A first-of-its-kind journalism investigation started with a barber leaving the bank.

The small business owner encountered police with money in his car. Officers seized the bills, $25,000 in cash meant for a property purchase.

Greenville News reporter Anna Lee was looking at court records later when she saw Ortagus Bennett’s file. The newsroom regularly sifts through public data, and Lee had an earlier story fall through.

So she pulled his case to read more.

Lee knew about federal law enforcement seizure of property but didn’t know how the broad civil power also given to South Carolina police played out in her state. “I grabbed Ortagus’ case because it was incredibly compelling, and because his email address was included in the court filings,” Lee said.

When she spoke to Bennett, she learned how life changed after police took his money. His small business, First Class Barber, went into default. He couldn’t make payments on his loan or pay the attorney he’d been forced to hire.

Lee’s digging led Executive Editor Katrice Hardy to greenlight a statewide investigation of civil forfeiture and how it affects regular South Carolinians.

"A vital part of our role is to be watchdogs for the public officials and agencies that spend taxpayer money," Hardy said. "We take that job very seriously.

"Once we began to understand the scope of this issue in our state, we realized that we needed to broaden the scope of our data collection and on-the-ground reporting. To examine a broken statewide system, we needed to tell the story of how civil forfeiture played out across South Carolina."

Greenville News investigative reporter Nathaniel Cary and Anderson Independent Mail reporter Mike Ellis joined Lee in the fall of 2016 to form the TAKEN team, making this a joint newsroom project. Eventually, USA TODAY NETWORK journalists from Asheville, North Carolina, and Staunton, Virginia, would also get deeply involved.

The team set out to build a statewide examination of every single case of civil forfeiture from a three-year time period, matching the data with other information about race, population, income and talking to dozens of citizens targeted with this kind of seizure.

No similar news investigation has been done for an entire U.S. state, featuring comprehensive asset forfeiture case data, according to national experts.

TAKEN ended up as a unique and definitive examination of how poorly understood, barely monitored civil law powers given to criminal law enforcement agencies in South Carolina have altered lives of its often most vulnerable citizens.

The three reporters crisscrossed the state, driving from courthouse to courthouse to pull paper records not available online. As they also left behind much of their normal newsroom jobs in a new year, they slowly, manually entered the records into what would become a large database.

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Legal experts, social advocates and historians across the country began to weigh in on the pattern of “forfeiture” that was emerging from our investigation.

Visual journalists Josh Morgan and Lauren Petracca joined the team as the targets of civil forfeiture started to tell their stories for TAKEN. Michael McGlone, a data expert from the USA TODAY Network’s Asheville site, was brought in for months of records wrangling.

William Ramsey, an enterprise editor from Virginia, took leadership of the investigative project in winter 2017.

Cary worked on the project amid other stories, like ones about Spartanburg County's terrifying serial killer. Ellis, a religion reporter, set aside his beat and was on the other side of the state pulling court records for TAKEN when the Rev. Billy Graham died.

“This team pulled together and dedicated itself to really understanding what was happening in South Carolina and where the system was failing,” Ramsey said. “It’s this study — not just of data but of the wreckage of lives public policy can leave — that marks the vital brand of local journalism the USA TODAY NETWORK is doing.”

The team learned how deep the benefit went for law enforcement agencies living off civil forfeiture money. Many police departments in South Carolina were funding healthy chunks of their annual operating budgets with money taken from citizens in civil actions. Officials said the seized funds played a vital role in making it possible to run drug task forces and K-9 units.

People lost cash and property, with little recourse to get it back — sometimes in cases that didn’t involve a criminal arrest or even a citation, just seizure of their property on suspicion of wrongdoing by them.

Table of contents:What's in the TAKEN civil forfeiture investigation

Cary watched police officers on the side of the highway take and thumb through a passenger’s wallet to look for bills.

Lee found a case where town officials tried to take an elderly widow’s home through forfeiture because neighborhood criminals were selling drugs on the corner of her property, despite her attempts to stop it.

McGlone ran data queries on what had become a cumbersome set of information. The team got a surprise as results came in — almost two-thirds of people who had their property taken were black men, in heavily disproportionate amounts to S.C. demographics.

“I was getting fired up about what we found,” Lee said, “and I was proud of what we were doing. This was real, impactful journalism, which to me has always been about telling stories to right wrongs and change lives.”

More than 3,000 cases covering 2014-2016 were examined. The team spoke to hundreds of sources after setting aside most other work in late 2017 to dedicate its time to TAKEN.

Any civil forfeiture in all 46 counties of South Carolina was pulled and analyzed for this three-year period.

The Greenville County barber?

Bennett won the battle eventually but perhaps lost the war. His money was returned to him four years after he was pulled over. By then, his business was bankrupt, and he owed $16,000 to his attorney for services rendered.

He was never convicted of a crime in the case — prosecutors dropped charges against him.

Contributors who worked on TAKEN included: Catherine Rogers, Daniel Gross, Ralph Jeffery, Jan Phillips, Karl Gelles, Ryan Hildebrandt, Kyle Omphroy, James Sergent, Rebecca Markovitz, Bill Fox, Ron Barnett, Dave Hennigan, Steve Bruss, Shawn Sullivan, Julia Fair, Jeff Schwaner.

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