by James Higdon
Frustrated, Louisville narcotics Detective Bud Farmer alerted DEA Internal Affairs that its chief agent in Kentucky was corrupt. Detective Don Powers with the Kentucky State Police came to the same conclusion.
After he was tossed out of the DEA in late 1981, Harold Brown continued to operate in his secretive capacity with his trafficking partner, Andrew Thornton. On the side, Brown established a mad scientist's laboratory, selling deadly poisons like ricin (made from castor beans) and curare (a rare South American blowgun toxin) in the classified section of Soldier ofFortune magazine. A teenager in Florida who wanted to kill his parents found Brown's ad and sent a friend to Louisville to pick up the poison he ordered.
Brown sold ricin to the kid's friend, but the friend had a change of heart and turned the ricin over to the police. Cops in Florida were about to discover that the maker of the poison in Louisville had a very shady past, but before they could turn the heat up on Harold Brown and get to the bottom of his involvement in ricin distribution, Brown turned up dead on March 20, 1984, shot in the head by the .32-caliber blue-steel Llama automatic pistol found in his hand.
From the police report:
"The victim was known by the undersigned as the former head of the local federal Drug Enforcement Administration.... A contact gunshot entrance wound was noted on the right side of the victim's head approximately two inches above the ear and near the mid-line of the ear.... There was a large amount of blood underneath the victim's head. Blood was also noted on his face, upper body, right leg near the gun and on the pillow by the right hand."
Although initial reports indicated suicide, Andrew Thornton thought otherwise. He contacted the police, wanting answers, as the Louisville homicide detective reported seven days after Brown's death:
"Thornton thinks it is a murder. Thornton said Brown was killed with a.32-caliber automatic and that Harold Brown never owned a.32-caliber automatic."
The investigating officer called the Thornton family horse farm, Thrive Main Stud, near Paris, Kentucky, and got a pager number for Andrew, which he called.
"At 0955 hours, Andrew Thornton called me on the telephone. I explained to Andrew that we were investigating the death of Harold Brown and that I understood he was a friend of Harold Brown's. Mr. Thornton interrupted and said, `His best friend.' I asked Mr. Thornton if or when he would be in Louisville, that we would like to talk with him about Harold Brown. Mr. Thornton asked me if I was with the `Special Investigations' or `Homicide.' I advised him that I only worked Homicide and Robbery. His reply was `OK, I will talk with you,' Mr. Thornton advised that he would be at Sport Shooters in Louisville tonight at 1830 hours ... and our conversation was terminated."
Later that day, when police arrived at the shooting range, Andrew Thornton was not there, and in his place was Harold Brown's attorney, Fred Partin, who had also beat the police to Brown's apartment at the time of his death. Although Thornton claimed that Brown never owned a .32, Partin seemed to know its exact provenance.
"Partin ... stated that he believed it was a weapon that Brown had loaned him three or four years ago ... [which] had been stolen from [Partin's] home and had been reported to the Louisville Police Department. After he reported the weapon stolen, his wife received a call from a subject who stated that the weapon was in the back yard ... wrapped in plastic and it was returned to Brown. A check with L.P.D. records revealed Partin had reported a .32-caliber automatic stolen on November 18, 1979 ..."
Therefore, it was the word of Brown's "best friend," Andrew Thornton, against his attorney, Fred Partin, as to whether or not Brown owned a .32 automatic.
"I wasn't aware of that," Don Powers said decades later. "That's interesting ... I don't know. I just never in my own mind ever believed that Harold Brown shot himself, but I don't know what sort of pressure he was under at the time, what was about to happen that might have caused it. That case you were talking about, about that boy from Florida, maybe that was enough to tip the scales for him."
The police detectives and Andrew Thornton weren't the only ones skeptical of Brown's suicide. Even Fred Partin, Brown's attorney, raised his own concerns to the
"For one thing," Partin told the newspaper, "Brown had always said if he was going to kill himself, he would imitate his hero Ernest Hemingway and shoot himself in the mouth. Brown's fatal wound, though, was to the side of the head."
In June 1982, Andrew Thornton pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor marijuana-smuggling conspiracy charge, paid a $5,000 fine and served six months in prison. On Wednesday, September 11, 1985, Thornton jumped from an airplane and fell to his death onto a gravel driveway outside Knoxville, Tennessee, after his parachute failed to open.
"Of course, when Thornton bailed out of the airplane he had cocaine strapped on him," Don Powers recalled, cocaine valued at $15 millionor $35.2 million in 2011 dollars. "Supposedly, the CIA had some kind of special phone number, and it was found on Thornton."
From the report:
KNOXVILLE, Tenn.-Andrew Carter Thornton II apparently set a twin-engine plane on auto pilot over Knoxville before parachuting to his death early Wednesday morning with about 75 pounds of cocaine, authorities said yesterday.
I•.1
Thornton, a pilot and holder of an eighth-degree black belt in [Wing-Chun, Bruce Lee's fighting style], was carrying several papers in a coat pocket, including his passport and verses citing the virtues O fa mercenary lifestyle.
He also was wearing a bulletproof vest and was carrying two pistols, a stiletto, special goggles for seeing at night ... about $4,500 in cash, six gold krugerrands and identcation papers in at least two names.
"He almost made the landing," [Lieutenant Charles] Coleman said.... "He landed on the cocaine, broke his ribs and stretched his aorta to the breaking point. "
And thus, this strange chapter of the history of drugs in the Bluegrass State ended with no real resolution. Two men who officially were responsible for stopping men like Johnny Boone and Bobby Joe Shewmaker appeared to be engaged in bigger drug deals than anything attempted by Marion County folk, and yet these same men were the Kentucky faces of the federal War on Drugs.
To Johnny Boone, it was clear that secret agents inside the government got away with bigger scores than he could ever imagine; and to the police detectives watching from the sidelines, it seemed clear to them that while they spent their time chasing men like Johnny Boone, the really big fish made mockeries of them.
"You're absolutely right," Don Powers recalled. "There's two things we'll never know out of all this: whether there was some involvement with the CIA and whether they were giving the green light to haul weapons south .. . and drugs north."
Johnny Boone and Don Powers, outlaw and detective, were not the only two who suspected the corruption of DEA Agent Harold Brown. The two-time former US attorney in Louisville, Marion County native John L. "Jack" Smith, saw it with open eyes as well.
Smith possessed ironclad law enforcement credentials: His father, Henry Smith, was the Marion County judge executive and raised three sons. One became an FBI agent, one became a Secret Service agent, and Jack, a precocious federal prosecutor, became the US attorney for the Western District of Kentucky in Louisville in January 1969-only five years after passing the bar. In November 1970, Jack Smith moved to New Orleans to lead the Justice Department's Organized Crime and Racketeering Strike Force for a year and a half.
In New Orleans, Smith worked to uncover public corruption, starting with Jim Garrison, the district attorney of Orleans Parish, best known for his portrayal by Kevin Costner in Oliver Stone's movie JFK, which tells the story of Garrison's prosecution of Clay Shaw for Shaw's connection to an alleged conspiracy to kill President John F. Kennedy. But Jack Smith's task force was not interested in grand conspiracies. Rather, the task force looked into a much simpler sort of crime: payoffs to government officials by, in this case, people from "pinball machines ... Bally Manufacturing," Smith said.
In the course of his investigation, Smith captured the local cri
me boss's moneyman, who agreed to become an informant for Smith's task force. Smith sent the informant to the home of Jim Garrison with a briefcase full of payoff money, a payment that Garrison was expecting. The FBI coated the cash with a fine powder visible only to ultraviolet light. The next day Smith's men arrested Garrison and tested his hands, catching him ultraviolet-handed.
Yet, despite the overwhelming evidence of his corruption, a New Orleans jury found Jim Garrison not guilty. When he walked out of the courtroom a free man, a crowd of three hundred gathered to greet him.
"They don't tolerate public corruption in New Orleans," Smith was fond of saying in later years, "they demand it."
After that, Smith planned on continuing his career as a strike force prosecutor.
"The Department of Justice called," Smith remembered, "and they wanted me to go to Cleveland to start up one of those strike forces. Well, you'll remember that was the year that the Cuyahoga River caught on fire. In my mind, Cleveland was a shithole. So the process then was, you could turn down the first one but if you wanted to stay in the strike force in the Justice Department, you had to take the second one, and the opening was in New York, and I was not going to go up there, and I was not going to raise my son up there, so I came back to Louisville ... in January'72."
Three years later Senator Walter Huddleston hired Smith to come to Washington, D.C., to work as counsel on the US Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, commonly referred to as the Church Committee, named after its chairman, Senator Frank Church of Idaho, who led the investigation into allegations of the CIA violating its own charter.
"Serving on the committee," Smith recalled, "reading a lot of reports and being at the hearings and everything-I think everybody has a thought in their mind that American intelligence officials that they're all wonderful people and wear a white hat and abide by the law. I think my experience taught me that the first responsibility of any law enforcement agent is not to enforce the law, it is for they themselves to obey the law...
"A person's experiences teach you a lot that you can make an assumption on.... You know, you are always surprised when you hear about drugs, or, weapons for hostages, and you hear that and your first reaction, perhaps, is to disbelieve it, but over the years it's been proven so many times that it's true....
"I told you the story of when I was in Washington, I got a call from a lawyer, and he wanted to talk to some people from the [Church] committee staff, and his client was [also] a lawyer, so they were trying to layer it, I guess, to protect ...
"But anyway, the deal was, it was a retired CIA agent-and I think I told you this story-about [William] Harvey going into the White House to see Kennedy and how Kennedy was enamored with James Bond and somebody told Kennedy, `[Harvey] is the American James Bond,' and what he did in Cuba and so forth.
"They gave a big going-away party because Harvey's friends thought the Kennedy brothers had really mistreated Harvey [for sending him to Rome after Bay of Pigs].... A terrible meeting ... and one of the-I don't know whether he was a CIA agent at the time or a former CIA agent-he kinda quoted Macbeth and ended up saying, `The blood of the Kennedy brothers will flow in the streets of America for what they've done,' and in less than a year, John Kennedy was assassinated, and then, a couple of years later, of course, Bobby was, too....
"I realized that there were people who I thought were white hat people that were really black hat people."
Following his experience on the Church Committee, Smith returned to Kentucky and became US attorney in Louisville for a second time, appointed toward the end of the Carter administration. That's when he ran into DEA Agent Harold Brown.
"I guess that I would have been naive to think that a DEA agent could be involved in something illegal, because when I was United States attorney I put a heap of stock in those people," Smith said. "I think by and large they are really good people, but I guess you learn that there's a bad apple just about anywhere....
"When I came into the office in 1979, the office was just overwhelmed .... So, I told the assistants that I would help any of them prepare for trial if they had any problems. So we could go on and get our cases tried, so this female assistant came to me and said here's our file, we're going to go to trial next week.
"And I said, `OK, where are your 302s from the agent?"'
A "302" was Justice Department-speak for an agent's report. The female prosecutor told Smith that the agent on the case, DEA Agent Harold Brown, "didn't do 302s."
"What?" Smith asked, surprised.
To Smith, a 302 was a basic necessity of any case. So, he picked up his phone to call Brown, but his prosecutor stopped him.
"Please don't call him," she said. "He scares me."
"Scares you?"
"He hit me," she said.
"What!?" Smith couldn't believe it.
Smith never followed up on the allegation that Harold Brown smacked around the female assistant US attorney. Instead, he went to every agency head to remind them of the importance of drafting 302s for his prosecutors:
"Listen, Secret Service man ... Listen, FBI man ... Listen, DEA agent, this is important..."
When Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in November 1980, Jack Smith's days as US attorney were numbered. In 1981, the same year Harold Brown resigned in disgrace from the DEA, Smith stepped down when a Republican was appointed to his post. Yet, there for a period of time, Smith was in a position to evaluate the sorts of accusations that would follow Harold Brown to the grave. So, did Jack Smith think the drug-trafficking allegations against Brown and Thornton were credible?
"Well, of course, I don't know for sure," he later said. "I don't have any facts to back that up, but that's not what you asked. You asked if it was credible, and yeah, I'd say it's credible."
NEXT STOP: BELIZE.
"I went down there in seventy the first time I went," Johnny Boone said later, referring to his maiden voyage to the only English-speaking country in mainland Latin America, tucked under Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula and just north of Guatemala. "I should have moved there, is what I should have done, but I didn't."
So, Johnny Boone went to the tropics in 1970; that's a year before the state police killed Charlie Stiles. It wouldn't be until 1973 that the name of the country would officially change to Belize from British Honduras.
"Anybody want to go there, work, take a chance and send shit up here could have been a millionaire in a short time. Twenty-five, thirty dollars a pound. Fifty would buy you the very goddamn best. I mean them son of a bitches knew it had to be the best, had to be sinsemilla for fifty dollars a pound."
Boone didn't go there alone, but the full extent of his friendly Belize network will never be known. His partners selected him for his role in the operation because they knew he kept his secrets.
"I can't tell you a lot about down there,"Johnny Boone said, "because there were a couple of guys who were protected and hidden."
What about his first trip to Miami?
"I guess I ain't decided to talk about all that," Boone said.
Despite his hesitance to discuss the topic years later, one could learn from Johnny Boone that he and his silent partners discovered they could buy all the land in Belize they wanted for $10 an acre in 1970. A British tomato company vacating the country left behind whole swaths of farmland that the jungle was quickly overtaking.
"Buy all you want," Boone said. "They was begging some son of a bitch to take it because it wasn't doing nothing but sitting out in the bushes."
Only constant work could keep a piece of land there out of the jungle's grip, as Boone and his partners learned watching an unlikely group of indigenous farmers: the Mennonites. Decades earlier the blond Germanic sect had come to the Yucatan paradise with their antiquated buggies and Dutch wardrobes and turned untended jungle into productive farmland. To have come thousands of miles from Kentucky to Belize and find something as familiar as bearded Mennonite farmers surprised Boone, mad
e him feel at home.
Boone watched the Mennonites work with tractors and earth-moving equipment and let them get used to seeing him around. He finally asked where they bought their heavy machinery. America, a Mennonite told him, and they had to pay for each item three times: once at the dealership, then at the port in New Orleans for export duties and a third time in tariffs when the item arrived in Belize. So, when Boone and his partners needed similar equipment, they followed the Mennonites' example: buying tractors in Kentucky, shipping them from New Orleans and, finally, seeing their tractors and heavy equipment arrive, at a steep cost, in the port at Belize City.
When establishing roots in their new environment, Boone and his partners met with a banker, a white-haired American expatriate, living a comfortable retired life as a money manager in paradise. One of Boone's partners asked the banker directly how he felt about drugs and the escalating American war against them. In response, the man reached out and grabbed a pitcher of water that had been sitting on a table between himself and Boone's associates. He tipped the pitcher and filled a glass half-full with water.' hen he filled a second glass half-full with water. He set the pitcher down, picked up the second glass and poured it into the first, so that the water filled the glass to the rim.' he lifted the pitcher a second time and filled the now-empty glass half-full of water again.
"Now I may hate this water," the banker said. "But here comes more of it."
As Johnny Boone watched, the banker took the half-full glass and poured it into the already-full glass, causing water to spill across the table.
"No matter how hard I try to stop this water, there will always be more. You see out there?" The banker pointed out his window, which offered a long view deep into the jungle. "The Indians out there run naked until they are ten or eleven years old. They don't have anything except what they can grow, and they will grow it. And if it gets caught, they'll grow more and send that, too."