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

by James Higdon

  "The only explanation that he makes, and he realizes it was wrong when he did it, was that he had grown up in a split family, he had been raised by his aunt and uncle, and because of the dire economic problems where he lived, there was no money, and he was afraid that he would lose his wife and three children. He made the only mistake he's made so far in his life, Your Honor. There's no-nothing in the presentencing investigation that shows that this man's ever been involved in anything like this before. And he spent 120 days in lockup at Stillwater.

  "He's got three children; two, he's adopted, and one of his own. It just seems to me, Your Honor, that a man thirty-six years old should be entitled to some consideration based on his past record, and I'd ask the court to sentence Mr. Berry to a split sentence, to give him some time in jail, but to put him on probation and credit the 120 days he served at hard time in the Stillwater prison.

  "If the court feels that this is not an appropriate sentence and decides to send him to prison, we would request voluntary surrender, Your Honor. But he's got a job now. He's got his family back together.

  "Frankly, I read his [presentencing report], and I've talked with Les for a long time here, and in my years of experience of representing defendants in federal court, he's the best one I've ever represented. And I think that says something for him. I've represented a lot of people, Your Honor. He's a good guy. There's no question about it. I mean, you know, basically a heck of a good guy."

  The judge then turned to the lawyer for the second member of the plea bargain, who asked the judge to give his client a reduced sentence and requested voluntary surrender. Finally, the judge turned to Johnny Boone's attorney, Jack Nordby. (When Boone reluctantly accepted his package-deal plea bargain, his Kentucky attorney, Jack Smith, advised his client that local attorneys who knew the judge, such as Jack Nordby, would be better suited to represent him in his sentencing hearing.)

  "OK," the judge said. "Jack?"

  "Your Honor . . ." Nordby said, "I think there's something obscene in even considering putting someone in jail for ten or twenty years for manufacturing a product which I believe is going to be sold across the counter by the drug companies shortly. That doesn't mean it's legal, but there's something gravely disproportionate in taking these gigantic amounts of time out of people's lives, any amount of time out of a young person's life, especially in days when we have what I believe to have been a very serious Supreme Court nominee who's used this substance. It's a violation of law, and Mr. Boone, as compared to these other folks, doesn't look very good. But there's still something obscene about saying that even a man with a long prior record should do that kind of time for this offense....

  "The obscenity I refer to, of course, has nothing to do with this court. It's the Congress who enacted this law. There are people who should be in jail forever and for long terms, but not people who are manufacturing, selling marijuana.

  "I'd ask Your Honor to sentence Mr. Boone to a period of five years in prison ... lodged in Lexington, Kentucky, which is nearest his home.

  "Thank you, Your Honor."

  "Mr. Boone," the judge said. "Do you want to say something?

  "Yes, I would, Your Honor," Johnny Boone said. "Your Honor, what we did was wrong, it caused many, many problems for all of our families. We don't deny that we broke the law.

  "I ask the court-I've had a lot of time, I've been over six months now in jail, and I've sat and done a lot of thinkin'. On this as a group of people, I ask the court when you sentence these people-we're from a poor place, and what we did, we-I don't think anybody here is into any kind of thievery. There are many hard drugs that are being sold in the United States now. In the area we're from, you know, things like cocaine and-we just-you know, we look on them as very bad and bad for all of America. I offer no excuse. I only say that because of the property in our area, marijuana is one of the things that sometimes helps put bread on the table for people....

  "We're not criminals, Your Honor. We're not-we're not the kind of people that go out and harm people. The only thing we try to do is-I know myself and several people here even feed families that are not their own. They feed little children that don't have breadwinners at home, back home where we come from. This is somethin'we do....

  "I don't understand this law, either; how people that are not into personally harmin'other people and are into workin'with their hands on the earth that God gave us, I don't understand the law takin' us for the long periods of time that it dictates it's going to. If we were physically harmin' people, or I read in the newspapers of people that actually take people's lives or bodily harm them, they don't get the kind of terms that we're facin' here. I guess I really don't understand how it can be done to a group of people like this. This group of people here are really good people. And you don't personally know them, but they stand out back home as hard-workin', honest people. Nobody here causes anybody any trouble back home.

  "And I personally am very sorry for what has happened. It has caused many problems for the families, much grief, and I hope that the court looks with mercy on this group of people. We didn't intend any harm to anyone.

  "Thank you," the judge said.

  Despite Boone's eloquent speech, the court sentenced him to twenty years in federal prison and the two others in the package-deal plea bargain to ten years each, stiff sentences compared with the six months in prison and three years of probation that the rest of Boone's Minnesota crew received.

  By the close of 1988, seventy federal prosecutions against Kentucky marijuana growers from in and around Marion County had resulted in fifty-six convictions. At the time, there were still many cases yet to be concluded: eight charged in the Western District of Kentucky; fourteen charged in Kansas; five in Illinois and one in Missouri. Of these twentyeight cases in progress, twenty-six were Kentuckians, with twenty-two from Marion County.

  With the task force working overtime to centralize intelligence on the Cornbread Mafia, federal law enforcement and prosecutors had a good understanding of exactly what Marion County had been up to for the past few years; the FBI had been keeping a list:

  A. On August 23,1985, Michigan State Police seiz[ed] 31,747 plants.... The prior year a couple lived on the farm, both from Marion County, Kentucky.

  B. On November 6, 1986, approximately 4,600 pounds of marijuana were seized in Woodford County, Kentucky.... Twelve were arrested, all of whom dressed in camouflage fatigues, and all but one were from Marion County, Kentucky.

  C. On August 20,1987... Indiana State Police ... 27,000 marijuana plants. Two were arrested from ... Marion County, Kentucky.

  D. On October 9, 1987, the Michigan State Police ... 20,000 marijuana plants.... All three were from Marion County, Kentucky.

  E. On October 12, 1987, Indiana State Police discovered 28,000 marijuana plants ... Marion County, Kentucky ... Documentary evidence discovered provided leads to a farm in Paris, Missouri.

  F. On October 23, 1987, information provided to the Minnesota State Bureau of Crime Prevention led DEA task force officers to a farm ... where they seized 96,000 pounds of marijuana and arrested 17 individuals ... from Marion County, Kentucky.

  G. On October 30, 1987, the DEA task force searched a farm in Paris, Rails County, Missouri, and seized 6,475 plants. One arrest was made, and he was from Marion County, Kentucky.

  H. On November 12, 1987, the Nebraska State Police ... seized 68,000 pounds of marijuana. The individual who was arrested ... is linked by his association with John BOONE.

  1. On November 15,1987, the Lebanon, Kentucky Police Department seized 1,700 pounds of marijuana from a truck.

  J. During the growing season of 1987, a total of 29,635 marijuana plants were seized from the following counties in Illinois ... all from Marion County, Kentucky.

  It was a working list. An FBI memo from 1989 would add to the catalog, along with its running cumulative totals of seizures and arrests:

  K. On August 22, 1988 the Missouri State Highway Patrol ... seized 25,000 marijuana plants
and 800 pounds of marijuana ... seven individuals were indicted by the Western District of Kentucky, all but one from Marion County, Kentucky.

  L. Between October 2 and October 5, 1988 the Kansas Bureau of Investigation seized 68,300 marijuana plants ... fourteen individuals were indicted from Marion County, Kentucky.

  M. On 6-29-89, the Illinois State Police, DCI, searched a farm in White County, Illinois, seizing 58,000 marijuana plants. Four individuals were arrested, all from Marion County.

  At the conclusion of these busts-A through M-authorities seized a total of 487,250 pounds of marijuana. As impressive a list as it is, it would appear that even with the combined manpower and resources of two federal law enforcement agencies and police forces in eight midwestern states, the law never found Cornbread crops any farther south than Kentucky, didn't find any in the coastal South, nor any in the mountain West.The FBI had a long list, but it was not exhaustive.

  Though the list wasn't encyclopedic, it gave the federal government a good idea of what it was dealing with: "The evidence collected thus far has revealed that the 487,250 pounds of marijuana seized was produced by an organized group of Kentucky residents who ... create[d] the largest domestic marijuana-producing organization in the history of the United States."

  While the task force developed a much clearer understanding of the Marion County marijuana "cartel" with seventy of its members behind bars, it still had not made a single arrest inside Marion County, whose fortress of silence had repelled every attack.' Raywick stronghold was still open for business. Even with Johnny Boone's operation unraveled, Marion County still held a firm home court advantage-an advantage that was slowly crumbling.

  A GOOD ROTTWEILER WAS LIKE A GUN THAT THOUGHT FOR ITSELF, keeping a pot patch safe from rippers while the farmhands slept. Consequently, Johnny Boone liked to breed rottweilers big and strong to maximize their effectiveness in the field, culminating in Rex, Boone's champion-caliber rottweiler, who could chase a cow and take it down as a cheetah would a Boone had seen it happen.

  Once, when Boone took Rex to Raywick before the 1987 Minnesota bust, a man brought his Great Dane to Bickett's Pool Hall, bragging that his big dog could whip any other dog in the state of Kentucky. Johnny Boone laughed and introduced him to Rex.

  Even after the introduction, the man stood by his claim. His Great Dane could whip Rex. At Boone's command, within seconds, Rex pinned the Great Dane by the throat, as the big horselike Dane struggled and whimpered against the crushing weight of Rex's jaws, and a crowd of Raywick drunks assembled around the action.

  "Now, I'll tell you what he's going to do," Boone told the man. "He's going to kill your dog. I've watched him do it before. Now what do you want me to do?"

  The man begged Boone to call Rex off, and Boone did, leaving the Great Dane gasping for air as the crowd dispersed.

  Whereas Johnny Boone was a dog person, Jimmy Bickett was more of a cat person, acquiring a male lion cub in October 1988; he named him Chico.

  Although Chico, as an African lion, was not a native species in Raywick, Marion County had once been a wonderland of dangerous animals, where they feasted on buffalo, elk and venison. As late as 1810, wolves forced farmers to impound all their sheep nightly if they wanted to keep them. Not long thereafter, the settlers chased away or killed the animals that threatened their farms and families. In 1824, the last panther was seen below Raywick, running toward Scott's Ridge, where someone killed the last wild bear in the county eleven years later, according to a 1977 edition of the Lebanon Enterprise-the last wild bear but not the last bear ever.

  A tamer black bear came to Raywick in 1968, when Hyleme George sold one of his two Canadian black bear cubs to Charlie Stiles as a pet. George had purchased the bears for a publicity stunt during his election campaign, keeping them in a cage near his 68 Liquor Store, which stood in the lot in front of his famous Club 68. Voters who would never stop for liquor might stop so their children could see the bears, giving Hyleme an opportunity to shake hands with their parents. After his successful election, George sold one bear to a farmer in Loretto and the other to Charlie Stiles. Although Charlie Stiles's bear escaped and got drunk a few times, it never harmed anyone in town, which perhaps led Jimmy Bickett to believe that his lion wouldn't hurt anyone, either.

  Exactly how Jimmy Bickett acquired his lion in 1988 remains unclear. One day his friends just saw him playing with the young cub, still immature at about eighty pounds but already dangerous to most. He kept the cat in his backyard, tied to his porch with a rope. When he would show it to people, he would jump down into the yard, grab Chico in a headlock and smack him on the head.

  "Good kitty," Bickett would say, slapping the cub's crown as Chico struggled to get out of his headlock. "Good kitty. Nice kitty."

  Roped up behind the house and fenced in with a regular wire fence that could keep cows out of the yard and dogs inside the yard, Chico could chew through his rope and conquer the fence as if it were nothing. So, every now and then Jimmy Bickett's phone would ring.

  "Hey, your lion's out here in the road," somebody would tell him, and Bickett would go pick Chico up.

  Once, when Jimmy Bickett came back from Louisville just as it was getting dark, he went to his backyard and saw that Chico had chewed through his rope again. Standing on his back porch, Bickett figured Chico hadn't run down the road, or else someone would be calling him on the phone. The lion must have gone into the cornfield on the back of his property, which dropped off straight to a creek bed.

  Bickett and a friend walked through that cornfield and beyond hollering for the cat until it was too dark to see. As they walked back toward the house, Bickett was sad, "tore all to pieces," because he loved that cat. Then, just as they crossed back over the creek bed, there was Chico in front of them, covered in mud and cockleburs, with ten feet of rope dangling from his neck.

  Chico and Bickett stared at each other. Bickett knew that Chico wanted to come home, but Chico wouldn't come to Bickett like a dog. Bickett had to trick the eighty-pound lion cub when he didn't have meat in his hand to lure him closer.

  "Come here, Chico," Bickett said before leaping onto the cub to hold him still.

  After that, Bickett kept Chico in the red barn behind his house on Sally Ray Pike, in a wooden stall built for horses, where the boys who lived across the street would hardly believe what they were seeing.

  "I was probably about seven or eight [years old], just started second grade," recalled Paul Miles, who grew up on Sally Ray Pike in Raywick, across the road from where Jimmy Bickett lived. "The most commotion I remember was just late night partying, squealing tires and stuff," referring to the silver Corvette Stingray that Jimmy Bickett owned at the time.

  "Well, my [older] brother come in one day and says he thought he saw a couple of mountain lions over in the field ... back behind the house over there. I just thought it was him fucking with me.

  "Then it was probably a couple weeks later, and I was shooting ball at this old dirt basketball court ... and I heard people talking over in the barn. I was picking up the ball; it was a bad rebound, terrible shot. If it came off wrong, the son of a bitch would roll all the way down the driveway. So, I was running down the driveway to pick up the ball, and I heard people talking in the barn, and I looked up and saw a couple of guys, and I shit you not, they were looking at a lion cub.

  "I instantly believed my brother's story. At the time, we thought they were mountain lions. It was only later that I learned they were African lions."

  When the cat seemed to get sick, Jimmy Bickett went to an amateur veterinarian in Loretto, who gave him a Folger's coffee can filled with a sandlike powder to pour over Chico's meat.

  While Chico's health improved in his Raywick horse stall, Bobby Joe Shewmaker kept two lions of his own 625 miles away in a remote farm in rural Kansas.

  In late September 1988, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation (KBI) began conducting aerial surveillance to look for marijuana. Agents flew with Sheriff Ron Moore when spotting
in the air above his turf, the farmland of Allen County outside Iola, population 6,302. They hoped to bust some pot growers, but they had "no idea" they would find a field of thirty thousand well-groomed marijuana plants in full mature bloom.

  "We spotted the field Tuesday afternoon," Sheriff Moore told the Topeka Capital-journal. "But by the time we got the search warrant and the manpower to take it down, most of the field had been harvested."

  Police arrested five Kentuckians, who had returned to the crime scene to collect marijuana scraps. Evidence from the patch led agents of the KBI to other counties, where they found that fifteen thousand plants had already been harvested in Linn County near Mound City, population 821. In Pottawatomie County, Sheriff Dean Taylor found seven hundred high-grade mature marijuana plants in a field near Olsburg, population 192. Seven of Taylor's deputies spent three hours chopping down the plants with corn knives. In the farmhouse, Taylor's men found a semiautomatic weapon, a handgun and a bulletproof vest-but no one to arrest. In Wabaunsee County, another fifteen thousand plants were discovered near Eskridge, population 589. Shirley Roark, the dispatcher for the Wabaunsee County Sheriff's Department, told the Mercury of Manhattan, Kansas, that officers began harvesting the plants on Monday at 1:00 p.m. and worked until 8:30 p.m., then returned at first light Tuesday and continued cutting until 2:30 p.m. On Thursday morning, county workers were still hauling away the machete-cut plants. Roark said officers commented on how "bushy" the pot plants were and "said they appeared to be a superior grade of marijuana."

  On Friday, September 30, police responded to a motel in Ottawa, population 11,016, after receiving noise complaints and reports of possible drug use. Backed by agents from the KBI, the police busted into one room and arrested two suspicious Kentuckians, Fred Elder and his girlfriend, who got herself into deeper trouble by offering sex to the police in exchange for their release. The police were not amused and booked her on charges of sodomy and solicitation.