before he ordered a magazine through
the mail. That was in 1992. Through the
years, Boyer had watched as numerous
stash-house defendants argued entrap-
ment 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 Chi-
cago 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 Chi-
cago 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 discov-
ered racial disparities in the N.Y.P.D.’s
stop-and-frisk program, to analyze data
on stash-house targets in Chicago be-
tween 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 confiden-
tial informants into Black neighborhoods,
the A.T.F. was guaranteeing high num-
bers 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 His-
panic 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 enforce-
ment. These cases involved ten white,
eight Hispanic, and two Black defen-
dants. 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 con-
fiscate 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 to-
gether 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 enor-
mous 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 in-
formant in Phoenix to look for “bad
guys” in a “bad part of town”; during
the operation, informants approached
men at a Black barbershop and at a
soul-food restaurant, according to the
New Mexico Political Report. In 2014,
USA Today published an analysis of six
hundred and thirty-five defendants ar-
rested in stash-house stings and found
that ninety-one per cent were people
of color, far higher than the percentage
among suspects arrested for violentcrimes 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 sev-
enty-nine defendants, not a single one
was white.
In February, 2018, Chicago prosecu-
tors 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 discrimi-
nation. 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 pur-
suing 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 Chi-
cago suburbs and found work at a rub-
ber factory, but he woke up each morn-
ing 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 di-
rector, filed a compassionate-release“ You ever worry we’re not getting enough Vitamin D?”