20 THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER18, 2021
may not associate with crime-fighting,
such as the Postal Service and the De-
partment 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 Den-
ny’s restaurant to arrange the sale of a
moon rock.
Law-enforcement officials say that
undercover work helps them catch so-
phisticated criminals when more tradi-
tional methods have failed, but many op-
erations are open-ended and indiscrim-
inate. They simply lay a trap and see who
falls in. In 2006, the New York City Po-
lice 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 ar-
rests. Two years later, according to New
Orleans City Business, local police parked
a car loaded with Budweiser, candy, cig-
arettes, 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 tak-
ing some of the items and charged with
burglary, an offense that carries a prison
term of up to twelve years. (A spokes-
person for the New Orleans Police De-
partment said that such tactics “are not
tolerated at N.O.P.D.”) Hinton, the his-
torian, has observed that undercover op-
erations are often concen-
trated in poor Black neigh-
borhoods, 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 en-
trapped, but the popular un-
derstanding 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 predispo-
sitions—then almost any degree of gov-
ernment involvement is permitted. A
sting usually doesn’t count as entrap-
ment even if agents conceived, financed,
and helped execute the plan.T
hat winter, when Boyer filed an ap-
peal, he decided to forego an en-
trapment defense, arguing instead that
he should have received a lighter sen-
tence because he was a minor partici-
pant 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 op-
erations, but the documents came back
heavily redacted, if the requests were
processed at all. After two years in pri-
son, 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 in-
mate who is now a professor at George-
town 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 con-
sult with Boyer at his reg-
ular table in the library. It
was against prison rules to
be caught with another in-
mate’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 work-
ing at a medical facility in Gary, Indi-
ana, when he was persuaded to help rob
a cartel’s stash house. Not long after-
ward, Boyer heard the same thing fromJames McKenzie, a man in his twenties
from Chicago. Soon, stash-house tar-
gets 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-train-
ing 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 un-
dercover role in operations ranging from
murder-for-hire plots to robbery inves-
tigations. 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 com-
ing up on homes and there would be
five or six dead Colombians, Venezue-
lans, or some other South American na-
tionality in the house,” Baixauli told a
military-news Web site.
Zayas helped invent the stash-house
sting as a way to investigate these rob-
beries. At first, the A.T.F. kept real co-
caine in a house in a residential Miami
neighborhood, but arresting people as
they made their getaway proved dan-
gerous. “After a number of car chases
and shootings, we decided that that
wasn’t a good idea,” Zayas testified in- “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.” Even-
tually, 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 investiga-
tion by USA Today found that, in the
previous decade, the number of these
operations run by the A.T.F. had qua-