When the FBI raided the safe deposit box business in Beverly Hills, the FBI confiscated Joseph Ruiz's life savings, and the unemployed chef went to court to get his $57,000 back. A judge ordered the government to tell Ruiz why the money was confiscated.

It came from drug trafficking, and FBI agents responded in court documents.

The agent wrote that Ruiz’s income was too low, he did not have that much money, and his side business was selling cigarette pots made from wine bottles, which indicated that he was an unlicensed cannabis dealer. The FBI also stated that a dog smelled an unknown drug on Ruiz's cash.

The FBI was wrong. When Ruiz produced records proving that the source of his funds was legitimate, the government dropped the false accusation and refunded his money.

Ruiz was one of about 800 people. The FBI confiscated money and valuables from the safe they rented. They rented it in a private American vault store in an open-air shopping mall on Olympic Avenue.

For years, federal agents have suspected that criminals are hiding loot there, and they assert that this is what they found. The government is trying to confiscate $86 million in cash, as well as jewellery, rare coins and precious metal stocks taken from about half of the boxes.

But six months after the raid, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles did not provide any evidence that the government tried to keep the property of the vast majority of the holders.

Approximately 300 box holders are raising objections to the attempted confiscation. Ruiz and 65 others have filed a lawsuit in the court, claiming that the trawl seizure was unconstitutional.

"This completely violated my privacy," Ruiz said. "They tried to discredit my character."

So far, the prosecutor has outlined the past criminal convictions or pending charges against 11 ticket holders to justify the confiscation. But in several other cases, court records show that the government’s claim that the money and property it seized was not more adequate than the reason for the crime.

Federal agents say the use of rubber bands and other common methods of cash storage are signs of drug trafficking or money laundering.

They also cited the dog's alertness to the smell of narcotics on most cash as key evidence. But the government said it deposited all the confiscated money in the bank, so it was unable to test which drugs might have been in contact with which bills and how long ago it had been in contact.

"Before this currency runs through the laboratory, you actually don't know anything," said Mary Kabuk, a Nevada scientist and prosecutor and defense lawyer's canine expert witness. A dog who warned of drug residues on cash "may be effective" and "may be completely wrong."

The FBI hopes to preserve the wealth of cash, gold and jewelry from the Beverly Hills raid. Is it abuse of power?

Clients of US private vaults sued the FBI for attempting to confiscate gold and silver, jewellery, and $86 million in cash in the safe.

US Private Vaults was indicted in February for conspiracy to sell drugs, money laundering and organizing cash transactions with unnamed customers to avoid government investigations. No one has been charged.

Since then, criminal cases have been dormant, and the lawyers or other representatives of the US private treasury did not appear in court to defend themselves. A spokesperson for the Los Angeles Attorney's Office declined to comment on why the case seems to be stagnating.

Michael Singer, a Las Vegas lawyer who has represented private U.S. vaults on other matters, declined to comment on the allegations against the company, but said he was unaware of any criminal activities by its owner. He also stated that the government "crossed the border" in searches, seizures and attempts to confiscate customers' money and property.

In response to 15 lawsuits filed by box holders and other claims for the return of property, prosecutors stated that the U.S. private vault deliberately marketed itself to criminals by emphasizing that customers can rent boxes anonymously.

A U.S. Postal inspector stated in court documents that the company’s owner, Michael Polyak, admitted to making money through medical fraud and illegal sales of marijuana. Poliak could not be reached for comment.

Lawyers for some ticket holders stated that the government's entire operation was to "rob money" and obtain tens of millions of dollars for the Ministry of Justice through confiscation. A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney's Office denied this statement and stated that part of the funds recovered would be used for crime victims.

In civil forfeiture, no criminal conviction is required. The government only needs to prove that the money or property it is trying to confiscate is more likely to be related to criminal activities.

The confiscation lawsuit filed against the two brothers in Woodland Hills on Monday clearly demonstrates a lax standard of evidence. The government wants to keep the $960,100 in cash from one safe and the $519,000 from another safe.

The prosecutor said that theft, fraud and money laundering were valid reasons for confiscation. But the only evidence of the complaint was that one of the brothers-it did not specify which one-allegedly had "contact" with armed robbers in the mobile phone shop.

Their lawyer, Benjamin Gluck, called the complaint a "horrific and unconstitutional abuse of power."

The prosecutors also provided a small amount of evidence in another confiscation case, confiscating more than $900,000 from the holder of the box whose identity they did not know. They accused him of being a "top drug dealer or money launderer."

The "signs" of these crimes include the way the person tied the cash with thick, thin, and torn rubber bands; paper tightly wrapped with tape; bank bands; and plastic CVS ​​and paper good neighbor medicine packs.

Using the pseudonym Charles Coe, the holder of the box has filed a lawsuit, questioning the confiscation of his money.

Gluck, who represents Coe, declined to discuss specific cases, but said that U.S. private treasury clients “include many immigrant business owners who have escaped from bank insecure authoritarian regimes and have collected large amounts of cash as their lifetime savings for many years.”

"The idea that the old rubber band means they must be drug dealers is absurd," he said.

The only other evidence that the government has against Coe is that the poison dog is alert to his cash.

As more and more states legalize marijuana, the decline in the value of dog alerts is well-known among law enforcement agencies. Police across the country have begun to weed out dogs that are wary of marijuana and train new dogs to find cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin.

However, the Los Angeles police dog Smithy, who sniffs Coe cash, has also been trained to detect marijuana. According to a statement in court by police officer Dolores Suviate, his agent, during his eight-year career as a drug dog, Smith's work resulted in the seizure of more marijuana than the other three drugs combined.

Billions of dollars in cash flow through the corporate cycle of selling marijuana every day. Experts say this leaves a perceptible smell on the banknotes and ends up in the hands of people who are neither dealers nor users.

According to the attorney for the box holder, in the U.S. private vaults, there are at least two boxes containing large amounts of cash from licensed cannabis companies that cannot open bank accounts due to federal laws prohibiting the sale and possession of cannabis. The safe deposit box is not airtight, and the smell of marijuana will spread between them.

On Friday, the prosecutor filed a complaint demanding the confiscation of more money from the holders. In two of the complaints, the government requested that one box holder’s $154,600 in cash and another holder’s $330,000 in cash be confiscated. In addition to the police dog alert, the main evidence is that both of them failed to apply for a state license to sell marijuana, which shows that "the funds are related to drugs", assistant American Artis. Victor Rogers and Maxwell Cole wrote.

Thom Mrozek, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney's Office, called the cash dog alerts "strong evidence" of drug crimes, but said they were "not the only possible cause."

"It is perfectly appropriate to use dogs to identify money contaminated with marijuana," he said. "First of all, marijuana is illegal under federal law. But under California law, it is also illegal to sell marijuana without the proper license."

As for Ruiz, Mrozek said that the government has never charged him with a crime, but “there may be reasons to believe that the funds in his box are related to drug trafficking.”

In the preliminary ruling, U.S. District Judge R. Gary Klausner blocked the government's case of confiscation of Ruiz and the other three, saying that the lack of any "specific facts and legal basis" violated their due process rights.

Klausner also believes that “facts and laws are clearly in favor of Ruiz,” and he claimed that the FBI violated the Fourth Amendment's protective measures against unreasonable searches and seizures.

The imminent conflict of laws is that Klausner or other judges may approve the box holder’s request that the raid on the entire US private vault is unconstitutional. This will jeopardize the prosecutor’s ability to use any evidence seized from the safe in confiscation and criminal cases.

In a search warrant authorizing the search and seizure of all "commercial equipment" in private vaults in the United States, US District Judge Steven Kim imposed strict restrictions on the government, expressly prohibiting federal agents from searching the contents of each box to find evidence of criminal behavior.

In the authorization application, it is submitted by the assistant assistant of the United States. Andrew Brown, FBI agent Lynne Zellhart (Lynne Zellhart) assured Gold in a statement that the agent’s inspection of each box “will not exceed the scope necessary to determine ownership” so that once The government takes an inventory of the seized property and can return the property.

The case holder’s lawsuit claimed that these promises were false, and the agent had no possible reason, and from the beginning, he planned to ruin the case in order to find evidence in the criminal investigation.

Jane Bambauer, a professor of law at the University of Arizona, said that under the restrictions imposed by King on searches, using poison dogs to sniff cash in boxes is a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

"As far as the real world is concerned, a common sense assessment of how this should work, what happened is wrong," Bambauer said. "I think it is also obviously wrong in the doctrine clause of the Fourth Amendment."

The FBI violated the rights of the holders of the Beverly Hills safe, the judge rules

The FBI’s efforts to confiscate the $86 million in cash seized from safes that are prohibited by law were set back by the court.

The U.S. Attorney's Office has denied wrongdoing. Mrozek said, "There is nothing that requires the government to ignore the criminal evidence it sees when it counts the seized goods."

"The search and seizure of items from private vault facilities in the United States is authorized by a federal judge, and the entire operation is carried out in accordance with the Constitution and applicable laws," he said.

Robert E. Johnson, an attorney representing Ruiz and six other cardholders in the class action, sees the case as a shocking sign of the government's efforts to "criminally criminalize financial privacy."

"The government's theory is that having cash will make you a presumed criminal, and I think every American should worry about this," said Johnson, a senior attorney at the Liberal Justice Institute in Virginia.

In the closed Ruiz confiscation case, the FBI listed the government's "probable reasons" in a court statement, arguing that his $57,000 came from drug trafficking.

Zellhart wrote that the agents checked Ruiz's "holysmokescrafts" email address, found that he was doing a side job, and concluded that he "may be involved in the cannabis industry in other ways."

She said that the FBI checked Ruiz's salary and tax history and found that his income since 2019 was only $18,510, "less than one-third of the cash in the box."

According to Zellhardt, the FBI’s review of court records did not confirm Ruiz’s claim that his money came from a legal settlement. Once Ruiz handed over the records confirming the payment—one was because of a car accident and the other because of a long-term violation of housing regulations in his apartment building—the FBI refunded his money in accordance with a court order.

"They robbed the bank in broad daylight," Ruiz said. "They didn't even apologize."

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Michael Finnegan is a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, covering federal courts and law enforcement. He has previously reported on state and national politics, including the 2020 presidential campaign.

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