The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History (45 page)

On October 4, 1988, Louisville DEA Agent Richard Badaracco and Assistant US Attorney David Grise visited Miller Hunt and his business partner, Michael Haskell, in Maine. It was the first time they had met, although Hunt had met with other federal agents twice since pleading guilty in June. They discussed Kentucky, marijuana, Raywick and the Bicketts. Hunt and Haskell said they would do anything to reduce the sentences they faced, including wearing a wire into Raywick.

Before using Hunt and Haskell, the task force members wanted to follow up on another lead. They had evidence that Jimmy Bickett owned a lion cub, which they thought they could connect to the cubs found in Shewmaker's operation in Kansas. By accompanying game wardens, the task force hoped to witness Jimmy Bickett doing something else he wasn't supposed to be doing with his lion.

On November 4, 1988, DEA Agent Badaracco, a Kentucky State Police detective, a US marshal and three US Fish and Wildlife officers paid a visit to Jimmy Bickett's house in Raywick to see about allegations that Bickett, "a distributor of multi-kilogram quantities of marijuana," according to Badaracco's DEA report, was "caring for a lion cub."

The team of state and federal officers arrived in Raywick at 12:35 p.m. and visited Jimmy Bickett's house on Sally Ray Pike, where Bickett's 1984 cream-colored Oldsmobile was parked in the driveway. As a US Fish and Wildlife agent banged on the door, attempting to arouse anyone inside, State Police Detective Leo Mudd looked inside the Olds. He saw the keys in the ignition, the center arm rest in an up position and a bottle of whisky lying next to a bank deposit bag in the front seat. No one answered the door.

As the wildlife agent walked to Bickett's next-door neighbor's house and the other cops hung back, Jimmy Bickett hopped into his creamcolored Olds and sped away from his home. The police followed with blue lights and sirens on. Before the police could get behind him, Bickett pulled into Blandford's Store, the grocery and hardware store in Raywick, and went inside as though he didn't realize he was being chased. While Bickett was inside, Detective Mudd noticed that the arm rest in the center of the Oldsmobile front seat had been lowered. Lifting it, he discovered a .38-caliber Walther semiautomatic pistol.

A few minutes later, Jimmy Bickett walked out of Blandford's Store with a sandwich and a pint of milk, and the state and federal agents wanted to talk with him.

"Do you have an African lion up there at your house?"

"Yeah," Bickett told them.

"Well, we need to go talk about it."

Bickett and the detectives returned to the house, where police handcuffed Bickett on a state charge of carrying a concealed weapon.

"That's my girlfriend Angela's gun," Bickett told them.

He sat handcuffed in his own home. The phone rang three times, and he couldn't answer it as the detectives interrogated him about his lion.

"Where did you get this lion?"

Bickett told them that a man had come by Bickett's Pool Hall and sold it to him.

"Yeah, the guy had two of'em," Bickett said and described the man, what the other lion looked like and the kind of car the man drove. "He had Taylor County plates."

Despite Bickett's answers, the police arrested him on the gun charge but uncuffed him because the game wardens were afraid of handling his eighty-pound lion cub. So, Jimmy Bickett picked Chico up and put him in the cage in the back of the game wardens' Chevy Blazer.

In December 1988, about a month after confiscating Jimmy Bickett's lion, DEA Agent Badaracco called Miller Hunt in Maine and told him to get ready to do what he had agreed to: come to Kentucky to be Badaracco's informant against the Bicketts.

On January 23, 1989, the FBI office in Louisville sent an "immediate" priority airtel to the FBI director to follow up on a telephone conversation dated January 19, in which the OCDE Task Force requested that the FBI send an expert "to assist Louisville division technical agents, in the installation of CCTV, Nagra recorders and the hardwiring of a transmitting device."

Following confirmation from headquarters, all the pieces were finally in place for the takedown. For a decade, various police agencies had tried to nail the Marion County marijuana "cartel" on its home turf; none had succeeded. Now they planned on succeeding by resorting to a street-level buy-bust operation, the sort of tactic that the DEA officially dismissed as rudimentary and that the FBI considered "contrary to the investigative methodology ... for narcotics matters." Yet, in Raywick, it was the best they could do, and they planned to make the most of it.

On the cold, wet Sunday afternoon of February 12, 1989, Miller Hunt and Mike Haskell flew into the Louisville airport, where they met Ray Gagner, a state drug enforcement officer from Maine in charge of their case, along with agents from the FBI and DEA.1he agents gave Hunt and Haskell a silver Lincoln Continental, more than a few years old, and some cash in case they had the opportunity to buy small amounts of drugs before making the big deal.

Hunt, Haskell and Gagner drove south in the Lincoln on Interstate 65, the first leg of the hour-long drive from Louisville to Marion County. Hunt knew the way. The silver Lincoln coasted through Lebanon and braked just before Club 68 in front of the Golden Horseshoe's tall neon sign that read MOTEL, the letters stacked vertically, each in its own lit-up square. A neon arrow behind the sign's letters pointed across West Main Street to an alley on the side of the Golden Horseshoe, where the motel sat-a strip of out-facing rooms that looked across a parking lot at the back of the disco.

Gagner went into the office to register them. Hunt and Haskell checked into room 27; Gagner stayed next door. At 2:00 p.m., Gagner frisked Hunt and Haskell and then sent them off to Raywick. They drove the familiar route down Highway 84, a two-lane road that weaved through the hills like the underage drinkers who drove it.

In Joe Keith Bickett's two hundred-year-old log cabin off of Sally Ray Pike, the cocaine waited in a cereal bowl next to a handgun on the kitchen table. A 12-gauge shotgun, loaded with double-aught buckshot, leaned in the corner next to an unloaded .22 rifle. Gary "Tank" Allen, Bickett's lifelong friend, stirred a pot on the stove, cooking cocaine down to a paste so that he and Bickett could freebase it. Bickett and Allen had been "partying" with several women for "what seemed like a month."

"Tank's in the kitchen, and I'm in the living room nursing one terrible hangover," Bickett wrote in a July 2006 letter from the federal prison camp in Manchester, Kentucky.

"Someone's coming in the drive!" Allen yelled to Bickett.

"Shit," Bickett said to himself. "Who the hell could that be?"

Bickett walked out onto his cabin's back deck and saw a 1970s Continental pulling into the drive. Bickett stood there, waiting.

"One man gets out, and the other stays in the car. It's Miller Hunt," Bickett wrote. Bickett hadn't seen Hunt "since around September 1987 when he went to prison."The two stood on the deck for a while, "shooting the shit," as Hunt's body wire transmitted the audio of their conversation to an FBI airplane circling overhead. Hunt explained why he hadn't been down for so long and how he planned to pay off the debt he said he owed.

"This is the deal," Hunt said several times. "Here is what I want to do. I owe you money, and I want to get your money back to you, and here's what we're going to do."

"Look," Bickett said, according to his letter, "I told you the last time I saw you, you don't owe me nothing. I told you I was out. Forget about it! See Jimmy, not me."

While still on the back deck, Hunt started to tell Bickett that he had with him a big dealer with a lot of money looking to buy 150 pounds of marijuana. The dealer had come to Kentucky, Hunt said, and was down in Lebanon at the Golden Horseshoe motel. Hunt proposed that they add $150 per pound to the asking price as a way of working off most of Hunt's "old debt."

"Look, you don't owe me nothing," Bickett repeated. Hunt made him uneasy. "Who's that you got with you in your car?"

"Mike."

"Mike who?"

"Mike Haskell. You remember Mike, don't you?"

"Yeah."

"We've been on the road for a couple of days," Hunt said.

"Come on in and have a cold one then," Bickett told him.

Hunt yelled for Haskell, and the three went into the cabin. As they passed through the kitchen, Bickett grabbed three beers from the refrigerator, and Hunt said hello to Allen, who still stood at the stove.

The two men from Maine sat on the couch in front of a glass-topped coffee table littered with Bickett's loose change, an ashtray, an aspirin tin, rolling papers, a remote control and a small black notebook that Bickett used to keep his business straight.

Exactly what happened next would remain in dispute for more than twenty years. According to Hunt and the US government, Joe Keith Bickett at this point in the conversation agreed to do the deal with Hunt, telling Hunt that he needed to get a shower and come down off his cocaine high before he could do business. Bickett later insisted that this never happened.

Hunt's body wire, which the Quantico-based FBI technical expert had installed, should have proved one account truthful and the other false. However, when the government turned the tapes over to defense counsel, parts of the conversation had seemingly vanished.

Bickett later claimed that in this missing portion of their conversation, after about ten minutes inside, Bickett denied that Hunt owed him any money and told Hunt he didn't want to be involved in any more business together.' hen, voices from outside the cabin interrupted them. "It scared the hell out of all of us," Bickett wrote in his letter.

When he went to the front door, Bickett saw his brother-in-law, Danny Cecil, and Cecil's twelve-year-old daughter, Kristen, both on horseback. Bickett walked outside to talk with them; Hunt followed Bickett but stopped at the threshold to listen to the conversation without being seen.

Danny Cecil and his daughter would both later testify under oath that they had left their home in Louisville earlier that Sunday morning, where Cecil worked at the Ford assembly line for sixteen years, to drive to Raywick, where Cecil kept a horse-drawn buggy that he had restored. As he drove on Bernheim Forest Road, between the Jim Beam distillery and Rooster Run, Cecil and his daughter passed Jimmy Bickett headed the other direction on his way to Louisville.

"There goes Jimmy," Kristen told her father.

"Well, I don't know if we'll be able to get the buggy or not," her father told her, because he kept the buggy locked up in Jimmy Bickett's garage.

When they arrived in Raywick, Cecil went to Jimmy's house to see if the garage was unlocked; it wasn't.

"Well," he told his daughter, "we'll just ride horses instead."

So, they drove up to the Bickett farm and caught the horses. For about an hour in the damp February daylight, they rode around on the 196-acre farm that had been in the Bickett family since the eighteenth century.

As they rode along the farm's perimeter, they turned up the half-mile gravel driveway leading back to the cabin where Joe Keith lived. Cecil hopped out of his saddle to open the gate to Joe Keith's drive. He looked at his watch; it was 2:00 p.m.

They planned to ride down the gravel drive to visit with Joe Keith, but when Danny Cecil saw an unfamiliar Lincoln Continental with outof-state plates parked in the driveway, he changed his mind about trying to go inside.

"Joe Keith has company," he told his daughter, "so we're just going to ride on."

Before they left, Cecil hollered out for Bickett a few times, and finally Joe Keith answered the door.

"What are you doing?" Cecil asked.

"Oh, nothing." Bickett told him. "Just got some company."

To Cecil, Bickett looked like he had been drinking.

"You want to go riding horses with us?"

"No, not right now. Maybe later on. Where are you going?"

"We're going to ride over to your dad's farm."

"I might join you over there later on."

"OK."

As Danny Cecil turned his horse to ride away, Joe Keith Bickett hollered back at him.

"Hey, have you seen Jimmy?"