The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History

by James Higdon

  "You ain't got enough food for yourself. You don't want to stay up all night awake watching those prisoners. If you turn them loose they're going to try to kill you tomorrow, ain't they?

  "Each war is different," Boone said. "That surely was that one."

  Nothing could have prepared anyone for those sorts of wartime experiences, but fighting in a war that seemed to lack rules certainly prepared men like Bobby Joe Shewmaker to succeed in a world back home where obeying the law kept a person poor and breaking it turned farmers into millionaires.

  The Vietnam veterans returning home helped the lawless elements of Marion County plug into a nationwide network of fellow veterans who understood how the world truly worked when one stripped away the surface. With this underground network seemingly in place from the start, Raywick and Marion County entered a gold rush, selling mountains of well-grown pot to buyers from the East and West Coasts and from one side of Marion County to the other as well because often one grower needed a few more dozen pounds to fill an order.

  The first time Jimmy Bickett tried to sell a load of pot to Johnny Boone, Boone sent Bickett back to clean the product up, pointing to a thick stem between two buds.

  "See this right here?" Boone asked. "I don't want to pay for this wood."

  After a long growing season and seemingly endless hours of work bringing in a load of pot, no one wanted to take the time to manicure the final product. Of all the jobs associated with creating desirable marijuana, manicuring consumed the most time and required attention to annoyingly minute detail after a season of strenuous labor.

  "If you're trying to move a lot of pot,"Johnny Boone later said, looking back, "you don't want it sitting and sitting in somebody's house for a month waiting for someone to decide if they want it because it ain't good enough to impress them the first time they look at it. That shit could be caught or stolen or burned up or mold or something.

  "It's a commodity that's great to have, but you don't want it sitting in one spot. It needs to be moving to the consumer. If it's got a bunch of wood in it, or a bunch of water in it, or something it don't need to have, some kind of trash hooked to it, it's not going to go nowhere. Somebody's got to clean it up, and it don't need to be cleaned up in New York. It needs to be cleaned up here before it goes there.

  "And sticks don't weigh a goddamn thing, but they are tedious to take out, and it costs a lot in labor to get them out. Talk about an aggravating job. You got a couple hundred pounds of pot to come out of a field, and you got to sit around on buckets and chairs and take all the sticks and trash out of it. You got to sit around and sit around and sit the fuck around."

  there was a lot of marijuana to sit around and manicure, always a lot of marijuana.

  "As you well know," Johnny Boone recalled, "Kentucky has been a wonderful place for producing marijuana and more so than maybe any other state as far as volume goes. Well, wonder why? It sure as hell grows good here, and it's not necessarily up in the fertile horse Bluegrass region but in all the peripheral regions everywhere Even those boys up in the mountains seem to do very well.... I farmed it in a lot of other states, and you could produce pounds there. But I think even anybody else who ever ran a group would say that the quality of the Kentucky-grown was still superior, the smoke, the THC, et cetera.

  "I traveled to other places, and people in other places way, way off know that Kentucky is the superior pot in America.... Guys in Amsterdam know about it. I have a friend traveling right now, and that's what he does.... He says the guys in Amsterdam ask him if he can bring them Kentucky seeds. They believe in the superiority of it as a breed.

  "High Times has a thing they call `landrace'seeds; those are seeds specific to the area they are in. Let's say Afghanistan. They are known to be there for a long time, to where they are looked at as a breed. You got places like Colombia, Mexico, Hawaii, Burma, Thailand, [even] South Africa is getting a really good name.... Kentucky is now getting that name. We're not yet included on what they call the Landrace List, but I say we will be."

  So that's a lot of sitting around on buckets and chairs, cutting and trimming pounds and tons of marijuana one branch at a time-and only with men one trusted enough to keep their mouths shut.

  All that sitting around forced men who wouldn't spend much time together otherwise to tolerate each other for longer periods of time than many thought possible, putting Marion County natives like the Bicketts and Bobby Joe Shewmaker with outsiders like Johnny Boone and Garland Russell. Boone fit naturally into the Marion County lifestyle because of his similar upbringing as a rural Catholic. Russell, on the other hand, didn't fit as well into the Raywick scene, but who was going to tell him no? Everyone decided that if something bad happened, they wanted Garland Russell on their side, not against them.

  During the boring parts of the marijuana business, like when the buds needed to be cut from the stalks, the men would sit in a barn and clip the buds from the branches with rose clippers-a giant pile of dried marijuana on one side of them and neat piles of groomed buds spread out carefully on plastic on the other. In these circles, the workers often rolled joints made from balls of the resin that clung to their fingertips from handling pounds of the sticky, green buds, or they would set fire to a goodsized bud and pass it around, inhaling the white smoke directly into their noses-no paper or pipe required. Despite their buzz, these farmhands learned to quickly clip through a mountain of marijuana in the dimly lit barn without losing a finger to the rose clippers, while Garland Russell, who didn't drink or smoke at all, made even faster time using an old buck knife, its blade edge concave from years of sharpening.

  As they sat in a circle chopping buds off stalks, Russell told them about what he learned in prison. As he talked, the young ones paid attention, carefully eyeing Russell: a neatly dressed, bald-headed man-an otherwise-ordinary-looking man except for a deep scar across the top of his brow and the tombstones in his eyes.

  Russell's stories motivated the greenhorn recruits not to slack on the job. The workers would take regular breaks from clipping buds by walking to the beer cooler or going outside to urinate, but Russell never moved off his bucket, steadily chopping buds with his concave-sharp buck knife, waiting for the youngsters to come back so he could tell them another story.

  Finishing a manicure job on a whole load of pot could take days or weeks and required that everyone stay from beginning to end.

  "They need to stay until it's done," Johnny Boone later said. "They don't need to go home, and that's hard to do. They got wives and girlfriends at home wondering where the hell you're at, and you're gone two weeks. But if you have much trouble between the spot and home, you'll have a problem.

  "And you got to sit around, and it's hard to get ten guys to get along for that long, too. Every so often somebody will get mad at somebody, but everybody knows the bottom line: If very many people have to go home for any emergency reason or any goddamn thing they say, somebody's got to go home to check on their wife to see if she's out fucking, all that other shit, somebody's going to know something. So, you can't go home. That's the real hard thing to think about.

  "It's like a National Guard bivouac. We're going to go there; we're going to stay there; when we get done, we're going to leave there. That's the ideal, but it's hard to get that way. Two men might, but when you are talking about ten, twelve, fifteen at harvest time, hard to get that way."

  If someone started trouble in one of these bivouacs, someone else would have to finish it. None of the older men wanted to take a whiner out back and beat him. They would if they needed to, but the need hardly ever arose if Garland Russell stood nearby. The deep fear that he engendered acted as a perfect motivational tool. Once, when one young worker wouldn't stop complaining, Russell's head snapped up from the stalk he was trimming.

  "Huh?!" Russell barked as he scanned the circle, looking for the complainer.

  But as soon as Russell spoke, the complainer's head dropped, and he began working again as fast as anyone. No one wanted Rus
sell to single him out as a crybaby. He might not make it home.

  But although Russell's reputation helped get business done at times, his unchecked rage and capacity for violence often became a liability. Once, some young men from Raywick and St. Joe planted two patches at either end of a farm that lined the Rolling Fork River near Bradfordsville in eastern Marion County. When tending the patch one day, they discovered that someone had been poaching from the plants in a patch that abutted the river. Just across the river sat a shack where a sharecropping family lived. Russell assembled his crew, and they crossed the river armed with shotguns to teach a lesson to this poor family, whom they suspected of stealing their marijuana.

  They opened fire on the shack, shooting out windows, hitting the beat-up car and killing the family mutt. The message had been sent, but Russell wanted more. He kicked in the door and wanted to exterminate every living soul-the children, the old people, everybody.

  But one young Raywick man held Russell at the door and convinced him to leave it alone. And very calmly Russell backed away, smiled and moved on, as if it didn't even bother him-the same feeling he would have had if he had killed them all.

  It wouldn't be the last instance when someone stopped Garland Russell from adding to his body count. Another time Garland Russell nearly killed two rippers he caught stealing plants from his pot patch.

  As Russell tended to a row, he discovered that another row of plants had been ripped out by the roots. Patiently he scanned the surrounding field and located a path through the tall grass, as if beaten by a dog or by a person dragging a trash bag filled with pot plants behind him. Russell tracked the rippers through the weeds back to an abandoned house on the back of the farm property. There the two thieves had stopped to cut the buds off the stalks of the plants they had stolen.

  When Russell caught them, he beat both into submission before restraining them hand and foot with a logging chain. He chained one thief like a cowboy ropes a calf, ankles and wrists bound together, and hung the other one upside-down from the ceiling of the abandoned house, chains holding his ankles in the air with his hands tied behind him. Then Russell doused them both with gasoline to teach them a lesson that no one would ever forget.

  Thankfully, a young grower from Raywick pulled Russell away, begging him not to do it. Without such an intervention, the thieves' families would have been planning a pair of closed-casket funerals.

  In 1978, Garland Russell grew a crop with Jimmy Bickett outside New Haven on Icetown Road. On a hot September day, Bickett, Russell and their crew were in the field stripping the male plants out. Any field of pot would have at least 60 percent male plants; they would never see a field as good as 50-50 male-to-female ratio. It's hard work out in a field with a long-handled tobacco knife looking for immature stamens of the male plants and cutting them out before they have a chance to pollinate the females. Jimmy Bickett had learned from Mr. X., just as Johnny Boone had, that it was best to pluck the males out of the field before they began making pollen because once pollinated, the female plant puts all her energy into making seeds, and a grower wants the female to continue to produce the sticky THC-rich resin that the female is making to get herself pollinated.

  In the field cutting out males, Jimmy Bickett and Garland Russell were caught by Sheriff Jackie Wimsett, who arrested them and hauled them off to the Nelson County jail. They made bond that afternoon.

  As soon as they were released, Russell and Bickett went straight back to Icetown Road with a bunch of tobacco knives, a covered truck and a big roll of twine, and they worked all night long stripping the pot patch clean-the same night that Muhammad Ali won his rematch against Leon Spinks, becoming the first three-time heavyweight champion in history. Like Ali, Jimmy Bickett worked in a profession that rewarded a disregard for long-term consequences; but on that night, September 15, 1978, both Ali and Bickett were winners.

  The next morning Sheriff Wimsett brought a bunch of deputies to New Haven with wagons and bush hogs. The convoy waited on the side of Icetown Road as Wimsett walked down to the patch, where he saw that the whole patch had been cleared out overnight. He walked back to his deputies shaking his head. The owner of the farm would later tell Bickett what happened next.

  "It's all gone," the sheriff told his deputies in disbelief. "You could sow oats down there."

  When Bickett and Russell appeared in court, the judge gave them $100 fines for disorderly conduct. The next day Jimmy Bickett went out and bought his first Corvette.

  There for a few years in the 1970s, Garland Russell lived a relatively peaceful Marion County life, while those around him worked nearly fulltime to keep him from killing again. One time Russell was hanging out in a gas station in downtown Lebanon, watching a baseball game on a little black-and-white television set, when a black man on a motorcycle pulled up to the gas pump and started revving his engine, drowning out the playby-play of the ball game. Russell was unamused.

  When the black biker came inside the station, he continued to talk loud, and Russell told him to be quiet. The biker thought Russell was being rude to him because of his skin color and so jawed back at Russell. The owner of the gas station, fearing for the biker's life, got between the two men and pushed the biker out of the station, telling him he had to go. The biker, again, thought he was a target of racial prejudice and let the gas station owner know it, as Garland followed them outside on the way to his truck.

  Finally the gas station owner got the biker onto his bike, and the biker gunned it down the street just as Garland Russell stepped out into the road with his pistol, squeezing off a few rounds, playing target practice with the disappearing motorcycle, leaving the black biker with a negative opinion of that gas station and maybe the whole county. But it hadn't been racism that had prompted the incident: Garland Russell would have shot at anyone who interrupted his ball game.

  The next year, 1979, Garland Russell blew up his second Raywick residence, a duplex owned by Joe Mike Mouser, his partner in larceny, without concern about the small grocery store on the other side of the duplex, run by Joe Downs, Charlie Stiles's former truck driver, who now ran the Fifth Wheel across the street.

  At 2:00 a.m. on a Monday morning in late September 1979, Russell snuffed the pilot light in the gas range and cranked the stove dials to HIGH and set the oven to BAKE. When the gas leak ignited, it blasted the front wall of the duplex into the street and engulfed what remained in fire.

  The explosion rocked Raywick, blasting out the windows of Bickett's Tavern across the street and the stained-glass windows of St. Francis Xavier church. Flames cut the telephone lines, knocking out communication to part of the county. As the fire raged, residents formed a bucket brigade to rescue anything left from Joe Downs's grocery.

  The next week prosecutors indicted Garland Russell in the federal courthouse in Louisville along with Joe Mike Mouser and three other men for stealing mobile homes from the Louisville Fair and Expo Center, an old Charlie Stiles trick. Now the FBI and the US attorney had Russell, a lifelong criminal, on interstate grand larceny charges that were enough to put Garland Russell away for life, and Russell knew it. So, he went underground as a fugitive.

  Garland confined himself to a voluntary imprisonment from everyday life. He couldn't go to the grocery or drive through Lebanon in the daytime. Everyone knew the police were looking for him. So, he stayed cooped up in the Bicketts' farmhouse, getting nervous, impatient and bored. After a few days, some others-including Joe Downs's little brother-came to fetch him to work with them on a deal. Russell cleaned up the Bicketts' house and left them a neatly written thank-you note for letting him stay there.

  Perhaps affected by cabin fever, Russell decided he could go out at night, if he went only to certain places where a wanted man wouldn't be ratted out. Only the worst, low-life places could accommodate him. Even the twin taverns of Raywick-the Fifth Wheel and Bickett's-as wild as they were, weren't safe for Russell. If Joe Downs saw Russell in Raywick, he wouldn't call the police until after he shot Russ
ell dead himself. But Downs's younger brother still trusted Russell as a partner.

  The younger Downs and his friends wanted Russell's help on a deal with Billy Smothers, proprietor of the infamous Jane Todd Inn and a notorious criminal himself, capable of killing a man for the money in his pocket. Smothers, known locally as "Smut," presided over the decline of the Jane Todd from a once-civil 1950s dance hall to a fist-fighting roadhouse, where men engaging in broken-bottle melees had replaced well-dressed young men dancing with poodle-skirted young ladies on a talcum-powder-coated dance floor as the bandleader played Hoagy Carmichael's "Stardust" on trumpet with one hand while keeping his band in time with the other.

  By the late 1970s, the police referred to the Jane Todd as the "Grab and Stab," the "Blood and Guts" or the "Bucket of Blood"-all nicknames earned on Smut's watch. Once, a Lebanon city policeman responded to a call that five people had passed out drunk in the Jane Todd parking lot. When the policeman arrived on the scene, he discovered the men weren't passed out; they had all been shot.

  "That was a real common occurrence back then," remembered retired State Police Detective Jacky Hunt. "Real common."

  Smut told the younger Downs that he had a good-size load of pot. If Downs could get four guys together with $50,000 each, they could all make some money. Downs took the offer to Russell, and together they took the bait.

  By 1979, the marijuana market had been running smoothly for nearly a decade, and the routine for marijuana transactions had long been established:lhe buyer would present the money, and the seller would take the money to a place, pick up the product and return with it. That way, the money and the drugs were never in the same place at the same time-an insurance policy against cops and robbers. However, the system required trust: The seller could run off with the buyer's money or deliver an inferior product or a product short on the weight paid for. In the old days, before cocaine, everyone still trusted everyone else-a weakness that Smut was counting on.