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

by James Higdon

  Pastures were so burnt that there was no clover or grass for cattle to eat, forcing farmers to feed them the hay they had been storing for the winter. Of the county's seventy thousand acres of pastureland, 50 percent of it was dead. In the blistering heat, the cattle had stopped eating anyway, forcing farmers to sell more than six hundred head of livestock to slaughter by August.

  Lebanon's railroad tracks, long since abandoned by the regular train traffic that had given Lebanon its early vitality, had one last use. To combat the drought, trains rolled into town loaded with hay from ranchers out West, who were returning the favor of Kentucky farmers sending them hay during bad western winters. Like a scene from a half-century before, farmers lined Water Street in downtown Lebanon with their flatbed trailers to load as much hay as they could for their starving herds. Families brought their children to watch.

  The tobacco crops, more easily irrigated than cornfields because the plots are smaller, still returned the lowest yields in decades. All across the middle of America, stretching north to Indiana and west to Missouri, states began asking for federal relief because of the worst drought in fifty years.

  By the beginning of August, only twelve hundred marijuana plants had been found and uprooted in Marion County. By the same point in the growing season a year before, the state police had found thousands and thousands of plants in the farmland surrounding Lebanon; in 1981, Marion County had played host to the largest single marijuana bust in the state's history; in 1980, state police had found forty-five acres of marijuana in Marion County in a single week. In the historic drought of 1983, all they were finding were small clusters of poorly grown, badly nourished pot.

  "The marijuana we're finding, most of it anyway, looks like it's been planted by people who don't know what they're doing," a state police detective told the Lebanon Enterprise in August. "They're hoping it will grow and that they can make some money off of it, but they haven't taken care of it."

  So, had the state police, combined with drought conditions, solved Marion County's marijuana problem? Sheriff Eddie Masterson didn't think so.

  "I can't believe that large-scale cultivation is all gone," the sheriff said.

  He was right. A week later two Marion County men, both named Mattingly, were caught in Hart County, sixty miles west, on a farm with seven thousand plants valued by police at $12 million-or $27.3 million in 2011 dollars.

  The next week the state police uprooted 750 "very healthy" plants, all of them at least eight feet tall, growing three miles outside Raywick on Hazy Downs Road. The tall, green female plants had been well fertilized and irrigated by a system connected to the water supply of a nearby home. In the house, the raiding team found a handgun, a semiautomatic .22 rifle, a fully loaded 12-gauge shotgun and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. They also found a vast array of plant foods and a "virtual library on how to grow marijuana."

  This fresh bust on Hazy Downs Road reinvigorated the state police, and they redoubled their marijuana-hunting efforts. On top of the drought, the marijuana growers began to feel the heat from the police. Charlie Downs, Joe's older brother, still lived on a piece of the family farm, not far from where the 750 plants were found. Charlie decided it would be a good idea to go ahead and harvest those still-standing marijuana plants, even if they hadn't fully matured, before the police harvested them for him.

  During the next week of blazing August heat in 1983, while the state police found and destroyed more than 2,100 plants scattered in small clusters around the county, Charlie Downs and his crew began chopping down his well-irrigated but immature twelve-foot plants.

  "They had a truckload of marijuana,"Joe Downs said later. "And they had a bunch of boys back there in the bushes a-stripping, and then they were bringing it out and laying it out on the plastic out here in the fields. And a'copter went over and seen that."

  By now in the game played between cops and growers, the state police had gained a psychological advantage over the growers; no longer did Charlie Downs and others like him feel safe on their home turf.

  As soon as the helicopter flew over, Charlie Downs ordered his workers to load up one last truckload of marijuana. He looked at the pile of pot they didn't have room for in their trucks-pounds of it laid out to dry on sheets of black plastic-and then the helicopter turned around for a second pass.

  "They dumped a pile of marijuana out," Joe Downs recalled, "and dumped a bucket of diesel on it and set it on fire."

  In the sun-scorched field, the fire quickly found more than the marijuana to burn. The flames spread fast across the brown grass of the pasture, toward a barn and the deep forest on the back edge of Downs's property known as the Cameron Woods, which many claimed to be haunted. Downs hopped into his truck to go dump its valuable contents somewhere safe so he could rush back to his burning field. In those nearby woods, he knew he had bigger problems than just the pot or the fire.

  When he returned, eight members of the Loretto Volunteer Fire Department had responded to the grass fire on his farm at the woods' edge, and Charlie Downs didn't want anyone, even the local firemen, looking in Cameron Woods.

  Three weeks before, a semi-truck trailer belonging to a trucking contractor for General Electric had disappeared in Louisville, along with fifty-four clothes dryers and 180 air conditioners. Most of those air conditioners and a couple of the dryers had found their way from Louisville to Raywick and down into "haunted" Cameron Woods.

  In order to keep the firefighters from entering the woods, Charlie Downs charged at them with his truck. As the eight men tried to contain the spreading brush fire, they had to keep dodging Downs's pickup. In one pass, the pickup sideswiped the fire engine and nearly ran over two firefighters as they held the hose.

  "He lost momentary control," Johnny Boone remembered, "which is a Downs asset."

  A firefighter on the scene radioed the police dispatcher to ask for a state trooper to come and arrest the man attacking them with his pickup. But, at that precise moment, all available police units were responding to another emergency: A crazy woman outside Loretto had been in a standoff with the police for more than four hours, armed with a hunting rifle and a razor blade.

  The dispatcher told the firefighter there were no units available and asked if it was a life-threatening situation. The firefighter said no.

  When Charlie Downs realized that the firemen wouldn't leave after barely flinching as he almost killed a few of them, he drove away hatching another plan. Just minutes later he returned and fired a shotgun into the air. That almost made the firefighters quit with the job half-done.

  Later that night a sheriff's deputy came and arrested Charlie Downs, charging him with wanton endangerment and leaving the scene of an accident. In the process, the deputy also found 180 air conditioners, still in their boxes and worth about $20,000, in the woods behind Downs's house. Downs spent the night in jail, posted his $1,000 bail the next morning and received a September court date. By the time he sprang himself from jail, word of his pickup ride had spread across town. Everyone had questions.

  When Downs stopped for groceries at Higdon's Key Market, coowner Jimmy Higdon (the author's father) wanted to know more about it.

  "What's that I heard about your truck, Charlie?" Higdon asked.

  "I've learned a valuable lesson," Downs told him. "Always be careful who you lend your truck to."

  At his trial, Charlie Downs stuck to his "someone borrowed my truck" defense, which created enough reasonable doubt with the Marion County jury to win his acquittal, confirming to the state police what they already knew: The only way to get charges to stick against someone from Marion County was to take him to federal court.

  In the autumn of 1983, the federal courthouse in Louisville sent another batch of Marion County men to federal prison for their part in a massive marijuana-growing operation in Hart County. The group included the nephew of a former Republican governor. Police considered the haul to be the largest marijuana bust in the state's history, obliterating the record set in
Marion County in 1981.

  In November, the Supreme Court affirmed the hard line taken against Marion County by the Kentucky State Police and the US Attorney's Office in Louisville with its ruling in Oliver v. the United States.

  Police had arrested Ray Oliver, a Kentucky farmer, for growing marijuana after officers hopped his locked fence, ignored his No TRESPASSING and KEEP OUT signs and dismissed verbal warnings from someone on the property to "get out"-all without a warrant. In the field, the police found a marijuana patch. Then they went to a judge, obtained a warrant and arrested Oliver. Although he claimed the police had violated his Fourth Amendment rights, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 against him, forever limiting the privacy rights of all property owners for the sake of the war on pot.

  By the autumn of 1983, thirty federal court cases in the western district of Kentucky had been postponed, awaiting the Supreme Court's decision. Of those thirty cases, seventeen came from Marion County. Of those seventeen, Elmer George represented twelve. He considered the Oliver ruling "an erosion of people's rights."

  "When Reagan gets through with the Supreme Court," George told the Lebanon Enterprise, "people won't have any rights."

  Between the increased powers granted to the state police by the Supreme Court, the increased funds for aerial surveillance granted to the DEA and the National Guard and the five-to-ten-year prison sentences imposed by the US district court system, Marion County's outlaw culture began to feel the steady encroachment of the overwhelming power of the federal government.

  In Raywick, all the recreational outlaws, the hard partiers and weekend warriors began to stay away. After the crowd thinned, the locals and professional outlaws remained to do business with big-money buyers. The intense scrutiny of the police and pressure of federal prison sentences began to crack the foundations already loosened by the influx of cocaine since 1980.

  There had always been guns, shootings and a crazy streak in Raywick. In the April 5,1882, edition of the Lebanon Standard and Times, the paper ran these Raywick headlines:

  RELIGIOUS.

  Last Sunday being Palm Sunday and a lovely day, there was a large congregation in attendance at High Mass at St. Francis Xavier's Church.

  GONE CRAZY.

  'Squire Skaggs, of Scott's Ridge, reports that "Doctor" David Alvey, of Clear Creek Valley, has gone crazy, and has taken to the forest with his gun.

  Until the mid-1980s, these strands of devout piety and "gone crazy" gunplay somehow coexisted in relative peace. The warning shots, parting shots and otherwise recreational gunfire, both indoors and out, rarely resulted in death, although celebratory gunfire had kept Father Clarence Schwartz awake in the St. Xavier rectory more nights than he could have ever counted. But murder was rare.

  By July 1984, that was no longer the case. Within the first six months of that year, four people murdered four victims in Raywick, a place with a total population of two hundred. In addition to the four murders, there was a fatal heart attack in the Fifth Wheel, leaving 2.5 percent of Raywick's population dead with noteworthy exits.

  The trend began on Friday, January 13, at 3:15 a.m., when seventy-oneyear-old Jack Lamkin shot and killed twenty-five-year-old Billy Downs in Lamkin's house on the back street in Raywick. Downs, a bartender at the Fifth Wheel, had moved in with Lamkin after his trailer had burned down a few months before. A third man, Gene Rogers, also lived there.

  Billy Downs, nephew to Joe and Charlie, had grown like the other Downs men-big and tall. Billy was six-foot-five, weighed three hundred pounds and used his size to bully some people, whereas other folks thought he "wouldn't hurt a fly." Some of the girls had nicknamed him "Meat." On the last night of his life, Downs came home at 2:30 a.m. Friday morning after working the Thursday night bartending shift at the Fifth Wheel in Raywick. He was drunk and not finished partying. He flipped on the lights, turned on the radio and told seventy-one-year-old Lamkin to wake up and dance. As they were dancing, Downs picked up a 12-gauge shotgun and aimed it at the old man. Lamkin left the room and came back with his own 12-gauge shotgun.

  "If you want to play with guns," Downs said to Lamkin, "I'll show

  In reply, Lamkin aimed and shot, firing a deer slug into the left side of Downs's chest between his breast and armpit. Downs flew backward, slammed into the wall behind him and dropped into a seated position on the floor, leaving a blood trail down the wall. He was alive when he landed but died within minutes.

  Gene Rogers, who had witnessed the whole incident, sprinted out of the house looking for help. He crossed the churchyard and banged on the front door of the rectory. A sleepy Father Clarence Schwartz answered. Rogers told him to come quick. When Father Schwartz arrived at the trailer, he knelt beside Downs and administered his last rites.

  Charlie Bickett had just closed up Squire's Tavern when he heard the shot a block away and saw Gene Rogers run for the priest. Bickett followed Father Schwartz and saw Downs, dead where he sat, still holding his shotgun, the blood trail still fresh on the wall. Then the ambulance arrived. Johnny Boone learned the news from the prison grapevine: Old Jack Lamkin shot Billy Downs dead.

  Following the shooting, an old-fashioned family feud nearly erupted in Raywick between the Lamkin family and the Downs family. Tommy Downs, Billy's father, wanted to kill old Jack Lamkin and any other Lamkin who didn't like it, but Joe Downs managed to mediate between the two sides to keep anyone else from getting killed. Everyone knew how Billy could be, so maybe he had gone too far.

  Not long after, old Jack Lamkin pulled a knife on someone in the Fifth Wheel. Jimmy Thomas, who co-owned the Wheel with Joe Downs, jumped over the bar and snatched the knife from the old man's hand.

  "Not everybody's as slow as Billy Downs," Thomas said and then kicked the old man out.

  Just a few weeks later in Raywick, a local man killed his mother and held his father and brother hostage with a deer rifle during a schizophrenic fit. After a few hours, the state police disarmed him and sent him off to the state mental hospital for a few weeks.

  Four months later, on Saturday, May 12, seven days after Laffit Pincay Jr. rode Swale to victory in the 110th Kentucky Derby, Raywick chalked up its third murder of the year when thirty-three-year-old Terry Williams shot twenty-seven-year-old Ronnie Ellis. Both men were in the marijuana business, although the killing wasn't work-related at all; it was personal.

  Ronnie Ellis had first made a name for himself in October 1981, when he and two other Marion County men were arrested in Atlantic City, New Jersey, while delivering fifty pounds of Kentucky marijuana.

  "They made such a fuckup of what they did,"Johnny Boone recalled.

  When the men arrived at the buyer's house, they discovered he wasn't home. Instead of waiting for him, Ellis kicked in his door, and someone called the police. Soon after, the Galloway Township Police Department arrested Ellis and his two fellow Marion County men after discovering fifty pounds of Kentucky Bluegrass in the trunk, along with two loaded handguns, brass knuckles and a few knives.

  "It used to be that money was forgiven if there was a bust-a real bust ... to help you get going again on your feet because you suffered the bust and didn't rat," Boone later said. "But they didn't do it that way. They went up there fucked up on coke and bullshit pills, and they went to the man to receive the pot, and he wasn't home. I'm guessing they probably went at the wrong time. Then they broke in the goddamn house door, and the cops got called immediately. They tried to break in to put it in there!"

  Each man made $200,000 bail, and none of the charges against them stuck. So, Ronnie Ellis returned home, where he married Terry Williams's sister and promptly began beating her. Finally she divorced him for her own safety, but Ellis told her he planned on killing her and her whole family.

  When Terry Williams finally met Ellis face-to-face in front of the Fifth Wheel in Raywick at 7:00 p.m. on Saturday, May 12, 1984, it was time for one of them to kill the other. Ellis stepped out of his car holding a brass-knuckle knife with a ten-inch blade.

  "Pills,
coke, I guess he was juiced to the max," Johnny Boone later said about Ronnie Ellis. "He was going to dare Terry to kill him, I guess is what he did."

  Joe Downs reached behind the bar and handed Terry Williams the gun he kept there.

  "I was in the pen, and they tell me he ran at him to stab him," Boone recalled. "Big old commando knife with brass knucks on them."

  When Ellis charged Williams with his knife, Williams blew him away, then handed the gun back to Downs, who surrendered it to the police when they arrested Williams two hours later.

  A month later a thirty-one-year-old Raywick native killed a nineteenyear-old Raywick man riding a red Honda motorcycle. The older man intentionally hit the motorcycle with his truck, knocked the teenager rider off and shot him in the head with a .22 pistol. To hide his tracks, he cut the dirt bike up into pieces and hid them in the woods, disposing of the body somewhere else. When police found parts of the motorcycle, the older man confessed and pointed police to the body.

  As sensational as that killing was, the death of Ronnie Ellis was the one that really sent shock waves through the outlaw world. Suddenly the young cowboys realized they could die just as easily as anyone else. The only thing that would make them feel secure again was to kill Terry Williams.

  "Some group members, they were good boys, they could kill male [hemp plants], they chopped out weeds, they could trim, they all said, 'OK, we're going to kill Terry Williams now."' Johnny Boone remembered. "I was sitting in prison, and a man was coming to see me in prison each week, telling me this.

  "I said, `Go back and tell those boys they aren't going to kill nobody without climactic consequences,"' Boone said he told his visitor. "Terry was one of our main men, and they were saying they were going to kill him. I really liked those boys, but I told him, `Enough of that shit, because a smart person asks the question, Do you want to get killed?'