Hobby Panic in 2009

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Posted By: boxingcardman

for the moment, I can state from experience that if you have to deal with the US Attorneys Office on asset forfeiture, you are in for a nightmarish battle, even if your client is 100% correct. The law has been established with very low thresholds of evidence to justify a seizure, at least until trial. Once the government has the funds it is similar to an IRS audit (where the IRS agent makes you prove to him why a challenged item is legit)--they tell you to prove to them why it isn't the proceeds of an illicit transaction. What makes things worse is that asset seizure has become a major source of revenue for governments at all levels.

A client of mine had an asset case several years ago; totally righteous on his part. The government was investigating a doctor writing scrips for junkies and one of them used my client's address as a fake address. He never lived there; just wrote it down randomly. The government got a warrant for all the addresses on the fake prescriptions on the basis that they were looking for drug sales rings who were getting scrips from corrupt doctors and reselling the pills on the street, and broke into my client's home. He was an ex-Black Panther from the 1960s and one of those "I don't believe in banks" types and had his life's savings, about $25,000 in a safe. The guy was a health care worker for 30 years, wasn't charged for anything, wasn't even arrested in the bust. The government still took the money and refused to give it back. Their "evidence" was that he could not show them documentation for how he got the money (apparently saving it for your lifetime a bit at a time in cash after cashing paychecks isn't enough) and a drug sniffing dog smelled cocaine manufacturing precursor chemicals on the money. Most of the money in circulation in the USA at the time would trigger a positive response in a drug dog, a fact that even the government had to concede. So I filed suit to recover the funds. The US attorney assigned to the case was a really nice guy--we got along great--and said he wanted to give it all back, but his department's policy was that they never give back more than 50% of the money regardless of merits without a trial. He even agreed that we would probably win the trial. The client opted to cut his losses and take the 50% rather than risk it all at trial.

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