Joshua Boyer’s mother often had to remind him to think for himself. Growing up in rural Illinois, Boyer was quiet and well mannered, a shy white kid who spent his afternoons fishing for strawberry bass in farm ponds and the creeks that feed the Mississippi. But he was drawn to charismatic boys who broke the rules. They would sneak out at night to drink and smoke; they would drive through town in a pickup truck, knocking down neighbors’ mailboxes with a baseball bat. “Are you coming?” they would ask him, and Boyer had trouble saying no. He didn’t say no when a cousin proposed that they run away from home, or when a friend at a rave handed him a small dose of powder heroin. By 2001, when Boyer was twenty-four, he was living in Tampa, Florida, doing heroin six or seven times a day. He was miserable and barely employable. He did deliveries for an electronics-repair business, but the job depended on his car, which was threatening to give out. He wanted to go to rehab, but the program cost nearly two thousand dollars—far more than he could afford.
That winter, Boyer met a man who promised to change his life. He was a wiry Cuban American named Richie, who wore tight jeans and had long curly hair. Some guys Boyer partied with said that Richie had a plan to “hit the jackpot,” and one of them took Boyer to an empty warehouse to meet him. Richie told them that he worked as a courier for a Colombian drug cartel, driving shipments of cocaine to New York City. He said that he was being cheated by his bosses, and he was assembling a crew to help him rob their stash house, which was lightly guarded. During pickups, Richie had counted at least eighteen kilograms of cocaine, worth close to two million dollars. “With the amount we’re talking about, you ain’t going to have to work no more, you understand?” Richie’s partner, Mike, told Boyer. “This is a gold mine.”
Heroin was turning Boyer’s stomach, and he hadn’t eaten in days. His cut of the money—tens of thousands of dollars—would allow him to fix his car, pay for rehab, and, he hoped, put his life in order. The next morning, after cooking up a shot of heroin, Boyer put on camouflage cargo pants and a black T-shirt with the word “police” across the front. He joined some other men Richie had recruited in the parking lot of a Home Depot, near a car that Mike had rented for the robbery. Boyer assumed that there were guns in the trunk. One of the men sent him inside to buy zip ties, and he grabbed every kind he saw, because he had no idea what they’d need. He had never done anything like this before.
Boyer and the others drove to an outdoor storage facility, where Richie wanted them to deposit his share of the drugs after the raid. While they waited for Richie to give them the location of the stash house, Boyer paced the rows of storage units, nervously smoking Newports, wondering if he should back out. All at once, snipers in tactical gear emerged from under a tarp on the roof, and the roll-up doors of the storage units rose, displaying dozens of federal agents holding machine guns, like the prize reveal on an old game show. A helicopter circled overhead, and the air cracked with flash-bang grenades. Boyer threw himself to the ground, where he was cuffed and dragged face down to a law-enforcement vehicle, his jaw scraping against the asphalt.
The next day, the Tampa Tribune reported that a drug-sting operation had led to the arrests of six people. Richie was actually Richard Zayas, a special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. In another article, the Tribune described the suspects as “a group of Tampa Bay area men who were masquerading as police and conducting mock raids on drug dealers. They would burst into homes wearing police jackets and bulletproof vests, flashing guns and badges, and order drug dealers to the ground. Then they made off with drugs and money.”
Boyer, who had not touched a gun, was charged with two firearm offenses and conspiracy to distribute at least five kilos of cocaine, even though the stash house didn’t exist. The A.T.F. had set the amount of drugs high enough to trigger a mandatory minimum of ten years, so a judge would have little leeway to amend a sentence. “My lawyer said that if I went to trial I’d be looking at life,” Boyer told me.
In the past four decades, sting operations of all types have become a major part of law enforcement in the United States, and stash-house stings are perhaps the most extreme example of this trend, because of the harsh penalties they carry. They can result in longer sentences than real crimes of a similar nature. Defendants like Boyer are often surprised to learn that the government has a nearly limitless ability to deceive. “Compared with traditional police practices, undercover methods are relatively unhindered by constitutional or legislative restrictions,” Georg Wagner, a U.S. Secret Service agent, wrote in a 2007 policy analysis. “There are no clear legal limitations on the length of the operation, the intimacy of the relationships formed, the degree of deception used and the degree of temptation offered and the number of times it is offered.” No judge is required to sign a warrant, and law-enforcement officials do not have to provide any evidence that a person is already engaged in criminal activity before initiating an undercover investigation.
Boyer spent six months in a holding cell at a Tampa jail, furious and confused, shivering as he went through withdrawal. He remained certain that a jury would be outraged by the A.T.F.’s conduct. At the trial, that summer, Zayas wore a dark suit and a tie, his hair drawn back in a ponytail. He testified that the A.T.F. had targeted known criminals who made an art of robbing drug dealers. “This isn’t a type of crime you’re going to commit the first time out of the gate,” Zayas said. “When we get involved in these type of cases, these individuals are violent.” Boyer saw that, just as Zayas had convinced the defendants, he was now convincing the jury. “I felt like the fix was in for me,” Boyer said. He was convicted on all counts, and sentenced to twenty-four years in prison. “Twenty-four years for a conversation,” he said. “It was like I was living in an alternate reality.”
Boyer was sent to prison in Pekin, Illinois, where everything seemed cold and hard: the concrete floors and the iron bars, the steel bed frame that left him with bruises. Two weeks into his sentence, another inmate hit him in the face with a padlock inside a sock, mistakenly believing that Boyer had stolen his radio. Boyer sought out the law library, a windowless room with a single working typewriter, hoping to find a way to fight his conviction. “I thought that my only way out of prison was to take this on and understand everything about it,” he told me. He piled law books onto a reading table made from one of the old wooden cell doors that had been in use until a riot led the warden to replace them with metal ones.
Boyer learned that undercover operations became common only in the seventies. In the preceding decade, a string of Supreme Court decisions protecting the rights of defendants—most importantly Miranda v. Arizona—placed limits on what law enforcement could do when investigating a crime. Gary T. Marx, a sociologist and an expert on undercover policing, observed that law enforcement changed its methods in response. “As the police use of coercion has been restricted, their use of deception has increased,” he wrote in 1982. “There need be little problem with rules of evidence, interrogations, the search for a suspect, testimony, and guilt if the undercover officer is a direct party to the offense, and the crime has even been videotaped in living color.”
The first large-scale sting operation began in 1975, when police in Washington, D.C., set up a fake warehouse to solicit stolen goods. In the 2016 book “From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime,” Elizabeth Hinton, a historian at Yale, writes that cops at the warehouse pretended to be Mafia dons, using names like Angelo Lasagna and Rico Rigatone. They dyed their hair, rode around in limousines, and posed for photographs with guns. During “Operation Sting,” they purchased $2.4 million worth of stolen goods, including typewriters, radios, televisions, credit cards, and welfare checks. In February, 1976, the “dons” invited a large group of their clients to a party, serenaded them with Dean Martin’s “That’s Amore,” and arrested them. Of the roughly hundred and twenty people caught in Operation Sting, most were not experienced traffickers but unemployed Black men who had heard about the high prices being offered at the warehouse and had decided to steal something. Still, the large number of arrests made headlines, and soon police departments across the country were setting up their own fencing operations. The police lieutenant who had been in charge of the warehouse later opened a firm called Sting Security, Inc., which offered undercover services to private companies.
In the early eighties, after the Abscam sting, in which undercover F.B.I. agents pretended to be the representatives of a wealthy Arab sheikh and tried to bribe a number of politicians, Congress considered requiring federal law enforcement to meet a threshold of “reasonable suspicion” or “probable cause” before launching an undercover investigation, but the bill never came to a vote. Local, state, and federal agencies, left for the most part to monitor themselves, created units that were dedicated to designing plots to ferret out wrongdoing.
Undercover methods are now seen by law enforcement as a “critical tool in fighting crime,” as the former F.B.I. director James Comey has said. Because undercover work does not have the same public-reporting requirements as standard policing, no expert or law-enforcement official I spoke to was able to estimate how many operations take place in the United States every day, but the number of participating federal agents is thought to be in the thousands. Today, there are stings targeting drug dealing, prostitution, terrorism, tax fraud, drunk driving, poaching, and a host of other crimes. In 2014, the Times reported that the Department of Homeland Security was spending a hundred million dollars a year on undercover operations. Many federal agencies have the ability to run stings, including some that the public may not associate with crime-fighting, such as the Postal Service and the Department of Agriculture. NASA once ran a sting targeting the seventy-four-year-old widow of an Apollo 11 engineer, who met with an informant at a Denny’s restaurant to arrange the sale of a moon rock.
Law-enforcement officials say that undercover work helps them catch sophisticated criminals when more traditional methods have failed, but many operations are open-ended and indiscriminate. They simply lay a trap and see who falls in. In 2006, the New York City Police Department launched Operation Lucky Bag, placing backpacks and purses around the subway system and waiting to catch the people who took them. It resulted in more than two hundred arrests. Two years later, according to New Orleans City Business, local police parked a car loaded with Budweiser, candy, cigarettes, and cans of baked beans at three locations, including one a block away from a homeless encampment. They left the doors unlocked and the windows rolled down. Eight people, two of whom were homeless and six of whom had no prior convictions, were arrested for taking some of the items and charged with burglary, an offense that carries a prison term of up to twelve years. (A spokesperson for the New Orleans Police Department said that such tactics “are not tolerated at N.O.P.D.”) Hinton, the historian, has observed that undercover operations are often concentrated in poor Black neighborhoods, writing, “Stings offered police an easy means to remove a population they saw as latently criminal from the streets and place them behind bars.”
Many people caught in these plots initially assume that they have been entrapped, but the popular understanding of entrapment is far from the legal standard. The concept doesn’t appear anywhere in the Constitution. The Supreme Court first recognized the defense in Sorrells v. United States, a 1932 case in which a Prohibition agent posing as a furniture dealer persuaded a North Carolina man to sell him a half gallon of whiskey. That case laid the foundation for the Court’s “subjective test” of entrapment, which emphasizes the suspect’s state of mind. If a person is “predisposed” to commit the crime—prior convictions, drug addiction, and even poverty could qualify as predispositions—then almost any degree of government involvement is permitted. A sting usually doesn’t count as entrapment even if agents conceived, financed, and helped execute the plan.
That winter, when Boyer filed an appeal, he decided to forego an entrapment defense, arguing instead that he should have received a lighter sentence because he was a minor participant in the plot. “Entrapment wasn’t so much a defense as an urban legend,” he said. Boyer filed dozens of Freedom of Information Act requests concerning Zayas and the A.T.F.’s undercover operations, but the documents came back heavily redacted, if the requests were processed at all. After two years in prison, he received a letter informing him that he had lost his appeal. Other men at Pekin were astonished. “It didn’t make sense to me that I walked into five banks with guns, got twelve years and three months, and he got a twenty-four-year sentence,” Shon Hopwood, a former inmate who is now a professor at Georgetown Law, told me.
By then, Boyer had accumulated four trunks of documents and transcripts, which he kept padlocked in his cell, and he had earned a reputation as a jailhouse lawyer, someone who could help write briefs or give advice on cases. During free hours each day, a line of men waited to consult with Boyer at his regular table in the library. It was against prison rules to be caught with another inmate’s legal paperwork, and Boyer often ended up in segregated housing after being discovered in his cell reading a motion for someone else.
Several years into Boyer’s sentence, an inmate told him a familiar story. Marlyn Barnes, a delicate man with thin dreadlocks, said that he had been working at a medical facility in Gary, Indiana, when he was persuaded to help rob a cartel’s stash house. Not long afterward, Boyer heard the same thing from James McKenzie, a man in his twenties from Chicago. Soon, stash-house targets were arriving in Pekin from across the Midwest. “They were showing up from all over,” Boyer told me. “That’s kind of when I had an idea that this thing had taken off.” When Boyer started reviewing their cases, he saw that many of them had been recruited by Zayas. “He seemed to be at the center of all of this stuff,” Boyer said. “I was seeing his name pop up everywhere.”
In the late eighties, Richard Zayas attended the A.T.F.’s undercover-training academy, in Glynco, Georgia, where agents learn how to recognize the weights, textures, smells, and street names of certain drugs, and how to play an undercover role in operations ranging from murder-for-hire plots to robbery investigations. Zayas was soon assigned to an anti-narcotics task force in Miami. At the time, South American cartels were moving large shipments of cocaine through Florida. According to Carlos Baixauli, an A.T.F. agent who worked with Zayas then, robberies of stash houses were turning into violent clashes between armed groups. “We started coming up on homes and there would be five or six dead Colombians, Venezuelans, or some other South American nationality in the house,” Baixauli told a military-news Web site.
Zayas helped invent the stash-house sting as a way to investigate these robberies. At first, the A.T.F. kept real cocaine in a house in a residential Miami neighborhood, but arresting people as they made their getaway proved dangerous. “After a number of car chases and shootings, we decided that that wasn’t a good idea,” Zayas testified in 2012. “So we tried tractor-trailer trucks where we put [drugs] in the sleeper area. Also that resulted in violence. We tried an airplane strip. That resulted in violence. We tried a boat, drugs on a boat. That resulted in violence.” Eventually, Zayas and his colleagues decided that real cocaine was unnecessary; agents would now make the arrests before a robbery took place.
In the years after Boyer was arrested, the A.T.F. significantly increased its use of stash-house stings. A 2013 investigation by USA Today found that, in the previous decade, the number of these operations run by the A.T.F. had quadrupled. Zayas travelled from Miami to Las Vegas, Phoenix, New Orleans, San Diego, Chicago, Cleveland, and St. Louis, teaching his methods to A.T.F. teams and police departments. He played the role of Disgruntled Drug Courier in more than fifty operations and shared the stash-house playbook with agents in the United States, Canada, and Germany. “The longer that you work undercover, the more you’re able to get into the role,” Zayas said on the witness stand in 2010. “You’re able to suppress that fear.”
In “RatSnakes,” a 2019 memoir, a retired undercover A.T.F. agent named Vincent Cefalu writes, “We were (and many of us still are) the quintessential human rodent hunters, released from our jars when an unsavory task needed attention.” Undercover agents “are dispatched to infiltrate a sordid, blood-spattered, degraded world, dominated by characters accustomed to vulgarity and violence. Only those mentally resilient and clever enough can navigate their way inside this dangerously clandestine setting, and then survive in its confines while doing their jobs.” John Kirby, a defense lawyer in San Diego who cross-examined Zayas in a 2012 stash-house case, got the impression that Zayas had a similar mentality. “He thought he was doing the greatest thing, putting all these people in jail,” Kirby said. “His demeanor on the stand was ‘I’m smarter than you, I’m better than you, and I’m doing God’s work here.’ ”
City leaders boasted about the high rates of arrests and convictions stemming from stash-house stings. In Phoenix, in 2009, a team led by the A.T.F. rounded up seventy people in the course of several months. “The results are stunning, and meaningful,” Phil Gordon, the mayor, said in a statement. “These people really are the worst of the worst and now they’re off the streets.” In Oakland, in 2012, the A.T.F. helped make sixty arrests in a hundred and twenty days. Officials announced at a press conference that agents had “strategically saturated criminally infested areas” in order to target people “who carry guns in the way that most of us carry cell phones.” Jean Quan, the mayor, thanked the agency on behalf of “the mothers of Oakland.” The next year, Zayas received an award for “distinguished service” from the Department of Justice for his role in stash-house stings. “Richie Zayas made his name on these cases,” a defense lawyer told me. “It was his thing.”
The A.T.F. claims that stash-house stings catch established crews who already have the means to commit armed robbery. “If we wanted to go out and cast a wide net, we could do one of these a week—that’s not what we want to do,” an agent said in 2014, according to the Los Angeles Times. “This technique is designed to take trigger-pullers off the streets.” Through the years, the A.T.F. has targeted many men with long and violent criminal histories, some of whom have shown up on the day of the robbery armed with assault rifles and bulletproof vests. “We don’t want to create a criminal,” Baixauli, Zayas’s colleague, said in an interview. “Superiors review our checks on the viability of targets.”
Nevertheless, the agency has also ensnared low-level offenders, and even people with no criminal records. I reviewed thousands of pages of court transcripts from more than a dozen stash-house cases and found that many of the so-called crews were haphazard groups of family members, acquaintances, or strangers thrown together at the last minute, as targets scrambled to find willing participants. Suspects in these cases frequently asked the undercover agents for help distributing cocaine or obtaining guns. One Chicago crew, after a failed search for handguns, showed up with only a five-shot revolver, manufactured sometime between 1898 and 1918, whose grip was duct-taped together. When targets struggled to put together a plan, agents sometimes helped them instead of abandoning the operation. In several cases, including Boyer’s, the A.T.F. promised to provide the would-be robbers with a vehicle. In at least one case, the A.T.F. provided a gun.
William Buchanan was one of about forty people arrested in a run of stash-house operations in St. Louis. In 2013, he and his three co-defendants showed up on the day of the robbery without guns, and, when interviewed later by a legal officer, Buchanan was unable to answer basic questions about his family. In an article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, his mother, Shirley Gill, said that he had suffered head injuries in a car crash and a fight. To be friendly, he tended to nod along while others were talking. “He’ll probably act like he understand,” she said. “But he don’t.” After nearly two years, Missouri prosecutors decided to dismiss the case against Buchanan, but John Ham, a spokesperson for the A.T.F., said that the St. Louis operations “were well planned out and targeted exactly the violent criminals that needed to be targeted.”
Desperate people will often take the chance to change their circumstances, even by dangerous, illegal means. “You give anyone an opportunity to see millions of dollars when they never had hundreds,” one target told NBC Chicago, “they’ll risk their life for it.” In 2014, the L.A. Times reported a conversation that took place between an undercover agent and two stash-house targets, Joseph Cornell Whitfield and Cedrick Hudson, before their arrests. “I’ll never be broke again,” Whitfield said. “My kid’s gonna be straight.”
“That’s my small business right there,” Hudson said.
Kirby, the San Diego defense attorney, told me that, when his client first met with Zayas, he arrived on a Schwinn bicycle, his only transportation. “They built these guys up, but they were dirt poor,” Kirby said.
As large numbers of stash-house cases made their way to court, some judges began to voice concern about the A.T.F.’s tactics. “In this era of mass incarceration, in which we already lock up more of our population than any other nation on Earth,” Stephen Reinhardt, a judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, wrote in 2014, “it is especially curious that the government feels compelled to invent fake crimes and imprison people for long periods of time for agreeing to participate in them.” But the difficulty of proving entrapment, combined with mandatory minimums for drugs, left judges little choice but to affirm the convictions. “You guys are dragging half a million dollars through a poor neighborhood,” William Fletcher, another Ninth Circuit judge, said the same year. “Now, the law’s the law and I’m going to follow it, but I think you guys are making a mistake.”
In the summer of 2011, a sombre Black man named Leslie Mayfield came to see Boyer in the prison library. Mayfield, who had grown up in the Chicago area, had joined a gang at a young age and dropped out of school after the eighth grade. After serving ten years for attempted murder, he had tried to make a clean break. At forty-two, he moved with his girlfriend, Sharonnette, her four kids, and a grandchild to Naperville, a Chicago suburb, and found a job at an electronics warehouse, where he made twelve dollars an hour. One of Mayfield’s co-workers was Jeffrey Potts, a white man who wore gold jewelry and drove a red Dodge Ram pickup truck with custom rims. Potts befriended Mayfield: he invited him to play basketball, and they took smoke breaks in the parking lot, leaning against Potts’s truck. Soon, Potts started boasting about the money he was making by dealing drugs, and he asked if Mayfield wanted in. Mayfield said that he wasn’t interested.
About two months later, Mayfield’s van broke down on the highway. He missed almost a week of work before he found a friend who would give him a ride, and he wasn’t sure how he was going to pay for the repairs. He confided in Potts, and the next day Potts handed him a stack of bills in the warehouse bathroom. “I tried not to take it,” Mayfield later told the Chicago Tribune, “but I did need it.” Potts promised that he would forget about the debt if Mayfield helped him rob a cartel stash house. Mayfield contacted a couple of old friends, and at the last minute he decided to bring along Dwayne White, a friend twenty years his junior whom he considered a brother, without saying exactly why he needed his help. “He loved me and trusted me,” Mayfield later wrote. “I never had the chance to explain the details of what we were about to do. I just told him to follow my move and given our relationship he didn’t question it.” They arrived at the meeting point—the parking lot of a storage facility—where they were surrounded by what seemed to Mayfield like fifty federal agents. Potts was working as an informant for the A.T.F.; according to the Tribune, he made two hundred dollars for delivering Mayfield and his “crew” to the agency. Mayfield was sentenced to twenty-seven years in prison. White was sentenced to twenty-five.
Now Mayfield was in the process of filing an appeal, and he wanted Boyer’s opinion about whether he could win on entrapment grounds. “It’s just dicey, man,” Boyer said. “No matter how good a case you’ve got, when it comes to entrapment it’s tough.” The last person to win an entrapment case in front of the Supreme Court was Keith Jacobson, a middle-aged Army veteran in Nebraska, whom the government tried to entice to buy child pornography for more than two years before he ordered a magazine through the mail. That was in 1992. Through the years, Boyer had watched as numerous stash-house defendants argued entrapment before judges in the lower courts. As far as he knew, all of them had lost.
In 2013, Mayfield’s case came to the attention of Alison Siegler, the founder and director of the Federal Criminal Justice Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School. She had become alarmed by the increase in stash-house stings. “Entrapment was a non-starter,” Siegler told me. “I created a new legal strategy entirely.” Siegler and Judith Miller, an instructor at the clinic, thought they might be able to prove that the A.T.F.’s undercover operations in Chicago were disproportionately targeting Black and brown men, violating the Fourteenth Amendment’s promise of equal protection. “If we can show that the A.T.F. is choosing poor people of color again and again,” Siegler said, “then maybe we can show this is a real problem and we are dealing with race discrimination.”
Siegler and Miller hired Jeffrey Fagan, an expert in policing who had discovered racial disparities in the N.Y.P.D.’s stop-and-frisk program, to analyze data on stash-house targets in Chicago between 2006 and 2013. Fagan found that, of ninety-four defendants in twenty-four stings, seventy-four were Black and eight were white—a gap so wide that there was “a zero-per-cent likelihood” it was accidental, he said. By sending confidential informants into Black neighborhoods, the A.T.F. was guaranteeing high numbers of Black defendants. Undercover agents also implicitly encouraged Black stash-house targets to recruit other Black men to help them. “If they see some other Mexicans doin’ it,” a Hispanic agent said in one case, “they’re gonna know they’re with me.” When another Hispanic agent met a Black target, he said, “What I like about you is that nobody can put me and you together.” In the words of an informant: “Yo, this guy is Black—he’s perfect.”
The University of Chicago team found only three drug-ripoff cases that were not orchestrated by law enforcement. These cases involved ten white, eight Hispanic, and two Black defendants. Three of the white defendants, Stan Kogut, Robert Vaughan, and Jimmy Rodgers, were officers on drug task forces. For several years, they used their authority to rob couriers and confiscate drugs, which they then sold back to dealers. Kogut worked undercover with the A.T.F. on at least one stash-house sting, setting up other people for crimes similar to those he and his friends were committing.
In 2016, Siegler’s team brought together forty-three defendants from the Chicago area, including Mayfield, in a “criminal class action”—the first of its kind. “In this district, the program swept up not the ‘worst of the worst,’ but enormous numbers of poor and vulnerable Black people and other people of color,” Siegler and Miller wrote in a brief. “Being Black significantly increased a person’s chance of being targeted by the A.T.F.” Those findings seemed to hold true nationwide. Zayas once sent an informant in Phoenix to look for “bad guys” in a “bad part of town.” During another operation, informants approached men at a Black barbershop and at a soul-food restaurant, according to a report by New Mexico In Depth. In 2014, USA Today published an analysis of six hundred and thirty-five defendants arrested in stash-house stings and found that ninety-one per cent were people of color, far higher than the percentage among suspects arrested for violent crimes or drug offenses. Five years later, a Harvard law professor reviewed stash-house stings in the Southern District of New York from the previous decade and found that, of a hundred and seventy-nine defendants, not a single one was white.
In February, 2018, Chicago prosecutors contacted Siegler with a deal: they would agree to drop all the charges with mandatory minimums if the members of her class action pleaded guilty and gave up their claim of racial discrimination. The deal collectively spared the group hundreds of years in prison. “The most important thing to me was that my clients came out of this with fewer years,” Siegler told me. “But, on the other hand, it meant we couldn’t continue pursuing the litigation. There’s never been an acknowledgment from the A.T.F. that this is racial discrimination.”
Mayfield was released that summer. He moved in with his sister in the Chicago suburbs and found work at a rubber factory, but he woke up each morning thinking about Dwayne White, who had not been a part of the class action, because his conviction had been made final by the time it began. He would not be released until 2030. Mayfield asked the Chicago clinic for help, and earlier this year Erica Zunkel, the associate director, filed a compassionate-release motion on White’s behalf. The motion included a letter from Mayfield. “It was me who lured Dwayne into this case,” he wrote. “I was standing right next to him when two weeks after our arrest he was told that he had a child on the way. . . . It’s not too late for her to have her father.” On August 9th, White received word that he would be going home. He arrived the next day at O’Hare Airport to find his eleven-year-old daughter waiting for him.
In prison, Boyer circulated the Chicago group’s filings among stash-house targets, so that they could use the arguments in their own cases. Around the same time, in 2015, Boyer heard that the Obama Administration was starting a clemency initiative aimed primarily at nonviolent offenders who had served at least ten years of their sentences. He and his lawyer, Katie Tinto, the director of the Criminal Justice Clinic at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law, put together a hundred-and-sixty-five-page petition with facts about his case alongside testimony from family, friends, and the judge who oversaw his sentencing. “Since I’ve been incarcerated, I’ve lost my mother, grandmother, grandfather, aunt, and several cousins,” Boyer wrote. “I have paid for my mistakes.” Ten months later, he was summoned to the warden’s office for a legal call. Tinto was sobbing. “You got it,” she said. “You got it.” Boyer was released in 2017, after sixteen years behind bars.
In late May of this year, I went to visit Boyer in St. Petersburg, Florida, where he was living with his girlfriend and her two daughters in a tiny mint-green bungalow with white trim. The house was framed by sugarberries and maples, and the girls’ purple bicycles lay on the ground outside. Boyer greeted me in a T-shirt, shorts, and a baseball cap; he is small, with close-set blue eyes and a jumpy, boyish energy. Something about the way prison warps the passage of time had given him an aura of suspended youth, as though signs of age—his crow’s-feet, the graying parts of his goatee—had been painted on a much younger person.
Since his release, Boyer has been working as a freelance paralegal and campaigning to persuade the Department of Justice to ban stash-house stings. He has sent letters to members of Congress, the D.O.J.’s inspector general, and the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, and he wants to help Tinto and Zunkel, who are compiling clemency petitions on behalf of a large group of stash-house targets who remain in prison. Until recently, Boyer was encouraged by President Biden’s nominee for head of the A.T.F., David Chipman, a reform-minded former agent. In September, however, after a campaign by the N.R.A. and other pro-gun groups, Biden withdrew the nomination. Now Boyer is hoping that Representative Bobby Scott, a Democrat from Virginia, will reintroduce his Safe Justice Act, which, among other provisions, would give judges the discretion to bypass mandatory minimums in certain cases. “One of the enticements of these prosecutions is the fact that you can get a nice reward of a huge sentence at the end,” Scott told me. If you remove that enticement, he said, “that ruins the media attractiveness of the spectacle.”
Boyer and I decided to try to find the storage facility where he had been arrested. He hadn’t been back since the day of the sting, twenty years earlier, but he was sure that he’d recognize it. We drove across the silvery expanse of the bay into Tampa, pelicans flying low over the cars. Boyer told me that he understood why some people might not be sympathetic to men who said they were willing to commit armed robbery, and he took responsibility for showing up to the storage facility that day. For that reason, he felt that the degree of government involvement should be considered at sentencing. The greater law enforcement’s role, the lighter the sentence. Such a system would recognize that guilt comes in shades of gray. Until then, he feared, police would be free to invent new plots to lure people into crime. “If you’ve got the power and the ability to tempt people, then you get to define who’s a criminal and who’s not,” Boyer said. “It’s kind of like playing God.”
Stash-house stings and other undercover operations are premised on the idea that there are people who break the law and there are people who don’t. But in reality most of us are what legal scholars call probabilistic offenders, people who might break the law under certain circumstances. “Somebody who’s broke or has been broke, somebody who’s suffering or has been suffering, probably is at a lot more risk than people who haven’t been in that situation before,” Boyer said. “Everybody has a price.” In the early eighties, Gary T. Marx, the sociologist, gave Congress a similar warning. “Some of the new police undercover work has lost sight of the profound difference between carrying out an investigation to determine if a suspect is in fact breaking the law and carrying it out to determine if an individual can be induced to break the law,” he said. “As with God testing Job, the question ‘Is he corrupt?’ was replaced with the question ‘Is he corruptible?’ ”
Boyer merged onto a highway lined with nail salons, coin laundromats, fast-food restaurants, and billboards for personal-injury lawyers. “Nobody’s had to admit any wrongdoing or fault in the process,” he said. Zayas is now a senior special agent; he has never spoken publicly about his role in creating the stash-house sting, and he did not respond to my requests for an interview. After the Chicago class action, the A.T.F. appeared to stop running stash-house stings in the Northern District of Illinois, but the operations have been deployed elsewhere in the country as recently as 2019. The A.T.F. declined to disclose whether it continues to use these stings today. A spokesperson told me, “Per policy, we cannot discuss tradecraft or investigative techniques.”
“This is it,” Boyer said, as we turned into the parking lot of a storage facility with a gabled roof over the entrance. “It looks the same.” We walked back into the rows of units, rounding a corner to see a sign that said “Smile, you’re on camera.” Boyer showed me where the snipers had appeared on the roof, and the spot where he had lain on the ground, holding his head in his hands, waiting for the ringing in his ears to stop. He told me that he had thought about this place nearly every day while he was in prison, and that he was unnerved by the hold it still had on him. He started to feel weak and light-headed, so I suggested we go back to the car. “I thought that I had been able to take the rock off my back and set it down,” he said. “But your body remembers.” ♦
An earlier version of this article mischaracterized a report about an A.T.F. operation in New Mexico.
