It's a free country and people should be allowed to transport money with them. He was on his way back to Northern California to pay someone for some stuff that had been fronted + re-up

Sure, nobody (here) would disagree that people should be able to carry as much cash as they want without fear of illegal search but the whole “he plead guilty and had multiple years of probation” rightly makes people wonder what did he plead guilty to? since it clearly wasn’t civil asset forfeiture if they charged him with criminal charges and then he plead guilty to criminal charges.

>He was on his way back to Northern California to pay someone for some stuff that had been fronted + re-up.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this very much sounds like "drugs". If that's the case, your point about him never being involved in "heroin" sales is now just semantics, because he's still engaged, to some degree, in the movement of drugs between states.

>It's a free country

Obviously, it isn't.

In cash? Did you tell him "this is a bad idea, you should wire the money instead"? What if he had been mugged? What if he lost the suitcase? I arranged the transportation of $25,000 in cash (I sold a car, it was a gag, I was very young, and it was an extraordinarily bad idea that cost me thousands of dollars), and just as a physical object that's pretty big. Also: where did he get the cash from? I had trouble getting it.

so it for was drugs, just not heroin.