by Sally Denton
The Bluegrass Conspiracy
An Inside Story of Power, Greed, Drugs and Murder
Sally Denton
iUniverse Star
New York Bloomington
“PLUMBS THE DEPTHS OF THE AMERICAN NIGHTMARE��� FASCINATING, COMPELLING… A MUST READ”
The Bluegrass Conspiracy
An Inside Story of Power, Greed, Drugs and Murder
Copyright © 2010 by Sally Denton
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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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ISBN: 978-0-5951-9666-1 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-4502-8378-6 (ebook)
Printed in the United States of America
iUniverse rev. date: 9/11/2001
James Grady, author of Six Days of the Condor
A spin-off of the Old South of the plantation days, Lexington landowning society stubbornly resists change.They resent the influx of people, developers, and modern ideas. But the reality of modern America—with its high costs of wages, real estate, and provisions—was swallowing their way of life by the late 1970s. A fortune was needed to paint the miles of fences, groom the fields, feed the horses, pay the trainers and domestic staff, and continue the lavish entertaining. To meet these extravagant financial demands, some farm owners subdivided their property—once considered a fate worse than death. Others incorporated and sold shares.
Some turned to drug smuggling.
“Gripping… Denton wisely and skillfully tells her story with its intricate twists and incredible details.”
Springfield Union News
“Presents a dramatic picture of a lengthy, unresolved criminal investigation and a shockingly corrupt power structure.”
Publishers Weekly
“This book will cause an outcry. It is a brave undertaking.”
Sallie Bingham
“If The Bluegrass Conspiracy had been fiction, it would have made a great American movie, but because it is painfully true, it is also a great American tragedy. Sally Denton goes into the heart of the drug war in Kentucky and shows how it fostered what it sought to destroy and destroyed what should be preserved, such as political integrity and honest law enforcement. An epic account of crime and corruption.”
Sam Smith, Author of The Great American Repair Manual and Shadows of Hope
“A larger than real-life thriller”
The Wall Street Journal
“Engrossing true crime drama.”
Kirkus
Contents
PROLOGUE
MIDNIGHT September 11,1985
PART ONE
BOOK ONE
The Preppy Mafia
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
BOOK TWO The Company
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
BOOK THREE
High Ambitions
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
PART TWO
BOOK ONE
Soured Mash
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
BOOK TWO
Bluegrass Justice
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
AFTERWORD
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Copyright
PROLOGUE
MIDNIGHT September 11,1985
The red lights of the instrument panel glared in the pitch-black airplane cockpit. The pilot, forty-year-old Andrew Carter Thornton II, had rehearsed the steps a thousand times in his mind, plotted his strategy with the precision of a commando for the event he hoped would never happen. When he realized that two jets were on his tail, “Drew” knew that only U.S. Customs could have deployed such specialized chase aircraft. It was not in his nature to admit fear, but he wasn’t optimistic about the forced switch to his contingency plan.
Moments earlier, the cold night air had blasted into the plane as Drew and his partner opened the door of the Cessna 404 and kicked the last parachute load into a remote section of Georgia forest. Then they prepared themselves for a jump into the black sky. Drew packed his Army duffel bag with a Browning 9-mm automatic pistol, a .22caliber pistol, several clips of ammunition, a stiletto, forty-five hundred dollars in cash, six Krugerrands, food rations and vitamins, a compass, an altimeter, and identification papers in two different names. This time, his enemies on the ground were not the Viet Cong or Sandinistas, but U.S. drug enforcement agents.
Wearing a bulletproof vest and military-issue infrared night-vision goggles, he checked the straps to his parachute. The inspection was perfunctory, as Drew’s paranoia of sabotage was so great that he did not allow anyone to touch his chute. The distant lights of Knoxville, Tennessee, twinkled on the horizon below, as he set the plane on automatic pilot, directed the aircraft to its crash destination in the remote mountains of North Carolina, and slid an extra ignition key into his pants pocket. His load, although heavy, was precisely the weight he thought his parachute could handle—not an ounce more or less.
Drew opened the door and jumped into the vast night, a free-falling flight as symbolic as America’s spin from the 1950s into the 1980s.
Fred Myers always arose at 5:15 a.m. His routine, from which he rarely deviated, included reading the Knoxville Journal while awaiting a breakfast call from his two sisters, both in their nineties, who lived down the road. On this early autumn morning, the eighty-fiveyear-old retired engineer and guitar picker gazed out of his bathroom window while shaving. Across the apple orchard in the dawn light, he saw a dead body in his driveway. He telephoned his elderly sisters and described the strange sight. Fred Myers had always had an active imagination, and his sisters knew it. They told him to go back to bed. Instead, Myers called the police.
The crumpled heap in Myers’ gravel driveway was Drew Thornton, a notorious narcotics agent turned drug smuggler.
“I saw the pack on him, and I knew right then he had too big a load for that little old parachute,” Myers later told the news reporters who swarmed onto his property.
When the Knoxville police opened the three-and-a-half-foot-long duffel bag tied around Drew’s waist, they discovered th
irty-four football-sized bundles of cocaine. Another bag tied to his body held dehydrated food and other survival supplies. His main parachute was still in its pack; his right hand still gripped the ripcord of his partially deployed reserve chute. He was wearing combat-style fatigues and expensive Italian shoes—a seeming non sequitur to those getting their first glimpse into the bizarre world of the sexy, madcap Kentucky blue blood. His pockets contained a membership card to the Miami Jockey Club and a personal address book listing fewer than a dozen names and telephone numbers. Bruises and abrasions marked both legs and a trickle of blood had hardened on both cheeks. His spine and several ribs were fractured. A ruptured aorta had killed him.
Of the three epigrams he carried in his pocket, the most revealing read: “There is only one tactical principle not subject to change: It is to inflict the maximum amount of wounds, death, and destruction on the enemy in the minimum amount of time.’’
Journalists and cops in Tennessee scratched their heads in bewilderment. They couldn’t untangle the incongruities of the handsome man who had plunged to his death with $75 million worth of pure cocaine strapped to his waist and a failed parachute on his back.
But back home in Kentucky, Drew’s wild and crashing demise seemed a logical conclusion to his life on the edge. Over the past twenty years, Drew had bounced from job to job, avocation to avocation. After a brief stint as an Army paratrooper, he dabbled in racehorse breeding, undercover police work, and the martial arts. He became a pilot, collected guns, and struggled through law school at night—obtaining a degree but few clients. He drove a white Jaguar sports car and played polo with other well-bred boyhood friends. He was an L. L. Bean-type dresser, sporting elegant flannels and expensive outdoor clothing. A health food fanatic and fitness freak, Drew smuggled tons of pot and cocaine into the country, while claiming never to “touch the stuff.” As a kid, he wasn’t athletic, wasn’t a good student, and wasn’t particularly popular. As a cop, he was a bully who enjoyed beating up the kids he busted, roughing up the drunks and hookers who put up little resistance, and practicing his karate on dogs. He believed in power through intimidation, thought he possessed supernatural abilities, and somehow persuaded an unlikely crew of misfits and sycophants from Lexington’s seamier side of the tracks to become his fiercely loyal groupies.
He boasted of military decorations and courageous derring-do, hinting at ties to the CIA and dangerous escapades as a soldier and a mercenary. But his Army records described him as an unremarkable five-foot-eight-inch, 150-pound private who received basic training, spent two months in combat in the Dominican Republic (during which time he was shot in the left arm and received medals for having been wounded in action), who was exemplary in neither aptitude nor performance, and who was a disciplinary problem on at least one occasion.
The picture of Drew’s dead body appeared on all three networks and went across the country’s major news wires. Published photos from happier times showed a man in his prime—a tanned and fit man of action, handsome and flashy enough to be a star on “Miami Vice.”
Drew Thornton wanted to be known as a guy with guts. He wanted people to think he was tough and intelligent, cunning and sophisticated. His exploits would have been dismissed as those of a second-class outlaw had he not been the son of what is known in the South as a “good family” and possessed the political and social connections inherent to such landed gentry.
To the average newspaper reader, Drew’s bizarre death was just another twisted statistic in the much-ballyhooed “War on Drugs.” But Ralph Edward Ross knew there was more. Ross knew that Drew Thornton was a gunrunner whose tentacles extended into the highest levels of state government, national law enforcement, and top-secret military installations; that his network included assassins, mercenaries, governors, and federal drug agents; that his lieutenants and allies had penetrated the inner sanctums of at least two Kentucky governors—John Y. Brown, Jr., and Julian Carroll; and that his schemes were hatched and fulfilled in places such as Las Vegas, Libya, Colombia, Costa Rica, Beirut, Honduras, El Salvador, Panama, and Angola.
Ralph Ross was possibly the least surprised of anybody at Drew’s absurd death. To say Ralph was happy about it might be going too far, but he did feel that the son-of-a-bitch finally got what he deserved.
Ordinarily Ralph’s mornings got off to a late start. Ever since he had “retired”—been forced out was more like it-—Ralph dawdled over his newspaper and coffee. He still hadn’t adjusted to his life as an ostracized cop. Since his conviction three years earlier for illegal wiretapping, Ralph greeted most days like an empty canvas of white space. A fifty-two-year-old man with nothing to do was a sorry sight in Ralph’s opinion. So he took his daily routine seriously, as if his life would collapse without that semblance of structure, measly though it was. Sooner or later, though, he would find himself alone with the tenacious mind that refused to forget anything. From noon on, Ralph spent most waking hours cursing Drew Thornton. “Just another darned blueblood puttin’ on airs,” Ralph had thought upon first meeting Drew a decade and a half earlier. Ralph’s initial instincts would prove accurate: In the end, Drew Thornton would be fatally hurled to earth, overburdened by his superiority complex and mythical self-perception.
When the phone rang at the crack of dawn on September 11, Ralph roused himself from a deep sleep.
“Drew’s dead,” the voice said. Though the caller didn’t identify himself, Ralph recognized him as an informant from his past police work.
“He slammed into the ground in Knoxville when his parachute didn’t open. At dawn I was driving north on Interstate 75 back to Lexington,” Ralph’s “source” continued. “Drew’s friend, Rebecca Sharp, sped past in a black stretch limousine with chemically darkened windows. She had somebody with her, but I didn’t get a good look at him.”
So began the denouement of the dramatic odyssey that began in 1970 when Ralph Ross and Drew Thornton embarked on their collision course.
Ralph recognized Drew’s last jump as the climax before the resolution. Finally, the promise of a just conclusion to years of deadly conflict seemed imminent. Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, the trails of Ralph and Drew had zigzagged across each other’s territory. Both were Kentucky natives—one rich and one poor. But their backgrounds were not as dissimilar as their outcomes would later suggest, nor were their motivations and personality traits as polarized. Both were warriors, trained by the elite forces of the U.S. military. Both had entered manhood through combat in America’s “lesser” wars— one in Korea and the other in the Caribbean. Both men returned home to Kentucky to serve as cops—one for the Lexington Police Department and the other for the Kentucky State Police. Both were trained in the most sophisticated undercover techniques of the time, attending some of the same law enforcement academies. Each had a reputation for patience and meticulousness, and each would rely upon the skills taught him by the U.S. government to keep the other at bay.
Each viewed the other as his nemesis, and the obstacle to his mission.
Rebecca Sharp sheathed her petite hands in a pair of white cotton gloves she retrieved from her handbag.
“Drew taught me to wear these when I don’t want to leave fingerprints,” she said to the distinguished-looking older gentleman she recognized as Bertram Gordon and his remarkably handsome companion. Though she had never met Gordon, she had spoken with him over the telephone, and had been told by Drew that Gordon was a trusted associate. She also knew that Gordon had introduced Drew to the leaders of the Colombian cocaine monopoly known as the “Medellín Cartel,” and that Drew had been living with Gordon at the Miami Jockey Club in recent weeks.
Rebecca fought the urge to blame Drew for bungling such a massive smuggling operation, leaving her with the labyrinthine puzzle of locating eight hundred pounds of cocaine strewn across thousands of acres of national forest. She had to find it, and then decide what to do with it. Meanwhile, she must try an
d persuade the Colombians who had “fronted” the coke to Drew that she was not the responsible party.
It did not come as a surprise, then, when, nine days after Drew’s jump, Bertram Gordon appeared on the scene to “collect.”
“I considered wearing a bulletproof vest,” Rebecca said to Gordon.
The man driving the car introduced himself as James Vincent, an American representative of the Colombians, who were anxious to make arrangements to receive payment for the $80 million worth of cocaine Drew had guaranteed he would transport safely into the hands of the cartel’s American distributors.
Rebecca handed Vincent a business card imprinted with the name “C. Fred Partin,” referring to Partin as Drew’s “good friend,” and implying that Partin, and not she, was the individual to whom their questions should be directed.
“What happened?” Vincent asked her.
Rebecca had arranged for the getaway car for Drew in Knoxville, she told the men, and was awaiting his arrival at a prearranged local motel. Waiting at various “drop sites” in Georgia was the ground crew who intended to truck the cocaine that was thrown out attached to parachutes to Daytona, Florida. Included in that group was David “Cowboy” Williams—a Kentucky native turned Atlanta real estate magnate. Rebecca knew the plans had been bungled when a man claiming to be Drew’s companion on the airplane appeared at the motel alone, and told Rebecca about the ugly turn of events that left Drew unaccounted for. She claimed not to know the identity of this individual.
With chilling detachment, Rebecca related the details of Drew’s final hours, as had been told to her, she said, by Drew’s mysteriously anonymous accomplice: The two dope transporters had left Colombia with twelve duffel bags full of cocaine on board. Upon crossing the U.S. border, they determined that government aircraft were tracking them. Vincent thought it odd that Rebecca specifically identified the chase planes as two Citation jets and a Black Hawk helicopter—aircraft recently acquired by U.S. Customs to interdict air smugglers— because it would have been impossible to see them from the cockpit.