[ Randy Sowers, farmer ] I’m Randy Sowers and I live in Middletown, Maryland and I’m just a farmer.
We work hard every day, do what we do, we produce milk here.
Two these agents from Treasury Department showed up;
told me they had seized my chequing account of $65,000.
And the government's telling you they got all the evidence that they need to prosecute you.
You can fight them if you want, but they have all the lawyers they want.
If they don’t have enough, they can hire more.
[ VO ] According to official records on the U.S. Department of Justice website,
in 2019, at least 2 billion 227 million dollars were seized from American citizens.
And that’s just the cash taken by what’s known as the Assets Forfeiture Fund.
[ GEO ] Ruptly, New York city
[ VO ] In the United States, Civil Forfeiture is a process by which
law enforcement agencies take assets away from people they suspect
of being involved with illegal activity
and they don’t have to charge the owners with a crime or misdemeanor.
That means a person only needs to be suspected of something,
for their cash, real estate, vehicles, and bank accounts to be seized
even without direct proof of guilt.
Since the early 80s, this cash and property seizure tool
has been gaining popularity as a weapon to combat drug traffickers and cartels.
Eventually though, enforcement officers began
to seize money from completely innocent people.
Civil forfeiture is still practiced in the United States.
[ Randy Sowers ] I’m Randy Sowers and I live in Middletown, Maryland and I’m just a farmer.
We work hard every day, do what we do, we produce milk here.
We grow crops for the cows and we
have a processing plant and bottlerer, make milk
and make yoghurts and butter and cheeses and
other things and we home deliver them in the Greater Washington, DC area.
And we were doing this for 38 years.
[ GEO ] Farmer's market, Baltimore, MD
[ Man singing ] I love you, you love me
Well, we’re best friends like friends should be
With a great hug
And a kiss from me to you
Won’t you say you love me?
[ VO ] Randy Sowers’s problems with the government began in February 2012.
[ Randy Sowers ] Two these gents from Treasury Department showed up
and asked me questions about my bank account,
which, you know, I never had a problem talking to them about.
But I wondered when they were going to show up
and ask questions about where all the cash came from,
because we do farmers’ markets and
our store takes in mostly cash. That time – almost all cash.
So I didn’t have a problem talking to them about it.
So they asked me questions for about 15 or 20 minutes and
they asked me question one time about where all the money came from. And I said,
“Well, you know, sometimes we have $12,000 or $14,000 a week if we
do farmers’ markets and have some kind of special event on the farm.
And with that question they quit asking me anything and told me they had seized my
chequing account of $65,000,
but they could tell that you know from what they
saw that we were actually farmers – we weren’t,
you know, money launderers or drug dealers or anything like that.
You know, I’ve been pretty uptight about it because there’s a felony
and they said, “You know, we can throw you in jail for this”.
[ VO ] US Internal Revenue Service agents pay particular attention to individuals
who make frequent bank withdrawals and deposits of less than 10,000 dollars.
It’s supposed to be a means of pursuing people
involved in a wide range of illegal activities
such as prostitution and drug dealing.
But agents often target people who have never had
had anything to do with criminal activity.
Randy Sowers and his family are among them.
They’re seen as some of the most respectable people in these parts.
They produce and sell a top-quality, time-proven product
and care a lot about their reputation.
Their stand at the Baltimore Farmers’ Market always attracts a big crowd.
Parents love taking their children to the Sowers farm for field trips.
They have designated hours when visitors can feed the calves
and then feast on ice cream that was made right there on the farm.
[ Randy Sowers ] You know, that was the whole idea through the whole
ordeal was, “You know, you can fight this if you want to
fight it, but, you know, we’ve got all the evidence we need to
convict you of this structuring,
because you told us, you know, that you sometimes get $12,000 or $14,000 a week
but you never deposit more than 10”.
But actually, one time my wife did deposit $12,000
and bank teller told her, you know, asked her not to deposit more than 10,
because it did a lot of extra paperwork for her
and she just appreciated if we just kept it under $10,000,
that’s what I and my wife did.
So in the beginning we thought,
you know, after we talked to the prosecutor,
he said, “You know,
we’re going to take… keep some of your money, but, you know,
you’ll be able to maybe negotiate how much we’re going to keep”.
So that’s what my lawyer was kind of working on,
was trying to work through.
And I got a call from Baltimore сity Paper one day and they were asking me
about the case, because they saw the documents coming out of the
Baltimore, you know, Federal Court building.
[ VO ] Randy agreed to give The Baltimore Sun newspaper an interview.
But the resulting article got him into even more trouble.
It was now clear why people rarely spoke to
the press about state agencies seizing their money.
They tended to keep quiet out of fear.
We asked the IRS media office about Randy’s case, but they didn’t respond.
[ Randy Sowers ] So, we got to the point where we thought we had to take the settlement
because, you know, they were ready to
prosecute us and throw us in jail.
And they said if we fought them
for keeping $30,000 and giving me the other $35,000 back,
they were going to make me pay them the whole $650,000 that we deposited
in that chequing account for that 32 weeks that we deposited that cash in there.
So, you know, they scare you into taking the settlement.
So when we, you know, decided we were going
to take the settlement the papers came through
they wanted me to admit that I did something wrong.
But it wasn’t in the other, you know, documents
of other people that went through the same thing.
And when the lawyer called, “So, what going on here? Why does,
you know, the paperwork for my client read
different from the other clients?”
And again he said, “Because he went to the press”,
that they were going to be harder on me because I went to the press with this.
[ VO ] Randy Sowers had no choice but to agree to the terms.
35,000 dollars were returned to him,
and the state kept the remaining 30,000 dollars.
[ Randy Sowers ] What we found out was a lot of money goes to the local
law enforcement people that help get the money.
You know, it’s distributed different way is we found out,
it’s doesn’t all go to the IRS or Justice.
You know, some of these local people get the money,
that’s why they are so intent on, you know, getting it.
So they get to use some of it.
[ Boy ] Keep the ice cream!
The cows don’t like ice cream!
[ VO ] Randy thought there was no way he could recover the rest of the money.
He’d need to hire expensive lawyers even to try.
And they would cost more than he could get back from the authorities.
Especially after spilling the beans to a local newspaper.
As Randy puts it himself,
it was hard to believe that all this was happening on land
where people had fought and died for their rights and freedoms.
[ Randy Sowers ] So, my American flag needs to be replaced.
The wind’s got it tore up. The only we got left is the stars…
Battle South Mountains, this was McClellan’s headquarters here.
[ Correspondent ] Civil war? [ Randy Sowers ] Yes.
[ Randy Sowers ] It’s actually… the road here used to be the main roads.
A lot of the presidents came through here.
One house there on the corner was Fox’s Tavern.
I think Lincoln supposedly stopped in there.
[ Randy Sowers ] And the government’s telling you they got all the, you know,
evidence that they need to prosecute you,
you can fight them if you want,
but they have all the lawyers they want.
If they don’t have enough they can hire more and
you’re the one who has to pay to defend yourself.
This is going to cost you more in the long run to defend yourself, so most people just,
you know, allowed to keep the money and licked their wounds and went on.
[ VO ] But luckily for Randy, an advocacy group called
the Institute for Justice read his story in the press.
And thanks to the efforts of the organisation’s lawyers,
Randy did recover the rest of the money that the state had kept, 30,000 dollars.
[ Randy Sowers ] It took me 5 years to get the money back.
And it was from a paper that the Institute for Justice filed,
I was the first one that has ever gotten any
money back once they give me all the money back.
People got parts of the money back just like we did – usually got half of it.
[ VO ] In Randy’s opinion, the state has long stopped taking care
of its citizens as it should, according to the constitution.
And every year, it’s getting harder and harder to run any kind of business
and that’s especially true in agriculture.
Many family farms that have been around for generations have gone bankrupt
and had to become something else.
[ Randy Sowers ] Others… lots of farmers are going out of business these days, lots of them.
But the government want Americans to have cheap food, so they…
kind of force the farmers to work for nothing.
They always come up with some kind of new regulations.
[ VO ] One of Randy’s most recent challenges
is a flood insurance fee for his old henhouse,
that’s where he stores hay and old farm machinery now.
Keeping hens wasn’t profitable,
but Randy still needed to repay a bank loan.
And that’s when a new government requirement came into the picture.
Now, Randy has to pay yet another fee, for flood insurance.
Randy says he hired an independent expert to assess the flood risk.
The engineer determined that there was no possibility of flooding
but the state officials could not be reasoned with
and the new annual insurance premium was set at 7,000 dollars.
[ Randy Sowers ] The building was built in 1990.
You got a permit from a county to do it.
They come out and inspected the site.
Even at that point in time they won’t let you build buildings in the flood plain.
Nobody ever said anything about it until 5 years ago,
which is 25 years after the building was built.
And the flood charges all through FEMA.
I mean other insurance agents broker it, but the money actually goes to FEMA,
which is a government agency.
And you know they’ve been bankrupt since
the flood in New Orleans, so they need money, so they
came up with this way to get extra money.
Because there’s a lot of buildings in flood plains,
if people have to pay their insurance on…
[ Correspondent ] Is there any way you can fight them? You can fight FEMA?
[ Randy Sowers ] You know, you can’t fight it, no.
I’d like to get my law degree, and I am looking into doing that.
If I can get that, then I’m going to fight them
because, you know, I could do it for nothing.
But, until that happens, what do you do? You can’t pay lawyers.
It’d just cost you way too much money.
[ VO ] When the flood insurance issue was first raised,
Randy thought about going to the media for help,
about holding a press conference right there at the old henhouse.
But memories of his civil forfeiture experience held him back.
[ Randy Sowers ] When I, you know, kind of blew the whistle on the structuring thing,
that’s why my lawyers has concerned about,
you know, we say anything about it,
because they say the government always,
you know, come back after you with some other reason.
So I think my name is on the list somewhere if, you know,
the government employee finds a way to get us, they’ll do it.
IN MAY 2020, WE CONTACTED THE IRS MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE ABOUT RANDY SOWERS’S CASE.
WE RECEIVED NO RESPONSE.