The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History (33 page)

"So, we employed Marion County people, and we paid more than the regular minimum wage. And some of the businesses were fighting us, I found out later, because they thought we were lifting the wage scale.

"One man came up to me and asked for a job. He told me his name, and his last name was Tabor.

"I asked him: Are you related to Pauline Tabor?'

"He said: `She's my aunt.'

"I said: `You're hired.'...

"J. E. Bickett wanted his son [Charlie] to have a job. Well, without a doubt, his son was going to get a job. J. E. was a big help, not just as a magistrate, but in many ways. He was a generous man and helpful in any way he could be. If we needed a tractor, he helped with that. If we needed vehicles, he helped us get them, and I'm sure he made some money on it, too, but who cares?

"For some reason, I became a friend with Charlie Bickett more than any other officer I had. He seemed like a genuine person."

"I was on drugs bad then," Charlie Bickett recalled regarding his life before starting work at the prison. "I was on cocaine, and my marriage was shaky. I knew I had to get out of that bar. I seen two or three people get killed in that bar. Quack Livers shot hisself there ... and Ronnie Ellis got shot right below me there. I found a guy hung himself, me and Joe Downs found him dead. Billy Downs, Jack Lamkin shot him.... Then I seen a couple of shootouts."

Although the killings of Ronnie Ellis and Billy Downs had been shocking and perhaps avoidable, the suicide of Quack Livers had been far less surprising because Quack made a habit of punctuating his point of view with a game of Russian roulette. He would say things like, "I don't care what anybody thinks. If anybody tries to stop me, I'll shoot 'em just like this," and then he would pull his revolver, spin the cylinder, put it to his head and pull the trigger. Every time, the hammer hit an empty chamber, and the gun said, "click." Every time except the last time.

Quack was at Squire's Tavern, and old Jack Lamkin, the man who killed Billy Downs, came in and told Quack that the air in one of his tires was low.

"Nobody tells me what to do with my car!" Quack shouted.

"I don't care what you do," Lamkin said. "I'm just telling you your tire is low."

"If anybody touches my car, I'll shoot'em," Quack said. "Just like this."

Pull, spin, point, squeeze and BLAM! The body of Quack Livers dropped to the floor, and Charlie Bickett called the priest for the all-tooregular duty of administering last rites in Raywick.

Soon the door opened, and Joe Keith Bickett entered, stepping over Livers's body.

"Give me six beers," he told his brother Charlie.

"Did you see Quack there?" Charlie asked him.

"Yeah,"Joe Keith said. "He's dead. Give me six beers."

Charlie gave him the beer, and Joe Keith left. After the door shut behind him, someone in the bar said, "That's one cold motherfucker."

"Anyway, I had enough of it," Charlie recalled nearly thirty years later. "I just figured sooner or later, my odds were getting slim. People getting locked up ...

"I was one of the first twenty people they hired [at the prison], I reckon, and that's when I approached Johnny Boone one day when I had a chance. I'd been running that old bar down there since 1971 up to that date, and I was sort of half-crook anyway because I knew all the-knew everybody I needed to know, let's just put it like that."

Charlie Bickett wanted the job at St. Mary's, but he was concerned about what people would think about a Bickett working at a prison. He didn't want to ruin his reputation.

"And so I approached Johnny one day and told Johnny I had an opportunity to get a good job ... and he said, `Man, go for it.' Johnny Boone of all people! You know, I always respected him, so I thought if I got an endorsement from Johnny Boone, I could give a shit less what everybody else thinks."

Once Bickett got the job, how did he like it?

"I loved it. I loved it," he recalled. "When they hired me, I was in charge of cleaning the place all up. They gave me a road crew, and three out of the ten people were all from Marion County, local boys, doing time up here.

"Hell, I went through the ranks from an officer to a corporal to a sergeant to a lieutenant to unit director to, uh, assistant temporary deputy of security and programs. When they left-the deputy director of security or programs-went on vacation or went to a seminar, I took their place."

What would have happened to Charlie Bickett without the prison?

"I'd probably be doing time," he said. "There's not a doubt in my mind. There wouldn't have been a way out for me if I would have stayed in that bar. It's not because I wanted to be there. It's not because I wanted to see the things I saw there. It was just the times.

"So, anyway, Johnny Boone and Cliff Todd saved my life."

On July 25, 1984, in the middle of the prison drama gripping Marion County, President Ronald Reagan held a rare evening press conference at the White House, during which he discussed a wide range of foreign and domestic affairs in order to shape the public debate before the political and media elites departed Washington for their August vacations.

"Please be seated," the president said to the assembled press corps. "I have a brief statement here. The Congress is back this week for a session that's lasting only until August 10. But that's enough time for the House of Representatives to approve legislation that would benefit all Americans.

"Among the many important issues now facing the Congress is legislation that will help reduce deficits, reward work and thrift, make our cities and neighborhoods safer and increase personal liberties throughout our land....

"I have talked with the House Republican leadership. They have pledged to try again to bring six key measures to the floor for a vote. "First, a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget....

Second, a proposal granting spouses working in the home [equal] retiring rights....Third, a proposal offering incentives for investment in seventyfive enterprise zones.... Fourth, a bill allowing tuition tax credits.... Fifth, a comprehensive anticrime package to crack down on criminals through restrictions on bail, tougher sentencing and stricter enforcement of drug trafficking laws. And sixth, an equal access bill permitting religious student groups the same freedom to meet in public high schools....

"These reforms are long overdue, and they would benefit all the people.... It's time to test the new realism and to see if the Democratic leadership will move from words to action."

In the ensuing press conference, the president answered questions from reporters on topics ranging from tax policy to Geraldine Ferraro's claim that Reagan wasn't a good Christian because his budget cuts had hurt the poor and disadvantaged.

"Well, Helen, the minute I heard she'd made that statement I turned the other cheek," the president quipped.

Others asked the president about the CIA's secret war in Nicaragua, about negative campaign tactics, about entitlement programs, interest rates, voting registration in the South and access of American nuclearpowered ships to the ports of New Zealand. But no one asked the president anything about his views on the potential long-term costs of his proposed anticrime legislation.

Two months later, on September 26, the House approved the president's anticrime package as the 98th Congress hurried to clean up its business before its imminent adjournment. When President Reagan signed the bill into law, he enacted the most far-reaching expansion of the federal government's law enforcement powers in its history.

"The legislation, for the first time.... abolishes parole and completely overhauls the Federal bail and sentencing systems," reported the New York Times. Twenty years later the Supreme Court would rule whole sections of this law unconstitutional.

When Johnny Boone returned home from prison in the autumn of 1984, he did not yet understand the far-reaching implications of President Reagan's new drug-fighting policy. Washington politics was not his primary focus. While locked away on the Belize deal, time on the outside had stopped for Boone. He saw family and visitors regularly and received news from the prison grapevine, such as about the death of Ronnie Ellis, but like any ex-convict returning home, Boone found the world around him to be not as he remembered it: Things at home had changed.

Before he had gone to prison, he had seen cocaine around, used mostly by higher-ups with Florida connections, but it hadn't yet exploded onto the wider market. When he drove his truck into Raywick for the first time since his release, Johnny Boone discovered that cocaine had blasted through Marion County like a snowplow, leaving in its wake the remains of the benevolent moonshine culture that had once been the linchpin for generations of good-ol'-boy outlaws. Cocaine had magnified the wild nature of Marion County while stripping it of its humility and cunningtempting fate at both ends.

Raywick had always maintained a cartoon level of excitement and violence; cocaine put that cartoon on fast-forward, changing Johnny Boone's world so dramatically that it left him, to some degree, in denial:

"I honestly never seen [cocaine] on a farm, but my own men now tell me that it was probably there. I don't believe it," Boone recalled. "I didn't see it; I didn't see nobody acting batshit crazy, but they said maybe so."

Yet, despite his uncertainty about whether his workers had been using cocaine without his knowledge, Boone held a clear understanding of the new drug's effect on his business:

"I can tell you it is a death blow to a [marijuana] farm. Anybody can tell you that," Boone said. "Makes people go fucking nuts right in the middle of everything going on. Makes people get their guns out-for no reason except they've done the coke and they've got so paranoid. Paranoid about the sun coming up. Paranoid about all the partners stealing their part, but they're sitting there watching it, but they're paranoid. They get an idea up in their head.

"You know what it is? A lot of them fucked someone before, and now they're worried that they're going to get fucked. That's what puts that shit in there. Projection. That's why they have all them nightmares. Vampires coming at you because you're a vampire yourself. That coke actually fucked up quite a few good deals for good people on them farms.

"It infiltrated Bobby Joe's system very much."

Johnny Boone wasn't the only one watching cocaine take hold. Steve Lowery, the newspaper editor, saw it, too:

"On Leap Year Night, February 29," Lowery said later, "my buddy was playing harp for a band that was playing at Bickett's, and I got behind the bar with Charlie.' was right after cocaine was introduced.' his was right after Mike Hall got elected [in a judge's race] because I supported Spragens.

"Joe Keith came in, and he was rockin' and rollin'. He sat down and put out two great big lines of coke, and he said, `Let's do it.'

"I said, `Man, this is not the place or the time. Thank you, but no thank you.'

"He started cussing me, calling me `cocksucker,"Spragens' blah blah blah.

"I said, `I'm not going to talk politics with you, either. I'm here to celebrate my two friends' birthdays.'

"Squire Bickett comes in ... he and I got along famously. He and Charlie started jumping Joe Keith's shit. Well, about that time, Shewmaker walks in, and he's wired up, too. And these guys are both ready to rock and roll. I was behind the bar, fortunately, and there was a back way out. I'm thinking, `I gotta grab my jacket at the first opportunity and exit right,' because it was about to get ugly.

"I got along great with Jimmy ... he was the best-looking of them. Nice guy, though. One of those snowy winters ... my wife with our two little baby girls in the back in car seats, she goes off in the ditch, out in the cold. He happened to come up on them. He hooked them up, pulled them out of the ditch, wouldn't take any money for it. That was the thing....

"These people were very kind. There's a real human side to these people. People like to demonize folks who are in this particular industry. They're no different from people that grow tobacco unless they're doing really serious drugs."