Berks County narcotics detectives were ready to pounce.

From a distance, they spied Jose Veloz and Ambioris Cruz sitting in a 2005 Nissan Murano on a leafy residential block in Reading. The SUV was stashed with bags of heroin and about $5,000 in cash.

Veloz and Cruz thought they were about to pull off a lucrative drug deal, but police were one step ahead. They had flipped one of the pair’s associates against them. It was a setup.

In a flash, detectives rushed the pair and made arrests — seizing the cash, the drugs and the SUV.

It was a nice haul for the Berks County District Attorney’s Office. The property could be confiscated using a legal procedure known as civil asset forfeiture, which allows authorities to take money, cars and other assets of those suspected of selling drugs — even before a person is charged or found guilty. Proceeds are liquidated and used at the whim of law enforcement outside of county budget oversight.

Criminal justice advocates have long criticized the practice.

But to officials in Berks County, which a Keystone Crossroads investigation found to be a statewide leader in civil forfeiture, it’s a common-sense solution.

In this case, the $5,000 and the Nissan Murano were just another easy prize: a way to keep taxpayers off the hook while using property of suspected drug dealers to fund more drug investigations.

But there was a problem.

The car was registered to Ambioris Cruz’s now-estranged spouse, Daisilee Cruz. An honor student enrolled at the University of Saint Joseph’s in Hartford, Connecticut, she was 240 miles away at the time of the bust.

She had nothing to do with her ex’s drug operation. She was never charged with a crime. And she wanted her SUV back.

This was 2016.

Veloz and Ambioris Cruz pleaded guilty and took multiyear prison sentences over the heroin bust. But Daisilee Cruz, who had no right to legal counsel in a civil forfeiture case, was effectively helpless. She notified the district attorney about her situation, but, by early 2019, she wasn’t any closer to retrieving her vehicle.

Contacted recently, she said she moved on.

“I’ve given up on trying to get it back,” Cruz said.

Stories like these used to be far more common in big cities like Philadelphia, where law enforcement once routinely took homes, cars and millions in cash from drug suspects without charges. That was before lawsuits showed that police had sometimes used this powerful tool to take property from innocent people.

Since then, there has been a radical shift that’s occurred with little notice. Records show Philadelphia collected less money from police confiscation in 2017 than any recent year on record.

Meanwhile, its suburbs and outlying counties like Berks and Lancaster have ramped up cash seizures, according to an analysis of five years of data from the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office.

In 2013, Philadelphia accounted for 40% of all cash seized by local law enforcement in the state. That share has since shrunk to just 10%. In the most recent year on record, half of the $11.1 million seized in Pennsylvania came from eight suburban and exurban counties in the Southeast, including Lancaster.

Collectively, Bucks, Montgomery, Delaware, Lancaster, York, Berks, Lebanon and Lehigh counties have nearly doubled their share of forfeited cash since 2012. Statewide, district attorneys have raked in more than $64 million in cash using the procedure in that time.

For Berks County District Attorney John T. Adams, this increase is no accident. It is a deliberate strategy, a point of pride.

“We’re looking for assets more so than we ever did before,” Adams said. “This is bad guys’ money that we’re taking to enable us to arrest more bad guys. You’re damn right we’re gonna take it.”

The fact that civil forfeiture has increased in suburban and rural parts of Pennsylvania comes as little surprise to the nation’s leading scholars on the subject.

“Counties pressed for funds are going to increase civil forfeiture,” University of Pennsylvania professor Louis Rulli said. “DAs know that this is a very profitable funding stream.”

In Philadelphia, Rulli says a lesson was learned over the decades: When forfeiture is used as a cash cow, everything can look like drug money. Everything can look like a prize.

And as other counties have scaled up the practice — as Daisilee Cruz’s case and others uncovered through our investigation show — seemingly innocent people are getting caught in the crossfire.

‘The city’s a mess’

Sandwiched between Coal Country, Amish Country and the sprawling Philadelphia suburbs, Berks County is 866 square miles of rolling farms, foothills and small towns with the city of Reading at its heart.

Adams, 57, is a tough-talking district attorney who bragged of chasing down scofflaws on foot during his days as a county probation officer in the 1980s. Today, he wears a suit and tie, but still likes being close to the action. He said he sometimes accompanies investigators on door-kicking drug raids.

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With Adams at the helm, the county has stripped more dollars away from people believed to be connected to illegal drug activity per capita than any other district attorney’s office in the state, according to an examination of forfeiture reports filed annually to the state attorney general.

Although just 418,000 people reside in Berks, Adams has brought in $4.6 million from cash seizures over five years. The figure equates to 9% of his total office budget. That total is a shade more than Allegheny County, home to the city of Pittsburgh and more than a million residents. Per capita, law enforcement in Berks brought in the equivalent of $11 for every person in the county, while Allegheny brought in just $3 for every resident.

Adams said the bulk of the county’s forfeiture proceeds come from marquee drug busts in Reading — a largely Latino city that suffered in the wake of deindustrialization and has battled drug crime and poverty for decades. Adams said the city’s highly transient population and its position amidst a triangle of major highways make it fertile ground for narcotics trafficking.

“If we do not have a method to take away the fruits of the illicit labor of drug dealers, they’re going to continue to deal their poison, and people are going to continue to die,” Adams said.

He pointed to the breakup of a violent, multimillion-dollar heroin and K-2 ring last year as an example of this plight. The joint effort with state and federal forces called “Operation Shattered” included deploying explosives to break into the homes of major dealers.

This, Adams said, was the daily reality in a city that is among the nation’s poorest.

“Do you think that Reading is some (expletive) nice community? Because it’s not,” said Adams, who’s elected at the county level. “The city’s a mess.”

The funding Adams secures through forfeiture is also, in his view, crucial for a municipality rocked by financial distress. Reading’s police department is short-staffed and raises are infrequent, he said. So Adams breaks off a share of seized cash to fund investigations and buy equipment.

“Frankly, I would never have been able to obtain that equipment if I had to rely on a municipal budget or a county budget or a state budget,” Adams said of forfeiture proceeds.

The office has also used forfeiture money to pay out bonuses to police and even the underpaid public defenders who represent people unable to pay for their own defense.

Critics of civil asset forfeiture say money found in a suspect’s pocket should not be used to pad budgets.

“As long as forfeiture money is being used to self-fund law enforcement agencies, there is always going to be an abuse of forfeiture practices,” said Darpana Sheth with the Washington-based Institute of Justice, which has been litigating civil asset forfeiture cases for years.

“Law enforcement has a direct financial incentive to not only seize property but pursue forfeiture even when there is a very tangential relationship to criminal activity,” she said.

As the use of forfeiture has spread outwardly from Philadelphia, district attorneys in counties neighboring Berks have come under fire for allegations of improper use. The York district attorney ran a cottage business of auctioning cars. The Lancaster district attorney, Craig Stedman, used $21,000 of forfeiture funds to lease a new SUV.

Despite the potential for abuse, for those living among the daily dread of crime, hardball law enforcement tactics such as civil asset forfeiture can be welcome.

Sunny Singh, 49, a father of two who manages a corner store in downtown Reading, feels he has an ally in Adams. “If you have drug money, that’s not yours. You’re killing people,” Singh said. “They have smart people at the DA, and I think they’re doing the right thing.”

‘Abandoned property’

While a few large cash scores comprise most of the revenue the Berks County district attorney brings in, most of the forfeiture petitions filed by Adams are over comparatively small sums of money. And a review of several months of court filings from 2018 shows that small amounts of cash are routinely taken from people never charged with crimes.

Adams conceded that cases like these do occur but referred to the money as “abandoned property” because the individuals didn’t show up to court hearings to contest the takings. “In these scenarios, we didn’t file charges, but we had cash associated with drugs that has been abandoned,” he said. “Who are we supposed to give it to?”

The process for turning seized assets into funding for law enforcement takes a long time — for both a district attorney’s office and the target of their petitions. And because forfeiture is a civil proceeding, people do not have the right to an attorney, and 80% do not jump through the necessary hoops get their property back from the government.

Berks County defense lawyer Joel Ready, who has represented clients whose belongings have been seized through civil forfeiture, said this thinking turns the U.S. Constitution on its head.

“Anybody who had $500 taken out of their pocket by the government and told, ‘Well, you’re going to have to prove that you didn’t do anything to get this back,’ is going to understand that this is a profound injustice,” Ready said. “Most people can’t afford to hire a lawyer to come in and get that money back.”

Nine states require a criminal conviction before an asset is seized. Pennsylvania is not one of them. That reform was proposed here, but it failed after lobbying from district attorneys. Other states have gone further: North Carolina, New Mexico and Nebraska have abolished civil asset forfeiture altogether.

Adams says Pennsylvania should not follow that path.

“That would be saying to drug dealers: Keep your money. And keep at your illicit activity,” Adams said. “That’s absurd.”

The hard-charging district attorney, however, made changes to how assets are seized in Berks during the course of reporting this story over two months. He barred cash seizures of less than $500; the limit had previously been $250. He diverted $100,000 in forfeiture revenues to a county drug treatment center. And he sent another $25,000 to a diversionary court program.

He also said he’s returning Daisilee Cruz’s SUV, which has been sitting in a police impound lot since 2016. He said his office had dropped the forfeiture because the car wasn’t “worth anything.”

To Andres Jalon, a lawyer who helped Cruz file paperwork over a year ago in a failed attempt to get her SUV back, Adams’ comment summarizes some of the deeper problems with forfeiture.

“Not valuable to who? The DA is looking at the car from a monetary standpoint because they want to make money,” Jalon said. “But I’m sure the vehicle was valuable to Daisilee, who has children and has to take them to school.”

Bobby Allyn covers courts, criminal justice and breaking news for WHYY. Ryan Briggs is an investigative journalist covering politics, criminal justice and government policy for WHYY.