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

by James Higdon

  "I didn't say, `turn on,"' McCall replied, frustrated by Grise's strawman argument.

  "There were two recording places," Grise continued. "One in the airplane and one on the ground.... The only people who could have turned off the [tape]-"

  "Are the agents," McCall interjected.

  "Are the agents," Grise said, nearly at the same time.

  "All right," McCall said.

  "And they had to get together-the people on the ground had to get together with the people in the plane and decide to turn it off at the exact same place and turn it on at the exact same places in advance when they didn't know exactly what was going to occur."

  "All I can tell you is-" McCall started before the judge interrupted.

  "Well, I appreciate everybody saying-well, let me say this,"Judge Simpson said. "It occurred to me that, Mr. McCall, the evidence that ... what is on the tapes is only a selected transmission, in which case the inference would be that the United States only wanted to show the bad parts of the tape as opposed to other parts, which might be neutral or of benefit to your clients.... If the inference can be drawn from your evidence most favorably to your position, it would be that the tapes were stopped and started by the United States in order to basically set up your client and eliminate from the tapes any information which may have exculpated himself or made statements that indicate a lack of any element of the crimes. [But] that would not be necessary if this jury did not hear the tapes.

  "In other words, your evidence is: Here is the rest of the story. But they don't need to hear the rest of the story if they don't hear the first part of the story.... If they don't hear what was on the tape, they don't need to know what was on the tape may-that may have been started and stopped. I can't see myself . . . "

  "I view it differently than you," McCall told the judge, "but I respect your position."

  "I don't see how it would be relevant," the judge said.

  "Judge, I think it would be relevant in this respect," Robert Fleming, Gary Allen's lawyer, said. "The premise that David [Grise] relies on [is] that these people had to be telling the truth because they knew the law enforcement officers were listening to their every word, and that is based on the premise that the law enforcement officers are straight guys, wouldn't do anything underhanded. But if the law enforcement officers told them, don't worry about a thing, fellows. If you get into there and we don't want to hear it, we'll turn off the tape ... then I think that destroys the premise that this was an up-and-up deal from the get-go.

  "I think Mr. McCall would be entitled to introduce that so that there was collusion between these people that anything we don't want to hear ain't going to be on there, so don't worry about that, fellows.... If you get into something that might be beneficial to the defendant, we'll take care of that. We'll just press a button and stop the tape....

  "I think that attacks or rebuts the proposition that the guy that went in there is, you know, just so worried about every word being recorded for posterity."

  "Judge," Grise said quickly, "I am compelled to mention the preposterous nature of a conspiracy between the FBI and the DEA and the Kentucky State Police to edit these tape recordings while the events are occurring and then to share that information, this conspiracy information, with Mr. Haskell and Mr. Hunt, so they sure would never tell anybody."

  "Well, Mr. Grise,"Judge Simpson said from the bench, "you lose me when you start telling me how preposterous things are because that's not my function, to determine whether it's preposterous or not.... The defense lawyers, I don't think, are necessarily smearing anybody. They're doing their job.... I will just rule on this and move along.

  "All right. Mr. Grise, I am not going to permit you to prove [that Haskell and Hunt were wearing body wires].... The defendants have come up with clever arguments that would implicate the entire tape, and that's getting into issues too ancillary. So, I'm going to not permit you to get into that.

  "Bring the jury in," the judge said to the bailiff.

  At 10:45 a.m., after an argument of more than an hour over whether the witnesses' body-wire transmitters could be discussed in open court in order for the government to bolster their credibility, the jury entered the courtroom.

  "Good morning, ladies and gentlemen," Judge Simpson said to the jurors. "So much for our 9:30 starting time."

  After the colloquy, Assistant US Attorney David Grise began reexamining Michael Haskell-after Haskell's memory had been refreshed by the US marshal, who had delivered Haskell's previous statement to him in his jail cell.

  "OK. Now where did you go after you left Joe Keith Bickett's house?" Grise asked. "Oh, excuse me. One more question, one more question about Joe Keith before I leave. Anybody ride up on horseback while you were there?"

  "No, not that I know of," Haskell said.

  "OK. Didn't see anybody riding a horse?"

  "No."

  "Is that something you think you'd remember, seeing somebody ride up on a horse?"

  "Yeah, I would if I had seen somebody. No, I didn't see anybody on any horse."

  On March 9, 1990, the Courier journal announced the Bicketts case verdict with the headline, "US Jury Convicts Three More Members of Marion `Corn Bread Mafia' Drug Ring." The jury deliberated for a day and a half, the Courier journal stated, and reached its verdict without information related to the possibly tampered-with audio tape or the collusion of the government's witnesses in the Bullitt County jail.

  On the day after the Bicketts'conviction, at 2:38 p.m., the phone rang in the US Attorney's Office. Assistant US Attorney Cleveland Gambill answered.

  "For David Grise, concerning the case yesterday," the caller said rapidly in a husky voice, "I'm going to get you."

  When Gambill asked the caller for his name, he hung up.

  Despite this threatening call, David Grise declined the extra security detail offered to him by the US Marshals Service. The Jefferson County Police Department patrolled Grise's residence three or four times a night to ensure his safety while Jimmy and Joe Keith Bickett prepared to serve their 240-month and 300-month sentences, respectively.

  With that, the Cornbread Mafia, as it had become known to the public a year earlier during the task force's press conference, had effectively been shuttered. Although many men continued the tradition of growing marijuana in and around Marion County, it would never be at the size or scale it had once been.

  "USP Terre Haute had one major advantage," according to Howard Marks. "One couldn't be transferred to anywhere worse." Within a few years of arriving at "Terror Hut," Marks would be transferred elsewhere, which, by definition, was a step up. In April 1995, Howard Marks was granted parole and deported home to the United Kingdom, where he was later released.

  In 1992, a new prison opened in eastern Kentucky. FCI Manchester was established to help house the rising federal prison population, a growing percentage of it POWs in the War on Drugs. Jimmy and Joe Keith Bickett were two of Manchester's first residents, entering just after it opened in January. Built for six hundred medium-security inmates and 150 minimum-security inmates in its camp, Manchester has been described by a former inmate as a "fortified college campus," filled mostly with men coming to a lower-security facility from the USPs in Terre Haute, Atlanta and Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

  Johnny Boone received word in January 1993 that he, too, would soon call Manchester his home, but he would come later because of paperwork problems, arriving in April. In Terre Haute, Boone felt like a caged animal in a deadly circus, where any day could be his last. His three years in the "gladiator school" caused him to be on alert at all times, ready to spring into deadly force at a moment's notice. As soon as he arrived in Manchester, a wave of stress left his body, as if the caged animal had been released onto a nature preserve. And there waiting for Boone were the Bickett brothers and a whole assortment of Kentucky men locked up for the same reason as himself. It was homecoming, of sorts.

  Johnny Boone had not associated with the Bicketts for a decade before they al
l arrived at the prison in Manchester. When cocaine had come to Marion County in the early 1980s, it had driven a wedge between those who dealt with it and those who saw it as a magic powder that turned good people into assholes. The Bicketts, along with men like J. C. Abell, followed Bobby Joe Shewmaker down the cocaine road, which distanced them all from men like Johnny Boone, who saw firsthand the problems and misery cocaine caused and avoided it altogether.

  By 1985, cocaine had caused a fundamental rift in the once-friendly Cornbread Mafia. Shewmaker and his men were running in places like Kansas, and Boone had his crews in places like Minnesota. Before the net fell and they had all been rounded up, the Kansas and Minnesota "families" of the Cornbread Mafia were nearly at war with each otherdeath threats between them had been exchanged. The cocaine use of the Kansas men caused a fundamental communication breakdown between them and Johnny Boone, who wanted them to quit fooling with that shit.

  But by the early 1990s, all that was behind everyone because most everyone involved was in the custody of the US Bureau of Prisons. Jimmy Bickett and Johnny Boone became fast friends again, just as they had been before the first kilo of cocaine came to Raywick.

  Joe Keith Bickett, freed from the influence of cocaine, spent most of his time in the prison law library, learning about the laws the government used to sentence him to a quarter-century behind bars. Then he and his lawyers drafted a detailed appeal, based on what they learned about Hunt, Haskell and Villacci talking with each other in the Bullitt County jail. They hadn't known during the course of the trial the extent of collusion between the three informants from Maine, so they couldn't introduce it as evidence, which might have damaged the credibility of the witnesses enough to create reasonable doubt with the jury, or so Joe Keith Bickett argued in his appeal on behalf of himself and his brother Jimmy. Joe Keith also pointed to the allegations that the DEA had edited the surveillance tape and had provided Haskell with his prior sworn statements while he was under direct examination. A three-judge panel from the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected each of Joe Keith's claims and affirmed the Bickett brothers'sentences, with this unhelpful caveat:

  "While we find that the trial court did not abuse its discretion ..." the court wrote, "the government's conduct in this matter is disquieting. Although there is no proof that the government's witnesses tailored their testimony, the government acted improperly by placing all three witnesses in the same cell for an extended period of time after the first day of trial. Such conduct raises the specter of impropriety, and, for that reason alone, should have been avoided."

  After the Sixth Circuit denied the Bicketts' appeal, Jimmy Bickett accepted that he would be in prison for the better part of the next two decades. Yet, Joe Keith remained in the law library, finding new ways to challenge his sentence, which he continued to assert had been wrongly imposed. Although the two brothers differed in how they handled their fates, the Bicketts were of a single mind when they worried what effect their incarcerations might have on their family. Their pot-growing days might have been behind them, but their family's grief was not.

  In 1995, when the Bickett brothers had been in prison for six years, their sister, Patricia, thirty-nine, and her husband, Richard Gaddie, fifty, sold a 1989 Bass Tracker fishing boat to a man named Altha "Junior" Cox, who paid with a check that bounced. When Patricia asked Cox either to pay for the boat or bring it back, Cox drove to their trailer parked on the Bickett family farm in Raywick and, finding both Patricia and Richard at home, shot them both twice in the head with a .22 Magnum.

  To conceal the evidence of his crime, Cox set fire to the trailer, where Patricia's two schnauzers curled around the bodies of their owners as their home burned around them. The four bodies were found together. Cox pleaded guilty and received two life sentences of twenty-five years, to run concurrently, plus a ten-year arson sentence to run at the same time. For 150 pounds of marijuana and his connection to Shewmaker's Kansas operation, Joe Keith Bickett was sentenced to three hundred months in prison. For the double homicide of Bickett's sister and brother-in-law, Cox would be eligible for parole in the same amount of time.

  In the late 1990s, as Johnny Boone's release date loomed only a few years away, the Bureau of Prisons transferred him to its facility in Lexington, Kentucky, just sixty miles from home. Not long after, it transferred Jimmy Bickett there, too.

  Bickett and Boone spent as many hours together in Lexington as they could, remembering old times. When they went to the weight room together for the first time, however, the two Kentucky men were walking into a corner of the prison claimed by a Washington, D.C., gang, and led by a large man who called himself Money.

  As Bickett and Boone started lifting at a weight station, Money came over to tell them that he and his crew wanted to use that bench.

  "All right," Boone said. "We'll use this one over here."

  "Naw," Money said as members of his gang stood behind him. "We need that one, too."

  And then it was clear. Itwasn't the weight bench Moneywanted. Money wanted Bickett and Boone to leave. Money did not get what he wanted. Johnny Boone stood his ground; the years of hardening he had undergone at Terre Haute had further tempered his already strong, alpha-male physique behind his graying beard. Jimmy Bickett stood at his side the whole time.

  Boone knew that Jimmy Bickett was a fighter, had seen him kick plenty of ass in Raywick; the fourth son of Squire Bickett was no coward. Here, in the face of certain defeat, outnumbered by a D.C. street gang five to one, Bickett didn't flinch, didn't leave Boone's side, and the two Kentucky men, one ten years younger than the other, stood their ground against nearly a dozen gangbangers, all with jailhouse physiques, ready for the fists to fly over a territorial fight on the weight pile.

  But Money wasn't prepared to begin a battle until he calculated what damage each of these two Kentucky men might inflict on his own. The standoff ended, instead, with jailhouse respect, and Money and his men backed off, leaving Boone and Bickett at their weight bench. After that incident, Boone and Bickett were closer than they had ever been in the free world.

  In the Lexington prison, Johnny Boone passed the time betting books of stamps, prison currency, on Jimmy Bickett's games of bocce-the Italian bowling game, much like horseshoes, in which players toss or roll four croquet-sized balls toward the smaller boccino, and each round's points are given only to the team with the ball nearest the boccino. The game had been imported into the prison system by incarcerated Mafiosi, and Jimmy Bickett was one of the best players on the yard.

  Every wiseguy wanted Bickett on his bocce team, even though the Italians didn't have much respect for Bickett, Boone or the other incarcerated Kentuckians, whom the Italians would openly refer to as "hillbillies" and "rednecks." Bickett didn't like them using those words, so he decided he would badmouth the Italians' heritage, too. Having grown up in Raywick, though, Bickett had never learned the slurs used to disparage Italian Americans in East Coast cities, so he had to think of his own"spaghetti-eatin' motherfuckers."

  The wiseguys didn't like that.

  There was something else they didn't like about Jimmy Bickett. Traditionally, bocce was played by old men quietly with strategy and skill. But that's not how Jimmy Bickett played. He would stand at the end of the pit and talk trash to distract his opponent.

  "You ain't no good," he would say. "You think you're smart, but you're locked up in here with the rest of us, spaghetti-eatin' motherfucker."

  Johnny Boone wagered books of stamps on these games, betting on Bickett's team. Over time, Bickett's insults began to overshadow his usefulness as a bowler; some of the wiseguys grew tired of hearing Bickett call them his invented ethnic slur. So, one day an older Italian asked Bickett to take a walk with him around the track. When they were alone, the old man spoke.

  "Why do you call us `spaghetti-eating motherfuckers'?"

  "Because that's what you are,"Jimmy Bickett told him.

  "What can we do to keep you from calling us that?"

  "Jus
t quit calling us `hillbillies."'

  "Is that all?"

  By the time the two men had walked a lap on the track, the problem had been solved without anyone getting hurt; the closest thing ever to a gang war between the Cornbread Mafia and the actual Mafia had been averted.

  Meanwhile, as two Bickett brothers did their time in federal prison, another Bickett brother worked his way up the ranks at the Marion Adjustment Center, the prison in St. Mary's.

  "I had a lot of knowledge about prisons," Charlie Bickett later said. "I was able to talk to inmates just like I'm talking to you right now. I got along with the inmates because they knew my background. They knew my brothers were in the pen, and they knew I come from a community there that had a lot of, I call them gangsters, there. So, they knew all about Charlie Bickett's profile.

  "A lot of'em, some of'em, started saying that I was bringing drugs in, telling the deputy director of security, and that's when Cliff Todd called me up.

  "He said, `Charlie, they're going to give you a polygraph test.'

  "I said, `What for?'

  "This was about 3:00 in the morning when Cliff called me.

  "He said, `Well, they think you're bringing drugs in. Are you?'

  "I said, `No sir. I'm not. Never have and never will.'

  "So anyway, David Donahue [the warden] called me over to his office.

  "He said, `Mr. Bickett, what if you had an employee here you think is selling drugs on campus, what would you do?'

  "I said, `I'd require him to have a urinalysis and a polygraph test.'

  "He said, `Guess who that is?'

  "And I said, `Me.'

  "And he looked at me.... He said, `Well, this morning, we're going to go to Frankfort to give you a polygraph so we can nip this in the bud or do what we gotta do.'