The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History (32 page)

Looking for a larger property to accommodate his growing following, Keyes saw an ad for a college campus on 150 acres in the middle of Kentucky, and he bought it in 1977, bringing with him about seventy-five staff members, workshop attendees and assorted weirdoes who raised the eyebrows of even back-to-the-land hippies like Steve and Susan Lowery of Raywick.

Keyes renamed the college the Cornucopia Institute, and the place that once educated governors and archbishops now tied students' wrists together in mixed-sex pairs, and together they would lead their lives and attend workshops for two weeks while literally bound together, each doing everything with the other-sleeping, eating and defecating.

The neighbors who remembered the finely mannered young men once schooled at St. Mary's could hardly conceive of what was happening in those classroom buildings now. Occasionally one of the Cornucopia people knocked on someone's door to ask if there was any work he or she could do and then refused payment for his or her time.

No one could quite figure them out. They were either a crazy cult or a bunch of drug-using freaks or both-but Keyes expressly forbade drug use at Cornucopia. The institute served no alcohol during its open-tothe-public events, and Keyes would later forbid his followers to engage in sex, while he pleasured one young woman after another-with his tongue, one assumes, because he was paralyzed from the neck down-in his specially designed bed.

This sort of thing continued for five years before Cornucopia shuttered in 1982, leaving the once-proud St. Mary's College empty again, leaving the next chapter of St. Mary's to be written by J. Clifford Todd.

A former epidemiologist, public health official, cattle breeder, gentleman farmer, property developer and avid long-distance runner and cyclist, Todd found himself by chance in the prison-building business, setting into motion a series of events that would turn St. Mary's College into the first private prison in America "by three years," according to Todd.

No one locally wanted the once-great St. Mary's turned into a prison. A prison was a place you went to, not a place that came to your town. Under normal circumstances, Cliff Todd would have never succeeded, but in Reagan's first term, the unemployment rate in Marion County climbed to 20 percent. A prison meant prisoners, but it also meant jobs. Any last lingering hope of the archdiocese reinvigorating the property was dashed by the news in the July 28, 1982, edition of the Enterprise that the archdiocese gave as a gift to Mother Teresa the chalice from the St. Mary's chapel.

Cliff Todd was an interesting character. Decades before coming to Marion County with the prison, he worked as an epidemiologist, testing the sex workers at Pauline Tabor's brothel in Bowling Green for sexually transmitted diseases, and according to Todd, the girls were always clean.

He found himself in the prison-building business by complete accident when in 1982 he bought at auction the old Waverly Hills Tuberculosis Hospital and Sanatorium in southern Louisville, while at the same time the state was undergoing an acute prison shortage. Strong local opposition in Louisville doomed the Waverly Hills project, but Cliff Todd kept his eye out for a property that might be suitable to refurbish into a prison.

"Then I heard that St. Mary's Seminary was for sale,"Todd later said.

To make the deal for the college at St. Mary's, Cliff Todd traveled to Coos Bay, Oregon, to meet the property's previous owner, Ken Keyes, and stayed with Keyes for four days.

"Oh, he was incredibly smart," said Cliff Todd of Keyes. "He had more intelligence than most people in his thumb, which is about all he could move below his neck.

"I took him to the doctor-apparently being paralyzed like that is bad on your kidneys. So, I took him to the doctor and helped him up onto the table. I really enjoyed talking with him. You know, he got stricken with polio the week after he got out of the Navy...

"He was so smart, I just never understood why all those beautiful young women practically threw themselves at him. He had been divorced two or three times, and when I was there, he was about to marry this other one."

When Todd returned home, he possessed a deed to 150 acres and campus buildings, but he had no guarantee that the state would grant him a contract to run a prison there.

"And I bought it without ever having a contract, without ever knowing it was going to be a prison. And then, when the residents of Marion County found out it was going to be a prison, there was going to be a hell of a fight there."

In urban Jefferson County, the county judge executive controlled the fiscal court like a CEO, but in rural Marion County, the court's magistrates, elected from the county's nine precincts, held more power. While Todd was in Texas at a conference for prison administrators, he received a phone call from a person who told him that the Marion County Fiscal Court had met that Thursday night. The courtroom had been so full of people that they had to move the meeting to a bigger courtroom. The people in attendance demanded that Todd not build a prison in Marion County, and the fiscal court agreed.

"But I couldn't give up ... so I hired lawyers," recalled Todd. Among Todd's lawyers was local-boy-made-good Jack Smith, whose effectiveness as a local boy was greatly diminished when he arrived in Lebanon driving a new Mercedes-Benz.

Despite the court's first vote, Todd and his team realized that the magistrates on the fiscal court would have to vote again on the prison.

"I think all the magistrates were sort of, in a way was, uh-not `bought,' but I don't know what word you want to use with Cliff Todd," Charlie Bickett later said, "because a lot of people were against it at first."

"We reached out to all of them [the magistrates], but some were more easy to work with than others, certainly [J. E. `Squire'] Bickett," Todd said. "Seems like all of them would be on my side one week, and then come back and say, `I can't do that. I'd be going against my people.'

"But finally we were close enough that we thought it was time to really dig our heels in and do or die. So, we rented an empty office building across from the courthouse and put an ad in the paper that we would be taking applications on the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of a certain week. It was the week that the fiscal court would be meeting on Saturday to approve or disapprove of the prison.

"So, in three days we gave out 2,800 applications for sixty-five jobs, but they could not fill them out and leave them.' They had to bring them back on Saturday morning. So, when they brought them back at 8 or 8:30, the fiscal court meeting was to convene at nine o'clock.

"I will never forget. People walked across the street and filled that courthouse. They had tobacco sticks and signs-anything that they thought would be helpful-and they chanted, in unison, with those tobacco sticks banging on the floor, `We want jobs! We want jobs! We want jobs!'

"Well, how could the magistrates sit there and look at them and not vote for the prison? And that's what got it done."

For the elected officials, the vote carried with it the consequences of any divisive public issue.

"Of course, that's why Judge Donahue got beat; that's why Daddy got beat; that's why Caldwell got beat," Charlie Bickett recalled. "Because of that prison because they all voted for it. After the election it was in the paper, `Courthouse cleaned.'... Cliff was a good man, but he wasn't too liked in Marion County because of that. You know, an outsider come in and put up a prison."

"I was driving out to the facility one day," Cliff Todd recalled, giving an example of the local hostility toward him. "And there was a dairy farm before you get to St. Mary's. And a cow had had a calf, and the creek was up because it had just rained. Well, I was sure that that calf was surely going to try to get up and fall into the creek.

"So, I stopped and knocked on the dairyman's door, and I said, `You have a cow over here with a calf, and I'm afraid it's going to jump in that creek.'

"`I know who you are, and we don't like your kind around here,' and that's all he said.

Yet, despite the difficult dealings with the locals, Cliff Todd wasn't ignorant of the ways of Marion County. Todd was born in 1928, and his father brought him on several occasions in their Model T Ford to Marion County in search of moonshine, which they bought by the gallon. And along his eccentric career path, Todd met a few people with connections to Marion County in other ways.

"Cliff was just a good man, had plenty of money and the foresight to see about private prisons," Charlie Bickett recalled. "Johnny Boone and him had previous-uh-relations, as far as under the table and all that."

The prison developer and former prisoner had done business in the past through their mutual interest in cattle breeding.

"I came upon a breed that people were trying to import from Europe," Cliff Todd said, "Maine-Anjou from the area of Maine-Anjou, France. But you can't import cattle, so we brought in the semen through Canada [mislabeled as a domestic breed].

"So, we bred our cows-first we'd have half-breeds, the next generation three-quarters, and so on until eventually you have a purebred. And that's where I met Johnny Boone.

"Johnny Boone and I were directors of the Maine-Anjou Association, and we met usually once a month somewhere, in Louisville or wherever. He built up quite a herd.... We got into this in about 1969.

"We were very friendly then, socially friendly, but along the way another breed was brought into the United States-Chianina-and that's an Italian cow. And they are wild; they're crazy! They would run like a quarter horse. When they turn, they would go with both front hoofs at once.

"Anyway, I went to South Dakota and bought seventy-five heifer calfs that were still nursing their mommas, but they were to be delivered in November at no less than 350 pounds.

"Well, the man I bought them from delivered them, but he-we knew he was in Kentucky by noon, but he didn't deliver the cows until it was after dark. The next morning, I could tell that quite a few of them were very much underweight. So, I pulled out seventeen of the seventy-five and weighed them, and they were like 225 pounds. So, I stopped payment on his check.

"He didn't want to give me a refund or take them back. He didn't want to do anything. I later found out that he hired Johnny Boone to rustle those cows. They were on a farm where no one was living at the time.

"Johnny Boone, with a crew, came in-and we never could understand how you could do it-and rounded up those seventy-five wild-ass heifers, got them on trucks in trailers and took them to Washington County.

"But some people saw these-they didn't know they were my cattle-but they saw cows drove through Finchville that looked like they were sardines. Some of their heads were on top like they were walking on one another.

"Anyway, that night-I felt like Johnny Boone had done it, and he had several farms. Between twelve midnight and four a.m., I was visiting every farm he was known to have been and didn't find them.

"Finally, on Saturday, I was in Springfield, and somebody told me to go to the stockyards. Well, there were my heifers with padlocks on the gates.

"Well, I thought: `OK, no big deal. I'll go have Johnny Boone arrested.'

"So, I go to the sheriff's office.

"The sheriff looked at me, and he said: `Mr. Todd, I could give you a warrant, but do you see that burned lot over there?' He was pointing out of the window of his office. `That used to be a big tobacco warehouse, but Johnny Boone had a disagreement with the owner of that, and it burned down.' He said: `I would advise you to get you a truck and take your cattle home, and I'll cut the locks for you.'

"So, that's what I did. I ended up hiring the same guy that Johnny used to take them, at my expense, of course.

"But later on, a few years later, Johnny and I became definitely speaking friends and talking. Bygones were bygones."

Yet, the people of Marion County had a much more difficult time letting go of their animosity toward Cliff Todd and his prison. Little did they realize that had they been successful in stopping Todd's plans, St. Mary's could have become something its Catholic founders would have deemed far worse.

"As the deed was given to me, and all papers were signed, the attorney handling the closing on the deal told me," Cliff Todd recalled.

"He said, `Mr. Todd, I've been authorized to offer you a profit of $100,000 on the facility if you will close within thirty days.'

"Well, that was hard to say `no' to because I had nothing really. I was hopeful of getting a contract, but it was a long way off-but I gritted my teeth, and said, `no.'

"I found out later that the interested buyer was a Baptist organization out of Texas."

Luckily, it never came to that, and Cliff Todd brought only prisoners to Marion County and not Texas Baptists. With the plan for the prison approved, Todd focused on honoring his commitment to fill his job openings with locals looking for work.

"I promised to give jobs, and I promised to give jobs only to Marion County people,"Todd said, "with the exception of three or four top people like my warden, and I stuck to that.