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

by James Higdon

  The Bicketts' poker house was the latest incarnation of the nonstop high-stakes craps and stud-poker games that had sent Cadillac-driving high-rollers hitchhiking home from Raywick since the 1950s. In the Bicketts' poker house, Jimmy played seven-card stud, and Joe Keith faded at the craps table. During harvest time, growers with money bursting from their pockets couldn't find ways to spend the cash fast enough. There weren't many places where someone could spend $25,000 in one night, so during the harvest season, the poker game ran nonstop. Jimmy practically lived there because he never stopped dealing and playing poker.

  To prove that claim, Haddad called a string of witnesses to the stand: the mailman, the utilities man and the Western Kentucky Gas Co. manall of whom testified that Jimmy Bickett lived in the poker house. The court dropped Jimmy from the indictment, leaving Joe Keith to stand trial a second time alone.

  In January 1982, more than a year after the initial bust, a jury returned a second guilty verdict on Joe Keith, but Frank Haddad again approached the bench and asked the judge, "Guilty of what?"

  The jury, Haddad argued, was supposed to find Bickett either not guilty, guilty of possession with the intent to distribute or guilty of simple possession. Because the jury did not make a clear distinction on the form, simply returning a verdict of guilty without identifying the charge, US District Judge Thomas Ballantine declared a second mistrial.

  "While we do not relish the prospect of a third trial," Ballantine wrote, "this court made a mistake."

  Before a third trial could commence, in early August 1982, Joe Keith Bickett pleaded guilty to possession with the intent to distribute, was fined $15,000 and sentenced to five years' probation, becoming the fifth Marion County man to plead guilty in federal court so far that year. The two mistrials had cost the government $100,000 by its own estimate, and Joe Keith Bickett walked away.

  As the Bicketts fended off the federal charges against them, work in Marion County continued to produce more pot, and more pot of greater quality in order to make its value worth the actual labor involved. In this time period, the early 1980s before President Ronald Reagan really came down hard on marijuana, Marion County operated at a high level, with growing crews multiplying across the county, largely independent of one another and made up of brothers and cousins, who had learned the ropes during the previous growing season from someone's uncle or classmate. And Johnny Boone continued to engineer a superior breed of marijuana as Mr. X dropped by intermittently.

  "He brought us some Russian," Johnny Boone recalled, "and it took us four years, and he kept saying, `It is the best, and it will do the best, and it won't get very tall."'

  After he visited Johnny Boone, Mr. X would go see Jimmy Bickett.

  "I remember he brought up that great big seed," Jimmy Bickett recalled. "And he would say, `This is what you boys ought to grow up here.' ... And that pot would get real mature."

  Until 1981, the DEA office in Louisville focused on interdicting largescale smuggling operations, schemes that used planes as big as DC-3s and DC-4s, but on September 11, 1981, the state police enlisted the help of the DEA to take down a pot farm bigger than any airplane, in what would become the most valuable marijuana raid in Kentucky's historyup to that point. The location: eastern Marion County, near Bradfordsville, where Johnny Boone, Bobby Joe Shewmaker, the Bickett boys and others had pooled their resources to grow a dense, potent patch not far from where Garland Russell had grown patches since the early 1970s. But instead of growing on the riverbanks where any hunter could stumble upon its secret, the growers' co-op used backhoes and bulldozers to carve out a section of knob land that no one could see from the road or discover by accident. In this patch, the collected Marion County growers nursed a crop of perfect sinsemilla of Russian origin. With less than two weeks before the autumnal equinox, the female marijuana plants were beginning to redouble their resin-producing efforts to try to get themselves pollinated before the frost. These superplants in this patch, the growers figured, were safe from anything but a helicopter.

  But instead of a helicopter, the state police used a high-performance, single-engine airplane with a V-shaped tail lent to them from DEA. The unusual tail design allowed the plane to dip below the tree line, scan a crop closely and then pull up just in time to avoid slamming into the wall of trees at the end of a field.' V-tailed airplane style, popular for a while with recreational pilots because of its maneuverability, lost its appeal once it acquired the nickname as the "Doctor-Lawyer Killer" for self-explanatory reasons.

  When Johnny Boone first saw that V-tailed plane swoop over the field early that morning, he knew it was time to go. As much as Boone hated to see that V-tailed plane, he couldn't help but to stop running for a minute to watch it dive in and out of the field with aerial agility like he had never seen before, flying below the tree line and then pulling up at the last second. Boone hated to see that plane, but he respected a strong thing when he saw it, and that V-tailed plane was something else.

  When the plane disappeared, the growers knew it wouldn't be long before the cavalry arrived, so they grabbed as much of the not-quitemature sinsemilla as they could load into every pickup truck on-site, and then they got the hell out of there.

  When the V-tailed plane landed at the Lebanon/Springfield Airport about ten miles away, a raiding party of seven heavily armed state police narcotics agents, troopers and detectives set out on its search-and-destroy mission, double-timing it to Bradfordsville. But when the officers got there, they couldn't find any road going back to the patch. They looked for two hours. Finally they gave up and decided to go to where they knew they could find some marijuana to bust: Raywick.

  Raywick was about twenty miles from Bradfordsville for the state police pot squad, but maybe only ten miles as the V-tailed plane flies. Just to the north of Raywick at 5:45 p.m., the state police found and destroyed three acres of marijuana in two different cornfields, about three thousand plants in all. A half-hour later, they discovered another three-quarters of an acre on the other side of Raywick on Hazy Downs Road. At 7:30, police found another four thousand plants on Hawk Mattingly's farm on Clell Mattingly Road. All the evening's marijuana had been spotted from the air by the V-tailed plane.

  When the growers realized that the cops were making busts in Raywick, they returned to the Bradfordsville patch to grab as many pickup truckloads as they could while the state police were on the other side of the county. When word spread, anyone with a truck who wanted to make a year's salary in one day drove out to Bradfordsville. A full-scale free-pot bonanza ensued. Each truckload could be worth $30,000.

  After cleaning out Raywick for three or four hours, the state police returned to Bradfordsville well after dark, where they gave up on trying to find the road themselves and started knocking on doors until just before midnight, when a compliant neighbor finally showed them the entryway to the rough-cut road, which led to the backside of the knob and six acres of Russian Bluegrass-worth at least $12 million.

  As the policemen entered the patch from one side, Johnny Boone and other growers loaded up a last round of pickup trucks full of plants and disappeared out the other side-there had been two roads back to the patch, and the police couldn't find either of them.' detectives spotted two trucks in the act, but they couldn't do anything about it because the trucks were too far away, and it was too damned dark.

  It was unusually brazen-even by Marion County standards-to load a pickup truck full of pot within eyesight of an incoming raiding party, but the male plants had already been cut out, and the females had already begun to bud into the highly potent strand of Kentucky sinsemilla that Johnny Boone had perfected through years of selective breeding. It was worth the risk.

  One of the trucks, its bed loaded with marijuana plants with stalks two inches thick, got stuck on the freshly bulldozed road. Even with the four-wheel drive engaged, it still spun mud. With the police closing in, everyone in the vehicle fled on foot, and the owner of the truck promptly reported it stolen. Unable to ch
ase the fleeing pickups, the state police narcotics agents camped out overnight, guarding the crop with automatic weapons so they could chop it down Friday morning with a state highway mowing crew.

  "This is just an unbelievable sight," a trooper told the the next morning.

  "And we may never see another patch like this one again," a narcotics officer added. "This is very high-quality pot."

  The Bradfordsville patch was the tenth destroyed in Marion County so far in 1981 by the state police, a number higher than that in any other county in Kentucky and accounting for more than one-third of the thirty- two acres of marijuana destroyed by KSP statewide.

  "This is some absolutely dynamite pot here,"a detective told the Courier- journal as he displayed a plant six feet tall and three feet in diameter.

  As usual, when the Kentucky State Police rang the marijuana bell in Marion County, news editors in Louisville salivated. On Friday morning Marion County became a media-rich war zone as camouflage-clad policemen directed the landing of a television station helicopter from Louisville, while other photographers circled overhead in airplanes like buzzards. When a television reporter and cameraman tried to set up a live shot on Hazy Downs Road in Raywick, a tenant farmer pulled a pistol on them. The action news team retreated to its van, which made a slow escape like a wounded elephant, the pistol-packing farmer laughing in its rearview mirror.

  "When I started working in Lebanon [it] was 1979," Steve Lowery recalled later, referring to his job as the editor of the Lebanon Enterprise, "it was still a misdemeanor to grow marijuana. It was nothing. It was being grown like tobacco. I could remember some busts where I went out, there would be twenty acres, like Christmas trees. I have pictures of them."

  Lowery soon adopted Marion County as his new home, along with his wife, Susan, a back-to-the-lander hippie who had found Kentucky on her own, looking for a place to raise animals and grow an organic garden. Steve and Susan made a home for themselves on Sally Ray Pike, a small farm lane that backs up against the Bickett property on the outskirts of Raywick, where the Lowerys raised a pair of twin daughters. On his time off, Lowery liked to belly up to the bar at Squire's Tavern, and soon he started bringing a few other reporters around with him.

  "They just hung out here, Steve [Lowery] and Al Cross," remembered Charlie Bickett. "We had a lot of people, what do you call'em, correspondents? They was always hanging out. Raywick was the spot where you hear about a lot of interesting things.

  "Steve Lowery-me, him and Daddy got to be the best of friends. And Al Cross came into the picture through Steve. They were both writing and sharing information and this and that, and they hung out at the bar. Seemed like marijuana was the big story back then. Anytime anybody got busted they were there, of course, but they were just doing their jobs, I reckon....

  "Steve and me was always big friends.... Steve was always involved in Raywick activities. You know, he loved Raywick. He brought his two daughters down. They were twins. They weren't two years old, and he put them on the bar, buy em suckers and this and that. Oh, he loved those two girls. I don't think his wife loved it too much."

  Although Steve Lowery was born and raised in Michigan, he learned how to operate in Marion County, dealing with the lawmen and the outlaws.

  "When I started [at the Lebanon Enterprise], the state police, they did not want to pop people," Lowery recalled. "I had an understanding with the state police: If I'm working a story with you, then that's what's going in the paper. And if I was down in Raywick at the bar and people were talking, I'm not working. So what goes on in the bar stays in the bar.

  "I told both sides that. I said, `I'm not going to work both sides against each other. I'm not going to tip anybody off to anything.'

  "I told the guys in Raywick, `If you get popped, you go on the front page. That's all there is to it. But on the other hand, I'm not going to run around to see you get popped.'

  "So, the state police trusted me. This is why I got to do the stuff I did. And the people down in Marion County trusted me. They knew I wasn't going to turn them out. They knew I wasn't going to cover for them, either, but they knew I wasn't going to turn them out."

  Therefore, Steve Lowery was often the first photographer the state police called after a bust, and Lowery would be right on the scene, snapping away with a manual-action Canon, shooting with Kodak T-Max 400 black-and-white film. The police even played to Lowery's lens and choreographed shots of a helicopter landing in a cornfield. Lowery was happy to play to what he perceived to be the policemen's ego because when they weren't looking, Lowery was loading up his camera bag with buds that no one would ever miss.

  Once, approaching a bust site, he must have arrived a few hours after the police had started chopping down the crop because it was clear from the road Lowery was driving down that the police had already taken a load out; there were leaves and bits of plants all over the road. Then Lowery hit the brakes-

  In the middle of the road was a marijuana bud at least a foot long.

  Lowery couldn't believe it. He hopped out, grabbed the bud, tossed it under the driver's seat and continued to the site of the bust. Over the many years of busting pot crops, the busts acquired some of the characteristics of a social event, with policemen and deputies and different sorts of people coming and going. It just so happened this particular time that the last two men at the scene were Lowery and the sheriff. A deputy had left in the sheriff's squad car. So, the sheriff asked Lowery for a ride.

  Sure, Lowery said.

  The whole ride back into Lebanon, the musky scent of that foot-long bud under the seat made the car reek like a family of skunks.

  "That smell sure stays on you, doesn't it?" Lowery offered to the sheriff, as they both rolled down their windows. Lowery was sweating bullets, but the sheriff never said a word.

  Steve Lowery's photographs remain superlative examples of the reporting of the day. However just like all the other pot-related stories coming out of the statewide media, Lowery's reports and photographs were reacting to police action; Lowery just happened to have a front-row seat. Al Cross, the reporter for the wanted to go deeper, to look into the world of pot cultivation proactively, so he pitched a long-form story to his editors in September 1981 and reported it for a solid month.

  At the end of October 1981, the peak of harvest season, the Courierjournal ran Cross's reporting in a three-part front-page series with datelines from Lebanon, Raywick and Frankfort, the state capital-a lot of ink and newsprint that stirred the pot-growing community into a simmer.

  "I knew we needed to do something greater with it because you kept getting these stories about bigger and bigger fields and about more numerous fields being found," Al Cross said thirty years after the series ran. "I knew when I moved to Bardstown in '79 that there was a marijuana industry within the state ... but it wasn't too long before I became aware that Marion County was really a hotbed of it."

  From part one of his series, which ran on Sunday, October 18, 1981:

  LEBANON, Ky.-When it was called hemp, and was legal, Kentucky led the nation in producing it.

  Now that it's called mar~iuana and is a high stakes but short-odds gamble for the people who grow it illegally, Kentucky is again a leading producer, officials say ...

  "`High stakes but short-odds,'that's a good line," said Cross, rereading his decades-old work.

  Each of these stories ran on page Al of the with a full page of newsprint after the jump with photos, maps and sidebars, also written by Cross.

  "That was fairly typical for the in those days," Cross recalled. "There was an expectation that if you wanted to move up, then you needed to produce stuff like this.... I didn't really feel like I needed to move up, but I did want to prove that I belonged....

  "This was an ideal project for me to propose because I had gotten to know people at the grassroots, no pun intended, and that's the kind of reporting that I really like to do. I like to deal with plain folk out in the country and seeing what I can find out, and that was how
I approached this one. I had to work at it a little bit to find growers willing to talk with you, but all it took was time, really."

  From part two of Cross's 1981 series, which ran on Monday, October 19:

  RAYWICK, Ky.-In step with the march offrost and of the fall colors, dozens of mar~uana buyers are moving south through Kentucky this month, looking for the best of this year's illicit crop.

  That's the report from several pot growers in Central Kentucky, which appears to have become one of the major sources of domestic marjuana in the United States.

  This story is based partly on interviews with people who said they grow mar~juana, or he p to sell or harvest it. They agreed to be interviewed on the condition that they not be named...

  "Finding a market is especially hard for novices, "said one grower, adding that he and others have been approached by poor `straight' farmers" wanting to sell marijuana that they said was grown "by a friend."It was obvious that the farmers grew the pot themselves, he said.

  Because mar~uana is harder to move this year, one grower said, many producers are fronting" lots of2O to 30 pounds-instead of the usual 50- to lots-to people who make connections with buyers in cities, and pay the growers after the lots have been sold.

  He said many of the "traveling salesmen" are partners in the cultivation of crops. He said few large crops are raised by people working alone, because raising high-quality marjuana requires quite a bit of labor...

  Some buyers from the western United States say they can handle 1,000 to 2,000 pounds of mar~uana a week during the harvest season, the grower said...