I'd read the whole article but I'm not a subscriber. I'm becoming subscription poor. Everything requires a subscription now days.

Thing is, we tend to focus on "ill-gotten" without bothering to define it very well or verifying that they're ill-gotten.

Law dates back to 1970. Part of the RICO Act. It covers a number of cases.

Let's say that you smuggle conflict diamond. You rake in $5 million/year smuggling diamonds into the country from places like the Congo, rife with warlord violence. You've done this for a few years. You duck the charges. There's not enough evidence. As soon as charges were filed, you got those from the Congo who could testify out of the country, and the few remaining you bribed with $500k to take a vacation in Belize for a year. Then you hired a battery of lawyers to defend yourself. You used your money to protect yourself. The government likes its defendants destitute.

Now, let's change the scenario. Everything's the same, but there's some evidence that can be introduced into court that you engaged in some smuggling. Those lawyers you hired continue to fight. And fight. It ties up resources you, as DA, would like to have elsewhere. It's handing you a string of court defeats--all maneuverings, no trial yet, but in the end it's painful. You settle for a lesser charge and the person keeps most of his assets. Crime does pay.

Even better. You find that it's quite easy to show that the scumbag actually did engage in smuggling. But, you know, that $5 million/year he's earned, the $25 million he has in assets after 8 years of doing this ... He finds out you're about to file charges and in the next three weeks, before charges are filed, something's happened to it. He's got a buck fifty left in his checking account, all the brokerage and other accounts are closed. The money was transferred to Betty Davis in Belize, then to Cary Grant in Ireland, then to Martha Washington in the Caymans, and each time some vanished so by the time the final $10k was transferred to Gary Cooper in Cyprus there were no assets to freeze when charges were filed--much less seize when he's found guilty. Of course, he'll go to prison for 5 years, but when he gets out, all his assets seized, there's a nice house at his disposal and somehow Vladimir Lenin from the Bahamas transferred $29 million into a variety of trusts that Mr. Scumbag has control over.

The '60s and very early '70s were a tough time for a lot of legal folk. In a lot of ways, it shifted the burden of proof from the prosecutor onto the defendant: You don't have to proof guilt, they have to prove innocence. Guilt is presumed. RICO does this in a few different ways, but it's not the only major set of laws that shifted the entire basis of American jurisprudence. (RICO was later included in the Patriot Act, which many (D) loathed, but which was primarily a rewrite or transcription of previous laws into one ginormous burrito.) RICO was signed by Nixon, passed by a Senate 47-1 and House 342-26. Both houses were majority Democratic: Senate 57-43 and House 243-192.

Like all other laws that are "living" and where the law changes as the meanings of the words used in the law change, the range of application at the time was fairly clear cut. But to serve "social needs" the law's application shifted from those that were Mafia and involved in traditional organized crime to things like drug dealers who are part of organized crime only barely, or to those involved in conspiracies involving a couple of guys at work.

Holder, btw, imposed restrictions on one portion of one federal program. That was after civil forfeitures had increased every year under his tenure and had finally surpassed the estimated loss of property to theft. After his restrictions, most civil forfeiture continued just fine, even though I've seen a lot of MSM stories saying that he "banned" the practice and Sessions "reinstated it." It's like a report I heard earlier today concerning the Constitutional "separation of powers" between the President and the DOJ--the reporter must have been absent that month during her high-school government class, she simply has no idea what the words mean.

Sessions undid Holder's restriction on that one portion of one federal program. By overstating Holder's act, we lionize him and make Sessions look all the worse. It's hard to evaluate things or be reasonable when one's perceptions are manipulated. Holder's restrictions were small potatoes, little more than notional, pointing in the right direction but using a bad means of doing so. They weren't bad. They just constituted pissing into a hurricane. Sessions revoking of those restrictions can't be huge, since the restrictions were small; I think they point in the wrong direction. But in either case, doing anything meaningful in anything more than a token, political, word-based sense would require a lengthy regulatory process, and would ultimately involve legislation. But Americans on the whole like punishing those we don't like, so that's not going anywhere. It's only a problem because those affected in the stories we hear are poor and disproportionately POC: if they were wealthy and white, we wouldn't see this thread. I dislike the law because of principle and due process; many dislike it because of the people affected. Vindictiveness is the new normal.

do not apply to poor families, where a son got involved with drugs, but live at home. The home, car, and bank assets are all seized. And to get it back they will have to sue, a civil suit when they lack funds.

Another DUer stated it excellently

https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=post&forum=1002&pid=9373732