FBI Accused of Stealing or Losing Seized Property, Including Cash and Gold Coins Worth Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars
Others have joined due to missing money and items from their boxes.
Civil asset forfeiture. It’s one of the few topics that bring together both sides.
Two Americans have accused the FBI of stealing or losing their property, including gold coins worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
No one even knows exactly what happened. From Fox News:
“All we know is that their property was in a box and safe before the FBI broke into the box,” Joe Gay, an attorney with the nonprofit law firm Institute for Justice, told Fox News. “Once the FBI broke into the box, we honestly don’t know exactly what happened.”
“We don’t know if they lost it. We don’t know if somebody pocketed it and walked away,” he continued. “We have no way to know.”
The Institute for Justice filed two lawsuits Friday on behalf of clients who had property seized from their safety deposit boxes in a March 2021 FBI raid on U.S. Private Vaults, a Beverly Hills–based company. After prevailing in court, and the FBI agreeing to return their property, both Don Mellein and Jeni Pearsons discovered some of their property was missing and suspect the FBI’s haphazard raid or sticky fingers are to blame.
Don Mellein decided to invest in gold coins when he retired. He placed those coins in the safety deposit box to, well, keep them safe.
But the FBI did not actually intend to return the boxholders’ property. Instead, the FBI’s plan from the beginning was to use civil forfeiture to keep everything in the boxes worth over $5,000. In the rush to process all those boxes, the FBI abandoned its initial plan to carefully videotape the process. Instead, agents completed inventory paperwork that described the contents of the boxes with vague terms like “miscellaneous coins” or even “miscellaneous general items.” In all, the FBI sought to forfeit over $85 million in cash and untold millions more in precious metals and other valuable property, including the contents of Don’s box.
The Institute for Justice already filed a lawsuit concerning the raid on behalf of another couple.
That’s when the FBI had to stop and return the items.
Well, people noticed items missing. Somehow they “found” some of Mellein’s coins:
A retired doctor reported the loss of coins worth at least $75,000. Two of the plaintiffs in IJ’s initial case challenging the raid, Jeni Pearsons and Michael Storc, reported the loss of $2,000 in cash. And when Don went to the FBI’s offices to retrieve his box—which, again, had contained coins worth hundreds of thousands of dollars—no coins were returned. After months of fighting, the FBI somehow “found” 47 of Don’s coins, but it has never returned Don’s other 63 coins, which are worth over $100,000.
That’s why Mellein and the Pearsons filed another complaint, demanding the FBI return their property or compensate them.
U.S. Private Vaults shut down and “pleaded guilty to conspiracy to launder drug money.”
So the FBI investigated the business but not the customers. They had no reason or warrant to target specific people. The warrant did not give agents permission to even open the boxes.
The agents only had permission “to identify box renters and to safeguard the contents.”
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Comments
Bunch of crooked crooks that work for the government and aren’t held accountable.
Just perks of the job for these underpaid and overworked protectors of The Party. Top to bottom,, the FBI has become the New Untouchables. Elliot Ness was never on the take…. now the FBI takes as it wishes. Garland’s Goons…..
NOT underpaid! There are no federal employees who are underpaid! Nor are they overworked! Show me how any FBI agents are more than worthless thugs and scabs. I am tired of people covering for these organized criminals, claiming that there are some good ones!
Hmm, how sure are we that Elliot Ness was never on the take? Is it a fact, or is it just what we were told and accepted as true because nobody dared tell us otherwise, like Walter Cronkite’s mythical integrity?
If you can’t trust them to ensure that seized goods are accounted for and protected, how can you trust them to write down testimony in lieu of actual recordings??
For that matter, how can you trust them not to fake the recordings?
They don’t do recordings. Their meetings are recorded strictly by notes.
Check Senator Menendez’ house. That kind of stuff turns up there apparently.
Makes one wonder just how much was actually found in Menedez’ house
Lost it or stole it?
Lost it or stole it?
Really tough call.
It does not matter if it was lost for stolen, everyone associated with this at the FBI should be canned.
You misspelled ‘jailed’.
No, shot. As in executed.
“Lost” it. Like police and sheriff departments that regularly “lose” heirloom or collector firearms.
Every agent and every supervisory agent associated with this fiasco must be charged with theft of property or it will continue to happen. They didn’t need to access the boxes to prevent suspected criminal activity. All the FBI needed to do was lock the front door of the business. When agents decided to exceed their authority by opening individual customers boxes then fail to keep precise records of high dollar value items in the safety deposit boxes, then ‘misplace’ some or all of the contents the result is on them. No way that a precise, double checked, counter signed inventory of high dollar items or contents from a safety deposit box isn’t a standard FBI requirement. When they chose to deviate from FBI SOP they were, IMO, no longer acting under the authority of the FBI. Eff them put all of them in jail.
You’re too
You’re too kind, them up against the wall and shoot them. Or if bullets cost too much, ropes are reusable
Hemp is green.
I suspect that in this late stage of what was the Republic, that whether the FBI is under the law or above the law is a variable. As are which “standard FBI requirements” they operate under at any given time.
Subotai Bahadur
No way that a precise, double checked, counter signed inventory
No way that is immune behavior. Heck, no way is it not criminal negligence at the very least.
I believe the metaphorical saying is “Heads, pikes, some assembly required” (Not literally, of course. We have laws.) If we had a responsible FBI this would not have happened. If we had responsible leadership at the FBI, there would have been mass firings complete with search warrants served on every employee who touched a single gold coin and their safe deposit boxes. You don’t ‘lose’ a gold coin during an FBI search. That’s a thousand bucks or so.
The agent in charge of this disaster obviously expected it to be 100% criminal with every box tossed into a pile, a triumphant photo for the office wall, and a few million bucks added to the local agency budget. That kind of thinking has no business being in any law enforcement agency, and the best way to avoid that kind of thinking is for the thinker to consider just what happened to the *last* guy who tried that. Did he get away with it, or did he get his hide nailed to the wall and wind up working road construction for the rest of his life. In this case, I have not heard of a single firing.
I’m not sure we’re far from the heads, pikes, some assembly required anymore.
Agreed! Every one of them acted in concert to commit and conceal crimes. There needs to be a RICO investigation and prosecution. Until this happens, we will continue to see LEOs look the other way.
If the FBI didn’t take a proper, admissible inventory, the plaintiff’s testimony and probable evidence will prevail, maybe by summary judgment or the equivalent.
I hope the agents pay income tax on it. If not, they will have to wait until the statute of limitations is allowed to expire.
The FBI needed them for evidence against Menendez….
The US cannot survive a “law enforcement” agency like the FBI (Cheka).
I understand once, back in the bad old days, a pro-Tsarist group had bloodily handled and chopped up a cheka agent. Then they put the parts in a box and sent it back to the Kremlin, COD.
When the chief of that division asked for an update on that agent’s mission, the box had just arrived at the Kremlin, and the subordinate responded, “The cheka’s in the mail.”
OK, I’ll see myself out.
When Martina Navratilova defected, she went to the US embassy and asked, “Do you cache Czechs?”.
OK, I’ll join you.
You both made my CzechMate giggle.
It’s not just the Feds. Texas (and I imagine a lot of other states) has asset forfeiture at the state and local level.
Civil asset forfeiture is evil and unjust.
Yes. Unfortunately, it’s not unconstitutional, since it was accepted practice at the time the constitution was ratified.
You would think it would be a direct violation of the 4th-amendment right and the 6th-amendment right.
It can’t be a sixth amendment violation, because it’s not a criminal prosecution.
Nor can it be a fourth amendment violation, since that only protects against unreasonable seizures, and a court decision in a civil case by definition makes the seizure “reasonable”.
Any challenge would have to come under the fifth amendment. But the same people who ratified that amendment had no objection to civil asset forfeiture, and didn’t see it as a contradiction. And we usually regard that as creating a strong presumption that a practice does not violate the constitution.
Not the civil asset forfeiture that is practiced now. The “legal fiction” that the assets committed crimes and all that ridiculous BS that only a lawyer could ever take seriously.
That legal fiction was in fact standard practice at the time.
Prove it. Show me some legal papers detailing it and the arguments made for it.
Okay … I see that it was first accepted by the SCOTUS in 1827 (not exactly the time the Constitution was ratified, but pretty old, anyway).
So what? That doesn’t make it any more true. and this legal fiction is something that any sentient, rational person understands is most certainly NOT TRUE, and that property can never commit crime of its own volition … since it obviously has no volition.
I don’t really care how long this idiocy has been accepted by the lawyer class, it is ridiculous and beyond stupid. It is a mockery of law and everyone who uses it or cites it knows that. Heck, we have courts letting clearly sane people out of punishment because they argue that the person went “temporarily insane” (for the exact duration of the crime, even!) but you are going to argue that property committing crimes is Constitutional?? I don’t think so. No one could argue that case and win, given any sort of objective, rational judge of the debate.
1827 is close enough to the 5th amendment’s ratification that it creates a strong presumption that it was considered constitutional at the time of ratification, and is therefore still constitutional.
Who said anything about crimes, or volition? This is a civil proceeding, and no volition is required.
Again, nobody claims the property committed a crime. The claim is that the property was used for a crime, and is therefore forfeit. If you don’t understand the fundamental difference between criminal culpability and civil liability you really shouldn’t discuss the constitution.
I hate it and wish it were unconstitutional. I would support an amendment to make it unconstitutional. But right now it isn’t. I also wish compensated takings weren’t constitutional (or at least that they were required to be used directly by the public) but the fifth amendment says they are..
In The Palmyra, in 1827, the United States Supreme Court
endorsed the judicially-created in rem personification fiction of the
“guilty object.”‘ Writing for the Court, Justice Joseph Story held
that a Spanish pirate ship could be put on trial for a crime, stating
that the personification fiction was a settled principle in the law of
admiralty. The pirate vessel itself was put on trial as a respondent “person” in the action in admiralty. Since that time, the legal fiction
of personificatiorl has become an important part of the law of both
civil and criminal forfeiture, accepted by the United States Supreme
Court as a legal reality.
I don’t care how long they have been doing that, it is clearly insane and makes a mockery of the very concept of law. Further, if lawyers had any sense of logic, at all, they would realize that such an action does what any inconsistent statement in a logical system does – it enables the provability of all statements.
Once property is allowed to be viewed as a criminal, itself (which is what much of modern civil asset forfeiture (and its restrictions) is based on) there is nothing left to the law, if one allows for logic to be used.
Again, it’s civil asset forfeiture, not criminal, so your objection is just wrong.
It’s still evil and should be banned.
This missing gold thing is all too common. There is a pattern and the FBI is not only stealing gold, but laundering it as well.
The Feebs once investigated organized crime. Now they are OC.
J. Edgar Hoover declared there was no such thing as organized crime. Just something where he didn’t want to adDRESS the problem. He and the Fibbies just wanted to skirt the issue as there was – to them – no foundation of truth to the matter.
All right, I’ll give you a sympathy thumb for effort.
Bonus points for using J. Edgar Hoover and “skirt” in the same comment.
Agents and Supervisors responsible must pay the lost costs, not taxpayers. That way, this shit will stop
Not to worry, the feds will investigate themselves and find no wrongdoing
This has in fact been reported to Congress as such for the last 20 years. The FBI/DOJ cabal is a dangerous malignant cancer on the nation.
Wray needs to get fitted for a stripped suit.
Striped, please. I don’t even want to think about the other thing with that guy…
In “The Road to Serfdom”, Friedrich Hayek described how governments descend into tyranny. An important part of the process is that people of good will want no part of it and venal, malevolent people are attracted to it. This selection process operates at the organization level too. The FBI has become an environment where evil thrives and honest people must leave or disguise themselves. Holder, Comey, Garland, Wray and their cohort are rotten, and the spread of their rot in the FBI is well along the path Hayek so well illuminated.
LOL.
How much effort does it take to videotape ANYTHING these days? All they had to do was pull out a phone – every FBI dirtbag has one, at least, and either have it on tripod videoing the FBI dirtbags pawing through Americans’ assets and papers, or just had one of their flunky friends holding the phone a videoing the whole thing. Children on Instagram and tik-tok show how easy it is to do this.
Any FBI scumbag who tries to offer some lame lie like this should be immediately thrown in jail and let to sit there until he can come up with a better lie or finally spills the truth.
Every FBI scumbag who touched any of the assets in that raid or was anywhere in the vicinity should be locked up until all of the assets are admitted to and returned. And then they should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
Bob Menendez better hope this crew weren’t in on the raid of his home
I follow a fellow named Steve Lehto on YouTube. He’s a Consumer Lawyer in Michigan, but covers a wide range of Legal topics daily. He’s definitely on the side of the ‘Little Guy’, & did a YT video on this very subject, link is below…
https://youtu.be/Fg48BQYUKno?si=a5xzqACkO7y1zJi4