Entrapped

But things were tight. Curry's $659 mortgage payment was due. Laquitney needed day care. The bank had threatened to repossess her car. Credit card bills were piling up. Her mother, who had recently been diagnosed with throat cancer, needed help financially. Mackey's proposal came at a time of weakness. "It was like someone slammed my head against the wall," Curry says. "That's how it felt. My whole world was crashing down."

Curry had the connection. Bousfield, a brother three years older, dealt drugs and needed suppliers. She could make easy money, she thought, acting as a broker between two people she trusted. "At that moment," friend Schillingford remembers, "she had her mortgage, she had her kids, her husband had left her, and I guess temptation brought her to it."

Curry would have never been enticed, she says, had Mackey not been trying to seduce her. "I know it was my decision, period," she says. "But I was desperate. Desperate."

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Curry didn't know that Mackey was a party boy who had an unfortunate gift for running into the law at inconvenient times and who'd been in and out of trouble since coming to Florida from the Bahamas in the mid-'90s. Nor did she know that he was a police informant. His full name was Lorenzo Leon Mackey, though he often went by the alias Lorenzo Bodie.

At 10:10 p.m. on August 28, 1995, five years before he met Curry, Mackey was stopped by Polk County Sheriff's deputies outside Briggitt Collins' house. Collins, a former girlfriend who had filed a restraining order against Mackey, reported to police that the man had been banging on all the doors and windows. She said that she wouldn't let him in and that Mackey was menacing her.

Sheriff's deputies searched Mackey's car and found "three packages that were packaged to look like kilograms of narcotics," according to the police report. They opened them. Inside, the deputies found Bibles. Mackey told the cops that he was working undercover for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). That seemed unlikely. "The defendant could not provide a full name or number for the alleged agent he was working for," the deputy wrote in his report. Mackey later pleaded guilty to trespassing; adjudication was withheld.

Two weeks later, on September 10, police in Winter Haven nabbed him for stealing a car. The charges were later dropped. No additional information is available. Daytona Beach police cited him twice for disorderly intoxication in 1996. On February 14, 1997, police in Tampa arrested Mackey after he racked up a $75 taxi fare and then couldn't pay. He allegedly told the cabbie that he didn't have any money because a wire transfer from the Bahamas hadn't come through, according to the police report. He pleaded guilty to petty larceny, a misdemeanor, and paid restitution and court costs.

All the while, Mackey appeared to be building a life in South Florida. In the mid-'90s, he struck up a relationship with Kristy Scott, a Fort Lauderdale woman four years his junior, and the couple had twin boys on July 26, 1997. Fatherhood must have had a calming influence on Mackey. A three-year gap in his rap sheet begins in February 1997. Sometime between then and May 2000, the couple split, and Mackey moved into a room at the Hollywood La Quinta Inn.

Scott, who could not be reached for comment, moved the twins to Fayetteville, North Carolina, but encouraged Mackey to have a role in their lives, according to court records filed in Miami-Dade County.

In 1999, about a year before Mackey met Curry, the Bahamian man called the South Broward Drug Enforcement Agency Task Force, a kind of local DEA. John Murray, a Hollywood police narcotics detective who at that time had 18 years' experience on the force, fielded the call. Mackey claimed to have worked with the DEA and police in Washington, D.C., and the Bahamas.

Murray arranged to meet Mackey in a parking lot. "We had a conversation regarding, you know, how we work, you know, what he had in mind, and, you know, if he had any specific targets..." Murray said. "He didn't have anything at all. As a matter of fact, I believe, after that conversation, he left the area, and we didn't see him for maybe a little over a year."

In 2000, Mackey called back. This time, he had a mark: Valarie Curry. "The informant advised us that [Curry] had several subjects that were looking to purchase cocaine," recalled Murray's partner, Detective James Callari.

The case was perfect for Murray. In 2000, the year of Curry's bust, the detective specialized in reverse stings. He made at least 18 such busts that year, according to commendations listed in his personnel file. Reverse stings are an aggressive form of law enforcement in which police agencies pursue buyers rather than dealers. But, Callari explained in court, "If people are looking for it, we will sell it." Many agencies have since quit employing the process.