The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History (39 page)

On the morning of October 23, snow fellwhile the Kentuckians worked feverishly to harvest, dry and pack their crop for shipment. At 10:00 a.m., the driveway alarm started ringing while Smith Fogle was working in the hayloft, clipping marijuana buds from their stalks with rosebush clippers while listening to his Walkman. Even with the music loud, he could hear the alarm, and so he pulled off his headphones and ran toward the window. At the end of the loft, Smith pulled back a sheet of black plastic that hung over the window to keep anyone from seeing inside. Peeking around the plastic, Fogle saw a truck towing a horse trailer approaching through the snow and told his companions it was a false alarm.

"It's just a truck," he said, figuring it was the load of workers from Kentucky.

But the next second, Fogle saw five armed policemen spring from the rear of the Trojan horse trailer, and his heart sank.

"It's a bust!" Fogle shouted, and everyone dropped what he was doing and ran.

Some didn't bother using the door, instead busting through the barn wall or sliding down a garden hose hung from the hayloft as the drainpipe for a makeshift urinal. They dashed past the firearms kept nearby for protection from rippers. As his workers broke out of the back of the farm, Johnny Boone went his own way, grabbing an AR-15 and Tech-9, along with two Smith & Wesson handguns, an automatic and a .38 revolver. If anyone was going to get a longer prison sentence because of the presence of firearms, Boone wanted it to be him and not his men.

While all of his workers broke through the back of the barn and leaped and ran across the back end of the frozen farm, Johnny Boone hopped into his truck, a gray-over-black GMC two-ton pickup with tinted windows and a camper shell, and drove out the front of the farm, hoping to distract the police long enough to give his workers enough of a head start to escape. Members of the police raiding party observed Boone's exit at 10:00 a.m.

At the end of the farm's gravel driveway, Boone turned south on County Road 58 and drove a short way, less than a mile, before two police cars turned southbound out of the Jenkins farm driveway to pursue him. Boone suddenly cut a U-turn and started coming straight at them.

Deputy Thompson, in the lead squad car, turned on his blue lights and parked halfway into the northbound lane to force the oncoming truck to stop, but Johnny Boone steered into the ditch and drove around Thompson's position without losing speed. Deputy Lockhart, driving the second squad car, saw the truck evade the lead cruiser and head toward him. Quickly Lockhart turned on his lights and cut into the northbound lane, but the bearded driver steered into the ditch and drove around him. Lockhart then turned his cruiser around, gunned the accelerator, passed Boone's truck and forced it to stop by cutting it off on a diagonal.

Although he couldn't get away himself, Johnny Boone managed to occupy three squad cars and five officers of a thirteen-man raiding party-enough, he hoped, to give his workers the chance they needed. Boone slowly complied with the arresting officers' demands to exit the truck and turned around to allow himself to be handcuffed.

The arresting sheriff's deputy asked Boone to identify himself.

"Charles Grass," Boone told him.

Behind the seat of Boone's truck, the Minnesotan policemen found several rolls of duct tape, the AR-15, the Tech-9, the two Smith & Wessons, plus more than a thousand rounds of ammunition for the AR-15, a few hundred rounds of 9-millimeter ammo and maybe a hundred rounds for the .38. All the guns were loaded, but Boone made no attempt to use them against the policemen. Under the truck's camper shell, the deputies found a number of machete-type knives, boxes of trash bags and the unmistakable scent of marijuana.

Meanwhile, inside the farm, the raiding party worked to secure every building and found the place to be mostly deserted except for Mary Jo McDonald, the camp's only woman, who had stayed behind with the eight adult rottweilers she had spent all summer training.' dogs'vocal cords had been removed so that they wouldn't bark at intruders-only attack them in silence. She knew that if she ran, the aggressive dogs would lunge for the policemen, so she stayed to keep them calm, prevent anyone from getting hurt and make sure her dogs didn't get shot. Agent Wagner, who had been a dog handler in the Air Force, would later vouch that McDonald's actions kept the raiding party safe and kept any of the dogs from being fired upon in self-defense. With the dogs safely secured, Wagner asked McDonald for her name, but she refused to identify herself.

In the aftermath of a Minnesota snowstorm, members of Boone's crew took off in a fast sprint across the snow-dusted cornfield wearing T-shirts, light jackets and camouflaged pants. As they came to a fence at the edge of the field, several of the men cleared it in a single leap. A chubby member of the group, a man known to the others as Possum, lagged behind and became hung up in the fence line as the others made it into the woods. Two men ran back to pull Possum over the fence and help him into the tree line. Inside the cover of the trees, they finally had a chance to catch their breath and look behind them, where they saw their footprints through the snow, a trail that would lead the police directly to them. They were cold and alone, and none of them knew where he was, other than somewhere in Minnesota.

As they caught their breath and gathered their thoughts, they realized that their numbers had dwindled. Of the nearly twenty who had run from the barn, only fourteen were huddled in the frozen woods. Outside in the snow, by mutual decision, the fourteen men agreed to split up into two groups of seven-Smith Fogle and Possum in one group along with Les Berry. Together they waded through a frozen swamp, hoping to shake their pursuers and remove any traces of the trail they had left through the snow but also exposing themselves to hypothermia and frostbite.

Finding the road again, they came upon a house with a light on. Freezing and panicked, they were willing to consider anything. They could run in, they thought, overpower whoever was there and tie them up. They didn't want to hurt anyone, but they needed to get away. They could tie them up and cut the phone line; by the time someone found them, the Kentucky boys would be long gone, and the restrained people would tell their rescuers how nice the men who did that to them had been.

Still, Les Berry, with his and his colleagues'faces blue and their clothes freezing to their skin, came up with a better plan. Each man still had most of the $500 in run money that Boone had given him upon arrival. Pooling their cash, they had almost $3,500. If they could get a ride to town, maybe then they could buy a car and get away without hurting anyone. It seemed unlikely to work, but it was better than doing something stupid.

Les Berry took the run money to the house and knocked on the door, while the remaining six men hid in the woods, huddling close to keep warm. When Mrs. Jodie Ewert answered the door, Berry asked her to drive him to town. She said yes, taking her two young children with her. Berry paid Mrs. Ewert $20 for the ride when she dropped him off at Ness Motors, a used car lot in Wadena, about fourteen miles from New York Mills, where Berry bought a blue 1972 Chevrolet Impala from salesman Robert Brummer, paid for with the pooled run money.

While in town, Berry gassed up the Impala, checked the oil and picked up some snacks before driving back out to the spot where he had left the others. Fogle, Possum and their colleagues were so happy to see Berry pull up in the fifteen-year-old Chevy that they "would have lined up and kissed his bare ass" if he had asked them to, according to Fogle. After the seven men had crammed into the car built for six, Berry drove off heading east toward Wisconsin.

By the end of the morning, a manhunt for an unknown number of suspects had begun, but the agents failed to track any of them directly from the farm. A few hours into the search, a neighbor called the Otter Tail County Sheriff's Department to tell the dispatcher that four men wearing camouflage had just approached his house asking for shelter. Agent Wagner arrived at the house shortly after the call came through. The Kentuckians had left tracks through the snow away from the house after the homeowner turned them away; they were very easy to track to the field where Wagner caught them.

None of the four men wore a heavy coat, only army fatigues. They were all "very, very cold" and "very, very wet,"Wagner would later testify in court. They surrendered without fighting or fleeing. Even though the men were wet, Wagner could tell "they reeked" of marijuana. While arresting them, Wagner discovered them to be "not impolite"; instead they were "very cordial" but "very uncooperative as well."

Shortly before 5:00 p.m., Otter Tail County Sheriff's Lieutenant Ray Polensky spotted a man wearing camouflage walking down County Road 67. When Polensky arrived on the scene, another officer advised over the radio that he had earlier spotted the individual walking into the woods. With two other squad cars on the scene, Polensky grabbed his shotgun, got out of his cruiser, walked through a harvested cornfield to the edge of the woods and hollered for the man to come out. The weather had cleared by then, and the temperature was in the low thirties. After a long silent moment, Polensky saw the camouflaged man coming out of the woods with his hands raised.

"Where are you going?" Polensky asked, pointing the shotgun into the air.

"Home," the man said.

"Where's home?"

"Kentucky."

"Have you been out here a long time?"

"Yes."

"Are you cold?"

"I'm glad it's over with," he said. He was unarmed. By the time Polensky put him into the back of his cruiser, without handcuffs, ten policemen had arrived in response to the radio traffic.

At 6:15, more than eight hours since the raid, the sun began to set, and the temperature quickly fell.Three hours later, a little past 9:00 p.m., the snow started falling again when another call came into the dispatcher from a farmhouse reporting that some camouflaged men had stopped by looking for shelter. Lieutenant Polensky responded to the Reger residence, where Mrs. Reger pointed in the direction the strangers had gone, leaving a clearly visible trail in the inch and a half of snowfall.

Polensky took his flashlight and followed the tracks on foot, running for about a mile and a half, kitty-corner across a field toward County Road 67 and then along the road's shoulder, where the tracks would be on the east side for a while and then switch over to the west side. Polensky also saw where, every once in a while, the suspects had lain down in a ditch to hide from traffic. After a mile and a half of running, Polensky found four men huddled in the ditch on the west side of the road and signaled with his flashlight for backup. He told the four men to come up to the road one at a time, and they obeyed, wet and shivering. After five minutes, squad cars arrived. The arrested men said next to nothing in a southern accent. They were wet and smelled strongly of marijuana.

At 10:00 p.m., BCA Agent Phillip Wagner learned that Mrs. Jodie Ewert had taken a camouflage-clad man to Wadena earlier that day. Within minutes, Wagner had Ness Motors salesman Robert Brummer on the phone and got the license plate number of the 1972 blue Impala. From the Ewerts' farmhouse, Wagner called his office's dispatcher and told the dispatcher to put out a nationwide teletype for a wanted vehicle.

Twila Schott, the night dispatcher, tried over and over to enter the wanted blue Impala into the computer system, but the computer kept rejecting it. Finally, three hours after Wagner called her, Schott discovered a way to get the computer to accept the information: by entering the Impala as "stolen" instead of "wanted." The computer finally accepted the nationwide alert at 1:31 a.m., notifying every law enforcement dispatcher in every state to be on the lookout for a "stolen" blue Impala filled with drug suspects from Kentucky who were "armed and dangerous."

Arden A. Asp worked the night shift for the Wisconsin State Patrol as Trooper 3. On October 23, his shift began at 11:00 p.m., patrolling the Interstate 90-94 corridor between Minneapolis and Chicago in an unmarked 1987 Plymouth Grand Fury, its blue lights concealed in its grille and dashboard. At 1:30 a.m., the Grand Fury idled between mileposts 72 and 74 in Juneau County. At 1:31, Asp's I-band radio squawked with a message from district headquarters: Minnesota authorities were attempting to locate a stolen vehicle.' he occupants, wanted in reference to a drug investigation, were armed and dangerous. Asp wrote the license plate number in his notebook and hoped he never saw it.

At 2:45, Trooper Asp was parked under the crossover at milepost 74 watching eastbound traffic, his headlights illuminating the cars and trucks as they passed his location. At 2:46, a blue Chevy Impala bearing Minnesota plates Boy Charles Young-770 drove past at a little under the 65-miles-per-hour speed limit. After the Impala had traveled about a half-mile, Asp pulled into the eastbound lane and accelerated. He slowly approached the Impala to double-check the license number and noticed that the car was full of passengers. Then the unmarked Grand Fury passed the Impala at a high rate of speed, pulled off at the next exit a few miles east and killed its lights at the top of the ramp. Inside the Grand Fury, Trooper Asp called for backup on his radio.