On March 15, 2007, Michael Annan was driving his black Nissan Maxima south on I-95 through southeast Georgia. He had just gotten off his job on a dredging barge and was on his way home to Orlando, Fla., when he was pulled over for speeding by deputies in Camden County, just north of the Florida state line.
Annan, a 40-year-old immigrant from Ghana, was carrying $43,720 in hundreds and fifties rolled up in a sock in the pockets of his overalls — everything he had saved from nine years of work in Florida and Georgia. But because he did not trust banks, or his then-wife in Orlando, Annan was carrying his life savings in his pocket.
"They open my car engine and they try to find something," Annan said in an interview from Brunswick, Ga. "But I don't have nothing in my engine, and I don't know what they thinking. ... After that, they said they would take me to the office."
At the sheriff's office, a drug dog was brought out to sniff his car, but it detected no narcotics. Annan says he showed them a pay slip from his employer, Great Lakes Dredging. Annan had no drug arrests. Undeterred, the officers confiscated the money anyway, explaining they needed to investigate whether it was drug money. They said he could call them back in two weeks.
Annan says he did call back, a half dozen times, but that no one would help him. So he took a day off from work to drive to the county seat of Woodbine, Ga., to visit the sheriff's office in person. He said they told him they were too busy to see him.
So he hired an attorney in Brunswick, who faxed Annan's work records and tax returns to the sheriff's office as proof he wasn't a drug dealer. Camden County then returned his money. The lawyer charged him $12,000 — more than a quarter of his savings.
"I think maybe they see money like that ... maybe they thought I was dealing with the drugs ... how can a black man have this much money in his pocket? I think they robbing me, I can't understand they can stop someone and take his money," he says in heavily accented English.
His attorney, Paula Crowe, who is familiar with Camden County, says that in her experience, she's sure Annan never would have seen his money again had he not hired a lawyer.
Lt. William Terrell, of the Camden County Sheriff's Office, said the highway interdiction team was just doing its job.
"The deputies, with all their training and experience, were acting in good faith as sworn officers doing their job. They were not trying to take Mr. Annan's hard-earned money, they were simply trying to verify that the $43,000 was not money made in a drug transaction."
Camden County has an aggressive highway interdiction program that has earned the sheriff's department more than $20 million over the past decade and a half. Sheriff Bill Smith — once considered one of the most successful sheriffs in the nation at confiscating drug money off the highways — is now the subject of a federal grand jury investigation into whether he misused the forfeiture funds.
"To use this one incident to paint a picture of our agency is neither accurate nor fair," Terrell says. "We have seized millions of dollars that did indeed belong to the drug cartels. We have also seized thousands of pounds of cocaine, marijuana and all the other drugs that plague our society."
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