🚀 go-pugleaf

*   Paolo Alvarez: "I believe in God, but the government's seizure of all my
*   savings was really horrible. I felt trapped and I almost flipped out."
*   
*   Alvarez was a landscape contractor, cautious and frugal, who saved his
*   money. Several years ago, however, Alvarez began listening to the
*   speeches of Ross Perot, especially Perot's exaggerated [beat the drum
*   of fear] warnings that the nation's savings and loan institutions
*   were about to collapse. As a reult of mounting anxiety generated by
*   the Texas businessman, Alvarez decided to move the nest egg from his
*   savings and loan.
*   
*   He placed some of the money in a regular bank and hid the balance in
*   small caches around the house.
*   
*   When the sky did not fall, when Ross Perot's predictions did not come
*   true, Alvarez began slowly moving the cash in his house back into a
*   bank. Partly because of his fear of a possible robbery, he chose to
*   redeposit his money in relatively small amounts, $5000 or so at a time.
*   
*   While Alvarez had come to know Perot's gloomy predictions were off the
*   mark, he did not know that the federal international government, in its
*   hysteria about drugs, had persuaded Congress to greatly expand the
*   government's civil and criminal powers to seize assets of individuals
*   it felt might be up to some illicit business. The government's concern
*   was so overwhelming that in 1986 Congress was prevailed upon to add a
*   provision to the seizure law forbidding any "structuring" of financial
*   transactions in a way so as to evade and