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

by James Higdon

  Yet another grower said he has been supporting himself for seven years by cultivating a small crop ofhigh-quality marjuana each year... .

  Mar~uana money isn't tainted for some people in Central Kentucky, who argue that it bolsters a depressed agricultural economy.

  It's better to keep mar~iuana money at home than to send it to Colombia or to the smuggling rings of Florida, said Charles Bickett, mayor ofRaywick, a village in western Marion County.

  State police have found several marijuana crops near Raywick. Two of Bickett's brothers have been charged with growing pot, and Bickett's bar has sold baseball-type caps boasting, "Marion County homegrown-the best-1981. "

  Bickett's attitude resembles that of oficials in Humboldt County, Calif., who two years ago rejected a federalgrant aimed at curbing the area's multimillion-dollar pot industry.

  Reporting on illegal activity is tricky business, as newshounds for the Courier ,journal were all too aware, given that the limits of press freedom were defined by the 1972 Supreme Court case Branzburg v. Hayes, a case involving a Courier-journal reporter, Paul Branzburg, who wrote a series on marijuana growing in Kentucky.

  "I did my best to avoid witnessing any felonies," Cross remembered. "I think going into it, I probably said that very thing, you know: `I'm going to have to go out and talk to people out in the field, and I may witness some misdemeanors, but I will do my best to avoid witnessing any felonies,'because that was indeed the issue in Branzburg....

  "As it turns out, I did witness a felony or two-by pure inadvertence, you know? When a guy pulls down five pounds of marijuana from the rafter [in the ceiling], you know, you just witnessed a felony."

  But that moment didn't make it into the paper?

  "No, of course not."

  Did that happen in Squire's Tavern?

  "I don't want to tell you where it was, but you could probably guess."

  The last of Cross's three-part series, datelined from Frankfort on October 20, focused on what would be only a temporary problem, the relatively lax nature of Kentucky's state laws concerning marijuana:

  Under Kentucky law, sale or manufacture of mar~uana is a misdemeanor,punishable on first offense by up to a year in a county jail and a maximum fine of $500. The only other states where the maximum penalty for growing pot is a year or less are Alaska, Hawaii, Kansas, Maine, New York, South Dakota, Virginia and Wyoming.... Kentucky, Kansas and Wyoming make no distinction between large and small growers, as do most states....

  A bill pre-filed by a Kentucky legislative committee would make growing any amount of marjuana a felony punishable by one to five years in prison and a fine of $3, 000 to $5,000. The bill would establish a presumption, however, that anyone growing less than 25 marjuana plants was doing so for personal use. Prosecutors would have to prove otherwise to make the felony penalties apply....

  But some people think convictions, st~er laws and regulatory action will do nothing to achieve the ultimate goal of mar~iuana laws-decreased use of the drug.

  "7here's nothing they can do to change it. If it's notgrown here, it'll be shipped in here, "said one man who said he has grown marijuana.

  Another grower said federal convictions might discourage some growers, but he added, "Iftimesget rougher, it might not stop them

  The Courier-journal had plenty of home subscribers in Marion County, and they all read Cross's work. Few were happy with the bringing more attention to Marion County's flexible interpretation of the law, but Cross's first thought after his series ran was to return to the scene of the crime.

  "Alvin was living in Bardstown," Lowery recalled, referring to Cross, "but he stayed in my house more than he was in Bardstown because it was such a big story.

  "He says, `Steve, I want you to do [me] a favor.'

  "I said, `What is it?'

  "`I want you to go down to Bicketts with me.'

  "This is after he ran that whole series on pot.

  "I said, `OK, I'll go with you.'

  "We went in. At the back of the bar, the biggest dope guys in three counties. They recognize Alvin immediately. They recognize me, too.

  "Charlie [Bickett] said, `Sit down and I'll get you a beer and don't worry about it.'

  "Anyway, they were sitting back there, and Alvin is sitting there. He did what he had to do. He had to make an appearance to let them know he wasn't intimidated even though he was shitting a brick."

  Cross later agreed with Lowery's memory of those events.

  "It's been thirty years, so it's hard for me to remember exactly," Al Cross said, "but Steve is correct that he recalled that I wanted to show to them that I wasn't intimidated because I liked going to Marion County to see Steve and [his wife] Susan and other folks in Raywick. I didn't want to feel like I had to avoid the place."

  Lowery and Cross were not the only two to recall the get-together.

  "You're talking about that time that Joe Keith, and maybe Bobby Joe [Shewmaker], J. C. Abell, I think two or three of 'em, they caught Al Cross outside there, in the back of our place," Charlie Bickett recalled. "I think they were going to try to muscle him around a little bit, but me and Daddy got involved there.... They cornered them out back, and somebody came in and said there was going to be some trouble, so me and Daddy walked back there.

  "I think Daddy jumped Joe Keith's shit. They didn't like that too much, but that was tough shit, you know? It was our place. We didn't give a damn what they thought. They [Lowery and Cross] was customers. They was friends. They was people who would do you a favor, you know, if it was possible to.

  "Steve thanked us every which way there. Steve tried to explain to Joe Keith and Bobby Joe and whoever else was down there, but they were playing the big time, but the big time hadn't hit yet, you know? All your big wheels hadn't really started surfacing in Raywick yet, but before it was over they did."

  "And they left us alone," Lowery recalled. "Charlie went back and said, `Look, they're just drinking a beer. Not hurting anyone."'

  "And... my experience was that people who have been operating outside the law," Al Cross remembered, "as long as they get the notion that you are not out to get them personally, individually, then they probably play on, and they also probably have a certain deal of respect for people who are willing to come look them in the eye, or at least come to the same place of business, so that's why I did it."

  "Of course, they were mumbling and grumbling and ready to roll some heads," Lowery said, "but nothing happened."

  Lowery wrote a response to Cross's series on the Enterprise opinion page:

  Marion County was once again thrown into the media spotlight earlier this week when the Louisville Courier-journal published a series on marjuana.

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  The stories point out that more marjuana crops have been seized in Marion County this year than in any of the other 119 counties in Kentucky.

  But what the stories neglected to say was that the state police narcotics unit-which totals less than 30 men, if I'm correct-has spent more time investigating reports of mar~uana crops in Marion County than in the rest of the counties combined.

  Ben Hadley, a narcotics agent who has worked many of the busts in Marion County, told me earlier this year that the state police have concentrated their efforts on Marion County. The Courier neglected to report that information.

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  The fact is this: Marjuana is being grown throughout the state. Cultivation is hardly restricted to Marion County.

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  There have been several other major marijuana hauls throughout the state this year, and not one has received half the attention that the busts in Marion County have received.

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  I think that the editors who determine how stories will be played and where they will be placed in the Courier-journal are insensitive at best and prejudiced at worst.

  I think they have created a mental image of Marion County and that they use stories about the county to support that image.

  Following the incid
ent at Squire's Tavern in 1981, Al Cross became a regular. Even after his assignment changed with his newspaper, and he was covering the metro desk or Frankfort, he always liked to come back to Raywick, especially for the annual Derby parties, where one could bet track odds with the local bookie and be drunk by noon.

  In the 1986 Kentucky Derby, Willie Shoemaker was slated to ride Ferdinand. Cross figured that it would be the last derby run for Shoemaker, a legendary jockey, so he bet on Ferdinand at 17 to 1, and apparently so did lots of other people because the bookie couldn't pay out the bets right away. He had to go to the local businessmen and borrow some cash. So, it was no surprise to anyone when Cross's wife decided to host his thirtieth birthday party at Squire's Tavern, which wouldn't have been complete without a birthday cake.

  "When I went to blow out the candles," Cross recalled, "they had those nonextinguishable candles. So, we were all two or three sheets to the wind, so we wound up pouring beer and whisky on the cake to extinguish them, and it created quite a weird scene for the locals.' They had never quite ever seen a thing like that at Squire's Tavern-dousing a cake with alcoholic beverages."

  "Al loved Raywick so much that he had a birthday party at my place," Charlie Bickett recalled. "Before it was over, the cake was slamming and throwing it through the bar and smacking going on. I mean, it was crazy.

  "Nobody got hurt. It was all in fun, but it was funny to look at it. They done everything. Anyway, everybody was pretty well liquored up or having a good time. That was back in Al's younger days."

  "Raywick was the friendliest place I ever lived, including my hometown in Michigan," Steve Lowery recalled. "I have never lived in a place where people were kinder or more giving or more loving than in Raywick, Kentucky.. . people took care of each other.

  "I didn't lock my doors for years. You didn't have to lock your doors because you trusted your neighbors, and you knew your neighbors were watching your back. If you go out of town for two weeks, shit, there'd be somebody going by your house every twenty minutes to make sure nothing was going on.

  "That's why I got so pissed off at the Courier[-Journal]. The projection was that this was a lawless county ... that had gone way, way over the pale. The truth of the matter was that this was a very friendly, loving place. They just happened to be in agri-pharmaceuticals."

  It would be bad enough if, as Lowery claimed, the Courier-journal was characterizing Marion County unfairly by using selective editing to support conclusions that the editors had already drawn, but in addition to that, the newspaper acted as an uncritical stenographer for DEA agent Harold Brown. From part one of Cross's pot series:

  "From the seizures by state police and all, it would certainly appear that there's more being grown this year," said Harold Brown, who headed the Louisville office of the US Drug EnforcementAdministration for 11 years before he resigned earlier this month.

  In part two of Cross's series, Brown advocated harsher prison sentences for marijuana growers:

  "That's really the heart of the problem.... You're probably not going to know what goes on in the brokerage system until the penalties are severe enough that a guy finds a reason to talk or cooperate. As long as he's facing misdemeanor penalties, he's going to pay that, keep his mouth shut, come back and try to recoup his losses by growing it again next year. "

  Al Cross quoted Harold Brown extensively in his three-part pot series, even though Brown had resigned under a cloud of suspicion weeks before.

  "Harold Brown, the top federal drug enforcement agent in Kentucky, has resigned," the Courier ,journal reported on October 3, 1981, under the headline, "US Drug Official in State Quits, Is Being Investigated."

  "My recollection is that I talked to [Brown] before he resigned," Cross remembered. "Of course, I was working on this thing for a month or so. I would like to think that we were cautious about what we used from him, but he was just talking in general terms about the situation. We had no reason to believe anything he told us was inaccurate or designed to help his own cause. We had no idea what his own cause was.... What ever happened to Harold Brown?"

  That's a good question. As Cross reported on the pot-growing in Marion County, internal DEA investigators had connected Harold Brown to large-scale drug crimes of his own, including the mysterious case of an abandoned DC-4, a World War II-era, four-engine cargo plane that appeared on the end of a Bowman Field runway in Louisville on January 11, 1979, with nothing on board except marijuana residue, some halfeaten sandwiches and a few empty Champagne cases.

  In investigating the DC-4, detectives found that it had been in military service until 1978 and then auctioned off and resold to associates of Brown, who flew the plane to Houston, Texas, where they called Dan Chandler, son of A. B. "Happy" Chandler, two-time Kentucky governor and former commissioner of Major League Baseball. The younger Chandler worked as a greeter at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas. DEA's internal investigation linked Harold Brown directly to this smuggling operation but handled the case lightly, as an "administrative investigation," not as a criminal investigation.

  So what was Harold Brown, the DEA agent, up to?

  "Well, nothing that I can prove," recalled retired Kentucky State Police Detective Don Powers. "I remember that we had some raw intelligence that indicated strongly that Harold Brown was running interference for [dirty cop and drug trafficker] Andrew Thornton and them. Especially, I remember a plane that landed ... out in western Kentucky, and all of a sudden, Harold Brown showed up on the scene and supposedly waved the plane off.

  "And I remember that particular case where they were tracking a particular load of marijuana, but by the time they got to the plane and got on it, there wasn't anything left in it. We always suspected very strongly that Harold Brown was running interference for Thornton [and his crew]."

  What would that mean?

  "It would mean that he was protecting the shipment of drugs, and, if I'm not mistaken, the DEA forced Harold Brown to retire early."

  Harold Brown began his career as Kentucky's chief federal drug enforcement agent in 1970, working in the Louisville office of the agency that preceded the DEA, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD). In 1973, President Richard Nixon consolidated the BNDD with other agencies: the US Customs drug unit; the Narcotics Advance Research Management Team, from the Executive Office of the President; and two offices from the Department of Justice-the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement (ODALE) and the Office of National Narcotics Intelligence. It was all done under Reorganization Plan No. 2, and it created the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

  During this bureaucratic transition, Harold Brown remained in Louisville, first as the head BNDD agent-an expert chemist with a military background-and then as the chief DEA agent for Kentucky. As part of his job coordinating drug investigations with state, local and other federal law enforcement agencies, Brown liaised with a federal drug trafficking task force, which included Jefferson County narcotics Detective Bud Farmer.

  Due to their close association from the task force, Harold Brown and Bud Farmer worked together on numerous occasions, including an August 1979 bust of a DC-3 that landed at an isolated western Kentucky airport with 2,500 pounds of Colombian marijuana on board, valued at more than $1 million, or $3.12 million in 2011 dollars. They arrested seven men at the airfield, and at the time Brown said that as many as a dozen more could be arrested by the end of the investigation.

  After the agents loaded the ton and a quarter of confiscated Colombian pot onto the back of a truck to transport it to an evidence facility, a staff photographer snapped a shot of the task force: Bud Farmer, a tall, middle-aged man in white pants, a short-sleeved collared shirt and Ray-Ban sunglasses whose wire rims disappear underneath the graying temples of his hair; behind Farmer stands a Jefferson County policeman under Farmer's command; Harold Brown sits on the bed of the truck, one leg crossed over the other knee, wearing blue jeans, a plaid short-sleeved shirt, sunglasses, shaggy dark hair, sideburns and a broad mustache; behind Brown, a serg
eant for the DEA sits on a bale of confiscated marijuana. Brown looks away in the photograph, toward the unseen distance, while Bud Farmer stares directly at Brown, seeming to eye him more as a suspect than as a fellow law enforcement officer.

  By 1979, cops throughout Kentucky distrusted Harold Brown. Investigations seemed to unravel when he became involved, and he associated with a wild element of Lexington nightlife, including cowboy narcotics cop and drug trafficker Andrew Thornton, who came from a blue-blooded horse-breeding family with experience fighting in the Caribbean as a member of the 82nd Airborne Division.

  Thornton joined the Lexington police after his military service in 1968 and worked his way through the ranks of patrol, narcotics, detective and criminal intelligence before resigning from the force in 1977 after getting his law degree.

  "All I can tell you is that we had a very strong suspicion at the time that Harold Brown and Andrew Thornton ... were all in a group," recalled retired Detective Don Powers. "And [Brown] was just as much a part of it as the rest of them.... When they had those DC-3s gutted out, they were hauling planeloads of marijuana in them....

  "There was even-and I wish I could remember more about this-but there was even strong suspicion that they were taking guns to South America and trading them for drugs. But as far as I know, no one ever proved that....

  "There was just so much raw intelligence during this time that Thornton was really working for the CIA.... There was just all kinds of rumors floating around, and as far as I know, none of that was ever really substantiated....

  "I can tell you with some assurance that no law enforcement wanted anything to do with Harold Brown during this time, because of the suspicion that Thornton would hear about it....

  "There always was the thought-you know-whether there was really suspicion of this, or whether Thornton and his associates wanted to make people to believe it, but there was always suspicion and talk that somehow they were connected to the CIA."