Two Americans have accused the FBI of stealing or losing their property, including gold coins worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.“All we know is that their property was in a box and safe before the FBI broke into the box,” Joe Gay, an attorney with the nonprofit law firm Institute for Justice, told Fox News. “Once the FBI broke into the box, we honestly don’t know exactly what happened.”
“We don’t know if they lost it. We don’t know if somebody pocketed it and walked away,” he continued. “We have no way to know.” The Institute for Justice filed two lawsuits Friday on behalf of clients who had property seized from their safety deposit boxes in a March 2021 FBI raid on U.S. Private Vaults, a Beverly Hills–based company. After prevailing in court, and the FBI agreeing to return their property, both Don Mellein and Jeni Pearsons discovered some of their property was missing and suspect the FBI’s haphazard raid or sticky fingers are to blame.
Don Mellein decided to invest in gold coins when he retired. He placed those coins in the safety deposit box to, well, keep them safe.But the FBI did not actually intend to return the boxholders’ property. Instead, the FBI’s plan from the beginning was to use civil forfeiture to keep everything in the boxes worth over $5,000. In the rush to process all those boxes, the FBI abandoned its initial plan to carefully videotape the process.
That’s why Mellein and the Pearsons filed another complaint, demanding the FBI return their property or compensate them.So the FBI investigated the business but not the customers. They had no reason or warrant to target specific people. The warrant did not give agents permission to even open the boxes.