Crime & Safety
Watch a 2011 ATF 'Stash House' Sting/Arrest in Woodridge
In a USA Today video called "Stash House: Woodridge," a hidden dashboard camera shows three men plotting to rob a non-existent cocaine horde.
A USA Today story on the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives' practice of conducting sting operations in order to arrest violent criminals by convincing them to rob (actually non-existent) drug dens focuses heavily on an incident that began in the Village of Woodridge in Jan. 2011.
The above dashboard-cam video, entitled "Stash House: Woodridge, Ill.," shows how William "Little" Alexander went from entering an undercover ATF agent's car in a Woodridge 7-Eleven to being arrested in a nearby forest preserve on-camera along with two others (Hugh Midderhoff and Devin Saunders) and and eventually charged with plotting a violent robbery to score 20-40 kilos of cocaine.
In the video, Alexander claims to have gang affiliations and a legion of loyal gun-toting minions to help fake a costumed police raid on the stash house; however, the paper said, when the time came for the actual robbery, he and his comrades could only produce a single pre-World War I rusty revolver and the wrong ammunition.
The stings are controversial, the paper said, for several reasons, among those being that agents can inflate the amount of imaginary drugs to create extremely long prison sentences, and that some believe the detailed and expensive stings are more likely to catch braggarts than hardened criminals.
"It's Orwellian that they have to create crime to prevent crime," Alexander's lawyer, Michael Falconer, told the paper. (Alexander is facing a minimum of 25 years in prison if convicted.)
The ATF, naturally, feels differently. "Are we supposed to wait for him to commit a (obscenity) murder before we start to target him as a bad guy?" Charlie Smith, the head of ATF's Special Operations Division, said to the paper "Throw him back out there, let him kill somebody, then when he gets a bad record, then we're going to put him in jail?"
Read the full, highly-detailed story of the Jan. 2011 Woodridge sting operation at the USA Today website, and watch the full video here.
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