ATF Asset Forfeiture

Mixing alcohol, tobacco, firearms, and bombs together is always a bad idea unless, of course, you are the United States government. The feds have established a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, commonly known as just ATF.

The clever ATF bureaucrats thought of other words fitting those initials: “Always Think Forfeiture.” They engraved “Always Think Forfeiture” on Leatherman pocket tool kits given to federal, state, and local law enforcement officers being trained by the ATF’s Asset Forfeiture Program.

Hardly a subtle message: Always think of ways to seize a citizen’s property for the government’s use.

When a congressman got wind of this and raised hell, the ATF’s response was a small masterpiece of bureaucratese:

“These training aids were designed to increase awareness of the asset forfeiture concept so that persons who do not regularly employ the strategy as part of a criminal investigation might be reminded to consider it. We regret that the ATF’s training initiative created a misperception. . .[blah blah blah, and we've stopped giving out those things].”

So what does ATF really stand for?

At The Frontline against violent crime!

Have a comment? Email me at merriner@jamesmerriner.com.
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Frank Vennes

Frank Vennes, a pawnbroker in North Dakota, converted to Christianity while serving three years in prison for money laundering and drugs and firearms offenses. Afterward, he became a leading businessman and Christian philanthropist in Minnesota.

Vennes filed a strange appeal to overturn his previous convictions. He said that somebody posing as a member of the Chicago mob had threatened to dismember his children unless he recovered $100,000 in laundered funds that somehow had been lost or stolen. Turns out, that wasn’t a Mafia guy after all. It was a federal agent trying to entrap Vennes, he said.

An appeals court threw out the claim as ludicrous, but one judge wrote a stinging dissent.  Allowing Vennes’ case to go to trial would have created “an embarrassing spectacle” for the government, he said. The whole matter was “wondrously bizarre,” especially “when the undercover agents tried to explain the loss of $100,000.”

Meanwhile, Vennes helped to find investors, including pastors and faith-based groups, for Tom Petters’ businesses. Petters was convicted in December 2009 of running a $3.6-billion Ponzi fraud. Vennes, though, has not been charged with a crime, let alone convicted of one—but the government has seized all his assets anyway. That is allowed because he was named as a defendant, along with many others, in a federal civil suit filed in October 2008.

Vennes has told friends he can’t make a living, because any money he earned, the government would seize anyway.

Have a comment? Email me at merriner@jamesmerriner.com.
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cormorant fishing

When I was ten years old my family was touring Japan and watched the 1,300-year-old tradition of cormorant fishing in Gifu. It was really cool. We were the only Americans in small boats lined along the shore to witness the spectacle. The other boats were filled with traveling Japanese businessmen. I guess it was something like going to Vegas for them.

The fishing is done at night, with baskets of burning wood illuminating the river for the fishermen and their cormorants—large birds. Each fisherman on either side of the bow of their boats in mid-river controlled twelve birds with lines around their fingers. The lines were attached to rings around the birds' necks. A small fish, the birds could swallow. Larger ones, they couldn't. So the fisherman with his fingers would deftly draw the birds back to his boat to take their fish. Twelve birds at a time, they did this, and never got the lines tangled. They were Mozarts at the keyboard.

The Japanese businessmen in our neighboring boats got drunk on sake. My parents didn't drink and that was the first time I ever saw people getting drunk.

A barge floated down the river featuring elaborately dressed dancing girls. They were exquisitely lit by torches and by their reflections on the water. That was also the first time that I realized the importance of, um, girls. At least I understood that the drunken businessmen appreciated them.

Recently I have been researching the Ponzi frauds of Tom Petters and Bernie Madoff. They remind me of those cormorant fishermen. They had all these lines wrapped around their fingers, draped to the necks of investors, creditors, some innocent people and some damn fools. Little fish, they didn't care. Big fish, they took. Miraculously, they kept the lines from entangling. For so long. Until the lines got so snarled that they fell overboard. And then, who would get the fish? Who would feed the birds?

I also saw people getting drunk—not on sake but on wealth and power. Petters and Madoff were drunk that way, if not self-deluded. So were many of their investors, both the smart guys and the damn fools.

And so were agents of the United States government.

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