The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History (10 page)

FARMERS ALL ACROSS KENTUCKY GREW TONS AND TONS OF HEMP IN THE nineteenth century but not in Marion County. According to an 1877 edition of The History of Kentucky, Marion County annually produced 81,800 pounds of tobacco, 2,207 tons of hay, 413,760 bushels of corn, 88,690 bushels of wheat, 1,041 bushels of barley-but zero pounds of hemp on 193,074 acres of land valued at $9.89 per acre. Neighboring Washington County reaped 2,100 pounds of hemp in 1876, a fraction of the statewide market for a product destined to become rope, paper and cloth in products used at home and at sea. Fayette County, the capital of thoroughbred horse country surrounding Lexington, produced 4.3 million pounds of hemp along with its 5,879 horses that same year. Hemp farmers in the counties that surround Fayette grew another five million pounds.

In 1937, four years after repealing Prohibition, the federal government criminalized hemp and its sister plant, marijuana. Yet, even while outlawing it, the government still consumed a great deal of hemp, needing its fiber for the miles of rope used by the Navy, which grew its hemp on plantations in the Philippines, an American territory, until Japan attacked in December 1941. In the days just after Pearl Harbor, America lost its sole supplier of hemp when it lost the Philippines. So, at the dawn of the war, the Navy was taxed not only with rebuilding its Pacific fleet but also with resupplying that fleet with rope made from the fiber that Congress had outlawed four years before.

While women grew victory gardens and Boy Scouts collected tires and tin, farmers across America raised hemp for the war effort at the request of the federal government. Farms across the Midwest and South grew mountains of the tall green plants and then packed them off by the truckloads to warehouses. From there, hemp was shipped by rail to processing plants where it was turned into the rope necessary for the Allied naval victories in the Pacific and European fronts. Of the nine states that grew hemp for the war, the government asked only Kentucky for its seed, which it then planted in tropical places with longer growing seasons, like Brazil and Hawaii. In 1942, the US government asked Marion County to produce enough seed for five hundred thousand acres of hemp, roughly enough for 453,750 football fields.

Though they had never seen hemp grown before, young Marion County men not drafted into the war worked the fields, tending acres of hemp that towered over their heads with trunks as thick as bamboo. When they harvested it in the autumn, they ran the hemp stalks through a thresher, which separated the seeds from their husks. Because the government wanted only the seeds, the farmers burned everything else, sending big white clouds of hemp smoke wafting up from the barn lots-the tranquility of the quiet landscape interrupted only by the chugga-chuggachugga of the diesel-powered threshers.

Farmers caught on pretty quickly that this hemp crop made them feel a little funny. One boy, Al Brady, helped his family thresh its hemp seeds, and while walking home from the field one day, he told his friend that he felt dizzy.

"I think being up on top of that separator all day made me drunk," he said.

Advocates of industrial hemp often assert that hemp grown for fiber lacks enough tetrahydrocannabinol (commonly referred to as THC) to get a person "high," so why did the thresher make Al Brady feel drunk? Hemp, in common shorthand, refers to the male cannabis plant, whereas its female counterpart is called mar~uana. In a field grown for seed, both males and females would be present to ensure fertilization, and the females with their seeded flowers would be the ones run through the threshers to harvest the seeds. Although the flowers of the fertilized females would have dramatically lower THC levels than unfertilized flowers, there would still be enough present in a field's worth to perhaps cause the effect Brady described-not unlike a greenhorn tobacco farmhand contracting nicotine sickness by absorbing tobacco's active drug through his skin.

So, Brady brought an old medicine bottle down to the barn one day and scooped up some hemp seeds before they went off to the government. That night he hid them for safekeeping in a barn behind his parents' home.

Thirty-some years later in the 1970s, in the midst of the younger generation's cannabis bonanza, Brady went back to look for that medicine bottle of old seeds, thinking to himself how much money he could make from his heirloom hemp. He found it exactly where he left it, covered in cobwebs and three decades of barn dirt. Excited, he grabbed it, cleaned it off and opened it; but the seeds by then had turned to dust.

As Al Brady's medicine bottle full of hemp seeds slowly decomposed in the family barn, the farming folks went on trying to make a living growing burley tobacco and teaching their children to follow along. In April 1957, the state 4-H office in Lexington announced its annual awards for its youth farming program, presenting the district tobacco championship to a thirteen-year-old boy from Washington County named Johnny Boone.

Boone's family raised him on a Bloomfield Road farm that belonged to his mother's family. His father, the man who gave him the surname of Daniel Boone, gave Johnny little else besides the sorts of beatings that angry alcoholics administer to their children. A good day for Johnny and his siblings was when their father passed out before they came home from school; a bad day sent the Boone children diving under beds and out windows to escape their father's belt. Once, after their father had beaten their mother with a fishing pole, Johnny Boone, still a child, drove his mother to the doctor to remove the fishhook embedded in her cheek.

So, Johnny Boone looked elsewhere for a father figure and found it in his maternal grandfather, Poss Walker, the owner of the family's large tracts of farmland. Walker guided bright young Boone's development as a farmer, helping his grandson at eleven years old to grow the 0.7 acres of tobacco that finished in seventh place in the district 4-H competition.

In 1958, at fifteen years old, Johnny Boone won the state 4-H championship in sheep breeding, earning him a trip to Chicago for the National 4-H Congress. In 1960, Boone conquered Kentucky again, this time for his tobacco, giving him "the unique distinction of having attained two state 4-H championships," according to the Springfield Sun, his hometown newspaper. His winning tobacco project "was 2.6 acres which he irrigated, suckered carefully and saved all of the ground leaves."

Johnny Boone graduated from high school in 1961 as a three-time football letterman in the top sixth of his class. "He plans to enter the University of Kentucky in the fall," the Sun reported. Life had other plans. Although smart and ambitious, Johnny Boone started a family and stayed on the farm to continue the traditions of his grandfather.

A veteran of Prohibition, Poss Walker learned to supplement his family income with moonshining and bootlegging and whatever else seemed necessary to keep his farm afloat. These activities he included in the mentorship of his grandson, teaching young Boone skills for which the state 4-H board didn't award prizes. In addition to moonshining, Walker taught Boone how to grow more than one's allotted share of burley tobacco, a crop strictly monitored and regulated by the government. If agents from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) caught a farmer growing more than his share, his card at the tobacco warehouse would be marked red, and the excess tobacco would be confiscated. This "red-card tobacco" became an essential element to some farmers' meager incomes. The trick for Johnny Boone was to grow extra tobacco in secret patches tucked away in a corner of his grandfather's massive property. At harvest time, the managers of the tobacco warehouses, gentleman farmers who made their fortunes moonshining themselves, helped red-card tobacco growers elude the scrutiny of the federal agents.

Married and forgoing college, Johnny Boone started farming and distilling on both sides of the law to raise his family. Although his home and property were in Washington County, Boone gravitated toward Marion County, where some people considered obeying certain laws to be optional, where the wets continually defeated the drys in the fight for the soul of the place.

The fight flared red-hot one night in May 1958, when nitroglycerin blew sky high the partly constructed home of George Helm, the state Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) agent sent to look after Lebanon's notorious liquor merchants. The response from Frankfort, the state capital, came swiftly when thirty state troopers descended upon Lebanon at a time when the whole state force numbered only one hundred troopers. The state police succeeded in making only three arrests on misdemeanor charges: Hyleme George, owner of the Silver Dollar liquor store; his brother Philip of Phil's Dispensary, both on Water Street; and John Nelson, owner of the Corner Liquor Store on Main and Proctor Knott Avenue.

Making matters worse, Kentucky's public safety commissioner, a thirty-year-old Harvard alumnus named Don Sturgill, inflamed the postbombing atmosphere by telling a major newspaper that Lebanon fostered "open and commonplace gambling, prostitution and illegal whisky sales."

When challenged by representatives of Marion County, who drove to Frankfort to confront Sturgill about his allegations that Lebanon played host to prostitution, the Harvard grad dug himself in deeper.

"When I said [prostitutes] were 'commonplace,' l simply meant they were available," he said. "And when you've got gambling and illegal whisky sales, you're almost bound to have prostitution.

"I have evidence," Sturgill continued, "that twenty-seven persons living outside Marion County bought 4,300 cases of whisky in Lebanon between 1956 and 1957."

When Commissioner Sturgill appeared in Lebanon a few weeks later-the press pool in tow-with the intention of arresting Hyleme George, Marion County turned the tables on him. The county judge refused to issue warrants and denied Sturgill's claim that it was a state matter by claiming local jurisdiction. So, Sturgill stepped out of the courthouse empty-handed, facing a crowd of angry locals and the assembled media. Stunned, Sturgill faltered, and Hyleme George took to the courthouse steps for an impromptu press conference.

"Thirty patrolmen sent down here to arrest one liquor dealer for lending whisky to another one," Hyleme began, waving his cigar around for emphasis. "That's no charge. The charge is that they're hard losers. They're mad," Hyleme said, putting his arm around the man beside him, "because this man's brother was elected county clerk."

That man's brother, Paul Clark, had defeated a twenty-year incumbent and state party patronage dispenser with the help of Hyleme George's new loyal voting bloc, Lebanon's black folks, whom George treated just like anyone else.

"I don't think this is coming from the governor's office," George continued in remarks recorded by George Trotter, editor of the Enterprise. "He wouldn't tolerate it if he knew what was going on."

The Harvard grad expressed surprise at the sore-loser allegation.

"I'd be glad to take a lie-detector test to show that no politics were involved in this investigation here," Sturgill insisted over the jeers of the angry crowd.

The spontaneous assembly, partial to George's point of view, heckled Sturgill on those courthouse steps, reminding him of his charges of prostitution.

"Where are those girls?" the crowd shouted repeatedly. "Where are those girls!"

A reporter didn't understand the dynamics of the situation, so the editor of the Lebanon Enterprise explained.

"Gambling and liquor violations are a sin against the state," Trotter, the local newsman, said. "But prostitution is a sin against God. That's a serious charge," thereby articulating this Marion County notion that Man's Law and God's Law were not exactly the same.

"And if he's a crook," Trotter added, regarding Hyleme George, "he's the nicest crook you ever saw."

"For that time back when he was getting going, he was pretty powerful," Johnny Boone later said of Hyleme George, adding that George "loved to take chances . . . to gamble with circumstance, but he needed enough money to live on, had a big family to raise, so he wanted to make sure some of those gambles were for sure, too."

That nice crook who liked to bet on sure things went on to help fend off a wet/dry referendum placed on the 1958 ballot by out-of-town Protestant moralists. With the dry vote defeated and the ABC officer's housebuilding plans on hold, Lebanon's nightlife turned the dial from 9 to 10, on its way to 11, from "wide open" to wider open.