T here was a drug deal going down that night in rural Michigan.docx

T here was a drug deal going down that night in rural Michigan.
It wasSeptember 4, 1990, just after sunset in the town of
Owosso,
population 16,360. There, about 90 miles northwest of Detroit,
the
Shiawassee River meanders past a hamlet of low-rent, brick
apartment
buildings. Inside one of them, a dealer with a brown moustache
handed a
bag of marijuana to Debbie Williams. He told her !rmly it was
$20 for the
quarter ounce, nothing less. “It’s a good thing you don’t want
any more,”
P O L I T I C S
The Wedding Sting
How a police department tried to save a failing Rust Belt town
by
luring all the local drug dealers to one party
J E F F M A Y S H | M A Y 1 2 , 2 0 1 5
Flint Journal / Landov
The Wedding Sting - The Atlantic
file:///Users/joannemoore/Desktop/Intro Feature Film
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said Williams, “because that’s all I got.”
She spoke with the slow drawl of a habitual stoner. But she was
an
undercover police o"cer, and one of the few women to have
crawled,
shot, and boxed her way through the male-dominated police
academy in
Flint. Since graduating college she had dreamed of catching
criminals
(“Michigan State police required female employees to have four
years of
college,” Williams told me, “its male applicants, none”). She
was 30
before they let her in. Now, the 38-year-old divorcee with a
shock of curly
blonde hair was her department’s undercover secret weapon,
because
buying drugs was easy when you didn’t look like a cop.
Waiting in a battered ’78 Chevrolet outside, Williams’s new
partner was
even more inconspicuous. Lacy “Moon” Brown, 47, had earned
his
nickname by dropping his pants during undercover operations.
“If I moon
them, they’ll never think I’m a cop,” he told the Detroit Free
Press.
Long-haired and overweight, Moon was known for his
preference for rare
burgers, his two-packs-a-day cigarette habit, and his sketchy
past. “If you
saw him, you’d never believe he was a cop,” says Lieutenant
Gary Parks, a
former colleague. “He had food stuck in his beard.”

Moon, says Williams “was more believable as a bad guy than he
was as a
police o"cer.” Together, they had been tasked by their superiors
to pose
as a drug-frazzled couple, to gather evidence on every dealer in
the area.
That night in Owosso, the blonde and the vagrant drove o# into
the night,
drugs in hand.
“We had a serious drug problem in the county at that time,”
recalls former
Shiawassee County Sheri# A.J. LaJoye, known as “Big Jim.”
The trouble
had started in 1986, when General Motors announced it would
close
seven plants in the area, starting a depression.Thousands of
workers were
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laid o#, and families began to $ee the area in search of jobs. In
1987,
Money magazine had named Flint the worst place to live in
America. Now,
dealers were at large, peddling cocaine, marijuana, LSD, and
prescription
pills.

In 1987, Money magazine named
Flint the worst place to live in
America. Dealers were at large,
peddling cocaine, marijuana, LSD,
and prescription pills.
After months of undercover work, Williams and Moon had
information on
more than 40 suspects, but the department realized it didn’t
have the
funds or the manpower to round them all up. So it had to come
up with
clever ideas. “Cops used to o#er parolees free tickets to the
Detroit Lions,
then arrest them,” recalls Peggy Lawrence, a Flint historian. On
one
occasion, Moon quietly arrested and locked up stolen property
dealer,
announced his death in the newspaper, and arrested gang
members who
showed up at his fake funeral. “Sometimes you gotta do things
that are
simply funny,” Moon later told a television reporter. “People
gotta go to
jail, but it don’t always have to be sad.” In 1990, the
department planned a
particularly elaborate operation: O"cers would throw a fake
wedding,
invite all the suspects, and arrest them.
The sting would become a police legend. Former high-ranking
DEA agent

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Michael Levine, who teaches investigative narcotics procedures
around
the world, says, “[The detectives] got it on video ... I use that
video in
training undercover agents today.” Over the years, other agents
have
pulled o# similar stings—like the one in 2009 where two FBI
agents,
posing as mobsters, staged a wedding onboard a yacht and
trapped an
Asian counterfeiting gang, scoring over $100 million in cash.
Or the one
in March 2015 where Houston police created a fake modeling
studio in an
operation designed to trap 40 johns. Or the one in 2013 where
Belgian
police caught a Somali pirate by hiring him as a consultant for a
fake
movie.
The Michigan wedding in 1990 was the original, and some say
the
greatest. By luring all the criminals to one place and arresting
them
simultaneously, the o"cers hoped to make a real impact,
transforming the

crime-ridden area and making it a place where people would
want to live
again.
n February of this year, Debbie Williams, now 62, welcomed me
into
her pretty, snow-covered home in Linden, near Flint. Over
co#ee, she
told me her part in the “wedding sting” operation began when
she
joined a group of undercover agents from various local
jurisdictions, to
catch local dealers. Because it was impossible to take notes
during an
undercover drug buy and too risky to wear a wire, Williams and
Moon
presented their evidence to a “handler,” she said. In her living
room,
Williams $icked through a yellowing copy of the Flint Journal
and paused
at the headline: “Here Comes Bride—for Narc Sting.” The
wedding was
just the icing on the cake, she told me: The undercover
operation spanned
!ve months.
After every buy during the operation, Moon’s car would pull
into a
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deserted trailer park on the outskirts of town, where Williams
checked
their mirrors for a tail. In the darkness lurked a Chevrolet S-10
pickup,
where their handler laid in wait. He was Sergeant Maurice
“Vic”
Wasylyshyn. “First thing I remember was the beer belly, a
silhouette that I
was walking up to,” Williams recalled, of their !rst meeting.
“He was so
cute ... Nice beard. Deep, sexy voice!”
Inside the pickup, Wasylyshyn pressed play on his tape recorder
as
Williams recounted her covert drugs purchases and described
the dealers
who had supplied her. “White male, early 30s,” she would say,
“Evidence
is one quarter ounce green leafy substance, suspected marijuana
contained in a clear plastic baggy.” Wasylyshyn had explained
to Williams
and Moon that to make an arrest, they needed to show
“continuing
investigation.” Unless a defendant made three buys at least, a
defense
attorney could claim he had been an innocent man, entrapped by
cops. So
the detectives had to become regular customers—and a genuine
part of the
underworld.
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When I met Wasylyshyn at the Plank on the Lake bar near Flint,
earlier this
year, he arrived with the aid of a walking stick, due to a leg
injury. Back in
the 1980s, he himself was an undercover legend and a master of
disguise.
In his police uniform he was a clean-cut ex-Marine, but at night
he prowled
the streets as his alter ego, “Animal.” An aggressive biker,
Animal was
known to have a taste for fast women, hard liquor, and even
harder drugs.
Lacy “Moon” Brown (bottom left, with gun) poses with bags of
drugs after a bust (Lapeer Area
View / Courtesy the County Press)
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Yet undercover cops are forbidden from taking drugs; a positive
test can
render an o"cer’s testimony void and cause him to be convicted
of a
crime. So Wasylyshyn snorted cocaine through a plastic
“tooter” that

swung from his neck. Hidden inside the tube was a cigarette
!lter that
trapped the evidence and stopped it from whizzing up his
nostril.
Once, a dealer had forced a gun into his mouth and made him
prove he
wasn’t a cop by smoking a joint. “Did I take it? Yeah I did,
until my eyes
crossed. I was driving home thinking it had hardly a#ected me,
when the
chief pulled me over,” he laughed. “I was driving at 10 miles an
hour.” By
1990, he was running covert operations from behind the one-
way
windows of his pick-up truck.
During our interview, after sinking three beers in quick
succession, a little
“Animal” emerged: Wasylyshyn told me outrageous tales of his
misadventures in vice and narcotics. Like the time he drank two
pitchers of
beer to blend in with heavy-drinking dealers before taking part
in a
shooting practice. He chuckled: “I shot a 42 out of 50.”
Wasylyshyn recalled with some pride that Moon and Williams
made 163
individual buys from over 87 dealers, as they nestled their way
into
suspects’ social lives. According to Levine, the undercover
police expert,
this number was “extraordinary.” He said his own record was 57
buys in
one operation, and that he “came very close to being killed.”

Moon and Williams’s secret was that, under Wasylyshyn’s
tutelage, they
went so deep undercover that they developed complicated
criminal
personas. Williams became “Debbie Leno,” the daughter of an
East Coast
gangster known as “Fast Eddie.” Moon played her boyfriend
“Danny,” a
large-scale drug dealer. Together, the two of them bought any
drugs they
could get their hands on and doubled their e#orts to be
believable. “I had
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to tell [Moon], ‘You have to remember to pretend you’re in love
with me,’”
Williams said. “[I would] get up close to him, tease him ... He
was kinda
embarrassed by it all.”
Once, a dealer forced a gun into
his mouth and made him prove he
wasn’t a cop by smoking a joint.
“Did I take it? Yeah I did, until my
eyes crossed.”

By mid-September, the detectives knew that Flint itself would
soon go
undercover: A sheet of ice would top the lakes and snow would
blanket the
roads, making video recording and surveillance more
challenging.
Williams and Moon had created a Who’s Who of the county’s
dealers, but
they knew if they made one arrest, word would get around.
Dealers would
go underground, $ush their stashes, or leave town.
In the pick-up truck with Wasylyshyn, Moon chain-smoked
Winstons and
discussed a plan. “[He] was the type of guy who ... could sell a
cow to a
vegetarian,” Wasylyshyn recalled.
And Moon’s retirement was looming. As Wasylyshyn
remembers it, Moon
told him, “I’d kind of like to go out with a bang. Do you got any
ideas?”
Wasylyshyn said that’s when Moon came up with the wedding
idea.
Moon said, “Yeah, that'd be cool. I can write a book about it.”
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M
“I don't give a shit,” said Wasylyshyn. “Let me run it by the
prosecutor.”
Williams told me it was late at night when the telephone rang in
her house,
where she was sleeping alone.
“Debbie,” asked Moon. “Will you marry me?”
oon was, in fact, already married. He’d met his wife, Beth,
while
he was posing as a mobster called Gregory Wilson. “He busted
her brother for making bombs,” recalls Lt. Parks. Beth had
stayed with him even after he locked up her brother and father.
But in
1991, she told the Detroit Free Press Magazine that she hated
Moon’s job
for its low pay and high-risks. “There were times we couldn’t
a#ord to eat,
and I felt bitter,” she said. “All I ever wanted was a roof over
our head.”
Moon’s path into law enforcement had been unorthodox. He had
started
drinking at the age of 6, swigging a raisin-based home-brew,
and in 1962,
he’d been kicked out of the Marines for violent conduct. A
messy decade
had followed, punctuated by bloody brawls and jail sentences
for illegal
possession of moonshine, breaking and entering, and !rearms
charges.

According to the 1991 Free Press pro!le, his life changed
forever in January
1972, as he lay on the $oor of a California jail cell, waiting to
be sentenced
for assault with a deadly weapon. As he described it, his body
was shaking
from alcohol withdrawal as he prayed for the !rst time: “Get me
outta
here, Jesus, and I’ll change, really.” His charge was improbably
reduced
from a felony, and Moon walked free.
He kept his promise. He left California for Michigan, and in the
pre-Internet age, he was able to keep his out-of-state criminal
past a secret
as he signed up to study law enforcement at Flint’s Mott
Community
College. Lieutenant Gary Parks, who has led the Lapeer County
Detective
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Division since 1974, told me, “[Moon] drank a lot when he was
younger,
got himself in trouble, and then he just wanted to get out of that
life. He
started helping the police and it was more exciting. He didn’t
know how to
stop.”

Moon caught the eye of a vice detective who recruited him to
help shut
down after-hours drinking dens. He used his street smarts to
solve various
small crimes, like the theft of gasoline from school buses. Then
he
progressed to catching rapists and murderers. Soon he had
enough
credibility that they sent him to the police academy.
Chain-smoking Moon gasped and panted around the athletics
track trying
to pass the !tness test and crammed all night for exams.
Somehow, he was
sworn in at Lapeer County in 1977, where his antics earned him
a unique
reputation. Parks enjoys telling the story of how Moon arrested
a murder
suspect on a local fairground ride called the Zipper. Moon
marched him
into the police station and announced, “I busted the prick in the
Zipper!”
“You don’t want to go to the board
of directors or the village and say,
‘I need some money for a sting’... It
could be some of their relatives
you’re stinging!”
As a full-time detective in Lapeer County, Moon earned
$18,500 a year.
But by 1990, his cover there had been blown. Unsuitable for

uniformed
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I
work or a desk job, he’d become a freelancer, doing jobs for
other
departments in the area. He earned just $500 for his four
months’ work on
the Flint operation, less than $1.82 an hour. Moon wanted to set
his
family up for the future, starting with a down payment on a
home in North
Carolina.
The sting, it seems, was inspired by a lack of resources all
around. The
federal government had been funding special intelligence units
like Moon
and Wasylyshyn’s since the late 1970s, but had gradually
reduced its
support by 25 percent each year until the units had to fend for
themselves.
Parks said the area’s small-town police departments had always
been poor:
“They wouldn’t have had the budget.” And dealing with local
governments was tricky in those tight-knit communities. “You
don’t want
to go to the board of directors or the village and say, ‘I need

some money
for a sting’... It could be some of their relatives you’re
stinging!”
In the end, Wasylyshyn was able to get approval and funding
from the
Shiawassee County sheri#. LaJoye had been an undercover
detective
himself, using the street name “Bear.” Now “Big Jim” was a
powerful
!gure in local law enforcement. “The Sheri# told me he wanted
nothing to
do with it,” Wasylyshyn said. But Lajoye recalled the
conversation
di#erently: “I said, as long as it’s legal ... it’s !ne by me. I had a
little
concern with [Moon], I dealt with him a lot. That was my
concern, to make
sure it’s done right. Stay in the rules ... You had to make sure
the ‘t’s were
crossed with [Moon] ... I want to make damn sure that we don’t
... end up
with mud on our face.”
n the weeks leading up to the wedding, cops put aside crime
reports
and !ngerprints to work on seating plans and $oral
arrangements. The
operations room began to sound like a wedding planner’s o"ce
as
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grizzled lawmen interrogated caterers. To save cash, the top two
tiers of
the wedding cake would be frosting-covered cardboard. As an
inside joke,
the o"cers decided to have it decorated in police-blue ribbons
and sugared
bees (for a “sting”). Cash for props would come from recycled
bottles
con!scated from teenagers, while cop-friendly businesses would
provide
the alcohol. A friend of the department donated the invitations
for free.
As the department made preparations for the wedding, it
!nalized the plan
for the operation itself: Father-of-the-bride Fast Eddie Leno
would arrive
in town for his daughter’s wedding, bringing 200 pounds of
marijuana.
Moon would lure the town’s biggest dealers to make a major
purchase just
before the ceremony. This is known as a “reverse buy.” “We
$ash the
dope, they give us the money,” explained Wasylyshyn. Once the
drugs
were loaded into the suspect’s car, cops would jump out and
arrest the
dealers, impound their vehicles, take their money—and get the
drugs back.
Next, the ceremony would begin. After the nuptials, they’d
catch every
other dealer with an outstanding warrant.

“It got to be stressful as we got close to the wedding,” says
Williams. “I
started feeling that stress like you would feel for a real
wedding.” During
brie!ngs, they discussed whether the bride should wear her hair
up or
down. How much would they spend on food? And how would
they squeeze
Moon into a tuxedo? At night, Williams and Moon made their
rounds as
usual, buying drugs from their dealers. But the couple also
announced
their happy news and hand-delivered wedding invitations.
As an inside joke, the o!cers
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decided to have the cake decorated
in police-blue ribbons and sugared
bees (for a “sting”).
Wasylyshyn called on undercover detective Phil “Shooter”
McCarty, from
nearby Port Huron, to play Moon’s drug connection.
Mustachioed Shooter
had enjoyed an undercover career spanning decades; he’d
recently posed

as a hit man to foil a plot to kill a sheri#. “I’ve had the cancer
and a stroke
... I lost a lot of weight in my face,” Shooter told me, when we
met in a
co#ee house near Lapeer. “I almost croaked ... They medevac’d
me to the
hospital. There’s some things I don’t remember.” But as we sat
drinking
co#ee, he began to recall exactly how it went down.
On September 19, he and Moon hit the road: “My role was to be
the big
time dope dealer.... We took some drugs up from the border,
from Texas,
put it in a van, got a hold of the local drug dealers ... We
showed them a
van full of dope,” he said.
As Shooter showed the weed to the buyers, he explained, “That
load was
sold already. We have another [load] coming up... Get your
money
together and we’ll sell in large quantities.” Shooter told me how
he
indicated that he was legit. “You could go to the drugstore, buy
empty
gelatin capsules, !ll them with Co#ee Mate, and… you say, ‘I’m
gonna do a
couple screamers.’ Sometimes, they’d ask for one and they’d
start acting
like they’re getting high!”
The next day, September 20, Fast Eddie Leno drove through
town in a
huge motorhome, complete with fake Florida license plates.
Former police

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chief Ed Boyce reveled in his role
as the gangster, a hardened
drugs boss eager to give his
daughter the best wedding ever.
By now, Williams knew Moon
would keep her safe during the
operation. She described how
lesser undercover detectives
would turn their chair backwards
and almost interrogate dealers,
looking just like cops. But Moon
had a knack for staying in
character no matter what was
happening around him. Williams
said it sometimes took extra
vigilance to avoid lapsing into
cop talk—for instance, saying
“nineteen hundred” instead of
“seven o’clock.”
But just a few hours before the wedding, there was one problem:
Williams
still hadn’t found a dress and the department couldn’t a#ord a
new one.
Though Williams said it felt surreal, Moon’s wife, Beth, agreed
to help. At
a Salvation Army thrift store, Beth watched Williams model a

full-length
ivory dress with lace cutouts. A second-hand bargain at $17,
Williams
noticed that it came with a lace garter, perfect for stashing her
snub-nosed
Smith and Wesson.
On the morning of September 21, Moon woke up to !nd a note
written by
his son in purple crayon: “Be careful Daddy.”
Debbie Williams on her fake “wedding day,” with
Vic Wasylyshyn standing behind her (Flint
Journal / Landov)
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A t Moore’s Family Circle Hall in nearby Corunna, o"cers
decoratedthe hall with blue and white ribbons. Chosen for its
a#ordable
food and its discreet location at the end of a dirt track, Moore’s
was the perfect place to hold the reverse buys without the whole
town
!nding out. Frustratingly to Wasylyshyn, however, the local
media showed
up to cover the dramatic moment. “I’ve got all these news
hawks coming
in... I was going crazy,” Wasylyshyn moaned. “Unbeknownst to
me,

[Moon] had invited them.”
At 2.55 p.m., the !rst car full of drug dealers arrived.
Wasylyshyn pointed
his video camera out of the hall’s window and pressed record. It
was just
three hours before the nuptials, and time was tight before the
guests
arrived. The suspects parked next to Moon’s car, and
Wasylyshyn zoomed
in on Moon and Shooter as they opened their trunk. The dealer
passed
Shooter a shoebox !lled with over $87,000 in cash. The cops
helped the
dealers load the bales of weed into their car. Then Shooter
pulled his
service weapon. That was the sign.
“Go! Go! Go! Go!” yelled a gang of uniformed o"cers,
appearing from
nowhere.
“Put your hands on there!” they shouted.
One car after another drove into the trap, in 20-minute intervals.
Moon
and Shooter pulled o# three busts, con!scating over $100,000 in
cash.
But inside one of the arrested suspect’s cars, police found a
young boy.
Wasylyshyn called on Williams who carried the boy to a police
car and told
him everything would be okay. “He was part of this so-called
victimless
crime,” Williams told me.

They arrested the last buyer at 4.50 p.m., just an hour before the
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ceremony. “If [suspects] saw uniformed o"cers out there
arresting people,
man, they’d be gone in a minute,” said Wasylyshyn. So the
arrested men
were bundled into vans and kept away from telephones to stop
them from
tipping o# their associates.
Uniformed cops jumped into their hiding places as wedding-
guest
suspects started to arrive around 5:30 p.m. “They were all
clearly carrying
guns,” recalled photojournalist Tom Cheek, who posed as a
wedding
photographer. Moon warned him to be ready to shoot a major
police
operation. “The place started to !ll up with thugs and I could see
the
weapons under their sports jackets — then they started to get
drunk on all
the free liquor. That was when I thought maybe this wasn’t such
a clever
idea after all.” Moon displayed bricks of marijuana inside the
hall, to ra%e
o# for $100 per ticket.

“I was a damn nervous wreck. I
didn’t want anything to get
burned,” says Wasylyshyn.
They’d agreed that the band
would play a certain song to
signal the start of the operation.
But they needed to wait for all
the guests to arrive to make
maximum arrests, and of course,
lots of people were late.
At six o’clock, the wedding march began to play. And there
came the bride.
Arm-in-arm with her proud father, Fast Eddie Leno (with a
Walther pistol
hidden in his cummerbund), Williams slowly walked the aisle.
Illuminated
by $ashbulbs, Williams arrived at her place next to Moon, who
stood
An undercover o!cer poses as a member of the
wedding band. (Courtesy of Vic Wasylyshyn)
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grinning at the altar. Next to him, his wife stood by as a
bridesmaid,
blank-eyed, ready to watch her husband marry another woman.
In the
audience, the area’s drug dealers were still holding their cups,

getting good
and drunk.
“We are gathered here together for a joyous occasion. Two
people
agreeing to share their lives, hopes and dreams,” the minister
announced.
He was retired Flint Police Sergeant Mike Parrish in disguise.
Underneath
his robes, Parrish, too, was packing a loaded weapon.
“I give you this ring in token and pledge of my ever abiding
love for you,”
said Moon, slipping the ring on Williams’s !nger. They both
turned back to
the minister, who announced: “By virtue of the State of
Michigan, I now
pronounce you husband and wife.” The crowd let out a cheer,
but as she
kissed Moon, Williams eyeballed the partygoers. Only half of
the wanted
guest list had arrived. Williams told Moon they’d have to wait a
little
longer.
The festivities began. “The bad guys were very impressed. It
became the
coolest party in the county that night,” says Dan Shriner, a local
reporter
who attended the wedding. The band announced itself as a
weed-loving
four piece whose name, SPOC, stood for “Somebody Protect
Our Crops.”
In fact, it was “COPS” spelled backwards, and it was led by
Don Brock, a
Davison City police o"cer. The department had found him after

making a
request over police radio for any o"cers who could play
instruments; three
other o"cers had come forward to play guitars and drums. (“The
band
were absolutely horrible,” recalled Lajoye.)
The dealers in the crowd downed pitchers of beer and cheered
as SPOC
dived into its !rst song. “It was getting real hinky in there,”
recalled
Cheek, the photographer. “Another group of gangsters showed
up and
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they were all tucking into the free drink.” Moon and Williams
posed for
photos. Her hand shook as she held the knife, making sure not
to cut the
fake part of the cake. There were fake speeches and toasts, and
from his
hiding position, Wasylyshyn ticked o# suspects from the guest
list as more
cars arrived. The criminals were now watching the marijuana
ra%e prize
with greedy eyes.
By 9:00 p.m. the party was in full swing, but behind the scenes
was pure

tension: Sweaty hands gripped weapons. Synchronized watches
were
checked. The band knew it was time to give the signal and
began to play
the song: “I Fought The Law (and the Law Won).”
Williams reached into her garter and felt for her revolver.
Shooter jumped
onto the stage, and grabbed the mic.
“Let’s have some fun,” he shouted. “Everybody here that’s a
cop, stand
up!”
A dozen undercover o"cers rose to their feet as uniformed
detectives
burst through the door.
“Okay!” Shooter yelled. “All the rest of you motherfuckers put
your hands
on the table, because you’re under arrest! This is a bust!”
On the amateur video taken by one undercover guest, you can
see a
suspect laughing during his arrest, believing it was some kind of
joke.
“We’re not kidding, we have a warrant for your arrest,” Shooter
told one
incredulous guest as Moon slapped the warrant against his
chest. Williams
arrested the nearest suspect, while Moon whipped out his
handcu#s and
arrested another.

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18 of 24 5/13/15 11:42 AM
Outside, a steady stream of suspects was marched past the
window of the
motorhome, where Wasylyshyn was keeping watch, and bundled
into
police vans. A dozen were arrested at the scene, and in the
following 24
hours, raid crews kicked in the doors of the suspects who rudely
hadn’t
shown up.
Suspects were taken to the Shiawassee County Jail and
scheduled for
arraignment on multiple felony charges, including delivery of
cocaine,
crack, LSD, marijuana, and prescription drugs. Later, some
would empty
their pockets and !nd matchbook souvenirs they’d picked up
that read:
“Thank you for sharing our joy.” The end take for the cops
included
several motor vehicles, vanloads of suspects, and, crucially,
over
$100,000 in cash from the reverse buys. “These monies, taken
under the
drug forfeiture law, will go towards the continuing e#ort to
combat drug
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19 of 24 5/13/15 11:42 AM
tra"cking in this county,” said Shiawassee County Prosecuting
Attorney,
Ward. L. Clarkson, talking to the Argus-Press on September 28,
1990. “The
funds are going to be a real boost for our investigators.”
Meanwhile, the event became a media sensation. A Flint Journal
article
reported, “It was a genuine shotgun wedding!” and an Orlando
Sentinel
headline announced, “Here Comes the Bride, There Go the
Crooks!”. The
sheri# gave interviews to international press. He was reelected
in 1992,
without opposition. “There was no one else on the ballot ... the
only way to
run!” he told me. And yet, there was still the small matter of the
convictions.
Poor record-keeping during the cash-strapped ’90s, and a
tornado that hit
Flint on the week of the sentencing made it impossible to
con!rm exactly
who was convicted or not. “We were not on computer back in
1990,” a
court clerk told me.
Williams reached into her garter
and felt for her revolver. “Let’s

have some fun,” Shooter shouted.
“Everybody here that’s a cop,
stand up!”
Several of the suspects were found guilty. “One of the guys
ended up with
seven years,” LaJoye said. “There were a lot of sentences, four
or !ve
repeat o#enders wound up going to prison ... There was a very
high
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20 of 24 5/13/15 11:42 AM
conviction rate on all of them.” The father of one defendant,
Larry
Ordiway, said his son had been arrested in the days following
the wedding:
“They worked him over pretty good. Yes, he was involved in
that whole
ball of wax. He was convicted, and spent a year in jail. I’m not
in contact
with him anymore.” His son and other defendants were
unreachable, or
did not reply to enquiries.
But Dan Shriner, a journalist, told me the sting “overwhelmed”
the local
court system: “In Michigan you have to have a preliminary

examination in
district court within 15 days of arraignment, and they were
swamped with
these 30 or 40 cases. I heard they were pleading them out,
o#ering them
sweet deals.” Wasylyshyn told the Flint Journal at the time, “at
least half of
the 30 or so persons arrested at or after the mock marriage had
pleaded
guilty or negotiated reduced charges in exchange for guilty
pleas.” Some
suspects posted bail and disappeared.
According to the Flint Journal, a number of defendants !led
claims of
entrapment. Judge Gerald D. Lostracco dismissed all of those
claims,
apart from one: The court heard that one undercover detective
in the
operation had faked a headache to coerce a suspect into selling
prescription painkillers. That was where the boundary lay:
Feigning a
headache meant luring a person into committing a crime, not
simply
catching him in the act. The rest of the charade was all well
within the
boundaries of the law. As a 1992 Supreme Court case would
state,
“Government agents may not ... implant in an innocent person’s
mind the
disposition to commit a criminal act,” but they can use “arti!ce,
stratagem, pretense, or deceit.”
This kind of trickery doesn’t always pay o#. In 2012, for
example,
undercover agents opened a fake gun store in Milwaukee in an

e#ort to
Dev.Spr2...
21 of 24 5/13/15 11:42 AM
Y
break up criminal operations. They didn’t manage to snare any
major
dealers; instead, the scheme ended in after 10 months with a
robbery and
a leaked document containing names and numbers of federal
agents. The
fact that the Flint wedding sting succeeded as well as it did
shows how
meticulously the o"cers planned the operation, down to the last
blue
ribbon on the wedding cake.
et for all the drama and creativity involved, the operation
ultimately didn’t do much to improve the grim outlook of the
city
and its surrounding areas. Scanning through micro!lm from the
Flint Journal archives, the years following the sting were
punctuated by
violent crimes and gang murders, and the population dropped
below
100,000 for the !rst time since the 1920s.
“This [period] was just the beginning of the depression,” the

Flint
historian Peggy Lawrence told me. She said the wedding sting
was
emblematic of Southeastern Michigan during that era. “What
comes to
mind is... you have to be inventive and do more with less.” Lt.
Gary Parks
added, “What it did was send a message to criminals that you
can’t trust
anybody, and that’s the only way you can beat this game.”
In the years after the sting, General Motors continued to move
its
operations to Mexico, closing and bulldozing its plants. Since
then, the
drug trade has grown with the unemployment rate, and law
enforcement
o"cers continue to stage busts and raids. But FBI statistics show
that Flint
has the most violent crimes per capita, even as the city's police
force is
shrinking. The city regularly tops lists of most dangerous cities
in America.
“It’s like rags to riches, and back to rags—that’s Flint,” said
Lawrence.
But while the 1990 operation didn’t make a long-term impact on
crime, it
was a life-altering event for the o"cers who took part in it.
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22 of 24 5/13/15 11:42 AM

After the arrests were made that night at Moore’s, the SPOC
guitarist
dived into another song as Moon’s colleagues toasted his
remarkable
career. Detectives from numerous agencies strutted onto the
dance $oor
as Shooter grabbed hold of the microphone again and
announced: “Any
time you put a doper in jail is a good day … Let’s party!” He
joked that the
suspects would enjoy free bed and breakfast at “Big Jim’s Bed
and
Breakfast,” otherwise known as the local jail.
“Then we really started drinking!” said Wasylyshyn, who !nally
joined the
party. “You don’t give cops free food and free beer and expect
them to
walk away when it’s still there.”
As Williams and Wasylyshyn danced into the early hours, Moon
walked
Detective Phil “Shooter” McCarty, shown here (center) with a
van full of marijuana, played the
role of Moon’s drug connection at the fake wedding. (Courtesy
of Phil McCarty)
Dev.Spr2...
23 of 24 5/13/15 11:42 AM

out of the party and never returned. With a reported $5,000
bonus from
the wedding sting, Moon moved back to North Carolina with
Beth, where
they hunted for a pretty home among eight acres of pine trees.
“Buying a
house is like a dope deal,” he told a newspaper reporter. “You
fan the
money, and greed takes over.” When Moon died in 2006 at age
63, his
obituary in the Lapeer Area View announced, “The Moon shines
no more”
and noted that lawmakers were paying tribute to a “once-in-a-
lifetime
legend.”
The Flint wedding sting also inspired two of the o"cers to plan
another
wedding a year later—but this one was real. When I visited
Wasylyshyn
and Williams in February, cats clambered over their laps as they
discussed
their forthcoming silver wedding anniversary. “When people ask
how we
met, they can’t believe it,” said Williams, who is now Mrs.
Wasylyshyn.
The o"cer once nicknamed “Animal” appears to be a soft-spoken
and
polite husband. He told me about his !rst moment alone with
Williams
during the fake wedding party: “All the cops were inside getting
drunk, I
was in the motorhome ... and she walked in,” he recalled, after
making

sure his wife was out of earshot. “And man, I realized, I
couldn’t let her
go.”
AA BB OO UU TT TT HH EE AA UU TT HH OO RR
J E F F M A Y S H is a crime reporter living in Los Angeles.
! Twitter
Dev.Spr2...
24 of 24 5/13/15 11:42 AM
LOGLINE: Alogline always comes first.
Excellent
Good
Fair
Poor
CONCEPT
X
PLOT
X
CHARACTERS

X
DIALOGUE
X
WRITING
X
This grid is a quick reference for executives to get an overall
impression of the script. It is perfectly acceptable to place the
X in-between 2 categories if you can’t decide which one applies
more.
RECOMMENDATIONS:
SCRIPT: RECOMMEND
WRITER: Only if asked to evaluate.
There are 3 possible responses: Recommend, Maybe (or
Consider) & Pass. Outside this class, 90-95% of what you read
will be a PASS. When you give a RECOMMEND—that means
that you are recommending an executive read the script because
it is good. It is often the case that you are torn between two
categories. Analysts will then use terminology like: “weak
recommend” or “strong maybe” to accurately reflect their
conclusion. You might be asked to evaluate the writer. Often
times the concept is strong, but the script needs a better writer.
Or, this particular story is not for your company, but the writing
is really good. This should be reflected in your recommendation
and comments.

SYNOPSIS: Feel free to start this on the cover page if there is
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summary. This appears after the Logline and before the ratings
grid.It is a quick summary of what you think about the script. It
is NOT what the script is about.
Your comments should be concise and well thought out. Give
examples from the script when appropriate. Do not put actual
dialogue in the Comments section, unless it is the only way to
make your point. And even then, use it sparingly.
A. Concept
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2. Does it have a fresh take, new twist on familiar story?
3. Is it a true-life story?
4. Is it based on other source material (book, graphic novel,
etc.)
B. Premise/theme
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C. Plot
1. Predictability
2. Obstacles, complications, reversals, twists (are there
enough?)
3. Believability
4. Subplots (do they serve the main plot, are they well written
and integrated?)
5. Continuity

D. Main and key supporting characters
1. Are they 3 dimensional? (with a range of emotion and
expression?)
2. Motivation-does it make sense? Are there actions believable
& consistent?
4. Flaws? Are there enough to make them interesting? Are they
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7. Do we care what happens to these characters? Are they
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9. Are these roles that will attract A List actors?
E. Dialogue
1. Reveals character traits
2. Reveals essential information
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4. Is over- or underwritten
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a. Is it appropriate for the various characters?
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2. Appropriate for the tone and theme of the piece
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L. Comparisons
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