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drupled. 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 Ger-
many. “The longer that you work under-
cover, 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 re-
tired 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 dis-
patched to infiltrate a sordid, blood-spat-
tered, 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 stem-
ming from stash-house stings. In Phoe-
nix, in 2009, a team led by the A.T.F.
rounded up seventy people in the course
of several months. “The results are stun-
ning, 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 Oak-
land, in 2012, the A.T.F. helped make
sixty arrests in a hundred and twenty
days. Officials announced at a press con-
ference 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 de-
fense lawyer told me. “It was his thing.”T
he 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 rob-
bery armed with assault rifles and bul-
letproof 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 en-
snared low-level offenders, and even peo-
ple 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 strang-
ers thrown together at the last minute,as targets scrambled to find willing par-
ticipants. Suspects in these cases fre-
quently 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 tar-
gets 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. prom-
ised 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 fam-
ily. In an article in the St. Louis Post-Dis-
patch, 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 un-
derstand,” she said. “But he don’t.” After“I wish we could be this happy about every soup.”