The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History (30 page)

Four months later, on Saturday, May 12, seven days after Laffit Pincay Jr. rode Swale to victory in the 110th Kentucky Derby, Raywick chalked up its third murder of the year when thirty-three-year-old Terry Williams shot twenty-seven-year-old Ronnie Ellis. Both men were in the marijuana business, although the killing wasn't work-related at all; it was personal.

Ronnie Ellis had first made a name for himself in October 1981, when he and two other Marion County men were arrested in Atlantic City, New Jersey, while delivering fifty pounds of Kentucky marijuana.

"They made such a fuckup of what they did,"Johnny Boone recalled.

When the men arrived at the buyer's house, they discovered he wasn't home. Instead of waiting for him, Ellis kicked in his door, and someone called the police. Soon after, the Galloway Township Police Department arrested Ellis and his two fellow Marion County men after discovering fifty pounds of Kentucky Bluegrass in the trunk, along with two loaded handguns, brass knuckles and a few knives.

"It used to be that money was forgiven if there was a bust-a real bust ... to help you get going again on your feet because you suffered the bust and didn't rat," Boone later said. "But they didn't do it that way. They went up there fucked up on coke and bullshit pills, and they went to the man to receive the pot, and he wasn't home. I'm guessing they probably went at the wrong time. Then they broke in the goddamn house door, and the cops got called immediately. They tried to break in to put it in there!"

Each man made $200,000 bail, and none of the charges against them stuck. So, Ronnie Ellis returned home, where he married Terry Williams's sister and promptly began beating her. Finally she divorced him for her own safety, but Ellis told her he planned on killing her and her whole family.

When Terry Williams finally met Ellis face-to-face in front of the Fifth Wheel in Raywick at 7:00 p.m. on Saturday, May 12, 1984, it was time for one of them to kill the other. Ellis stepped out of his car holding a brass-knuckle knife with a ten-inch blade.

"Pills, coke, I guess he was juiced to the max," Johnny Boone later said about Ronnie Ellis. "He was going to dare Terry to kill him, I guess is what he did."

Joe Downs reached behind the bar and handed Terry Williams the gun he kept there.

"I was in the pen, and they tell me he ran at him to stab him," Boone recalled. "Big old commando knife with brass knucks on them."

When Ellis charged Williams with his knife, Williams blew him away, then handed the gun back to Downs, who surrendered it to the police when they arrested Williams two hours later.

A month later a thirty-one-year-old Raywick native killed a nineteenyear-old Raywick man riding a red Honda motorcycle. The older man intentionally hit the motorcycle with his truck, knocked the teenager rider off and shot him in the head with a .22 pistol. To hide his tracks, he cut the dirt bike up into pieces and hid them in the woods, disposing of the body somewhere else. When police found parts of the motorcycle, the older man confessed and pointed police to the body.

As sensational as that killing was, the death of Ronnie Ellis was the one that really sent shock waves through the outlaw world. Suddenly the young cowboys realized they could die just as easily as anyone else. The only thing that would make them feel secure again was to kill Terry Williams.

"Some group members, they were good boys, they could kill male [hemp plants], they chopped out weeds, they could trim, they all said, 'OK, we're going to kill Terry Williams now."' Johnny Boone remembered. "I was sitting in prison, and a man was coming to see me in prison each week, telling me this.

"I said, `Go back and tell those boys they aren't going to kill nobody without climactic consequences,"' Boone said he told his visitor. "Terry was one of our main men, and they were saying they were going to kill him. I really liked those boys, but I told him, `Enough of that shit, because a smart person asks the question, Do you want to get killed?'

"I said, `You know, I'm trying to get to the bottom of it. Who the hell wants to die around here?'

"I sent them one more message. I said, `Look, think about it. You talking about all this killing shit. You need to shut the fuck up. Go on and have yourself a life, motherfuckers. Stay home with your girlfriend and stop talking about all this shit.'

"But it upset them to see that blood come out of one of them. And they thought, `My God, somebody's killing us.' So I asked them to think about that fact.

"You know, some people talk and play about this or do that ... but the real deal is when grown men kill each other. If you kill someone, that's it; they're not going to live no more. That's a different world."

On top of the drama spurred on by these killings, another man died in the Fifth Wheel as he tried to pay his bar tab with a check.

"If this check is cold,"Joe Downs said, "I'm going to kill you."

Downs never had the chance; the man had a heart attack and dropped to the floor. Downs hopped over the bar and pulled the man up onto the bowling machine to beat on his chest.

"Is he dead?" someone asked.

"Fuck yeah, he's dead," Downs said.

When Downs turned around, he realized he had been speaking to Father Schwartz, who had arrived just in time to administer last rites.

Raywick was turning darker and more ruthless than ever before, largely because of the twin stress inducers: law enforcement and cocaine. The cocaine supercharged the already wild side of Raywick. But even with such visible and noisy offenses, state police detectives and federal agents were unable to unravel the secret and complicated world of Raywick, which they knew was the headquarters for a nationwide network of marijuana production and distribution. They had attacked the drug network on the roads and from the sky, but had they done any good?

One by one, every law enforcement branch in the state had taken a crack at Raywick: the detectives stationed at the KSP post in Columbia, undercover narcotics officers working out of headquarters in Frankfort, pilots flying at least three sorts of aircraft, the National Guard, even the DEA and FBI agents in Louisville. And still Raywick and the rest of Marion County remained open for business.

So, in January 1984, Detective Mike Moulton, commander of Kentucky State Police Special Investigations Unit, decided it was time for his squad to do the job that no other agency could do. Special Investigations, headquartered in Louisville and then consisting of seventeen detectives and two sergeants, specialized in organized crime, political corruption, white-collar crime and prostitution. It was a crack squad of investigators with experience unraveling sophisticated urban and suburban criminal syndicates but with zero experience past the city limits, where the concrete ended and the hills began. Now Detective Moulton had caught wind of these organized hillbilly outlaws and wanted their scalps on his wall.

"Why Marion County?" Steve Lowery, editor of the Lebanon Enterprise, asked Moulton in an interview six months later.

"Why Marion County?" Moulton repeated softly, smiling to himself before answering. "One reason was notoriety," he finally said. "Marion County is the prime place to grow marijuana in the state. We wanted to try to get involved with that group of people and gather information."

At the beginning of February, a new bar opened in Lebanon in a long-dormant building on the corner of Water and Depot Streets. The out-of-towners who seemed to own the bar hoisted a sign into place one day and ran an ad in the Enterprise announcing the grand opening ofTom Foolery's. When people stopped in to see the new place, they found the three strangers running it.

"Lebanon is a small community where everybody knows everybody else," Moulton said. "That made it a lot harder. When we were given an opportunity to work in the bar, we took our time getting to know people and getting accepted.... The officers sat around and listened and made friends and that's all. We were just listening. After a while, we put the word out. Slowly, of course, but we let it be known that we were interested in making some buys."

As Sunday church bells rang on April 15, one of Moulton's detectives decided to dip his toe into the Marion County underworld by buying liquor on Sunday at Votaw's Grocery in St. Mary's. At 3:40 p.m., the detective walked into Votaw's, and there were about a dozen people there, some sitting at a table, others at the game machines and some playing pool. Jimmy Votaw was working behind the counter when the detective asked to buy a Pepsi and a half-pint of whisky.

Votaw told him that the ABC had raided the grocery last week, so he had to keep the whisky across the street. Votaw went outside and returned with three bottles of Very Old Barton. He put one on the counter for the detective and tucked the others behind the scales at the deli counter. The detective paid him $3.50 and left.

Five days later the detective was ready for a bigger score. He met a small-time dealer and tried to buy a pound of marijuana from him just past midnight at the Golden Horseshoe Club for $150. Later, at 1:45 a.m., the short, overweight twenty-four-year-old with a mullet met the detective in the Jane Todd parking lot, gave him a small sack of marijuana and returned $130-turning the transaction into a misdemeanor, barely more illegal than buying liquor on a Sunday. The mullet-headed dealer told the undercover detective he could get the pound in the morning.

The next day the detective met the dealer again at the Jane Todd parking lot, where the dealer handed the detective a pound of low-grade marijuana for $150.

"I've got thirteen more pounds ready to go," the dealer said. "If you've got the money."

Five days later the dealer came into Tom Foolery's to tell the detective he had more marijuana than he could handle.

"I've got about two hundred pounds, and I'm selling it at bargain prices. I'll sell you five pounds for three hundred dollars."

The detective agreed and followed the dealer to his sister's house, where the siblings showed the detective five large garbage bags filled with marijuana in the sister's bedroom closet. As the dealer was pulling buds from the large bag into a small bag for the detective, his sister's nine-yearold daughter watched from the doorway.

"Don't worry about her," he said. "She's seen more marijuana than most grownups."

The detective gave him the money, took the marijuana and left.

"Of course, when you start buying drugs you expect the word to get around that you're a cop. That always happens when you start making buys," Moulton would later say. "But what happened in Lebanon wasn't the usual `Hey, these guys are nares!' kind of thing.

"We started getting rumors about our people being burned around the first of May. At first we weren't sure how serious it was. Then it started getting heavy. One of our men was told that if he ever showed his face in Raywick again, it would be the last time he ever showed his face anywhere. Then the threats started to get more frequent. One of the detectives who works this county got wind of threats on the lives of the officers in the operation. When you start hearing serious talk about killing police officers, it's time to consider pulling out."

And that's exactly what Moulton did in the first week of May, just days before Swale won the 110th Kentucky Derby and ten days before Terry Williams shot Ronnie Ellis. They kept Tom Foolery's open for a few weeks after the three detectives had bugged out, but then they shuttered it for good.

"It was just starting to get successful.... We were just starting to get some really good information when we had to pull out."

Information gleaned from the three months Moulton's men spent at Tom Foolery's led to the arrests of five Marion County residents-two on marijuana charges, two on cocaine charges, and Jimmy Votaw on charges of selling liquor on Sunday. Six months after the arrests, Detective Mike Moulton still wondered how his investigation had been compromised. He couldn't understand how Marion County had seen straight through Tom Foolery's.

"I don't know how we got burnt. I can't figure it out. I don't know why the whole thing went sour."