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My name is Joshua Sheets. Today, I want to talk with you very quickly about something remarkable that I just saw related to civil asset forfeiture. This question came up in a Q&A show a week ago where a listener called in and said, "How do I cross the United States with a significant amount of currency safely?" And I gave an extended monologue.

I talked about how to drive the money across the country safely. And I mentioned flying with the money. And I specifically said that I think driving is a better plan, but that flying could potentially work. Definitely not in checked luggage, but I talked about how, if you had valuable personal items that you ever did need to check, how to check those with greater safety.

And I talked about how to fly with the money. Well, it just so happens I saw this episode pop up on Steve Leto's YouTube channel, called "It Was a Good Week to Fight Civil Asset Forfeiture." And I heard about just now a case that I had never heard about that relates directly to that question and conversation from last week.

So let's go through this together because you have got to hear this particular discussion. Welcome once again to Leto's Law. Here's Steve Leto. Civil asset forfeiture, of course, popular topic on this channel. Talk about it all the time. And we talk about cases, both good and bad. And the good cases I'm talking about are the ones where they lose, the government loses, and they have to give the money back.

Now, all of these cases are bad on one level. And I know if I didn't say that, somebody would point it out. It's bad that they took your money. It's good if you got it back. It would be even better if they never took it in the first place.

So I understand that. But TechDirt.com, Tim Cushing, has been following this topic for quite some time now. I love the work they do at TechDirt.com. And he points out now that the DEA has racked up two forfeiture losses in one week. They've lost twice this past week. By the way, it's been good to see the government lose.

Obviously, this last Friday, we talked about the Rittenhouse case. I think I'll bring you a number of more comments on that. But on this particular issue of civil asset forfeiture, it is so, so good to see the government lose on this issue. So let's keep going. And they've been forced to return $100,000 in stolen cash to their victims.

So in the past week, the federal government has twice been forced to give the money back that they stole from travelers. And they stole the money, of course, because they could. In both cases, it was American citizens trying to board domestic flights at U.S. airports. So I want to make something very clear.

Notice these facts, as what we talked about last week. Talked about the fact that in international flights, if you fly with cash, you have a legal duty to disclose that in the vast majority of countries. If you've ever passed through an international airport, you've always seen these signs. Travelers have a duty to disclose if they're carrying more than $10,000.

Usually, that's about the number in cash or cash like instruments to -- otherwise, you risk the loss of forfeiture. That is a customs regulation. And that is something that is silly. I think there's no reason for it. But that has a strong foundation in law. Governments believe that they have the moral right and the legal right to protect their borders, to impose taxes on assets that are passing through.

And they have decided as part of the customs regulations that they are going to require you to report cash. You can fly with larger amounts of cash, but legally you have an obligation to report that money. Otherwise, you run the risk of loss at customs. These flights are not international.

These cases involve American citizens flying within the United States in domestic airports. Traveling inside the United States. Both times, even though it's not illegal to carry currency on domestic flights, the government decided that cash had to have been illegally obtained and moved forward for forfeiture proceedings by saying, basically, you want your money back.

You have to go to court, sue us, and prove the money's innocent. So the first case was the 58-year-old Kermit Warren, the New Orleans native, who was accosted by federal agents at the Columbus, Ohio airport. He had $30,000 on him, which he planned to use to buy a tow truck for his scrap metal business.

That sale fell through, which forced him to purchase a one-way flight back home. They actually let him keep a little bit of his money, but they took most of it. And I talked about that case. So we're talking about kind of like the overview. His cash had caught the eye of a TSA screener.

TSA screeners, of course, are looking for threats to the aviation. That's their job. And, of course, transportation securities with TS stands for TSA. And the problem is that when they spot money, which is not part of their job, they apparently tip off the police and say, by the way, this guy's carrying money.

You might want to come take it. You might want to come take it. So cash is not contraband, but it gets on the TSA's radar thanks to the DEA's purported anti-drug efforts. And it turns out that the DEA pays screeners to look for cash. So this is an important point that Steve's going to continue on.

But I want to emphasize that this is where things are. And this is true in many aspects of modern financial dealings in the United States. There is nothing illegal about this New Orleans man flying from New Orleans to Ohio with $30,000 of his savings with the goal of buying a truck.

That's a normal thing to do. That's a normal and common thing to do. If you are not familiar with this, let me just tell a quick story on this about how and why this is important. To date, actually, I think I'll break this soon, but to date, I have never purchased for myself or sold a vehicle in any form other than with physical cash except once.

And I'll tell you how that one turned out to convince me even more why this is necessary. Now, this is usually because I purchase most of my vehicles, cars, trucks, RVs, toys, etc. I purchase them in the used marketplace. And in the used marketplace, you can always get a better deal if you walk in with cash.

And it's always, I like to get good deals. So there was one time where a number of years ago, I bought an RV. I bought it myself in Georgia. I drove it from Georgia to Florida. I used it for a while, and then my family outgrew the RV. And so I listed it up, and I sold it.

And at the time, I was living in South Florida. I had a buyer come across from the West Coast of Florida to buy it. And on this particular issue, meaning this particular sale, everything seemed fine. The buyer got it. The buyer inspected it. Everything was looking good. The buyer bought me a certified bank check for the purchase of the vehicle.

And so I sold the buyer the vehicle, and I agreed to take a certified bank check from the buyer in payment. I don't remember what the exact issue was a day or so later. Excuse me. Yeah, it was I think the next day. But the next day, I got a call from the buyer, and the buyer said, "Joshua, the vehicle has this particular issue.

Wrong with it. You didn't disclose this issue to me. I'm returning the vehicle." And I said, "You're not returning the vehicle." Again, I don't remember what the issue was, but I disclosed everything to them, and I was not responsible for the thing that they were saying was wrong with the vehicle.

There was nothing wrong with the vehicle. So I said, "I'm not taking it back." And he said, "I've got your money. I've cashed the check. I've already deposited the check. I'm not taking it back. I refuse to take it back." So he says, "Well, yeah, you are." "I'm going to come by, and I'm going to drop it off at your house." And I said, "I'm not taking it back.

Do not bring the vehicle back." And so fast forward, he said, "No, I'm not giving your money back." He said, "Well, I'm going to do a stop payment on the check." He said, "Joke's on you for taking my certified bank check. You didn't do your homework. I can do a stop payment on the check, and you can have your money back.

So you better take the vehicle back." So I called the police. And when the guy pulled up with the van, I had a police officer sitting there. I explained to the police officer the issues happening, and I explained to the police officer, again, what was happening. And I had a police officer sitting there when the guy pulled up with the van.

And it's a good thing I did because having the police officer there was the only thing that sobered the guy up. He thought he was going to get one over and return this vehicle when there was nothing wrong and whatnot. And so fast forward, what proceeded was two weeks of hassle where now I had deposited a check.

He was going to not stop the payment on the check. And we went back and forth and back and forth, and I refused to take the vehicle back, although I did actually take possession of it. And then I required him to fulfill the deal. But the one time that on a transaction like this I broke the normal process of requiring cash was the one time where the sale of the vehicle, when he finally did give me cash to get the money all squared away, that was the one time where it was a real hassle.

And I promised myself never again will I sell something like that and not take cash. Because individuals in markets like that, individuals don't know enough. I wasn't sophisticated enough at the time to understand that, yes, it's a certified bank check, which means he has the funds, but he could still do stop payment, and that doesn't protect me.

And so I forget the blow by blow at this point. All the details are done and gone. I eventually sold in the van. I had my money, just like we originally agreed. But I was out basically the hassle of taking the vehicle back and forth across the state to force him to fulfill the contract.

So I did eventually come out, but I learned my lesson not to do it. And so when you are dealing with a dealership and purchasing things from a dealership, you use the normal forms of financing, right? You use bank wires, you use certified checks, et cetera, at the dealership because you're dealing with an institution.

But when you're dealing in the secondary market, you need to use cash to make sure that the transaction is final. You need to use cash to make sure that the buyer and the seller are protected, that there is a proper exchange of value, there's a proper bill of sale, and then there's proper possession of the actual vehicle in question.

So this is not an abnormal thing until the U.S. federal government sticks its nose in and starts saying, oh, you've got $30,000 in your pocket. You must be a crook. We're just going to take some of that money. Now, Steve also mentioned about the fact that the DEA is paying bounties to TSA agents to discover cash as part of the screening process.

So remember how wrong this entire process is, right? You come into the airport, and as a society, we have decided that in an airport, you are no longer entitled to personal privacy. That's the decision that the country has made, for better or for worse. And so you come through the airport, boys in blue come by.

They force you to take everything off. They put you through the scanner. They put your stuff through the scanner. Oh, look, this guy has money. And so we're going to tip off the DEA. And then the DEA and the cops come. They confiscate the money. And as I've explained with civil asset forfeiture, they say, if you can prove to us that this is legal money, we'll give it back to you.

But in order to do so, you have to sue them. And you have to sue them in federal court. And that's going to cost you a huge amount of time and a significant amount of money on a major hassle. And you lose the use of your money in the meantime.

And I don't know anything about the case where the guy doesn't have a dump truck. But if you took money and you're trying to get a dump truck, you're trying to make money with it. Now you've got no money, no dump truck. That's a major, major loss for that New Orleans guy.

And so -- but the key thing you need to understand, this is the way that the world works. It's the same thing the IRS does, right? They give bonuses to anybody who will tip them off to somebody who's cheating on his taxes. They'll pay a percentage of the collected money.

Forget what the maximum is. My brain is saying something like 30%. But something like up to 30% of the bounty will be paid as a commission to whoever tips them off. And so there was the guy who tipped off the U.S. government to -- I think it was the UBS scandal.

Made hundreds of millions of dollars based upon the money collected by the U.S. government. But it's on the small scale, right? It's your secretary tipping off the IRS and getting a bonus for that. It's your brother-in-law. It's your ex-wife. It's anybody who can tips off. And they pay these bonuses, these bounties, just like the DEA is paying.

So this is a big, big deal. And it's leading -- it leads to a society. It has created and is creating a society with a very low level of trust and cohesion, which is a major, major bad trend. Back to the video. So it's not part of their job, but the DEA asks them to.

Screeners have responded by locating cash more frequently than anything else. So, in other words, their job is to look for stuff that shouldn't get on board an airplane. Weapons, bombs, things of that nature. The thing they find most often that they report? Cash. And why wouldn't they, right? Imagine yourself as a TSA screener.

The threat of terrorism is a mostly made-up fake threat. It's mostly complete nonsense. And so TSA screeners simply do not find anything that is actually risky. What they find is nonstop forgotten pocket knives. I lost tons of knives from forgetting to take them out and whatnot. Or my son one time recently were flying and he had a pocket knife and, well, there goes another one.

They take away my screwdrivers. I travel with a little screwdriver. I said, "Oh, can't travel with this," et cetera. So most of them spend time, they spend finding junk. They don't find much. Now, I have a friend who used to work for TSA. He told me that they actually did find a lot of stuff.

I don't buy it until I see public reports of it. But when you incentivize someone -- so they don't get any special bonus for finding a knife in somebody's bag or something like that recently. It doesn't matter. But when you do get a bonus for finding cash, well, now all of a sudden, when you're a low-paid government worker who has to make people angry all day, every day, at least you can get a little extra money by getting cash.

And this makes this particularly dangerous. And so follow the money, right? The incentives make people find the cash. And so it's a big risk. Cash. And it's not part of their job. They're literally doing something other than their job while at work. So the TSA alerted the DEA, who showed up and questioned Warren.

They didn't like his answers. But it really wouldn't have mattered what his answers were because the DEA wanted the cash and sworn affidavits from multiple family members and business associates wouldn't have changed what happened next. They brought in a drug dog and the dog alerted to the money, having detected the odor of drugs.

At least that's what they think because dogs don't talk. Dogs don't talk. I've had dogs, a couple of dogs in my life. And they don't speak. I often thought I knew what they were thinking. But I'll be honest, just an educated guess. So I want to talk about this for a moment on the subject of dogs.

There are two things you need to know about cash and probable cause that police officers use related to dogs. Number one, they claim that virtually all cash has drug residue. And when you think about the drugs that could be present, the drug residue that could be present in physical currency, that amount of drug residue is only increasing.

Now, right, in Florida, now we have medical marijuana. Many, many states have medical marijuana. You have dogs that are still trained for marijuana even though you have increasing legality of it. This is a major question. Is the dog trained for marijuana? Is the dog trained for other drugs? And so the money itself is tainted by drugs, the money that's in your pocket and my pocket right now.

So the fact that the dog alerts to the money doesn't prove anything. And yet that is still something that is still used as probable cause for confiscation. The second thing is that drug dogs can be forced or encouraged or manipulated to alert any time the handler wants the dog to alert.

Now, I think that clearly they do it. But the best explanation of this that came by years ago was from Barry Cooper's Never Get Busted series where he talked about training drug dogs. And he, back in the, I think it was the '90s, he trained his own drug dog.

And what he explained is that what you need to understand about drug dogs is what they start with is they start with a certain type of dog. A certain type of drug dog that you start with is the kind of dog that's just obsessive about his ball, obsessive about getting his tennis ball.

You and I, you know those dogs, those dogs that you throw for them, throw, fetch, and they just don't stop. They don't stop. They don't stop. They're obsessed with it. Most of training a good drug dog is based upon finding the right type of dog that will alert. And then you train the dog to alert to the substance in question and the dog can find it because the dog is then trained to do it.

But you can watch in that old movie, that old video that's on YouTube or any other number of videos, you can watch a handler make the dog alert when there is literally nothing there. And so this is the classic tactic of any kind of police officer. You can create probable cause anytime you want by simply causing the dog to alert.

Many dogs alert rightly. The dog has a powerful sense of smell. The dog can sense the drugs or they can be forced to alert. So who knows what happened. Maybe there were drugs on the money. Maybe there weren't drugs on the money. Maybe the dog just alerted because he was trying to make his handler happy.

Maybe he wasn't. But now all of a sudden you and your money could potentially be separated. Despite making vague allegations that Warren is involved in illicit drug trade, the DEA let him go but kept the money. And that's one of the problems with this on an intellectual level is they say this is drug money and this person is a drug dealer.

We take the money and we let this guy go. Well, if that guy is a drug dealer, shouldn't you go after him and pursue him and shut him down? You just take his money? And the reason for that is there's a much higher standard of evidence and probable cause to actually affect an arrest over somebody to charge that person with a crime, etc.

And that same standard does not exist for civil asset forfeiture. So he fought back and, of course, the government was counting on that and they lost. The prosecutors eventually backed down after his lawyers presented them with several pieces of exonerating evidence, including text messages with the owner of the truck and financial documents showing his income over the years.

They returned all of the seized money and they agreed to dismiss the case against him with prejudice, meaning they cannot go after him again at a later date. Now, that was not a total loss to the government. They managed to deter any future losses from this case by getting Warren to agree to not sue the agents for violating his rights.

And why? Imagine a normal guy like this just wants his money back and he's put through the absolute ringer just to get that done. So now government gets immunity and the agents are protected from the lawsuit because the guy is tired of fighting. The only people who seem to be able to effectively fight this stuff is either people who have very deep pockets themselves or who are able to attract enough attention to their case to have a well-funded legal fund.

And so the actions will give you your money back, but sign the release that you won't sue us. And I guess he did that. So he agreed to do that. The man needed his money. And again, they have that over you also. They take all your money. Well, how are you going to get by now while you're fighting to get your money back?

So the government, meanwhile, has not given his money back. They say they need a few more weeks to find the money. And I did a video not so long ago where we talked about how the city of Mooresville took money from a guy and then gave it to the government by turning it into a check and sending a check to the government.

And this cash went and disappeared. So why do they need to find the exact same money? Just cut the man a check. We know the money hasn't been segregated and parked someplace. The odds of that happening are pretty slim. So the government has no apology for stealing a citizen's cash.

All the government needs is an unproven allegation to take the cash, which is completely the opposite of the way the judicial system is supposed to work. The second story, and we talked about this one also, and I apologize because some of you are going to say, "Steve, these are stories you've already covered." But I've got a couple extra thoughts on that, and so does Tim Cushing who wrote this article.

But in January of 2020, a New York filmmaker was flying from JFK to California to work on two different projects. He was carrying cash with him specifically so he could get his projects done in California. He was carrying $69,000 in cash, and he said that he stashed the money because some of the places he was going, he didn't feel safe just having wads of cash laying around.

So he hid them in – Do you see the irony in that? Isn't it funny? The government, the police officers can't succeed in creating a place where you feel safe with large amounts of cash, and then they go and they steal your own money. It's very possible for a government to create a place that feels safe.

You can walk down the streets of Dubai with a million-dollar watch on your wrist and no one will touch you. Don't tell me it's not possible. That is not the case in California. So the guy takes his cash to do his business, stashes it because he doesn't feel safe.

I had a device that was in his carry-on. It was an old, broken Xbox. And so an agent at the airport spotted the money, apparently I believe tipped off by the TSA, and then the DEA took the money and at one point said, "You know what this looks like, right?" And then they took his cash but let him go.

So again, if the man's a dangerous drug dealer, you should grab him also and prosecute him to the fullest extent of the law with the evidence you have. Oh wait, you don't have any evidence. All you've got is the cash. Can you imagine if the cash was the evidence against you for a crime?

He fought back and he secured the representation of a lawyer named John Corbett, C-O-R-B-E-T-T, John Jalen. I had several people ask me how to spell that, that's how. And he started the process of going after the money, filed a lawsuit, and he actually got some good traction on that lawsuit.

And they wound up getting their money back plus some extra money, even though the first offer from the government was, "We'll give you some of your money back." How's that? Attorney said no. Now in the Filmmaker case, the government wasn't able to talk the Filmmaker into not suing him because that's what they did is they sued.

According to Corbett, the judge made it clear that he did not like the government's position at all and basically told the government that they really want to consider settling. They agreed to go to mediation and the mediator worked on the case to the point where the man got all his money back plus $15,000, which was more than enough to cover his attorney fees.

And that is a remarkable result. And I know people are saying, "Steve, you should have gotten like three times his money back." Well, it's harder to get that because there's no statute that says you can get that. I'm surprised he got his attorney fees, but I'm happy that he did, but that's unusual in this day and age.

So that's two big failures on the part of the federal government in stealing people's money in one week. And of course, you'd think that after you lose a couple of times, you might start rethinking your position. The problem is they make so much money when they don't lose that they're going to keep doing it for a while.

So the good news in these cases is that it looks like not just the people who are victimized by it think it's bad. It's not just people on my channel who think it's bad. It's not just the talking heads on YouTube who think it's bad. But here's a judge, a federal judge, who gets this brought in front of him and looks and goes, "What?

This isn't right." And a lot of people think because they haven't been exposed to enough of it. But a lot of people think of courts as all being the same. They're interchangeable, they're fungible, or of judges as being interchangeable. So in other words, if you have a lawsuit and you file it in a courthouse that's got 20 different judges that are randomly drawn, many people think, "I'm going to file my case in that courthouse." Great.

Well, ask the attorneys. They'll tell you that, "Oh, by the way, in that courthouse, there's one crazy judge, one lunatic judge, insane, out of their minds." There are a couple judges who are just on autopilot, just going through the motions. There's a couple judges that are known to be really, really tough on crime because they're former prosecutors and they've got friends in the prosecutor's office.

There's a couple judges who practiced corporate law and then became judges and now don't really care so much about the criminal cases, but they are fascinated by the civil litigation cases. So keep in mind that not all judges are the same, not all courts are the same, not all attorneys are the same.

So not all judges will protect the police. Not all judges will protect civil asset forfeiture. So the key is to find the cases where they've spun this around, whether it's civil asset forfeiture or qualified immunity or whatever. Find these cases and publicize them and get the word out so people know this.

And I think that as more people find out that there are other like-minded people out there, it makes you more comfortable in your beliefs. So that's the situation. And that is that the DEA, in essence, lost two cases within a week and had to give back $100,000 in stolen cash.

But it's money they never should have taken in the first place. So Keith, thanks for pointing it out to me. TechDirt.com, Tim Cushing wrote it, great story. Questions or comments, put them below. Let's talk to you later. I will link to Steve's video and also the TechDirt article in the show notes for today's show.

But great, great video, great commentary. I don't have much to add to that other than just simply that I stand by my original recommendation that as in that Q&A show, I had physical cash that I needed to move from one side of the country to the other. And it wasn't convenient for me to simply move it digitally, deposit it in the bank, deposit it in a Bitcoin ATM, something like that.

Then I would drive it myself. I think the risk, especially with the TSA agents and whatnot, the risk is too high. I would drive it myself or I would mail it. Hey, Cricket customers, Max with Ads is included with your Cricket $60 unlimited plan at no additional cost. Max is the streaming platform where you can watch Scoob, Meg 2, The Trench, The Nightmare on Elm Street Collection, and so much more.

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