22 THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER18, 2021
nearly two years, Missouri prosecutors
decided to dismiss the case against Bu-
chanan, 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 mil-
lions of dollars when they never had
hundreds,” one target told NBC Chi-
cago, “they’ll risk their life for it.” In
2014, the L.A. Times reported a con-
versation 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 attor-
ney, 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 incarcera-
tion, 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 peo-
ple for long periods of time for agree-
ing to participate in them.” But the dif-
ficulty 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 neigh-
borhood,” 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.”I
n the summer of 2011, a sombre Black
man named Leslie Mayfield came to
see Boyer in the prison library. May-
field, 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 madetwelve dollars an hour. One of May-
field’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 May-
field: he invited him to play basketball,
and they took smoke breaks in the park-
ing 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,” May-
field 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. May-
field 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 con-
sidered 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 infor-
mant 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 en-
trapment 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“I wrote my own vows, and, to be on the safe side, I wrote Evan’s, too.”