The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History (36 page)

Two months later, November 1986, the Kentucky State Police caught a glimpse of something that they knew to exist but that had been kept from their view: a pot-processing factory, where marijuana, cut and cured, was trimmed and groomed into a final product. The police had never seen a pot-processing factory before because such factories remained well hidden. The police knew that such places must exist, but like the Loch Ness monster, it was a fact many detectives took on faith.

For the first decade of the marijuana era in Marion County, all processing from a number of top growers was centralized in one location, a place no one would ever suspect of housing a multimillion-dollar illicit factory-on a farm owned by a prominent doctor, whose brother had once been mayor of Lebanon. No one would have ever guessed that the stately proportioned barns and outbuildings concealed several tons of high-grade sinsemilla in any given October between 1972 and 1980, drying on blue tarpaulins. Yet, there it was, the processing headquarters for Johnny Boone, Bobby Joe Shewmaker and a dozen other growers.

The most stressful job at this particular location was that of the tenant farmer, whose surname was Brady. Although he had a variety of tasks to perform throughout the season, his chief duty was to take the fall if the operation was ever uncovered. The property owner knew nothing about these activities and would have been genuinely shocked and embarrassed if police had found marijuana on his land.

At some point the constant stress of running an industrial-sized marijuana-processing plant began wearing on Brady, and he decided he couldn't take it anymore. So, he curled up with a bottle of liquor in a bottom bunk bed in the back of the farmhouse, where he drank himself to sleep. When Bobby Joe Shewmaker found him there, Shewmaker leaped onto the top bunk, sending it crashing down onto Brady in the bunk below. Then Shewmaker grabbed him and pulled him to his feet.

"I want out," Brady begged.

"You can't get out," Shewmaker told him. "You are in," he said as he kicked Brady down the hallway toward the door. "You hear me? You are in!"

Once the state police started flying helicopters, beginning in 1980, the sprawling farm no longer provided the sort of cover it once had when the police searched only from the road. With the changing nature of the cat-and-mouse game, the growers moved their processing plants elsewhere, leaving them more vulnerable to exposure. But still, the processing barns remained hidden until Thursday morning, November 6, 1986.

On that day, a Lexington narcotics detective received information from a confidential informant that there was a barn in Woodford County with a bunch of marijuana in it. The Lexington cop called a Kentucky State Police detective to relay the information, asking to meet him at the McDonald's in the Woodford County seat, Versailles (pronounced "Ver-sails").

At the Versailles McDonald's, the two detectives met and waited as others joined their conference, including two DEA agents and two IRS agents. The barn in question, the Lexington detective said, was two miles out of town, and they should call the Woodford County sheriff. Shortly after, the sheriff arrived at McDonald's, and he led a convoy of police vehicles out McCracken Pike toward the 175-acre Lewis farm in the late morning.

At the farm, the sheriff talked with a farmhand who had managed the Lewis property for eleven years. The farmhand told them that Lewis wasn't home but that he was in charge of the farm when Lewis was away. The sheriff asked if they could look around, and the farmhand said that would be fine with him.

As the detectives prepared a consent-to-search form, they saw an unidentified man run from the silos in the near distance into a barn. The sheriff asked if the farmhand knew that man, and the farmhand said no. It was 12:15 p.m.

The agents raced to the barn, where they watched the man enter. Inside, the state police detective looked up and saw marijuana plants hanging from the rafters, as if they were a crop of burley tobacco curing in the cool darkness. The police announced themselves and told everyone to come out. Immediately a dozen or more unidentified men scattered from the barn in all directions like mice; the detectives and agents, like cats, gave chase. Two of the men fled out of the back of the barn and fell, chest-deep, into the dairy farm's manure pond, where the police held them at gunpoint, their hands in the air as they sank deeper into the liquefied feces, until eight of their co-workers had also been arrested.

Upon further investigation, the lawmen realized they had found a "sophisticated marijuana-processing operation," according to the police report. Marijuana was hanging in two of the three barns on the farm; the cattle shed had been converted into a sleeping and eating quarters, where detectives found thirteen sleeping bags. State police radioed headquarters to request a crime lab unit, and the federal agents called their superiors in Louisville and suggested they come see for themselves. No one had ever seen anything quite like it.

By the end of the day, the farm was crawling with law enforcement of every stripe: In addition to the initial raiding party, there were ten Woodford County officials (six sheriff deputies, a city policeman, the county attorney and two truck drivers), a sergeant with Lexington Metro Narcotics, four Kentucky State Police narcotics officers, a videographer, two members of the KSP public affairs team, five state troopers, an officer with KSP vehicle enforcement, four members of the KSP crime identification team and two additional DEA agents from Louisville.

In the first barn, detectives found ten folding chairs arranged in a circular pattern. Beside each chair was a box of untrimmed marijuana. Beside each box was a pair of scissors (three red-handled, six orangehandled). Above their heads were forty tobacco sticks, each holding fifty to sixty stalks of marijuana, hanging on barbed wire that had been strung from the rafters. In the rear of the barn, they found a sifting operation consisting of a wire mesh screen attached to wooden studs, raised off the floor by plastic buckets. Each sift was three by six feet and used, the detectives speculated, for separating the seeds from the marijuana. (In fact, this was a drying rack.)

In the second barn, the detectives found nineteen pounds of processed marijuana, eight pairs of scissors, one pack of cigarette papers and assorted trash, from which the crime scene unit pulled sixteen fingerprints.

The investigators found that the third building, made of white block and formerly a cattle shed, had been converted into living quarters by hanging a sheet of plastic over the west side of the structure, which was not enclosed. Bales of straw were stacked outside the plastic, and a propanefueled barbecue grill sat just outside the plastic wall with three Igloo coolers nearby. The room's interior was crowded with sleeping bags, suitcases, duffel bags, clothing, shoes and a kerosene heater. In the middle of the room, a portable TV had been placed atop a folding metal table along with two TV Guides and two decks of cards, one blue and one red.

Along one of the block walls, another table had been set up as a dining table, lined with benches. There had been a hot pork chop dinner served on the table when the raiding party sent the workers fleeing in all directions. As the investigators combed the scene, the coffee was still hot in the Styrofoam cups on the table.

Next to the stove stood a refrigerator with a sign on the front that read Pop 5o, which led investigators to conclude that the workers were being charged fifty cents per soft drink by the operation's boss. A Woodford County sheriff's deputy recognized the refrigerator. He had seen the farmhand driving down Main Street in Versailles with the refrigerator on the back of a blue Chevy S-10 pickup truck.

"I remember it because of the writing on the front of the refrigerator, `pop 50."' the deputy said.

Inside the refrigerator, detectives found a giant package of pork chops, net weight 19.46 pounds, purchased for $30.94 from Higdon's Foodtown in Lebanon. Elsewhere in the room, detectives found nearly two hundred rounds of .45-caliber ammunition, a hardback copy of Love and War by Patricia Hagen, a paperback edition of The Rider of the Ruby Hills by Louis L'Amour, a University of Kentucky Wildcat sportswear order form, a Kentucky High School basketball yearbook, the Kentucky basketball factbook for the 1986-87 season (Rex Chapman's freshman year) and the April 1985 issue of Penthouse magazine. In all, the crime lab team found forty-nine latent fingerprints in the room.

The detectives hauled from the scene six loads of marijuana, totaling 3,900 pounds. Sixty-five additional pounds of the processed pot was kept as evidence. The truck drivers delivered the six loads of pot to the county maintenance farm, where it was burned. The Woodford County sheriff, his deputy and a Lexington television news crew watched the bonfire.

Meanwhile, in the Woodford County jail, detectives began interrogating the ten men they had in custody, beginning with the first suspect at 3:25 p.m. Some of the interviews lasted less than a minute, as the ten arrested men responded to their interrogator's questions with a short list of answers, including, "I choose to remain silent," "I don't know" and "I want to see my attorney."

On Thursday, November 20, all ten defendants were charged on federal indictments. By January 21, 1987, the state crime lab had processed all the fingerprints collected from the Woodford County farm, connecting one suspect to the scene by prints lifted from a Styrofoam cup, a bottle of Kahlua liqueur and a spatula in the kitchen. Another print from a Campbell's tomato juice can matched the left thumb of another suspect; prints on another Styrofoam cup matched a third defendant's prints.

The lab dusted every piece of trash left on the scene and every conceivable surface, including each page of all the books and magazines left behind, finding fingerprints on five pages of The Rider of the Ruby Hills and twenty-three fingerprints, four full palm prints and two knuckle impressions in the April 1985 issue of Penthouse, which featured a black-haired, leather-wearing dominatrix named Fasha as the "Pet of the Month."

At the end of March 1987, the federal courthouse in Lexington issued subpoenas for two Marion County men who, prosecutors believed, had escaped the scene during the November raid. The subpoenas asked the men to "relinquish their finger and palm prints." Prosecutors hoped to link them to the Penthouse or to any other unidentified fingerprints scattered throughout the scene. On July 15, 1987, prosecutors made it official and charged the two remaining men with "possession with intent to distribute."The two men surrendered to US marshals on August 12.

On Wednesday, October 7, 1987, prosecutors brought the twelve defendants in the Woodford County case before a federal grand jury in Lexington. All ten men pleaded the Fifth Amendment and refused to answer questions, after which the US district judge explained the concept of forced immunity to them. All acknowledged that they understood that the judge, through a writ of forced immunity, could compel them to speak without Fifth Amendment protection because the court had immunized them against self-incrimination.

Despite understanding the writ, none of the men answered any questions put to him in the grand jury. The judge found them all to be in contempt of court and sentenced them to an additional eighteen months on top of their sentences for the crime of trimming pot in a barn. To the men from Marion County, an extra year and a half in prison was a small price to pay for the knowledge that no one else had been sent to prison because of them.

ONE WEEK BEFORE THE 1986 MIDTERM CONGRESSIONAL ELECTION, President Ronald Reagan signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, a muscular supplement to his 1984 anticrime package. The law was "the federal government's way of saying no," Reagan said, adding $1.7 billion in taxpayer dollars to the $2.2 billion already spent each year fighting drugs to improve enforcement programs, toughen sentences for drug violators and increase the size of the federal government's payroll by several thousand drug enforcement agents. That $3.9 billion that President Reagan spent fighting drugs is equal to $8.5 billion in 2011.

Following their president's orders, these agents worked to send a new wave of Americans convicted by its laws into the federal prison system, overwhelming facilities that were already crowded, according to a 1986 study by the United States Sentencing Commission. The federal prison system, with a capacity of twenty-eight thousand prisoners in 1986, already held forty-four thousand adults. The Justice Department estimated that at least half the convicts entering the system by the end of the decade would be drug violators. In the span of a single election cycle, President Reagan and the Democrats in the House had whipped the drug war into its highest state of alert since its declaration by Richard Nixon more than a decade before.