The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History (21 page)

While nine Marion County men faced charges in federal court in Louisville, Lebanon and its surrounding farming communities faced the toughest economic climate since Prohibition. By the end of 1980, Marion County's unemployment rate ticked up to 11.5 percent, the highest in a ten-county region. After layoffs at the GE Appliance Park in Louisville and the bourbon cooperage in Lebanon, Marion County saw the largest number of food stamp applications, 973, in its history.

As Christmas neared, the economic outlook for Marion County remained bleak. On Christmas Eve, no fewer than four dozen people huddled in the circuit courtroom to sign up for unemployment checks. Ninie Glasscock, a reporter for the Lebanon Enterprise, spent part of her Christmas Eve with them.

"I got four kids, all of'em little," a Lebanon man said on the condition he remain anonymous. "I ain't worked since July. I've tried everywhere I know, but nobody's hiring, and I got bills to pay. And it hurts, you know, not to be able to do for your little ones on Christmas.

"We went out and cut us down a tree, and it's all decorated pretty. And I've tried to tell the kids that this Christmas won't be like some others we've had. But they're little, and three of them still believe in Santa Claus. They tell me, `Santa ain't been out of work, Daddy."'

The man stood silent for a moment.

"It's hard," he said quietly. "It's real hard."

Another Lebanon man said that he had two small children and that the bourbon cooperage had laid him off five months ago.

"When I got laid off this last time, I said to myself that even if the bills have to wait the kids'll get Christmas," he said. "Kids aren't little but once."

A mother of seven was laid off a week before Christmas.

"This Christmas won't be like it would have been cause money's short," she said. "And we've had a lot of sickness in the family. My husband's had three heart attacks, and I've got a grandson that was struck by lightning. We lost our house in a fire last year, and it takes a lot to build back.

"Instead of being in the courthouse, I could be out trying to get in the Christmas spirit, but we don't even have a Christmas tree this year. We're more fortunate than some," she added. "A lot don't have anything at all."

The Bicketts had once had their share of modest Christmases in Raywick, back when Coletta still made the clothes for all nine of her children, with as many as four in cloth diapers at the same time, when Charlie Stiles used to dress up like Santa Claus and give the Bickett children toys as he made his rounds through Raywick. But 1980 wasn't a lean Christmas in Raywick. The town of two hundred had struck it rich like a California gold rush boomtown. Corvettes had begun to replace pickups in the parking lot outside Bickett's Pool Hall and the Fifth Wheel.

To Jimmy Bickett, those people at the courthouse waiting for someone to offer them jobs were lost sheep. They didn't get it; there was no point waiting in a line for a job that wasn't there. The Bicketts had taken to heart the lessons of self-reliance their elders had learned during Prohibition by adapting to the times with an entrepreneurial spirit. Combining their community's knowledge of farming and bootlegging, the Bicketts were engaged in the freest of free enterprise without taking a dime from the government.

Despite the loss of forty-five acres of marijuana during the 1980 season, Marion County growers had diversified their holdings sufficiently to bring enough product to market through a system that had been going strong, uninterrupted for nearly a decade by the end of 1980. Some had begun to operate as though they might never be caught.

A week after Christmas, on New Year's Eve 1980, federal agents served a search warrant to a house on the Bickett farm, where Jimmy and Joe Keith lived, and found 150 pounds of homegrown marijuana therethe home that Garland Russell had used as a hideout the previous year.

The government indicted the Bickett brothers on March 18, 1981, and tried them three months later. The evidence: sixteen garbage bags filled with homegrown marijuana, about 150 pounds. For their legal defense, the Bickett brothers retained the legendary Frank Haddad with Elmer George as co-counsel.

The jury found Joe Keith guilty with the intent to distribute and Jimmy guilty of simple possession, a lesser charge, but Judge Thomas Ballantine made a mistake, accidentally sending evidence back to the jury room that he had previously ruled inadmissible-a sifter with cocaine residue and three bottles of amphetamines. Haddad and the prosecutor approached the bench to discuss the error with the judge, and Elmer George looked over his shoulder and winked at Jimmy Bickett.

Because of his own error Judge Ballantine declared a mistrial-a classic example of Frank Haddad's magical touch with the judges, a special relationship gained from years of courting the class of black-robed men, including once when he defended a judge accused of holding a police officer as someone else punched him during a barroom brawl. Against seemingly irrefutable eyewitness accounts, Haddad managed to win an acquittal for the judge. Although he didn't win an acquittal for the Bicketts, Haddad had managed to force the government to prosecute them a second time.

Before the Bicketts'second trial, Frank Haddad worked to get Jimmy dropped from the indictment altogether by arguing that Jimmy didn't live in the house where the police found the marijuana. Jimmy lived in the poker house, Haddad said, and he could prove it.

The Bicketts owned several houses within a mile of each other. In addition to the two-story house in downtown Raywick, where Coletta and Squire raised enough children to field their own baseball team, the Bickett farm, just down the road, had at least three houses on it, including two old log cabins, a couple of house trailers and an aluminum-sided farmhouse, where the 150 pounds of homegrown had been found in December. And lastly, near where the Bickett family property adjoined Raywick's city limits, behind the firehouse, sat the poker house.

The Bicketts' poker house was the latest incarnation of the nonstop high-stakes craps and stud-poker games that had sent Cadillac-driving high-rollers hitchhiking home from Raywick since the 1950s. In the Bicketts' poker house, Jimmy played seven-card stud, and Joe Keith faded at the craps table. During harvest time, growers with money bursting from their pockets couldn't find ways to spend the cash fast enough. There weren't many places where someone could spend $25,000 in one night, so during the harvest season, the poker game ran nonstop. Jimmy practically lived there because he never stopped dealing and playing poker.

To prove that claim, Haddad called a string of witnesses to the stand: the mailman, the utilities man and the Western Kentucky Gas Co. manall of whom testified that Jimmy Bickett lived in the poker house. The court dropped Jimmy from the indictment, leaving Joe Keith to stand trial a second time alone.

In January 1982, more than a year after the initial bust, a jury returned a second guilty verdict on Joe Keith, but Frank Haddad again approached the bench and asked the judge, "Guilty of what?"

The jury, Haddad argued, was supposed to find Bickett either not guilty, guilty of possession with the intent to distribute or guilty of simple possession. Because the jury did not make a clear distinction on the form, simply returning a verdict of guilty without identifying the charge, US District Judge Thomas Ballantine declared a second mistrial.

"While we do not relish the prospect of a third trial," Ballantine wrote, "this court made a mistake."

Before a third trial could commence, in early August 1982, Joe Keith Bickett pleaded guilty to possession with the intent to distribute, was fined $15,000 and sentenced to five years' probation, becoming the fifth Marion County man to plead guilty in federal court so far that year. The two mistrials had cost the government $100,000 by its own estimate, and Joe Keith Bickett walked away.

As the Bicketts fended off the federal charges against them, work in Marion County continued to produce more pot, and more pot of greater quality in order to make its value worth the actual labor involved. In this time period, the early 1980s before President Ronald Reagan really came down hard on marijuana, Marion County operated at a high level, with growing crews multiplying across the county, largely independent of one another and made up of brothers and cousins, who had learned the ropes during the previous growing season from someone's uncle or classmate. And Johnny Boone continued to engineer a superior breed of marijuana as Mr. X dropped by intermittently.

"He brought us some Russian," Johnny Boone recalled, "and it took us four years, and he kept saying, `It is the best, and it will do the best, and it won't get very tall."'

After he visited Johnny Boone, Mr. X would go see Jimmy Bickett.

"I remember he brought up that great big seed," Jimmy Bickett recalled. "And he would say, `This is what you boys ought to grow up here.' ... And that pot would get real mature."

Until 1981, the DEA office in Louisville focused on interdicting largescale smuggling operations, schemes that used planes as big as DC-3s and DC-4s, but on September 11, 1981, the state police enlisted the help of the DEA to take down a pot farm bigger than any airplane, in what would become the most valuable marijuana raid in Kentucky's historyup to that point. The location: eastern Marion County, near Bradfordsville, where Johnny Boone, Bobby Joe Shewmaker, the Bickett boys and others had pooled their resources to grow a dense, potent patch not far from where Garland Russell had grown patches since the early 1970s. But instead of growing on the riverbanks where any hunter could stumble upon its secret, the growers' co-op used backhoes and bulldozers to carve out a section of knob land that no one could see from the road or discover by accident. In this patch, the collected Marion County growers nursed a crop of perfect sinsemilla of Russian origin. With less than two weeks before the autumnal equinox, the female marijuana plants were beginning to redouble their resin-producing efforts to try to get themselves pollinated before the frost. These superplants in this patch, the growers figured, were safe from anything but a helicopter.

But instead of a helicopter, the state police used a high-performance, single-engine airplane with a V-shaped tail lent to them from DEA. The unusual tail design allowed the plane to dip below the tree line, scan a crop closely and then pull up just in time to avoid slamming into the wall of trees at the end of a field.' V-tailed airplane style, popular for a while with recreational pilots because of its maneuverability, lost its appeal once it acquired the nickname as the "Doctor-Lawyer Killer" for self-explanatory reasons.

When Johnny Boone first saw that V-tailed plane swoop over the field early that morning, he knew it was time to go. As much as Boone hated to see that V-tailed plane, he couldn't help but to stop running for a minute to watch it dive in and out of the field with aerial agility like he had never seen before, flying below the tree line and then pulling up at the last second. Boone hated to see that plane, but he respected a strong thing when he saw it, and that V-tailed plane was something else.

When the plane disappeared, the growers knew it wouldn't be long before the cavalry arrived, so they grabbed as much of the not-quitemature sinsemilla as they could load into every pickup truck on-site, and then they got the hell out of there.

When the V-tailed plane landed at the Lebanon/Springfield Airport about ten miles away, a raiding party of seven heavily armed state police narcotics agents, troopers and detectives set out on its search-and-destroy mission, double-timing it to Bradfordsville. But when the officers got there, they couldn't find any road going back to the patch. They looked for two hours. Finally they gave up and decided to go to where they knew they could find some marijuana to bust: Raywick.

Raywick was about twenty miles from Bradfordsville for the state police pot squad, but maybe only ten miles as the V-tailed plane flies. Just to the north of Raywick at 5:45 p.m., the state police found and destroyed three acres of marijuana in two different cornfields, about three thousand plants in all. A half-hour later, they discovered another three-quarters of an acre on the other side of Raywick on Hazy Downs Road. At 7:30, police found another four thousand plants on Hawk Mattingly's farm on Clell Mattingly Road. All the evening's marijuana had been spotted from the air by the V-tailed plane.

When the growers realized that the cops were making busts in Raywick, they returned to the Bradfordsville patch to grab as many pickup truckloads as they could while the state police were on the other side of the county. When word spread, anyone with a truck who wanted to make a year's salary in one day drove out to Bradfordsville. A full-scale free-pot bonanza ensued. Each truckload could be worth $30,000.

After cleaning out Raywick for three or four hours, the state police returned to Bradfordsville well after dark, where they gave up on trying to find the road themselves and started knocking on doors until just before midnight, when a compliant neighbor finally showed them the entryway to the rough-cut road, which led to the backside of the knob and six acres of Russian Bluegrass-worth at least $12 million.