How A FedEx Shipping Hub Has Become A Cash Cow For Indiana

Henry and Minh Cheng are jewelry wholesalers who have done business across the U.S. for over three decades, but one state they have never been to is Indiana. That hasn’t stopped Indiana from taking more than $42,000 from the couple without charging them with a crime. How did the state end up with their money? By intercepting packages at a busy FedEx shipping hub at the Indianapolis airport.

Civil forfeiture is often derided as “policing for profit,” but what is happening in Indiana hardly qualifies as policing. The hub in Indianapolis is the company’s second busiest in the U.S. Some 99,000 packages are processed per hour.

For at least several years, police have pulled packages from conveyor belts, run K-9s over them, gotten warrants to open the parcels, and seized money when they find it. Prosecutors for Marion County then file civil forfeiture cases to keep the money. Property owners find themselves fighting for their cash in a court that could be hundreds or thousands of miles away from home.

Indiana prosecutors file these cases without alleging any specific violation of Indiana law. Instead, they say the cash is proceeds of “a violation of a criminal statute.” To get their money back, property owners have to affirmatively defend against allegations that their property is linked to a crime. It is American justice flipped on its head.

For Henry and Minh, shipping products is standard but shipping cash is out of the ordinary. They work with Asian retail jewelers across the country and had shipped gold chains to a regular customer in Virginia. The retailer was slow to submit payment, and a few months after the sale the customer said she could pay promptly in cash. So the bill would be paid right away, Henry and Minh agreed to accept the cash payment and sent her a FedEx shipping label.

The money never got to the Chengs in California. What they got instead was a civil forfeiture notice. At this stage, many people simply give up, as the cost to pay an attorney can quickly equal the amount of money lost. Some who do get a lawyer choose to cut a deal with prosecutors to get only some of their money back.

But the Chengs were upset. They had done nothing wrong and they needed that money for their business. They found attorneys with the Institute for Justice and are fighting back in court.

However, the Chengs are not just defending their money. Their lawsuit also seeks to end Indiana’s FedEx hub scheme.

There is a lot wrong with civil forfeiture, but what Indiana is doing is unusually predatory. First, packages are deemed suspicious by police based on innocuous features. For instance, police have said a package was suspicious because it had tape on the seams. But FedEx actually tells customers to tape seams securely.

Second, getting a drug dog to alert to a package of cash is easy. At least one study showed that 90% of U.S. bills have traces of cocaine. If packages contain only money, no contraband, a dog alert doesn’t reasonably indicate the money is criminal proceeds. Every cash register in America is full of bills that would cause a dog to alert.

Third, Indiana prosecutors don’t allege what specific Indiana law is linked to the money. For the most part, the money seized is in Indiana only by happenstance. The origin and destination of the package are in other states. For Indiana to take someone’s property, it has to say what Indiana law was violated and thus justifies forfeiture.

Indiana police and prosecutors simply aren’t interested in uncovering crimes or arresting criminals. But they like the easy money. So far, since 2022 more than $1 million has been raked in with another $1.5 million working its way through the courts.

Now the Chengs’ lawsuit will put Indiana police and prosecutors in the hot seat for how they are violating Indiana law and the federal Constitution. No one should have to effectively prove their innocence to keep the money they’ve worked hard to earn.