The Bluegrass Conspiracy

by Sally Denton

  The Navy’s investigation had progressed splendidly, resulting in a tidy indictment of the Bryants and three Californians. An August 1981 trial was scheduled, and the Navy seemed anxious to prosecute its misfits outside the uncomfortable glare of publicity.

  The fact that some of the stolen military hardware was traded in South America for drugs was a delicate matter. Neither the Navy, the Air Force, nor the CIA seemed particularly interested in either pursuing or publicizing that avenue. But the departments of Justice, State, and Treasury were not so willing to ignore the implications of military arms and technology being illegally exported as currency for drugs, Soviet radar equipment, or anything else.

  The FBI, Customs, DEA, ATF, and myriad state and local police forces, were all pushing for further investigation, prompting the U.S. attorney in Philadelphia, who was prosecuting the Bryants on gun charges, to make a formal request for an interagency investigative force. The Criminal Division of the Justice Department denied that request.

  “We banged our head against the wall for months trying to get some coordination,” said an assistant U.S. attorney in Philadelphia. “Some kind of task force should have been organized. Instead, we had a bunch of assistant United States attorneys fumbling around the country because they didn’t know what each other was doing.”

  While the Defense Department may have preferred to have the Bryants quietly convicted and sentenced, too many other federal agencies, encumbered by their own jurisdictions and agendas, refused to allow that to happen.

  The FBI was still hot on the trail of Bradley for his knowledge about the contract murder of Judge Wood, and saw the China Lake indictments as a great opportunity to squeeze him into cooperation.

  U.S. Customs in Louisiana had opened a criminal case against Bradley’s former employees—Johnny Trussell and Jan Fisher—for illegally exporting the Starlight nightscope and Green Box radar unit to Colombia.

  Ralph’s Special Operations team within the Kentucky State Police was anxious to reopen the drug importation case of the DC-4 that had unloaded 20,000 pounds of pot at Lexington’s Blue Grass Airport, before being abandoned an hour later in Louisville—apparently with the collusion of DEA regional chief Harold Brown.

  ATF agents were still pursuing leads generated by the weapons found during the raid of the Sheraton in Philadelphia and the U-Store-It warehouse in Lexington, including guerrilla warfare activities at Triad.

  The Georgia State Bureau of Investigation was actively pursuing Drew Thornton on a drug-importation case in Savannah.

  DEA agents in Florida were just weeks away from arresting an associate of Bradley and Drew—Mike Kelly of Lexington—for importing several tons of marijuana into the West Coast of Florida.

  The IRS in Kentucky had opened tax evasion cases against several of Bradley’s associates, but was precluded by law from sharing its information with any other agency.

  The DEA had an informant—one of the former China Lake employees—who was in the middle of a drug deal with Bradley. The “sting” was expected any day, and Bradley, who had been released on bond on the China Lake charges, operated with seeming obliviousness to his predicament.

  Bradley’s far-flung activities came to an abrupt halt on May 18, 1981, when he sold 804 pounds of high-grade marijuana to an undercover DEA agent near Chicago.

  Federal agents posing as drug purchasers handed Bradley $240,000 in cash in Room 141 of the Holiday Inn in Elgin, Illinois. Wearing a three-piece suit and an open-collar shirt, Bradley counted the money. He then ordered his accomplices to transfer the marijuana from a van rented by him to a second van that had, unbeknown to Bradley, been rented by the DEA.

  While awaiting the return of his subordinates, who had been arrested as soon as they transferred the pot from one vehicle to the other, Bradley told undercover agents he would be able to deliver another 20,000 pounds of pot in a couple of months.

  Shortly after making that statement, Bradley was read his Miranda rights. Anything he said could be used against him in a court of law.

  Federal agents determined that the marijuana had been stored at a farmhouse near Elgin, Illinois, and was part of a bulk shipment of pot that had been off-loaded at an airstrip several months earlier near Tampa, Florida.

  Not coincidentally, Bradley’s partner in the deal—Robert Walker— had become a government informant. The fifty-nine-year-old Florida man who operated the Pasco County airport had long been considered a kingpin in a huge narcotics organization, and had recently opened a bank in the Bahamas to launder his “narco-dollars.” But shortly after his indictment on money laundering charges he decided to make a deal with the feds.

  But before he had the opportunity to testify against Bradley or any other associates, he mysteriously disappeared.

  Coincidentally, at almost the exact same moment that Bradley was being arrested in Illinois, Walker’s badly decomposed body was being retrieved from a Florida swamp. He had been strangled by a cord, in apparent retaliation for having become a government snitch.

  As it turned out, Walker was but the first in a trail of dead bodies that would litter Ralph Ross’s life during the next several months.

  In July 1981 Ralph stretched out in the bulkhead of a commercial airplane bound for Fresno. He had carefully folded his brown suit jacket and placed it in the vacant seat next to him. As soon as the jet was airborne, Ralph opened his leather briefcase and retrieved a file labeled “Mike Kelly.”

  The first page identified Mike’s legal name as Wallace McClure Kelly. The thirty-three-year-old, 350-pound, bearded son of a Lexington pharmaceutical businessman had been a Boy Scout who liked hot-rod cars and music. He attended Henry Clay High School in the mid-1960s and, though slightly younger, counted Drew Thornton, Henry Vance, and Bradley Bryant among his boyhood friends.

  His wife, Bonnie Lynn Gee, was the oldest of twelve children who had been raised in an eastern Kentucky “holler” near Tick Ridge. The peroxide blonde began her life with Mike Kelly in 1974, at the impressionable age of twenty-two, after he rescued her from a motorcycle gang that was holding her against her will.

  Kelly had been arrested a few weeks earlier by Florida authorities and Customs agents and Florida police followed up with a raid of Kelly’s Lexington home on June 29, 1981. Kelly was charged (though later acquitted) with attempting to smuggle seventeen tons of marijuana into the West Coast of Florida in early June.

  The pot had been loaded onto a seventy-two-foot shrimp boat which was scheduled to rendezvous with a ground crew waiting at a Charlotte County, Florida, marina. Parked at the marina were four refrigerated tractor-trailers. Ready to haul the dope north, the trucks had PRODUCE emblazoned across their panels.

  All the smugglers connected to the deal had abandoned the boat and vehicles moments before the feds arrived, apparently tipped off to the impending bust. But Florida authorities located Kelly at a local dirt airstrip where he was waiting to be picked up by a private airplane. Kelly provided the cops with identification, but they had lacked the evidence to arrest him at the time. Further investigation showed that two radios found aboard the shrimp boat belonged to Kelly, and eventually Florida police were successful in building a criminal case against the overweight Lexingtonian.

  Ralph flipped through a stack of ATF documents that showed Kelly had been a federally licensed firearms and ammunitions dealer since 1971—when he was only twenty-three years old. Through a company called Diversified Equipment, Inc., which listed a Lexington address, Kelly sold shotguns, rifles, handguns, and ammo, and manufactured alarm systems. On his license application, Kelly claimed he obtained all of his weapons from Phillip Gall & Sons—the infamous Lexington gun wholesaler and retailer.

  In 1975, however, a routine inspection by ATF had turned up numerous violations. Like his father—the owner of a wholesale drug company who had been charged for failing to maintain appropriate records of narc
otics sales—Mike risked his license by failing to keep track of weapons transactions, as required by law.

  He had explained to the feds that he stored his inventory at his remote Jessamine County farm because he was afraid the guns would-be stolen from his Lexington office. It was therefore difficult, he explained, to remember specific details about his guns. Unimpressed by Kelly’s excuse and lax record-keeping system, and suspicious of his high rate of reported stolen weapons, the ATF had recommended Kelly’s license be revoked in 1976. Kelly had somehow managed to bring his company back into compliance, however, compelling ATF to drop its charges.

  Ralph pulled a notebook from his briefcase and began listing the events that had initially brought Mike Kelly to his attention:

  During an inspection by the DEA of inventory at the W. Kelly Company in 1977, the feds found evidence of drug diversion—specifically, the disappearance of forty-three thousand doses of Valium.

  Kelly had been identified by police as one of the off-loaders of the marijuana from Bradley Bryant’s DC-4 at Lexington’s Blue Grass Airport in January 1979.

  Kelly, for the past several years, had used his expertise in electronics to install burglar alarm systems in Lexington commercial properties; to build broadcast antennas; to sell sophisticated radio equipment to drug dealers and police officers; and to sell rifles,, shotguns, and handguns throughout central and eastern Kentucky. He had admitted that Bradley was one of his “clients” for electronic equipment—as were several Kentucky judges, Kelly had been quick to point out.

  Bradley had made sixteen long-distance phone calls to Kelly from the Sheraton in Philadelphia prior to Bradley’s arrest.

  Electronic dart guns seized from Bradley’s Lexington warehouse belonged to Kelly.

  Intelligence information had long suggested that Mike was an expert at manufacturing M-10 machine pistols, and Kelly and Henry Vance made silencer parts and converted semi-automatic weapons into fully automatic weapons; Kelly also made false Kentucky driver’s licenses for members of drug organizations.

  By the time the jetliner touched down in California, Ralph had reviewed all the files in his possession regarding Bradley Bryant, Larry Bryant, Andrew Thornton, Bill Canan, Mike Kelly, Harold Brown, and Dan Chandler. He felt thoroughly prepared to convince Assistant U.S. Attorney Brian Leighton, as well as the federal grand jury, that sufficient evidence existed to indict each of those individuals, along with two more former Lexington cops—Jack Hillard and Steve Oliver—for, at the very least, their participation in the importation of ten tons of pot into the Lexington Blue Grass Airport.

  Upon Ralph’s arrival in Fresno, Leighton told him that the first China Lake indictment against Bradley and Larry Bryant had been replaced by a superseding indictment. The original indictment, handed down in March 1981, dealt only with the theft of military equipment from China Lake. The superseding indictment, filed a few months later, had been expanded to include charges of conspiracy and intent to distribute narcotics. That twenty-page federal indictment detailed various overt drug-smuggling acts, including: The DC-4 flight into Lexington; the Queen Air trip from Texas to Mexico and back; and the jaunt from Starkville, Mississippi, to Colombia that had been thwarted.

  Although the number of defendants had increased from five to eighteen, neither Drew Thornton, Mike Kelly, Harold Brown, nor Bill Canan were named. Ralph was determined to rectify those omissions. He also believed that Dan Chandler, who had been named as an unindicted co-conspirator, should have been questioned about his role in the importation of twelve hundred pounds of pot from Mexico onto a ranch near Sonora, Texas. Chandler had been the person Johnny Trussell contacted, at Bradley Bryant’s behest, and Chandler had arranged meetings at which drug deals were discussed.

  After testifying before the grand jury, and meeting with other cops from various state, local, and federal law enforcement agencies, Ralph felt confident that a second superseding indictment would be handed down within weeks.

  Ralph returned to Kentucky feeling a sense of completion, as though years of loose ends had been gathered into a tidy ball. Bradley, Drew, Canan, and Harold Brown would be out of his hair for a while. Now he would be free to focus on nightclub owner Jimmy Lambert, who, so far, had managed to float in and out of the shadows, protected by his social status, political connections, and wealth. Ralph marveled at how Lambert kept his hands so clean.

  The summer of 1981 proved to be relatively quiet. Lexington’s big operators seemed to have taken a hiatus from smuggling. The Fresno grand jury was taking much longer than anticipated. The simmering scenarios of the summer proved to be the bizarre deaths of low-level players in the Company—individuals who had either “flipped” to become government witnesses, or were suspected by the conspirators of being susceptible to government pressure.

  Homicide investigators in Florida and Georgia continued to seek clues in the strangulation murder of Robert Walker, who had been named in one of the early China Lake indictments, and had then agreed to testily against Bradley Bryant.

  In Lexington, in the middle of a hot, muggy afternoon, the bodies of Danny Sheppard and Cindy Baker were found. They had both been stabbed several times in the heart, and left in the bathtub of their home. The shower was running and the bathroom walls were drenched with blood. The two were known drug couriers, and had been identified by Ralph’s undercover men as regulars at Lambert’s house on Old Dobbin Road.

  Like Walker, Sheppard and Baker had become government informants against Company members just prior to their deaths. Apparently the Company had impeccable sources within both local and federal law enforcement agencies in order for them to learn the identities of snitches so quickly.

  Ralph rolled his eyes as he read Lexington policeman John Bizzack’s account of the investigation that was published in the Lexington Herald. Calling the incident a “bizarre-Romeo and Juliet suicide and homicide,” Bizzack decided to close the case without further ado.

  Bizzack explained that he had “re-created” the scene and examined the thrusts of the weapons, and had concluded that Cindy first stabbed Danny in the heart. Danny lived just long enough to be able to pull the knife from his chest and plunge it into his girlfriend’s heart.

  Once again, Ralph’s hands were tied by jurisdictional limitations. Frustrated, he observed from the sidelines as the Lexington police seemingly blundered their way through the grisly probe, conveniently drawing a neat conclusion. He watched angrily as the Lexington newspaper provided a forum for the police, never challenging the “official story.” He tried to “leak” tantalizing tidbits to individual news reporters, hinting that the state police, as well as the medical examiner, found the murder/suicide explanation to be factually and physically implausible. But his attempts to incite any investigative initiative fell on deaf ears.

  Ralph thought about Bradley and Drew: In 1970, they had been clean-cut sons, devoted husbands, natural-born leaders. Ten years later, they were suspected of running a behemoth dope and gun-smuggling syndicate that boasted millions of dollars’ worth of boats, planes, trucks, warehouses, and landing strips—all hidden in a labyrinth of offshore corporations.

  By 1981, Bradley and Drew were under investigation in Pennsylvania, California, Georgia, Mississippi, and Florida.

  Only in Kentucky were they always guaranteed sanctuary.

  Ralph was determined to change that. As head of the new all-encompassing Special Investigations Unit of the Kentucky State Police, he considered the Company his domain.

  Ironic though it would later seem, Ralph’s opportunity to dismantle the international crime network based in Lexington came under the patronage of the new governor of Kentucky—John Young Brown, Jr.

  BOOK THREE

  High Ambitions

  CHAPTER TEN

  “Nobody had heard very much about John Y. Brown before he ran for governor,” Ralph Ross remembered. “Suddenly he and his wife Ph
yllis George were running a wild campaign, flying a helicopter in and out of them hollers of eastern Kentucky, and spending millions of dollars on TV ads. They dazzled everybody with flashy clothes and jewelry and celebrities. Before you knew it, he was elected.”

  John Young Brown, Jr., was five years old in 1939 when his father, John Young Brown, Sr., suffered the first in what would be a series of defeats at the hands of the Kentucky Democratic political machine. Accusing then-Governor “Happy” Chandler of fixing the governor’s race in favor of Chandler’s handpicked successor, Brown began what would be a lifelong feud between the two men. Until 1939, Brown Sr. had been a tenacious young politician who clawed his way through the world of Kentucky’s legendary rough-and-tumble politics. A fiery underdog, he had managed to serve two terms in the state legislature, and one in the U.S. Congress. But the tide would turn and Brown Sr. would eventually be pounded by Chandler’s political muscle. By the time of his death, Brown Sr. had run for governor once, the U.S. Senate seven times, and the State House twenty times. He was elected to the state legislature only six of those times.

  By all accounts, young “Johnny” took it hard when his daddy lost his bid for governor. As did all little kids, Johnny thought his daddy was the smartest, strongest, most courageous man alive. He watched in awe as his father took his licks, yet continually got up and went back into the ring. He listened as his daddy extolled the values of competition, hard work, manliness, ambition, resourcefulness, and education. The firstborn son, Johnny felt an enormous weight on his shoulders from an early age—to surpass the standards set by his larger-than-life father. He was expected to carry his father’s torch, to avenge his father’s defeats.