The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History (28 page)

While Johnny Boone was disappearing from Kentucky for weeks at a time to deal with his organization in Belize, Jimmy Bickett focused on growing locally. Because he knew the police would be watching him in Raywick and flying over Marion County, Bickett planted one of his fields at the top of Muldraugh's Hill in Mannsville, a tiny farming community built on the edge of the escarpment's ridge.

In April 1981, the year before Boone's Belize bust, Jimmy went back out to Mannsville with someone in the Brady family to check on their crop, budding on the backside of a dairy farm. It had just come a good rain, so it was a good time to side-dress the young plants. As they walked into the barn, Bickett saw two dead crows lying next to the bags of fertilizer they were about to use. A bad omen, he thought.

Bickett and Brady went ahead and poured the high-nitrogen fertilizer into the dispenser hooked to the side of a tractor. By side-dressing the plants at this early stage, Bickett would ensure healthier plants, fewer pests and higher yields.

Out in the field, Brady drove the tractor slowly down the rows of plants, applying the fertilizer in the balk between the rows of plants, careful not to let the fertilizer burn the plants' water leaves. As the tractor rolled, Brady twisted his body so he could look down and behind him to make sure he laid the fertilizer straight without touching the plants.

When he finished laying a row of fertilizer, Brady looked up to stretch his neck and saw a police cruiser's bubblegum blue light flashing as it bounced over a rough farm road behind a patch of young corn. Brady cut the tractor's engine, hopped out of the cab and signaled to Jimmy Bickett to run. Then Brady disappeared on foot through the trees.

Jimmy Bickett ran to his truck, which he had parked near the back of the pot patch, and drove over a hill. He didn't think he could escape the sheriff, so he drove around on the farm until he thought of something to say: He was looking for Hondo, the dairy farmer's son.

The sheriff drove toward him, and Bickett pulled up alongside with his window down.

"Where you going?" asked the sheriff, a real big guy.

"Not going nowhere," Bickett told him casually.

"I saw you coming out of that pot patch back there."

"What pot patch? I'm looking for Hondo. I'm wanting to buy his mud bike."

"Why don't you go on and get out of that truck," the sheriff said as he put his cruiser into park. "You're under arrest."

The sheriff locked Jimmy Bickett up in the Taylor County jail, and Bickett hired Elmer George, who had rapidly gained the reputation as the local marijuana growers' first choice of defense attorneys. At the trial, George put Hondo, the farmer's son, on the stand to testify that he did indeed have a mud bike for sale. Then George stood at the blackboard and drew the farm for the jury to show the jurors how the land lay and to show the routes of Bickett's truck and the sheriff's cruiser and where the two met.

Elmer George's courtroom performance created reasonable doubt in the Taylor County jury thanks to Jimmy Bickett's quick thinking at the time of his arrest, which made it appear that he wasn't trying to escape. Bickett walked away a free man, and Elmer George was pretty proud of himself for pulling it off. It would be a case George would brag about for years to come-a calling card for potential clients as to his prowess in certain arenas of criminal defense law.

Less than six months later Jimmy Bickett found himself in trouble in Taylor County once again. He had driven a girl to Louisville in a retired police cruiser, and the two ended up partying at the Toy Tiger, one of Louisville's best nightclubs in its heyday. With his sort of supplies, Jimmy Bickett could have partied for several days straight, but the girl wanted to go home around midnight. So, with a pound of marijuana in the former police car's trunk, an ounce of cocaine in the glove compartment and a box of one-gram glass bottles he had picked up in Louisville to facilitate his retail cocaine business, Jimmy Bickett pointed the cruiser south and slammed on the gas. If she wanted to get home fast, he would show her how fast they could go.

She held onto her door handle as the old cruiser ripped over the dark highways, getting her to Campbellsville in record time. As police Patrolman Clifton Price headed back toward Lebanon, he noticed the former cop car swerving and speeding on its way out of town. So, Patrolman Price switched on his blue lights and pulled over Jimmy Bickett at 3:15 a.m. Before Bickett stepped out of the car, he tossed the ounce of cocaine under the driver's seat.

Price locked up Bickett for drunk driving and possession of marijuana. As Bickett sat in the Taylor County jail sobering up, he figured he had gotten away with his biggest worry, the bag under the driver's seat. But during a second search of the car, Price found the ounce, the largest quantity of cocaine he'd ever seen. With Bickett locked up in the drunk tank, Price drove a sample of the cocaine to the state lab in Frankfort to have it tested. When the desk deputy released Bickett after sunrise, Price arrested him again for possession of cocaine and tossed him back into the Taylor County jail.

Prohibition ended in most of America in 1933, but it never ended in Taylor County. Many in the congregations of its twenty Baptist churches devoted their Sundays to their ministers' preaching of fiery sermons on a narrow range of topics, mostly the evils of sex, Catholicism, liquor and Communism.

The drinking Catholics of neighboring Marion County represented to these Taylor County Baptists the worst of sinful humanity. Just as Marion County typified the wets in the fight over the freedom to drink, Taylor County epitomized the drys. It was so dry in Taylor County that when one turned on the water faucet, crackers came out.

For a decade by then, Taylor County had been fighting the new menace of marijuana, and just as with liquor before it, Marion County was this new evil's source. Some worried that it would be only a matter of time before cocaine hit the streets of Campbellsville, and Price's diligent police work proved them right.

Jimmy Bickett, for his whole life until that moment, had danced on top of the justice system. He had walked away from a federal indictment with Frank Haddad's poker house defense, and Elmer George had sprung him of the Mannsville marijuana cultivation charges by convincing a Taylor County jury that he had been on the farm in question because he had been looking to buy Hondo's mud bike. Now he faced the same judge just a few months later with the first cocaine charge Taylor County had ever seen.

It didn't look good for Jimmy Bickett.

Before Bickett's arraignment, a friend introduced Bickett to Pete Gurton, a black bootlegger from Taylor County. Gurton had strong roots in Marion County because that's where he bought his liquor and a certain amount of pull in Taylor County-as any bootlegger has in any dry county. Gurton liked helping out folks from Marion County whenever he could, but Bickett's case seemed tricky, especially because he just walked away from that earlier marijuana charge. People in the community wanted to see Bickett go to jail.

"The best I can do for you," Gurton told Bickett, "is thirty days, shock probated."(Shock probation is the practice of granting a first-time offender early release after the initial "shock" of the prison system.)

Bickett thanked the bootlegger and went to see his lawyer, Elmer George.

"I've got you a good deal worked out," George told Bickett. "Thirty days, shock probated."

When Bickett went before the court, the judge asked him for his plea.

"Guilty, Your Honor" Bickett said.

"When can you go in?" the judge asked.

"Let's go right now," and the bailiff took Jimmy Bickett away.

The state sent Jimmy Bickett to the prison camp at Eddyville. While sitting on his prison bunk one evening in March 1982, Jimmy Bickett glanced up at the television during the local news and saw FBI agents leading a bearded, handcuffed man into the Louisville courthouse. Bickett jumped up.

"Hey," he said, pointing at the television. "I know that guy right there. That's Johnny Boone!"

Sitting in his federal prison cell at the LaGrange Reformatory after the federal court had sentenced him to five years, Johnny Boone kept telling himself he should have never left Belize. He could have set up a nice life down there, living like a Mennonite farmer in a tropical paradise among the Maya ruins. Instead, he would lift weights, read books and stare at the walls for the next few years while his son Jeffrey continued to tend the Russian pot, working to get it crossbred just right for Kentucky.

"I had to go to jail, and my son kept working with it,"Johnny Boone recalled, "and the fourth year we just put seed out everywhere-we'd already smoked what little bit lived the first year we tried it, and it was the killer of killer. So, we kept after it, trying to get it to go. Finally we did."

IN THE SUMMER OF 1983, AS JOHNNY BOONE SAT IN THE LAGRANGE Reformatory doing time for his Belize conviction, Marion County marijuana growers worried about the ratcheted-up war on pot that risked sending them to join Boone in federal prison. But in 1983, pot growers, along with farmers of more-legal crops, faced a far more ancient enemy than the state police and DEA: drought.

The growing season of 1983 began with a wetter-than-usual spring that nearly washed out the Kentucky Derby, leaving Sunny's Halo galloping first past the muddy finish line during a "thunderstorm that had frightened off a third of the humans in the infield," according to New York Times sports columnist George Vecsey. That Derby Day drenching would be the last raindrops the Bluegrass State would see nearly all summer.

By the end of July, so little rain had fallen in central Kentucky that farmers had long stopped hoping for one good rain to solve their problems. Corn farmers had already lost 10 percent of their crops, and for every day it didn't rain, Marion County farmers lost a bushel out of every acre of the fifteen thousand acres of corn grown in the county. In the end, more than 50 percent of the corn would be lost, along with 15 percent of the soybeans.

Pastures were so burnt that there was no clover or grass for cattle to eat, forcing farmers to feed them the hay they had been storing for the winter. Of the county's seventy thousand acres of pastureland, 50 percent of it was dead. In the blistering heat, the cattle had stopped eating anyway, forcing farmers to sell more than six hundred head of livestock to slaughter by August.

Lebanon's railroad tracks, long since abandoned by the regular train traffic that had given Lebanon its early vitality, had one last use. To combat the drought, trains rolled into town loaded with hay from ranchers out West, who were returning the favor of Kentucky farmers sending them hay during bad western winters. Like a scene from a half-century before, farmers lined Water Street in downtown Lebanon with their flatbed trailers to load as much hay as they could for their starving herds. Families brought their children to watch.

The tobacco crops, more easily irrigated than cornfields because the plots are smaller, still returned the lowest yields in decades. All across the middle of America, stretching north to Indiana and west to Missouri, states began asking for federal relief because of the worst drought in fifty years.