United States v. A. Erpenbeck, Jr.

OPINION

SUTTON, Circuit Judge.

In a fact pattern befitting a John Gris-ham novel, FBI agents found a cooler filled with more than $250,000 in cash buried at a private golf course outside Cincinnati. The money belonged to A. William Erpenbeck, Jr., a convicted fraudster then serving a 300-month sentence in federal prison. What came next is a tug-of-war over who gets the money: the government, which wants a criminal forfeiture of the cash, or the trustee of Erpenbeck’s bankruptcy estate, who wants to distribute the cash to Erpenbeck’s creditors. The district court sided with the government, but…