150
Blackmun, J., dissenting
Justice Blackmun, with whom The Chief Justice, Justice O'Connor, and Justice Thomas join, dissenting.
On October 27, 1988, petitioner Waldemar Ratzlaf 1 arrived at a Nevada casino with a shopping bag full of cash to pay off a $160,000 gambling debt. He told casino personnel he did not want any written report of the payment to be made. The casino vice president informed Ratzlaf that he could not accept a cash payment of more than $10,000 without filing a report.
Ratzlaf, along with his wife and a casino employee, then proceeded to visit several banks in and around Stateline, Nevada, and South Lake Tahoe, California, purchasing separate cashier's checks, each in the amount of $9,500. At some banks the Ratzlafs attempted to buy two checks—one for each of them—and were told that a report would have to be filed; on those occasions they canceled the transactions. Ratzlaf then returned to the casino and paid off $76,000 of his debt in cashier's checks. A few weeks later, Ratzlaf gave three persons cash to purchase additional cashier's checks in amounts less than $10,000. The Ratzlafs themselves also bought five more such checks in the course of a week.
A jury found beyond a reasonable doubt that Ratzlaf knew of the financial institutions' duty to report cash transactions in excess of $10,000 and that he structured transactions for the specific purpose of evading the reporting requirements.
The Court today, however, concludes that these findings are insufficient for a conviction under 31 U. S. C. §§ 5322(a) and 5324(3),2 because a defendant also must have known that the structuring in which he engaged was illegal. Because this conclusion lacks support in the text of the statute, conflicts in my view with basic principles governing the inter-1 For convenience, I follow the majority, see ante, at 138, n. 2, and refer only to Waldemar Ratzlaf in this opinion.
2 As does the majority, I refer to the codification in effect at the time the Court of Appeals decided this case. See ante, at 139, n. 5.
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