Fox News:  “Lyndon McLellan fought the law — and apparently, he won.  The North Carolina business owner for months has been battling the federal government after IRS agents last fall seized $107,000 from him, under a controversial practice known as civil forfeiture. But his attorneys at the Institute for Justice announced Thursday that the IRS and Department of Justice have moved to dismiss the case and give him back his money.  McLellan is just one of thousands of Americans the IRS has seized money from, supposedly for “structuring” funds to avoid a law requiring banks to alert the government of deposits over $10,000.”

Washington Post:  “How the DEA took a young man’s life savings without ever charging him with a crime.  Joseph Rivers was hoping to hit it big. According to the Albuquerque Journal, the aspiring businessman from just outside of Detroit had pulled together $16,000 in seed money to fulfill a lifetime dream of starting a music video company. . . . A DEA agent boarded the train at the Albuquerque Amtrak station. . . . The agent found Rivers’s cash, still in a bank envelope. . . . he agents found nothing in Rivers’s belongings that indicated that he was involved with the drug trade: no drugs, no guns. They didn’t arrest him or charge him with a crime. But they took his cash anyway, every last cent, under the authority of the Justice Department’s civil asset forfeiture program.”

The Daily Signal:”14 years ago, McLellan decided to try his hand at the family business and purchased his own store in the heart of the Bible Belt, naming it L&M Convenience Mart. . . . What McLellan didn’t know, though, was that the federal government could come in and take away what he’d worked so hard for.

On a summer day last July, McLellan, who hadn’t yet arrived at the store, received a phone call from one of his employees summoning him to L&M. More than a dozen federal agents had flooded into his business—officers from North Carolina’s Alcohol and Law Enforcement, the local police department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation—and they were asking for him. . . .

The federal agents then showed McLellan paperwork that included deposits to the store’s account at Lumbee Guaranty Bank. The statements showed two deposits made within a 24-hour period totaling $11,400.  The statements, they said, indicated he had a history of consistent cash deposits of less than $10,000, which is illegal.  Then, the agents told the small business owner something that shook him to his core: The Internal Revenue Service had seized all of the money in L&M’s bank account: $107,702.66.”

Update:  See “IRS Refunds $107,000 It Lifted from Business Man.”