Almost four years ago to the day, the FBI entered U.S. Private Vaults (USPV), a storage business in Beverly Hills, and raided the safe-deposit boxes there, pocketing tens of millions of dollars in cash, valuables, and personal items. Among those owners was Linda Martin, from whom agents took $40,200—her life savings—despite that she had not been charged with a crime.
Those charges would never come. Although USPV itself was ultimately indicted in federal court, the government had no case against unknowing customers like Martin, in a scheme that attorneys have compared to seizing property from individual apartment units because the tenants' landlord was suspected of criminal wrongdoing. At USPV, the agency confiscated over $100 million in valuables from a slew of such people via civil forfeiture, the legal process that allows the government to take people's property without having to prove its owners committed any crime.
The FBI was found to have exceeded the terms of its warrant and to have violated the Fourth Amendment. But it still refused to give back Martin's life savings. She had opted not to store it in a bank account, she says, because she was saving it for a house and did not want to be tempted to spend it. Her bank, meanwhile, did not have a safe-deposit box available, prompting her to turn to USPV.
