18 THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER18, 2021
AMERICAN CHRONICLES
SET UP AND SENT AWAY
Stash-house stings carry real penalties for fake crimes.BY RACHEL POSER
PHOTOGRAPH BY EVE EDELHEIT
J
oshua 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 trou-
ble 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 her-
oin 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 pro-
gram 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 jack-
pot,” 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 byhis 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 ki-
lograms 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 stom-
ach, 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 as-
sumed 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 scrap-
ing against the asphalt.
The next day, the Tampa Tribune re-
ported 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, To-
bacco, Firearms and Explosives. In an-
other article, the Tribune described the
suspects as “a group of Tampa Bay area
men who were masquerading as police
and conducting mock raids on drugJoshua Boyer was sentenced to twenty-four years for his role in an imaginary plot.