The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History (13 page)

That night, with the funeral and the era of Charlie Stiles over, Sonny Larue drove into the St. Francis Xavier Cemetery after dark to visit his grave, but when he approached the Stiles plot, Larue froze, staring down into the unbelievable: The grave was empty! Panicked, he ran to his car, slammed the accelerator down, ripped out of the cemetery drive and raced to the Stiles farm, fishtailing into the driveway, throwing gravel into the darkness and skidding to a stop in front of the farmhouse.

Larue hopped out and banged on the door. When Paul Stiles answered, he saw Larue-a short balding man, his panting chest heaving his potbelly up and down.

"Paul!" Larue sputtered, wide-eyed. "Something's happened to Charlie. His coffin's missing. His grave's empty!"

"Calm down, Sonny," Stiles said. "After some thinking, I got Mary Dee to agree to an autopsy. The medical examiner is coming tomorrow. Maybe we'll see if it's like they said it was or not."

Paul Stiles seemed tired and maybe drunk.

"Go home, Sonny," he said before going back inside.

The next day Paul Stiles walked into the back room of Bosley's Funeral Home and saw his dead brother laid out naked on a metal table, a sheet over his lower half and the makeup lines from the funeral visible on his neck and wrists. His suit had been cut off him and lay on a stainless steel counter nearby. The coroner stood in the back of the room with Paul as the doctor stood in front of Charlie with his tools spread out.

The medical examiner noted that he was examining a body of a "welldeveloped, well-nourished fifty-five-year-old white male," who would have been perfectly healthy if it wasn't for the eighteen holes in his chest, abdomen, back, right arm, left buttock and hip, which had been sutured after he was embalmed to prepare him for the biggest funeral Marion County ever saw. The state police had already recovered bullets from Stiles's body, but as the medical examiner clipped open the sutures on the entry and exit wounds, he found a few slugs that the Spencer County coroner had missed. He pulled one buckshot slug from the left side of Stiles's chest, under the fifth rib; a second slug from his right back; and a third from near Stiles's heart, lodged in the pericardial sac without rupturing the heart itself.

Each slug the doctor removed he dropped into a stainless steel pan, ringing out a metallic echo in the quiet, tiled room. And with each KLANG of a slug into the pan, Paul Stiles said quietly:

"I'll get'em for you, Charlie."

KLANG.

"I'll get'em for you, Charlie."

KLANG.

"I'll get'em for you, Charlie."

Paul Stiles lost a son to the Vietnam War and then his brother to the state police. Paul never did "get'em" in a direct sense because the four members of the state police's Charlie Stiles squad all rose to leadership positions within the force, and no questions were ever raised publicly as to the truth of the police's version of events.

Although those who shot Charlie Stiles were never forced to prove their version of events, Paul Stiles got his revenge-in his own way. In the years after the death of his brother Charlie, Paul Stiles turned to a new outlaw enterprise, growing plants similar to the ones he knew as hemp, which he had helped grow, reap and thresh as a child during World War II.

From the funeral of Charlie Stiles sprang a new generation of outlaw ready to break a whole new set of laws-not exactly what the state police had in mind when they set out to take care of their Charlie Stiles problem. The state police must have figured that they had tamed Marion County once and for all, but because of the law of unintended consequence (or "the fecundity of dragon's teeth," as William Faulkner put it), the killing of Charlie Stiles created for the state police a much larger problem: It gave Marion County a brand new reason to disrespect the badge just as local Vietnam veterans returned home with a brand new law to break. The killing of Charlie Stiles did not create the Cornbread Mafia, but his blood certainly fertilized the field.

"The first time I ever saw anybody smoke marijuana was down at Joe Downs's place," recalled Charlie Bickett, "and two guys that had just got out of the service, out of Vietnam, local boys, and they were smoking it. And I didn't know what marijuana was. You heard about it, you know, but it was sort of hush-hush.

"They got four or five more smoking it, but I never would fool with it because I was scared to death of it. I didn't know what marijuana was. That was the first time I had seen anybody smoke marijuana in my had to be around'71."

The shooting of Charlie Stiles and the emergence of marijuana on the Marion County scene would be the sorts of events that Charlie Bickett would chronicle in the old bank ledger that he kept under the bar.

"When I found this book, a whole stack of these books were given to me," Charlie Bickett said later, opening the 150-year-old ledger. "An outfit called Webster, they were president of the bank, they gave them all to the City of Raywick ... so anyway, I stole this one here. There's some really interesting stuff in here .. .

"Let me read you something from eighteen-something. This is a town ordinance, passed June 2, 1888-Ordinance to Prohibit Breaking Colts in the Streets of Raywick on Sundays or Holidays. Whoever shall drive or hit a colt as to break him to drive any kind of vehicle, he shall be fined five dollars for each and every offense, and if failure to pay the sum, he will be confined at hard labor in the streets of Raywick until said fine is paid....

"Then at one point the bank turned into a store, where people bought stuff-grindstone rocks, buggy, horse-one buggy, six dollars-Earl Bickett, that's my granddaddy, one quilt, $7.75 ... Paul Bickett, one horse, $21 ... Eugene Bickett, one hammer.

"That's why I added all my stuff to it:

"Approximately one-fourth of the poker room was occupied with ten Raywickians smoking grass and Mary Jane. They all seemed to be pretty high. This is 1973.. .

"I, Charles Bickett, declare that Bill Mattingly is under the influence of alcohol. I, William Mattingly, declare that it is true . . . "

Another entry described what Charlie Bickett referred to as the "mafia" versus the "vigilantes."

"The mafia struck Raywick again last night. They ventured themselves through Raywick two proceeding times creating a riot. They were shooting up the streets and the houses of the congested area of Raywick. To prohibit this uncalled-for vandalism to occur again, the vigilantes, which was us, was called. Stake-outs were made and guerrilla warfare was necessary.

"At approximately 12:00 midnight, the `mafia' drove through," Charlie Bickett said, reading more from his ledger. "Not the mafia we know, not the `Cornbread Mafia,' just a bunch of punks-Main Street of Raywick on Highway 84. The mafia had their weapons sticking out of the'62 Ford Galaxy and started shooting up the town.

"By the time they got halfway through Raywick, shooting began and gunfire was exchanged. A bystander received a flesh wound. The `mafia' lost control of the vehicle and proceeded into the park, where members escaped.

"Gunfire was again exchanged repeatedly between the mafia and the vigilantes. One of the mafia members proceeded to flee the scene of the accident, and guns were going off. The gang proceeded to escape in the opposite direction with a 16-gauge shotgun.

"Two of the instigators-I'm not going to mention their names here; they're dead-they got stranded in the vehicle. Merrill Mattingly, the assistant deputy sheriff, had drove through ...

"Merrill proceeded to back up the street and put his spotlight on the vehicle. At that time, the vandalizers raised up ... Merrill was bearing arms and he arrested four of them.lhat was 9-28-1977," Bickett said as he closed the dusty antique ledger.

"I put all kinds of old bullshit in there. I really enjoy this book here."

By 1977, when the "vigilantes" took on the "mafia" in the Ford Galaxy, the marijuana business was in full bloom. Men like Johnny Boone had applied his state champion 4-H tobacco-growing and sheep-breeding skills to a new agricultural problem entirely: building the best breed of marijuana ever grown in Kentucky.

"The first thing about rebreeding pot is you got to have a high THC that's pleasant and good for you," Johnny Boone said later. "It's no good if it gets you stoned if it knocks you down and gives you migraine headaches. It's got to be the good kind.

"I'll tell you what happened to us. We started out, we only had the seeds of whatever was around to smoke: in those days Mexican, Colombian. More Mexican real early than anything. It wasn't any good, and that's all people had. Started crossing it, and soon you could see the differences in the different pot.' you had to be religious, make every effort to let that be what you tried to breed. Don't just throw a bunch of other seeds in with it because you'll just diffuse and decrease the potency, [and do] anything else to try to get it to excellence.

"To be worth all the work going to go into it, it needed to do well in Kentucky because it wasn't going to be grown in Mexico or Colombia or something; it was going to be grown here. Mold in the field is a big problem; the denser your buds get, the bigger and better and denser your buds get, so there's really a lot of pot there-they can harbor molds. Good to breed something that's immune to that. Buds like corncobs because you're looking for density."

Johnny Boone learned his cannabis genetics from Mr. X, a local boy with a well-stamped passport whose identity remains secret because the police never apprehended him. Mr. X got out of Marion County early and knew where to find suppliers of the high-quality strains of pot from growers who retreated into the woods of northern California's Humboldt County and beyond.

Mr. X brought Boone early issues of High Times magazine as soon as the publication began in 1974. The magazine showed Boone how to pluck male plants from the juvenile females in order to produce a seedless crop of high-potency sinsemilla.

"Take out all the male plants early," he told Boone.

"We do that at the end," Boone replied.

"No," Mr. X. scolded him. "Do it before the males pollinate the females. Then they'll be seedless. It's called sinsemilla. Trust me."

Boone paid attention; his friend was right. Boone taught the other Marion County growers, who thought Boone was a genius for figuring it out on his own.

While Johnny Boone stayed on his farm on Bloomfield Road in Washington County, tending the fields the way Mr. X taught him, Mr. X went off to discover new cannabis cultivators in India, Pakistan and the Middle East. These growers, he learned, grew a different type of marijuana, another species entirely called Cannabis indica, which grew low to the ground with thick leaves-groomed for generations in their indigenous environments to produce high quantities of the THC-rich resin for use in hashish production, unlike the tall sativa plants, which were genetically selected for their height because taller plants made longer hemp fibers.

Mr. X discovered certain corners of the world where the hashish and marijuana markets flourished without state-sponsored prohibition, places overrun with hippies from America and western Europe on the dropout trail, like the hash houses on Chicken Street in Kabul, Afghanistan, where thousands of hippies had congregated by the early 1970s. When Mr. X found Chicken Street, he told the friendly English speakers there that he was looking for seeds, and they loaded him up. He returned to Chicken Street several times before hardliners overthrew Afghanistan's Westernfriendly king in 1973, ending the love affair between Western stoners and Kabul's hash dens and sending Mr. X to other global marijuana hotspots looking for seeds to support the Marion County seed bank.

Though the central Asian and Middle Eastern indica strains were highly potent, some early cannabis connoisseurs like Mr. X didn't like the stoned, narcotic high they produced; it felt more like a drugged-out opium effect than the good, cerebral high of the sativa varieties. Responding to the challenge, early breeders cross-bred the two cousin plants to produce hybrids that maintained the potency of indica with the heady, cerebral high of classic sativa while retaining other positive indica traits like shorter plants that matured earlier in the growing season.

When Johnny Boone first started growing, he soon realized that the tropical strains matured too late in the year for the Kentucky frost in October and that the old hemp plants weren't worth using at all, not if you wanted to get high. Through Mr. X, Boone discovered an indica strain to cross with the sativas he had, a hybrid that would do well in the temperate, humid growing season of central Kentucky. Boone wouldn't see Mr. X for six months or a year at a time. When Mr. X would return, he would bring more seeds.

"These are from Thailand; these are from Burma. This one here is from Tibet up in the Himalayas."

Boone would grow each strain, careful to keep the plants separate. Some would do well in Kentucky; others just wouldn't.

"Let me tell you another little trick; all agronomists can tell you this," Johnny Boone said later. "Plants climatize, so what works tremendously well here in Kentucky might not work in Alaska. So, not only do you need to seed for latitude ... but also for where you're going to grow.