The FBI Commits Largest Vault Heist in US History in 2021

I'm really torn about the FBI.  Because on the one hand, they're the vanguard of prosecuting child sex crimes.  They and the NCMEC are the go-to prosecutors for that, all around the world actually.  Because even if you're trading child porn in Russia, or Vietnam, or wherever, chances are your interwebs usage crossed into US telecommunication lines at some point.  And now our legal system can and will fuck you over.  For this, I send them all my donuts.

Multicolored, decorated donuts Photograph by Alexander Grey

But this bullshit, wow.

This is why I can't forget that these are J. Edgar's boys in real life.  They started out as the dirty tricks brigade, the ones the federal government sent out to work the dark arts against Martin Luther King and the American Indian Movement, as well as the gays and everybody else who wasn't John Q. Whiteman.

So the audacity and overstep being described by the attorneys in this clip doesn't surprise me at all.  The FBI was Wile E. Coyote in a suit when I was growing up.  Even the whiter side of my family knew it, much less the Italians.  The FBI was the internal version of the CIA, which wanted to get rid of Fidel Castro by blowing up his cigars and dosing him with LSD.  I can't even begin to imagine all of the bizarre, dastardly shit our government has concocted and actually done over the years that we'll never know about.  Me of little faith.

So nothing about how the FBI decided to just yank the goodies out of all of these boxes because it was investigating the company that owns them was a surprise.  Because of course all of the various private citizens renting security deposit boxes were uninvolved and not being investigated.  The FBI didn't know who they were, and ignored the emergency contact information available on the outside of the locked boxes.  

But the FBI called all of them criminals and seized their assets because it was investigating the owners of the private vault company.  That they're still doing this kind of shit under 2021 in a Democratic administration is grim.

The federal government knows that each of these individuals will have to fight the federal government in court if they want their stuff back.  And they know how hard that is to do.  The federal government is far and away the biggest law firm in the country, and probably one of the biggest ones in the world. 

The federal government is really hard to fight in the court they own and operate.  Ask anybody who's ever accepted a plea bargain -- from either side, defendant or victim.  Once he's made up his mind, you pretty much have to go along with what the boss wants to do.  Once the wheels roll over you, you're screwed.  Ask Pablo Cano's survivors.  Or Timothy Barber's.  Plea bargaining is the dick that keeps on fucking.  American "justice" is what it is.  The smaller you are, the truer that is.

In this case, the government determined that any box containing more than $5,000 cash would be seized as criminal assets.  They made that determination without knowing who actually owned the money.  So they couldn't possibly have known that it was criminally gained.  They hadn't given the citizen any opportunity to prove rightful ownership.  So they had to conceal that part of the plan from the magistrate in order to get the warrant in the first place.

The FBI decided in advance they were taking all the money in these boxes, period.  The plan was to scoop everything up and sort it out later, basically.  The difference between the FBI and the mafia in this case is that they wrote out exactly what they were going to do and filed it in court first -- omitting minor details so the magistrate wouldn't get upset.  LOL

The FBI later explained in discovery for the ensuing lawsuit, that they derived the $5K amount by their own administrative costs.  It costs them $5,000 to do the asset forfeiture process.  So if they don't take that much, it's not worth their time.

Like former Officer Chapman from Charlotte, apparently the FBI saw that big pile of goodies and just couldn't resist.  And because they're the federal government and there's nobody to stop them, away they went.

So of course they "lost" and damaged a ton of stuff behind their "omnibus forfeiture act," in other words "we swoop and scoop."  Remember that billion dollars that got misplaced in Iraq, and those migrant kids who were forcibly removed from their parents at the border?  Right.  They train heavily on raids and going in.  They're not experts at inventorying and returning stuff.  Other people's things can disappear -- whoopsie

Surprisingly, the people who owned the jewelry store, and stored gold and silver coins as well as cash, got totally screwed.  The FBI denied she had any cash in her box at all.  They totally tried to "Officer Chapman" her shit.  And they only minimally inventoried anything anyway, "miscellaneous coins" when obviously there can be a huge difference in number, type, and value when discussing the sort of coins one puts into a vault versus what's in a jar in my cupboard.

Bottom line, not having every second of everything on videotape in 2021 is inexcusable.  In paramedic school they taught me res ipsa loquitur, the thing speaks for itself.  The mafia doesn't videotape their criminal activity either, because they're professionals too.

From the video above:

"After months of arguing, the FBI somehow 'found' 47 of Don's coins, but it hasn't returned Don's other 63 coins, which are worth over $100,000."

Now.  If you send your local beat cop over to somebody's house because you have evidence that they went into your safe deposit box and took your coins without your permission.  And that cop is able to eventually get them to produce some, but not all of those coins.  That joker is under arrest, boo.

There's a whole problem because he and the jewelry store owner both had emergency contact information right on the top of the box.  They owned that property lawfully and were holding it there lawfully.  And they had 4th Amendment rights for the FBI to just leave it alone in the first place.

The court has ruled resoundingly in favor of the plaintiffs about the 4th Amendment issue on the first case to come up.  They violated the terms of the warrant, concealing their forfeiture plans from the magistrate in the first place.  The court called the use of a drug-sniffing dog going over all of the cash improper. 

But mostly it's the part where they lied to the magistrate about their intentions to just take everything that was worth taking.  So it's great that the first case was won by the plaintiffs.  Let's see how the chips fall, what fallout ensues.  Let's see if I hear about this in my FBI newsletter LOL