Boyer threw himself to the ground, where he was cuffed and dragged face down to a law-enforcement vehicle, his jaw scraping against the asphalt.
STASH HOUSE CRACKED
A helicopter circled overhead, and the air cracked with flash-bang grenades. All at once, snipers in tactical gear emerged from under a tarp on the roof, and the roll-up doors of the storage units rose, displaying dozens of federal agents holding machine guns, like the prize reveal on an old game show. While they waited for Richie to give them the location of the stash house, Boyer paced the rows of storage units, nervously smoking Newports, wondering if he should back out. He had never done anything like this before.īoyer and the others drove to an outdoor storage facility, where Richie wanted them to deposit his share of the drugs after the raid.
STASH HOUSE ZIP
One of the men sent him inside to buy zip ties, and he grabbed every kind he saw, because he had no idea what they’d need. Boyer assumed that there were guns in the trunk. He joined some other men Richie had recruited in the parking lot of a Home Depot, near a car that Mike had rented for the robbery. The next morning, after cooking up a shot of heroin, Boyer put on camouflage cargo pants and a black T-shirt with the word “ police” across the front. His cut of the money-tens of thousands of dollars-would allow him to fix his car, pay for rehab, and, he hoped, put his life in order. Heroin was turning Boyer’s stomach, and he hadn’t eaten in days. “With the amount we’re talking about, you ain’t going to have to work no more, you understand?” Richie’s partner, Mike, told Boyer. During pickups, Richie had counted at least eighteen kilograms of cocaine, worth close to two million dollars. He said that he was being cheated by his bosses, and he was assembling a crew to help him rob their stash house, which was lightly guarded. Richie told them that he worked as a courier for a Colombian drug cartel, driving shipments of cocaine to New York City. Some guys Boyer partied with said that Richie had a plan to “hit the jackpot,” and one of them took Boyer to an empty warehouse to meet him. He was a wiry Cuban American named Richie, who wore tight jeans and had long curly hair. That winter, Boyer met a man who promised to change his life. He wanted to go to rehab, but the program cost nearly two thousand dollars-far more than he could afford. He did deliveries for an electronics-repair business, but the job depended on his car, which was threatening to give out. By 2001, when Boyer was twenty-four, he was living in Tampa, Florida, doing heroin six or seven times a day. He didn’t say no when a cousin proposed that they run away from home, or when a friend at a rave handed him a small dose of powder heroin. “Are you coming?” they would ask him, and Boyer had trouble saying no. They would sneak out at night to drink and smoke they would drive through town in a pickup truck, knocking down neighbors’ mailboxes with a baseball bat.
But he was drawn to charismatic boys who broke the rules. Growing up in rural Illinois, Boyer was quiet and well mannered, a shy white kid who spent his afternoons fishing for strawberry bass in farm ponds and the creeks that feed the Mississippi.
Joshua Boyer’s mother often had to remind him to think for himself.
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