Profit share after burglary?

Question

A burglar breaks into my house and takes my 5 years old tv, worth maybe 100 bucks. Somehow an eccentric billionaire finds out and offers him one million dollars for the tv, just because he's a collector of stolen items. The police finds the burglar, he admits to stealing and selling the tv for the enormous amount, but the identity of the buyer remains unknown.

At this point I'm not interested in him paying for the house damages nor the tv, since that's much less than what he made - I'm not even interested on him doing any jail time; I want some of the money. However, in the transaction described the value was not intrinsic to the tv itself; it was the burglar's 'work' that added the entire value.

Do I have any legal standing in asking for a share - at least half - of the profit the burglar made in the transaction?

Answer 1

The concept you're looking for, I think, is called "disgorgement" of ill gotten gains or "unjust enrichment".

Disgorgement is a remedy requiring a party who profits from illegal or wrongful acts to give up any profits they made as a result of that illegal or wrongful conduct. The purpose of this remedy is to prevent unjust enrichment and make illegal conduct unprofitable.

As seen in SEC v. First Jersey Securities, Inc., district courts have wide discretion over whether they will mandate disgorgement in a given case as well as how much money must be disgorged.

It is probably a remedy that is available in most places (no jurisdiction is specified), either as restitution in the criminal process, or in a civil lawsuit between the theft victim ands the thief. In a civil lawsuit, this remedy is also sometimes called imposition of a "constructive trust."

A Constructive Trust is a type of Trust that holds property for a person or entity with the purpose of remedying a situation when that person or entity may have been wrong. Constructive Trusts are typically set up by court order when the court rules that there has been unjust enrichment. This means that someone may have wrongfully possessed property[.]

Answer 2

You are only entitled to restitution

The million dollars is illegal proceeds of crime and is seizable by the state, but it doesn’t belong to you.

As part as a criminal punishment, the convicted may be required to pay restitution (including pain and suffering), but that is what the victim lost through the crime, not what the criminal gained. The same would be true if the victim pursued a civil trial.

If the television can be found, it will be returned to The rightful owner once it is no longer needed as evidence.

Answer 3

In most jurisdictions, buying and selling of goods that are known to be stolen is a crime (it might not even be required to know that the goods are stolen).

Exchanging goods for money is a contract. A contract between two parties to do something that is illegal is void in most jurisdictions.

You can not benefit from a contract that wasn't valid to begin with.

It is likely that the funds in possession of the thief/seller and the TV in the possession of the billionaire would be seized by law enforcement as evidence. The TV will probably be given back to you once it's no longer needed, because it's your property. The billionire will probably hire a good attorney who will try to get at least their money back. They might or might not succeed. If they don't, then the money will probably become the property of the government.

Answer 4

Stealing something and selling it does not change ownership. It is still your TV and I would take it back merely to deprive the billionaire of it (and its million dollar value to him).

The money exchanged by burglar and billionaire is off limits to you, as Dale M discusses.

However, the billionaire has wronged you by the tort of conversion (taking your TV) and that's your ticket to court (cause of action). There, you get to raise the invasion of your peace and privacy by the burglary. The "compensatory damages" are trivial, the $100 TV. However, the billionaire's behavior is both intentional and malicious both to you and to the public at large, invading their homes and their peace of mind for a frivolous gain.

As such, this case is ripe for punitive damges - those are designed to punish counterparties whose wrong behavior is grossly negligent or intentional.

A jury will be thinking how hard they hit this person to make them stop doing this to other citizens. And they would probably conclude that if the person is willing to drop a million dollars on an old TV, the jury should probably need to punch a whole lot harder than that.

So while you're not entitled to the original million, this could be an even bigger payday.

My experience is that in a case like this, you are your own worst enemy, because you tend to be afraid to ask for as much as you can get.