You were smart. You had saved cash, precious metals and important documents in a deposit box in a private company not affiliated with any bank or institution. The place is brimming with security and only you can access your box. Nobody can mess with your safety nest.
(Cue laugh track and sad trombone)
Armed with a warrant, agents with the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration pulled each of the store’s several hundred boxes out of the walls and seized all the contents. It took five days to inventory everything and take it to an undisclosed warehouse. Prosecutors said drugs, weapons and stacks of currency that drew the attention of drug-sniffing dogs were discovered.
To reclaim property, people must identify themselves to federal authorities and prove they are the rightful owners of the items — a bar that may prove challenging to clear when dealing with cash, gold, heirloom jewelry and other undocumented items.
After FBI seizure of safe deposit boxes in Beverly Hills, legal challenges mount
I can start a diatribe about forfeiture laws and the clear violation they are to our constitutional rights, but I would be preaching to the choir. The same applies to the apparently untamed corruption that now drowns the FBI and makes J. Edgar Hoover look like a virginal saint.
At the end, the sad conclusion is simple: If they want it, they will take it. It can be your car, your money or your life and fuck you very much for playing The American Dream game. Sorry, we do not have parting gifts to offer you, we kept those too.
Holy F, Batman!!
Good lord that is just unashamedly abuse of power, but then what else is new.
If its not in your hands its not yours when you need it.
It’s like the cops locking and blocking doors in a bar recently and not allowing people out until they identified themselves and submitted to being ran for warrants.
Well. That’s highly disturbing to say the least.
It used to be only the Mafia did this. Now the FBI does it too. Tell me again what the difference is between the two of them again ?
“Under color of law”.
That’s the difference.
The Mafia is more reliable and trustworthy.
Government is and always has been Mafia. It operates the exact same way, pay your protection money or we come and fuck you up.
Encroach on our domain or enterprises without proper tribute. We come and fuck you up.
Bury it deep in a non- metallic box.
Mines buried under all the ammunition.
Just to clarify, was that Mine’s or mines?
Both make sense, but for slightly different reasons…
Sooooooooooooo, drug sniffing dogs just happened to wander through that strip mall………
The more I think about this the more it disturbs me. Starting with this: Everything started out in individual boxes. It sounds as though the Feds just … mixed it all together, either initially or as they did inventory. (I checked the linked article, but it didn’t seem to clarify this point.)
It would have taken a microscopic additional effort to put the contents of a box, back in the box, after it was inventoried. It’s easy to segregate the boxes that had illegal content vs. those that didn’t. Giving the latter set of boxes back to the company would then have been simple and assuming all the people doing inventory were honest (don’t … just don’t, for the moment, go there), the law-abiding customers are whole again.
Unless the depository company actually assumes ownership (as opposed to blind custodianship) of the contents of the boxes, I see zero justification for the Feds doing it the way they apparently did, other than for things like, oh, revenue enhancement.
How do you “prove” a stack of money belongs to you? It’s not like there’s a receipt for it.
Law enforcement in the South have been using the war on drugs to pull over cars and, if there’s any large amounts of cash, seize it. They then let the driver go – no charges – but if you want your money back you have to “prove” it’s not drug money. Well how the hell do you do that?
Yes, they can take it illegally and tough shit.
Other than saving your ATM receipts (printed, usually, on thermal paper that fades to illegibility in a few weeks)…?
This very blog once told me that we couldn’t and SHOULDN’T end the war on drugs.
Are you reconsidering your former position, Miguel?
I want to know how they were able to take every single box, not just specific ones. Sounds like one huge fishing expedition to me.
This disturbs me to an incredible degree, but in reality it really shouldn’t surprise us. Just look at what happens when you don’t pay taxes on your supposed property. It is seized and sold right out from under you.
Matt, the same answer applies to your question that applies to every aspect of this story:
They don’t give a flying f*** about the Constitution. They are f***ing criminals pretending to be LEOs. They need to be impeached, convicted, charged with Federal felonies, convicted of that, and sent to jail for at least 10 years.
Will any of that happen? Of course not, especially not in Biden’s empire where murderers are nominated for high government office.
100%
It was a rhetorical question, we all know already.