These criminals should be in jail for fraud under color of law, and so should those authorities who enabled it too.
A Treasury Department analysis in 1991 concluded that over 75% of the money seized under the structuring law belonged to people not involved in any illegal activity.
This racket has now been going for 28 years, with thousands of law-abiding Americans stripped of their savings and, in many cases, imprisoned as well.
A textbook case is that of Daniel Aversa, who in 1993 was sentenced to a mandatory prison term for conspiring with a friend to hide income from his wife. The scheme, which involved smurfing, triggered reports of suspicious transactions in Aversa’s and his friend’s bank accounts. After sentencing Aversa and his “co-conspirator” to a mandatory prison term, Judge Martin Loughlin wrote:
Defendants should never have been prosecuted for structuring currency transactions… where evidence showed that defendants were not attempting to avoid paying tax on money or disguise where it came from… The evidence shows that [Aversa] did not believe that [he] was breaking any law… There is only one explanation for the bringing of these charges – it was easy.
In 1994, the Supreme Court overturned the conviction of another defendant convicted of structuring, because prosecutors couldn’t prove the defendant knew it was illegal. Congress responded in 2000 with a law that makes structuring punishable even “without the need to prove specific knowledge that such evasion is unlawful.”
And today, nearly three decades after the enactment of the original law, the vast majority of structuring investigations still involve legally earned, after-tax funds. Prosecutors love the law because winning is a slam-dunk. And it’s getting used more and more, because seizing agencies keep a cut of what they confiscate – sometimes as much as 80%. More than 100 multiagency task forces are now combing through the 700,000 Suspicious Activity Reports that banks file every year, looking for accounts to seize.