Police seized over 30 luxury cars from an alleged drug trafficker in New Salem. After auctioning many of the cars, they’ve been busy spending the more than $2 million in proceeds.
It was a case that police billed as one of the region’s biggest-ever drug busts.
The year was 2020, and officers had pulled over Cory Taylor in the town of Pelham, where they said they seized 138 pounds of cannabis from the van the 41-year-old was driving. Taylor made bail and disappeared. Two months later, his dead body was discovered in a vacant building in Holyoke.
In the meantime, police had raided two properties they said were connected to Taylor: a home in the Franklin County town of New Salem and a 5,000-square-foot former firehouse converted into a high-end home in Holyoke. In New Salem, police seized upwards of 30 luxury vehicles — including 13 Toyota Supras, of “The Fast and the Furious” fame.
Soon, prosecutors would begin the legal process of permanently taking that property from Taylor’s estate and splitting the proceeds with local police departments.
It’s a process known as “civil asset forfeiture,” which allows law enforcement to seize, and in most cases keep, someone’s property if police allege that property is connected to a crime. In Massachusetts, it’s easier to “forfeit” someone’s assets than anywhere else in the country. Massachuestts is now the only state where the burden of proof for seizing a person’s property is “probable cause.” Other states have decided to reform their asset forfeiture systems by raising their evidentiary standards. States like Maine and Nebraska have gone further, abolishing civil asset forfeiture altogether. Still others deposit forfeited money into the state’s general fund.
But in Massachusetts, police who took property after alleging it was connected to a crime can eventually benefit from it financially. Police departments and district attorneys’ offices get to split any proceeds from forfeited assets.
In 2022, the Northwestern District Attorney’s Office came to an agreement with Taylor’s mother, allowing the DA’s office and 12 local police agencies to keep the proceeds from 24 of Taylor’s luxury cars, which the DA’s office sold at an auction at the Orange Municipal Airport back that year. The proceeds were staggeringly large.
“It’s so far out of the norm, we’ll never see a case like that again,” Northwestern District Attorney David Sullivan told me last year.
Since then, the police departments that received cash from that case — their split of the money was $1.24 million in total — have spent those funds on everything from weapons and surveillance technology to cars and training, an investigation by The Shoestring has revealed. The Northwestern District Attorney’s Office, meanwhile, has spent the other half of the money on “protracted investigations,” training, and police equipment and technology, in addition to charitable donations to drug- and alcohol-abuse prevention groups.
Using public records requests, The Shoestring has tracked those departments’ spending from their civil asset forfeiture accounts since Taylor’s estate settled the case in Franklin County, sending a wave of unrestricted funding into police departments’ bank accounts from Athol down to Easthampton. Only the state police have failed to turn over records.
That spending offers a window onto what might soon happen in Hampden County, where police seized even more property from Taylor. There, a civil case has been playing out over more than four years as the Hampden District Attorney’s Office looks to forfeit the luxury Holyoke residence, over $4 million in cash, 12 cars, and 14 pieces of jewelry, including a bracelet valued in the six figures. It’s a seizure of property that is unprecedented in the region.
In court filings, Taylor’s mother, who has been representing Taylor’s estate, has pushed back against prosecutors’ attempts to forfeit the property and allegations that it was connected to illegal activities. Her lawyer, Vincent Bongiorni, did not respond to an interview request.
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For most of the police departments involved in the Taylor case, the payout was among the largest forfeiture deposits they had ever received.
“This one was obviously a big one,” Hampshire County Sheriff Patrick Cahillane told The Shoestring.
The sheriffs’ offices in Hampshire and Franklin counties were among the eight agencies that received $141,192 each from the Taylor case. The others included the state police and the police departments in Orange, Deerfield, Easthampton, Greenfield, and Belchertown.
Four other departments received smaller deposits of $30,886: Athol, Northampton, Hadley, and Montague.
All of those agencies are part of the Northwestern District Attorney’s Anti-Crime Task Force. Each designates one or more officers to work for the task force, which, according to the DA’s website, works to “identify, investigate and prosecute illegal narcotics offenses, unlawful firearms offenses, gang-related crimes, major crimes, human trafficking and other organized criminal activities.” The police departments then split any forfeited funds with the DA’s office, their cut of the proceeds depending on how many officers the department is contributing to the task force.
Once police departments receive that money, they can spend it on just about anything. It’s a system that prosecutors and police say allows them to dismantle criminal organizations and use their illicit proceeds to conduct further investigations, maintain and purchase vital equipment, and donate money to community organizations. Hampden District Attorney Anthony Gulluni has likened the system to “Robin Hood,” “taking from bad sources and giving it to good.”
Many police chiefs say it allows them to buy items that the state or their local municipalities wouldn’t allocate money for in their budgets.
“Normally, we spend it on those things that you normally wouldn’t purchase,” is how Cahillane described it.
But it’s a system that experts say disproportionately impacts minority communities and the poor, who can’t afford to fight against the seizure of their property. Unlike in criminal cases, defendants without money to pay for a lawyer aren’t afforded a public defender in civil asset forfeiture cases, and prosecutors have fought against legislative reforms that would provide them one.
The effect, some say, is essentially the creation of a slush fund that bolsters police departments’ already bloated budgets.
It’s also a system lacking in transparency, several oversight bodies have found. Police don’t have to report how they spend forfeiture funds to any agency — or, in many cases, their own city governments. The Shoestring had to file separate public records requests with each individual police department in order to track how they spent forfeiture funds in the wake of their Taylor-case windfalls.
A 2021, a special state legislative commission recommended providing defense counsel in forfeiture cases, requiring police to report their expenditures, depositing forfeited money into the state’s general fund, and raising the standard of proof for forfeiture. To date, lawmakers have done none of those things.
The Legislature’s report also noted that during the time period it analyzed, most forfeitures weren’t for high-dollar amounts like the Taylor case.
“The highest number of cases filed were between the very modest amounts of $1,000 and $4,999 accounting for 1378 cases,” the Legislature’s report found. “There were only 163 cases above $25,000 but 693 cases under $1,000.”
In 2023, the Massachusetts Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights concluded that Massachusetts should abolish civil asset forfeiture altogether, citing the state’s “breathtaking lack of transparency and accountability in the seizure, retention, and use of seized assets.”
“It has resulted in, and continues to create opportunities for, consistent and systematic violations of the civil rights of citizens of the Commonwealth,” the commission wrote. “Given the existing racial and other disparities found throughout the criminal legal system, there is a large likelihood that people of color and other protected groups are experiencing significant civil rights violations in the civil forfeiture process.”
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When the Taylor money hit departments’ bank accounts in the summer of 2022, some departments soon went on a spending spree.
Greenfield police, for example, have dropped $85,819 on three cars, including a 2022 Toyota Highlander Hybrid, and another $14,550 on a golf cart after receiving funds from the Taylor case. They also paid $19,500 for bullet-proof vests, $4,146 to remodel the department’s kitchen, and $4,189 on paint for the police department building, too.
“If you have a little faith in us, we’re not blowing this money on trinkets,” Police Chief Todd Dodge said as part of an investigation that I reported for New England Public Media and The Republican on civil asset forfeiture.
However, Greenfield also spent $2,027 on a tab for an awards ceremony at the Country Club of Greenfield’s restaurant, $2,629 on a desk and credenza for Dodge, $1,601 on “challenge coins,” and $600 on engraved Greenfield Police Department tumblers.
The Taylor seizure was exceptionally large, allowing departments to spend more forfeiture money than they normally have access to. But it’s not the only case that has netted forfeiture funds for local police departments in the Anti-Crime Task Force during the time period The Shoestring analyzed. When the Taylor money was deposited in those departments’ bank accounts, it was added to forfeited funds they had already received, and they continued to accumulate forfeiture money after that, too.
Some local police departments are also part of a federal anti-drug task force, meaning that they also receive forfeiture money from federal cases. Easthampton, for example, spent $56,940 in federal forfeiture funds on a new Tesla cruiser in 2023.
Many departments purchased weapons with their forfeiture funds after receiving money from the Taylor case.
Deerfield and Easthampton each spent over $10,000 on Tasers, and Athol, Orange, and the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office also spent thousands on the electroshock devices. Hadley also spent $14,715 with the company that makes Tasers, Axon Enterprise.
Other departments spent their money on guns and related equipment. Belchertown, for instance, paid $7,560 to trade in their decade-old firearms for new ones. And police in Orange — a town of less than 8,000 inhabitants — spent $28,125 at firearms retailers on rifles, holsters, ammunition, targets, simulation ammunition, and “go bags.”
In Deerfield, police bought a $1,199 shotgun for shooting rabid animals. They also spent $7,437 on 14 “tactical shields” and $442 on a suppressor that quiets the sound of rifle shots. Police Chief John Paciorek said that those heavy shields are different from the ones police might carry at a protest, for example. They’re heavy, protective shields for a situation like an active-shooter inside the schools, he said, allowing police to protect themselves while clearing hallways. The suppressor is for the same scenario, ensuring that officers don’t damage their ears shooting indoors.
“I wish I didn’t need the stuff,” he said. But if he didn’t plan for such events, he said, he’d be ill-prepared for when the worst does happen. “We’re taught as emergency managers to be prepared for everything.”
The Hampshire County Sheriff’s Office spent $5,132 on ammunition and $2,012 on weapon lights for nighttime illumination.
‘That’s part of the requirement for [officers’] training,” Cahillane said. “They have to do low-light shooting and obviously daylight shooting.”
Cahillane’s office also purchased pepper-spray replacement. And that’s not the only “less-lethal” weapon the department bought. It also spent $2,021 on a 40 mm single shot bean-bag launcher. Cahillane said that the launcher replaced an older model the jail would use in “a riot type situation or a serious disorder management situation.”
“If you have one group of inmates that decided to fight against another group of inmates,” he said as an example. “We have not seen any such thing and we hope that we never do, but it’s nice to have the piece of equipment available.”
A 2020 study in The New England Journal of Medicine that analyzed police use of bean-bag munitions at Black Lives Matter protests found that the weapons “can cause serious harm and are not appropriate for use in crowd control.”
Surveillance technology also represented a big cost for some departments.
Easthampton and Hadley both purchased technology from the company Flock Safety, which makes automated license plate readers. Easthampton police spent $17,350 in forfeiture funds on two ALPR devices, as they’re known, placing one on Route 141 to surveil cars traveling between Holyoke and Easthampton. Lt. Dennis Scribner said that police have used the technology to solve hit-and-runs, some break-ins, and a stolen-car case.
“It’s just a helpful tool for investigations,” Scribner said.
However, civil libertarians and others have expressed alarm over Flock’s technology and the federal government’s ability to subpoena its data. The American Civil Liberties Union, for instance, has raised concerns about the company’s ambitions to “create a nationwide mass-surveillance system out of its customers’ cameras,” which the ACLU has called “dangerously powerful and unregulated.”
In a 2023 report, the ACLU warned that ALPR readers that share data nationally, like Flock’s, “could be used to enforce anti-abortion or anti-immigrant laws from other jurisdictions, or even to assist foreign, authoritarian regimes in hunting down political opponents and refugees living in America.” It noted that at the time, Flock’s default provisions gave the company a “worldwide” license to use customers’ data.
But Scribner said he’s not worried about data falling into the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He said he understands people’s concerns and hopes that doesn’t happen, but also recognizes that “we live in a technological society, there’s cameras everywhere and license plate readers all over the state.” He noted that Easthampton has a policy against assisting ICE officials, though that policy makes no mention of what critics are concerned about — sharing data with a company that could then hand that information over to ICE or other federal agencies.
“I’m not getting inundated with complaints about it,” he said. “We’ve explained its purpose and we’ve been assured about the integrity of that information.”
Flock has been sued over its technology in Virginia, where a federal lawsuit argued that its technology is unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment. And on Wednesday, the news outlet 404 Media published an investigation of internal company documents that found Flock is building a people lookup tool “allowing police to much more easily identify and track the movements of specific people around the country without a warrant or court order.”
Easthampton aren’t the only ones buying controversial tech.
The Northwestern District Attorney’s Office used some of its funding to purchase software and training from the Israeli firm Cellebrite, who have come under fire for selling their mobile-device extraction and hacking services to authoritarian regimes worldwide. And Northampton police have used its forfeiture accounts to pay for the Canadian firm Thomson Reuters’ software Clear, which recently settled a $27.5 million class-action lawsuit over privacy concerns.
“CLEAR is a public database that is gathered from public records such as utility bills, etc.,” Northampton Police Chief John Cartledge said in an email. “We use it in a variety of ways: during investigations, to locate owners of vehicles who may need to be moved during construction (so we don’t have to tow their vehicle), and conducting background investigations on potential new hires, to name a few. The public can also have access to this, it is not just for law enforcement. We do not contribute information to this system.”
Under state law, district attorneys can actually give out up to 10% of their forfeited cash as community grants — a fact frequently touted by DAs across the state. In 2023, Northwestern District Attorney Sullivan gave out $122,396 to organizations, including many drug- and alcohol-abuse prevention groups, and in 2024 he handed out another $5,904. Sullivan has said he wishes he were allowed to give out more of that money.
Much of the DA’s spending is on “protracted investigations,” many of them related to drug trafficking. Software, equipment, training, and “other law enforcement purposes” — everything from storage costs to office expenses — also represent major expenditures.
Vehicles were another large purchase for departments after they received money from the Taylor case.
Montague police spent $29,908 on a custom Chevrolet Impala, for example, and the Hampshire Sheriff’s Office spent $53,188 on a 2023 Ford transit van to take incarcerated people to and from community programs and work. The Franklin County Sheriff’s Office bought a $30,656 vehicle and Belchertown police spent $19,361 on a Tesla.
Deerfield police spent $44,442 on a 2022 Chevrolet Tahoe, in addition to $9,534 on upgrades to the car and $4,400 on paint. The department also dropped $28,006 on a 2022 Ford F-150 “drug truck.”
Some departments used the money for capital improvements. Deerfield, for example, made $8,800 on driveway repairs, Belchertown repaired the sign in front of its police station for $7,800, and Easthampton made $9,300 in repairs to its booking area ceiling.
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The famed civil rights attorney Michelle Alexander argued in her 2010 book “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” that civil asset forfeiture was a key spark in starting the so-called war on drugs. When, in 1984, Congress amended federal laws to allow local police departments to keep the money they seized, Alexander said that gave them an incentive to participate in imprisoning communities of color in the name of fighting drugs.
“This dramatic change in policy gave state and local police an enormous stake in the War on Drugs — not in its success, but in its perpetual existence,” she wrote.
Speaking last year to Sullivan, the Northwestern DA, I asked him about Alexander’s critique. He said that because departments aren’t spending their forfeiture money on personnel, “it’s not like they’re hiring more cops to go out and fight the war on drugs.” He criticized some departments’ spending on items like an ice cream truck, but said those are outliers and that police are largely buying equipment they need to “serve the public,” such as bulletproof vests or crucial software. He said he’d be open to departments receiving that funding from a source other than forfeiture.
“If the Legislature said tomorrow, ‘Hey, you know, we’ll fund you the $70,000 that you were getting per year,’ that’s fine with me,” he said. “But a lot of it is that these 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.”
During that interview, Sullivan said he’s in favor of raising the evidentiary bar for seizing assets but that he was opposed to providing attorneys for low-income defendants facing forfeiture.
It’s unclear if any of those reforms, or the abolition of forfeiture, are coming to Massachusetts anytime soon. Police and prosecutors have long lobbied against any changes to the system, including dissenting from the state Legislature’s final report in 2021.
In the meantime, the Hampden District Attorney’s Office is continuing its case seeking to forfeit the cash, cars, jewelry, and home that police seized in Holyoke as part of their case against Taylor.
The sheer scale of the forfeiture immediately caused infighting among police agencies that would receive a cut of the eventual proceeds, according to reporting in The Republican at the time. The newspaper reported that squabbling between local, state, and federal police involved in the Holyoke raid became so tense that it almost caused the breakup of drug task forces that have existed since their creation in the early years of the so-called war on drugs.
“Members of the DEA began taking the cash to be counted, according to law enforcement officials familiar with the investigation,” The Republican’s Stephanie Barry reported. “But state troopers balked, arguing it was their case — and some blocked federal agents’ cars in with their cruisers, sources say. There was a lot of yelling. Bosses were called in the middle of the night, officials said.”
The forfeiture case against Taylor’s assets is set to go to trial sometime later this year.
