If you’re hauling $300,000 in illicit cash in your car, you might want to skip the tinted windows, make sure you obey the road signs and then be certain that you keep cool and have your story straight if the cops pull you over.
Edgar Medina-Mora got an F on all of the above, and now the feds are planning to take his money — a total of $309,866.
He said the cash is from his concrete business. But prosecutors say in court papers that they think it’s drug money.
They’ve moved to forfeit the stash, seized by state troopers in the summer after a traffic stop on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
The case started on the evening of July 25 when a trooper spotted a Nissan Frontier with a California plate cruising through Somerset County. The pickup had tinted windows — they are illegal in Pennsylvania — and the headlights were off despite a highway sign to turn them on.
The trooper followed and checked the plate, which came back to Medina-Mora, of Spring Valley, Calif., a town 20 minutes from the Mexican border outside San Diego.
Prosecutors noted that Spring Valley is a known drug-source city. The trooper pulled the pickup over because of the tinted windows and no headlights, and noticed that the driver put on his hazard lights.
The trooper said drug dealers often do that to avoid suspicion by pretending to be concerned for officer safety. It didn’t work. Inside the vehicle, the trooper saw Medina-Mora along with a woman and a toddler.
Medina-Mora was nervous. He said he was driving to California and Georgia. He said he’d been in Philadelphia, a destination the family chose at random for a visit to “hang out and see what’s up.” They stayed inside their hotel room the entire time, he said, because it was too hot to go anywhere.
He said he ran a concrete business, earning $2,000 a week, and was looking to buy concrete pumps in Philadelphia because he wanted to move out of California. He was also looking for some pumps down in Atlanta, he said.
When told that his route on the turnpike, which traverses the state east-west, is not the way anyone would travel south to Atlanta, Medina-Mora said he was headed back to California.
His passenger, Paola Lizbeth Ruedas Saavedra, also was extremely nervous, and her information conflicted with what Medina-Mora said.
When the trooper asked what Medina-Mora might have inside his truck, he said he didn’t have more than $2,000. A search of a duffle bag on the floor turned up $307,866 more than that.
The trooper put Medina-Mora in handcuffs, after which he said he had been paid $20,000 to transport the money from Philadelphia to California. He said he had picked up the money from someone in a Philadelphia parking lot.
A drug dog alerted on the money.
Medina-Mora later filed a claim with U.S. Customs and Border Protection that the cash was for a cement mixer truck and a concrete pump trailer.
But prosecutors say the money was for drugs. They’ve asked a federal judge to turn it over to the U.S.
Torsten covers the courts for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but he's currently on strike. Reach him at jtorsteno@gmail.com.
