Court Opinion

ID: 9487510
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 12:18:26.978229+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:52:18.819386
License: Public Domain

NOONAN, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
I would not depend on the dog but I would consider the facts as they converge in the context of Los Angeles. Albert Joseph Alexander is a young man 30 years old at the time he was stopped on an April evening in 1990 with $30,060 in cash on the front seat of his car. He at once told the police about where he had obtained the money, saying he had earned it as a partner of Dan Tucker at Tucker’s Cafe. He also told the police about his current employment, saying that he worked at Jim Dandy’s Liquor. As it turned out, he had not earned the money by working at Jim Dandy’s. He had not been a partner of Tucker but was dating his daughter. Albert Joseph Alexander had not worked for five years. His sole legal source of support was his mother, an employee of the post office.
The money was in a plastic bag. The bills included denominations of $5, $10, $20, $50 and $100. They were bound by rubber bands and stacked so that each set amounted to $1,000. Although there was one uneven stack because the total was $30,060, Alexander believed that he had only $30,000 and so stated to the police.
It is proper to consider the convergence of the lie about the source of the money, the lie about Alexander’s job, the arrangement of the cash into bundles of $1,000, the absence of any income acknowledged by Alexander, his strange and mistaken belief that he had a *1046-1048round sum of $30,000, his immature hope that his girlfriend’s father would cover for him, the time of day and year, and the city where he was arrested. What else could Alexander be but the agent of a drug ring? His lies and his lack of income make it clear that the money was illegally obtained: the money’s illegality is far more than a suspicion, it’s a virtual certainty. Alexander could not “just as easily have been a distributor of ‘street money’ in a political campaign”; it was not the season. He could not have been an embezzler; he had no job where he could embezzle. He could not have been “an S & L crook”; he had no connection with any bank. Abstractly speaking, he could have been a jewel smuggler, an art thief, an extortioner, a bank robber, or a kidnapper. But the government was not obliged to prove him guilty of a particular crime beyond a reasonable doubt, only to prove what the probability was. It may well be doubted that any sophisticated or violent criminal would be so casual in the keeping of his cash.
We deal with probabilities in the real world, in a city where the drug trade has flourished and where seventy-five percent of the currency is tainted with drugs. Nine persons out of ten would come to the same conclusion as the police, the dog, and the government: the money was drug money, neatly packaged in a round sum, as Alexander believed, for delivery. The carrier was careless. He and his employers are given an unjustified break by indulging the fiction that there is substantial doubt about the crime the cash was connected with. The proper standard for forfeiture is a practical, common sense appraisal of whether, given the particular convergent circumstances, there is “probable cause for belief that a substantial connection exists between the property to be forfeited and the criminal activity [required by 21 U.S.C. § 881(a)(6) ]”. United States v. $5,644,540.00 in U.S. Currency, 799 F.2d 1357, 1362-63 (9th Cir.1986) (emphasis in original). The standard has not been altered, as the majority seems to imply, by United States v. $191,910 in U.S. Currency, 16 F.3d 1051, 1072 (9th Cir.1994). There is probable cause to believe the cash here was specifically connected to criminal drug activity. No other plausible source exists. The process of eliminating plausible alternatives establishes the probability.
The majority opinion also fails to correct the error of the district court assessing probable cause at the time the seizure was effected rather than at the time of the forfeiture proceeding. United States v. One 1985 Cadillac Seville, 866 F.2d 1142, 1146-47 (9th Cir.1989); United States v. U92 S. Livonia Road, 889 F.2d 1258, 1268 (2d Cir.1989).