The Bluegrass Conspiracy

by Sally Denton

  During the remainder of 1978, Bradley made frequent trips to Vegas to meet with the Chagras while the Chagras were under investigation, prompting law enforcement authorities to suspect Bradley had become a key lieutenant in Jimmy Chagra’s drug organization—at the time considered one of the largest in the country.

  Drew Thornton thought Jimmy Chagra was a loudmouthed liability—an egomaniac obsessed with outshining his older brother. But Bradley was adamant: Chagra’s drug connections, both in Colombia and the United States, were a valuable asset. Bradley even went as far as to tell Drew that if he didn’t like being associated with Chagra he was free to leave the organization.

  Drew begrudgingly agreed to stay with “the Company,” but he began bad-mouthing Bradley behind his back. Despite his misgivings and bruised ego, Drew went ahead planning for the importation of ten tons of marijuana into Lexington.

  Dismissing Drew’s concerns about Chagra, Bradley told Drew to focus on the transportation end of the business, specifically to make sure the DC-4 aircraft was able to handle the heavy load Drew would be flying from South America to Kentucky during the 1978 Christmas holidays.

  Bradley was also making frequent trips to South America with Jimmy Chagra, where he met Chagra’s drug suppliers. Rumors were flying in El Paso and San Antonio about Jimmy Chagra’s imminent indictment, so Chagra introduced Bradley to his U.S. distributors, and it became evident to everyone in the operation that Bradley was the heir apparent.

  Jimmy attributed his problems to an assistant U.S. attorney in Texas named James Kerr, blaming Kerr for the ubiquitous “leaks” to the news media that were increasingly crimping his style and modus operandi. Kerr was making no secret of his grand jury vendetta against the Chagra criminal organization. Normally Jimmy would have relied upon his brother Lee to defuse such an explosive situation. But this time it seemed Lee had a world of troubles all his own. Lee was also a target, and all of his legal machinations were falling on deaf ears.

  On the morning of November 21, 1978, as Kerr waited at a San Antonio intersection on his way to the federal courthouse, two gunmen opened fire on Kerr’s Lincoln Continental from the back of a van. Nineteen rounds of ammunition riddled Kerr’s car before the van sped away. Miraculously Kerr escaped injury. Certain the Chagras had been responsible for the assault, Kerr vowed to pursue their prosecution with vengeance. Bradley and Drew’s alliance with the Chagras was the rocket booster that launched “the Company.” In the overall scheme of things, Bradley’s responsibilities were more expansive and demanding, while Drew’s hands-on relationship to the drugs was more risky.

  Combining their assets with those of the Chagras, “the Company” almost immediately had enough money to command a cadre of electronics and weapons experts; aircraft brokers; wheeled-vehicle suppliers; retired military pilots; ground crews; polygraph examiners to test the loyalty of their drones; attorneys; recruiters; flight engineers and mechanics; couriers; bag men to pay off cops and politicians; and financiers. All transactions were made with cold cash, and their trips to local banks became so frequent they had to search for more discreet ways to hide their money.

  Through Chagra’s mob connections, “the Company” hooked up with distributors in New York, Chicago, Florida, Texas, Cleveland, and Cincinnati.

  Simultaneously their private security operation was flourishing and their clients included competing drug organizations, Mafia figures, and government operatives who could not fulfill their goals within the parameters of their agency’s guidelines.

  Friends and family say that in the fall and winter of 1978, Bradley and Drew moved more and more into the shadowy, violent world of mercenaries and international drug smugglers. The society they now traveled in was one in which individuals perfected their survival skills through self-defense. They stockpiled paramilitary weapons, freeze-dried foods, and gold coins. Drew wore camouflage fatigues and swastikas and bulletproof vests, and talked about revenge and the end of the world. Bradley wore skintight Levis and cowboy boots, and surrounded himself with homosexual weight lifters and body builders. Any challenges to his manliness, however, brought a venomous display of macho superiority.

  The two men began bickering incessantly. Bradley saw himself as the brains and Drew as the brawn—a perception that Drew was apparently willing to tolerate in the early years. Though they were ostensibly equal partners, their employees considered Bradley Bryant both the president and chief executive officer.

  They considered themselves invulnerable. The only thorn in their side was the Kentucky State Police or, particularly, Ralph Ross. Drew felt assured that Ralph was not a serious threat, thanks to sources like Henry Vance in Governor Julian Carroll’s administration that could keep them apprised of any State Police activity.

  They knew that Ralph was oblivious to the magnitude of the partnership they had cemented with the Chagras, and that Ralph underestimated the abilities of Drew and Bradley to pull off as large a scam as they had in mind.

  A pair of country boys reared in the Camelot world of the South, Bradley and Drew immersed themselves ever deeper in the opaque world of espionage and narcotics, where drug dealers and spies find common ground—a world where one government agency inevitably breaks the laws that another government agency tries to enforce. A world where American military equipment is bartered in Third World nations and international narcotics organizations and governments are one and the same. A revolving door world where CIA-trained employees enter civilian life, skilled in techniques illegal in the United States but in demand abroad. A world where multibillion-dollar drug profits make it easy to buy corruption—at any level. A world of temptation, glamour, and intrigue that is often impossible for underpaid cops and spies to resist.

  On December 23, 1978, Lee Chagra’s wife surprised him with a block of tickets to the Sun Bowl football game. He had bet fifteen thousand dollars on his alma mater, the University of Texas, against Maryland. Ecstatic about the gift, he told his wife he would meet her at the stadium after first spending a couple of hours at his electronically guarded law office.

  Two hours later, the charismatic attorney was dying slowly on the carpet beneath a stained-glass window in his fortress-like office. Both lungs had been sliced by an assassin’s .22-caliber bullet. After writhing in a sticky pool of blood for almost an hour, Lee Chagra finally died.

  Three months earlier, Lee Chagra had taken the offensive in his war against the government. He had retained two Boston lawyers to bring a lawsuit against the DEA, charging the agency had launched a conspiracy to entrap and harass him. That suit died with Lee.

  Even before a medical examiner was called in to inspect the body, El Paso police and DEA agents sealed off the murder scene and began rifling through thousands of manila folders containing information on Chagra’s drug-smuggling clients. They confiscated cassette recordings of his privileged conversations with clients, receipt books, files, and cash totaling anywhere between $100,000 and $2.5 million, according to varying reports. Envelopes full of cash had been found strewn throughout the law office—apparent bets from local bankers and businessmen.

  Jimmy Chagra was a terrified man when he called Bradley Bryant to relate details of his brother’s brutal slaying. He needed Bradley to provide him with protection as soon as possible. Lee’s assassin remained at large; the rest of the family could be targeted next.

  Bradley personally arranged for Jimmy Chagra’s protection, assigning two of his employees to serve as Chagra’s secret service.

  The death was bad timing, all the way around. Two days before Christmas, Bradley Bryant and Drew Thornton were in the final stages of importing 20,000 pounds of pot into Lexington. The new heat on Chagra—Lee’s murder and the assault on Kerr—made Drew even more nervous. He had more faith in his and Bradley’s original organization—it was smaller, its members more loyal, and fewer things could go wrong. But Bradley had violated their pact by bringing Chagra into th
e fold. He had then poured salt on the wound by siding with Chagra over Drew. It seemed to Drew that Bradley had sold out the Company to a bigger corporation, and by doing so had forsaken his partner.

  Bradley had carefully patterned the organization after the CIA, compartmentalizing its various facets. Although his personal bodyguards, mainly weight lifters and karate instructors recruited from various spas, accompanied him everywhere, they were never included in business meetings. Pilots he hired to fly drug loads were not the same pilots he used for ferrying aircraft across the country. Bryson employees were separated from Executive Protection employees, and different offices and staff were maintained. He hired individuals who were paid six thousand dollars per month to forward mail from a post office box in one city to boxes in other cities. Bradley insulated himself from his inferiors, often playing them against each other to instill loyalty and fear. He had painstakingly created a system of deniability—a quagmire that only he understood.

  To Drew, smuggling was the most exciting, challenging, adrenaline-activating venture that existed in peacetime society. The risk, the thrill, the payoff—everything else in life paled in comparison. Organizing and planning the dope runs were the least captivating, most mundane pastimes to Drew. Drew took care of the airplanes he’d fly, the parachute he’d use, and his personal weapons and survival supplies. He preferred to leave the rest of the details to the ubiquitous sycophants who surrounded Bradley.

  Bradley’s employees in Executive Production Ltd. were charged with the more sensitive arrangements of the drug deals. For menial tasks that required little or no knowledge on the part of the participants, Bradley relied upon employees of his legitimate truck enterprise—Bryson Intentional.

  Jack Hillard and Don Leach were two of Bradley’s more trusted subordinates. Hillard, a former captain with the Lexington Police Department, had served seventeen years on the force before Drew recruited him as head of Executive Protection Ltd. Leach, a former Pennsylvania policeman, was the muscle of the operation.

  Johnny Trussell, a former Mississippi state trooper, had been a pilot operating out of the Savannah airport for several years when he was first approached by Hillard in December 1978 and was asked to fly for Bradley. Mutual friends had suggested Trussell to Hillard. Trussell knew Bradley only as a handsome Philadelphia businessman who was flashing money around Savannah’s high-class night spots. He told Hillard he would take the offer under consideration.

  Two days later Bradley appeared at the airport. He told Trussell he was offering him an opportunity for early retirement, Trussell indicated he was interested and Bradley arranged a second meeting to be held within a week.

  Trussell went to the Bryson International offices on the appointed date, and was surprised to be greeted by Don Leach instead of Bradley. Leach informed Trussell that he would be given a “couple of tests,” and led Trussell to a back room where he was hooked up to a polygraph machine and asked questions designed to reveal his propensity to become an informant, and any prior activities as a narc. Following the lie detector test, Trussell was given a psychological stress evaluation to test his reactions under pressure, using scenarios such as being chased by U.S. Customs, interrogated by cops, ripped off by smugglers barraged by gunfire, and other skirmishes typical of the front lines of the drug war.

  Sweating it out for a week, Trussell didn’t know how he had fared with Bradley’s mind games. Then, in late December, he was summoned again to Bradley’s inner sanctum. Peeling two thousand dollars in crisp hundred dollar bills from his pocket, Bradley dispatched Trussell to Muskogee, Oklahoma, for his first assignment: To inspect a DC-4 aircraft Bradley was considering purchasing. Trussell was told he would be flown to Oklahoma on a Lear Jet belonging to one of Bradley’s other employees.

  When Trussell reported back that the aircraft was capable of hauling several thousand pounds of marijuana, Bradley ordered him to sit tight. A few days later, Don Leach arrived in Oklahoma with $105,000 in cash to purchase the plane, Leach, using the alias “Mr. Lear,” registered the plane with the FAA in the name of one of Bradley’s shell corporations, and delivered Trussell’s next set of orders from Bradley: Trussell was to ferry the DC-4 to Phoenix, Arizona, with a former Lexington policeman named Steve Oliver, where the two men would be “type-rated” by the FAA as certified pilots of the multiengine aircraft.

  Bradley remained in Savannah, where he made elaborate lists in his stenographer’s notebook about the items needed for the haul: Two cases of strobe lights; twelve railroad flares; six gallons of deodorized disinfectant; two portable lamps; three hundred cardboard boxes; heavy-duty trash bags; two cases of survival food.

  He then dispatched three Bryson employees to Dothan, Alabama, instructing them to drive in two separate vehicles. The trunks of both cars carried the necessary supplies for the drug run—the flares, boxes, etc. When they arrived in Dothan they located the DC-4, which had been flown from Arizona by Trussell and Oliver, and loaded it with the provisions. The next day, on January 10, Drew and Bradley arrived together in Dothan to oversee the situation. Bradley checked into a Ramada Inn to wait, while the two former Lexington cops— Drew Thornton and Steve Oliver—flew to South America to pick up a load of marijuana. They returned the following night, the plane so heavy with its twenty thousand-pound load that it barely flew above the ground, grazing a shrimp boat off the Georgia coast and nearly causing it to capsize. Finally, it landed safely at Lexington’s Blue Grass Airport. On the ground a short time, Thornton and Oliver departed while another pilot waited for the off-load crew to remove the ten tons of pot. In less than an hour, the plane was unloaded and flown by different pilots from Lexington to the Louisville airport where it was parked and abandoned by its crew.

  Years later, it would become apparent that Drew’s buddy Harold Brown at the DEA had told the Lexington police not to get involved.

  Arousing the suspicion of airport employees, the unmarked plane prompted queries to the DEA, which was forced to respond. Reluctantly boarding the vacant aircraft, DEA agents found marijuana residue, a sleeping bag, a five-hundred-gallon fuel tank, and a magazine with an address label for “Gary Scott”—a Savannah pilot known to belong to the international drug-smuggling conspiracy that the DEA knew as the Company.

  Parked near the DC-4 was a black pickup truck carrying two Bryson employees. The two men readily admitted to the DEA they had been instructed to travel from Savannah to Louisville, meet the DC-4 and unload all boxes and equipment on the airplane, vacuum its interior, lock it, and return to Georgia. Each man had been promised one thousand dollars for the task.

  Much of the evidence at the scene suggested the involvement of Bradley Bryant: The plane was registered to a company owned by Bradley; the ground crew in Lexington had been identified as Bradley’s employees; the truck in Louisville belonged to Bryson International; Bradley was the subscriber to a phone number found in the possession of one of the Bryson employees. Yet the DEA never pursued criminal charges against Bradley Bryant, or anyone in Bradley’s organization, even though they seized the aircraft.

  Johnny Trussell figured he must have passed muster on the DC-4 incident, for two weeks later he was assigned a more substantive and financially rewarding endeavor. Bradley gave Trussell seventy thousand dollars in cash to purchase a Queen Air aircraft in North Carolina and to fly it to a small airport near Houston, Texas. Bradley had told him to make numerous takeoffs and landings from the airstrip over a period of three days to determine if he attracted any heat—or law enforcement surveillance.

  “Once you feel clear,” Bradley told Trussell, “then call Dan Chandler in Vegas. Chandler will take it from there.”

  Bradley provided Trussell with two phone numbers for Chandler— the unpublished number at his home on the Las Vegas Country Club, and his direct line at Caesars Palace. When Trussell felt certain no cops or curious airport personnel were watching him, he transferred his belongings from one hotel
to another. Checking into the Houston Airport Ramada Inn, he placed his call to Chandler.

  Chandler directed Trussell to stay at his hotel, not to make any additional phone calls, and to wait for another individual whom Chandler did not identify.

  “A day or so later, a man arrived at the hotel and told me he was the man I was waiting for,’’ Trussell later told police. Trussell claimed never to know the identity of the man. The man drove Trussell to Houston, where Trussell was told to wait to be contacted by a man using the name “John Wayne” who would “set up the drug deal.” Trussell waited at the Houston motel for several hours before a towering redhead who called himself “John Wayne” appeared. Wayne directed Trussell to fly them in the Queen Air to a remote ranch Wayne apparently owned near the U.S.-Mexican border.

  “This is where you can reach me if you need to,” “John Wayne” said, handing Trussell a business card. With that, “Wayne” was gone, leaving Trussell with three Mexican men unknown to him.

  After stripping the seats from the aircraft and equipping it with radar detection devices and a “bladder,” or extra fuel tank, Trussell and the three men flew to the interior of Mexico. Greeted at the jungle landing strip by several armed Mexicans, Trussell waited as the Mexicans loaded the plane with twelve hundred pounds of marijuana. He left his passengers at the dirt airfield, and returned solo. Hugging the ground to avoid detection by American radar, Trussell flew the plane in an electronic blind spot along the border. He landed safely back at the ranch in Sonora, Texas, where the pot was immediately unloaded and hauled off in camper pickup trucks by three men Trussell had never seen before.

  When Trussell was unable to start the plane to return to Georgia, he called Bradley for directions. Bradley told him to burn the plane and leave it in Texas. Trussell balked, afraid such a fire would attract too much attention. Bradley, who hated his judgments to be challenged by his underlings, reluctantly agreed to send Trussell the necessary spare parts and a mechanic. However, when Trussell returned to Georgia, Bradley withheld twenty thousand dollars from Trussell’s compensation, so angered was he by Trussell’s insubordination.