The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History (19 page)

"Sixteen," said the girl.

Baker nodded and rolled up the window.

"I just wanted to satisfy my curiosity," he told the reporter. "They each probably added a year or two."

Then Baker laughed again when he saw a boy make a suspicious movement, rolling a beer can under a car. Baker made the kid-who said he was seventeen-pour the beer out.

"They always tell on themselves. They make that one movement that gives them away."

After the nightclub rounds, Baker pulled over three drivers in a row. The first, a kid from Louisville, violated several driving rules at once. When Baker pulled him over, the boy promised to drive better after his warning and then darted back into traffic, narrowly missing an oncoming truck. The second violator moved his car slowly in front of Baker's cruiser, weaving back and forth. The driver's turn signal came on for no reason.

"Now there," Baker pointed out, "is your typical drunk driver."

The seventeen-year-old from another county admitted his crime.

"There's no use in lying to you," the boy said. "I admit that I've been drinking beer. I've had four or five. Don't you think it's better to tell the truth?"

The Breathalyzer confirmed the teen's confession, and Baker locked him up in the juvenile area of the jail after the boy called his parents to tell them where he was spending the night.

Back on the street, a speeder shot right past Baker's cruiser. He put on his blue lights and pulled the car over. The driver, a local teenager, knew Baker by sight.

"Yessir, Mr. Baker," the young driver said over and over. "Yessir, Mr. Baker."

Baker gave the kid a warning and said he could go, but before Baker could walk back to his cruiser, the Marion County teenager slammed on the gas and tossed gravel behind him as he sped out onto the dark highway.

At 3:00 a.m., the end of his six-hour shift, Baker told the reporter that it had been as quiet a Saturday night as he had seen in Lebanon in his eighteen months on the job. Not that Baker was disappointed by the night's inactivity, the reporter noted, just "a little surprised."

In March 1980, five months after Garland Russell's disappearance, Ed Baker, now a sergeant, squeezed all the excitement he could handle out of a Saturday night in Lebanon. As the clock moved toward midnight, Baker and the rest of the department's weekend night shift had their collective feet propped up in the station house between rounds. So far, the usual assortment of disorderly conduct, drunk driving and public intoxication arrests kept the evening moving for the Lebanon Police Department, a force entrusted with maintaining the peace while the town's half-dozen nightclubs were in charge of the opposite.

At some time past midnight, the phone started ringing in the dispatcher's office. Excited callers reported that a black truck just drove through their yard, ran over their mailbox, nearly killed their cat.' hen the police in the station began hearing for themselves the sounds of squealing tires, unmuffled exhaust and excessive RPMs echoing through the streets of Lebanon, but they couldn't pinpoint the offending vehicle's location.

Officer Carrico was looking out a window of the station, and suddenly there it was. A black-and-chrome half-ton Chevy pickup fishtailed around the corner of Main Street and Proctor Knott Avenue, gunning for the police station head-on.

"Here he comes!" Officer Carrico hollered.

Ed Baker raced to the window and watched as the black-and-chrome blur ran full-speed onto the sidewalk between the parked police cruisers and the brick station house-inches from the window-knocking down three OFFICIAL PARKING ONLY signs and scraping against the cruisers parked there before accelerating around the corner and out of sight.

Sergeant Baker ran out the front door to inspect the damage with his flashlight. The OFFICIAL PARKING ONLY signs at the curb had been sheared off level with the sidewalk, and the chrome door handles of the police cruisers had been busted off their anchors, left dangling on the scraped and dented doors.

As Baker stood there, he heard the engine again and the tires again. He looked up to see the chrome bumper and black flared fenders of the Chevy pickup aimed at him, not moving. The engine revved.

"When they got in front of the police station," recalled Steve Lowery, then the editor of the station's neighbor, the Lebanon Enterprise, "they did a little Coyote thing, `beep beep.'They literally did. They stopped in front of the police station and did the, what's the Wile E. Coyote and uh? Yeah, Road Runner. They do a `beep beep."'

Then the driver popped the truck into gear and barreled straight at Sergeant Baker, who identified two of the three men in the truck's cabJohnny Boone and J. C. Abell, the same J. C. Abell whom Charlie Stiles had peppered with buckshot for cutting donuts in the Raywick church parking lot eleven years before.

As the truck came at Ed Baker for the second time, Baker started waving his flashlight at it. The relationship between the local police and resident outlaws had seen better days than this Saturday night, perhaps its lowest moment since the 1974 beating death of Mose Willett.

"Mose Willett, owner of Sunnyside Dispensary," Johnny Boone later recalled. "They beat him up, and he suffered a head injury, and he died in Loretto in a brush pile."

Lebanon's wide-open nightclub culture had corrupted the local police into a cowboy-style outfit designed to deal harshly with the rowdiest visitors to a town that had become a weekend magnet for every teenager and crazy person within 150 miles. This cowboy attitude, left unchecked for a decade, permitted the Lebanon police chief to coerce signed confessions from suspects by pressing a loaded gun to their heads, a later case would reveal. It also permitted police officers to administer beatings to anyone they thought had it coming.

In April 1974, two Lebanon police officers beat Mose Willett, the forty-eight-year-old co-owner of Sunnyside Saloon on the corner of Water and Depot Streets, nearly to death with nightsticks. Willett, a member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the Knights of Columbus, certainly had his demons. In retrospect, some say he might have been bipolar due to his bouts of depression and tendency to get "redneck drunk." On April 18, 1974, when he talked back to two Lebanon policemen for pulling him over just a few blocks from his home, the officers pulled him from his car and thrashed him.

Willett couldn't leave his house for days, refusing to go to the hospital and gripped by a downward spiral of shame and embarrassment for not being able to defend himself. He was last seen alive on the first Wednesday in May 1974, about two weeks after the attack. At 11:00 a.m. that Friday, the day before Cannonade won the 100th Kentucky Derby, someone found Mose Willett's body in the undergrowth in Loretto, dead from a cerebral hemorrhage. At his funeral, six pallbearers and eight honorary pallbearers carried Mose Willett's coffin down the steps of St. Augustine Church and into the waiting hearse. The next day a judge ordered the grand jury to investigate Willett's death because of "rumors and innuendo" surrounding the circumstances of his passing. By the end of the week, the officers who beat Mose Willett to death were suspended for ninety days, seemingly ending the story.

But six years later, the moment after that black-and-chrome Chevy pickup had taken one run at the police station and Sergeant Ed Baker ran outside with his flashlight, the men in the truck didn't see Baker at all. They saw Mose Willett caught in a thunderstorm of nightsticks and Sergeant Baker as one of the policemen who had killed him, even though he wasn't.

"Baker, he's out there with a flashlight. This was the second run," Johnny Boone said later. "We went through the first time and come back, and [two of us] thought, `Better not go through there,' and the driver said, `Yeah, we're going through there. We need to tidy it up a little.'

"Baker thought sure we'd stop and be good humans, so he's out there like a man on an old-time train caboose waving that light, standing between the building door of the police station and the police cars.

"`He ain't doing that, is he?Johnny Boone said, re-creating the dialog from inside the truck.

"`Yeah, he's standing there with that light.'

"`Motherfucker better move."'

The front door of the police station was recessed about three feet off the sidewalk, making a brick entryway protected from the elements. As the black pickup roared toward him, Sergeant Ed Baker dove into that doorway, barely avoiding the oncoming truck.

"It's like a movie-Rambo or something," Johnny Boone recalled. "He's diving across the walkway as best he can as a train is coming right up through there. What in the hell is he trying to do?"

The truck had barely missed Baker, clipping the corner of the brick entryway instead, crushing a few bricks and knocking the mortar loose. After the truck bounced back onto the street, it peeled off heading southbound on Proctor Knott Avenue in the direction of the city park. Baker and other policemen shook off their shock, raced to their cruisers and gave chase in a high-speed pursuit.

But why? Why would a group of Cornbread types antagonize the police by attacking police headquarters with a pickup? And why in March? March is a down month in the growing season. Before the days of indoor growth operations, not a lot of farming activity happened in March, and all the product harvested in October of the previous year had been sold by February.

Maybe March was a time when large amounts of imported marijuana came into the area to be sold to Marion County's growing customer base. If so, perhaps those driving the product into Marion County from whoknows-where wanted insurance that no police officer would pull them over, and it just might be that the Black Bandit was just an aggressive decoy to keep the local policemen busy while something else traveled on the road.

"I can tell you," Johnny Boone later said cryptically, "that it is a possibility that this was an absolute necessity in that context."

In order to achieve whatever mystery goal he and his cohorts had, Johnny Boone had volunteered the black Chevy half-ton pickup for the job.

"Nineteen seventy-nine black half-ton S-10, Chevy," Johnny Boone recalled. "Seemed like they always run forever even when you try to tear em up. And it come off a car lot ... had about fifteen thousand miles on it. It was the nicest damn truck. Everybody that rode in it or worked in it, or somebody would drive it down to Tennessee or something, they'd say, `Damn, that's a hell of a nice truck.'

"It would jump through fence lines, go down into hollers with the lights off. They weren't the first police who couldn't find that truck when they was looking for it. That's why we took it that night. We already knowed what that truck could do, but we never dreamed that the night would go on and on and on. The driver decided we needed some contact."

After its second run at the police station, the black truck bounded around the city park, up the hill on Country Club Drive, past Golf View Terrace and then right onto Old Calvary Road, where, to the police cars in hot pursuit, the truck seemed to vanish.

When he turned onto Old Calvary Road, and before the cops had made the same turn behind him, the driver turned off the black truck's headlights and pulled a hairpin turn into the unlit entrance of the Lebanon Country Club, surrounded by its nine-hole golf course. While the cops raced by with their red-and-blue lights blaring toward Calvary, the invisible truck cut donuts in the fairways with its lights off.

If the driver saw a row of shrubbery he didn't like, he took it out. The two passengers held on tight as the truck bounced through a sand trap and then slammed head-on into a telephone pole, which snapped in half about three feet from the ground.

"Ran over that goddamn pole," Johnny Boone recalled. "And listen, I'm telling you that truck was built to take most things and keep going. It needed to [for] what it was used for. That son of a bitch hit that poleand that was a good pole, just like that one right down there-it hit that motherfucker and hardly stopped. Top part went over top the truck, stub pushed over. I mean a big pole now. This truck was made to try to keep going if it had to, and it just went on through there."

The bandits hadn't noticed yet, but when they snapped that utility pole, they cut power to half the county as they continued to tear the hell out of the golf course.

"For some reason the driver could see the greens come up, and they were really perfect," Boone said. "So, he just went right down through the middle of them sons of bitches."

A half-hour later, after losing the truck's trail completely, the police began to conduct a systematic search of the area in the power-outage darkness, when Jody Greenwell, a Kentucky State Police detective, called into the station from his house in Loretto, on the opposite side of the county. He knew the truck's location-it had just left his front yard!

Detective Greenwell was at home, his gray KSP cruiser parked in his driveway, when he heard a Road Runner-like "beep beep" come from outside.

"They get in front of Jody Greenwell's house," Steve Lowery recalled. "They do the Road Runner deal again."

Greenwell looked out his front door and saw the black Chevy halfton pickup revving its engine in his driveway. Inside the truck, Johnny Boone didn't want to ram Greenwell's cruiser, but after all that had come before so far that evening, it seemed at that moment to be inevitable.