from the aria casino in las vegas so here's the deal here is like a silver coin for instance it has value uh as u.s currency i can spend this it's worth a half a dollar it's worth 50 cents but it's actually worth more than that because it's a collectible so i hang on to it and and so if you had a bunch of these in a box in california or maybe gold ones they make gold coins 20 gold pieces that look kind of like this you know he had a bunch of those in the box and they found they go hey you're a criminal why why do you have these um now just to be fair the fbi has returned the contents of about 75 boxes and plans to give back the items found in at least 175 more but they haven't done that yet they say that there was no evidence of criminality at all in those boxes probably because they were near empty but federal agents have not determined who owns what was stored in many of the other boxes the indictment says that u.s private vaults marketed itself to attract criminals who want to distort valuables anonymously and to keep tax authorities at bay an owner and a manager of u.s private vaults were involved in drug sales it says and co-conspirators helped customers convert cash into gold to evade government suspicion so again you're not allowed to go out and evade suspicion apparently there are a lot of people out there who like to stay off the radar of the officials and in this day and age i don't think there's anything wrong with that the idea that you've got assets and you don't want other people to know you've got these things nothing wrong with that remember that when it comes to the government you're supposed to pay taxes on your income income taxes so the fact that you own something doesn't mean that you have to somehow tell the government oh by the way i own this could you would is that okay can i can i have your permission to keep this oh i'm i'm sorry here take it from me i i'm scared of having it you you have it it's better if you have it i guess among those grabbed in this dragnet was a man named joseph ruiz who lost his life savings in the raid he had fifty seven thousand dollars in cash saved up it was his life savings he's an unemployed food service worker who lives near crenshaw boulevard and the ten he's 47 years old and if you ask me says he distrusts banks and he views the world as unstable and joined the club my friend so he kept his money at u.s private vaults now if you want to know where he got the money from which by the way is none of your business but he'll tell you because right now he's got to be telling people otherwise he can't get his money back and he might not get it back but he can actually tell you where he got the money from he has 57 000 in cash that was taken and he obtained it in two legal settlements one of which was for injuries he suffered in a car accident and another was for housing code violations at his apartment complex the fbi seized the 57 thousand dollars they rejected his request to return it and they're now moving to confiscate it because obviously why on earth would someone keep 57 000 cash in a safe deposit box why would you do that unless you're a criminal so he says they kind of stole my money and and many people would say uh correction they stole your money uh by the way he recently worked at gate gourmet an airline caterer and when he went to the fbi to try to reclaim his money a federal agent asked him if he belonged to a drug cartel are you are you a member of a drug cartel because you've got 57 000 cash and we don't think any law-abiding us citizen could possibly have 57 000 in cash unless they were a member of a drug cartel so so fess up are you a member of a drug cartel no we don't believe you so he says i'm made out to be a criminal and i didn't do anything i'm a law abiding citizen by the way his father is a los angeles police officer or at least he was so there have been several lawsuits at least 11 filed by box holders against this action trying to get their money back and they want to get these uh various court orders declared unconstitutional case you're curious this is all part of civil asset forfeiture uh and in 2000 to 2019 so the first 20 years basically of this century depending on where you start counting forfeitures generated 46 billion dollars for the federal government according to an institute of uh for justice report and yes this is basically just a tax this is just another way the government raises money uh in the u.s private vaults case the fbi's may 20th notice of forfeiture against 369 safe deposit boxes marked a major escalation of what was already a raw display of power by the fbi and the u.s attorney's office in los angeles a former prosecutor named david b smith who wrote a book on how to prosecute and defend forfeiture cases says this definitely doesn't smell good they can't say you show me this is legitimate money that's not the law and no judge is going to let them do that except we've seen that they do that so box holders who fail to claim their property the next few weeks will automatically lose it so they got the boxes and then they announce if you want your stuff back you've got a time frame within which you must try to claim it there actually are people out there who might not know about this yet it's possible we always hear stories about that someone say yeah i was actually traveling in europe i got stuck over there because kovad i don't watch the news i come home go to my bank and and enter you know safe deposit box place and places all shut down and there's signs in the door uh it's actually possible that someone out there who had a box doesn't know about it but if they don't claim their property the next couple weeks they lose it boom gone so you lose all arguments at that point however if you want to challenge the confiscation you've got two choices one is to concede that the fbi has a right to take some of it and ask for some of it back and that's the negotiation that they often do with you so if you get caught traveling with twenty thousand dollars in cash and they take it from you and you say i want my money back they'll often say well tell you what we'll split it you give us 10 we'll give you 10 and you sign a thing saying you can't come after the rest they'll negotiate with you for your own money so if you want to you can negotiate with them the second thing you can do is you can contest the forfeiture by june 24th which would then require the government to show evidence in court linking the property to some sort of crime but of course there's the risk of high legal fees because this ain't cheap and it ain't free jeffrey b isaacs an attorney for box holders said prosecutors are trying to extort people into exposing their identities in order to investigate them it's unprecedented and i think it's very dangerous in their lawsuits box holders claim the fbi is forcing them to give up either their fourth amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures or their fifth amendment right not to criminate themselves so they're basically saying look you know if you want to keep your money explain to us where it came from explain yourself and of course that would be you testifying against yourself in a roundabout way so the lawyers say that the government's intent all along was to search the boxes which was in direct defiance of the magistrates warrants and they're looking for evidence against the customers so from the start the raid on u.s private vaults posed challenges for the fbi legally so the article in the los angeles times is quite lengthy and it's wonderful and they're doing a great job of following this story it happened in their backyard of course and they've got a wonderful staff over there and michael finnegan has been writing about this and so there's much much more to the story but at the heart of this if we've been following this as we have since the beginning there's a private business a private business like mail boxes etc but instead of mailboxes they've got safe deposit boxes and they tell you that you can come in and get a safe deposit box anonymously so some people go interesting so i got stuff that i might want to stash someplace don't leave it laying around my house can't put it in the bank obviously i can put in a safe deposit box at the bank but i can do it here it's local suppose you live in beverly hills you know so you put a bunch of stuff and so there's three or four hundred people who are doing this and so then the government decides that they think that the people who are running that business are committing crimes on the side it's not crimes with the boxes it's crimes they're doing on the side so the government gets a search warrant to search and seize stuff on that property and specifically the warrant said they were allowed to grab the nest the the framework that the boxes were in but they couldn't take that just leave the boxes laying around so they had to take custody of the boxes for safe keeping and the magistrate said explicitly your search warrant and your seizure warrant is not for the contents of those boxes even though they'll be in your possession only thing you can do is inventory the stuff and give it back to its rightful owners and that's what this whole story started with was well the fbi's got your stuff they're going to catalog it make sure that nothing gets lost and then they're going to give it back well once they started cataloging it assuming that they didn't lose a whole bunch of the stuff along the way they decided that oh a lot of this is evidence of crime and and now of course the evidence of crime is simply somebody having cash and the idea that they can look at an amount of cash and go you know 57 000 is too much for you to have why would you have 57 000 why don't why don't you explain that to us no why don't you explain why it's illegal for a u.s citizen who works hard and saves their money to have accumulated 57 thousand dollars that's something we should applaud not something we should prosecute how do you look at something and say oh that must be related to a crime now i understand there's a possibility let's let's suppose that something so unique that was discovered in one of these boxes was recognized as hey wait that's stolen let's suppose for instance there's an antique watch one of one only one known to exist in the world and let's make sure that this is a hypothetical you can't argue with it's engraved it's engraved and it's got an engraving on it that's unique they only made one watch some watch company 200 years ago made this one watch for the king okay and it's engraved to the king from the watchmaker and that watch was stolen from a museum decades ago and it's been missing it's the holy grail of watches let's assume those facts are true if they find that watch in one of these safe deposit boxes yes you say oh this watch belongs to museum we can positively identify it you give it back to museum and then you might ask the box owner why are you in possession of stolen goods but that's different than simply finding something going hey that's valuable that must be linked to a crime no that's that's not how you define crimes and again i'm a lawyer i assure you that's true you cannot say simply because you've got something of value you're a criminal and you can't say because you're a criminal you can no longer have anything of value that's not that's that's that's not correct either okay so story is still unfolding there are at least 11 pending lawsuits and there's going to be probably more on this in the news but as of right now the fbi who originally said we're simply going to inventory this stuff and then give it back they've now changed their position said oh we're actually going to keep it the federal government's going to keep this stuff and uh let me give some of it back but but the 57 thousand dollars you've got that you can't explain in a way that we like that's that's evidence of a crime that's evidence of a crime that mindset has got to change and that's a problem so michael finnegan the los angeles times great article fbi wants to keep fortune go cash gold jewels from beverly hills raid is that abuse of power and that's a hypothetical question that's so obviously cr answerable in that yes it's an abusive power sent to me by roger ken david nathan trocon dave phillip sue joe celeste david ron bartley john stephen of the ph jack and badly not bradley but badly thanks a lot questions your comments put them below as i'll talk to you later bye-bye thank you for watching lato's law can you remember who you were before the world told you who you should be you

Channel: Steve Lehto

Views: 165,189

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

Id: O4OVzbg5CM0

Length: 19min 11sec (1151 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 13 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/mach_250]

This is infuriating, this isn't the first time I've heard about something like this happening. When will the courts push back and crush departments that think they can do this and create precedent of illegality? They obviously used a loophole to do what they originally wanted.

[u/blacknwhitelitebrite]

What's new? FBI/ATF/NSA... it's clear these federal cops are above the law.

[u/DrinkMoreCodeMore]

Articles about this

• https://news.bitcoin.com/fbi-seizes-800-beverly-hills-safety-deposit-boxes-with-86m-attorneys-claim-feds-raid-unconstitutional/
• https://nypost.com/2021/06/12/fbi-aims-to-keep-valuables-86m-cash-found-in-safe-deposit-store-raid/
• https://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2021/06/12/fbi-overreach-millions-seized-in-raid-on-safe-deposit-boxes.cnn

[u/ThatsWhataboutism]

Who do you call when the FBI is robbing banks?

[u/lulzmachine]

Isn’t this just civil forfeiture? It’s terrible but not a new phenomena.