Operation Rolling Thunder scours the interstate each year in a search for crime and drivers' cash.

SPARTANBURG — The sunlit ballroom falls silent, a line of news cameras trained on a wooden podium. A few dozen law enforcement officers lounge at round tables, sipping coffee, guns holstered.

They fix their eyes on what’s behind the lectern: Stacks of cash. Kilos of meth. Bag after bag of pungent, dried marijuana, and cartons of Newports stacked as high as your back pocket.

Pairs of Jordans. Brightly colored purses emblazoned with designer names. A green bottle of Gain laundry detergent, original scent.

One week. Twenty agencies. Patrols saturating the interstates through Spartanburg and Cherokee counties.

They’ve taken guns from bad guys. Drugs off the streets. Counterfeit goods collected. Lots and lots of money.

These are the spoils.

Later, they’ll petition a judge to keep the loot — a haul that will be split among the agencies that assembled for the state’s longest consecutive and prominent highway interdiction effort, Operation Rolling Thunder.

Chuck Wright, the three-term Spartanburg County sheriff who started Rolling Thunder early in his first term, strides toward the podium. He’s wearing a suit and his blue-and-red tie is festooned with the state’s Palmetto flag and crescent moon.

He’s here this time with his friend, Steve Mueller, Cherokee County’s top cop who Wright nominated as South Carolina’s Sheriff of the Year in 2016.

Wright and Mueller stand together. Everyone waits.

“Can you read all that?” Mueller says quietly as Wright glances at a log of statistics from a week of work.

“With my glasses, I can,” Wright says. He looks up at the cameras, “You guys ready?”

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Fishing for forfeitures

A staunch defendant of civil forfeiture, Spartanburg County Sheriff Chuck Wright holds one of the guns seized during last year's Operation Rolling Thunder on Friday, May 4, 2018. JOSH MORGAN/Staff

Wright has been here before, explaining how Rolling Thunder takes "bad guys" off the streets and how drug money and contraband end up in the hands of the law.

Dozens of officers — federal, state and local — target drivers on the county’s two interstates: Interstate 85, which runs from Atlanta to Charlotte, and Interstate 26, which runs from Charleston to Asheville. Agencies send their own officers, pay their wages and use their own cars.

This is Wright's 11th year conducting the program. The 2018 iteration of the law enforcement blitz ran 24 hours a day from April 30-May 4.

One afternoon, officers lunch on Little Caesars and store-bought chocolate cake in a conference room at U-Haul’s corporate office in Spartanburg. An officer carries an AR-15 style rifle up a sidewalk and into the building.

This is Rolling Thunder headquarters, and inside, Wright shuffles through manila folders with operation details as officers prepare to head back out to the interstates.

They aren’t assigned specific locations, so they go looking for prime spots. “Kinda like fishing,” Spartanburg sheriff's Cpl. Danny Blackwell said.

Few officers trawl for people in Cherokee County this afternoon. Closer to Greenville, they reel in vehicles. It’s hot, and the sun shines in a cloudless sky. Overhead, Wright pilots the Sheriff’s Office helicopter. He’s working on his pilot’s license, and his voice chirps over the walkie-talkie.

Four unmarked SUVs sit at one interchange. The officers inside scan northbound traffic, waiting for a prime target. The radio crackles. One officer has his eye on a silver Accord. “It might be a good one,” he says, because the car has North Carolina plates and is speeding up and slowing down. "I think I can get him," someone pipes up.

A minute later, an officer confirms he’s made the stop.

Across the interstate, a Sumter County deputy pulls over a flatbed trailer, and the driver stands on the side of the highway. A State Transport Police officer arrives to search the cab.

The driver, a grizzled white man in jeans and a T-shirt, chats with the deputy while they wait in the tall roadside grass. Another officer pats the man down. The man lifts his shirt, empties his pockets, unbuttons his jeans, pulling them down a bit. Nothing to hide.

A search of the truck doesn’t turn up anything either. They scribble him a traffic ticket and send him on his way.

There’s more action in the northbound lanes. Seven patrol vehicles respond to one stop after a blue sedan is pulled over for a moving violation. The late afternoon traffic slows to a crawl across all three lanes.

Two young black men sit in the gravel, elbows on their knees, heads bowed against the glaring sun. Behind them, a third young black man stands handcuffed.

On the hunt for cash and drugs on South Carolina's interstates Operation Rolling Thunder goes after criminals, but also people with money who never get charged or convicted. Josh Morgan, Greenville News

Officers clad in bulletproof vests swarm the scene. The blue sedan is from Massachusetts, and two narcotics officers poke their heads under the hood and seats and through the trunk.

Another officer holds a wad of folded bills taken from one of the passengers.

Deputies charge one man with simple possession of marijuana. The cuffs come off, and the man gets his money back. He smiles and gives a handshake to an officer. They pile into the car and merge into traffic, which has slowed to a crawl near the scene.

There’s no rest for the officers. Another target, this time a charter bus bearing Massachusetts plates, is stopped.

Spartanburg County's Blackwell pulls up to the back of the line of cars, dons his official Operation Rolling Thunder baseball cap and hops out to watch. A narcotics agent has crawled inside the bus' cargo hold to remove a black backpack, which he places in the grass.

Time for the K-9 to be called in.

A muscular German Shepherd bounds over and sniffs the bag. The dog is rewarded with a green tennis ball. A deputy then opens the book bag and finds a wallet, but there's no cash inside. He takes out an ID card and steps onto the bus.

A few minutes later, a young black man in a black sweatshirt is led off the bus.

The search of his book bag comes up empty, but a second deputy emerges from the bus with a plastic grocery bag. He takes out a dime-bag of weed.

The deputies walk him back to a patrol car, place the wallet on the hood, untwist the bag of marijuana, and dump the drugs on the asphalt.

The man grinds the marijuana into the gravel with his heel. Then they let him go.

More: Got the receipt? It could be key to recovering items seized by cops

Police target minor violations for chance to search cars

Nearly everyone does something illegal if you follow them long enough, a deputy explains as he points out small violations while driving his unmarked car along I-85.

Officers pull over a lot of vehicles, usually for the most minor of violations.

Failure to signal. A missing license tag light. A car drifting into another lane, even for a second. The ubiquitous “following too closely.”

By the time Rolling Thunder ends, 202 people are cited for following too closely, according to statistics the Sheriff's Office releases.

The probable cause for the initial traffic stop is often questionable but can be difficult to fight, Greenville defense attorney Beattie Ashmore says.

“It’s amazing to me that suddenly when (Wright) does Operation Rolling Thunder there’s a tremendous increase in people following too closely,” Ashmore says.

A total of 1,214 tickets are written. Besides following too closely, drivers are cited mostly for improper lane changes, speeding or driving left of center — “dumb little violations,” Wright calls them.

On average, officers search every fifth stopped car — hundreds of vehicles in all. They bring in a drug-sniffing dog 128 times. They make 40 arrests, 25 of them for felony offenses.

More: King of forfeiture?

Beattie Ashmore, Greenville defense attorney “They’re not doing it because they want to help law enforcement. It is a money grab.” Quote icon

Without the incentive for officers' departments to profit from cash seizures, Rolling Thunder wouldn't exist, critics say.

It might only be a few thousand dollars for each agency this year, but some years departments take home much more. Rolling Thunder made almost half a million dollars in 2007, for instance, when officers hit the jackpot on at least one stop by interdicting a massive sum of cash.

“They’re not doing it because they want to help law enforcement,” Ashmore says. “It is a money grab.”

It's one of two major highway interdiction operations that happen in South Carolina each year. Wright modeled his blitz after Operation Strike Force in Florence and Darlington counties.

Like Rolling Thunder, Strike Force draws on multiple local, state and federal agencies for manpower, with officers making hundreds of traffic stops in a concerted weeklong effort. It concludes with a news conference in which the seized loot is displayed alongside piles of marijuana and other illegal drugs, contraband and firearms.

Participating departments share in any profits from forfeited money, according to local media reports.

'We can pick on you if we want to, we just don’t'

Most of the officers have left by the morning of the news conference. Some stand outside chatting, taking pictures and shaking hands or hugging goodbye. Another successful week. A few arrests. Lots of tickets written. No one's injured.

Inside, Wright stops a reporter who had interviewed him weeks earlier about Rolling Thunder. He wants the reporter to know about a box truck deputies had stopped this week.

They’d found $85,000 in cash inside, Wright says. But when they question the men, their stories checked out and officers couldn’t find a reason to seize the cash.

Chuck Wright, Spartanburg County sheriff “We profile for bad guys, but we don’t profile for color. A lot of people think we pick on them. No, we can pick on you if we want to, we just don’t.” Quote icon

More: SC cops defend keeping cash they seize: 'What's the incentive' otherwise?

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He repeats the story in the press conference and says he doesn’t want to “be ridiculous” about seizing people’s money. “Just because there’s a stop doesn’t mean there’s a seizure and an arrest, and we don’t take everybody’s money like I’ve heard some people say before,” he says.

Wright maintains that he doesn’t profile for people or types of vehicles.

“We profile for bad guys, but we don’t profile for color,” he says. “A lot of people think we pick on them. No, we can pick on you if we want to, we just don’t.”

More: 65% of cash seized by SC police comes from black men. Experts blame racism.

Trophies for ‘good, clean fun’

Spartanburg sheriff's deputies pack up bags of marijuana seized during Operation Rolling Thunder on Friday, May 4, 2018. Authorities seized a total 60 pounds of marijuana over four days. JOSH MORGAN/Staff

The backdrop at his press conference looks the part. Zip-top bags of cash labeled by amount. Dozens of guns. Bags of marijuana and other drugs. Counterfeit or stolen goods. “We had a lot of success as you can see behind us,” Wright says.

Earlier, on the stage on the opposite side of the room, the two sheriffs had rewarded the officers for their efforts. The press weren't invited, no cameras were rolling.

Officers received trophies, some based on how much money they’d seized. Trophies were handed out to the best unit, to the officer with the largest seizure, to the officer who made the most cases. A highway patrolman won one of the top awards. Sumter County deputies took home more than one trophy, officers said.

Wright says it’s all in “good, clean fun.”

“It’s just a little bit of an incentive to get them out there to work if they’re standing around talking about their hunting adventures,” he says.

A couple years earlier, Cherokee County took home a trophy with an eagle mounted on it, as photographed by The Gaffney Ledger.

After the press conference, Wright migrates toward the tables and picks up a sawed-off shotgun. He poses for a photo as officers wearing gloves begin to pack up money, guns and drugs in cardboard evidence boxes.

A dozen officers swarm the tables, and in minutes, they’ve wheeled loads of goods outside into waiting vehicles to be hauled away, the cases to be sorted out. And, later, the profits to be divided.

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