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The company that operated a store in Beverly Hills that rented safe deposit boxes agreed to plead guilty to conspiring with customers to launder drug money.
According to the plea agreement with US Private Vaults Inc., the federal prosecutor’s office in Los Angeles agreed not to file criminal charges against its two owners.
The decision goes against a recent Department of Justice policy that requires prosecutors to be more aggressive in holding people accountable for corporate wrongdoing.
The company admitted that it recruited drug traffickers as clients and used the illicit profits to run the business.
He also acknowledged that people from the company sold cocaine, organized drug deals in the store and instructed the clients on how to structure cash transactions to circumvent foreign exchange reporting requirements.
Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for the US Attorney’s Office, declined to comment on the deal, which was signed in November and filed in court on Wednesday.
The government will be hard-pressed to collect the fines that may be imposed at the time of sentencing; US Private Vaults has virtually no assets, according to Michael Singer, the Nevada attorney who brokered the deal for the company.
The US Private store Vaults on Olympic Boulevard closed in March 2021, when federal agents executed a search warrant and seized all of its safe deposit boxes, along with at least $86 millions of dollars in cash and millions of dollars more in jewelry and valuables. that clients hid inside them.
Assistant US Attorney Andrew Brown, who is leading the investigation, called most of the approximately 800 customers of the store “delinquents” in court documents. But the government has not charged any customer with any crime.
The judge who approved the search warrant explicitly prohibited the government from conducting any “criminal search or seizure of the contents of safe deposit boxes,” and ordered the agents to identify owners and return their belongings.
However, the FBI and the US Attorney’s Office have attempted to seize the contents of 369 of the seized boxes, alleging that the money, precious metals, watches and other property they contained were the product of unspecified criminal activity .
After a series of lawsuits accusing prosecutors of trampling on the rights of box holders, the government has returned dozens of million dollars in cash and valuables to clients who said they were falsely accused of wrongdoing.
Some said they were suspicious of the system bank and preferred to keep their savings in cash and lock them away.
Other clients were state-licensed marijuana dealers with limited access to banks .
To justify search warrants and forfeiture cases against box keepers, prosecutors have relied heavily on alerts of dogs on the smell of marijuana on much of the seized money, a method widely debunked by narcotics testing experts who say most of the region’s currency bears traces of marijuana odor.
Owners of US Private Vaults They are Mark Paul and Michael Poliak. They each owned half of the company and were its only two directors, according to Singer.
Paul’s attorney, Sara L. Caplan, declined to comment.
Mark Werksman, who represents Poliak, said his client was “a legitimate and successful businessman who invested in USPV because he thought it was a legal business that was properly managed and served a legitimate clientele.”
Poliak and her daughter, Gabrielle Poliak, contested the government’s attempted forfeiture last year for $1.5 million in cash found in a safe of the store.
In November they agreed to allow the government to confiscate the money, but neither admitted nor denied prosecutors’ accusations that the money came from drug trafficking or fraud.
In court documents filed last year to support a search warrant request, the gobi erno alleged that Michael Poliak was involved in health care fraud and COVID relief loan fraud-25, but was never charged with any of the crimes.
The lawyers of the box holders have denounced the operation against the vaults as a “money appropriation”.
They suggested that the most revealing part of the plea agreement was US Private Vaults’ agreement to withdraw its June objection of 2021 to prosecution by prosecutors for the seizure of 369 safe deposit boxes, an exemption that could make it easier for the government to seize the content.
Benjamin Gluck, an attorney who recovered more than $25 million dollars for the caseholders, said the deal exposed “the constitutional and moral bankruptcy of the US Attorney’s office in showing that they are willing These to grant immunity to an admitted criminal as long as he does not. do not interfere with their illegal plan to confiscate money from innocent box holders.”
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