POSSIBLE SPOILERS!! If you are a Breaking Bad fan and have not seen the last episode or two you may want to skip this. Mods, this is a factual question only prompted by the show hence me putting it here.
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In last week’s episode of Breaking Bad (or the one before…not sure) the cops decide to follow an attorney who they knew was working for one of the bad guys (Mike Ehrmantraut). This attorney was carrying money for Ehrmantraut and placing it into safety deposit boxes as payoffs for guys who were busted to stay quiet.
In the scene the cops let the attorney walk into the safety deposit box room unaware he was being followed. Once the attorney was in there he opened his suitcase he brought with him which was filled with money and proceeded to start filling various safety deposit boxes with the payoffs.
He barely starts, turns around and sees three cops standing in the door smiling at him. Scene cuts but basically the guy is arrested.
So, my question is can the cops do that?
A) Usually safety deposit rooms are private. Without a warrant can the police impose on the bank to open the door for them to see what someone is doing?
B) Even if “A” above is allowed can they arrest a guy for a suitcase filled with cash? Note they had no warrant on the guy…just decided to follow him. While I agree that is suspicious as hell is it actually illegal? Could the attorney just tell them to piss off, go get a warrant and finish filling safety deposit boxes?
Just curious…I am not involved in anything of the sort or trying to learn how to evade cops. I literally only dream of a suitcase full of money in my possession.
I happened to come across a “Cops” type of show set in Laredo (or similar border town in Texas/Arizona). The cop stops a suspicious looking car (I forget - but he explained why it looked suspicious). The car was headed to Mexico.
After a few questions cop believes the suspect is lying and searches him and the passengers and finds wads and wads of dollar bills. He arrests them all. Don’t know if they were charges and convicted though.
Was it brought across an international border? If it was more than $10,000, and I am going high on that amount, they can track it until it reaches it’s final destination.
They can do so for five years if they want. Cash over a certain amount is considered not so much a personal amount but more of business amount. I haven’t passed the broker test nor ever tried but I think that is close. Check CFR.19
The scene in question the lawyer was on private property inside a bank. I don’t quite think it would have played out that way. Vehicles getting searched for traffic violations is one thing but they would have needed a warrant to be inside the bank and then to show probable cause that the money was obtained illegally.
I’d like to hear some actual lawyers experience I don’t think civil forfeiture is quite as easy as they show it or that someone can be arrested and have their money seized on private property just for carrying a large sum of cash. ( especially a lawyer how has legitimate reasons for dealing with cash and can also assert client privilege. )
BB has a lot of tolerances on reality in some of the writing. they get around the actual law and logistics in some cases by just failing to explain all the details (how did walter get to brock in order to poison him?!)
when the lawyer was cornered putting money into the safety deposit boxes, i’m sure there’s a series of pretty official questions relating to the paper trails that make it a little terrifying for the lawyer. having just added myself to my folks’ SDB at the bank, i know there’s a lot of official paperwork to allow access. if he was associated with Mike or if Mike’s name was on any of the paperwork, it might be pretty shadeballs for the lawyer to cage out of it (considering 609 or whatever the new SDB number was is for Kayleigh, Mike’s name has to be on some of that shit). it seems like a pretty ‘caught red-handed trap’ that might have more to do with the people involved than the money, per se.
I think this is more a case of, “Oh, hi. We notice you sure are putting a lot of cash in those boxes. It’s a suspicious amount. If we were, you know, hypothetically, to watch all those boxes, would we see any shady characters taking the money out?”
^that.
and “oh hey, we see the paperwork for that new box contains some hundreds of thousands of dollars to Mike’s grand daughter. we knew he was involved in some illegal shit. looks like you’re fucked. unless you cooperate…”
i’d squeal before they even finished talking, so. that guy seemed pretty weak sauce from the get-go. psh…bacon banana cookies. come on.
i really don’t know he even came from. Saul is always the right answer in that situation…
Lots of things don’t make sense about “mikes nine guys” but thats not really relevant, I’m also interested in the OP. I know cash found in vehicle searches has been seized many times in the US but could they seize cash in the specific case shown here?
Fair enough but would the bank even open the door for them?
It has been ages since I have gone to a safety deposit box but my memory is the process was deemed very private by the bank.
Cops with no warrants can walk into a bank and tell them to open the door so they can see what’s up?
As for the attorney wanting to make a deal well…he should have a clue about the people he is dealing with and realize that rolling over on them would be bad for his health so perhaps he might not spill the beans as fast as you suggest. He might but I sure would think twice about it in his position.
There was a case in London a few years ago. The Police got a warrant to open all the safe deposit boxes in a particular bank (in Knightsbridge I think). As you would expect they found large quantities of cash and jewels, the owners had to come forward to claim the contents and prove they’d obtained it legally. Some owners didn’t come forward, some owners went to prison, some owners sued the police.
In Breaking Bad it’s not “the cops”, it’s the DEA, who have special anti-organised-crime powers that regular cops don’t have. Or at least that’s my understanding. Regular cops might not be able to do it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the DEA can.
They already knew the names. Presumably, they got a warrant and learned the boxes belonged to soldiers in the drug ring. They got him to flip on Mike because otherwise they would pin the payoff scheme on him.
If they simply saw the lawyer with the money, there’s no crime and he could refuse to answer questions about the origins of the money or destination based on client-attorney privilege.
A) Usually safety deposit rooms are private. Without a warrant can the police impose on the bank to open the door for them to see what someone is doing?
IANAL, but I don’t see the problem. The bank is private property. The owner or owner’s representative can do what they wish within the law. If some police officers asked to observe some activity in the bank and the manager agreed why would a warrant be needed? It isn’t the customer’s property. The customer might sue if he believes his contract rights have been violated, but I doubt they were-if one reads the fine print. As for an arrest, that will be up to the judge. From the description, I suspect the judge will find probable cause, but observing in the bank-I can’t imagine there would be a problem.
There is nothing illegal (in the US at least) about possessing large amounts of cash; you cannot be arrested for doing so.
However, if you’re dealing with a bank, they may file a Suspicious Activity Report. If you are conducting a transaction over $10K, they have to file a Currency Transaction Report. Depending on the circumstances, either of those reports may draw attention from law enforcement agencies. If you haven’t done anything illlegal, then you still don’t have much to worry about.
Even though you can’t be arrested for carrying large amounts of cash, you may end up with your cash taken from you by police. Asset forfeiture laws, created to help fight the illegal drug trade, give police a great deal of power and discretion to confiscate cash and property if they merely suspect that said property or cash were used in illegal drug activity. Many police agencies have abused this tool to enrich their own coffers. Example here.
First, there’s the “reasonable expectation of privacy”. The bank may own the room, but the boxes belong to private individuals. Also, the bank may own the washrooms but that may not allow them to give permission for a man to enter the ladies’ washroom, either. I suppose if the boxes are wide open, it’s “in plain sight”, but if they lift a lid they need a warrant.
As for the lawyer - not sure where he fits on the list - there are lists of businesses that must report cash transactions over the threshhold amount. (Not just banks - IIRC brokers, etc. also qualify) Be caught with more than that, or conspiring/ constructing transactions to evade the reporting limits (I suppose divvying up substantial amounts in safety deposit boxes could qualify) and you face charges. OTOH, he does not have to answer any questions because attorney-client privilege kicks in. IIRC, IANAL, he does not even have to identify a client.
I guess the next question is - are the money recipients stupid enough to put the boxes in their own names, or are they registeres to 1234567 Inc. and the signing agent at the time was some temp from down the block from his office?
Does a bank know which particular box you are working with, or do they just leave you in the room to fetch your own box(es)? In the former case, they would probably want some documentation to verify you have a right to that box; likely including ID, and it would be surprising if that record of who accesed what boxes is not available to the feds.
I have a box at my local Bank of America, and here’s how it works there:
To access the box I have to identify myself, specify which box number I wish to visit, and sign some kind of record-of-access card associated with that particular box. Once the bank employee has verified that I am one of the people who is authorized access, we walk together into the vault itself.
Inside the vault one sees a scene very much like that shown here: Each box is kept in an independently-locked miniature safe, I guess you’d say. Access requires two keys: I have one; the bank keeps the other. (They claim to have no copies of “my” key, and warn that if I lose it I’ll be paying for a locksmith to get into my box.) The bank employee and I together unlock the box’s slot in the wall and withdraw the box itself, which is a pretty lightweight affair with a lid.
I’m then led into a somewhat private area (visualize an office cubicle with a door) and left alone to do whatever I care to. When I’m done I emerge, flag down an employee, and we reverse the above process to re-secure the box in the vault.
Long story short: Yeah, they know exactly which box(es) you’re there to visit.
Presumably they also log the visit info.
Therefore this “scenario” is not the brightest way to pass large amounts of cash to a subordinate.
Thanks.
If the police had the fore-knowledge to catch the guy in the act, in this case, then they had access to the information that would tell them who all was involved in the transfer-by-box payment scheme. All of which would probably require a warrant. I can’t imagine a bank freely sharing its records with the police without one, or the DA allowing such free access when a warrant should be easy to get and would remove the risk of the evidence being deemed tainted and thrown out.
Can the lawyer claim attorney-client privilege when the lawyer and client are involved in a crime together?
Oddly enough, Hollywood is not the most reliable source of legal correctness; although when it comes to details like Robert Redford on a horse outrunning a car, or Keanu Reeves on a motorcycle outrunning a nuclear explosion, I’m sure their track record for realism is more reliable…
I’m glad someone asked this question, because I was wondering about it myself when I saw the episode last week. Does the DEA really have distinctly different warrantless search and seizure capabilities, as was suggested, then the police? In the context of a lawyer having lots of cash and placing it in safety deposit boxes, I would think no “transaction” has taken place the bank would report, per se, any different than if I stored large quantities of cash in my house. Hey, maybe I’m one of those people who is unable to get a credit card or doesn’t like using them and was planning to buy a car for cash. Or at least, that’s what I would tell a cop/DEA agent, not that it’s any of his business.
Why wouldn’t the police simply arrest the lawyer on the street before he went into the bank, then take the safety deposit box keys, get a warrant, and find out which boxes they went to? I didn’t think the police or DEA had any special rights to be allowed in the vault unless they believed an actual crime was being committed inside. Which brings up another related point…
Assuming I’m wrong and the police/DEA really do have the right to ‘catch you in the act’ like they did with the lawyer, what if the lawyer had been a slow that day, looking at his smartphone or whatever, and hadn’t yet opened the suitcase? If they flung open the vault door to find the lawyer sitting there with a closed suitcase, and he hadn’t yet removed any safety deposit boxes, or removed the cash, could they compel him to ‘finish his transaction’ in front of them?