The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History (35 page)

Of the thirty-two conspirators identified in the indictment handed down in the closing days of December 1985, just days before the statute of limitations expired on the charges, Bobby Joe Shewmaker would be one of only three who eventually stood trial because he refused to plead guilty and inform on his associates. Even in the tough, anticrime era of Reagan's second term-a period marked by lengthy prison sentencesShewmaker held strong to his code of silence. When he was convicted, Shewmaker paid his $250,000 cash bond in Savannah and returned to Kentucky. When it came time for Shewmaker to surrender for sentencing in the Savannah courthouse on Wright Square, federal officials found themselves waiting in an empty courtroom: Bobby Joe Shewmaker decided to become a fugitive instead.

As a man on the run, Shewmaker continued to manage a multistate pot-farming network so extensive and elaborate that he purchased one of his Missouri farms specifically not to grow marijuana at all; it was located too close to town for that. But with the increasing size of the growing operation, Shewmaker's Missouri farm managers needed a location just to store and pool the tractors, combines and other heavy farm equipment that they moved from one farm to another. Because all the in-and-out traffic could cause increased scrutiny of the property, Shewmaker kept it clean of contraband and used it exclusively as an equipment depot.

While these sorts of elaborate farming networks were being run by Raywick graduates in other states, local activity in Marion County had dropped off to an amateur level. The professionals had moved on to other pastures, returning at harvest with their yields.

The only signs that the marijuana marketplace continued to thrive would appear briefly and unannounced, like Bigfoot. One such sighting occurred on March 1, 1986, when three teenage boys, while running across farmland outside St. Mary's, discovered something they had not anticipated. Two local brothers showed a visiting city boy around the farm. The new kid had never been on a farm before and asked the brothers to show him a silo, something he had never seen.

As the boys ran across the farmland, they hopped the fence onto the neighbor's property, where they discovered a ramshackle barn in disrepair. Curious, the boys decided to explore it. When they entered the barn, the older brother discovered a $20 bill on the dirt floor.

"Look!" he said, picking up the twenty.

"Split it three ways!" the other two demanded.

But while the little brother and the visiting boy debated how to split the $20, the older brother saw something most people only dream about: bundles of $50, $20 and $10 bills stacked on a mound of dried cow manure.

"Look at all that money," he said, and the two other boys stopped fighting.

In unison, the three boys jumped at the cash and started stuffing their pockets, shirts and pants, then ran home across fields and over fences at a full sprint. At the house, the boys hid their loot-in a cigar box, in the back of a boom box, in a tackle box. After it was stashed, the boys contemplated their situation for forty-five minutes and then decided they should tell their mothers.

"Mom," one said. "What would you do if we found $10,000?"

"We'd blow it," she told him.

So, the boy fetched his cigar box and showed his mother. She knew it was too much. She called the police; they arrived in ten minutes. The police officers quizzed the boys, wanting to know everything they could about the money and where the boys had found it. Then the police asked for the money. The boys, reluctantly, fetched their stashes.

One brought $600 from his room; another handed over $2,000 from the inside of his radio; the other brother gave the policemen half the money he had found. His mother found the rest a few days later when she was cleaning his room.

The police helped the boys retrace their steps, finding $1,000 in cash that the boys had dropped like accidental breadcrumbs on their sprint home, but there wasn't a single bill left in the barn where it had been found. In the end, the police counted $16,000, cash, which they locked away in an evidence locker until an investigation could be completed. The boys would never see the money again.

In 1986, despite declining eradication numbers in Marion County, the state police planned another pot-clearing campaign. They had some new hardware, the Kentucky State Police's first helicopter of its very own, a jet Bell Ranger, leased with funds from the DEA, along with a mobile command post and radio center, which they set up at the Lebanon/Springfield Airport.

In late June 1986, police had used the helicopter to find just fortyseven plants in one county, twenty-three plants in another and sixty-five plants in a third. So, when the state police took to the air above Marion County in early July, they expected to find equally small patches. Instead, less than thirty minutes after leaving the airport, detectives found sixty thousand plants growing in two patches-huge busts even though the male plants had not yet been removed from the patches and especially significant because fields of this size hadn't been seen in Marion County for years. The police, journalists and everyone else had concluded that crops of this size had long since moved out of state. Yet, despite the losses from those two plots, the Kentucky marijuana market continued to produce some of the most potent marijuana available in the nation because of the syndicate's geographic diversification.

According to the National Narcotics Consumers Intelligence Committee, the average THC level was 4 percent for marijuana grown in the United States and 8 percent for sinsemilla. Kentucky's marijuana, on average, doubled the THC level of the national baseline, and homegrown Kentucky outdoor sinsemilla, like Johnny Boone's Kentucky Bluegrass, was testing at 14 percent by 1986. In 1989, the Louisville office of the DEA reported that it tested Kentucky samples that surpassed 18 percent, more than double the potency of marijuana grown elsewhere in America at the time.

Much of that highly potent Kentucky sinsemilla left Raywick in the backs of trucks, vans and cars with big trunks. This was no secret; police knew it, but there wasn't much the authorities could do to stop it. By 1984, Raywick had proved itself to be invulnerable to undercover police work after it had sniffed out the Tom Foolery's "undercover bar" investigation and ran it out of town.

Folks in Raywick were well trained at spotting a "narc" before he opened his mouth. The state police undercover narcotics force made it easier on the outlaws by its consistent and obvious choices of cover. Every undercover narcotics detective working for the Kentucky State Police wore his hair shaggy, drove a Trans Am and drank Sterling beer, according to one retired detective. In some parts of the state, this was enough of a disguise to make a few small buys and move up the supply chain before making an arrest. In Raywick, Trans Am-driving, Sterling beer-drinking strangers were given the Raywick special.

Had the police decided to roll into Raywick disguised as a motorcycle gang, they might have had better luck or at least generated a little more respect. But even that plan could have been disastrous because the Mongols, the nastiest of the West Coast motorcycle gangs, met more than they could handle when they roared into Raywick on their chop-shopped Harleys in 1988, thinking they could take over Bickett's Pool Hall and the Fifth Wheel just as they had everywhere else they had conquered.

When the Mongols parked in Raywick, roughing up Bickett's clientele and starting fights in the parking lot, Jimmy Bickett learned their weakness. In downtown Lebanon, the Mongols had parked their mobile headquarters: a sixteen-wheel semi-truck and trailer, from which its mismatched motorcycles had spewed. While the Mongols raised hell in Raywick, Jimmy Bickett and a carload of buddies paid a visit to the unguarded semi-truck.

When no one was looking, they worked the truck over: slashing tires, breaking out windows and lifting the hood to cut out every wire, hose and belt they could see. Then they drove back to Raywick, where the Mongols thought they had planted a flag. A predatory and violent criminal organization like the Mongols would have substantial interest in controlling the marijuana distribution out of a place like Raywick, and for most of an evening, the Mongols thought they had.

When they returned to their truck and surveyed the damage, they roared back to Raywick to raise hell again. The leader asked Jimmy Bickett if he had heard anything about a truck getting vandalized, and Bickett shook his head and told them no. He didn't know anything about it. The Mongols, chastened, disappeared the way they had come.

Bickett's Pool Hall outlasted generations of police work, fires, gunshots and repeated assaults by invading outsiders, culminating in the Mongol horde. Like a rock against the ocean, when the waves receded, Bickett's remained. Yet, like every invincible thing in history and myth, Bickett's Pool Hall had one enemy too small to consider but too great to defeat. Its Achilles' heel would be a wounded teenage ego.

On Tuesday night, September 2, 1986, a nineteen-year-old Nelson County native, the son of a construction contractor, came to Raywick looking for a good time. Inside Bickett's Pool Hall, he began flirting with a good-looking woman who was out of his league.

"A punk from Nelson County whose father was a contractor-that's where he got the dynamite," Steve Lowery recalled. "And he was in Bickett's playing pool and hitting on this lady, who just so happened to be married to one of the `boys.'

"So, the guy came in, and she told him, `This guy's been hitting on me all night, we want to whip his ass.' . . . They whip his ass and tell him, `Don't ever come back here.' He left with his friend, and his friend dragged him out of there.

"He went home and got a bunch of his dad's dynamite out of his shop. He comes back into Raywick and throws two or three sticks of dynamite into Bickett's, and it just blows the hell out of the place. No one was there, fortunately. When he did that, it was going to cause a lot of trouble, obviously."

The blast created a vacuum that sucked open the doors to all the cabinets and refrigerators, so the floor was littered with glasses and full cans of beer, some spewing foam from holes busted in their sides.

"I was in my house asleep about three in the morning, and there was an explosion; my house started shaking," Lowery remembered. "It actually cracked the foundation of the church across the street. It was a hell of an explosion.

"`What the hell was that?' I thought.

"Immediately, a contingent of boys got together and formed the crew that was going to re-create the bar immediately and the crew that was going to go out and-They knew, pretty much, who had done it....

"So, the crew that stayed, before one or two o'clock in the afternoon, they had the walls back up, they had all brand new furniture in there. It looked great ... so by the time the state police arson investigator showed up in the late afternoon-no one reported anything, either. There was no report.

"He said, `I heard there was an explosion.'

"And they said, `What? What explosion? We don't know what you're talking about.'

"He said, `Well, wait a minute. What's all this?'

"And they say, `We're redecorating.'

"The other boys, who were sent out on a mission to get the son of a bitch, they get themselves armed up to the teeth. They get their machine guns out, and they knew where the guy lived. There was about five or six of them, and they all have machine guns, and they all roll up to the house. The father comes out; he's nervous.

"He says, `What's my boy done?'

"And they explain what he had done.

"He says, `Give me a bill, and I'll pay for it.'

"They say, `That's part of it. The other part is, tell him: We don't ever want to see him in Raywick again, or we're going to kill him.'

"He says, `I'll make sure he understands it, and I'll kick his ass myself.'

"So, it was all settled without police interference, which is the way things usually went down in Raywick. They preferred not to have police involved in things. They take care of themselves."