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

by James Higdon

  One television crew drove into Loretto, where the reporter spent all day attempting to get someone to talk to him with no luck.

  "Loretto, Kentucky," the reporter said, according to a Marion County viewer, "population two thousand, and nobody knows a thing."

  Some people didn't believe it at all. Cornbread Mafia? Never heard of it. Others believed it but for all the wrong reasons. Some disgruntled citizens could give names of a whole string of people they saw with their own eyes get arrested with a whole busload of other people-and it wasn't just farmers and outlaws. It was prominent people and public servants. It was everyone but the talker's family. As the rumors spread, they took on a force of their own.

  Suddenly phones started ringing everywhere-at the police station, the sheriff's office, the commonwealth attorney's office and the US Attorney's Office in Louisville. Misled by the press conference and the uncritical reporting that followed, people called to ask for details of the arrests that they assumed had occurred within the last few days, when in reality the arrests had taken place over four years. A newscast on Lebanon's radio station WLBN reported on Wednesday morning (five days after the press conference) what should have been obvious after the first day: Despite all your calls, folks, what you're saying just isn't true; there was no FBI roundup in Lebanon last week.

  Meanwhile, as the rumors hit tidal wave proportions, John Bramel realized that when the Enterprise came out that week, people would read his factual account of the press conference; then the truth would be known, and the world would become sane again. Under a photo of Assistant US Attorney David Grise pointing to his big map, Bramel wrote the headline:

  CORN BREAD MAFIA?

  The question mark was his editorial statement, a mark of skepticism of Grise's claims.

  "What makes you think it was an editorial statement?" Bramel asked defensively twenty-two years later. Then he smiled. "You're right. It was." As Bramel worked in his office Wednesday morning, a woman who refused to identify herself called his line.

  "When are you gonna report the truth," she barked, "and report the names of those who have been arrested!"

  By then news of Marion County and the Cornbread Mafia had acquired prominent placement on the front pages of newspapers across the country and around the globe. One Lebanon native saw the headline by chance in a suburban D.C. diner in northern Virginia. In Australia, Marion County native Sandra Gwinn worked as a tax accountant in Sydney and was surprised when her Price Waterhouse co-workers showed her the "Cornbread Mafia" headline from the Sydney Morning Herald.

  "They didn't even know what cornbread was in Australia," Sandra Gwinn said twenty years later. "All they had there was polenta."

  On the same day in June 1989, Johnny Boone, in federal custody for nearly two years by then, wondered if he would ever be able to see home again. Then, on television, he saw news of the press conference in Louisville where David Grise revealed the workings of the Cornbread Mafia.

  "I wonder where they got that name," Boone thought to himself. He had certainly never applied the label himself to his operations, but there was David Grise on television, telling the world that it was a name the pot growers called themselves.

  Johnny Boone was not alone in suspecting that the term Cornbread Mafia had been coined by the federal agents, eager to ignite the imagination of the public. Others in Marion County would blame the Courier ,journal, the first news outlet to use the term in print. Yet, an FBI memo obtained through the Freedom of Information Act stated "this term has been applied to this group by some of the participants," an allegation that many participants would later deny, which confirms the idea that this was no single organized "mafia" at all but rather many crews operating independently. James "Jim Bean" Cecil later said he was there when the infamous term was created.

  "We were all sitting down here in this big metal shop," recalled Jim Bean, who served a four-year sentence for taking 733 pounds of marijuana to Florida with J. C. Abell in 1983. "Aaannnd, we were sitting there talking, and we all ... I don't know what year it was. It was either'79 or'80. It wasn't'81, I'm sure of it. I was thinking about'80, and we started talking about how we was, out in the cornfield, you know, 'cornfield'this and `cornfield' that. And the word, the best to my knowledge, and the word, what'd they call us? `Corn Boys.'

  "Then we started talking about the mafia. Therefore, that's the first time I heard the word Cornbread Mafia. That was in about around '80, and from then on, I guess, you know, we would jokingly say, `Well, you know we're the Cornbread Mafia,' and that's when [the state police] come down there, and that's when they picked up on it.

  "And the year, that one year there,'81, they were trying to follow some of us to a patch because we found this homer [homing device] because Bobby Joe had a black truck and took it down there to [a service station]. And they raised the truck up, you know, and the one of them told him, without saying anything ... He walked into the garage, and they pointed to this black box with an antenna and a magnet on it. What they were trying to do, they were trying to follow him, not knowing we'd find that box.

  "We took it off, and they put it on someone else's truck. I don't know who or where or nothing, but I'm sure they got sent on a wild goose chase."

  To briefly revisit the map revealed at the June 1989 press conference: Many retired Cornbreaders looking at it came to the same conclusion, which was that the government found only a fraction of Cornbread crops across the country.The map clearly showed busts to the west and north of Kentucky-9 o'clock to 12 o'clock-but nothing from 12:01 to 8:59. Three-quarters of the Cornbread clock face remained undiscovered, it would seem.

  Two MILES SOUTHWEST OF TERRE HAUTE, INDIANA, NEAR THE ILLINOIS state line, a bus driven by the US Marshals Service turned at the intersection of State Road 63 and Springhill Drive, carrying a load of convicted felons, Johnny Boone among them, to their new home: the United States Penitentiary at Terre Haute, the prison with the reputation as the worst in the federal corrections system, where the federal government sends prisoners it would rather see dead than alive. Terre Haute, unofficially, was a death sentence to most who entered, either dying by natural causes before their long sentences expired or being killed by the most violent prison population in America.

  Boone's first impression of his new home, like that of every incoming inmate of Terre Haute, was the sprawling cemetery in the front of the compound, where the warden had planted fifty years' worth of dead prisoners.

  "Welcome to the gladiator arena," the prison guard at the front of the bus announced as the vehicle passed through the first set of gates into the Terre Haute compound. Boone and the rest of his busload became the latest addition to USP Terre Haute's population of fourteen hundred inmates, of whom 39 percent were white and 57 percent were black; he was one of the 25 percent there on drug charges. At forty-four years old, Johnny Boone was seven years older than the median age of the inmates there.

  Built in 1940 on 1,126 acres of land, USP Terre Haute was one of the first federal prisons to emphasize rehabilitation by providing psychological and psychiatric treatment, referring to prisoners by names as opposed to numbers and allowing prisoners to talk during meals instead of eating in silence.' he institution initiated the use of the word inmate as opposed to other less-appealing labels such as convict or criminal. It also became one of the first federal prisons to implement educational programs with sessions devoted to improving the inmates'skills in reading, writing, math, as well as trades.

  Inside its fenced perimeter, Terre Haute offered its inmates a hundred tons of weight-lifting equipment; courts for racquetball, handball, tennis and basketball; pitches for bowling and horseshoes; fields for baseball and football; a running track; an outdoor gymnasium; a covered, casino-style card-playing area and an eighteen-hole miniature golf course. Near the casino was the Native American sweat lodge and sacred area; near the totem pole was UNICOR, the prison factory, where inmates could work for pennies a day.

  Inside its walls were a chapel used for e
very conceivable religion, a law library with rudimentary photocopiers and typewriters, a leisure library, a cafeteria, a pool hall, two recording studios, a cinema, a school, a hobby shop, a supermarket and thirty television rooms.

  Yet, despite these amenities and the high-minded goals of its prewar founders, by the end of the 1980s, the residents of Terre Haute referred to their home as "Terror Hut," and, according to the only published memoir from inside its walls, Mr. Nice by Howard Marks, Terre Haute had "the worst reputation for slaughter and gang rape," adding that the Indiana prison "resembles an enormous insect whose outside skeleton is razor wire, whose body is the main thoroughfare, whose legs are cell blocks for prisoners, whose claws are holes for administering torture, whose arms are mindless facilities for its 1,300 inhabitants, whose compound eyes are TV cameras, and whose head is a gymnasium."

  The prison had become, according to Marks, "America's `gladiator school' and provided an arena for tough redneck US government hacks, black inner-city gang leaders, bikers and psychopaths," along with "Indian braves, terrorists, bank robbers, presidential assassins, spies, interstate hooker transporters, dope smugglers and any state convict too butch for the state authorities to handle."

  Like Marks, Boone quickly discovered that Terre Haute's cell blocks overflowed with a cross-section of American criminals of every conceivable stripe: black, white, Native American, Latino and Asian. As one grew accustomed to one's surroundings there, a clearer picture of each group emerged. The black population represented members of gangs from all over: Black Panthers from Oakland, Bloods and Crips from Los Angeles, Blackstone Rangers and Gangster Disciples from Chicago, plus gangsters from Washington, D.C., New York and Jamaica.

  Among the all-white gangs were the Aryan Brotherhood, the Dirty White Boys, the Dixie Mafia, the Winter Hill Gang from Boston and the Westies from Manhattan. Plus an assortment of ethnic gangs like the Latin Kings, the Mexican Mafia and syndicates from Cuba, Puerto Rico and Colombia, not to mention motorcycle gang members from the Hells Angels, Mongols, Pagans and Outlaws.

  Terre Haute housed its share of famous Italian Mafiosi, including first among equals Joseph "Joe Bananas" Bonanno, the patriarch of the Bonanno crime family and one of Mario Puzo's influences for his Vito Corleone character in The Godfather. Bonanno was sent to Terre Haute for part of his fourteen-month confinement in 1986 for contempt of court because he refused to answer questions from a federal grand jury.

  Whereas Bonanno stayed for only a short time, some of his associates called Terre Haute home for much longer.These were men like Colombo family underboss Gennaro "Jerry Lang" Langella, serving a one hundredyear sentence; Gambino family member and convicted heroin dealer John Carneglia, whose release date is set for 2018; Victor Amuso, the boss of the Lucchese family; Frank Locascio, consigliere in the Gambino organization under John Gotti; Anthony "Whack-Whack" Indelicato, a top capo in the Bonanno family; and Joseph Testa of the Gambino family, who as half of the "Gemini Twins" and a member of the so-called Murder Machine participated in as many as two hundred mob-related killings in the back room of the Gemini Club in Brooklyn's Bushwick neighborhood before his conviction in 1989 on federal charges for killing a government witness. Testa arrived at Terre Haute a year and a half into Johnny Boone's tenure there, and he and Boone became close friends.

  Early in Testa's stay, a jailhouse rat told the prison guards that the mobster was planning an escape. Prison officials locked Testa up in solitary confinement while they "investigated the charges," a tactic that Boone and other inmates understood as a method for the prison to break Testa, a potentially headstrong citizen of Terre Haute.

  With Testa in solitary, the prison sent three prison snitches to fetch Testa's footlocker, the repository of all his personal possessions, ostensibly so the prison officials could investigate. When Johnny Boone saw the snitches pushing a cart toward Testa's cell, Boone ran to it first and blocked the cell door by pushing the bed against it. Boone knew that the prison wanted to take Testa's locker just to break him psychologically and that these snitches the prison sent to do the job were nothing but trash.

  "If you want it that bad," Boone told them from inside Testa's cell, "you come and get it. You'll probably end up killing me, but I'll get at least one of you before I go. Which one's it going to be?"

  They stood their ground for a while, thinking about what to do, but eventually backed down. Nobody wanted a fight to the death with the bearded Kentucky outlaw. When word got back to Testa from the orderlies who passed him meals through a slot in the door that Johnny Boone had saved his footlocker, a bond of mutual respect formed between the two men and, by extension, Testa's Italian family.

  Boone learned he had a good deal in common with the Mafiosi he met in Terre Haute. Although the wiseguys were there for murder, extortion, racketeering and other violent, predatory crimes and Boone was there as a nonviolent marijuana cultivator, they were all sentenced to lengthy terms because they kept their mouths shut and didn't inform on their friends. Had any of them turned state's evidence against his organization, what little jail time he did would not have been in Terre Haute.' here was a sense that the federal courts sent this type of uncooperative convict to Terre Haute to administer prison justice beyond the Thunderdome style-"Two men enter; one man leaves!"-and in Terre Haute, that was a real thing.

  Boone's Cosa Nostra friends taught him the word they used for the code of silence that Boone sacrificed more than twenty years of his life to defend; they called it omerta. To the Sicilians, omerta signified manhood beyond simple silence. It prohibited not just cooperating with state authorities but relying on them at all, even if one was the victim of a crime-like on Christmas Eve 1981, when a nineteen-year-old Marion County man told police at a hospital in Louisville that he hurt himself when he slipped and fell against a bumper while trying to get a drunk friend into a car, even after the police showed him the X-rays that showed a broken-off knife blade lodged near his spinal cord in his back. If a court convicted a man of a crime he didn't commit, omerta dictated he not give police information about the true criminal-a philosophy of self-reliance and complete independence from the state.

  When Johnny Boone understood what his Italian friends were describing to him, he had a revelation: He had been following the laws of omertd his whole life and learned the term for his personal philosophy only after suffering the consequences of the silence that it insists upon. Johnny Boone had a Terre Haute tattoo artist ink OMERTA across his back in blue and red.

  Even though statistics indicate that 350 of Boone's fellow inmates had been sent to Terre Haute on drug charges, few fit his profile as a nonviolent, high-level marijuana broker. Of those 350, the nearest to Boone in career choice and demeanor was Howard Marks, even if the two men were polar opposites in most other respects-Marks: a thin-statured, cosmopolitan Welshman with the debonair swagger of a British rock star; and Boone: a stocky, bearded, Kentucky-bred farmer.

  Although clean-shaven in prison, Marks had at times worn a beard and other facial hair designs as part of the cover for his numerous disguises, aliases and passport photos. He could look like a banker with a meticulous Dutch-boy haircut and a crisply trimmed mustache as he famously smuggled bricks of hashish into America inside the speaker cabinets for rock'n'roll concert tours for bands like Pink Floyd; or he could look like a Marxist revolutionary with a bushy mane and a full, bushy beard.

  Johnny Boone stopped trimming his beard when he was first arrested in Minnesota, and because the federal government kept custody of him from the moment of his arrest, denying him both bail and voluntary surrender, his beard grew bushy and long and had begun to turn gray prematurely because of the stress of his arrest, the preparation for a trial that never came and his incarceration in the roughest hole in the federal prison system. In Terre Haute, Johnny Boone found that his big beard had a certain psychological advantage.

  "In there," Johnny Boone said later, referring to Terre Haute, "it helped to look a little bit crazy."

  Howa
rd Marks's displeasure with his accommodations at Terre Haute extended to the prison's staff-"the hacks," he calls them in his bookwhich he categorized as ranging from "fat military megalomaniacs to fat and demented local Ku Klux Klan rejects."

  Johnny Boone's opinion of the guards and warden staff was a little different, perhaps because Boone had more exposure to redneck types in his Kentucky world than had Marks during his days at Balliol College, Oxford, or in the Mod scene of swinging London. To Boone, the guards and warden were better than some in the American prison system-to be called by your name instead of by a prison-issued number was an important gesture, not to be taken for granted. It meant that the prison guards saw the inmates as humans and not just as walking statistics. If an inmate had a problem, Boone saw that the guards would actually listen to the inmate's issue and treat him with consideration-unlike guards in some places, where the inmate would be told just to get back in line.' he Terre Haute staff knew that the whole place was a teetering powder keg, Boone reasoned. At any moment, the whole place could erupt into full-scale riot. Listening and responding to inmates' concerns were some of the few pressure valves the staff could use to relieve some tension at America's gladiator school.

  In keeping with this philosophy, the warden of Terre Haute contacted any prisoner of interest to the media. It was the inmates' constitutional right to speak to the press. If a journalist wanted to speak to a convicted felon in Terre Haute, the warden always let the inmate know of the request and allowed him to talk with the journalist if he wanted. In this way, the warden called Johnny Boone to his office on three separate occasions, telling him a newspaper wanted to talk to him about his case, and in each instance Boone declined, refusing to talk with the Wall Street Journal, the Detroit News and the Chicago Tribune. Boone remembered the news stories that had been written about his business in the earlier in the decade, and he saw nothing good come from those stories, only more heat and harsher sentences. As he sat in his cell in Terre Haute, where his life was in danger every day from random violence, Boone thought that silence was best.