They don’t have any special magical powers. They must operate according to federal law and the Constitution, same as any federal law enforcement officer.
But a warrant is not required to hang around in the vault room and see what’s going on. All they need is the bank’s permission to hang out there. If you were the manager of a small-town S&L, you probably would not want to get in an ideological privacy-rights fight with the DEA, so you say, “have at it, boys!”
Jeeze- since he was the lawyer for all those guys, why didn’t he just have the family members pick up the money at his office? They would have had a legit reason for being there.
Should we link this to the Massachusetts civil asset seizure thread?
Could they arrest him for just having the money? I would say no unless the money was know or reasonably suspected to be tied to illegal activity. (IANAL)
But I guaranty the money will be paying for a new coffee maker at the police station.
When I was a bank customer service rep ten years back, safety deposit privacy and security was drilled into us. We were supposed to take the customer into the room, unlock the box (each had two locks, I think, for which the customer had one key and the bank the other), and give them privacy while they conducted their business. No one else was allowed in the vault while a customer was using his or her box, not even another customer with a box and certainly not a cop without a warrant. Nor were there any cameras in that room.
And again, let’s assume the cops/DEA see the lawyer with this money. So what? Is that really enough to seize it on sight just because there is a lot of it? The fact I am the guy is a lawyer should give them even more pause. It’s reasonable to think that anyone who wants to have a lot of cash on hand (for legal or illegal reasons) would want to store it in a safety deposit box. I would think the warrant would have to be extremely specific, like they would have to know I was placing a specific amount of money into the box of a known criminal and that it was specifically associated with a crime. In this case, the box presumably belongs to the families of the nine guys in jail, who presumably aren’t major criminals. The fact an ‘anonymous benefactor’ is donating to those families may prove nothing, and the lawyer may not even know the details.
What if my cash only company has me deposit lots of money at the bank each day, and only a small part of it is from an illegal drug sale the owner did out of the back of the shop that was labelled on the books as a ‘large dry cleaning job’. Assuming the cops are on to it, am I getting arrested at the bank and allowing these guys to seize all the money because of it?
On the other hand … it also occurs to me that, ten years back at it, it was forbidden to keep cash in safety deposit boxes. I remember thinking at the time that the rule was all-but-unenforceable, givne that we weren’t allowed to see what the clients were putting in or taking out. Though in many cases I knew.
Case law; SC;
…This Court repeatedly has explained that “probable cause” to justify an arrest means facts and circumstances within the officer’s knowledge that are sufficient to warrant a prudent person, or one of reasonable caution, in believing, in the circumstances shown, that the suspect has committed, is committing, or is about to commit an offense. See Gerstein v. Pugh, supra at 420 U. S. 111; Adams v. Williams, supra at 407 U. S. 148; Beck v. Ohio, supra at 379 U. S. 91; Draper v. United States, 358 U. S. 307, 358 U. S. 313 (1959); Brinegar v. United States, supra at 338 U. S. 175-176; Carroll v. United States, 267 U. S. 132, 267 U. S. 162 (1925).
A 7th Circuit opinion;
…We have observed in prior cases that “[p]robable cause requires only that a probability or a substantial chance of criminal activity exist.” Purvis v. Oest, 614 F.3d 713, 722–23 (7th Cir.2010)…
PC for an arrest/arrest warrant is NOT in the 4th AM, that only deals with Search Warrants. However, from decisional law, not quoted, an arrest warrant/arrest is to be construed to dictate the same PC as a search warrant.
If an arrest is made absent PC, if claimed by the defendant, then thier Attorney can challenge it, just as a search warrant affidavit can be challenged. A trial Judge even has the power to negate a SW another signed.
In your scenario, absent facts to support a so called “Totality of the circumstances”, PC is very weak. Though PC is not to be correlated with conviction beyond a reasonable doubt, more than hunches need be present.
The SC has stated time and again, a search absent a warrant is “presumptively UNreasonable”. A safe deposit box is a safe haven that requires a SW/Court authority to open absent emergency/exigent circumstances
While a warrant may not be needed with the banks permission, you can bet if a cop saw illegal activity and arrested the person, you can bet a million, the first argument a good defense attorney will proffer was, it was an UNreasonable search, and thus argue the Exclusionary rule applies.
A search is not necessarily what most think it is, a pat down for weapons, a search inside a home/car.
There is an “Expectation of Privacy” in a bank vault. When an EOP has been breached, a search most probably occurred.
But they don’t need to bother with that at all. They already have the box numbers and can get warrants for them if they need to. All they need is for the lawyer to roll over on the other guys and take his deal for expediency.
I do not think they had the box numbers.
Hank Schrader, the head of the DEA office, was told by his boss he was no longer allowed to keep Ehrmantraut under observation because nothing had come from it. So Schrader decides to tail Ehrmantraut’s attorney (thus abiding by the letter of his boss’ order and not the spirit of it).
Schrader knew he had Ehrmantraut’s nine guys but I do not think they knew about the safety deposit boxes.
In short, following the attorney was a shot in the dark for them and they got lucky catching him with all the SDB doors open and a bag full of money.
Yes, if they had some other reason. No they can’t follow you into a safe deposit box room to do so.
I’m sure they got the box numbers from the cookiemonster bank clerk. Remember, she was nervous the second time the lawyer came in, because the DEA had talked to her after they saw him in the bank the first time.
They didn’t need a warrant. All they needed was a tray of warm cookies.
Nope.
And you’re right, that the whole safety deposit scheme simply created a method whereby every dropoff and pickup was thoroughly documented. Didn’t make any sense.
A) Police don’t need a warrant if probable cause and exigent circumstances are present. We don’t know what the bank manager told them, so it’s possible she provided both.
B) What the lawyer was doing was money laundering. It’s not illegal to put money in a safe deposit box, but it is illegal to hide transactions involving dirty money - and that’s what the lawyer was doing.
Yeah, I don’t understand why the attorney didn’t do this either. There was no reason to include a bank employee as a witness, or to leave a paper trail.
Machine Elf is essentially right. I worked for a while in Asset Forfeiture (for DEA, as it turns out). There’s a good bit of “behind the scenes” sort of activity. I would frequently assist, for example with investigations to identify assets for seizure. First, we would already know basically what all of the targets were up to. From there, we would use confidential sources (like FinCEN - the Financial Crime Enforcement Network) to identify bank activity, casino activities (often used to launder money), employment data, and so on. When a shit’em gets pulled over (by a uniformed officer, so that DEA’s involvement is concealed), and $250k is is stuffed into a shoebox, the target is given an opportunity to explain wtf he has all that money for. No good reason? Screw it - the money gets confiscated. Go ahead and sue - by the time your civil case gets to court, the USAO has already approved the seizure and forfeiture proceedings have started. And you’re probably already in custody.
One thing that we did sometimes was to FIRE (Frozen, Indected, Restrained and Encumbered) assets. For example, if we knew that your multi-million dollar house was bought with drug proceeds, we would FIRE the house. You’d really only figure that out if you tried to sell it. One day you wake up with a nice sign on your front door telling you that “all your house are belong to us.”
I order to get your stuff back, you need to be able to demostrate that it was all from legitimate (taxed) income. And, of course, the USAO is pretty good at making sure that you miss a deadline, or just wear you down with time and lawyer’s fees. That said, I never really saw the gov dicking people out of their money/assets. We always had a surplus of evidence; there’s a reason for the expression “let’s not make a Federal case out of this.” You will lose almost every time.
So, to answer the OP - they can’t arrest the lawyer for having a suitcase full of money.
They could seize it and hold it, it seems.
I wonder how the scenario plays out -
“Prove the money is legit taxed income.”
“I am forbidden by the Bar’s attorney-client privilege rules from disclosing that.”
I guess the next question is - what consitutes reasonable grounds for believing the money is proceeds of crime? It could have been collected by the Sisters of Immaculate Deception to help support the poor wives and children of incarcerated parishoners, and the lawyer was only delivering it.
In Giant Rat’s example, they would have reams of observed drug-trafficking and other illicit behaviour - I assume surveillance reports, the cash tracked by serial numbers sometimes, matching bank records if it came from elswhere, etc. In other situations involving less sophisticated or less concerned law enforcement, it appears DWB was usually sufficient.
I presume if the circumstances of money seized were tossed from criminal court as tainted evidence due to illegal search and seizure, the same evidence could not be used by the prosecutor in the civil fofeiture action?