Foiled

Monica Davey: GERALD, Mo. — Like so many rural communities in the country's middle, this small town had wrestled for years with the woes of methamphetamine. Then, several months ago, a federal agent showed up.



Arrests began. Houses were ransacked. People, in handcuffs on their front lawns, named names. To some, like Mayor Otis Schulte, who considers the county around Gerald, population 1,171, "a meth capital of the United States," the drug scourge seemed to be fading at last.



Those whose homes were searched, though, grumbled about a peculiar change in what they understood — mainly from television — to be the law.



They said the agent, a man some had come to know as "Sergeant Bill,"…