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

by James Higdon

  That evening Jimmy and Joe Keith were moved to the Jefferson County jail in Louisville, where all the state's federal defendants were housed. A search of Snake Lamkin's trailer yielded prescription drugs, eight wristwatches, including four Rolexes, and fourteen firearms.

  In the sixteen months since Johnny Boone's farm in Minnesota had alerted federal agents to the scope of Marion County's reach, no one had been able to infiltrate the county's home turf. So, as the DEA agents drove the Bickett brothers to Louisville to place them in federal custody, they sent a clear signal to what remained of the Marion County underworld: We can catch you where you sleep, even in Raywick. We've got your number now.

  "For the information of the bureau," the Louisville FBI chief wrote in a "priority"-level airtel to the director's office in Washington, federal agents just arrested "five Marion County, Kentucky, residents ... for selling 158 pounds of marijuana," saying that Jimmy and Joe Keith Bickett "are two of the main suppliers of marijuana in the ... area.

  "To date, this task force has been unable to identify the distribution network of this Marion County marijuana cartel because of the remote area and also because this is a very close knit group, who have pooled resources and often work in conjunction with one another.

  "It has been virtually impossible to penetrate this group with conventional investigative techniques, and attempting to convince an insider to provide information against this organization has proven to be futile."

  The arrests of the Bicketts "has proven to be a very significant step in the dismantling of the Marion County marijuana cartel, an extremely productive marijuana cultivation/distribution organization, which has existed in this area for several years.

  "For additional information of the bureau ... the case is receiving extensive media coverage.

  "Also, DEA headquarters has declared this case a special events operation (SEO) and presented this case to a congressional committee in March, 1988, to illustrate the magnitude of the marijuana dilemma and the vast amounts of money generated by this cartel."

  "Then, I think in '89, that's when everybody got busted," Charlie Bickett recalled. "I was [working at the prison] for two or three years, and I'm sure my name floated around in the DEA office or whatever. You know, `How does Charlie Bickett play into it?' But I didn't. I was just there. I was sort of a pawn."

  Two and a half months after the Bicketts' arrest, on April 27, 1989, in Grand Bend, Ontario, a resort town on the Canadian shore of Lake Huron, authorities finally caught up with Bobby Joe Shewmaker, who had been a fugitive for more than four years. Grand Bend's population of two thousand swelled to fifty thousand in the summer months, as its hundreds of miles of open beach became the "West Coast of Ontario," with all the active nightlife that title entailed. With gently sloping beaches and sunsets over the water, Grand Bend's shoreline attracted visitors from all over.

  But in April 1989, Grand Bend was still a quiet town of two thousand. A month later, when the summer season officially opened on Victoria Weekend, police would arrest 318 people on alcohol-related charges. The police of this quiet, sleepy community planned for such annual binges, but the force was quite surprised when a patrolman ran the Kentucky plate of a Buick Grand National, the fastest American sports car to ever come off the assembly line, and discovered that it had been reported stolen and that the driver, Bobby Joe Shewmaker, was an American fugitive.

  When Shewmaker's girlfriend, using the alias "Pamela Anderson," left the cottage for the car, police moved in to arrest her. During the scuffle, Shewmaker sprinted from the cottage, but police caught him a few blocks away with a West Virginia driver's license in his pocket that said his name was Ronald A. Treadway. Shewmaker and his girlfriend had been in Grand Bend since February and had recently purchased a substantial farm that he named Treadway Stables on the paperwork.

  When Shewmaker was extradited to the federal courthouse in Detroit, he found himself accompanied by a personal SWAT team with snipers lining the roofs of neighboring buildings. By pure coincidence, an attorney from Lebanon happened to be in Detroit that day to represent two clients from Gravel Switch who had been caught growing pot in Michigan. When the attorney and Shewmaker made eye contact in the courtroom, Shewmaker called him over.

  "Is this all for me?" Shewmaker asked, referring to the SWAT team. It sure was.

  On top of the twenty-five years on drug charges, the government sentenced Shewmaker to ten years for being a fugitive. He will be incarcerated until his projected release date, October 10, 2016, when he will be sixty-eight years old.

  With Shewmaker behind bars, after various police agencies had spent more than five years trying to catch him, the task force began to focus its next attack. By May 6, 1989, when Sunday Silence won the 131st Kentucky Derby, the assembled members of the task force knew that the CCE investigation, which they fought so hard to keep out of the hands of DEA headquarters, had gone nowhere. None of the seventy members of the Marion County "cartel" could be persuaded to testify, an effort the task force itself would describe as "futile."

  Without the life sentences imposable under a CCE conviction, the prosecutors on the task force grew creative. They were looking for ways to keep the Bicketts in prison for as long as they could, and the task force needed a way to prosecute the Marion County leadership without risking acquittals in court.

  For this second problem, the task force found a simple solution: hold a press conference and try Marion County in the court of public opinion instead of the court of law. In the court of public opinion, the government's burden of proof was substantially lower, and those accused, without access to the media, would have no opportunity to defend themselves.

  On June 5, 1989, the task force held a meeting to discuss plans for its press conference. US Attorney Joseph Whittle attended the meeting and suggested inviting the television stations from both the Louisville and Lexington network affiliates to maximize media exposure. They established a timeline to give member agencies deadlines for submitting press release drafts, charts and summaries of operations. Whittle agreed to lead the press conference at the state police post, but he would later back out. In the end, both the speaker and location would change. However, the task force's decision to use the term Cornbread Mafia at the press conference remained unchanged, "as this term has been applied to this group by some of the participants," according to an FBI memo.

  IN I988, STEVE LOWERY left the Lebanon Enterprise to run the Kentucky Standard, the daily paper in Bardstown, and John Bramel took over at the helm of the Enterprise on the corner of Proctor Knott Avenue and Mulberry Street.

  On Thursday, June 15, 1989, Bramel's phone rang. The caller was from the US Attorney's Office in Louisville, who told Bramel that there was going to be a press conference in Louisville on Friday morning at 10:30 a.m.

  "What's this press conference all about?" Bramel asked.

  "Well, we can't really say," the man told him, "but we want to make sure you'll be there."

  The man wouldn't hang up until Bramel promised he would be there the next morning. The tenor of the conversation left Bramel feeling as though the US Attorney's Office would have sent a limo for him if he had asked for it. Why did the federal prosecutor's office want him, a little Podunk reporter for a weekly newspaper, to come to an important press conference up in Louisville on a moment's notice?

  The next morning Bramel woke up to a drenching rainstorm. Because of the weather, he left early. As he drove the sixty-five miles to Louisville, he thought about Lebanon, his hometown. The era of teenage lawlessness that had lasted from the 1950s through the 1970s had ended; no longer would the Courier journal be accurate in calling Lebanon the "Fort Lauderdale of central Kentucky" due to its night clubs, live music and liberal attitude toward underage drinking. The live music circuit had long since passed Lebanon by, and most of the nightclubs were now ghosts of their former selves. Lebanon, as Bramel saw it, was beginning to reclaim its good name. The marijuana-related publicity and negative headlines the town had r
eceived in the earlier part of the 1980s seemed like ancient history, too.

  A journalist seldom gets to edit his own hometown newspaper, and when Bramel stepped into that position after Lowery's departure, he felt it couldn't have been happening at a better time. He saw the silver lining in the dark cloud that had hung over Marion County for so long. When the state offered tax incentives to factories to relocate in Kentucky, it put the most economically desperate counties high on the list-and Marion County topped the list. When Toyota opened an assembly plant in Kentucky in 1986, a brake pad factory came to Lebanon.

  When John Bramel enrolled his two sons, Zachary and Gordon, at St. Augustine, the Catholic school in Lebanon founded by the Sisters of Loretto during the Civil War, the Bramel boys matriculated along with two other new students, Mishi and Yoshi Ozone, children of the Japanese Toyota plant manager. Zach and Mishi joined St. As sixth-grade class, as Gordon and Yoshi entered fourth grade together.

  The Japanese children wouldn't have recognized it, but Bramel saw them as a bellwether for Lebanon's future economic health: Those kids represented a few hundred jobs for residents in Marion County who graduated high school but weren't going to college. Folks who might have turned to growing marijuana just a few years before now had legitimate opportunities and benefits: health care, sick days and the opportunity to work without risking prison.

  As Bramel approached downtown Louisville that Friday morning with these positive thoughts of Lebanon in his head, he exited Interstate 65 and drove down Broadway to the stately federal courthouse. He parked his tan Isuzu Trooper, grabbed his camera and notebook and walked into the grand, neoclassical building not knowing what to expect. When he entered the conference room, a staffer took him personally to a seat reserved for him in the front row.

  Bramel looked around himself and saw representatives from 840 WHAS radio, Louisville's flagship talk radio station; all the major papers; the Associated Press; United Press International and every major television news crew in the state.

  "What am I doing here?" Bramel thought. "And why did they escort me to a reserved seat in front-row middle?"

  In front of the assembled press stood a podium to which reporters attached their microphones, and behind the podium was an easel with a four-by-eight-foot placard covered by a black sheet.

  Soon enough, an assistant US attorney, David Grise, came to the podium and removed the sheet, revealing a poster-sized map very similar to the one reprinted in the Courier-journal the following day:

  The location labeled number 1 on the map was Johnny Boone's Minnesota farm. Number 2 was Minnesota's sister farm in the far reaches of western Nebraska. Numbers 3 through 9 were in eastern Kansas, farms run by Bobby Joe Shewmaker. Numbers 10,11 and 12 in Michigan; 13 through 16 in Kentucky; 17 through 21 in northern Missouri, also run by Shewmaker. Numbers 22 through 27 in all parts of Illinois; 28 in Indiana; 29 in Wisconsin.

  And all roads led to Marion County.

  Bramel's stomach sank. As the shutters of the other cameras clicked and whizzed around him, he knew that in a matter of minutes, Marion County was going to be dealt a blow like it had never felt before-and just when he thought all this was behind them. Through Bramel's daze he heard the man at the podium talking, so he snapped out of it.

  "What we are revealing today," David Grise said, "is the largest domestic marijuana-producing organization in the history of the United States."

  Pointing at the map, Grise said they had identified twenty-nine farms in nine states.

  "Each of these farms," Grise said, pointing to the dots on the map, "has been traced back to the cooperative by documents seized at the farms, by fingerprints, by eyewitness accounts, by the arrest of cooperative members and by the method of operation of those farms."

  Cleve Gambill, the first assistant US district attorney, stepped up to the podium as well. As certain as these prosecutors were of their facts, they weren't certain enough to present them to a judge and jury, only to a row of cameras and compliant reporters.

  "The organization," Gambill said, "is a highly motivated, well financed and highly organized group of marijuana growers from Kentucky who are responsible for growing this vast amount of marijuana [and who] call themselves the Cornbread Mafia."

  David Haight, the head of the Louisville office of the DEA, said that all other major trafficking organizations in the nation "have been foreign nationals, primarily Latins from either Mexico or Colombia.

  "This is the first major trafficking organization in the United States that we have thus far identified ... that has not relied on foreign nationals for their production and distribution of marijuana," Haight said.

  "The wholesale value of the marijuana we've seized is $364 million," Gambill said. "And we know the street value would be much, much more than that."

  "A major dent has been made in the group," he explained, acknowledging that the Marion County cooperative continued to operate. "We intend to crush this organization."

  Federal and state agencies had arrested seventy people-forty-nine from Marion County alone-and seized 182 tons of marijuana since the investigation began in 1985. Yet, the first busts they cited in connection with the cooperative hadn't occurred until November 1986, a multimilliondollar marijuana-processing plant in Woodford County, Kentucky, that netted twelve arrests-number 14 on the map.

  This case was already public knowledge, having been reported upon and written about in the Lebanon Enterprise and Courier ,journal and all the other news organizations present, as was the other cornerstone of the vast alleged conspiracy: the October 1987 bust of Johnny Boone's farm in Minnesota (number 1 on the map). In fact, all the busts represented on the map had been previously reported.

  Two of the cooperative's leaders, Grise said, were "Robert Joseph Shewmaker" and "John Robert Boone." Although he identified these two as "major figures," Grise was careful not to call them kingpins, bosses or anything that would perk a reporter's ears enough to ask, "If they are kingpins, are they being prosecuted under the CCE statute?"

  Gambill echoed Grise, saying "two major figures in the cooperative" were Shewmaker and Boone. "Both of these persons are from Marion County, and all are in custody at this time," Gambill said.

  "Wait a minute," John Bramel finally interjected from the front row. "You keep mentioning Johnny Boone's name. But he's not from Marion County. He's from Washington County."

  The man behind the podium hardly acknowledged Bramel and presented his next piece of evidence.

  "And wait," Bramel said. "You said Shewmaker was a major figure in the cooperative, and you also described him as one of the people who would arrive to purchase a farm. But Mr. Grise had said earlier that a `financier'would send his 'lieutenant'to purchase the farm. So, exactly what ..." Bramel was in the middle of his question when he was cut off again.

  Other reporters asked other questions. For whom was the marijuana being produced? How was it sold and distributed? Who were the financiers? Nobody asked the government prosecutors why this evidence was being given at a press conference and not to a grand jury.

  John Bramel sat there with a growing sense of nausea, ashamed to be sitting there with a reporter's notebook as the metropolitan media outlets uncritically accepted a story that, Bramel knew, was about to rip the heart out of his hometown. After the press conference concluded, John Bramel approached David Grise, the assistant US attorney, wanting to know if this vast marijuana conspiracy was an indictment or a criminal charge for which these men would be prosecuted.

  "Well, no," Grise told him.

  As the facts merged with their presentation at the press conference, John Bramel understood why he had been called, why his seat had been reserved. It wasn't just out of courtesy; it had been done with cold intention to maximize the effect of the news conference on the people against whom it was directed, a psy-ops campaign.

  As he drove home in the rain, Bramel felt sick. He had witnessed firsthand the US Attorney's Office manipulating the press to seek a conviction in the c
ourt of public opinion while bypassing the courtroom completely. The federal prosecutors charged that all of the people they named were part of the Marion County marijuana cooperative, yet they had no intention of actually charging anyone with conspiracy as a leader or participant. Bramel saw it for what it was: an allegation with no chance for recourse, no chance for trial to be proven innocent. It was a guilty verdict read to the cameras without an indictment.

  Bramel turned on the radio, switched to the AM frequency and found 840 WHAS, Louisville's most powerful talk radio station. When the news came on at the top of the hour, Bramel's day grew worse. WHAS reported that forty-nine residents of Marion County had been arrested in a roundup, as if the FBI had arrested nearly fifty men that day. Bramel turned off the radio.

  "The DEA framed the story in a way that it was going to reflect poorly on Marion County, at least in some people's eyes," recalled Al Cross, who had moved from the city desk to the politics desk of the Courier .journal since leaving his Raywick beat. "They want to put a stereotype on it: If they are violating the law, they must be bad people."

  John Bramel arrived back at the Enterprise office just after lunch. Not far behind him came the Action News vans from the Louisville and Lexington television stations. They came to shove microphones into people's faces and ask for a reaction. A reaction to what? The press conference hadn't made the papers yet, and the only news of it had come from WHAS radio, which had been dead wrong-there had been no fifty-person roundup. The six o'clock news made it worse, and then the 11:00 news hammered it home again.