Posted on 04/20/2006 4:51:44 AM PDT by rightwingintelligentsia
When security guards at the Beaver Valley Power Station discovered a bag containing thousands of dollars in a tractor-trailer cab, one of the vehicle's occupants told them his boss planned to use the cash to buy a truck.
It must have been some truck.
State police said the bag, which guards spotted on Tuesday while conducting a routine search of the tractor-trailer at the entrance to the nuclear power plant, contained 10 plastic-wrapped bundles of cash totaling $504,230.
Police later seized the money and bag after a dog trained to detect drugs sniffed and reacted to the bag, indicating contact with controlled substances.
The truck driver and passenger, whose names were withheld but who are from Texas, were released without charges because no apparent crime had been committed.
State police were investigating to determine who owns the money and how it got into the tractor-trailer. If no one comes forward to claim legitimate ownership of the money, police said, they will begin proceedings for forfeit of the cash to the government.
"I wanted to know, why is somebody running around with that amount of money when they're not in a Brink's truck?" said Shippingport police Sgt. R.N. Davis Jr., who pulled the truck over after it left the power plant in Beaver County.
(Excerpt) Read more at post-gazette.com ...
Um, if nobody else wants it, I guess I'll have to take it.
FYI ping.
bump
there was a time when it wasn't a crime to carry cash.
It's mine. The bills were green and grey and white and they had numbers on 'em, right? And, like, pictures of presidents and houses and stuff? Yeah, they're mine. I was wondering where they'd gotten to.
I'd bet dollars to donuts... that if the real owner would really step forward, claim and prove that the cash was his. He would never get it.
"I wanted to know, why is somebody running around with that amount of money when they're not in a Brink's truck?"
Terrorists do that, McFly.
I know that trace amounts of cocaine is on almost all cash. I wonder if that is done on purpose by the powers that be.
I'll take a stab at identifying it,
Oh Yeeesssss, Prrrescious....we wants its....and we wants to takes its.....
[Smeagol rant off]
Why does the government think it has a right to confiscate the cash if no crime has been committed???
It is not illegal to carry large sums of cash. It may not be smart but it isn't illegal that I know of.
Supposedly it is because bills are commonly rolled up to snort the stuff. I suspect that chemically it is easy to detect in very small amounts so there are traces of it all over.
Usually the person who finds it, gets it, if no one claims it within a certain period of time.
I think the fact that the dogs alerted to "controlled substances" may change the procedure.
Remember when we cared about rights? While it's technically legal to carry large amounts of cash so long as you don't enter or leave the country while doing so, government on any level can seize it on any pretext, using the legal fiction that the cash itself may have committed a crime.
$500,000?
I suspect that would have raised eyebrows at any time during our history...
If I went to the bank, could they certify that the money they have in their bank is drug free? Obviously new money would be. Money that has been circulated is " fair game " if the cops should need to test it?
That is true. But it's not very common for someone to misplace $500K, and fail to claim it, either.
Context is everything...
This isn't 1936... or 1956... We now need to consider the new improved dangers we are fighting; and the role of large amounts of cash in them.
Evidently they don't want the money or they would have claimed it. Nice of the police to try to find the rightful owner.
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