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

by James Higdon

  "I said, `You know, I'm trying to get to the bottom of it. Who the hell wants to die around here?'

  "I sent them one more message. I said, `Look, think about it. You talking about all this killing shit. You need to shut the fuck up. Go on and have yourself a life, motherfuckers. Stay home with your girlfriend and stop talking about all this shit.'

  "But it upset them to see that blood come out of one of them. And they thought, `My God, somebody's killing us.' So I asked them to think about that fact.

  "You know, some people talk and play about this or do that ... but the real deal is when grown men kill each other. If you kill someone, that's it; they're not going to live no more. That's a different world."

  On top of the drama spurred on by these killings, another man died in the Fifth Wheel as he tried to pay his bar tab with a check.

  "If this check is cold,"Joe Downs said, "I'm going to kill you."

  Downs never had the chance; the man had a heart attack and dropped to the floor. Downs hopped over the bar and pulled the man up onto the bowling machine to beat on his chest.

  "Is he dead?" someone asked.

  "Fuck yeah, he's dead," Downs said.

  When Downs turned around, he realized he had been speaking to Father Schwartz, who had arrived just in time to administer last rites.

  Raywick was turning darker and more ruthless than ever before, largely because of the twin stress inducers: law enforcement and cocaine. The cocaine supercharged the already wild side of Raywick. But even with such visible and noisy offenses, state police detectives and federal agents were unable to unravel the secret and complicated world of Raywick, which they knew was the headquarters for a nationwide network of marijuana production and distribution. They had attacked the drug network on the roads and from the sky, but had they done any good?

  One by one, every law enforcement branch in the state had taken a crack at Raywick: the detectives stationed at the KSP post in Columbia, undercover narcotics officers working out of headquarters in Frankfort, pilots flying at least three sorts of aircraft, the National Guard, even the DEA and FBI agents in Louisville. And still Raywick and the rest of Marion County remained open for business.

  So, in January 1984, Detective Mike Moulton, commander of Kentucky State Police Special Investigations Unit, decided it was time for his squad to do the job that no other agency could do. Special Investigations, headquartered in Louisville and then consisting of seventeen detectives and two sergeants, specialized in organized crime, political corruption, white-collar crime and prostitution. It was a crack squad of investigators with experience unraveling sophisticated urban and suburban criminal syndicates but with zero experience past the city limits, where the concrete ended and the hills began. Now Detective Moulton had caught wind of these organized hillbilly outlaws and wanted their scalps on his wall.

  "Why Marion County?" Steve Lowery, editor of the Lebanon Enterprise, asked Moulton in an interview six months later.

  "Why Marion County?" Moulton repeated softly, smiling to himself before answering. "One reason was notoriety," he finally said. "Marion County is the prime place to grow marijuana in the state. We wanted to try to get involved with that group of people and gather information."

  At the beginning of February, a new bar opened in Lebanon in a long-dormant building on the corner of Water and Depot Streets. The out-of-towners who seemed to own the bar hoisted a sign into place one day and ran an ad in the Enterprise announcing the grand opening ofTom Foolery's. When people stopped in to see the new place, they found the three strangers running it.

  "Lebanon is a small community where everybody knows everybody else," Moulton said. "That made it a lot harder. When we were given an opportunity to work in the bar, we took our time getting to know people and getting accepted.... The officers sat around and listened and made friends and that's all. We were just listening. After a while, we put the word out. Slowly, of course, but we let it be known that we were interested in making some buys."

  As Sunday church bells rang on April 15, one of Moulton's detectives decided to dip his toe into the Marion County underworld by buying liquor on Sunday at Votaw's Grocery in St. Mary's. At 3:40 p.m., the detective walked into Votaw's, and there were about a dozen people there, some sitting at a table, others at the game machines and some playing pool. Jimmy Votaw was working behind the counter when the detective asked to buy a Pepsi and a half-pint of whisky.

  Votaw told him that the ABC had raided the grocery last week, so he had to keep the whisky across the street. Votaw went outside and returned with three bottles of Very Old Barton. He put one on the counter for the detective and tucked the others behind the scales at the deli counter. The detective paid him $3.50 and left.

  Five days later the detective was ready for a bigger score. He met a small-time dealer and tried to buy a pound of marijuana from him just past midnight at the Golden Horseshoe Club for $150. Later, at 1:45 a.m., the short, overweight twenty-four-year-old with a mullet met the detective in the Jane Todd parking lot, gave him a small sack of marijuana and returned $130-turning the transaction into a misdemeanor, barely more illegal than buying liquor on a Sunday. The mullet-headed dealer told the undercover detective he could get the pound in the morning.

  The next day the detective met the dealer again at the Jane Todd parking lot, where the dealer handed the detective a pound of low-grade marijuana for $150.

  "I've got thirteen more pounds ready to go," the dealer said. "If you've got the money."

  Five days later the dealer came into Tom Foolery's to tell the detective he had more marijuana than he could handle.

  "I've got about two hundred pounds, and I'm selling it at bargain prices. I'll sell you five pounds for three hundred dollars."

  The detective agreed and followed the dealer to his sister's house, where the siblings showed the detective five large garbage bags filled with marijuana in the sister's bedroom closet. As the dealer was pulling buds from the large bag into a small bag for the detective, his sister's nine-yearold daughter watched from the doorway.

  "Don't worry about her," he said. "She's seen more marijuana than most grownups."

  The detective gave him the money, took the marijuana and left.

  "Of course, when you start buying drugs you expect the word to get around that you're a cop. That always happens when you start making buys," Moulton would later say. "But what happened in Lebanon wasn't the usual `Hey, these guys are nares!' kind of thing.

  "We started getting rumors about our people being burned around the first of May. At first we weren't sure how serious it was. Then it started getting heavy. One of our men was told that if he ever showed his face in Raywick again, it would be the last time he ever showed his face anywhere. Then the threats started to get more frequent. One of the detectives who works this county got wind of threats on the lives of the officers in the operation. When you start hearing serious talk about killing police officers, it's time to consider pulling out."

  And that's exactly what Moulton did in the first week of May, just days before Swale won the 110th Kentucky Derby and ten days before Terry Williams shot Ronnie Ellis. They kept Tom Foolery's open for a few weeks after the three detectives had bugged out, but then they shuttered it for good.

  "It was just starting to get successful.... We were just starting to get some really good information when we had to pull out."

  Information gleaned from the three months Moulton's men spent at Tom Foolery's led to the arrests of five Marion County residents-two on marijuana charges, two on cocaine charges, and Jimmy Votaw on charges of selling liquor on Sunday. Six months after the arrests, Detective Mike Moulton still wondered how his investigation had been compromised. He couldn't understand how Marion County had seen straight through Tom Foolery's.

  "I don't know how we got burnt. I can't figure it out. I don't know why the whole thing went sour."

  TWENTY-NINE YEARS AFTER THE ARRIVAL OF THE REVEREND DERoHAN IN 1790, a second Irish priest reached the Ca
tholic settlements in the land that would become Marion County-the Reverend William Byrne from County Wicklow, who saw the need for an educational institution among the settlements and founded a school for fifty boys on a farm at St. Mary's, which included in its charter class a young John Martin Spalding, the future archbishop of Baltimore, a youth who demonstrated such natural intelligence that he taught his classmates mathematics when he was fifteen.

  After running the school for twelve years and educating some twelve hundred students, Byrne put the St. Mary's school into the hands of a band of French Jesuits. But after an argument with Bishop Flaget in Bardstown, the Jesuits left St. Mary's for the newly founded Fordham University in the Bronx-yet another example of in-fighting within the church hierarchy in Kentucky to the detriment of the flock. In the end, Bishop Flaget's two greatest accomplishments were running out of Kentucky the founders of Fordham and Notre Dame Universities. And they didn't leave with mixed feelings: Father Badin left Louisville chanting the Dies Irae, the Latin song of death, while the Jesuits were known to have said on their way out of St. Mary's: "Nothing good would come from Kentucky."

  After the departure of the Society of Jesus, care of the college at St. Mary's fell into the hands of the Resurrectionists, an order headquartered in Kitchener, Ontario. Through the nineteenth century, the Resurrectionists educated a number of notable luminaries, clergy, governors and congressmen at St. Mary's, including J. Proctor Knott, who used his St. Mary's education to deliver one of Congress's most famous sarcastic speeches ever, a ripsnorter about the proposed funding for a railroad to Duluth, Minnesota.The New York Times headlined his obituary:

  PROCTOR KNOTT, WIT OF POLITICS, IS DEAD

  Former Congressman and Governor of Kentucky Passes Away at 82, Leaving a Widow.

  SPEECH ON DULUTH A CLASSIC

  His Satire on Promoters of a Railroad In the Northwest Attracted Attention Across the Country.

  ... Although he was later to become governor of Kentucky, it was as a Democratic representative in Congress, to which he was first elected in 1866, that he made his famous Duluth speech, for which he will-probably be longer remembered than for any ofhis more serious efforts. It was practically his introduction to Congress, but it lingers in the traditions of that body as one of the most keenly humorous satires ever delivered. One can't go to Duluth today without hearing the story of it...

  "Where is the patriot who is willing that his country shall incur the peril of remaining another day without the amplest railroad connection with such an inexhaustible mine of agricultural wealth?" Knott said from the floor of the House of Representatives.

  "I was utterly at a loss to determine where the terminus of this great and indispensable road should be until I accidentally overheard some gentleman the other day mention the name of Duluth. Duluth! The word fell upon my ear with a peculiar and indescribable charm-like the gentle murmurs of a low fountain stealing forth in the midst of roses, or the soft sweet accents of an angel's whisper in the bright, joyous dream of sleeping innocence. Duluth! Twas the name for which my soul had panted for years as the hart panteth for the waterbrook. But where was

  Another noteworthy St. Mary's alumnus, John Lancaster Spalding, nephew to Archbishop John Martin Spalding, became an archbishop himself, presiding over the diocese of Peoria, Illinois. The New York Times headlined his obituary:

  BISHOP SPALDING DIES IN 77TH YEAR

  Roman Catholic Prelate of Peoria, Ill., Was Once Chancellor of New York Diocese.

  AN AUTHORITY ON LABOR

  One of the Arbitrators Chosen by President Roosevelt in the Coal Strike of 1902.

  St. Mary's continued to educate young men through the twentieth century, bringing aspiring priests by train into the wilderness of Marion County from Chicago, Milwaukee and beyond. A young Jerry Eifler came from Louisville.

  "When I decided I wanted to be a priest, I entered St. Mary's College in 1953 in the fall to study in Latin," Eifler later said.

  "My days at St. Mary's College were very positive because I had the opportunity to make lifelong friends with a number of people.' he unique thing about St. Mary's was that it was very poor.' here were no frills, and if anything was to be done, whether it be athletics, or art, or theater or music, it had to be done by the students."

  The world outside the 150-acre campus did not exist for its students. Newspapers were censored by the priests before students could see them, and no one was allowed to venture off campus, certainly not into Lebanon.

  "We could not leave the seminary property from when we got there in September until we went home for Christmas," Eifler recalled.

  What about the wild side of Marion County?

  "We knew nothing about it."

  The students' only exposure to the greater community was through the staff who worked at the college.

  "Billy Elder was the head of food service," Eifler remembered. "He was from St. Mary's town, and he and his quote-unquote `staff' would cook our meals for us. Of course, Billy was a known drunk. It wouldn't be unusual at all for Billy to serve-and he did, a number of times-he'd go into the cupboard and get out the large gallon cans of what he thought was fruit cocktail and put it in a bowl and serve it to us as dessert. Where, in reality, it was mixed vegetables.

  "And his menus were quite varied and unusual, to say the least.... We suspect that it might be wild game or varmint, but it wasn't. Once he got through with a chicken, you weren't quite sure where he got it."

  After Vatican II, when Latin was no longer a clerical requirement, and after the pope declared that each diocese should have its own seminary, enrollment at St. Mary's continued to atrophy, another victim of diocesan mismanagement. What finally killed it off for good?

  "A number of things," said Eifler. "After we graduated, if you were going to go on and do any graduate work, you had to have your degree validated by additional classes by an acceptable school, except for Catholic University in Washington, D.C., but no other reputable institution would do that because [St. Mary's] had some type of accreditation, but it wasn't full accreditation.

  "Then, when the Archdiocese of Louisville opened its seminary in 1961, or thereabouts, all the seminarians from the archdiocese were transferred from St. Mary's to St. Thomas in Louisville."

  The archdiocese sunk $800,000 into its new seminary at St. Thomas when it already had a perfectly good one at St. Mary's, and St. Thomas closed fewer than ten years after it opened. St. Mary's finally shut its own gates in 1975, 154 years after its foundation by the Reverend Byrne and the "no good will come from Kentucky" Jesuits.

  In a strange turn, the property of the seminary was purchased by an eccentric millionaire, Ken Keyes (whose surname rhymes with eyes or thighs), a man born into money, married first at twenty and stricken with polio at twenty-five, which left him nearly quadriplegic-an affliction that did not stop Keyes from enjoying multiple sexual partners from his electric wheelchair.

  In Berkeley, California, in the late 1960s, Keyes founded the "Living Love Center" in an old fraternity house. There he taught a New Age "method" of removing the jealousy inherent in multipartner sexual relationships, a field in which Keyes was an expert, having been married and divorced twice already.

  Looking for a larger property to accommodate his growing following, Keyes saw an ad for a college campus on 150 acres in the middle of Kentucky, and he bought it in 1977, bringing with him about seventy-five staff members, workshop attendees and assorted weirdoes who raised the eyebrows of even back-to-the-land hippies like Steve and Susan Lowery of Raywick.

  Keyes renamed the college the Cornucopia Institute, and the place that once educated governors and archbishops now tied students' wrists together in mixed-sex pairs, and together they would lead their lives and attend workshops for two weeks while literally bound together, each doing everything with the other-sleeping, eating and defecating.

  The neighbors who remembered the finely mannered young men once schooled at St. Mary's could hardly conceive of what was happening in
those classroom buildings now. Occasionally one of the Cornucopia people knocked on someone's door to ask if there was any work he or she could do and then refused payment for his or her time.

  No one could quite figure them out. They were either a crazy cult or a bunch of drug-using freaks or both-but Keyes expressly forbade drug use at Cornucopia. The institute served no alcohol during its open-tothe-public events, and Keyes would later forbid his followers to engage in sex, while he pleasured one young woman after another-with his tongue, one assumes, because he was paralyzed from the neck down-in his specially designed bed.

  This sort of thing continued for five years before Cornucopia shuttered in 1982, leaving the once-proud St. Mary's College empty again, leaving the next chapter of St. Mary's to be written by J. Clifford Todd.

  A former epidemiologist, public health official, cattle breeder, gentleman farmer, property developer and avid long-distance runner and cyclist, Todd found himself by chance in the prison-building business, setting into motion a series of events that would turn St. Mary's College into the first private prison in America "by three years," according to Todd.

  No one locally wanted the once-great St. Mary's turned into a prison. A prison was a place you went to, not a place that came to your town. Under normal circumstances, Cliff Todd would have never succeeded, but in Reagan's first term, the unemployment rate in Marion County climbed to 20 percent. A prison meant prisoners, but it also meant jobs. Any last lingering hope of the archdiocese reinvigorating the property was dashed by the news in the July 28, 1982, edition of the Enterprise that the archdiocese gave as a gift to Mother Teresa the chalice from the St. Mary's chapel.