Ponzi-Dot-Gov Outrages

Frank Vennes, a pawnbroker in North Dakota, converted to Christianity while serving three years in prison for money laundering and drugs and firearms offenses. Afterward, he became a leading businessman and Christian philanthropist in Minnesota.

Vennes filed a strange appeal to overturn his previous convictions. He said that somebody posing as a member of the Chicago mob had threatened to dismember his children unless he recovered $100,000 in laundered funds that somehow had been lost or stolen. Turns out, that wasn't a Mafia guy after all. It was a federal agent trying to entrap Vennes, he said.

An appeals court threw out the claim as ludicrous, but one judge wrote a stinging dissent. (Read it here.) Allowing Vennes' case to go to trial would have created "an embarrassing spectacle" for the government, he said. The whole matter was "wondrously bizarre," especially "when the undercover agents tried to explain the loss of $100,000."

Meanwhile, Vennes helped to find investors, including pastors and faith-based groups, for Tom Petters' businesses. Petters was convicted in December 2009 of running a $3.6-billion Ponzi fraud. Vennes, though, has not been charged with a crime, let alone convicted of one—but the government has seized all his assets anyway. That is allowed because he was named as a defendant, along with many others, in a federal civil suit filed in October 2008. Review the case here.

Vennes has told friends he can't make a living, because any money he earned, the government would seize anyway.

A gang in Minnesota accosted innocent people, seized money and cars, fenced property, and destroyed evidence. They were not crooks, at least not the kind we usually think of. They were members of a select branch of law enforcement, the Metro Gang Strike Force. Officers often took property seized during searches for their personal use, even if they didn't arrest anybody. Vehicles were grabbed and sold off; some just disappeared. Other seized property included cash, large-screen Tvs., computers, jewelry, even a wood chipper, stump grinder and ice auger.

These outrages were revealed by two official investigative reports in 2009. To date, none of the 34 Strike Force officers has been charged with a crime.

To read an official report, click here.

To see a related civil lawsuit, click here.

If you are African-American, don't drive through Tenaha, Texas. The cops are apt to pull you over and offer you a choice: give us your money or be charged with drug crimes.

That is not the premise of some paranoid writer's script for a TV show or movie. The evidence for such police behavior in that little town seems convincing. The legal defense for the police? Proper search-and-seizure practices under the state's asset-forfeiture law. Really.

So, in the minds of law enforcement, it's OK to pull over an interracial couple from Houston and threaten to seize their children and put them into foster care. Tenaha sits on the highway to gambling destinations in Louisiana, so motorists often are carrying cash. The Houston couple handed over $6,000. They were not charged with a crime. The police still have their $6,000.

To read the federal class-action lawsuit against Tenaha, click here.

A college student in Detroit, Anthony Smelley, received a $50,000 settlement from a car accident. Months later, in January 2009, cops pulled him over in Putnam County, Indiana, for making an unsafe lane change and driving with an obscured license plate. Turns out he also had an expired driver's license. A cop, patting him down, found $17,500 in cash. So the cops called in the dogs. A drug-sniffing dog signaled twice. The police arrested Smelley and two passengers and seized Smelley's money.

A later search found no evidence of illicit drugs. Smelley was never charged with a crime, nor were his passengers. Smelley proved that he was awarded $50,000 in court and said he was taking $17,500 to St. Louis to buy his aunt a car. But the police still have his money.

To read Radley Balko's reporting of this outrage in Slate, click here.

Mixing alcohol, tobacco, firearms, and bombs together is always a bad idea unless, of course, you are the United States government. The feds have established a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, commonly known as just ATF.

The clever ATF bureaucrats thought of other words fitting those initials: "Always Think Forfeiture." They engraved "Always Think Forfeiture" on Leatherman pocket tool kits given to federal, state, and local law enforcement officers being trained by the ATF's Asset Forfeiture Program.

Hardly a subtle message: Always think of ways to seize a citizen's property for the government's use.

When a congressman got wind of this and raised hell, the ATF's response was a small masterpiece of bureaucratese:

"These training aids were designed to increase awareness of the asset forfeiture concept so that persons who do not regularly employ the strategy as part of a criminal investigation might be reminded to consider it. We regret that the ATF's training initiative created a misperception. . .[blah blah blah, and we've stopped giving out those things]."

So what does ATF really stand for? At The Frontline against violent crime!

I wish I were imaginative enough to make this stuff up. If you think I am doing so, click here and here.