THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER18, 2021 19
dealers. They would burst into homes
wearing police jackets and bulletproof
vests, f lashing guns and badges, and
order drug dealers to the ground. Then
they made off with drugs and money.”
Boyer, who had not touched a gun,
was charged with two firearm offenses
and conspiracy to distribute at least five
kilos of cocaine, even though the stash
house didn’t exist. The A.T.F. had set
the amount of drugs high enough to
trigger a mandatory minimum of ten
years, so a judge would have little lee-
way to amend a sentence. “My lawyer
said that if I went to trial I’d be look-
ing at life,” Boyer told me.
In the past four decades, sting oper-
ations of all types have become a major
part of law enforcement in the United
States, and stash-house stings are per-
haps the most extreme example of this
trend, because of the harsh penalties they
carry. They can result in longer sentences
than real crimes of a similar nature. De-
fendants like Boyer are often surprised
to learn that the government has a nearly
limitless ability to deceive. “Compared
with traditional police practices, under-
cover methods are relatively unhindered
by constitutional or legislative restric-
tions,” Georg Wagner, a U.S. Secret Ser-
vice agent, wrote in a 2007 policy analy-
sis. “There are no clear legal limitations
on the length of the operation, the in-
timacy of the relationships formed, the
degree of deception used and the degree
of temptation offered and the number of
times it is offered.” No judge is required
to sign a warrant, and law-enforcement
officials do not have to provide any evi-
dence that a person is already engaged
in criminal activity before initiating an
undercover investigation.
Boyer spent six months in a hold-
ing cell at a Tampa jail, furious and con-
fused, shivering as he went through
withdrawal. He remained certain that
a jury would be outraged by the A.T.F.’s
conduct. At the trial, that summer, Zayas
wore a dark suit and a tie, his hair drawn
back in a ponytail. He testified that the
A.T.F. had targeted known criminals
who made an art of robbing drug deal-
ers. “This isn’t a type of crime you’re
going to commit the first time out of
the gate,” Zayas said. “When we get in-
volved in these type of cases, these in-
dividuals are violent.” Boyer saw that,
just as Zayas had convinced the defen-
dants, he was now convincing the jury.
“I felt like the fix was in for me,” Boyer
said. He was convicted on all counts,
and sentenced to twenty-four years in
prison. “Twenty-four years for a con-
versation,” he said. “It was like I was
living in an alternate reality.”B
oyer was sent to prison in Pekin,
Illinois, where everything seemed
cold and hard: the concrete floors and
the iron bars, the steel bed frame that
left him with bruises. Two weeks into
his sentence, another inmate hit him in
the face with a padlock inside a sock,
mistakenly believing that Boyer had
stolen his radio. Boyer sought out the
law library, a windowless room with a
single working typewriter, hoping to
find a way to fight his conviction. “I
thought that my only way out of prison
was to take this on and understand ev-
erything about it,” he told me. He piled
law books onto a reading table made
from one of the old wooden cell doors
that had been in use until a riot led the
warden to replace them with metal ones.
Boyer learned that undercover op-
erations became common only in the
seventies. In the preceding decade, a
string of Supreme Court decisions pro-
tecting the rights of defendants—most
importantly Miranda v. Arizona—placed
limits on what law enforcement could
do when investigating a crime. Gary T.
Marx, a sociologist and an expert on
undercover policing, observed that law
enforcement changed its methods in
response. “As the police use of coercion
has been restricted, their use of decep-
tion has increased,” he wrote in 1982.
“There need be little problem with rules
of evidence, interrogations, the search
for a suspect, testimony, and guilt if the
undercover officer is a direct party to
the offense, and the crime has even been
videotaped in living color.”
The first large-scale sting operation
began in 1975, when police in Wash-
ington, D.C., set up a fake warehouse
to solicit stolen goods. In the 2016 book
“From the War on Poverty to the War
on Crime,” Elizabeth Hinton, a histo-
rian at Yale, writes that cops at the
warehouse pretended to be Mafia dons,
using names like Angelo Lasagna and
Rico Rigatone. They dyed their hair,
rode around in limousines, and posed
for photographs with guns. During“Operation Sting,” they purchased $2.4
million worth of stolen goods, includ-
ing typewriters, radios, televisions,
credit cards, and welfare checks. In Feb-
ruary, 1976, the “dons” invited a large
group of their clients to a party, sere-
naded them with Dean Martin’s “That’s
Amore,” and arrested them. Of the
roughly hundred and twenty people
caught in Operation Sting, most were
not experienced traffickers but unem-
ployed Black men who had heard about
the high prices being offered at the
warehouse and had decided to steal
something. Still, the large number of
arrests made headlines, and soon po-
lice departments across the country
were setting up their own fencing op-
erations. The police lieutenant who had
been in charge of the warehouse later
opened a firm called Sting Security,
Inc., which offered undercover services
to private companies.
In the early eighties, after the Ab-
scam sting, in which undercover F.B.I.
agents pretended to be the represen-
tatives of a wealthy Arab sheikh and
tried to bribe a number of politicians,
Congress considered requiring federal
law enforcement to meet a threshold
of “reasonable suspicion” or “probable
cause” before launching an undercover
investigation, but the bill never came
to a vote. Local, state, and federal agen-
cies, left for the most part to moni-
tor themselves, created units that were
dedicated to designing plots to ferret
out wrongdoing.
Undercover methods are now seen
by law enforcement as a “critical tool in
fighting crime,” as the former F.B.I. di-
rector James Comey has said. Because
undercover work does not have the same
public-reporting requirements as stan-
dard policing, no expert or law-enforce-
ment official I spoke to was able to es-
timate how many operations take place
in the United States every day, but the
number of participating federal agents
is thought to be in the thousands. Today,
there are stings targeting drug dealing,
prostitution, terrorism, tax fraud, drunk
driving, poaching, and a host of other
crimes. In 2014, the Times reported that
the Department of Homeland Security
was spending a hundred million dollars
a year on undercover operations. Many
federal agencies have the ability to run
stings, including some that the public