Editor’s note: New England Public Media and The Republican collaborated on a monthslong investigation into the practice of civil asset forfeiture in western Massachusetts. This story is one part of that series. You can read the other stories here.
In the summer of 2022, the Greenfield Police Department received a windfall. But unlike its usual funding from the city, the $141,192 deposit arrived into a bank account the department can use for just about any purpose.
And that’s just what it did.
Since then, Greenfield police have spent more than $100,000 from that kind of fund. They racked up a $2,027 tab for a 100-person award ceremony at the Country Club of Greenfield’s restaurant, buying food and a “private bar.” They used $14,550 from the fund on a golf cart, $19,500 on bullet-proof vests, $4,189 on paint for the police department building, $2,270 on handguns and $739 on shooting targets.
Two days after Mayor Virginia Desorgher named Todd Dodge as acting police chief, he spent $2,629 on a mahogany-colored desk and credenza to replace one he said was water-damaged. The department dropped another $4,146 to remodel the department’s kitchen, installing granite countertops and a range.
That money came from a process known as civil asset forfeiture — when police take property from people they suspect of a crime, most often drug trafficking, and then district attorneys file a case in civil court to keep the property. In this case, the $141,192 was from one of the region’s largest-ever drug busts: the 2020 arrest of Cory Taylor. The Northwestern District Attorney’s Office had seized 37 cars, most of them luxury vehicles, from Taylor in New Salem. Prosecutors alleged the vehicles were connected to the trafficking of cannabis.
Taylor died before his criminal case was resolved, and prosecutors and Taylor’s estate agreed to some forfeiture in civil court. The DA’s office was eventually able to sell some of those cars at auction and split the proceeds among the police departments that helped with the initial bust. A civil case over his property — including $4 million in cash — seized at his Holyoke apartment has been ongoing for more than four years in Hampden Superior Court.
In Hampshire, Franklin and Hampden counties, law enforcement used civil asset forfeiture to seize at least $6 million from people in the fiscal years 2021, 2022 and 2023, the most recent data available from the state’s Trial Court. Police and prosecutors can also take somebody’s property in criminal proceedings, including a plea deal.
For police and prosecutors, civil asset forfeiture is a tool they say helps them thwart criminal enterprises. Hampden District Attorney Anthony Gulluni says it’s “enormously useful” because it both deprives alleged drug traffickers of their profits and provides an infusion of cash police can use to conduct long-term investigations that pull drugs and guns off the streets.
Critics, however, say the practice amounts to “little more than legalized theft” that disproportionately targets minority and low-income communities in order to further bolster already bloated police budgets. In a report last year, the Massachusetts Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights criticized the “breathtaking lack of transparency and accountability in the seizure, retention, and use of seized assets.”
David Harris, the committee’s chair, told NEPM and The Republican the money amounts to little more than a “slush fund” for police — a criticism Dodge acknowledged.
“I could see why it would be called that, I guess,” Dodge said. “But we try to use funds accurately.”
In a joint investigation, NEPM and The Republican requested records from six of the largest police departments in western Massachusetts, and the Valley’s two district attorneys offices, in an attempt to track how they’ve spent civil asset forfeiture money since 2019. That includes funds from both state and federal forfeitures.
For money forfeited at the state level, police departments don’t have to disclose annually how they spend it. State law only requires district attorneys to disclose that information yearly in broad strokes.
Under state law, funds can be used for any law enforcement purpose a chief, district attorney or the state attorney general “deems appropriate,” except it should not be treated as operating revenue.
State lawmakers and advocates have proposed reforms over the years, suggesting everything from greater transparency to abolishing the practice altogether. Police and prosecutors, however, have opposed those efforts and, to date, few have passed.
After other states have passed reforms, Massachusetts now has the lowest burden of proof for seizing property of any state in the country: probable cause, or a reasonable basis for believing someone has committed a crime. At the federal level, the burden of proof required to forfeit property is higher.
‘To protect … and serve ice cream’
While many departments’ state and federal forfeiture expenditures are related to policing, they also shelled out seized cash for everything from trophies and an ice cream truck to public-relations consulting.
In Greenfield, for example, during the years analyzed by NEPM and The Republican, police spent $10,881 in forfeiture money to help purchase a $172,055 mobile command center. The department also spent $4,500 on a mugshot capture system with facial-recognition technology and nearly $1,000 on a rifle and sight to mount on it.
Dodge said the department is using the money for “legitimate purposes.”
“All I can say is, if you have a little faith in us, we’re not blowing this money on trinkets,” Dodge said.
However, the department also spent $1,601 on “challenge coins,” $600 on engraved Greenfield Police Department tumblers and $200 to pay a fine to the city after an unidentified officer illegally parked in a handicap spot on Main Street.
Similarly, Chicopee police spent $14,735 on trophies, officer training cards, challenge coins, fridge magnets, flags and display cases.
Uniforms represented a big expenditure for some departments, including the West Springfield Police Department, which spent nearly $100,700 in forfeiture funds on clothing costs.
Some police departments used large amounts of seized funds for vehicles.
Chicopee police spent $26,500 on car repairs in the years in question. The department, which conducts operations like water rescues on the Connecticut River, spent another $27,293 on scuba and boat equipment. But it also bought and fixed up an ice cream truck for $12,982. The department uses the vehicle, which reads “To protect … and serve ice cream” on the side, at community events.
“One of my main goals was to try to bridge the gap between police work, our department and our community,” Officer Travis Odiorne, who came up with the idea for the truck, told Fox News Digital in September.
In addition to vehicles, Chicopee police spent $36,141 in forfeiture money on furniture, $17,826 on fitness equipment, $7,862 on shields and “riot team uniforms,” $7,685 on defensive tactics training suits and $3,840 on pest control.
Chief Patrick Major did not respond to an interview request NEPM and The Republican sent to Odiorne, who is the department’s spokesperson.
Springfield police also spent a substantial portion of their forfeiture funds on vehicles. That includes $173,415 on a mobile crime lab and at least $90,000 on a police cruiser and several undercover vehicles.
The department also spent tens of thousands of dollars in forfeiture money on public-relations consulting services.
In response to NEPM and The Republican’s public records request, the Springfield Police Department turned over $16,333 in invoices for PR consulting with the Georgetown-based firm John Guilfoil Public Relations from the year 2021. In total, the department spent $24,500 in civil asset forfeiture funds on public-relations services in 2021, said Ryan Walsh, the department’s spokesperson.
Walsh said Springfield police initially hired the PR firm in part for website improvements to comply with a 2022 consent decree it signed with the U.S. Department of Justice, which two years prior had accused Springfield’s narcotics unit of using excessive force with impunity. The department also paid the firm Police Executive Research Forum $137,580 in forfeiture funds in 2020 to complete a review of policies.
Part of John Guilfoil’s consulting work with Springfield police included PR strategy meetings with Walsh and others, as well as writing press releases. Walsh said the department hired the firm in the wake of the 2020 police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Another big purchase from the Springfield Police Department’s forfeiture accounts was the installation of surveillance cameras across the city, for which it paid $80,720. The department redacted the camera locations from the records it provided NEPM and The Republican. Walsh said that’s because it doesn’t want people evading the cameras, which he said the city uses for traffic enforcement and more serious crimes.
“Cameras are integral,” he said. “They’ve solved dozens and dozens of crimes. Almost every homicide (investigation) is aided by these city cameras.”
Springfield police aren’t the only ones who have used forfeiture funds to buy policing technology.
Northampton police have used their forfeiture accounts to pay monthly software subscription costs — climbing to $329 monthly in 2024 — to Thomson Reuters for the use of its product known as Clear. Thomson Reuters just reached a $27.5 million settlement in a class-action lawsuit over that software in California, where two civil rights activists sued the company in 2020 over privacy concerns.
Northampton police did not respond to requests for comment last week.
The Northwestern District Attorney’s Office and others have used forfeiture funds to pay for training with the Israeli digital intelligence firm Cellebrite, which offers mobile-device extraction and hacking services to police worldwide. The company has come under criticism for selling its technology to authoritarian regimes including Russia, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
Holyoke police, meanwhile, spent $20,800 in forfeiture funds in 2019 on Tasers. In 2023, consultants the city hired to audit the Holyoke Police Department’s policies wrote that they were “astounded” at the lack of basic field training for Holyoke police officers, including annual training on the use of Tasers. The firm also found the department had no use-of-force policy for Tasers.
Most of what Holyoke spent its money on, however, was payroll.
“A lot of it is offsetting payrolls for detectives when they are doing longer investigations,” said Sgt. Joseph Zurheide, the department’s spokesperson.
The records Holyoke police turned over don’t specify what kind of payroll expenses those were or who received that money. A 2022 investigation published by the Daily Hampshire Gazette, though, found that between 2018 and June 2022, the department spent $136,004 in forfeiture money to pay officers overtime. At that time, the biggest beneficiary of that spending was Officer David Pratt, who received $168,956 in overtime pay from the city’s forfeiture accounts from 2011 through 2021. That accounted for 41% of all the forfeiture money Holyoke had spent on overtime during that period, according to the Gazette. Pratt became police chief in 2021.
Holyoke has also spent more than $20,000 since 2019 sending its officers to conferences — mostly for the New England Narcotic Enforcement Officers Association’s annual conference in Rhode Island. Another $12,314 in expenditures from 2023 are simply labeled “training.”
Drug policing represents a big expenditure of forfeited funds for district attorneys and police. The Chicopee police, for example, dedicated $34,000 to drug investigations during the period NEPM and The Republican examined. West Springfield police spent $19,000, more than half of which was used as drug-bust “buy” money.
How District Attorneys spend the funds
For district attorneys, who receive a 50% split of forfeiture money, many of their expenses from these accounts support “prolonged investigations” and other similar costs.
The Northwestern District Attorney’s Office, for example, spent $102,011 on those investigations from 2019 through 2023. The office’s records show those costs include everything from wiretap costs and “confidential investigations” to DNA testing and phone bills. The office also spent $95,527 on “other law enforcement purposes,” which includes a wide range of costs from offsite storage and vehicle leases to brochures and general office expenses.
The Hampden District Attorney’s Office spent $303,293 on prolonged investigations from 2019 through 2023, its records show. But it’s not clear how exactly they’re spending that money because the DA’s office declined to turn over invoices for those expenditures.
“These documents contain confidential information, the release of which would affect the safety of law enforcement and would interfere with ongoing criminal investigations,” the DA’s office wrote when it denied those records to NEPM and The Republican.
In an interview, Gulluni, the Hampden DA, said that those are often “wire investigations” and that many deal with alleged drug trafficking. The funds can be used for “buy money,” cars or other expenses, he said, adding that those are often the most fruitful investigations that remove from the streets “large amounts of narcotics” and guns.
“They are by and large supported by forfeiture monies, which, again, is consistent with the statutory purposes outlined, and, I believe, consistent with my responsibilities in making sure that we’re protecting people and protecting our communities,” Gulluni said. “And I think that the public would agree with that. The public would say, ‘Hey, you can use money that was taken from drug dealers to conduct high-level investigations that take off other drug dealers from our streets.’”
By state law, district attorneys are also able to give up to 10% of their forfeited money to local organizations in the form of community grants. The Hampden DA’s office, for example, gave out $118,236 to local charitable groups between 2019 and 2023. Last year, for example, those grants included $4,833 to the Boys and Girls Club of Chicopee and $8,000 to the New North Citizens’ Council in Springfield.
Last year, Sullivan’s office dedicated $122,396 to “private-public partnerships” with a wide range of drug- and alcohol-prevention groups and other social service organizations like the Athol YMCA, Big Brothers Big Sisters and Soldier On.
“It’s like Robin Hood, a little bit,” Gulluni said. “It’s like taking from bad sources and giving it to good.”
However, some critics also view those grants as controversial. They say that not only is there a low bar for proving the money came from “bad sources,” but that the money provides elected district attorneys with an opportunity to boost their political profile by inviting reporters and TV cameras to watch them hand over big checks.
Northampton defense attorney Luke Ryan, who has experience dealing with forfeiture cases, said he thinks the money should go into the state’s general fund rather than to district attorneys and police.
“Their expertise is the prosecution of crime,” Ryan said “They don’t have any specialized expertise on how to spend money to uplift communities. This is not money that they should be getting for their offices to decide how to utilize it. I think it’s totally inappropriate to think that because you seize the money, you get to spend it … It raises some real serious concerns that law enforcement is being driven by a motive to profit.”
Sullivan and Gulluni both dismissed that argument. Gulluni said legislative leaders have a tendency to overlook western Massachusetts, meaning that money put into the general fund may end up benefiting other parts of the state at the expense of the region where it was seized.
“Let’s keep it local,” Gulluni said.
For Ryan, all the money seized and then spent has done little to combat the social ills of drug addiction and trafficking.
“We’ve chosen to criminalize a public health crisis. The forfeiture thing is part of a much larger problem,” Ryan said. “We’re over five decades into the War on Drugs and drugs are cheaper, more potent and more plentiful than they have ever been.”
Sullivan said he would be open to state lawmakers providing regular funding to police and prosecutors to spend in lieu of forfeiture funds. But at the moment, he said, a lot of police departments “are very dependent on this drug forfeiture money to buy those extras that they can’t get allocated within a state or a municipal budget.”
“So if it was for an ice cream truck, shame on them,” Sullivan said. “But if it was for that equipment — the Kevlar vests and other equipment or software — that they need to use to serve the public, that much the better.”
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