Joshua Boyer was hoping to find a way to afford rehab when an undercover agent recruited him to rob a fake stash house. He was sentenced to 24 years for his role in the imaginary plot. “Twenty-four years for a conversation,” he said.
Boyer spent six months in a holding cell at a Tampa jail, furious and confused, 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 dealers. “This isn’t a type of crime you’re going to commit the first time out of the gate,” Zayas said.
The first large-scale sting operation began in 1975, when police in Washington, 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 historian 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.
Law-enforcement officials say that undercover work helps them catch sophisticated criminals when more traditional methods have failed, but many operations are open-ended and indiscriminate. They simply lay a trap and see who falls in. In 2006, the New York City Police 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 arrests.
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 consult with Boyer at his regular table in the library.
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