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

by James Higdon

  Once the officers made it to Boone's door, they told him they were looking for the black truck in which they had seen him the night before. Johnny Boone told them he didn't know what they were talking about.

  "I'm just an old man with a bunch of kids to feed," Boone said. "If you don't have a way for me to make some money, I'm not going to talk to you about shit."

  "Well, we're going to lock you up then," one of the policemen told him.

  "I don't give a fuck about all that, let's go," Boone said, grinning under his beard. "Sooner in, sooner out. Who gives a fuck?"

  At the jail in Lebanon, Boone bumped into J. C. Abell and the third accused man, Selix Thomas. They had been arrested on similar charges. While the three men were in the jail, phone calls started flooding the police station, each caller claiming to be the "Black Bandit," but none could verify details of the black truck's wild ride. The three accused bandits stayed in the jail Sunday night for a bond hearing Monday morning.

  Meanwhile, at the Lebanon Enterprise office next door to the police station, editor Steve Lowery raced to get the story into the paper on deadline, cramming it onto the front page above the newspaper's masthead with the headline, "Bandits!"

  "The score is now Smokeys three. Bandits nothing,"said Sam Deacon, Lebanon's police chief, after Boone, Thomas and Abell had been arrested.

  "We heard on the C.B. about the Dukes of Hazzard and Smokey and the Bandit. People called us claiming to be the `Black Bandit,' but they were all cranks," Deacon said. "It's the most exciting thing that's happened in Lebanon in weeks."

  At the bond hearing on Monday, Johnny Boone saw state police Detective Jody Greenwell, dressed smartly in a suit and busying himself about the courtroom-talking to the defense lawyers, then to the prosecutor and then to the judge. Boone could see the anger in Greenwell's face. After all, he had been personally disrespected, and the main symbol of his authority-his police cruiser-had been treated poorly when the black truck pushed it through his garage door.

  "It made Jody so mad.... Somebody rammed his car sitting in his driveway, pushed it into his garage door, and he didn't catch him and he's in the house, and then the truck took off," Boone recalled, laughing at the memory. "It made him look bad. I didn't want to.... We get along good now when I see him, but I know he wanted to beat the hell out of me back then."

  In the courtroom, Greenwell certainly wanted to get even, to reassert himself as a symbol of law and order. But there was one problem: The truck had disappeared. Searches of the three men's farms had failed to locate the 1979 black Chevrolet half-ton pickup.

  As the court proceeding dragged on and on, as if someone were waiting for someone else to run in and say he'd just found the truck, the city attorney asked the defendants if they were in the habit of driving around at night together.

  "With these two?" J. C. Abell shot back. "You think I'm going to ride around with these sons of bitches? Every truck they got is tore up. I don't want to ride with them. They'll get somebody killed. They don't know how to drive. I wasn't driving. You got the wrong people."

  J. C. Abell knew that the charges filed against them-wanton endangerment, criminal mischief and leaving the scene of an never stand up in trial unless the prosecution could connect these men to the hell-raising truck, and he also knew that the truck the police were looking for, a 1979 black Chevy, had been chopped with a torch hours before the police arrested him. The three men each posted $7,500 bond and walked away, leaving the cops in the courtroom steaming.

  The next week a Lebanon policeman found Johnny Boone at the Springfield car wash. The cruiser pulled into the lot but wouldn't get close to Boone.

  "Come on up here," Boone said.

  The officer got out of his cruiser but still wouldn't get too close.

  "We just want the truck," the policeman shouted across the parking lot.

  "I told you a hundred fuckin' times, I don't know what you're talking about," Boone told him.

  "We seen it! We seen you in it!"

  "Then how come you ain't got the son of a bitch?" Boone asked him. "You're making me wonder now."

  "Come on, now," the policeman said. "Make it easy on yourself."

  "I am making it easy on myself," Boone replied. "You see me having any problems?"

  Without the truck, the state dropped the case. Sergeant Ed Baker, after his near-death experience with the Black Bandit, decided he had seen enough of Lebanon's nightlife. In less than a year, he moved to Louisville to work for the US Marshals Service.

  "This is where this story is going," Steve Lowery later said. "What that did, that pissed the state police [Boone and others] were making all their money off of dope. And the police had not really been on their case until [the Black Bandit incident]. But that's when the war started. That's the most defining moment that happened, in my view.

  "Up to that point, it wasn't uncommon to see state police sit down at old Bickett's before it burned down. It wasn't uncommon to see them drinking a beer with everybody else. They were not in collusion, either. I don't think."

  Five months after Johnny Boone's Black Bandit ride, the Kentucky State Police introduced a new weapon in this new Bluegrass marijuana war: the eye in the sky. KSP's single-engine airplane had never been able to fly low enough or slow enough to spot a marijuana field. The state police needed a helicopter, like they had used back in 1976 to spot Paul Stiles's crop after receiving a tip. In developing a response to the unique threat to law and order posed by Marion County, the Kentucky State Police were among the first police forces in the country to employ helicopters in the hunt.

  On the morning of August 5, 1980, two Kentucky State Police detectives drove to Louisville to meet a helicopter pilot for the Jefferson County Police. They pointed him in the direction they knew would be the most lucrative marijuana hunting in all of Kentucky: Marion County.

  At 11:45 a.m., the detectives in the air spotted a half-acre of marijuana on the farm of Larry Jones outside Loretto, a hamlet of two thousand souls anchored on one end by Maker's Mark distillery and by the Sisters of Loretto Motherhouse on the other-both landmarks simultaneously visible from the police helicopter. And there sat a pot patch in between.

  At 12:30 p.m., the detectives spotted another half-acre in a cornfield on the Stiles farm outside of Raywick. With Charlie Stiles dead for nearly a decade, and his brother Paul having died in 1979, the family farm had been left to Paul's surviving son, Johnny. Here he was, carrying on the family tradition. After spotting this second patch, the detectives guided the pilot to a landing spot and continued the investigation on the ground.

  At 2:20 p.m., the detectives drove to the farm in Loretto, advised the farmer that they had observed a marijuana patch on his property and led him back to it, across a soybean field into a horseshoe-shaped patch of woods. As they walked, the detectives noticed a path that had been worn into the earth, leading out of the soybean field into the woods, down over a bank and into a clearing, where they found the marijuana. As the farmer watched, one of the detectives hopped onto the landowner's tractor and bush-hogged the patch until it was gone.

  At 7:34 that evening, with the sun still hanging above the Muldraugh's Hill escarpment that formed the southwest boundary of Marion County, the two detectives pulled off Highway 527 onto the gravel drive marked by a green road sign that read PAUL STILES Co. ROAD. Before they could drive the length of the long farm driveway, Johnny Stiles, Paul's twentyeight-year-old son, drove out to meet them.

  Stiles tried to call off the heat. He said that the sheriff had already come and cut up the acre of pot they were looking for, trying to talk his way out of it. But the detectives explained that they weren't after that old patch; they'd located a half-acre of pot in his cornfield about twelve rows into the corn. Stiles knew the gig was up, so he volunteered to bush-hog it himself, working a half-hour past the sunset at 8:45.

  Three days later, August 8, the detectives hopped back into the helicopter, circling Marion County. At 12:45 p.m., they spotted another ac
re of marijuana growing on another farm in Loretto that belonged to a Hayden, a descendant of Basil.

  The detectives then drove out to that farm at 2:20 p.m. There they found a trail leading from the right side of the house directly to the cornfield that had concealed the marijuana. As they neared the pot patch, the detectives observed a flatbed wagon piled full of marijuana that had been pulled out by the roots, as if in a hurry. Continuing down the lane, the detectives saw that in the ninety-five minutes since they'd spotted it, the marijuana patch had been harvested.

  Looking closer, the detectives found a tent that was pitched on the edge of the woods and that had a clear view of the pot patch. They recorded what they found in and around the tent: a lawn chair, water jugs, a hoe, a shovel, an ax, a Coleman heater and a bed with blankets. They collected a sample of the marijuana from the wagon at 4:39 p.m. and returned to the farmhouse, where they saw an International Loadstar 1600 truck with a covered trailer.

  The next Monday, August 11, the helicopter went back to work in Marion County, spotting at 11:45 a.m. five acres in a cornfield on top of Muldraugh's Hill, the escarpment, near a little community called Finley.

  That night, it came a hard rain.

  The following Tuesday, the detectives drove up the escarpment to Finley, where they met the farmer driving a four-wheel-drive pickup. The detectives identified themselves and drove back into his farm, only to discover that someone had harvested most of the marijuana. Muddy tire tracks criss-crossed the ground. The detectives took pictures of the scene and collected samples of what remained of the five-acre pot patch.

  Within a week, Kentucky State Police, aided by Jefferson County's helicopter, found and destroyed more than forty-five acres of marijuana in Marion County, mostly near the remote Catholic hamlets of Loretto, Holy Cross, Raywick, St. Joe and Calvary. In neighboring Washington County, Johnny Boone's neck of the woods, they found another twenty acres on a single Sunday. The following week, the Lebanon Enterprise reported the next aggressive move in KSP's escalating battle with Raywick. The growers caught in the August sweep would face federal charges, the first marijuana farmers in Kentucky history to do so.

  "It's the first time that I've ever tried it," Detective Jody Greenwell told the Enterprise. "And I've never heard of any other officers trying it."

  Detective Greenwell had finally taken the upper hand following the Black Bandit incident of six months before by using the one-two punch of helicopter enforcement and federal charges. Under state law in 1980, marijuana cultivation in Kentucky was still a misdemeanor. Taking six Marion County men (including the nephew of Charlie Stiles) to federal court, KSP detectives hoped to lock up those growers for the maximum felony penalty under federal law: five years with a $5,000 fine.

  While those half-dozen cases waited for their court dates, the detectives were back at work preparing more. On September 13, 1980, a detective found marijuana growing in thirteen acres of corn. Staking out the farm, the lawman found no traffic coming or going. He tried to get a search warrant for the farmhouse but was denied. Permitted to search only the field, he found the illegal plants growing in the corn. Some of the marijuana stalks had been cut at four feet, their tops already harvested, and the marijuana left in the field had "suckered out."

  The detective noted that the field had been driven upon and that marijuana had been harvested from all sides. The field itself had lots of ragweed and Johnson grass in it, a sign of neglect, and the paths leading through the center of the field were well-worn. The marijuana had been stripped in one corner of the field and placed in plastic bags. Inspecting the bags of pot and the condition of the ground beneath them, the detective estimated they'd been there several days. Over half the thirteen-acre field, he estimated, had marijuana in it.

  When the farmer heard that state police had taken a federal indictment out on him, he drove to Louisville and voluntarily surrendered himself to US Marshal Ed Baker, formerly of the Lebanon Police Department-the easiest arrest of a Marion County man that Baker ever made.

  While nine Marion County men faced charges in federal court in Louisville, Lebanon and its surrounding farming communities faced the toughest economic climate since Prohibition. By the end of 1980, Marion County's unemployment rate ticked up to 11.5 percent, the highest in a ten-county region. After layoffs at the GE Appliance Park in Louisville and the bourbon cooperage in Lebanon, Marion County saw the largest number of food stamp applications, 973, in its history.

  As Christmas neared, the economic outlook for Marion County remained bleak. On Christmas Eve, no fewer than four dozen people huddled in the circuit courtroom to sign up for unemployment checks. Ninie Glasscock, a reporter for the Lebanon Enterprise, spent part of her Christmas Eve with them.

  "I got four kids, all of'em little," a Lebanon man said on the condition he remain anonymous. "I ain't worked since July. I've tried everywhere I know, but nobody's hiring, and I got bills to pay. And it hurts, you know, not to be able to do for your little ones on Christmas.

  "We went out and cut us down a tree, and it's all decorated pretty. And I've tried to tell the kids that this Christmas won't be like some others we've had. But they're little, and three of them still believe in Santa Claus. They tell me, `Santa ain't been out of work, Daddy."'

  The man stood silent for a moment.

  "It's hard," he said quietly. "It's real hard."

  Another Lebanon man said that he had two small children and that the bourbon cooperage had laid him off five months ago.

  "When I got laid off this last time, I said to myself that even if the bills have to wait the kids'll get Christmas," he said. "Kids aren't little but once."

  A mother of seven was laid off a week before Christmas.

  "This Christmas won't be like it would have been cause money's short," she said. "And we've had a lot of sickness in the family. My husband's had three heart attacks, and I've got a grandson that was struck by lightning. We lost our house in a fire last year, and it takes a lot to build back.

  "Instead of being in the courthouse, I could be out trying to get in the Christmas spirit, but we don't even have a Christmas tree this year. We're more fortunate than some," she added. "A lot don't have anything at all."

  The Bicketts had once had their share of modest Christmases in Raywick, back when Coletta still made the clothes for all nine of her children, with as many as four in cloth diapers at the same time, when Charlie Stiles used to dress up like Santa Claus and give the Bickett children toys as he made his rounds through Raywick. But 1980 wasn't a lean Christmas in Raywick. The town of two hundred had struck it rich like a California gold rush boomtown. Corvettes had begun to replace pickups in the parking lot outside Bickett's Pool Hall and the Fifth Wheel.

  To Jimmy Bickett, those people at the courthouse waiting for someone to offer them jobs were lost sheep. They didn't get it; there was no point waiting in a line for a job that wasn't there. The Bicketts had taken to heart the lessons of self-reliance their elders had learned during Prohibition by adapting to the times with an entrepreneurial spirit. Combining their community's knowledge of farming and bootlegging, the Bicketts were engaged in the freest of free enterprise without taking a dime from the government.

  Despite the loss of forty-five acres of marijuana during the 1980 season, Marion County growers had diversified their holdings sufficiently to bring enough product to market through a system that had been going strong, uninterrupted for nearly a decade by the end of 1980. Some had begun to operate as though they might never be caught.

  A week after Christmas, on New Year's Eve 1980, federal agents served a search warrant to a house on the Bickett farm, where Jimmy and Joe Keith lived, and found 150 pounds of homegrown marijuana therethe home that Garland Russell had used as a hideout the previous year.

  The government indicted the Bickett brothers on March 18, 1981, and tried them three months later. The evidence: sixteen garbage bags filled with homegrown marijuana, about 150 pounds. For their legal defense, the Bickett brother
s retained the legendary Frank Haddad with Elmer George as co-counsel.

  The jury found Joe Keith guilty with the intent to distribute and Jimmy guilty of simple possession, a lesser charge, but Judge Thomas Ballantine made a mistake, accidentally sending evidence back to the jury room that he had previously ruled inadmissible-a sifter with cocaine residue and three bottles of amphetamines. Haddad and the prosecutor approached the bench to discuss the error with the judge, and Elmer George looked over his shoulder and winked at Jimmy Bickett.

  Because of his own error Judge Ballantine declared a mistrial-a classic example of Frank Haddad's magical touch with the judges, a special relationship gained from years of courting the class of black-robed men, including once when he defended a judge accused of holding a police officer as someone else punched him during a barroom brawl. Against seemingly irrefutable eyewitness accounts, Haddad managed to win an acquittal for the judge. Although he didn't win an acquittal for the Bicketts, Haddad had managed to force the government to prosecute them a second time.

  Before the Bicketts'second trial, Frank Haddad worked to get Jimmy dropped from the indictment altogether by arguing that Jimmy didn't live in the house where the police found the marijuana. Jimmy lived in the poker house, Haddad said, and he could prove it.

  The Bicketts owned several houses within a mile of each other. In addition to the two-story house in downtown Raywick, where Coletta and Squire raised enough children to field their own baseball team, the Bickett farm, just down the road, had at least three houses on it, including two old log cabins, a couple of house trailers and an aluminum-sided farmhouse, where the 150 pounds of homegrown had been found in December. And lastly, near where the Bickett family property adjoined Raywick's city limits, behind the firehouse, sat the poker house.