The driver of an armored car carrying $712,000 in cash from licensed marijuana dispensaries was heading into Barstow on a Mojave Desert freeway in November when San Bernardino County Sheriff’s deputies pulled him over. They interrogated him, seized the money and turned it over to the FBI.
A few weeks later, deputies stopped the same driver in Rancho Cucamonga, took an additional $350,000 belonging to legal pot stores and gave that cash to the FBI too.
Now, the FBI is trying to confiscate the nearly $1.1-million bounty, which it might share with the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department. The FBI says the money is tied to federal drug or money-laundering crimes, but has specified no unlawful conduct and charged no one with a crime.
The cash seizures — and another from the same trucking company in Kansas — raise questions about whether the Justice Department under President Biden is moving to disrupt the operations of licensed marijuana businesses in California and other states where pot is legal.
The FBI and the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles have been forced to return tens of millions of dollars in cash and valuables seized by federal agents last March from hundreds of safe deposit boxes in Beverly Hills after the government failed to produce evidence to back up its allegations the money and goods were criminal proceeds. Some of that money belonged to owners of state-licensed marijuana businesses.
Now, Judge John W. Holcomb of U.S. District Court in Riverside is weighing a request by Empyreal Logistics, the company whose armored cars were emptied in California and Kansas, for an emergency order to force the FBI and the Sheriff’s Department to stop pulling over its vehicles and seizing cash without evidence of illegal activity. The company is also trying to get back the cash.
Empyreal says it follows U.S. Treasury Department guidelines on how to handle the cash of state-licensed marijuana businesses without running afoul of federal law and verifies that the dispensaries whose money it carries are in good standing with state regulators.
“This is among the more egregious forfeiture cases that we’ve ever seen,” said Dan Alban, senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, a libertarian group that fights forfeiture excesses nationwide and represents Empyreal in its lawsuit.
Alban called the cash seizures a “very cynical attempt to exploit the differences between federal and state law” on marijuana.
Possession and sale of marijuana remains illegal under federal law, but 36 states have legalized medical cannabis, and 18 of them, including California, allow recreational pot.
During the 2020 presidential campaign, Joe Biden promised to let states “continue to make their own choices regarding legalization.” He also vowed to decriminalize marijuana, but he has taken no steps to keep that pledge.
A Justice Department spokesperson did not respond to repeated questions by email on whether the Biden administration’s policies on marijuana enforcement permit seizures of cash from businesses licensed to sell cannabis.
Empyreal’s…
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