US Govt steals $58,100 from Ohio man without charges or arrest

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Kazazi is a retired officer with the Albanian police who relocated with his family to the United States in 2005 after receiving visas through the State Department's lottery program. They became U.S. citizens in 2011. After more than a decade away, Kazazi planned a trip to Albania last fall to visit relatives, make repairs on a family property and potentially purchase a vacation home.

He took $58,100 in U.S. currency with him, the product of 12 years of savings by Kazazi, his wife, Lejla, and his son Erald, who is finishing a chemical engineering degree at Cleveland State University, according to the lawsuit. The family lives in Parma Heights, a suburb of Cleveland.

In an interview translated by his son, Rustem Kazazi said safety concerns prompted him to take cash on his trip, rather than wire the funds to a local bank.

"The crime [in Albania] is much worse than it is here," he said. "Other people that have made large withdrawals [from Albanian banks] have had people intercept them and take their money. The exchange rates and fees are [also] excessive."

Albanian contractors often prefer dollars and euros over the local currency, Kazazi said. For those reasons, he said, many expatriates who return to visit Albania bring large amounts of cash with them.

On Oct. 24, Kazazi arrived at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport to begin the first leg of his journey, which would take him to Newark to connect with an international flight. He carried the cash in three counted and labeled bundles in his carry-on bag, he said, along with receipts from recent bank withdrawals and documentation pertaining to his family's property in Tirana, the Albanian capital.

According to a translated declaration that Kazazi provided to the court as part of the lawsuit, TSA employees discovered the cash in his bag during a routine security check and alerted Customs and Border Protection.

"They asked me some questions, which I could not understand as they spoke too quickly," according to Kazazi's declaration. "I asked them for an interpreter and asked to call my family, but they denied my request."

The CBP agents led Kazazi to a small windowless room and conducted multiple searches of him and his belongings, he said. According to Kazazi's declaration, the agents asked him to remove all of his clothing and gave him a blanket to cover the lower portion of his body. Kazazi said that a man wearing rubber gloves then "started searching different areas of my body."

Kazazi characterized the search as a "strip search" in an interview translated by his son. "I felt my rights violated," he said.

The searches turned up nothing — no drugs, no contraband, no evidence of any illegal activity, according to the lawsuit. But the agents took Kazazi's money. Even more alarming to Kazazi was that the receipt the agents handed to him did not list the dollar value of his cash.

"I began to worry that they were trying to steal the money for themselves," he said in his court declaration.

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The CBP spokesman also noted that there are disclosure requirements for traveling internationally with sums of cash greater than $10,000. "Failure to declare monetary instruments in amounts more than $10,000 can result in fines or forfeiture and could result in civil and or criminal penalties," he said.

Hottot said Kazazi was well aware of those requirements and planned file his disclosure form during his four-hour layover in Newark. The form instructs travelers to file the paperwork "at the time of departure from the United States with the Customs officer in charge at any Customs port of entry or departure."

"If he's gonna follow the law on this he's gonna have to do it in Newark on the way out of the country," Hottot said.

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The first thing the Kazazis noticed was that the dollar amount listed was $770 less than the amount that Kazazi said he took with him. The family said that the cash was all in $100 bills, making it impossible for it to add up to $57,330.

Hottot said these types of "errors" are common in forfeiture cases, and that it's "always in the same direction": government receipts coming up a few hundred or a few thousand dollars short of what defendants say they had.

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