Spotlight: The global drug crisis' other side

 

November 26, 2025 Brendan McCarthy Spotlight Editor 📥 brendan.mccarthy@globe.com This week, we have an important follow-up to the team's big DEA drug cartel story. It's a beautifully rendered portrait of a struggling man in a small, drug-wracked town. Bill May is the end user in the global drug game — and this is a must-read story from reporter Hanna Krueger. In addition, we have a behind-the-scenes accounting of how this whole investigation came to be. Andrew Ryan walks you through it below. As always, thanks for reading, sharing, and supporting this journalism. For this we are grateful. Spotlight follow-up The DEA cast him as a cartel member. He calls himself the poster child of America’s drug crisis. Craig F. Walker/Globe Staff Hanna Krueger Investigative Reporter 📥 hanna.krueger@globe.com FRANKLIN, N.H. — Bill May’s leg spasmed as he sank into a tattered chair and recounted the life that brought him here: to a living room with holes punched in the drywall, a woman writhing on the couch in a drug stupor, and empty Narcan bottles littered about. It was cold outside on this November morning as May reminisced about bygone high school football games, the birth of his two daughters, the summer he coached tee ball, and, most recently, the day federal agents stormed this house with rifles drawn, one of dozens of supposed drug raids the Trump administration touted far and wide. He had scrambled down the stairs so quickly that morning he forgot to slip on a shirt. Outside, he locked eyes with local police officers, familiar faces shrouded in tactical gear. They drove him to the police station, where, for all of the drama surrounding his arrest, he was only charged with failure to pay a two-year-old fine. May didn’t have the $1,000 but was released shortly after posing for a booking photo. Within days, his shirtless mugshot had gone viral. Police in Franklin posted the image in an online gallery celebrating a raid by the US Drug Enforcement Administration on the Sinaloa Cartel, a notorious Mexican drug gang. The photo roundup on Facebook featured 27 supposed cartel members and evoked more than 3,000 reactions. Peppered among the sea of insults, death threats against the accused, and praise for the DEA was this one observation: “This is the kind of activity that, when left unchecked, can destroy a city completely.” No one in Franklin could argue with that. The fentanyl crisis has seeped into every corner of this old mill town, but as a recent Globe Spotlight Team investigation revealed, Franklin is no cartel hub. The roundup seemed intended to build up the apparent reach of the Sinaloa Cartel just before the Trump administration unleashed airstrikes on alleged drug boats in international waters. Caught in the politics of the moment was Franklin, one of countless American cities where the supply chain does not begin, but ends, in the veins of people like May. Read Now Behind the story How we exposed the DEA's inflated Sinaloa Cartel claims Andrew Ryan Spotlight Reporter 📥 andrew.ryan@globe.com Those initial headlines – which seemed to be getting traction across the country – just didn’t smell right.  The US Drug Enforcement Administration claimed it had arrested 171 “high ranking” Sinaloa Cartel members here in New England? And more than two-dozen of these alleged narco terrorists were in Franklin, an old milltown on the edge of New Hampshire’s Lakes Region?  Skepticism is my superpower. Sure, the instinct to distrust everything people tell me can be a challenge for my teenagers, but it is a useful skill as an investigative reporter. And on that morning in early September, my suspicion grew with each word I read.  I shared my incredulity with my Spotlight colleague, Hanna Krueger. We quickly sifted through federal court records, hunting for a hefty federal indictment. Surely there would be documents identifying these cartel members and describing how this criminal organization stretched some 3,000 miles from the Mexican state of Sinaloa to rural New England?  Nope, nothing.  We drove two hours north to Franklin and started knocking on doors. Another colleague, Joey Flechas, headed to Lawrence, Mass., which had been labeled an epicenter of Sinaloa cartel activity, much to the surprise of the city’s police chief.  We tapped Globe resources across New England: Steven Porter jumped in from our New Hampshire bureau, as did Amanda Milkovits, who anchors our Rhode Island outpost, and Paul Heintz joined from Vermont. As a team, we worked longtime law enforcement sources, contacted more than 75 police agencies, scoured arrest logs, read 1,650 pages of court records, and more.  Our investigation found that many of the DEA’s “high-ranking” cartel members were actually addicts, low-level dealers, shoplifters, and people living at a homeless encampment. Most of the arrestees we identified were casualties of the fentanyl crisis, not kingpins making a living off it. Exhibit A is Bill May, a whip-smart but tragic man whom Hanna and I spent a day with last month. Hanna wrote the jarring profile you see above. Make sure to read it.  Immediately, our first investigative piece was picked up by local and national media. And earlier this month, El Pais translated the story into Spanish and reprinted it in digital editions in Spain, Mexico, and beyond. That spurred local coverage in the Mexican press.  This has played out as the US military has killed at least 83 people in strikes on boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, according to a tally by the New York Times. The Trump administration has described the dead as drug-smuggling cartel members, but it has offered little evidence to support that claim.  From around the newsroom ‘Treated like an animal’: ICE is moving detained immigrants quickly to conservative states, raising due process concerns Immigrants in New England targeted for deportation are being whisked away quicker and to farther locations than ever before, according to a Globe analysis of arrest and detention data and interviews with immigration attorneys and experts. 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