the entrapment protocol: "Please commit a crime" — "so that if anybody eats cheese…"
so that if anybody eats cheese later or the phone’s frequency is covertly accessed, somehow, Pemulis will have been entrapped.
Context
The dealer's self-protection rendered as a scripted ritual: every buyer must first demand aloud that Pemulis commit a crime, on the record, so that any later informant or wiretap has him legally entrapped rather than dealing. The paranoia is total and procedural, a whole liturgy of coercion-in-reverse — the same "please commit a crime" a Newton buyer named from the other side of the phone.