Paige Williams

Banyai is a fifty-year-old former landscaper from Poughkeepsie. Ten years ago, he bought thirty undeveloped acres on Briar Hill Road, an unpaved thoroughfare in West Pawlet, a few miles from where the historic center—Town Hall, the library, Mach’s Market, Lake’s Lampshades—knuckles onto a bend in the Mettawee River. The property borders a quarry, and Banyai named it Slate Ridge. His patch of woodland was tucked out of sight, at the end of a long, gravel driveway. Banyai liked the “clandestine” l…

A booster is a professional thief who typically sells to a fence—someone who resells stolen materials. A fence may buy a hundred-dollar drill from a booster for thirty bucks, to resell it for sixty. Or he may pay in drugs. In sworn testimony before a House committee on homeland security, Scott Glenn, Home Depot’s vice-president of asset protection, recently accused criminal organizations of recruiting vulnerable people into retail-theft schemes by preying on their need for “fast cash” or fentany…

On a recent Friday, Hansen-Miller helped a new immigrant from Afghanistan with some paperwork, then greeted her next visitor, Robert Blood, a skinny, soft-spoken former cook with eyeglasses and a goatee. He had on a puffy jacket and wore a baseball cap over his shoulder-length hair. Blood had been mostly unhoused for about seven years when, last summer, Hansen-Miller helped him land a studio apartment on the tenth floor of a public-housing building downtown, for sixty-one dollars a month. He mov…

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