by James Higdon
When police busted into a second motel room, they found it empty but just recently abandoned-the TV was still warm, and a VHS video camera, pointing at an unmade bed, had been left on a tripod. The videotape left inside the camera revealed another scene: Bobby Joe Shewmaker, his young apprentice and their girlfriends, all naked and cavorting in the motel room only hours, maybe minutes, before the detectives arrived. The taped performance captured images of Shewmaker's legendary endowment, copious amounts of cocaine consumed by the foursome, and a Doberman pinscher joining the party in ways best left unwritten. Retracing their steps, detectives realized that Bobby Joe Shewmaker and his girlfriend must have been the twosome who had casually passed them in the hallway as the police were heading to his room.
Evidence collected from the hastily abandoned motel room led agents to a farmhouse nine miles away in Princeton, population 322. Besides finding "a lot of marijuana" and a pile of firearms, the KBI stumbled upon Bobby Joe Shewmaker's wildlife menagerie: a black bear and two African lion cubs, which were "a real surprise" to the raiding party.
"At first everyone was pretty nervous,"Joe Bret, the Franklin County jailer, told the Capital-Journal, "but we found out they were tame, and we started playing with them. Apparently, the neighbors knew about them."
The bear was only nine months old, weighed 120 pounds and had been declawed and defanged. The lion cubs, a brother and sister, were also nine months old and weighed one hundred pounds each. Workers from the Topeka Zoo came the sixty miles to the Princeton farmhouse to take the animals away. The zoo told the newspaper it would keep the animals for six months to try to find them a new home, but the defanged, declawed bear would be more difficult to place because it couldn't defend itself against other bears in an enclosed environment.
"We are real satisfied with this operation," Dave Johnson, director of KBI, told the Topeka newspaper. "With this type of plant that has been cultivated and carefully nurtured, the value is $3,000 per plant. Overall, I'd say the entire operation was worth $145 million, including the value of the plants we didn't get."
Yet, although KBI had found sixty-eight thousand marijuana plants, two lions, a bear and a sex tape, it had a more difficult time finding Bobby Joe Shewmaker.
While Jimmy Bickett nursed his lion cub back to good health in Raywick, the special agent in charge of the Louisville FBI office sent a memo to the FBI director, in an airtel marked PRIORITY, requesting "for the first time, authorization for an additional [dollar amount redacted].
"To date, Louisville division has expended [dollar amount redacted] (under [Special Agent in Charge] authority) regarding captioned matter." The special agent in charge of the Louisville office "anticipated expenses" related to tapping telephone lines, "for as yet undetermined length of time," in order to conduct a Continuous Criminal Enterprise investigation into the Marion County marijuana market, headquartered, they believed, at Bickett's Pool Hall in Raywick.
As background, the memo summarized the activities of the marijuana syndicate headquartered in "the Marion County, Kentucky, area and several other states," which the task force believed to be a supermarket in the marijuana marketplace. "The November 1986 seizure of 2.3 tons of marijuana in Woodford County, Kentucky ... further convinces law enforcement that indeed this was the case."
After the bust in Minnesota, federal investigators had another web of associations to link into the shadowy world of the Raywick marijuana market. How did Johnny Boone fit in? The Bickett brothers, and their pool hall, were somehow centrally involved, investigators knew, yet they never had anything solid that connected the dots.
The task force needed an insider, an informant, to help them understand the connections between the major players in this "cartel," how it was organized and how it operated. However, finding a local person to turn into an informant for them proved "impossible" and "futile," according to task force documents. Yet, at some point in 1988, the task force caught the break it had been looking for: a regular customer of Raywick who was locked up in a prison and willing to cooperate-in the state of Maine.
In 1945, Jack Anderson began working for Drew Pearson's syndicated investigative column, "Washington Merry-Go-Round," which Pearson had started in 1932. Anderson took over operation of the "Merry-GoRound" full-time after Pearson's death in 1969. With an estimated sixty million readers from "some 1,000 newspapers in its heyday," according to Anderson's 2005 obituary, the "Merry-Go-Round" broke a series of scandals, including printing excerpts from secret Watergate grand jury transcripts and uncovering the CIA's plot to help the Mafia kill Fidel Castro, stories that earned Anderson a place on President Nixon's "enemies list" and the Pulitzer Prize for his 1972 column stating that the Nixon administration secretly backed Pakistan in its war with India.
More than a decade later, in 1986, Anderson broke a key element of the Iran-Contra scandal, retaining his relevance in his fourth decade on the "Merry-Go-Round." In 1988, Anderson worked on a story, assisted by reporter Dale Van Atta, about the proliferation of the marijuana marketplace throughout America.
"The flower children have long been overrun by gun-toting thugs and behind-the-scene investors who use hired help to till the fields," Anderson wrote in an October 3, 1988, "Merry-Go-Round" column headlined "Marijuana Growers Proliferate" that ran in hundreds of newspapers across the country.
"Usually, the organized criminal groups have multiple fields," Anderson wrote. "If one or two are discovered, there are others that can be harvested. In business, it's called diversification....
"The biggest group found to date was stumbled upon when its 355-acre farm in New York Mills, Minn., was raided last year.... Investigators found another farm the group had in Nebraska, where an additional 34 tons worth more than $170 million was seized. Additional evidence suggested that the same group also had farms in Kentucky, Missouri and Maine."
This was as close as Jack Anderson would come to Marion County, but his sources within the federal law enforcement community had been impeccable, sharing with him actionable intelligence-the Maine connection. Anderson's column ran in the Topeka Capital-Journal the day after police found all that marijuana growing in Kansas. Had anyone from Shewmaker's Kansas crew seen that newspaper column, he would have known to be suspicious of anyone he knew from Maine, but October 3 was the day that some of them were in a Kansas jail, and the others were racing into Missouri, and they missed an opportunity to learn that the government knew about a link between Marion County and the northernmost state in New England.
The marijuana pipeline between Kentucky and Maine opened in 1984, when a man from Maine came to Kentucky laying power lines. He met a Marion County native who told him that he knew where to buy wholesale marijuana, and a friendship developed. Later that year, the power line layer invited the Marion County man to Maine, where he met Miller Hunt, a career drug dealer, who peddled marijuana and cocaine in upper New England.
Hunt then planned a trip to Lebanon, where at $1,100 per pound he bought eleven pounds of Kentucky marijuana that was stashed in a shed behind a two-story, aluminum-sided Cape Cod-style house in a quiet residential neighborhood in Lebanon.
As Hunt's trips to Kentucky became more frequent, the poundage increased and the price dropped. At his peak, Hunt bought one hundred pounds at $800 per pound, the reduced cost coming after he cut out the middleman in Lebanon and started dealing directly with the Bicketts or Bobby Joe Shewmaker in Raywick.
Nearly every month between 1984 and 1986, Hunt drove the thirteen hundred miles from Maine to Kentucky, or paid someone to do it for him, to buy marijuana in quantities ranging between ten and one hundred pounds. They made the drive without calling in advance so they wouldn't leave a phone record of their transaction. They just showed up at Bickett's Pool Hall, and amid the local commotion, the bartender called Jimmy or Joe Keith. As the New Englanders waited for the Bicketts, they bought a drink and soaked up the scene: fresh-faced high school students drinking and dancing with bearded outlaws. To regulars at Bickett's, the men fro
m Maine stood out from the crowd. Wearing tight black jeans and leather jackets with their hair slicked back, Miller Hunt and his crew looked like greasers from the 1950s, or like "a gang of Fonzarellis," according to Charlie Bickett.
Once, Hunt flew down to Lebanon with his girlfriend, Debbie Lewis, and his business partner, Mike Haskell. They flew from Logan Airport in Boston to Bluegrass Field in Lexington and brought with them one hundred pounds of live Maine lobster, which they boiled in Jimmy Bickett's poker house as the stud poker and cocaine-fueled craps games whizzed on around them.
In the 1980s, Lebanon had two motels: the Holly Hill and the Golden Horseshoe. The Holly Hill's two wings of rooms branched out from a nineteenth-century, federal-style brick home, which had been a Confederate field hospital during the Civil War. The Golden Horseshoe motel sat behind the Golden Horseshoe nightclub, an establishment that, by 1989, had seen its glory days come and go. Hunt regularly used both motels when coming in from Maine.
Miller Hunt of Standish, Maine, was first arrested in 1979 on a marijuana possession charge in Portland. Law enforcement had been keeping tabs on him since 1985, when the Cumberland County Sheriff's Department in Portland learned that Hunt was selling large amounts of Kentucky marijuana. By 1986, he was dealing in cocaine pretty heavily, slowly becoming messed up from using his own product.
"When you're dealing cocaine," Hunt would later testify, "it's the lifestyle that leads you on having people around all the time, doing lots of cocaine with everyone. You know, it's the lifestyle."
The cocaine business was not like the marijuana business, he would later say.
"It's a whole different clientele," and cocaine "just messed up the whole business and everything." Hunt used more cocaine than he would have if he hadn't been selling it, and his business started going downhill because of his loss of focus. By the end of 1986, Miller Hunt's purchasing had fallen off following a series of events that had left him cash poor.
Then, in 1987, police in Louisiana busted Hunt with 191 pounds of marijuana, sending him to prison there. Through a favorable plea deal, Hunt managed to get his incarceration moved to Maine, to be closer to his family and his business. Little did he know that the Portland office of the DEA wanted him close to home, too, as it built a case against him as one of the biggest marijuana dealers in Maine. As soon as he realized he was under federal scrutiny, Hunt tried to get his people to lie to investigators for him and even to commit perjury for him to the grand jury, "like anybody else would," he would later testify.
He tried to get his friends, and his girlfriend Debbie Lewis, to lie for him. He didn't ask Mike Haskell because he knew Haskell was good for it. Hunt "didn't have to come out and tell him."
Hunt hoped that when he got out of jail he could get back into the marijuana business. He was released after seven months, in April 1988, and the feds arrested him on June 2 with 137 pounds of marijuana, and this time Hunt knew they had him good. Only three days after his arrest, he pleaded guilty to a fifteen-year cap and agreed to cooperate with the government. By the end of July, he made bond and was back on the street. By cooperating with the DEA in any federal investigations, Hunt was "in hopes" that his sentence would be even less than the fifteen years he had received. Though that might seem a long prison term, a fifteen-year sentence actually fell far below what the Reagan guidelines suggested. Because the 137-pound bust was his third felony conviction, Hunt should have been facing as much as twenty-seven years and three months based on Reagan's minimum sentencing guidelines. By cooperating, Hunt eventually received a sentence of almost half that, with the possibility of serving even less.
On October 4, 1988, Louisville DEA Agent Richard Badaracco and Assistant US Attorney David Grise visited Miller Hunt and his business partner, Michael Haskell, in Maine. It was the first time they had met, although Hunt had met with other federal agents twice since pleading guilty in June. They discussed Kentucky, marijuana, Raywick and the Bicketts. Hunt and Haskell said they would do anything to reduce the sentences they faced, including wearing a wire into Raywick.
Before using Hunt and Haskell, the task force members wanted to follow up on another lead. They had evidence that Jimmy Bickett owned a lion cub, which they thought they could connect to the cubs found in Shewmaker's operation in Kansas. By accompanying game wardens, the task force hoped to witness Jimmy Bickett doing something else he wasn't supposed to be doing with his lion.
On November 4, 1988, DEA Agent Badaracco, a Kentucky State Police detective, a US marshal and three US Fish and Wildlife officers paid a visit to Jimmy Bickett's house in Raywick to see about allegations that Bickett, "a distributor of multi-kilogram quantities of marijuana," according to Badaracco's DEA report, was "caring for a lion cub."
The team of state and federal officers arrived in Raywick at 12:35 p.m. and visited Jimmy Bickett's house on Sally Ray Pike, where Bickett's 1984 cream-colored Oldsmobile was parked in the driveway. As a US Fish and Wildlife agent banged on the door, attempting to arouse anyone inside, State Police Detective Leo Mudd looked inside the Olds. He saw the keys in the ignition, the center arm rest in an up position and a bottle of whisky lying next to a bank deposit bag in the front seat. No one answered the door.
As the wildlife agent walked to Bickett's next-door neighbor's house and the other cops hung back, Jimmy Bickett hopped into his creamcolored Olds and sped away from his home. The police followed with blue lights and sirens on. Before the police could get behind him, Bickett pulled into Blandford's Store, the grocery and hardware store in Raywick, and went inside as though he didn't realize he was being chased. While Bickett was inside, Detective Mudd noticed that the arm rest in the center of the Oldsmobile front seat had been lowered. Lifting it, he discovered a .38-caliber Walther semiautomatic pistol.
A few minutes later, Jimmy Bickett walked out of Blandford's Store with a sandwich and a pint of milk, and the state and federal agents wanted to talk with him.
"Do you have an African lion up there at your house?"
"Yeah," Bickett told them.
"Well, we need to go talk about it."
Bickett and the detectives returned to the house, where police handcuffed Bickett on a state charge of carrying a concealed weapon.
"That's my girlfriend Angela's gun," Bickett told them.
He sat handcuffed in his own home. The phone rang three times, and he couldn't answer it as the detectives interrogated him about his lion.
"Where did you get this lion?"
Bickett told them that a man had come by Bickett's Pool Hall and sold it to him.
"Yeah, the guy had two of'em," Bickett said and described the man, what the other lion looked like and the kind of car the man drove. "He had Taylor County plates."
Despite Bickett's answers, the police arrested him on the gun charge but uncuffed him because the game wardens were afraid of handling his eighty-pound lion cub. So, Jimmy Bickett picked Chico up and put him in the cage in the back of the game wardens' Chevy Blazer.
In December 1988, about a month after confiscating Jimmy Bickett's lion, DEA Agent Badaracco called Miller Hunt in Maine and told him to get ready to do what he had agreed to: come to Kentucky to be Badaracco's informant against the Bicketts.
On January 23, 1989, the FBI office in Louisville sent an "immediate" priority airtel to the FBI director to follow up on a telephone conversation dated January 19, in which the OCDE Task Force requested that the FBI send an expert "to assist Louisville division technical agents, in the installation of CCTV, Nagra recorders and the hardwiring of a transmitting device."
Following confirmation from headquarters, all the pieces were finally in place for the takedown. For a decade, various police agencies had tried to nail the Marion County marijuana "cartel" on its home turf; none had succeeded. Now they planned on succeeding by resorting to a street-level buy-bust operation, the sort of tactic that the DEA officially dismissed as rudimentary and that the FBI considered "contrary to the investigative methodology ... for narcotics matters."
Yet, in Raywick, it was the best they could do, and they planned to make the most of it.
On the cold, wet Sunday afternoon of February 12, 1989, Miller Hunt and Mike Haskell flew into the Louisville airport, where they met Ray Gagner, a state drug enforcement officer from Maine in charge of their case, along with agents from the FBI and DEA.1he agents gave Hunt and Haskell a silver Lincoln Continental, more than a few years old, and some cash in case they had the opportunity to buy small amounts of drugs before making the big deal.
Hunt, Haskell and Gagner drove south in the Lincoln on Interstate 65, the first leg of the hour-long drive from Louisville to Marion County. Hunt knew the way. The silver Lincoln coasted through Lebanon and braked just before Club 68 in front of the Golden Horseshoe's tall neon sign that read MOTEL, the letters stacked vertically, each in its own lit-up square. A neon arrow behind the sign's letters pointed across West Main Street to an alley on the side of the Golden Horseshoe, where the motel sat-a strip of out-facing rooms that looked across a parking lot at the back of the disco.
Gagner went into the office to register them. Hunt and Haskell checked into room 27; Gagner stayed next door. At 2:00 p.m., Gagner frisked Hunt and Haskell and then sent them off to Raywick. They drove the familiar route down Highway 84, a two-lane road that weaved through the hills like the underage drinkers who drove it.
In Joe Keith Bickett's two hundred-year-old log cabin off of Sally Ray Pike, the cocaine waited in a cereal bowl next to a handgun on the kitchen table. A 12-gauge shotgun, loaded with double-aught buckshot, leaned in the corner next to an unloaded .22 rifle. Gary "Tank" Allen, Bickett's lifelong friend, stirred a pot on the stove, cooking cocaine down to a paste so that he and Bickett could freebase it. Bickett and Allen had been "partying" with several women for "what seemed like a month."