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 on Spring Street in Reading, Pa. 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: Cops 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. An open-and-shut drug case, 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, Conn., 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 multi-year 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 DA 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. But, meanwhile, its suburbs and outlying counties, like Berks, 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 Pa. came from eight suburban and exurban counties in the Southeast.

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

