The Bluegrass Conspiracy

by Sally Denton

  Twenty-four hours after takeoff, the plane landed at a remote landing strip located in a tropical jungle. Several three-quarter-ton military vehicles were awaiting the aircraft, and, upon their arrival, uniformed guards off-loaded the weapons. Ralph’s informant began his twenty-four-hour return flight to Kentucky within an hour.

  Although the informant could not identify the country to which the arms were taken, he recognized that the soldiers were speaking Spanish.

  Ralph’s long-standing suspicions were confirmed, for the person who had hired his source for the job had a high-level position on the Lexington police force.

  Ralph immediately realized that an operation of that magnitude had more far-reaching implications than fell under his purview. First, he set up meetings with the FBI and turned over his information to them. He hoped that agency would have the wherewithal to take on the Lexington Police Department. A few days later, he met with

  Customs agents, who, Ralph knew would be interested in neutrality violations.

  After a couple of weeks had passed—long enough, Ralph thought, for the FBI and Customs to have made some progress in the probe— Ralph called a contact at the CIA. He told the CIA about the incident, primarily to let the intelligence agency know that he had infiltrated the network because he had a sneaking suspicion that maybe he had inadvertently landed in the middle of a CIA deal. “Look,” Ralph told his contact, “if this is your operation, maybe you should be getting in touch with FBI and Customs, because I already turned it over to them.”

  As is customary with the CIA, they neither confirmed nor denied any knowledge or involvement. But Ralph wasn’t looking for confirmation or denial. He was merely trying to keep them apprised.

  Suddenly, Ralph’s informant disappeared. Inquiries Ralph made into his whereabouts were met with silence. Though he knew it was possible that he had been killed, Ralph assumed that one of the federal agencies had co-opted him to work for them.

  That incident started Ralph thinking about guns. Where were they coming from? His suspicions led him to cast a wary eye toward a wholesale Lexington gun dealer who seemed to have an inordinate supply of weapons warehoused. Licensed to supply the official handguns to all the major police departments in Kentucky, Florida, West Virginia, and Tennessee, the outfit had a perfect cover for arms trafficking.

  Phillip Gall & Sons had established a pattern with the Kentucky State Police that was suspect to Ralph. Every year, Gall ordered a thousand magnum pistols from the Smith & Wesson factory. Since guns could legally be purchased in such massive quantity from a gun manufacturer only if they were to be sold to police departments, Gall made arrangements for the weapons to be sold to the Kentucky State Police. The following year, Gall would order a thousand brand-new guns from Smith & Wesson, claiming they would be provided to the Kentucky State Police. When the guns arrived, Gall would distribute them to the state troopers free of charge, in exchange for the previous year’s weapons.

  Such a scenario, Ralph reasoned, provided the Gall Company with a surplus of unreported weapons available for private sale.

  Following his hunch, Ralph checked with friends at ATF, from whom he learned that the company had a longstanding history of shoddy paperwork and delinquency in filing reports required by the federal government. But, like so many other occurrences in Lexington, the gun dealer had never been the subject of a criminal investigation. To the contrary, the company’s owners enjoyed the social benefits generally bestowed upon reputable, successful businessmen.

  Ralph found it particularly noteworthy that Drew Thornton was one of Gall’s steadiest customers. That fact in and of itself was not especially remarkable, since police officers are frequently avid gun enthusiasts. But Ralph had come to believe that Melanie Flynn’s disappearance was integrally tied to the gun and cocaine trade currently flourishing in Lexington, and that she had fallen into fatal quicksand at the hands of the Lexington police.

  At the heart of it all, Ralph suspected, was Drew Thornton.

  Ralph set out to locate and interview Drew—a task that turned out to be more difficult than he anticipated. Drew’s colleagues on the police force—Canan and others—refused to cooperate with Ralph. Even the chief of police was recalcitrant when called upon to assist in determining Drew’s whereabouts.

  Despite the roadblocks and cover-ups thrown into Ralph’s path, he soon learned that Drew was spending all of his time up in Philadelphia with his childhood friend and erstwhile military school cadet—Bradley Fred Bryant.

  BOOK TWO The Company

  CHAPTER FIVE

  As Drew approached the curved driveway of Bradley Bryant’s seven-acre estate, he could see that outdoor tables had been set among the huge oak trees where a group of well-dressed guests were already mingling. An off-duty policeman was waiting to offer valet parking to Drew and others. Black waiters wearing white dinner jackets were taking drink orders near a buffet table. The guests—an odd mixture of police types and high-society elements—must have been reminiscent to Drew of Lexington’s royalty. Standing near the champagne fountain, women drifting toward him as if pulled by an invisible magnet, Bradley was, as usual, the most handsome, intriguing man in the crowd.

  When Drew Thornton joined his best friend Bradley Bryant in Pennsylvania in 1977, Bradley had been living there for nearly a decade. He was known by his neighbors as the perfect Southern gentleman, who hosted lavish parties, a shrewd and successful businessman, a devoted father to three small children and loyal husband to a blond beauty. Few saw beneath his veneer.

  But to those aware of Bradley’s darker side, his outer facade was peeling, exposing a mysterious man whose marriage was on the rocks, whose enterprises were on the wrong side of the law, and whose exploits had strayed beyond the boundaries accepted by everyday American life.

  One of Lexington’s native sons, Bradley grew up in enviable uppermiddle-class circumstances, in a tree-shaded neighborhood near the estate of statesman Henry Clay. The second of four children, Bradley was the son of a businessman and the grandson of a former Lexington mayor. As a toddler, he was breathtakingly adorable—his chocolate brown eyes and sweet smile, his shy, yet engaging demeanor prompted one family friend to describe Bradley as the most beautiful little boy she had ever known. He spent his adolescent summers at a family retreat on the shores of a remote Kentucky lake, attended cotillion with the other upper-class children, and grew into a tall, tanned, athletic, attractive young man whose sexy earnestness made him popular with the girls in his high school. A born leader, Bradley had the type of personality that attracted and intimidated at the same time. Gregarious but cool. Affable but unapproachable.

  Though Bradley’s childhood was enviable, it was not without its blights. His grandfather’s suicide brought shame and confusion to the family, and his father—a used car salesman—went into a professional and personal slump as a result. Domestic events tumbled out of control for Bradley’s family during the 1950s, and inevitably led to the divorce of his parents in 1958. Living with his mother, Bradley became the family leader—a role for which he was not quite prepared at fourteen years of age. His lack of a strong, masculine model took a toll on Bradley’s personality and, his mother feared, on his academic capacities. In 1960, during Bradley’s sophomore year, his mother decided he should transfer to Sewanee Military Academy. Several of Lexington’s privileged youth were attending the institute, including the son of ‘‘those lovely people, Carter and Peggy Thornton,” so it would be easy, she reasoned for Bradley to fit in. She hoped a military environment would prove an adequate substitute for a weak father figure.

  At Sewanee, Bradley and Drew forged an alliance that confounded some observers. They assumed roles that would last for nearly twenty years—Bradley the leader and Drew the follower.

  Bradley was everything Drew wanted to be but could never quite achieve—smart, goal-directed, incredibly good-looking, and popular. He received goo
d grades and won the Team Spirit Award three years in a row. What Bradley and Drew had in common was an eagerness to become men, to prove to themselves and to their parents that they were able to take control of their lives. Each felt like a misfit within his own family unit—firstborn sons who were conflicted by the male role models they saw in their fathers. These ambiguous feelings drove them both to never-ending searches for shortcuts to surpassing their fathers’ successes and failures. For nearly twenty years, the two young men would attempt to beat the system that their fathers symbolized.

  After graduation in 1962, Bradley stayed at Sewanee for an extra year of trigonometry and physics, hoping to qualify for the Naval Academy at Annapolis, but he was rejected. Following a short and unremarkable stint with the U.S. Marines, Bradley returned to Lexington to study architecture at the University of Kentucky. But he found he had neither the discipline nor the endurance, much less the finances to pursue his dream of becoming an architect. During this period, he socialized almost exclusively with Drew and Betty, and when he met Callie Grace—a stunning blond coed—he fell head over heels in love. Bradley married Callie in 1967, and the next year Drew followed suit, as if he were waiting to take his cue from Bradley. Drew chose Bradley as his best man, even though Bradley had not bestowed the same honor upon Drew.

  The two couples became the closest of friends, even after Bradley and Callie moved to Philadelphia where Bradley had obtained a high-paying corporate executive’s position, thanks to his friendship with John Young Brown, Jr.—the fast-food wizard who had made millions with his Kentucky Fried Chicken empire. Bradley had gotten to know Brown when his younger sister Lynne married one of Brown’s best friends—Dan Chandler. Chandler, the wayward son of former Kentucky governor A. B. “Happy” Chandler, worked for “John Y.,” as everyone called the chicken magnate, in the franchise business. The marriage of Lynne Bryant to Dan Chandler signaled Bradley’s inclusion into a slightly older, and more solidly entrenched, generation of bluebloods. Chandler and Brown were like big brothers to Bradley, and their fast crowd of jet setters and gamblers appealed to Bradley’s adventurous streak. Through them, Bradley met his future partner—a Philadelphia multimillionaire named Edward “Biff ” Halloran, who was a regular at the Kentucky Derby. Chandler was more than happy to take credit for launching Bradley’s career. When Chandler and Brown introduced Bradley to Halloran, Bradley was working as a flack in Frankfort for the state government—a patronage position Chandler had helped Bradley land. Disenchanted with his menial bureaucratic salary and bored with his duties, Bradley was looking for a windfall. He felt insecure and uncertain about his lifetime goals and lack of professional experience. Since neither Annapolis nor architecture had panned out for him, Bradley was more than willing to entertain offers of any kind.

  Biff Halloran had extensive oil and real estate holdings, including a racetrack in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and was looking for someone to run his industrial cleaning service. Individuals familiar with Halloran’s operations said later that Halloran needed to hide his ownership in the company, called the Armstrong Corporation, because of conflicts of interest in the awarding of government contracts to construction firms owned by Halloran’s family. So in order to avoid bad publicity and the scorn of both his competitors and government prosecutors, Halloran selected Bradley Bryant as the perfect front man to disguise Halloran’s involvement with the company.

  Bradley jumped at Halloran’s offer, and made immediate arrangements in 1970 to move his wife, Callie, and son Bradley, to Pennsylvania, where they bought a rundown, Georgian mansion on Philadelphia’s Main Line, and began renovating it one room at a time.

  The Armstrong Corporation was an immediate success, given Bradley’s enthusiasm and Halloran’s financial backing, and Bradley’s life was perfect for a while. The first major strains on his marriage apparently began with the birth of Brandon, in 1971, who was born with a cleft palate. While president of Armstrong Corporation, he bought a 5 percent interest in a waste oil reclamation company, and in 1973 his wife bore him a little girl. By the mid-seventies, Bradley was exhibiting the confidence of a successful businessman and the restlessness of an unhappily married man. Friends point to this era as the turning point in Bradley’s life—a time when ideas percolated in his mind for ways to make big money—and in 1975 he actually managed to start his own company. Drawing upon what he had learned with Halloran, he founded Bryson Environmental Services, Inc.

  Bradley was not satisfied to live on the periphery of wealth and power. His grandfather’s prominence had been his ticket to the cotillions, the country clubs, the debutante balls. But the suicide, coupled with his father’s failings as a businessman and family man, had marred Bradley’s credentials. His kinship to Chandler had opened worlds previously closed to Bradley Bryant, yet he always felt as if he were an observer rather than a participant. John Y. Brown and Dan Chandler seemed to Bradley to be of a higher caliber: John Y., a self-made millionaire at the age of thirty-three, possessed the glamorqus lifestyle unique to rich, young entrepreneurs; Chandler had the rare protection of his daddy’s immense national political power.

  When John Y. Brown bought Lums Restaurants in 1974—the corporation that owned Caesars Palace in Las Vegas—Brown insisted that Chandler be given a top-level job at the casino, which meant that

  Bradley had carte blanche access to the garish casino. Bradley frequently visited his sister and Chandler at Caesars, where his every desire was “comped.” The casino, under Chandler’s reign, picked up the tab for Bradley’s meals, drinks, suites, and women. In Vegas, Bradley rubbed elbows with high rollers and mobsters, and crossed paths with other Lexingtonians such as Anita and Preston Madden. To Bradley, the Vegas casino scene was but one more example of a life he could experience, but not quite command.

  It was the Vegas connection that would send the partnership of Bradley Bryant and Drew Thornton into the big leagues.

  What had started as a two-man operation in which Bradley and Drew sold small quantities of drugs stolen from police evidence and from suspects that Drew had arrested, was being transformed into a large-scale operation by 1977.

  They both came to the realization at approximately the same point in time that perhaps they were ready to try a test run of smuggling their own load of marijuana. Drew decided to leave the police force in order to devote full attention to their enterprise and begin a search for appropriate aircraft. It had been a convenient time for Drew to resign from the Lexington Police Department, though he seemed undaunted by the investigations of both the Flynn disappearance and the Ryan murder.

  Drew told close associates that Melanie Flynn had followed in the footsteps of Jimmy Hoffa, referring to the missing and presumed dead, labor leader. He boasted of inside knowledge of the Ryan investigation, for his network of police associates kept him apprised of all developments. He knew that his lone fingerprint on Ryan’s steering wheel would never comprise enough evidence to justify criminal charges against him. Drew felt untouchable. As it turned out, he was right.

  When Drew attended the party at Bradley’s Devon, Pennsylvania, home in 1977—shortly after his resignation—the two men had a secret agenda. Bradley introduced Drew to the guests at his party: real estate magnates, casino executives, DEA and FBI agents, cops from Mississippi and Florida, jockeys and thoroughbred horse trainers, lawyers and corporate climbers. The eclectic crowd was the nexus of their own secret company, the network upon which they would rely to expand their business goals.

  Drew had learned a great deal during his years as a policeman; and he certainly knew how to avoid detection and apprehension by other cops. Now, he knew the legal ropes as well. In short, Drew felt his military and law enforcement training, his law degree, his tightly knit Lexington organization, his DEA and Lexington Police connections, his professed relationship with CIA assets and operatives, his piloting, parachuting, and martial arts expertise, his knowledge of various types of aircraft, his leg
endary courage, and his excellent physical condition, qualified him as major player on the international gun and drug circuit.

  Bradley, too, had expanded his horizons during the past decade. Bryson Environmental—the industrial cleaning firm that he formed with his brother, Earl—had quickly mushroomed, with offices in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Alabama, and Colorado. Meanwhile his marriage to Callie was coming to an end.

  But most of all he had met people at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas who had offered to invest in their operation. The Vegas crowd were scammers—high-rolling gamblers looking for places to hide their money. Bradley told Drew about men that he met who would drop half a million dollars on the table in one night. Bradley convinced Drew that the two of them could create a smuggling organization that could make them both millionaires.

  During the mid-1970s, Bradley and Drew had become deeply involved with what is known as “the SOF crowd���—a group of freelance military advisers and mercenaries whose unofficial leader is Robert Brown, the publisher of Soldier of Fortune magazine. How that association developed is not clear. Since both Bradley and Drew had been gung ho military types who fancied themselves as paramilitary experts, the SOF crowd was a natural melting pot. At the annual Las Vegas convention of soldiers of fortune, Bradley and Drew came into contact with a number of Vietnam veterans who were looking for action.

  It was time, Bradley convinced Drew in 1977, to use those contacts for profit. Under the auspices of a private security firm, hiring independent contractors through the classified advertisements in Soldier of Fortune, they would find a retinue of pilots who weren’t afraid of the risks and danger—pilots who enjoyed the challenge of flying below radar in the middle of the night and into remote jungle landing strips of foreign countries to pick up a load.