by James Higdon
"I said, `Let's go.'
"So, we left that morning, about 7:00, and, of course, I came out smelling like a rose. Well, it wasn't but a week later that the guy that took me down there, the chief of security, they busted his ass for doing cocaine and bringing drugs in.
"So, what do they say? What's the old expression? I was in the kitchen, but it wasn't me . . . "
Further mixups with the bosses convinced Charlie that maybe what some people said was true: A Bickett couldn't work in a prison. After a minor prank involving a mounted deer head, Charlie was suspended, demoted and had his pay docked.
"Finally, I quit the fucking place. They wanted me to come back so bad."
Not long after Charlie Bickett quit the prison, his new friend, Cliff Todd, found himself in trouble with the law after he blew the whistle on extortionists in the Louisville corrections system.
"Louisville was so overcrowded that they were letting them out after serving only 5 percent of their time," Cliff Todd recalled. "So, without any contact with county officials, I bought the Goodwill Industries of Kentucky building. It had five stories with a one-story building across the parking lot with a large tunnel connecting the two. I then went to the county officials and told them that I bought it ... and the fiscal court approved [my plan to build a private jail]."
Todd soon found out that to do business in Louisville, he had to grease a few wheels. When he didn't pay a judge to help with a previous home incarceration business, suddenly none of the judges in Louisville would sentence convicts to his program, forcing Todd to sell the business to the city. So, when the county's director of prisons asked for a monthly payoff for Todd's Goodwill-into-jail project, Todd agreed to pay the man's father in Los Angeles $4,000 a month, which he did for fifty months. As Todd was about to sell the jail business (together with the Marion Adjustment Center in St. Mary's), the director of corrections told him he wanted $50,000. Instead of paying it, Cliff Todd went to the FBI.
Yet, despite being responsible for the fate of a public corruption whistleblower, the judge in the case against the corrupt prison director sentenced Cliff Todd to six months in federal prison, breaking the FBI's promise to Todd that he wouldn't do any time at all and raising suspicions in Todd's mind that his sentence had something to do with his failure to pay off another judge in the home incarceration program.
So, to get back at the judge who sentenced him, Cliff Todd decided to bicycle himself from Shelby County, Kentucky, to the prison in Beckley, West Virginia-and promoted his cycling trek as a fundraiser for the Shelby County battered women's shelter.
"You know he rode a bike all the way to prison," Charlie Bickett recalled. "That made national news right there."
The world that remained behind after Johnny Boone, the Bickett brothers and Cliff Todd were incarcerated continued its endless cycle of boom and bust in the usual places.
On October 5, 1998, at the peak of harvest season, the Kentucky State Police flew pot-spotting missions over Washington County, and Lieutenant Shelby Lawson, coordinator of the KSP Cannabis Suppression Branch, called Post 15 in Columbia to inform the post that there might be some marijuana growing on the Boone farm. Three state troopers arrived at the gate to Boone's farm at the end of Walker Lane about 2:00 p.m.
The squad cars pulled into the two hundred-yard-long gravel driveway leading up to Jeff Boone's new home-a one-story wood-and-glass house with a wrap-around deck and a walk-out basement, built just a few hundred yards from the Boones' previous address on Walker Lane. The police could see a woman, Jeff Boone's wife, pacing back and forth along the deck. When the squad cars parked, she met them in the driveway, along with "the odor of marijuana," according to the police report.
The policemen told her they suspected there was marijuana growing on the property, and she invited them to look around. Almost instantly, one cop hollered to the others and pointed to two well-manicured plants in a blue plastic tub right behind the house. There were also piles of pot leaves and trimmings covering the back deck.
The officers showed the pot to Mrs. Boone and advised her of her rights.
"I guess I'll remain silent," she said but asked if she could get her children ready for the babysitter.
When she wouldn't let the policemen into the house, they arrested her for misdemeanor marijuana cultivation. One trooper called for backup, and Mrs. Boone asked if she could use the phone to call her lawyer.
"Because I don't want to get dicked around," she said.
The officer told her that was fine but said that they didn't intend on asking her any more questions. She called her father instead. A trooper called for a search warrant, using Mrs. Boone's driver's license for the address to be searched. Then they waited.
"During this time," the police report states, "Detective Wells walked around the farm and located fifty-five marijuana plants growing in a manure spreader. This was located over the hill to the side of the residence. This marijuana was equal in quality and had also had the leaves removed. I also called post again and requested further help.
"At about 4:45 p.m., Trooper Williams returned with the search warrant. Police entered the house and then went to the basement. We first saw a marijuana plant hanging on the back side of a bathroom wall. We then walked past that to a wall which had a large door made of the same wood as the walls. We opened that door and entered the room. Once through the door we could see marijuana everywhere. We opened the basement garage door for light and were able to survey the enormity of the find.
"There were large sheets of clear plastic covering most of the floor with marijuana spread out on those sheets. The marijuana was at different stages of the curing process, but most appeared ready for sale."
The police search yielded a find of 153.4 pounds of processed marijuana; $78,211.25 in cash; two bulletproof vests; six guns, including an AR-15 (a civilian model M-16), a rusty Russian-made Nadant boltaction rifle and several other items, including a "large sword ... pair of scissors ... [and] novelty handkerchief."
An officer arrived on the scene with his drug dog "but stated that there was so much marijuana in the house that the dog would be ineffective. He left a short time later."
A records search revealed that Jeff Boone's wife had a clean record and that Jeff previously had served four years on a federal count of conspiracy to manufacture marijuana for his role in the Minnesota bust. Jeff had escaped the initial raid in Minnesota by hiding himself inside a hay bale for three days in the freezing cold-only to be arrested three years later.
(How did the feds finally connect the younger Boone to the Minnesota raid? By analyzing the scraps of papers, records and receipts left behind during the chaotic chase sequence combined with the testimony supplied by a rare animal once thought not to exist-the Marion County rat.
As one will recall: Just before Johnny Boone had been set to take his Minnesota case to trial, he had discovered that his fate would be tied to two of his workers in a package deal. If one refused to take the plea that the prosecutors were offering, then all three would have to go to trial. Each man refusing to take the fate of the others in his hands, Boone accepted his twenty-year sentence, and the other two accepted their tenyear terms. The two ten-year recipients-whose names are unimportant since they are deceased-were released from federal custody at two different times: one on January 19, 1995, and the other, who apparently got tired of prison life after about a year of it, decided he would help prosecutors nab the men from the Minnesota deal who had successfully escaped the raid in exchange for an early release. Consequently, that man's tenyear sentence ended a bit early-on July 30, 1991. About the same time, Jeffrey Boone was arrested as he walked out of a classroom at Eastern Kentucky University. He served four years.)
In October 1998, returning to prison was not on Jeff Boone's to-do list, so, like many accused marijuana growers in central Kentucky before and since, he and his wife hired Elmer George as their defense attorney. George filed a motion to suppress the evidence acquired during the search bec
ause the address on the search warrant was incorrect. The arresting officers took Mrs. Boone's address on Walker Lane from her driver's license, but that address was for the Boones' older house about two hundred yards up the road, not the new wooden house with the wrap-around deck.
"Because the search warrant was invalid on its face, and because application of the good-faith exception test does not save this search warrant, the evidence obtained pursuant to the search warrant must be suppressed," ruled Washington County Circuit Judge Doughlas "Dotie" George, Elmer's first cousin, on June 1, 1999. "The court does not condone the behavior or approve of the practice which generated the evidence seized in the residence.... The search of the Walker Lane residence was illegal, and any evidence seized therefrom shall not be admissible at trial."
"The search warrant was suppressed," remembered retired state police Detective Jacky Hunt. "So, I think Jeff thought it was going to get dismissed. But then the commonwealth's attorney's office apparently appealed to a higher court, and the higher court overturned the judge's decision and reinstated the search warrant, which reapplied the charges, the way I remember it."
Hunt remembered correctly. On September 13, 2000, an assistant commonwealth's attorney informed the state police that the Court of Appeals had reversed the lower court's decision to suppress the search warrant.
"I was there on the search warrant," recalled Hunt. "I remember helping with the search. I knew Jeff Boone prior to that because a year prior to that we had a serial burglar in the area.... Actually Jeff Boone's mother's house got robbed. I worked that burglary and took fingerprints. I remember taking his thumb print. He didn't do it; he didn't have anything to do with it. I didn't know who he was at the time. Then I figured out who they were. Johnny was in prison, I think, then ...
"Of course, when Johnny was ripping and roaring back in the eighties, I was in the Marine Corps. I wasn't around when they took down those `Cornbread Mafia' guys. My grandfather was from Raywick, so I knew a lot about that stuff growing up."
The US Bureau of Prisons released Johnny Boone back into the world in December 2000, and he returned home to a Washington County even more altered than the Washington County to which he had returned after his Belize prison time in the early 1980s. The son he loved was hooked on cocaine and facing another stiff prison sentence now that the appeals court had reinstated the search warrant from 1998. Johnny had taught Jeff everything he could about the marijuana business, but Jeff had to face the consequences himself. With his marriage unraveling, his passions let loose by cocaine and a prison sentence looming, Jeff's life spun out of control, as documented by the state police in their file on him:
"On 3-25-01 an accused in this case, Jeffrey Boone, died of a single, self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head at his residence on Walker Lane.... During the investigation, Detective [Jacky] Hunt located a letter written by Boone in which he attempted to take full responsibility for the evidence in this case."
"I believe Johnny is the one who found him, if I remember correctly," Jacky Hunt said later. "When I arrived, Johnny was there. Of course, he was upset about his son. His only statement was he found him like that.
"I believe there was a suicide note, and it pretty much led to the fact that he didn't want to go back to prison and he was facing these charges. I don't remember exactly what the note said, but I believe there was a note."
While the Boones faced their family tragedies, the Bicketts continued to receive bad news from the courts. On June 25, 2007, after six appeals to various federal courts, including the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, Joe Keith Bickett received the ruling from his original trial judge, Charles Simpson.
"Upon review and consideration," Judge Simpson wrote, "the court concludes that Joseph K. Bickett has not demonstrated entitlement to the relief of his requests. The court does not believe that `old Rule 35' applies in this matter, but even if it did, the court would not be inclined to alter the sentence this court imposed many years ago. The court has already ruled with respect to Mr. Bickett's claims concerning alleged moisture in the marijuana.
"Because this defendant has not shown entitlement to the relief of his requests, his motions are appropriately, and hereby are, DENIED." [emphasis his]
Because Judge Simpson stated no reason for his final denial, Bickett appealed his decision to the Sixth Circuit.
While Joe Keith Bickett remained in prison, his brother Jimmy was released in August 2006, first to a halfway house in Louisville and then home to Raywick. Jimmy's sentence had been five years shorter than Joe Keith's because ofJoe Keith's connection to Shewmaker's Kansas operation.
Less than a year after Jimmy Bickett returned home, former Enterprise editor Steve Lowery passed away, his death the result of a long fight against alcoholism.
"Steve Lowery was . . . one of the best rural journalists I've ever known," Al Cross said in his eulogy for Lowery on May 8, 2007, three days after Calvin Borel rode Street Sense to victory in the 133rd Kentucky Derby, which paid $11.80 on a $2 ticket.
"The best rural editors play two institutional roles," Cross said, "that of the journalist, independent to a fault, and the role of civic leader. You must be willing to call them as you see them, show courage and speak truth to power. But whatever passion you show in criticizing what you think is wrong, you must show that same passion in promoting what you think is right. Steve did both-and he did it, to be frank, in a place where that may have been a little more difficult than most."
MARY IMMACULATE HOSPITAL CHANGED ITS NAME TO SPRINGVIEW AND installed air-conditioning well before September 28, 1976, when I was born there. I attended St. Augustine School, where, in my sixth-grade class, we got two new students: Zachary Bramel, son of the new newspaper editor, and Michi Ozone, daughter of the new auto parts factory manager.' same year that the Bramel boys and the Japanese kids arrived at St. A., several uncles and fathers of our classmates started going to jail, then to trial and then to prison. At the end of seventh grade, 1989, the US Attorney's Office held the "Cornbread Mafia" press conference, and the media circus began.
At first, the adults around us appeared angry at the marijuana growers for bringing a fresh round of bad publicity upon Marion County-its third bad reputation in fifty years-but as the bad press continued, the community's animosity shifted toward the federal government and the media for maligning a whole community for the actions of a few.
To combat the mixed reputation that Club 68 had bestowed upon Lebanon in the 1960s, members of the community banded together to make Country Ham Days, established in 1970 on the last weekend in September, the best harvest festival in the region. By 1981, Marion County Country Ham Days depended on five hundred volunteers to serve to a crowd of twenty thousand visitors some 4,548 ham breakfasts, made with 15,000 biscuits, 600 hams, 10,320 eggs, 210 gallons of apples and 144 pounds of coffee.
In 1989, the first Ham Days after the "Cornbread Mafia" press conference, the rain and cold weather decreased Ham Days'breakfast sales by 550 from 1988's total, but overall revenue for the festival rose 9 percent from the previous year, from $98,677 to $107,706, despite the rain and cold.' That year I bused tables under the breakfast tent with the rest of the middle-school football team. To fight off the cold, I drank my first fifteen cups of coffee.
I graduated from Marion County High School in 1994 without ever smoking marijuana once. I attended Centre College; I attended Brown University; I moved to New York. In 2004, I enrolled at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, which I discovered offered a book-writing class taught by New York Times columnist and book author Sam Freedman.
I tell him I want in.
"What's your book about?" he asks.
"The biggest homegrown marijuana syndicate in American history," I tell him.
"Send it to me in an e-mail," he says.
In May 2005, I graduate Columbia with honors and a book proposal. I secure an agent. I intern at the Courier-journal in Louisville. I take a job as a web producer for the New York Times.
In October, my agent sells the book to Putnam. I give my notice at the Times and return to Kentucky at the end of the year.
My advance arrives in January 2006, just as zookeepers in Houston notice that Bruno, the male lion and centerpiece of the zoo's big cat exhibit, is refusing food. Eventually he stops responding to his handlers altogether and shows signs of pain. After he has eaten a raw-meat diet for eighteen years (nearly double an African lion's lifespan in the wild), Bruno's kidneys are failing.
On a Saturday, Waheed Agha, a Houston resident and amateur photographer, takes photographs of Bruno in the morning sun nuzzling with his sister, Lindi, twenty, and daughter, Celesto, who was born on June 1, 1990, according to Kevin Hodge, a supervisor at the zoo's carnivore section. On Tuesday, as Agha works in the photo-processing storefront he manages in the downtown underground mall called the Tunnels, Houston Zoo veterinarians separate Bruno from his female kin through a series of steel cages, sedate him, and then euthanize him with an injection. On Thursday, January 19, the Houston Chronicle runs Bruno's obituary on the front page of its Metro section, headlined: "Zoo Bids Farewell to Its Reigning Feline."
"Bruno's deep-throated roar was a daily occurrence at the Houston Zoo," the story begins. "It could be heard throughout the grounds and, if the wind was right, beyond."
"He had a tendency to call first thing in the morning and last thing in the evening," Hollie Colahan, the zoo's curator for primates and carnivores, tells the Chronicle. "You could hear that all over the zoo."
However, even though Bruno's passing is well documented, his origins, as well as those of his sister, are less clear to their keepers.' heir birth date of December 1, 1987, was estimated because if anyone knows the lions' exact birthdates, he's not talking.
"Bruno's genetic pedigree was unknown," the Chronicle reports. "He was confiscated in a federal drug raid."