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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