The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History (14 page)

"The landrace breeds, let's say high in the Himalayas, if you went over there and got a thousand of them seeds and stuck them in the heel of your boot and come back and plant them in an elevation lower, they probably wouldn't do as well here as they might if you took'em to a place like where they live at ... like the Rocky Mountain lowlands."

The landrace breeds best suited for Kentucky, Mr. X and Boone discovered by trial and error, were those from Afghanistan because the two places share the same approximate lines of latitude.

"You'll remember it's what made [Mr. X] king," Johnny Boone said, referring to Mr. X's access to international seed banks.

"I'd look forward to him coming home once a year," Boone said," cause he had these little old bags tied up with Pakistan seed over here. Seed over here from Burma or some fucking place. Now I would say, `Are you sure?' ... and he'd say, `Yeah, I know what this is,' and he would show it to me.

"He was a big help.... He was a Daniel Boone,"Johnny Boone later said of Mr. X. "He'd have to be, wouldn't he? ... Look what he did: He just went every fucking place in the world, a lot of times didn't have but blue jeans on. And then wherever he went, seems like the liberal community accepted him.... Obviously they did or he couldn't have done it as quick as he done it. Goddamn, he did it in just a few years.... He wasn't bullshitting, neither. Seeds are tricky things; they can be good or they can be bad. If they're bad, you ain't got nothing ... but every seed he gave me was good."

So, when Marion County growers wanted good seeds, they came to see Johnny Boone. Every seed Boone gave a farmer grew the biggest buds anyone had seen before. When Boone walked through his patch, he liked to feel the buds beat against his body with the mass and density of corncobs and the length of baseball bats.

"All these fucking people-all them guys you know, Jimmy and all of them-wanted the seed I had," Boone said, "because they wanted the best, and they knew I'd been working with seed here, there and yonder."

None of those growers working with Boone had any idea where his seeds came from. Some would speculate where he got them; none would be correct, and none would ever know Boone's connection to Mr. X, who would arrive in his hometown and disappear without warning or notice, each time bringing with him another batch of seeds from another set of exotic corners of the world and giving them to Johnny Boone and later to Jimmy Bickett, Joe Keith's younger brother, but to no one else.

As word spread of the quality and quantity of marijuana available in Kentucky, distributors from California started coming to Raywick looking for a bargain, tired of the Humboldt County hippies' escalating prices from competing strains in a widening menu of marijuana varieties: sativas like Maui Wowie, Kona Gold and Panama Red; pure indica strains like Afghani No. 1 and Hindu Kush; and popular hybrid varieties such as Early Girl, Purple Haze and Northern Lights.

Soon many distributors realized that Kentucky sinsemilla wasn't just some ugly cousin or second-class citizen to the boutique California hybrids dominating the marijuana connoisseur market; Johnny Boone's Kentucky Bluegrass was good, as cerebral and potent as anything California had to offer, cheaper by half and for sale by the ton. The only drawback that Boone and fellow farmers faced as they started selling their homegrown marijuana to the West Coast was that smokers there looked down their noses at Kentucky marijuana, calling it hillbilly pot.

To combat the prejudice, Marion County growers altered their crops' appearance and marketed them under different names. To replicate the brown, sticky quality of Jamaican pot, a grower might buy a barrel of cola syrup from the Coca-Cola distributor, water it down and spray it over his buds-not too much because any amount of moisture on the pot once it has been cut might cause it to mold. After it was compacted, the bale possessed the dark, sticky, sweet character of Jamaican ganja.

Another farmer, to replicate the golden quality of Colombian Gold, an early popular sativa strain, might spread his marijuana out on a black sheet of plastic, spray it with a mixture of water and allspice, then cover it with a sheet of clear plastic and let it sit out in the sun for a day.' sun would bleach the buds just enough to give them a golden color, and the spice gave it an exotic aroma that hid any moldy smell from the added water. One farmer even stenciled his own burlap sacks that read COLOMBIAN GOLD.

But once Kentucky growers grew more skilled at their craft, and as word spread across the country about the quality of Bluegrass homegrown, Marion County outlaws stopped worrying about disguising their product. Kentucky marijuana began to sell itself. Some big-time West Coast distributors could turn around a ton of Kentucky marijuana per week during the harvest season, from mid-October until midwinter.

Buyers with deep pockets sometimes ordered in advance, fronting the money for seed, fertilizer, planting, transplanting, cultivation, harvesting and security-usually costing the buyer $10,000 for a lease on an acre, $40,000 to tend the crop and $50,000 to harvest it and prepare it for sale, or $100,000 total. Sometimes the broker would hire others to grow and transport it to market, so the broker wouldn't ever touch it at a middleman with the right connections on both sides of the deal, bringing Kentucky pot to California smokers.

The first time police suspected that the secret herb grew in Marion County came on July 10, 1973, when a Lebanon police officer pulled over a car driven by a twenty-six-year-old Lebanon man. The officer spotted a brown paper grocery bag with a peculiar smell in the front passenger floorboard. Upon searching the trunk, the officer found fifty-nine other grocery bags. Each bag, he estimated, contained enough marijuana to make one hundred cigarettes, which the Kentucky Standard (the newspaper in neighboring Bardstown) valued at $1 each, bringing the total value of the bust to $6,000-or $30,530 in 2011 dollars.

In October 1976, two teenagers and their uncle from St. Joe were snooping through Paul Stiles's cornfield looking for some good roasting ears of corn to steal when they stumbled upon a patch of bright green plants covered in jagged leaves growing eight feet tall in the balk between the corn rows.

The plants reminded the boys' uncle of his wartime boyhood, when his family had grown hemp for the war effort. While he recounted tales of hemp farming, his teenage nephews laughed to themselves, knowing about the plants' extracurricular use. The old uncle pulled up a few plants by the root to show around the St. Joe store to reminisce about the war years. While their uncle tugged at the branches, his nephews took a few buds for themselves to smoke behind the barn later.

When the farmer returned to St. Joe, he couldn't stop talking about what he had seen growing down by the Rolling Fork. Those who knew something about that Stiles patch couldn't get the farmer to shut up fast enough, and some people who shouldn't have found out about it heard all they needed to know. When a Kentucky State Police trooper caught wind of Stiles's pot field, he called for reinforcements.

On the morning of October 1, 1976, the state police borrowed a helicopter from the Louisville police and flew it down to Marion County, where they spotted the five acres of marijuana laced in with the corn on the Stiles farm.' They arrested Paul Stiles at 3:30 p.m., and by the end of the day, the state police had the Stiles family farm under armed guard.

Before dark, a highway mowing crew arrived with three tractors and bush hog mowers. With the tractors' high-powered headlights, the mowing crew worked all night long, cutting down the largest marijuana crop ever discovered in Kentucky to that time, with a street value-state narcotics agents estimated-of $2 million. From the lookout on the top of Scott's Ridge five hundred feet above the river, one of the patch's growers looked down, watching the tractors swipe back and forth across the field all night long.

The next morning Paul Stiles called his lawyer in Lebanon and learned that he faced a $500 fine and six months' probation. Stiles drove into Lebanon and paid his fine in cash, then saw the judge when he needed to. For five acres of marijuana, Paul Stiles spent zero nights in jail.

Before Charlie Stiles had died, the Stiles brothers had stored countless stolen tractors, appliances and other pieces of heavy equipment on their farm. But since Charlie's death, Paul had spent more time teaching the kids coming back from Vietnam the ways of the outlaw farmer.

From Paul's point of view, growing this new crop far surpassed the sort of stealing that Charlie had perfected because it attracted much less police attention, like a return to the moonshining days, only perhaps better, the perfect victimless crime. The police wouldn't know it if they saw it and were lucky to find the patch they did.

After Paul Stiles's $500 fine, the growers worried little if at all about prison sentences and mostly about deer eating their buds or thieves stealing them. To keep the deer away, growers put radios in the trees, going back every few days to change the batteries. They also found moth balls, human hair and urine to be effective deer repellent.

Marijuana theft became a widespread problem as soon as everyone knew what it sold for. The thieves were known in the business as rippers, and growers set booby traps around their crops to teach them a lesson: fishhooks hanging at eye level, trip wires rigged with dynamite, live rattlesnakes tied to poles, and rottweilers with their vocal cords removed so they wouldn't bark before they attacked and fed with gunpowder to make them meaner.

In 1976, around the same time the state police found Paul Stiles's five-acre patch, Johnny Boone discovered that a ripper had visited a patch on his Washington County farm. He came out to tend it and found a whole row picked clean. So, Boone staked out the patch overnight with his sidekick, his ten-year-old son Jeffrey, and an AR-15 rifle-a civilian model M-16, the same sort of gun that Johnny would be caught with in Minnesota in 1987, that Jeffrey would be caught with in 1998 and that Johnny would be caught with again in 2008.

Meanwhile, a state police officer pulled over a car for speeding, and the driver happened to be the man stealing from Boone's pot patch. The driver negotiated his way out of the ticket by offering in exchange to give the location of the best patch of marijuana he had ever seen.

So, the state trooper drove out to Johnny Boone's farm at the end of Walker Lane (named after his grandfather) and pulled right up to his cattle gate, one hundred feet from where Boone hid in the darkness with a gun and his son. At first Boone thought he had found his thief, but the state troopers identified themselves before anyone got hurt. This wasn't Boone's first run-in with the law. In the late sixties, Boone had been arrested with a Marion County farmer when the two were caught sweating barrels, an old bootlegger's trick. If you put a few gallons of water into a used bourbon barrel and set it out in the sun, the heat will cause the barrel to "sweat," and the water will soak up the alcohol trapped in the staves of the barrel. It makes good whisky, but because Boone was making it and selling it without paying taxes on it, it wasn't exactly legal.

So, in the autumn of 1976, with the police closing in on his prized pot patch, Johnny Boone didn't panic. He simply surrendered, and the state police stumbled upon one of the first public examples of Johnny Boone's 4-H skills applied to his personal breed of marijuana, which he had been genetically crossbreeding for years by then, a strain of indica/ sativa hybrid that Boone initially named Kentucky Bluegrass but then had second thoughts.

"To me, calling it Kentucky Bluegrass sounded a little too much hillbilly,"Johnny Boone later said, "but High Times used to list the prices each month, and they would say `Kentucky Bluegrass.'This was in the old days."

CHARLIE STILES'S PHILOSOPHY OF UNARMED CRIME WAS NOT ESPOUSED by everyone within the Cornbread universe. There were those who exceeded all rational bounds of human restraint, who violated God's Law right along with Man's Law, psychopaths feeding on the silence offered by Marion County like a bull feeds on corn. Men like Garland Russell, who began his criminal career in the 1950s as a thief and truck hijacker but who would become a major player in the early Cornbread days, once he was released from prison in 1972 for horrific crimes that rattled even Lebanon's liberal moral core.