The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History (17 page)

When the Stiles home had crumbled beyond Russell's standard of living, he paid his insurance bill, turned on the gas and blasted the house's facade across the street into the parking lot next to Bickett's Pool Hall. If he hadn't said it before, he said it then: Garland Russell had arrived in Raywick.

Garland Russell soon established himself among the Raywick crew considered to be the first generation of Kentucky marijuana growers, men who were much younger than he but who already had a few growing seasons' experience. How many young men engaged in the illegal cultivation of Marion County cannabis around 1972 would be impossible to calculate, but they likely numbered in the dozens, and they included Johnny Boone, the Bickett brothers, and a number of Vietnam veterans like Bobby Joe Shewmaker, Meece Williamson, who would kill Paul Stiles's son inside the Fifth Wheel in the early 1990s, and Don Nalley, whose career would end abruptly in 1983 when a high-caliber bullet ripped through him in his New Haven driveway.

Johnny Boone never served in Vietnam, but Bobby Joe Shewmaker told him about a few of his experiences there:

"He said he was downriver where he could see. He said there was a bunch of guys up there whose lieutenant was killed just then," Boone recalled later. "He said a bunch of what they called `gooks,' which meant they figured they were fighting for the North Vietnam.' They was wearing Vietnamese clothes. I guess it's hard to tell ...

"The river wasn't very deep, but they were wide where they had eroded over the centuries, they come across there. And when it didn't look like no more were going to come out of the jungle ... they just opened up, guns clacking, clacking.

"He said you could see them fall off them water buffalo, killed every one of them, shot a couple buffalo, too. He said, whatever went down in the water you could see it floating down the river ...

"He said taking prisoners there was about a joke because nobody enforced it. Nobody instrumented any transfer or anything. Recon lieutenant and captain would come out there if you captured five men, you call it in on the radio and recon would come out there and question them, might beat the shit out of them, try to get them to talk or something. When they were done with them, recon left.

"You ain't got enough food for yourself. You don't want to stay up all night awake watching those prisoners. If you turn them loose they're going to try to kill you tomorrow, ain't they?

"Each war is different," Boone said. "That surely was that one."

Nothing could have prepared anyone for those sorts of wartime experiences, but fighting in a war that seemed to lack rules certainly prepared men like Bobby Joe Shewmaker to succeed in a world back home where obeying the law kept a person poor and breaking it turned farmers into millionaires.

The Vietnam veterans returning home helped the lawless elements of Marion County plug into a nationwide network of fellow veterans who understood how the world truly worked when one stripped away the surface. With this underground network seemingly in place from the start, Raywick and Marion County entered a gold rush, selling mountains of well-grown pot to buyers from the East and West Coasts and from one side of Marion County to the other as well because often one grower needed a few more dozen pounds to fill an order.

The first time Jimmy Bickett tried to sell a load of pot to Johnny Boone, Boone sent Bickett back to clean the product up, pointing to a thick stem between two buds.

"See this right here?" Boone asked. "I don't want to pay for this wood."

After a long growing season and seemingly endless hours of work bringing in a load of pot, no one wanted to take the time to manicure the final product. Of all the jobs associated with creating desirable marijuana, manicuring consumed the most time and required attention to annoyingly minute detail after a season of strenuous labor.

"If you're trying to move a lot of pot,"Johnny Boone later said, looking back, "you don't want it sitting and sitting in somebody's house for a month waiting for someone to decide if they want it because it ain't good enough to impress them the first time they look at it. That shit could be caught or stolen or burned up or mold or something.

"It's a commodity that's great to have, but you don't want it sitting in one spot. It needs to be moving to the consumer. If it's got a bunch of wood in it, or a bunch of water in it, or something it don't need to have, some kind of trash hooked to it, it's not going to go nowhere. Somebody's got to clean it up, and it don't need to be cleaned up in New York. It needs to be cleaned up here before it goes there.

"And sticks don't weigh a goddamn thing, but they are tedious to take out, and it costs a lot in labor to get them out. Talk about an aggravating job. You got a couple hundred pounds of pot to come out of a field, and you got to sit around on buckets and chairs and take all the sticks and trash out of it. You got to sit around and sit around and sit the fuck around."

there was a lot of marijuana to sit around and manicure, always a lot of marijuana.

"As you well know," Johnny Boone recalled, "Kentucky has been a wonderful place for producing marijuana and more so than maybe any other state as far as volume goes. Well, wonder why? It sure as hell grows good here, and it's not necessarily up in the fertile horse Bluegrass region but in all the peripheral regions everywhere Even those boys up in the mountains seem to do very well.... I farmed it in a lot of other states, and you could produce pounds there. But I think even anybody else who ever ran a group would say that the quality of the Kentucky-grown was still superior, the smoke, the THC, et cetera.

"I traveled to other places, and people in other places way, way off know that Kentucky is the superior pot in America.... Guys in Amsterdam know about it. I have a friend traveling right now, and that's what he does.... He says the guys in Amsterdam ask him if he can bring them Kentucky seeds. They believe in the superiority of it as a breed.

"High Times has a thing they call `landrace'seeds; those are seeds specific to the area they are in. Let's say Afghanistan. They are known to be there for a long time, to where they are looked at as a breed. You got places like Colombia, Mexico, Hawaii, Burma, Thailand, [even] South Africa is getting a really good name.... Kentucky is now getting that name. We're not yet included on what they call the Landrace List, but I say we will be."

So that's a lot of sitting around on buckets and chairs, cutting and trimming pounds and tons of marijuana one branch at a time-and only with men one trusted enough to keep their mouths shut.

All that sitting around forced men who wouldn't spend much time together otherwise to tolerate each other for longer periods of time than many thought possible, putting Marion County natives like the Bicketts and Bobby Joe Shewmaker with outsiders like Johnny Boone and Garland Russell. Boone fit naturally into the Marion County lifestyle because of his similar upbringing as a rural Catholic. Russell, on the other hand, didn't fit as well into the Raywick scene, but who was going to tell him no? Everyone decided that if something bad happened, they wanted Garland Russell on their side, not against them.

During the boring parts of the marijuana business, like when the buds needed to be cut from the stalks, the men would sit in a barn and clip the buds from the branches with rose clippers-a giant pile of dried marijuana on one side of them and neat piles of groomed buds spread out carefully on plastic on the other. In these circles, the workers often rolled joints made from balls of the resin that clung to their fingertips from handling pounds of the sticky, green buds, or they would set fire to a goodsized bud and pass it around, inhaling the white smoke directly into their noses-no paper or pipe required. Despite their buzz, these farmhands learned to quickly clip through a mountain of marijuana in the dimly lit barn without losing a finger to the rose clippers, while Garland Russell, who didn't drink or smoke at all, made even faster time using an old buck knife, its blade edge concave from years of sharpening.

As they sat in a circle chopping buds off stalks, Russell told them about what he learned in prison. As he talked, the young ones paid attention, carefully eyeing Russell: a neatly dressed, bald-headed man-an otherwise-ordinary-looking man except for a deep scar across the top of his brow and the tombstones in his eyes.

Russell's stories motivated the greenhorn recruits not to slack on the job. The workers would take regular breaks from clipping buds by walking to the beer cooler or going outside to urinate, but Russell never moved off his bucket, steadily chopping buds with his concave-sharp buck knife, waiting for the youngsters to come back so he could tell them another story.

Finishing a manicure job on a whole load of pot could take days or weeks and required that everyone stay from beginning to end.

"They need to stay until it's done," Johnny Boone later said. "They don't need to go home, and that's hard to do. They got wives and girlfriends at home wondering where the hell you're at, and you're gone two weeks. But if you have much trouble between the spot and home, you'll have a problem.

"And you got to sit around, and it's hard to get ten guys to get along for that long, too. Every so often somebody will get mad at somebody, but everybody knows the bottom line: If very many people have to go home for any emergency reason or any goddamn thing they say, somebody's got to go home to check on their wife to see if she's out fucking, all that other shit, somebody's going to know something. So, you can't go home. That's the real hard thing to think about.

"It's like a National Guard bivouac. We're going to go there; we're going to stay there; when we get done, we're going to leave there. That's the ideal, but it's hard to get that way. Two men might, but when you are talking about ten, twelve, fifteen at harvest time, hard to get that way."

If someone started trouble in one of these bivouacs, someone else would have to finish it. None of the older men wanted to take a whiner out back and beat him. They would if they needed to, but the need hardly ever arose if Garland Russell stood nearby. The deep fear that he engendered acted as a perfect motivational tool. Once, when one young worker wouldn't stop complaining, Russell's head snapped up from the stalk he was trimming.

"Huh?!" Russell barked as he scanned the circle, looking for the complainer.

But as soon as Russell spoke, the complainer's head dropped, and he began working again as fast as anyone. No one wanted Russell to single him out as a crybaby. He might not make it home.

But although Russell's reputation helped get business done at times, his unchecked rage and capacity for violence often became a liability. Once, some young men from Raywick and St. Joe planted two patches at either end of a farm that lined the Rolling Fork River near Bradfordsville in eastern Marion County. When tending the patch one day, they discovered that someone had been poaching from the plants in a patch that abutted the river. Just across the river sat a shack where a sharecropping family lived. Russell assembled his crew, and they crossed the river armed with shotguns to teach a lesson to this poor family, whom they suspected of stealing their marijuana.

They opened fire on the shack, shooting out windows, hitting the beat-up car and killing the family mutt. The message had been sent, but Russell wanted more. He kicked in the door and wanted to exterminate every living soul-the children, the old people, everybody.

But one young Raywick man held Russell at the door and convinced him to leave it alone. And very calmly Russell backed away, smiled and moved on, as if it didn't even bother him-the same feeling he would have had if he had killed them all.

It wouldn't be the last instance when someone stopped Garland Russell from adding to his body count. Another time Garland Russell nearly killed two rippers he caught stealing plants from his pot patch.

As Russell tended to a row, he discovered that another row of plants had been ripped out by the roots. Patiently he scanned the surrounding field and located a path through the tall grass, as if beaten by a dog or by a person dragging a trash bag filled with pot plants behind him. Russell tracked the rippers through the weeds back to an abandoned house on the back of the farm property. There the two thieves had stopped to cut the buds off the stalks of the plants they had stolen.

When Russell caught them, he beat both into submission before restraining them hand and foot with a logging chain. He chained one thief like a cowboy ropes a calf, ankles and wrists bound together, and hung the other one upside-down from the ceiling of the abandoned house, chains holding his ankles in the air with his hands tied behind him. Then Russell doused them both with gasoline to teach them a lesson that no one would ever forget.

Thankfully, a young grower from Raywick pulled Russell away, begging him not to do it. Without such an intervention, the thieves' families would have been planning a pair of closed-casket funerals.

In 1978, Garland Russell grew a crop with Jimmy Bickett outside New Haven on Icetown Road. On a hot September day, Bickett, Russell and their crew were in the field stripping the male plants out. Any field of pot would have at least 60 percent male plants; they would never see a field as good as 50-50 male-to-female ratio. It's hard work out in a field with a long-handled tobacco knife looking for immature stamens of the male plants and cutting them out before they have a chance to pollinate the females. Jimmy Bickett had learned from Mr. X., just as Johnny Boone had, that it was best to pluck the males out of the field before they began making pollen because once pollinated, the female plant puts all her energy into making seeds, and a grower wants the female to continue to produce the sticky THC-rich resin that the female is making to get herself pollinated.