The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History (27 page)

It would be months still before agents decided it was time to arrest Shewmaker; they had five years on the statute of limitations, and they planned on using every day of it. Meanwhile, a separate police agency in a different city began investigating a seemingly unrelated case.

Detective Bud Farmer, the lead narcotics officer for the Louisville/ Jefferson County Police Department, learned from a source at Bowman Field that someone from the county attorney's office had contracted a pilot to fly in a load of marijuana from Central America. Under ordinary circumstances, Farmer knew he should report this case to the federal, state and local drug enforcement task force run by the DEA, on which Farmer once served. But by this time, he suspected that the task force's leader, DEA agent Harold Brown, was a dirty cop. Farmer didn't trust anyone from that agency, even after Brown's hasty resignation.

With Farmer's narcotics squad and the DEA office in Louisville on less than the best of terms, and with this airplane load of marijuana due to Bowman Field, Farmer asked the FBI instead of the DEA for assistance. Although this was against standard procedure, Farmer concluded it was his only choice. If he told the DEA, Farmer figured, they might tip off the smugglers as Harold Brown had done so many times in the past.

So, Detective Farmer met with the pilot of the Piper Aztec before it lifted off for Belize. The police would be waiting for the plane when it returned, Farmer explained, and the pilot agreed to go along with the plan so that the police could catch their suspects in the act of drug trafficking.

The idea to fly directly from Belize into Kentucky was born out of the desire to eliminate interstate ground transportation. One of Johnny Boone's associates, the full-blooded Apache named Jim Below, had a wife who worked as a secretary in the county attorney's office in Louisville. One of her bosses, Below explained, flew planes at Bowman Field in Louisville; and this boss, Assistant County Attorney Donald Erler, hired the pilot who eventually revealed the operation to Detective Farmer.

The first run of this new transportation route happened when the turncoat pilot took off in a red-white-and-blue, twin-engine Piper Aztec. After the plan was in motion, Jim Below hopped a commercial flight to Belize on March 1, 1982, to meet the Aztec pilot there. As soon as Below's flight departed Staniford Field, Louisville's commercial airport, the surveillance team shifted into high gear at Bowman Field, the city's smaller airfield.

On Friday, March 5, US Customs alerted Jefferson County police that their red-white-and-blue Piper Aztec had entered US airspace and would arrive in Louisville that night. Two detectives parked at Bowman Field at 8:00 p.m. in an unmarked van equipped with night-vision telescopes. Another eighteen agents and detectives, including Bud Farmer and his partner James Black, took positions in seven undercover vehicles around the airport's perimeter: on Taylorsville Road, on Dutchmans Lane and on the Watterson Expressway.

At 10:00 p.m., two vehicles arrived, a 1981 Oldsmobile and a 1981 Ford 4x4 pickup, both driven by bearded men. The surveillance team had yet to identify the drivers: Johnny Boone, thirty-nine, and his friend from Washington County, Kenny Lanham, thirty-five. The detectives watched as Boone, in the pickup, circled the airport parking lot to check for any activity; he didn't see the policemen waiting for him. As Boone kept guard in the truck, Lanham entered a hangar to check it out. Then, as the policemen had been doing for two hours by then, Boone and Lanham parked their vehicles and waited in the cold March night for the Piper Aztec to arrive.

"I sat in the motherfucking hangar, and the weather was colder than fuck,"Johnny Boone later said. "And I'm waiting for that fucking airplane to come, and that son of a bitch is late. I've been sitting in that motherfucker for about five hours. I wouldn't let nobody else sit in there with me because if something goes wrong I didn't want nobody else caught."

The plane should have landed by 2:00 a.m., but by 3:00, as snow flurries circled the tarmac, it hadn't yet arrived.

"But they were close," Boone recalled, "you know?" Every time Boone felt frozen enough to leave, he would tell himself, "He'll get here. He'll be here."

At 3:30, Boone and the waiting detectives heard the sound of an approaching plane, and the shabby red-white-and-blue Piper Aztec landed, carrying 550 pounds of high-quality Belizean sinsemilla worth more than a half-million dollars if Boone could sell it for $1,000 per pound. The Aztec, stripped of its six passenger seats so it could carry its load, taxied into hangar 11, where Boone and Lanham loaded the twentyfive neatly packed cardboard boxes and five plastic containers into Boone's pickup and Lanham's Oldsmobile.

Boone and Lanham drove out of Bowman Field in a two-vehicle convoy onto Taylorsville Road, passing Air Devils Inn (a rowdy motorcycle bar) at its only quiet hour en route to the Watterson Expressway. As they left, the investigating team-formed of Jefferson County narcotics, Kentucky State Police and FBI agents-prepared for the takedown. The detectives waited to see if the departing car and truck would rendezvous with anyone else as they trailed them with two helicopters and a fleet of squad cars and unmarked sedans. As the 4x4 Ford led the Oldsmobile onto Interstate 65, then exited at the Bardstown ramp onto Bernheim Forest Road, the police realized that Boone and Lanham wouldn't be meeting any co-conspirators. As the two-vehicle convoy passed the Jim Beam distillery, the police radio started squawking.

"If you let them get into Washington County,"one state trooper advised Captain James Black, "you may lose them both if they escape on foot."

"If you let them get into Marion County," another said, "you might lose them, the drugs and everything."

So, Captain Black made the decision to arrest the Washington County men while still in Nelson County, and the helicopters-filled with SWAT team officers-moved into forward positions at the point of the takedown: Rooster Run.

"Done all that shit, and got out there to Rooster Run and here come that fucking SWAT team in them helicopters," Boone remembered.

Rooster Run wasn't the name of a town; it didn't have a post office or an intersection. The road wasn't even wider at Rooster Run. The name of the stretch of otherwise-lonely highway came from the only business for miles in any direction, a general store and gas station with a catchy, colorful name that gained popularity with its logo on ball caps and T-shirts and with Johnny Carson's occasional use of Rooster Run as a punchline. By 1982, to cement its own popularity, the Rooster Run General Store acquired a twenty-foot rooster on wheels, a blue bib around its neck, and permanently perched the bird on the roadside in front of the gas pumps. There, in front of the twenty-foot rooster, a state police cruiser turned on its blue lights behind Kenny Lanham's Oldsmobile, and two helicopters dropped out of the sky, their massive floodlights stopping Johnny Boone's truck on a dime.

"Son of a bitch had a light on it as big as this table here," Boone recalled.

Lanham tried to cut a U-turn and escape back toward Interstate 65, but an unmarked sedan blocked his path. By the time the Oldsmobile stopped, SWAT team officers had surrounded both vehicles, their weapons trained at the drivers' heads.

I don't know what this is, Johnny Boone thought to himself as the paramilitary agents closed in with automatic weapons aimed at him, but it's not what 1 planned on.

An arresting officer looked into the bed of Boone's truck at the neatly stacked cardboard boxes.

"How much you got in there?"

"How much what?" Boone said as the policeman handcuffed him.

"Pot in them boxes."

"News to me, motherfucker. Open one of them up."

Bud Farmer, James Black, and the Jefferson County narcotics squad had been following Jim Below the Apache for nearly a year, tracking down his associates in Denver, Detroit and Canada. The two narcotics detectives also knew that Below's wife, Constance, and her boss, Assistant County Attorney Donald Erler, were involved in this operation. Because of the Belize conspiracy's intimate connection to the Louisville courthouse, Farmer and Black thought it might involve other, more prominent members of the Louisville/Jefferson County legal establishment.

As Louisville police processed Johnny Boone, Lanham, Erler and the Belows at the downtown courthouse, Bud Farmer talked to a reporter for the Louisville Times, telling her that his investigation continued to track down leads in Cincinnati, Detroit and Colorado.

"We hope to get the connection in Central America, too, if we can," Farmer told the reporter.

While Farmer talked to the press, another member of his narcotics unit worked to determine if they could identify the typewriter used to type some of the documents found inside the Piper Aztec. Inside the courthouse after hours, investigators typed out sample documents on typewriters in various offices, using each office's letterhead for each example.' They checked the typewriters in the offices of the county attorney, the chief of police and the county judge/executive. On each sheet of letterhead, the detective typed the same sentence repeatedly:

A few hours later, inside an interrogation room at the Jefferson County jail, Bud Farmer pressed Johnny Boone over and over about his Central American associates, trying along the way to get something from Boone that would implicate someone in the Jefferson County courthouse. To Boone, this was funny; not only was he not going to tell Bud Farmer anything, but Farmer was barking up the wrong tree anyway.

"Y'all have been reading comic books again," Boone told Farmer. "You've been on the job too long."

Farmer eventually hung it up with Boone. He knew they weren't going to get anything out of the Sphinxlike outlaw. They were more confused after interrogating him than before they had started.

Yet, despite the dead end they encountered with Johnny Boone, Detectives Farmer and Black thought that they could still unravel the "large international conspiracy to import marijuana into Kentucky" with the help of the FBI. Wrong again. Like before, the Jefferson County narcotics unit ran into a conflict with federal law enforcement-this time with FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., who didn't like how Bud Farmer had conducted his investigation.

In an FBI airtel message from the FBI director's office to the special agent in charge of Louisville, dated March 10, 1982, four days after Johnny Boone and his associates were busted, an FBI supervisor ripped into the investigation, saying Bud Farmer's narcotics unit had displayed "an absence of candor" and that Farmer should have sought FBI or DEA assistance "well in advance."

"Instead, they developed the investigation based on a `buy-bust' scenario and sought the FBI's assistance only in the very final stages of the contrary to the investigative methodology subscribed to by the FBI for narcotics matters. [Therefore,] Louisville will conduct no further active investigation of this matter."

In response, the Louisville FBI office sent an airtel message to the director's office the next day, March 11, in a sharp rebuke of FBI headquarters' micromanagement:

"To clarify ... FBI Headquarters supervisor is not in a position to evaluate the candor of the Jefferson County Police Department.... The investigation by the FBI in this case is in the spirit of the law enforcement coordinating committee (LECC) mandated by the attorney general.... This is the primary function of the FBI and why we exist.... Therefore, investigation continuing."

Later that same day, FBI headquarters responded to Louisville. Although the headquarters had lost its primary argument against the FBI's continuing assistance of Bud Farmer's investigation into Johnny Boone's associates, the FBI supervisor chose to chastise Louisville for its classification of the type of criminal organization to which Johnny Boone belonged. Classification group 245-A would have designated the involvement of La Cosa Nostra (abbreviated "LCN" on FBI forms), the Italian mafia.Therefore, Louisville assigned Boone's organization the classification of 245-B, but the supervisor at D.C. headquarters took issue with this determination, saying the B group should be used to classify "major non-traditional organized crime groups such as outlaw motorcycle gangs, prison gangs, or ethnic/regional groups such as Israeli mafia, black gangster disciples, Yakuza [Japanese mafia] or Tong [Chinese mafia]." As of 1982, the FBI had no classification for what would later be called the Cornbread Mafia.

"You are requested to review this matter," the supervisor from headquarters wrote, "and if not primarily an investigation of one of the above crime groups, FBIHQshould be notified of proper alpha character, i.e., `D' for major international narcotics trafficking groups."