On a Friday in March 2021, Brian Moore, an aspiring rap artist, was about to catch a flight from Atlanta to Los Angeles, where he planned to produce a video that he hoped would promote his musical career. To pay for the video, he was carrying $8,500 in cash, money he had inherited from his late grandfather.
Federal drug agents put an end to Moore's plan by taking his money, which they vaguely alleged was connected in some way to illegal drug activity. What happened next illustrates the importance of legal safeguards against the dangers posed by civil forfeiture, a system of legalized larceny that authorizes law enforcement agencies to pad their budgets by seizing supposedly crime-tainted assets without filing criminal charges, let alone obtaining a conviction.
While profit-motivated law enforcement agencies tend to portray it as inherently suspicious, there is nothing illegal about traveling with large sums of cash. And although the government claimed a drug-detecting dog "alerted" to Moore's money, that is less incriminating than it sounds, since research has found that most U.S. currency contains traces of cocaine.
