The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History (25 page)

In the course of his investigation, Smith captured the local crime boss's moneyman, who agreed to become an informant for Smith's task force. Smith sent the informant to the home of Jim Garrison with a briefcase full of payoff money, a payment that Garrison was expecting. The FBI coated the cash with a fine powder visible only to ultraviolet light. The next day Smith's men arrested Garrison and tested his hands, catching him ultraviolet-handed.

Yet, despite the overwhelming evidence of his corruption, a New Orleans jury found Jim Garrison not guilty. When he walked out of the courtroom a free man, a crowd of three hundred gathered to greet him.

"They don't tolerate public corruption in New Orleans," Smith was fond of saying in later years, "they demand it."

After that, Smith planned on continuing his career as a strike force prosecutor.

"The Department of Justice called," Smith remembered, "and they wanted me to go to Cleveland to start up one of those strike forces. Well, you'll remember that was the year that the Cuyahoga River caught on fire. In my mind, Cleveland was a shithole. So the process then was, you could turn down the first one but if you wanted to stay in the strike force in the Justice Department, you had to take the second one, and the opening was in New York, and I was not going to go up there, and I was not going to raise my son up there, so I came back to Louisville ... in January'72."

Three years later Senator Walter Huddleston hired Smith to come to Washington, D.C., to work as counsel on the US Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, commonly referred to as the Church Committee, named after its chairman, Senator Frank Church of Idaho, who led the investigation into allegations of the CIA violating its own charter.

"Serving on the committee," Smith recalled, "reading a lot of reports and being at the hearings and everything-I think everybody has a thought in their mind that American intelligence officials that they're all wonderful people and wear a white hat and abide by the law. I think my experience taught me that the first responsibility of any law enforcement agent is not to enforce the law, it is for they themselves to obey the law...

"A person's experiences teach you a lot that you can make an assumption on.... You know, you are always surprised when you hear about drugs, or, weapons for hostages, and you hear that and your first reaction, perhaps, is to disbelieve it, but over the years it's been proven so many times that it's true....

"I told you the story of when I was in Washington, I got a call from a lawyer, and he wanted to talk to some people from the [Church] committee staff, and his client was [also] a lawyer, so they were trying to layer it, I guess, to protect ...

"But anyway, the deal was, it was a retired CIA agent-and I think I told you this story-about [William] Harvey going into the White House to see Kennedy and how Kennedy was enamored with James Bond and somebody told Kennedy, `[Harvey] is the American James Bond,' and what he did in Cuba and so forth.

"They gave a big going-away party because Harvey's friends thought the Kennedy brothers had really mistreated Harvey [for sending him to Rome after Bay of Pigs].... A terrible meeting ... and one of the-I don't know whether he was a CIA agent at the time or a former CIA agent-he kinda quoted Macbeth and ended up saying, `The blood of the Kennedy brothers will flow in the streets of America for what they've done,' and in less than a year, John Kennedy was assassinated, and then, a couple of years later, of course, Bobby was, too....

"I realized that there were people who I thought were white hat people that were really black hat people."

Following his experience on the Church Committee, Smith returned to Kentucky and became US attorney in Louisville for a second time, appointed toward the end of the Carter administration. That's when he ran into DEA Agent Harold Brown.

"I guess that I would have been naive to think that a DEA agent could be involved in something illegal, because when I was United States attorney I put a heap of stock in those people," Smith said. "I think by and large they are really good people, but I guess you learn that there's a bad apple just about anywhere....

"When I came into the office in 1979, the office was just overwhelmed .... So, I told the assistants that I would help any of them prepare for trial if they had any problems. So we could go on and get our cases tried, so this female assistant came to me and said here's our file, we're going to go to trial next week.

"And I said, `OK, where are your 302s from the agent?"'

A "302" was Justice Department-speak for an agent's report. The female prosecutor told Smith that the agent on the case, DEA Agent Harold Brown, "didn't do 302s."

"What?" Smith asked, surprised.

To Smith, a 302 was a basic necessity of any case. So, he picked up his phone to call Brown, but his prosecutor stopped him.

"Please don't call him," she said. "He scares me."

"Scares you?"

"He hit me," she said.

"What!?" Smith couldn't believe it.

Smith never followed up on the allegation that Harold Brown smacked around the female assistant US attorney. Instead, he went to every agency head to remind them of the importance of drafting 302s for his prosecutors:

"Listen, Secret Service man ... Listen, FBI man ... Listen, DEA agent, this is important..."

When Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in November 1980, Jack Smith's days as US attorney were numbered. In 1981, the same year Harold Brown resigned in disgrace from the DEA, Smith stepped down when a Republican was appointed to his post. Yet, there for a period of time, Smith was in a position to evaluate the sorts of accusations that would follow Harold Brown to the grave. So, did Jack Smith think the drug-trafficking allegations against Brown and Thornton were credible?

"Well, of course, I don't know for sure," he later said. "I don't have any facts to back that up, but that's not what you asked. You asked if it was credible, and yeah, I'd say it's credible."

NEXT STOP: BELIZE.

"I went down there in seventy the first time I went," Johnny Boone said later, referring to his maiden voyage to the only English-speaking country in mainland Latin America, tucked under Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula and just north of Guatemala. "I should have moved there, is what I should have done, but I didn't."

So, Johnny Boone went to the tropics in 1970; that's a year before the state police killed Charlie Stiles. It wouldn't be until 1973 that the name of the country would officially change to Belize from British Honduras.

"Anybody want to go there, work, take a chance and send shit up here could have been a millionaire in a short time. Twenty-five, thirty dollars a pound. Fifty would buy you the very goddamn best. I mean them son of a bitches knew it had to be the best, had to be sinsemilla for fifty dollars a pound."

Boone didn't go there alone, but the full extent of his friendly Belize network will never be known. His partners selected him for his role in the operation because they knew he kept his secrets.

"I can't tell you a lot about down there,"Johnny Boone said, "because there were a couple of guys who were protected and hidden."

What about his first trip to Miami?

"I guess I ain't decided to talk about all that," Boone said.

Despite his hesitance to discuss the topic years later, one could learn from Johnny Boone that he and his silent partners discovered they could buy all the land in Belize they wanted for $10 an acre in 1970. A British tomato company vacating the country left behind whole swaths of farmland that the jungle was quickly overtaking.

"Buy all you want," Boone said. "They was begging some son of a bitch to take it because it wasn't doing nothing but sitting out in the bushes."

Only constant work could keep a piece of land there out of the jungle's grip, as Boone and his partners learned watching an unlikely group of indigenous farmers: the Mennonites. Decades earlier the blond Germanic sect had come to the Yucatan paradise with their antiquated buggies and Dutch wardrobes and turned untended jungle into productive farmland. To have come thousands of miles from Kentucky to Belize and find something as familiar as bearded Mennonite farmers surprised Boone, made him feel at home.

Boone watched the Mennonites work with tractors and earth-moving equipment and let them get used to seeing him around. He finally asked where they bought their heavy machinery. America, a Mennonite told him, and they had to pay for each item three times: once at the dealership, then at the port in New Orleans for export duties and a third time in tariffs when the item arrived in Belize. So, when Boone and his partners needed similar equipment, they followed the Mennonites' example: buying tractors in Kentucky, shipping them from New Orleans and, finally, seeing their tractors and heavy equipment arrive, at a steep cost, in the port at Belize City.

When establishing roots in their new environment, Boone and his partners met with a banker, a white-haired American expatriate, living a comfortable retired life as a money manager in paradise. One of Boone's partners asked the banker directly how he felt about drugs and the escalating American war against them. In response, the man reached out and grabbed a pitcher of water that had been sitting on a table between himself and Boone's associates. He tipped the pitcher and filled a glass half-full with water.' hen he filled a second glass half-full with water. He set the pitcher down, picked up the second glass and poured it into the first, so that the water filled the glass to the rim.' he lifted the pitcher a second time and filled the now-empty glass half-full of water again.

"Now I may hate this water," the banker said. "But here comes more of it."

As Johnny Boone watched, the banker took the half-full glass and poured it into the already-full glass, causing water to spill across the table.

"No matter how hard I try to stop this water, there will always be more. You see out there?" The banker pointed out his window, which offered a long view deep into the jungle. "The Indians out there run naked until they are ten or eleven years old. They don't have anything except what they can grow, and they will grow it. And if it gets caught, they'll grow more and send that, too."

Soon Johnny Boone and his partners had a marijuana plantation running in Belize with the help of a local assortment of English-speaking black Creoles, Maya natives and Caucasian expatriates.

Cannabis was not a native species to Belize; it did not grow there when the ancient Maya built their temples scattered across the region's low-lying landscape. The Spanish and Portuguese first brought the little, round seeds to the New World in the sixteenth century to grow hemp for their navies and hemp's sister for smoking.

Four hundred years later, deep upstream on the Belize River, one of Johnny Boone's partners, a full-blooded Apache named Jim Below, found Maya tribesmen nurturing sativa marijuana strains that had grown in the Yucatan jungle for centuries by then. It was seeds from these fragrant, potent strains that Boone and his partners sowed on the old Belize tomato plantation for export back to Kentucky. In the days before the huge cocaine epidemic, and before serious government efforts to prevent smuggling, small planes leaving Belize for America could fly into Florida low and unnoticed, as long as all the planning had been worked out neatly beforehand.

To work out those logistics, Johnny Boone traveled much of the southern Florida coastline, looking for good landing strips for his in-bound planes. A proper landing place was essential-it had to be remote so it wouldn't attract attention but still close enough to a highway for an easy exit. It couldn't be in a dead-end or a cul-de-sac-that would be flying into a trap if the cops were there waiting. Boone inspected one runway that looked ideal-until he looked out into the water and saw two small planes floating belly-up in the bay. A nasty crosswind? Something else bad about the place? It wouldn't do.

The logistics eventually worked themselves out (with plenty of legwork), and soon Johnny Boone and his partners were flying small planeloads of high-quality Belizean pot into Florida and then transporting it by land back home to Kentucky.