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

by James Higdon

  While these sorts of elaborate farming networks were being run by Raywick graduates in other states, local activity in Marion County had dropped off to an amateur level. The professionals had moved on to other pastures, returning at harvest with their yields.

  The only signs that the marijuana marketplace continued to thrive would appear briefly and unannounced, like Bigfoot. One such sighting occurred on March 1, 1986, when three teenage boys, while running across farmland outside St. Mary's, discovered something they had not anticipated. Two local brothers showed a visiting city boy around the farm. The new kid had never been on a farm before and asked the brothers to show him a silo, something he had never seen.

  As the boys ran across the farmland, they hopped the fence onto the neighbor's property, where they discovered a ramshackle barn in disrepair. Curious, the boys decided to explore it. When they entered the barn, the older brother discovered a $20 bill on the dirt floor.

  "Look!" he said, picking up the twenty.

  "Split it three ways!" the other two demanded.

  But while the little brother and the visiting boy debated how to split the $20, the older brother saw something most people only dream about: bundles of $50, $20 and $10 bills stacked on a mound of dried cow manure.

  "Look at all that money," he said, and the two other boys stopped fighting.

  In unison, the three boys jumped at the cash and started stuffing their pockets, shirts and pants, then ran home across fields and over fences at a full sprint. At the house, the boys hid their loot-in a cigar box, in the back of a boom box, in a tackle box. After it was stashed, the boys contemplated their situation for forty-five minutes and then decided they should tell their mothers.

  "Mom," one said. "What would you do if we found $10,000?"

  "We'd blow it," she told him.

  So, the boy fetched his cigar box and showed his mother. She knew it was too much. She called the police; they arrived in ten minutes. The police officers quizzed the boys, wanting to know everything they could about the money and where the boys had found it. Then the police asked for the money. The boys, reluctantly, fetched their stashes.

  One brought $600 from his room; another handed over $2,000 from the inside of his radio; the other brother gave the policemen half the money he had found. His mother found the rest a few days later when she was cleaning his room.

  The police helped the boys retrace their steps, finding $1,000 in cash that the boys had dropped like accidental breadcrumbs on their sprint home, but there wasn't a single bill left in the barn where it had been found. In the end, the police counted $16,000, cash, which they locked away in an evidence locker until an investigation could be completed. The boys would never see the money again.

  In 1986, despite declining eradication numbers in Marion County, the state police planned another pot-clearing campaign. They had some new hardware, the Kentucky State Police's first helicopter of its very own, a jet Bell Ranger, leased with funds from the DEA, along with a mobile command post and radio center, which they set up at the Lebanon/Springfield Airport.

  In late June 1986, police had used the helicopter to find just fortyseven plants in one county, twenty-three plants in another and sixty-five plants in a third. So, when the state police took to the air above Marion County in early July, they expected to find equally small patches. Instead, less than thirty minutes after leaving the airport, detectives found sixty thousand plants growing in two patches-huge busts even though the male plants had not yet been removed from the patches and especially significant because fields of this size hadn't been seen in Marion County for years. The police, journalists and everyone else had concluded that crops of this size had long since moved out of state. Yet, despite the losses from those two plots, the Kentucky marijuana market continued to produce some of the most potent marijuana available in the nation because of the syndicate's geographic diversification.

  According to the National Narcotics Consumers Intelligence Committee, the average THC level was 4 percent for marijuana grown in the United States and 8 percent for sinsemilla. Kentucky's marijuana, on average, doubled the THC level of the national baseline, and homegrown Kentucky outdoor sinsemilla, like Johnny Boone's Kentucky Bluegrass, was testing at 14 percent by 1986. In 1989, the Louisville office of the DEA reported that it tested Kentucky samples that surpassed 18 percent, more than double the potency of marijuana grown elsewhere in America at the time.

  Much of that highly potent Kentucky sinsemilla left Raywick in the backs of trucks, vans and cars with big trunks. This was no secret; police knew it, but there wasn't much the authorities could do to stop it. By 1984, Raywick had proved itself to be invulnerable to undercover police work after it had sniffed out the Tom Foolery's "undercover bar" investigation and ran it out of town.

  Folks in Raywick were well trained at spotting a "narc" before he opened his mouth. The state police undercover narcotics force made it easier on the outlaws by its consistent and obvious choices of cover. Every undercover narcotics detective working for the Kentucky State Police wore his hair shaggy, drove a Trans Am and drank Sterling beer, according to one retired detective. In some parts of the state, this was enough of a disguise to make a few small buys and move up the supply chain before making an arrest. In Raywick, Trans Am-driving, Sterling beer-drinking strangers were given the Raywick special.

  Had the police decided to roll into Raywick disguised as a motorcycle gang, they might have had better luck or at least generated a little more respect. But even that plan could have been disastrous because the Mongols, the nastiest of the West Coast motorcycle gangs, met more than they could handle when they roared into Raywick on their chop-shopped Harleys in 1988, thinking they could take over Bickett's Pool Hall and the Fifth Wheel just as they had everywhere else they had conquered.

  When the Mongols parked in Raywick, roughing up Bickett's clientele and starting fights in the parking lot, Jimmy Bickett learned their weakness. In downtown Lebanon, the Mongols had parked their mobile headquarters: a sixteen-wheel semi-truck and trailer, from which its mismatched motorcycles had spewed. While the Mongols raised hell in Raywick, Jimmy Bickett and a carload of buddies paid a visit to the unguarded semi-truck.

  When no one was looking, they worked the truck over: slashing tires, breaking out windows and lifting the hood to cut out every wire, hose and belt they could see. Then they drove back to Raywick, where the Mongols thought they had planted a flag. A predatory and violent criminal organization like the Mongols would have substantial interest in controlling the marijuana distribution out of a place like Raywick, and for most of an evening, the Mongols thought they had.

  When they returned to their truck and surveyed the damage, they roared back to Raywick to raise hell again. The leader asked Jimmy Bickett if he had heard anything about a truck getting vandalized, and Bickett shook his head and told them no. He didn't know anything about it. The Mongols, chastened, disappeared the way they had come.

  Bickett's Pool Hall outlasted generations of police work, fires, gunshots and repeated assaults by invading outsiders, culminating in the Mongol horde. Like a rock against the ocean, when the waves receded, Bickett's remained. Yet, like every invincible thing in history and myth, Bickett's Pool Hall had one enemy too small to consider but too great to defeat. Its Achilles' heel would be a wounded teenage ego.

  On Tuesday night, September 2, 1986, a nineteen-year-old Nelson County native, the son of a construction contractor, came to Raywick looking for a good time. Inside Bickett's Pool Hall, he began flirting with a good-looking woman who was out of his league.

  "A punk from Nelson County whose father was a contractor-that's where he got the dynamite," Steve Lowery recalled. "And he was in Bickett's playing pool and hitting on this lady, who just so happened to be married to one of the `boys.'

  "So, the guy came in, and she told him, `This guy's been hitting on me all night, we want to whip his ass.' . . . They whip his ass and tell him, `Don't ever come back here.' He left with his frien
d, and his friend dragged him out of there.

  "He went home and got a bunch of his dad's dynamite out of his shop. He comes back into Raywick and throws two or three sticks of dynamite into Bickett's, and it just blows the hell out of the place. No one was there, fortunately. When he did that, it was going to cause a lot of trouble, obviously."

  The blast created a vacuum that sucked open the doors to all the cabinets and refrigerators, so the floor was littered with glasses and full cans of beer, some spewing foam from holes busted in their sides.

  "I was in my house asleep about three in the morning, and there was an explosion; my house started shaking," Lowery remembered. "It actually cracked the foundation of the church across the street. It was a hell of an explosion.

  "`What the hell was that?' I thought.

  "Immediately, a contingent of boys got together and formed the crew that was going to re-create the bar immediately and the crew that was going to go out and-They knew, pretty much, who had done it....

  "So, the crew that stayed, before one or two o'clock in the afternoon, they had the walls back up, they had all brand new furniture in there. It looked great ... so by the time the state police arson investigator showed up in the late afternoon-no one reported anything, either. There was no report.

  "He said, `I heard there was an explosion.'

  "And they said, `What? What explosion? We don't know what you're talking about.'

  "He said, `Well, wait a minute. What's all this?'

  "And they say, `We're redecorating.'

  "The other boys, who were sent out on a mission to get the son of a bitch, they get themselves armed up to the teeth. They get their machine guns out, and they knew where the guy lived. There was about five or six of them, and they all have machine guns, and they all roll up to the house. The father comes out; he's nervous.

  "He says, `What's my boy done?'

  "And they explain what he had done.

  "He says, `Give me a bill, and I'll pay for it.'

  "They say, `That's part of it. The other part is, tell him: We don't ever want to see him in Raywick again, or we're going to kill him.'

  "He says, `I'll make sure he understands it, and I'll kick his ass myself.'

  "So, it was all settled without police interference, which is the way things usually went down in Raywick. They preferred not to have police involved in things. They take care of themselves."

  Two months later, November 1986, the Kentucky State Police caught a glimpse of something that they knew to exist but that had been kept from their view: a pot-processing factory, where marijuana, cut and cured, was trimmed and groomed into a final product. The police had never seen a pot-processing factory before because such factories remained well hidden. The police knew that such places must exist, but like the Loch Ness monster, it was a fact many detectives took on faith.

  For the first decade of the marijuana era in Marion County, all processing from a number of top growers was centralized in one location, a place no one would ever suspect of housing a multimillion-dollar illicit factory-on a farm owned by a prominent doctor, whose brother had once been mayor of Lebanon. No one would have ever guessed that the stately proportioned barns and outbuildings concealed several tons of high-grade sinsemilla in any given October between 1972 and 1980, drying on blue tarpaulins. Yet, there it was, the processing headquarters for Johnny Boone, Bobby Joe Shewmaker and a dozen other growers.

  The most stressful job at this particular location was that of the tenant farmer, whose surname was Brady. Although he had a variety of tasks to perform throughout the season, his chief duty was to take the fall if the operation was ever uncovered. The property owner knew nothing about these activities and would have been genuinely shocked and embarrassed if police had found marijuana on his land.

  At some point the constant stress of running an industrial-sized marijuana-processing plant began wearing on Brady, and he decided he couldn't take it anymore. So, he curled up with a bottle of liquor in a bottom bunk bed in the back of the farmhouse, where he drank himself to sleep. When Bobby Joe Shewmaker found him there, Shewmaker leaped onto the top bunk, sending it crashing down onto Brady in the bunk below. Then Shewmaker grabbed him and pulled him to his feet.

  "I want out," Brady begged.

  "You can't get out," Shewmaker told him. "You are in," he said as he kicked Brady down the hallway toward the door. "You hear me? You are in!"

  Once the state police started flying helicopters, beginning in 1980, the sprawling farm no longer provided the sort of cover it once had when the police searched only from the road. With the changing nature of the cat-and-mouse game, the growers moved their processing plants elsewhere, leaving them more vulnerable to exposure. But still, the processing barns remained hidden until Thursday morning, November 6, 1986.

  On that day, a Lexington narcotics detective received information from a confidential informant that there was a barn in Woodford County with a bunch of marijuana in it. The Lexington cop called a Kentucky State Police detective to relay the information, asking to meet him at the McDonald's in the Woodford County seat, Versailles (pronounced "Ver-sails").

  At the Versailles McDonald's, the two detectives met and waited as others joined their conference, including two DEA agents and two IRS agents. The barn in question, the Lexington detective said, was two miles out of town, and they should call the Woodford County sheriff. Shortly after, the sheriff arrived at McDonald's, and he led a convoy of police vehicles out McCracken Pike toward the 175-acre Lewis farm in the late morning.

  At the farm, the sheriff talked with a farmhand who had managed the Lewis property for eleven years. The farmhand told them that Lewis wasn't home but that he was in charge of the farm when Lewis was away. The sheriff asked if they could look around, and the farmhand said that would be fine with him.

  As the detectives prepared a consent-to-search form, they saw an unidentified man run from the silos in the near distance into a barn. The sheriff asked if the farmhand knew that man, and the farmhand said no. It was 12:15 p.m.

  The agents raced to the barn, where they watched the man enter. Inside, the state police detective looked up and saw marijuana plants hanging from the rafters, as if they were a crop of burley tobacco curing in the cool darkness. The police announced themselves and told everyone to come out. Immediately a dozen or more unidentified men scattered from the barn in all directions like mice; the detectives and agents, like cats, gave chase. Two of the men fled out of the back of the barn and fell, chest-deep, into the dairy farm's manure pond, where the police held them at gunpoint, their hands in the air as they sank deeper into the liquefied feces, until eight of their co-workers had also been arrested.

  Upon further investigation, the lawmen realized they had found a "sophisticated marijuana-processing operation," according to the police report. Marijuana was hanging in two of the three barns on the farm; the cattle shed had been converted into a sleeping and eating quarters, where detectives found thirteen sleeping bags. State police radioed headquarters to request a crime lab unit, and the federal agents called their superiors in Louisville and suggested they come see for themselves. No one had ever seen anything quite like it.

  By the end of the day, the farm was crawling with law enforcement of every stripe: In addition to the initial raiding party, there were ten Woodford County officials (six sheriff deputies, a city policeman, the county attorney and two truck drivers), a sergeant with Lexington Metro Narcotics, four Kentucky State Police narcotics officers, a videographer, two members of the KSP public affairs team, five state troopers, an officer with KSP vehicle enforcement, four members of the KSP crime identification team and two additional DEA agents from Louisville.

  In the first barn, detectives found ten folding chairs arranged in a circular pattern. Beside each chair was a box of untrimmed marijuana. Beside each box was a pair of scissors (three red-handled, six orangehandled). Above their heads were forty tobacco sticks, each holding fifty to sixty stalks of marijuana, hangi
ng on barbed wire that had been strung from the rafters. In the rear of the barn, they found a sifting operation consisting of a wire mesh screen attached to wooden studs, raised off the floor by plastic buckets. Each sift was three by six feet and used, the detectives speculated, for separating the seeds from the marijuana. (In fact, this was a drying rack.)

  In the second barn, the detectives found nineteen pounds of processed marijuana, eight pairs of scissors, one pack of cigarette papers and assorted trash, from which the crime scene unit pulled sixteen fingerprints.

  The investigators found that the third building, made of white block and formerly a cattle shed, had been converted into living quarters by hanging a sheet of plastic over the west side of the structure, which was not enclosed. Bales of straw were stacked outside the plastic, and a propanefueled barbecue grill sat just outside the plastic wall with three Igloo coolers nearby. The room's interior was crowded with sleeping bags, suitcases, duffel bags, clothing, shoes and a kerosene heater. In the middle of the room, a portable TV had been placed atop a folding metal table along with two TV Guides and two decks of cards, one blue and one red.

  Along one of the block walls, another table had been set up as a dining table, lined with benches. There had been a hot pork chop dinner served on the table when the raiding party sent the workers fleeing in all directions. As the investigators combed the scene, the coffee was still hot in the Styrofoam cups on the table.

  Next to the stove stood a refrigerator with a sign on the front that read Pop 5o, which led investigators to conclude that the workers were being charged fifty cents per soft drink by the operation's boss. A Woodford County sheriff's deputy recognized the refrigerator. He had seen the farmhand driving down Main Street in Versailles with the refrigerator on the back of a blue Chevy S-10 pickup truck.