Posted on 12/23/2014 6:00:02 AM PST by C19fan
Pennsylvania state police were tied up for months in a sting operation that ended with a 20-hour raid in early January. As law professor Baylen Linnekin writes in Reason, the target wasn't illegal narcotics but a cellar full of rare and expensive bottles of wine. 2,447 bottles, to be exact. They are worth more than $160,000. Officers seized the bottles from the Malvern home of attorneys Arthur Goldman and Melissa Kurtzman, and state they are now planning to destroy the collection. The state's strict liquor laws led law enforcement to Goldman, who insists he was not looking to sell off his collection and that the bottles were only for his private consumption.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
The state bureaucrats are going to destroy this fine collection... one bottle at a time...
You can be sure that state knows and cares nothing about the ‘proper storage’ of valuable wine. Before any legal matter is finished the bottles will be worthless.
Thank you Big Brother. Govt is best at destroying value, livelihoods, lives, and families.
I don’t know about PA, but I cannot ship wines direct from California wineries to my house. If I want to buy wine on one of my trips to California, I have to carry it back on the plane as luggage.
Article reads like the lawyer was in fact breaking the law but I'd guess these are the types of laws most Pennsylvanians didn't even know existed.
PA does. The Commonwealth controls alcohol distribution. Wine and liquor are sold at State Stores (renamed to Wine & Spirit stores) run by over paid State employees that have incredible health care benefits and pensions. A great place to be a cashier.
Liquor licenses are impossible to get for mom & pop restaurants. Just about every aspect of alcohol is control by fascists.
Even after four years of Republican control of the legislature, the governorship, and 80% of the public supporting privatization, they couldn't privatize State Stores. F'n RINOs.
Trust me, if you are a wine drinker who lives in Pennsylvania, you know about Pennsylvania’s ridiculous laws regarding wine.
The unionized State Store must get their cut.
Contemporary Americans have grown contemptuous of LIBERTY. They will pay a heavy price.
I can't imagine this supports his argument very well.
Sounds like both are lawyers. Very well could be one of them crossed paths with and PO’ed the wrong state bureaucrat.
That’s only about 65 dollars a bottle not very rare or that expensive compared to some.
“From what I understand PA has the worse laws around the distribution and sale of alcohol. “
I lived in MA for 3 years. They weren’t allowed to sell beer in the bowling alleys but you bring your own in and drink it!
Yep...exactly. They must have crappy cars, because if they had nice ones they would “confiscate” them too!
At $65 a bottle, it is probably a significant upgrade from the box wine the property clerk drinks on a daily basis.
We have become the old USSR in many ways.
Sounds like Virginia
From the book:
At the federal prosecutor’s office in the Southern District of New York, the staff, over beer and pretzels, used to play a darkly humorous game. Junior and senior prosecutors would sit around, and someone would name a random celebrity—say, Mother Theresa or John Lennon. It would then be up to the junior prosecutors to figure out a plau- sible crime for which to indict him or her. The crimes were not usually rape, murder, or other crimes you’d see on Law & Order but rather the incredibly broad yet obscure crimes that populate the U.S. Code like a kind of jurisprudential minefield: Crimes like “false statements” (a felony, up to five years), “obstructing the mails” (five years), or “false pretenses on the high seas” (also five years). The trick and the skill lay in finding the more obscure offenses that fit the character of the celebrity and carried the toughest sen- tences. The result, however, was inevitable: “prison time,” as one former prosecutor told me.
At least one can buy wine from the supermarket in VA.
avoid any state that has commonwealth in it’s name.
You can now buy beer and wine at the grocery store but there are limits. Pennsylvania government is horrible.
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