LOS ANGELES - The U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California, the Los Angeles FBI Assistant Director and the United States are all called to federal court by a man who says the FBI wrongfully seized things that he was storing in a safe deposit box.
According to the April 5 complaint filed in the Los Angeles federal court, the plaintiff, under a pseudonym Richard Roe, was one of hundreds to utilize the safe deposit boxes at U.S. Private Vaults. While the complaint does not specify what Roe stored in the box, the plaintiff says the property was not any sort of contraband and not of interest to any criminal investigation.
U.S. Private Vaults offers highly secure safe deposit boxes in Beverly Hills. The boxes use biometric encryptions including iris and hand scans, as well as motion detectors, heat sensors and other security measures to provide constant surveillance of the boxes. For added security, the vault facility itself does not carry keys to its own deposit boxes or even know the identities of the box holders, relinquishing all control of the box to its user.
On March 22, FBI agents from the L.A. office, at the direction of the defendant U.S. Attorney Tracy Wilkison, seized every safe deposit box in the facility after supposedly obtaining a sealed federal seizure warrant, the suit says.
The warrant allegedly did not have any specific names of vault users, deposit box numbers, suspected contents or any other information that would justify the seizure of the plaintiff's, and every other box holder's, property, the suit says.
Roe says that the FBI and the Attorney's Office have refused to provide the box holders' attorneys with copies of the warrant, and the plaintiff argues that there is likely no warrant at all, and certainly no warrant authorizing a search of his own safe deposit box, because the FBI doesn't know who he is.
According to the complaint, the FBI and U.S. Attorney overseeing the investigation say that the box holders' attorneys won't be given a copy of the warrant unless they disclose the identity of the box holder.
The defendants are accused of essentially holding the safe boxes hostage until the box holders come forward, disclosing their identities and waiving their Fifth Amendment rights; the plaintiff accuses the FBI of using the reasoning that "nobody would utilize the U.S. Private Vaults safe deposit boxes unless they were a criminal."
The plaintiff demands return of his property pursuant to federal code and charges the defendants with unreasonable search and seizure of private property in violation of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. Roe is represented by Bird, Marella, Boxer, Wolpert, Nessim, Drooks, Lincenberg and Rhow PC.