by James Higdon
When Johnny Boone returned home from prison in the autumn of 1984, he did not yet understand the far-reaching implications of President Reagan's new drug-fighting policy. Washington politics was not his primary focus. While locked away on the Belize deal, time on the outside had stopped for Boone. He saw family and visitors regularly and received news from the prison grapevine, such as about the death of Ronnie Ellis, but like any ex-convict returning home, Boone found the world around him to be not as he remembered it: Things at home had changed.
Before he had gone to prison, he had seen cocaine around, used mostly by higher-ups with Florida connections, but it hadn't yet exploded onto the wider market. When he drove his truck into Raywick for the first time since his release, Johnny Boone discovered that cocaine had blasted through Marion County like a snowplow, leaving in its wake the remains of the benevolent moonshine culture that had once been the linchpin for generations of good-ol'-boy outlaws. Cocaine had magnified the wild nature of Marion County while stripping it of its humility and cunningtempting fate at both ends.
Raywick had always maintained a cartoon level of excitement and violence; cocaine put that cartoon on fast-forward, changing Johnny Boone's world so dramatically that it left him, to some degree, in denial:
"I honestly never seen [cocaine] on a farm, but my own men now tell me that it was probably there. I don't believe it," Boone recalled. "I didn't see it; I didn't see nobody acting batshit crazy, but they said maybe so."
Yet, despite his uncertainty about whether his workers had been using cocaine without his knowledge, Boone held a clear understanding of the new drug's effect on his business:
"I can tell you it is a death blow to a [marijuana] farm. Anybody can tell you that," Boone said. "Makes people go fucking nuts right in the middle of everything going on. Makes people get their guns out-for no reason except they've done the coke and they've got so paranoid. Paranoid about the sun coming up. Paranoid about all the partners stealing their part, but they're sitting there watching it, but they're paranoid. They get an idea up in their head.
"You know what it is? A lot of them fucked someone before, and now they're worried that they're going to get fucked. That's what puts that shit in there. Projection. That's why they have all them nightmares. Vampires coming at you because you're a vampire yourself. That coke actually fucked up quite a few good deals for good people on them farms.
"It infiltrated Bobby Joe's system very much."
Johnny Boone wasn't the only one watching cocaine take hold. Steve Lowery, the newspaper editor, saw it, too:
"On Leap Year Night, February 29," Lowery said later, "my buddy was playing harp for a band that was playing at Bickett's, and I got behind the bar with Charlie.' was right after cocaine was introduced.' his was right after Mike Hall got elected [in a judge's race] because I supported Spragens.
"Joe Keith came in, and he was rockin' and rollin'. He sat down and put out two great big lines of coke, and he said, `Let's do it.'
"I said, `Man, this is not the place or the time. Thank you, but no thank you.'
"He started cussing me, calling me `cocksucker,"Spragens' blah blah blah.
"I said, `I'm not going to talk politics with you, either. I'm here to celebrate my two friends' birthdays.'
"Squire Bickett comes in ... he and I got along famously. He and Charlie started jumping Joe Keith's shit. Well, about that time, Shewmaker walks in, and he's wired up, too. And these guys are both ready to rock and roll. I was behind the bar, fortunately, and there was a back way out. I'm thinking, `I gotta grab my jacket at the first opportunity and exit right,' because it was about to get ugly.
"I got along great with Jimmy ... he was the best-looking of them. Nice guy, though. One of those snowy winters ... my wife with our two little baby girls in the back in car seats, she goes off in the ditch, out in the cold. He happened to come up on them. He hooked them up, pulled them out of the ditch, wouldn't take any money for it. That was the thing....
"These people were very kind. There's a real human side to these people. People like to demonize folks who are in this particular industry. They're no different from people that grow tobacco unless they're doing really serious drugs."
In order to evade law enforcement, marijuana growers relied on legitimate farmers allowing them to grow a certain number of plants mixed into the farmers' cornfields. The marijuana man would usually pay a farmer a good-faith deposit; the farmer would plant his corn, and the grower would go in behind him and plant marijuana, either in the cornrows or in the balk between the rows. At the end of the season, the marijuana would be taken away to market, and the marijuana man would be responsible for bringing the straight farmer his cut of the deal, which was usually around $10,000. It was a system that worked well for years, but it depended upon the farmers' trust in the integrity of the marijuana men, once an honorable lot, until "really serious drugs" came and ruined half of them.
For a few months after returning home, Johnny Boone tried to address some of the problems he kept hearing about, especially regarding Shewmaker's crew, by trying to talk to one of his old friends, J. C. Abell. But Boone had trouble getting Abell to pay attention.
In the early 1980s, J. C. Abell had been a reliable marijuana man, working in partnerships with many in the same line of work, including Johnny Boone in the 1981 field that was busted by the DEA's V-tailed plane and during the ride of the Black Bandit, when Boone and Abell had been cohorts. But when Boone went away to federal prison, J. C. Abell gravitated toward Bobby Joe Shewmaker and his endless supply of cocaine, becoming by 1986 no longer an independent operator but rather an integral part of Bobby Joe's system, which was a completely different operation from Johnny Boone's operation or any of a dozen working independently from the others.
Several farmers came to Johnny Boone to complain that Abell owed them money for doing their part. This sort of discontent bred disharmony in a network that depended on everyone keeping his word so that everyone else would keep his secrets. Cocaine turned once-reasonable men into ego-driven narcissists with little regard for the consequences of their fastliving behavior. Johnny Boone recognized it as bad for business. Cocaine was unraveling the delicate marijuana network that Boone had spent fifteen years helping to create.
Boone knew that if he didn't act quickly, that network would be damaged beyond repair. When he had the chance, he took J. C. Abell aside and told him Abell needed to pay the farmers whom he had stiffed from the previous year, but Abell didn't even acknowledge Boone other than to say goodbye or hello. The cocaine, in addition to rotting his mind and inflating his ego, had clogged Abell's ears. Johnny Boone needed to do something dramatic to get his attention.
"We ... had it out in the doorway of Bickett's bar," Johnny Boone recalled. "Same ol'shit, went bad.
"A month or two later, still nothing straightened out. Nobody come sit down and said, `OK, we can try to do this this week, something else next month.'There was no good talk about nothing.
"I said, `Fuck."'
Right at the end of that "month or two," Billy Thompson, a Raywick war veteran, died and joined his wife, Yun Sun Pok Thompson, in the Raywick cemetery. Due to Thompson's military service, Ft. Knox sent an army chaplain to Marion County to conduct the funeral rite alongside Father Clarence Schwartz in the cemetery where Charlie and Paul Stiles, the grandfathers of a new generation of outlaws, had been buried in 1971 and 1979, respectively.
From the back of the assembled mourners, Johnny Boone kept an eye on Abell, who befriended the army chaplain, a sandy-haired military man in his forties. After the services concluded, Abell offered the chaplain a ride back into town in his red Corvette.
Whereas J. C. Abell and many others began driving Corvettes as soon as they could afford them, Johnny Boone always drove a sturdy Chevrolet pickup, no matter how much money he made. His truck blended into its agricultural surroundings. If an IRS agent began asking questions, what excuse did Abell, a man without employment, have for owning a red Corvette?
After the funeral, J. C. Abell took the army chaplain on the grand tour, likely telling him stories about Raywick and all the crazy things that happened there, maybe even telling the story of when Charlie Stiles shot him in the knee for cutting donuts in the church parking lot.
"They went to the Fifth Wheel ... and proceeded to get as drunk as they fucking could,"Johnny Boone recalled.
Boone stayed in his truck and waited. Soon enough, they emerged from the Fifth Wheel and into the street.
"So, I seen him," Boone said. "They'd probably been doing coke, to tell you the fucking truth."
At that moment, Boone committed himself to getting his message across to Abell in one way or another.
"I just played up the part of the scorned partner," Boone said. "That [chaplain] just happened to be there on the wrong day."
So, as J. C. Abell staggered into the red Corvette with his new friend, the Ft. Knox chaplain, Johnny Boone watched them from his pickup. The red Corvette disappeared down Highway 84 toward Hodgenville.
"They'll be back," Boone thought and waited in his truck.
When the red Corvette returned to Raywick, it came to a stop in front of the Bickett family home, where Highway 84 intersects the road where Boone was parked in front of the Fifth Wheel.
The chaplain sat in the Corvette's passenger seat as Abell let the engine idle at the only stop sign in Raywick when an oncoming pickup didn't stop and didn't turn. Instead, it made contact with the driver's-side door-not with the full impact of a head-on collision but with the gentle, deliberate thud of train cars coupling.
"I got my truck underneath him and just raised him up," Boone said. Johnny Boone, after gently T-boning the Corvette, dropped his truck into low gear and pushed the red fiberglass sports car up into the air onto two wheels, sending Abell and the chaplain grasping for anything to keep from falling out the passenger-side window. Then Boone backed up, let the Corvette fall back onto all four tires and gave Abell and the chaplain a chance to breathe. And then-
"I did it again," Boone said.
The spectacle drew a crowd outside the Fifth Wheel and Bickett's Pool Hall. During the spontaneous demolition derby, Coletta Bickett, the woman who had raised the Bickett boys, ran out her front door into the street, trying to stop Boone from hurting Abell any further.
"Johnny! Stop!" Coletta yelled over the sounds of the Corvette's fiberglass body crunching and the pickup's engine revving and the crowd of drunk spectators continuing to gather. "Johnny! Johnny!"
Jimmy Bickett, just a face in the mob outside his family's pool hall, tried to keep his mother out of it.
"Mamma!" Jimmy shouted, waving his arms. "Get back in the goddamn house!"
"Funniest part of it was Mrs. Bickett standing out there in her yard," Boone said, looking back twenty years later. "It was the funniest shit in the world."
Boone raised and lowered the Corvette a third time, which he figured was enough to get J. C. Abell's attention. So, after setting the Corvette down onto all four tires, Johnny Boone stepped out of his pickup to talk to Abell face to face but not before grabbing the handgun he kept in his truck. Gone were the days of Charlie Stiles, when one could go around without a firearm.
"I got out to go see J. C.," Boone said. "And the chaplain got out and came around that fucking car. I had something [a pistol] in my hand, but he didn't know it when he came charging around that car. Hair up like this, still had his tie on, eyes wild."
Only when the chaplain was face to face with Boone did he see the steel in his hand.
"Are you sure?" Boone asked him.
"And that motherfucker ran around the car and slammed the fucking door," Boone said later.
Then Boone leaned down to J. C. Abell's window.
"So much for your help," Boone said. "Now what?"
There were dozens of witnesses, including Steve Lowery, the newspaper editor.
"He [Boone] casually got into his pickup truck," Lowery said later, "and knocked that Corvette all the way into about next week. I mean, it just tore the hell out of it. The Corvette was destroyed. Then he got out and said, `You want to fuck with me now? You want some more?'
"No report was ever made. A lot of this stuff was folklore, but it happened."
This incident caused relations to sour between the crews of Johnny Boone and Bobby Joe Shewmaker, to which J. C. Abell belonged. Boone wanted them out of the cocaine business, and to Shewmaker and his men, that was just inconceivable. The conversation ended in a standoff, culminating in death threats from both sides. But no one wanted to be the man who shot Johnny Boone, and Johnny Boone didn't want to shoot anyone at all. He just wished they would pay attention and see that he was right and they were wrong, but that wasn't going to happen, either.
In November 1984, Ronald Reagan coasted into a second term in office, defeating the Mondale-Ferraro ticket in a forty-nine-state landslide. President Reagan won even in Lebanon, Kentucky, a historically Democratic stronghold. In a story headlined "Reagan Victory over Mondale Makes Marion County History," the Enterprise reported that 53 percent of Marion County, which was registered Democratic at a ratio of more than 20 to 1, voted for the reelection of the president by a margin of 470 votes. Before 1984, only two Republican presidential candidates had won in Marion County: Dwight Eisenhower in 1956 and Richard Nixon in 1972-and then only by eighteen and nineteen votes, respectively.
Neither Johnny Boone nor Jimmy Bickett voted in 1984; their voting rights had been stripped from them as convicted felons. Despite their exclusion from the voting process, Boone, Bickett and others in their business kept abreast of the changing political landscape. They didn't need their defense attorneys to know which way the wind blew.
Seeing the mounting federal government pressure, Johnny Boone took his operation underground and out of sight. The growers who once raised the large marijuana fields in the deep corners of Marion County had begun to take those operations to other states, where the state police were less adept at spotting marijuana from the air. Marion County had given the Kentucky State Police too much target practice to make any location in the Bluegrass, no matter how isolated, safe enough to grow a multiacre patch as Marion County had grown in the early days. With the increased threat of long prison sentences, Cornbread growers quietly began organizing in rural enclaves of states like Missouri, Kansas, Michigan and Minnesota, to name a few.
The police and journalists in Kentucky wondered where all the big marijuana farms had gone. The secondary evidence-Raywick's parking lots filled with cars with out-of-state license plates and new sports cars with Marion County tags-was as abundant as ever; but the primary evidence-big patches of marijuana spotted from the air-had long ago disappeared. More and more, the pot sold in Raywick was being grown far away and then trucked back to town, marketed to buyers nationwide as Kentucky Bluegrass. A buyer might drive all the way in from Cleveland to buy Kentucky pot that was grown in Ohio.
"One of the main reasons we brought everything back was because we could control and protect it, and the workers lived here," Johnny Boone recalled. "But another reason was it needed to be here, preferably in Raywick, to be loaded into buyers' cars, one-ton truck, whatever it was, all kinds of vehicles. It needed to be loaded right here because they were paying for Kentucky Bluegrass, baby. They wanted it.
"I told my men we would probably load [buyers' trucks] out of [the out-of-state farm]. I didn't tell them I intended to bring every pound coming back to Kentucky to load out of Raywick. It would bring $500 per pound extra premium to sell it out of Raywick."
While Raywick pot began to bring a premium price, federal law enforcement members began to zero in on the man they believed to be Marion County's number 1 distributor: Bobby Joe Shewmaker. For the past five years, federal agents had worked one imprisoned accomplice against another from Savannah to St. Augustine to Big Fred and his recorded phone conversations until a full picture of Shewmaker's role in the smuggling operation emerged.
Thirty witnesses from Florida a
nd Georgia cooperating with the federal government detailed a plan to navigate a stolen shrimp boat from Key West to the Caribbean coast of Colombia, where it was loaded with thousands of pounds of baled marijuana before returning to the waters off the coast of St. Augustine, Florida. Men with nicknames like "Pretty Boy," "Tug," "Big Fred" and "Little Fred" told federal agents that Bobby Joe Shewmaker took more than one thousand pounds of that shrimp boat load of marijuana by truck to Kentucky.
Of the thirty-two conspirators identified in the indictment handed down in the closing days of December 1985, just days before the statute of limitations expired on the charges, Bobby Joe Shewmaker would be one of only three who eventually stood trial because he refused to plead guilty and inform on his associates. Even in the tough, anticrime era of Reagan's second term-a period marked by lengthy prison sentencesShewmaker held strong to his code of silence. When he was convicted, Shewmaker paid his $250,000 cash bond in Savannah and returned to Kentucky. When it came time for Shewmaker to surrender for sentencing in the Savannah courthouse on Wright Square, federal officials found themselves waiting in an empty courtroom: Bobby Joe Shewmaker decided to become a fugitive instead.
As a man on the run, Shewmaker continued to manage a multistate pot-farming network so extensive and elaborate that he purchased one of his Missouri farms specifically not to grow marijuana at all; it was located too close to town for that. But with the increasing size of the growing operation, Shewmaker's Missouri farm managers needed a location just to store and pool the tractors, combines and other heavy farm equipment that they moved from one farm to another. Because all the in-and-out traffic could cause increased scrutiny of the property, Shewmaker kept it clean of contraband and used it exclusively as an equipment depot.