Cincinnati developer Robert Smyjunas has been cleared of all the charges stemming from a traffic stop in Indiana where he was driving a Mercedes Benz without a normal license plate and instead a tag that said, "For the detention of this traveler is with the fee of $500,000.00 Gold."
As a result of the June 2025 stop, Smyjunas was charged with two felony drug offenses, resisting law enforcement and refusal to provide information or a driver's license
.In court documents, police said Smyjunas refused to identify himself and only after being asked "approximately 13 different times" did the he say he went by "Bozo."
After months in court, all the charges were dismissed by this May and have now been expunged, Smyjunas told The Enquirer. He provided
documents verifying the dismissals; Indiana's courts have no public records available on the cases at this time.
"They screwed this thing up so bad," he said. "This what they are doing to everyone."
Smyjunas said he lost out on hundreds of millions of dollars in business deals while dealing with the charges. Smyjunas is the founder and CEO of Oakley-based Vandercar Holdings and one of the Cincinnati area’s most successful developers. His projects include the Oakley Station mixed-use development and the Millennium Hotel deal.
From the beginning, he maintained that the Indiana traffic stop was illegal and provided prescriptions for the medications that prompted the drug charges. He filed over a hundred pages of court documents while representing himself in the Kosciusko County courts.
Court records said those documents were "in the nature of sovereign citizen theory, which courts have repeatedly characterized as legally frivolous with no conceivable validity."
"They called me a sovereign citizen," Smyjunas said. "What is a sovereign citizen?"
Although Smyjunas rejects that label, court documents referenced arguments often associated with the sovereign citizen movement. The FBI describes sovereign citizens as "anti-government extremists who believe that even though they physically reside in this country, they are separate from the United States. As a result, they believe they don’t have to answer to any government authority."
Smyjunas said he does not profess to be a sovereign citizen, but some of his statements and court filings used arguments made with that movement. After his stop, he told The Enquirer he was "traveling in private and not in public" and in some court documents he identified himself as "Sui Juris, a living man, not a 14th Amendment U.S. Citizen."
The 14th Amendment established birthright citizenship and was recently the subject of arguments before the Supreme Court as they considered President Donald Trump's executive order reinterpreting the 1868 amendment.
Most sovereign citizens believe the 14th Amendment created a form of second-class citizenship, less empowered and more subject to the federal government, according to George Washington University paper about the sovereign citizen movement.
But when it comes to the Indiana charges, Smyjunas said the investigators "made up the whole thing." He declined to say if he planned to sue.
The Enquirer left messages with the Kosciusko County Prosecutor's Office for comment, but did not receive a reply at the time of this report.
This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Cincinnati developer Robert Smyjunas cleared in Indiana traffic stop case
