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

by James Higdon

  "Tank's in the kitchen, and I'm in the living room nursing one terrible hangover," Bickett wrote in a July 2006 letter from the federal prison camp in Manchester, Kentucky.

  "Someone's coming in the drive!" Allen yelled to Bickett.

  "Shit," Bickett said to himself. "Who the hell could that be?"

  Bickett walked out onto his cabin's back deck and saw a 1970s Continental pulling into the drive. Bickett stood there, waiting.

  "One man gets out, and the other stays in the car. It's Miller Hunt," Bickett wrote. Bickett hadn't seen Hunt "since around September 1987 when he went to prison."The two stood on the deck for a while, "shooting the shit," as Hunt's body wire transmitted the audio of their conversation to an FBI airplane circling overhead. Hunt explained why he hadn't been down for so long and how he planned to pay off the debt he said he owed.

  "This is the deal," Hunt said several times. "Here is what I want to do. I owe you money, and I want to get your money back to you, and here's what we're going to do."

  "Look," Bickett said, according to his letter, "I told you the last time I saw you, you don't owe me nothing. I told you I was out. Forget about it! See Jimmy, not me."

  While still on the back deck, Hunt started to tell Bickett that he had with him a big dealer with a lot of money looking to buy 150 pounds of marijuana. The dealer had come to Kentucky, Hunt said, and was down in Lebanon at the Golden Horseshoe motel. Hunt proposed that they add $150 per pound to the asking price as a way of working off most of Hunt's "old debt."

  "Look, you don't owe me nothing," Bickett repeated. Hunt made him uneasy. "Who's that you got with you in your car?"

  "Mike."

  "Mike who?"

  "Mike Haskell. You remember Mike, don't you?"

  "Yeah."

  "We've been on the road for a couple of days," Hunt said.

  "Come on in and have a cold one then," Bickett told him.

  Hunt yelled for Haskell, and the three went into the cabin. As they passed through the kitchen, Bickett grabbed three beers from the refrigerator, and Hunt said hello to Allen, who still stood at the stove.

  The two men from Maine sat on the couch in front of a glass-topped coffee table littered with Bickett's loose change, an ashtray, an aspirin tin, rolling papers, a remote control and a small black notebook that Bickett used to keep his business straight.

  Exactly what happened next would remain in dispute for more than twenty years. According to Hunt and the US government, Joe Keith Bickett at this point in the conversation agreed to do the deal with Hunt, telling Hunt that he needed to get a shower and come down off his cocaine high before he could do business. Bickett later insisted that this never happened.

  Hunt's body wire, which the Quantico-based FBI technical expert had installed, should have proved one account truthful and the other false. However, when the government turned the tapes over to defense counsel, parts of the conversation had seemingly vanished.

  Bickett later claimed that in this missing portion of their conversation, after about ten minutes inside, Bickett denied that Hunt owed him any money and told Hunt he didn't want to be involved in any more business together.' hen, voices from outside the cabin interrupted them. "It scared the hell out of all of us," Bickett wrote in his letter.

  When he went to the front door, Bickett saw his brother-in-law, Danny Cecil, and Cecil's twelve-year-old daughter, Kristen, both on horseback. Bickett walked outside to talk with them; Hunt followed Bickett but stopped at the threshold to listen to the conversation without being seen.

  Danny Cecil and his daughter would both later testify under oath that they had left their home in Louisville earlier that Sunday morning, where Cecil worked at the Ford assembly line for sixteen years, to drive to Raywick, where Cecil kept a horse-drawn buggy that he had restored. As he drove on Bernheim Forest Road, between the Jim Beam distillery and Rooster Run, Cecil and his daughter passed Jimmy Bickett headed the other direction on his way to Louisville.

  "There goes Jimmy," Kristen told her father.

  "Well, I don't know if we'll be able to get the buggy or not," her father told her, because he kept the buggy locked up in Jimmy Bickett's garage.

  When they arrived in Raywick, Cecil went to Jimmy's house to see if the garage was unlocked; it wasn't.

  "Well," he told his daughter, "we'll just ride horses instead."

  So, they drove up to the Bickett farm and caught the horses. For about an hour in the damp February daylight, they rode around on the 196-acre farm that had been in the Bickett family since the eighteenth century.

  As they rode along the farm's perimeter, they turned up the half-mile gravel driveway leading back to the cabin where Joe Keith lived. Cecil hopped out of his saddle to open the gate to Joe Keith's drive. He looked at his watch; it was 2:00 p.m.

  They planned to ride down the gravel drive to visit with Joe Keith, but when Danny Cecil saw an unfamiliar Lincoln Continental with outof-state plates parked in the driveway, he changed his mind about trying to go inside.

  "Joe Keith has company," he told his daughter, "so we're just going to ride on."

  Before they left, Cecil hollered out for Bickett a few times, and finally Joe Keith answered the door.

  "What are you doing?" Cecil asked.

  "Oh, nothing." Bickett told him. "Just got some company."

  To Cecil, Bickett looked like he had been drinking.

  "You want to go riding horses with us?"

  "No, not right now. Maybe later on. Where are you going?"

  "We're going to ride over to your dad's farm."

  "I might join you over there later on."

  "OK."

  As Danny Cecil turned his horse to ride away, Joe Keith Bickett hollered back at him.

  "Hey, have you seen Jimmy?"

  "Yeah, we passed him halfway to Raywick headed to Louisville."

  As Bickett turned to go back into the house, Cecil could see a man standing behind the door.

  "Is anything wrong?" Cecil asked Bickett.

  "No, it's fine. Maybe I'll catch up with you later."

  As Danny Cecil turned to ride away, he overheard Joe Keith Bickett talking to his unfamiliar guest.

  "Oh, it's just somebody riding some horses," Bickett said as he walked back into his house.

  When Joe Keith Bickett returned to the living room with Hunt, Haskell was sitting at the fireplace.

  "Look," Bickett said, "I'm out of this stuff you're talking about. But when Jimmy gets back from Louisville, I'll tell him you all are looking for him."

  "Well, at least let me tell you about this deal," Hunt said. "It won't hurt to listen, will it?"

  Then Hunt detailed his proposal to Bickett, and Bickett led Hunt toward the door. As they passed through the kitchen, Hunt saw Allen cooking cocaine on the stove.

  "You guys basing coke?" Hunt asked. "My man can get you all the coke you want if you all can find him some pot."

  This conversation continued for a while in the kitchen.

  "You should come on up to the Horseshoe motel and talk to this guy," Hunt said.

  "Sure," Bickett said, finally, to get Hunt out of the house.

  After this factually disputed conversation, Bickett walked the Maine men to the door and watched them drive off, the silver Continental bouncing through the gravel-filled ruts of the washed-out drive. When the car weaved out of sight, obscured by the thick trunks of oak, walnut and sycamore trees, Joe Keith shut the door and rubbed his face.

  Hunt and Haskell returned to Lebanon, where they bought a pizza at Pizza Villa to take back to the motel. They ate with Gagner and waited.

  A few hours later Tank Allen drove to the motel in a gray Oldsmobile to say they were still working on the deal. To make Allen more comfortable, Hunt introduced him to Gagner, their so-called investor. They offered to show Allen the money, but he said it wasn't necessary. Gagner offered Allen a drink from a fresh bottle of Jack Daniel's, and Allen cracked the seal and drank straight from the bottle. Haskell took a swig, to
o.

  Gagner brought bottles of whisky to his undercover drug operations as props. In the event that a drug dealer asked him to do drugs, Gagner would say he only drank, and he would drink the Tennessee whisky instead. But in the motel room with Allen, he didn't drink at all.

  Not long after Tank Allen left the Horseshoe motel, Jimmy Bickett arrived in a cream-colored Oldsmobile with Stevie "Snake" Lamkin riding shotgun. They wanted Hunt and Haskell to come back out into the country with them, so Hunt and Haskell followed the cream Olds in their silver Continental the eleven miles from Lebanon to Raywick and then onto an unpaved, rural road and parked in a dirt patch at the base of a wooded hill. Haskell recognized it when they pulled off the road-the same spot where Jimmy had sold him twenty-one pounds once before. Hunt opened the Lincoln's heavy door and walked across the cold ground toward the other car; Haskell stayed put. Hunt sat in the back seat of the Olds, with Bickett and Lamkin in front. Jimmy said the deal would be later on, probably in the morning. After that, Hunt walked back to the Lincoln and returned with Haskell to the Horseshoe a little less nervous.

  The next morning, 7:15 a.m., the phone rang in room 27 at the Horseshoe motel. Hunt answered. After a short conversation, he hung up the phone.

  "Let's go," he told Haskell. "We're going to Stevie's."

  They told Gagner where they were going and left in the Lincoln.

  Stevie "Snake" Lamkin lived in a cream-colored trailer in Raywick next to a garage where he fixed cars as a part-time job. When Hunt pulled the Lincoln up to the garage, Lamkin pulled in behind. He had two girls with him. He needed to drop them off at school and pick up scales, so he backed out of the drive, leaving Hunt and Haskell waiting. A few minutes later Lamkin returned with the scales and without the girls.

  Lamkin took Hunt and Haskell into his two-car garage. A gray'88 Oldsmobile was on one side, and on the other side was the hood of an El Camino resting upside down on the smooth concrete floor. Lamkin set the scales up on the El Camino hood, opened the trunk of the Oldsmobile and started pulling ten-pound bags of marijuana from the trunk. They emptied the trunk and put all the bags next to the El Camino hood. When they emptied the Oldsmobile, they backed it out of the garage and pulled Hunt's Lincoln in so it could be loaded up without attracting attention from the road.

  Then they weighed all the bags, and the total came up short-139 pounds. Hunt said he wanted the full 150 pounds, that they had the money to pay for the full quota and that the full quota was what their investor wanted. Lamkin didn't seem to mind. He left to get another bag or two of marijuana while Hunt and Haskell waited in the garage, loading the 139 pounds into the trunk of the Lincoln. While Lamkin was gone, Jimmy Bickett arrived in his cream Olds. Hunt went outside to talk to Jimmy while Haskell waited in the garage. Lamkin returned with two more bags, carrying them into the garage without bothering to hide them. After weighing out the full amount, Lamkin and Haskell finished loading the trunk. The Lincoln's trunk wasn't large enough for all 150 pounds, so they put two or three bags in the back seat, and Lamkin covered them with a blanket. With business done, they talked about going back to town.

  "Well, how about if Mike rides with us?" Bickett asked, referring to Mike Haskell. Hunt and Haskell agreed. Hunt would park at the shopping center in Lebanon across the street from the Horseshoe, and Haskell would go with Jimmy Bickett and Lamkin to the motel to get the money. Haskell rode in the back seat of Bickett's Oldsmobile, and Hunt drove the Lincoln by himself.

  Taking Haskell along on the cash pickup was security against Hunt's driving off with a load of dope for free. In the cream Olds, Bickett made small talk with Haskell. He asked a few times about the new investor and how Haskell knew him. Haskell told Bickett that the investor was someone Hunt had dealt with in the past with coke. Haskell didn't know the guy that well, but he seemed to be OK. When Hunt drove into Lebanon, he turned his headlights on as a signal to the numerous law enforcement officials monitoring the transaction that he had the drugs. Hunt pulled into the Market Square shopping center and parked between Higdon's Foodtown and McDonald's, opened the hood of his car (his prearranged signal) and waited for the police to pick him up.

  Jimmy Bickett pulled the Olds into the alley beside the Golden Horseshoe. Twenty years before, the Horseshoe had been the country music alternative to Club 68 across the street. Whereas Club 68 booked musicians who played rock'n'roll and rhythm and blues, the Horseshoe was a country-western place that hosted the likes of Kenny Rogers and the First Edition, Hank Williams Jr., Johnny Cash and Barbara Mandrell. By 1989, however, the Horseshoe was nearly abandoned, and the motel behind the Horseshoe was well on its way to becoming a first-class dump.

  Haskell opened the back door of Jimmy's Oldsmobile and walked toward the motel. As far as Jimmy Bickett knew, Haskell was picking up the cash. Haskell went into Gagner's room, and Gagner asked if there were any weapons in the vehicle. Haskell said no.

  "OK. Get down on the floor," Gagner said.

  Haskell lay down, and Gagner radioed the Kentucky State Police to tell them Jimmy was in the lot. Gagner and Haskell waited in the motel room for the next thing to happen. Outside, Bickett revved his engine, growing impatient.

  "He's going to go," Gagner said into his radio.

  Gagner and another officer burst into the parking lot with their guns out. Haskell stayed on the floor and didn't look outside.

  There were two exits to the motel parking lot, one on each side of the nightclub-Kentucky State Police cruisers blocked both. Bickett tried to escape but then stopped the car when he realized he was trapped. State Police Detective Mike Bandy didn't show his face to Bickett at first because he was a familiar law enforcement face in the area. But after Bickett was cornered, Bandy stepped forward, cuffed Bickett and read him his rights. In Bickett's pockets, the police found a few Valium, a halfounce of cocaine and the business card for a Miami resident, who was formerly an officer of the Colombian air force.

  At 11:00 a.m., Monday, February 13, after they arrested Jimmy Bickett, DEA agents and state troopers drove up to Joe Keith's farmhouse under a gray, rainy sky. By chance, Beverly Bickett, Joe Keith's sister, drove up right behind them. With his gun drawn, DEA agent Richard Badaracco told Beverly to go tell Joe Keith there were people there to see him. He told her to keep her voice up so they could hear her. It wasn't her family's first run-in with the law, but that didn't make it any easier to have guns pointed at her. Her eyes wide, she tried to count the men coming toward her. She backed up against her brother's back door, knocked loudly and yelled for Joe Keith.

  Beverly and her boyfriend managed the Bickett family bar now that Charlie worked at the prison. On Mondays she would always go over to Joe Keith's and tell him how the bar's business had been that week. She also liked to straighten the house up a bit. Mondays were the only days Beverly could clean the house because the gambling parties always started on Tuesday nights and usually didn't end until Sunday.

  With guns pointed at her, Beverly walked into the kitchen, yelling loudly to Joe Keith that there were people there to see him. She was scared. Joe Keith, groggy and half-awake, stepped out of his bedroom, saw the police outside and knew he was under arrest.

  "Is Bobby Joe Shewmaker here?" Agent Badaracco asked.

  "No,"Joe Keith said. "Do you have a search warrant?"

  The police told him they could do this the easy way or the hard way.

  Telling Joe Keith that they were searching for Shewmaker was a way to buy time so that a judge would sign a search warrant for the residence. The real reason the police came was to grab Joe Keith before he could find out that they had arrested his brother in Lebanon. With their guns drawn, state troopers and federal agents swarmed the kitchen and living room. Tank Allen came out of the downstairs bedroom, and agents told him to sit at the kitchen table. Joe Keith took Agent Badaracco and other officers on a tour of the house, opening closet doors for them as the agents pretended to search for Shewmaker for about a half-hour. When Joe Keith came back downstairs, he tried
to pick up the black notebook on his coffee table, but Badaracco stopped him. In the kitchen, Beverly watched the police handcuffJoe Keith and lead him out to sit in the back of a police cruiser. Joe Keith asked numerous times if Beverly could leave, but the police ignored his requests. Beverly nervously watched the cops mill around her brother's house.

  In Joe Keith's cabin, police found the homemade freebasing pipe, a digital scale with cocaine residue, a package of cocaine, a pen tube and a cup with cocaine residue, the rifle and shotgun, the black notebook with marijuana distribution records, cutting agents, a Ziploc baggie floating in the commode and a road map of Kansas.

  Joe Keith sat in the cruiser until around 2:00 p.m., when State Trooper Mike Bandy finally wrote him a citation and showed him the warrant that gave them the right to search the house. Joe Keith again asked if his sister could leave, and the police finally consented. She went to the store and bought cigarettes, returned and gave Joe Keith a smoke in the cruiser. The police booked Joe Keith Bickett in the Marion County jail by 3:00 p.m.

  Louis Earl Bickett, eldest brother of Jimmy and Joe Keith, had been a GE employee for twenty-three years. Like many Marion County workers, he commuted the hour each direction every day to the General Electric factory in Louisville for the union pay and benefits. Louis Earl heard about Joe Keith's arrest from Beverly around 4:45 p.m., when he returned home from work.

  Louis Earl drove his silver Dodge Daytona straight to Joe Keith's house in the rain. Officers on the scene wore ponchos. As Louis Earl approached the house, an officer came out carrying the rifle they had found in the kitchen.

  "That rifle there is mine," Louis Earl said.

  "That belongs to the federal government now," the officer replied.

  Louis Earl stood out in the rain for four or five minutes before one of the officers said he could come inside. Then Detective Bandy arrived along with a blue van carrying a K-9 unit. As the K-9 officer opened the back of the van for the dog, Bandy made small talk with Louis Earl, asking him what ever happened to the guy in Raywick who used to change tires and all that. Louis Earl told him the guy was dead.