RIAD v. THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Filing 15

MEMORANDUM AND ORDER THAT DEFENDANT'S MOTION TO DISMISS OR IN THE ALTERNATIVE FOR SUMMARY JUDGMENT IS GRANTED. THE PLAINTIFF'S COMPLAINT IS DISMISSED WITH PREJUDICE; ETC.. SIGNED BY HONORABLE MARY A. MCLAUGHLIN ON 3/22/12. 3/22/12 ENTERED AND E-MAILED.(jl, )

IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE EASTERN DISTRICT OF PENNSYLVANIA
JOSEPH RIAD
v.
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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CIVIL ACTION

NO. 11-7777

MEMORANDUM
McLaughlin, J.

March 22, 2012

The plaintiff seeks fifteen billion dollars in damages
in connection with Federal Reserve bonds he alleges were
wrongfully detained by a federal agent in 2009.

After his

administrative claim to recover the bonds was denied, the
plaintiff sought assistance from members of the United States
Congress, but ultimately filed the instant suit seeking, among
other relief, damages under the Federal Tort Claims Act (“FTCA”).
The defendant has moved to dismiss the plaintiff’s suit as timebarred.

The Court will grant the defendant’s motion.
The plaintiff filed this action on December 22, 2011,

alleging that he had produced fifteen $1 billion 1934 Federal
Reserve Bonds to an agent with U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (“ICE”), a division of the Department of Homeland
Security (“DHS”), who promised to determine the authenticity of
the bonds and then return them.

Riad alleges that the ICE agent,

after informing him that the bonds were not authentic, refused to
return them.

He brings claims for trespass to chattel (Count I),

conversion (Count II), and intentional misrepresentation (Count

III) under the FTCA, seeking $15 billion in damages and a
declaratory judgment that the bonds are authentic.

The defendant

then filed the instant motion.
I.

Background
The plaintiff possesses three bronze boxes, each

containing 250 Federal Reserve Bonds from 1934 with a face value
of $1 billion each.

He retained experts whose reports suggested

the probable authenticity of the bonds and the likelihood of
successfully “repatriating” those bonds by offering them to the
federal government for redemption at face value or a reward for
returning them.

Satisfied with the legitimacy of his claim, the

plaintiff began a process by which he sought to repatriate the
bonds, and initially provided the U.S. Secret Service with
samples of the bonds in order to review his claim.

Compl. ¶¶ 9,

11-14, 16-18, 29.
The Secret Service returned the bonds to the plaintiff
and referred him to an official at the Bureau of the Public Debt,
who “categorically denied the existence of bonds such as” the
ones in the plaintiff’s possession, and informed the plaintiff
that neither the Bureau of the Public Debt nor the Secret Service
had authority to redeem the plaintiff’s bonds.

At that point he

began to contact members of Congress for help in repatriating the
bonds, including former Senators Arlen Specter and Rick Santorum
and Representative Joe Pitts.

Id. ¶¶ 20-25.
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The plaintiff was informed by a financial consultant he
had retained that Nickolaus Jones, an agent with ICE in Irvine,
California, could assist him in repatriating the bonds.1

Riad

sent Agent Jones photos of the bonds and reports prepared by his
experts, and Jones requested that the plaintiff provide him with
a sampling of the bonds so that he could physically inspect them.
At a meeting on March 11, 2009, the plaintiff provided Agent
Jones with a sampling of five bonds each from the three boxes in
his possession.

Agent Jones promised to investigate the

authenticity of the bonds and return them.

Id. ¶¶ 26-34, 38, 39.

Agent Jones contacted the plaintiff one week later and
informed him that he had concluded that the sample bonds were not
authentic.

The plaintiff requested that the samples be returned

to him, but Agent Jones refused to do so.

Riad requested an

explanation for Agent Jones’s conclusion as to the bonds’
authenticity, but did not receive one.

Agent Jones informed the

plaintiff that he had destroyed the bonds, although the plaintiff
believes that Agent Jones still has them or has given them to a

1

The plaintiff avers that his consultant, Neil Gibson,
substantiated his expertise in bond repatriation by providing the
plaintiff with correspondence from Robert Davis, whom Gibson
claimed was an official with the Federal Reserve Bank of San
Francisco and responsible for its repatriation program. The
plaintiff asserts that this letter was fraudulent, that no
individual named Robert Davis ever worked for the San Francisco
Fed, and that the Davis correspondence was part of Agent Jones’s
overall scheme to dispossess the plaintiff of his property.
Compl. ¶¶ 26, 37.
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third party.

Id. ¶¶ 41-44, 47.

The plaintiff filed an administrative claim with ICE
and the Department of Justice to recover the bonds on June 8,
2010.

Id. Ex. A.

On April 1, 2011, ICE sent notice by certified

mail to the plaintiff and his counsel, informing them that the
administrative claim had been denied.

Decl. of Geoffrey M.

Harriman, Def.’s Mot. Ex. 1 & 1.A-1.F 9.2
seek reconsideration of that denial.

The plaintiff did not

The plaintiff then filed

the instant suit on December 22, 2011.
II.

Discussion
The defendant argues that the plaintiff’s suit is time-

barred under the FTCA because he did not file suit within six
months of the date of mailing the notice of denial of his
administrative claim.

The plaintiff argues that in spite of his

having missed the deadline for filing suit, he is entitled to
equitable tolling to permit his claim to go forward.

The Court

concludes that the plaintiff’s failure to comply with the statute
of limitations did not occur under the extraordinary
circumstances that give rise to a right to equitable tolling.

2

As

Including these documents with the defendant’s motion does
not convert it into one for summary judgment because it is
indisputably authentic and integral to the complaint, as the
denial of the plaintiff’s administrative claim is required for
the Court to exercise jurisdiction under the FTCA. Pension
Benefit Guar. Corp. v. White Consol. Indus., Inc., 998 F.2d 1192,
1196 (3d Cir. 1993); 28 U.S.C. § 2675(a).
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a result, the Court will dismiss the plaintiff’s claims.
A.

Statute of Limitations
The plaintiff concedes that he did not timely file

suit.

The FTCA includes an administrative exhaustion requirement

providing that no action may be brought against the United States
unless the claimant “first presented the claim to the appropriate
federal agency and his claim . . . [has been] finally denied by
the agency in writing and sent by certified or registered mail.”
28 U.S.C. § 2675(a); see also McNeil v. United States, 508 U.S.
106, 112 n.7 (noting that the addition of this requirement to the
FTCA in 1966 was made with the purpose of encouraging quick
settlement of meritorious claims).

Upon receiving notice of

final denial of the claim (or denial of a request for
reconsideration) a plaintiff must bring suit within six months or
the claim is “forever barred” as against the United States.

28

U.S.C. § 2401(b).
The parties do not dispute that the plaintiff brought
an administrative claim against ICE after Agent Jones refused to
return the bonds, that ICE was the appropriate agency with which
to raise that claim, or that the plaintiff did not request
reconsideration of that claim.

The deadline for the filing of

suit in federal district court under 28 U.S.C. § 2401(b) was thus
October 1, 2011.

The plaintiff does not dispute that he filed

the instant suit after that date.
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See Pl. Opp. 7-8; Harriman

Decl. Ex. 1.

Under the FTCA’s statute of limitations, his suit

is “forever barred.”
B.

Equitable Tolling
The plaintiff argues that he is entitled to have the

limitations period equitably tolled because his delay in filing
suit was on account of his pursuit of alternative resolutions to
his claims via the legislature.

The invocation of equitable

tolling under these facts is inappropriate.
The plaintiff argues that his failure to file suit
within the limitations period is attributable to his pursuit of
“as many non-litigious avenues of resolution as possible and
. . . patien[ce] in waiting for those potential resolutions to
come to fruition . . . .”

Pl. Opp. 7-8.

He avers that in March

2011, he retained a lobbying firm to contact federal legislators
in an attempt to pass a private bill confirming the authenticity
of his bonds and allocating a finder’s fee for the plaintiff.
The lobbying firm contacted staff members of various members of
the House and Senate between April and August 2011.

He argues

that because Congress did not begin its fall session until
October 4, 2011, he reasonably waited for a response from the
legislators into the fall, and therefore missed his filing
deadline.

Id. at 12-13.

He argues that these efforts, and the

fact that the government was on notice of his claims since at
least the time of his filing of an administrative claim, entitle
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him to equitable tolling.

Pl. Opp. 13-14.

They do not.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Third
Circuit has held that equitable tolling may be applied to FTCA
claims, at least in the limited context of medical malpractice.
See Santos ex rel. Beato v. United States, 559 F.3d 189, 194-96
(3d Cir. 2008) (concluding that Congress did not intend to
preclude the doctrine’s application as with other waivers of
sovereign immunity).

But see Marley v. United States, 567 F.3d

1030, 1035 (9th Cir. 2009) (en banc) (holding that the six-month
time bar in Section 2401(b) is jurisdictional and may not be
tolled).
Equitable tolling of claims is appropriate where “a
plaintiff has been prevented from filing in a timely manner due
to sufficiently inequitable circumstances.”

These circumstances

include “(1) where the defendant has actively misled the
plaintiff respecting the plaintiff’s cause of action; (2) where
the plaintiff in some extraordinary way has been prevented from
asserting his or her rights; or (3) where the plaintiff has
timely asserted his or her rights mistakenly in the wrong forum.”
Hedges v. United States, 404 F.3d 744, 751 (3d Cir. 2005)
(internal citations omitted).
None of these circumstances is present here.

The

plaintiff appears to have made a conscious choice to pursue
resolution of his claims through the legislature, and the

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government did not mislead him as to his cause of action or
prevent him from asserting his rights.

Indeed, the claim-denial

letter from ICE explicitly states that he “may file suit in an
appropriate United States District court not later than six
months after the date of mailing of this notification of denial.”
Harriman Decl. Exs. A, B, C (citing 28 U.S.C. § 2401(b))
(emphasis added).

The plaintiff’s own decisions as to how to

pursue his claims were the cause of his failure to file a timely
complaint.

None of the facts the plaintiff alleges entitle him

to tolling of the limitations period, which is “extraordinary”
and to be used “only sparingly.”

Santos, 559 F.3d at 197.

The plaintiff’s argument regarding his entitlement to
equitable tolling under the circumstances is detailed and
extensive in explaining the reasons why he filed suit outside the
limitations period.

Because the plaintiff’s failure to comply

with the statute of limitations is undisputed, and because the
plaintiff has argued the factual basis for relief from that
failure at length, granting the plaintiff leave to amend the
complaint would be futile.

See Philips v. County of Allegheny,

515 F.3d 224, 245 (3d Cir. 2008).

The Court will dismiss the

complaint with prejudice.
An appropriate order shall issue.

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