The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History (47 page)

The arrests of the Bicketts "has proven to be a very significant step in the dismantling of the Marion County marijuana cartel, an extremely productive marijuana cultivation/distribution organization, which has existed in this area for several years.

"For additional information of the bureau ... the case is receiving extensive media coverage.

"Also, DEA headquarters has declared this case a special events operation (SEO) and presented this case to a congressional committee in March, 1988, to illustrate the magnitude of the marijuana dilemma and the vast amounts of money generated by this cartel."

"Then, I think in '89, that's when everybody got busted," Charlie Bickett recalled. "I was [working at the prison] for two or three years, and I'm sure my name floated around in the DEA office or whatever. You know, `How does Charlie Bickett play into it?' But I didn't. I was just there. I was sort of a pawn."

Two and a half months after the Bicketts' arrest, on April 27, 1989, in Grand Bend, Ontario, a resort town on the Canadian shore of Lake Huron, authorities finally caught up with Bobby Joe Shewmaker, who had been a fugitive for more than four years. Grand Bend's population of two thousand swelled to fifty thousand in the summer months, as its hundreds of miles of open beach became the "West Coast of Ontario," with all the active nightlife that title entailed. With gently sloping beaches and sunsets over the water, Grand Bend's shoreline attracted visitors from all over.

But in April 1989, Grand Bend was still a quiet town of two thousand. A month later, when the summer season officially opened on Victoria Weekend, police would arrest 318 people on alcohol-related charges. The police of this quiet, sleepy community planned for such annual binges, but the force was quite surprised when a patrolman ran the Kentucky plate of a Buick Grand National, the fastest American sports car to ever come off the assembly line, and discovered that it had been reported stolen and that the driver, Bobby Joe Shewmaker, was an American fugitive.

When Shewmaker's girlfriend, using the alias "Pamela Anderson," left the cottage for the car, police moved in to arrest her. During the scuffle, Shewmaker sprinted from the cottage, but police caught him a few blocks away with a West Virginia driver's license in his pocket that said his name was Ronald A. Treadway. Shewmaker and his girlfriend had been in Grand Bend since February and had recently purchased a substantial farm that he named Treadway Stables on the paperwork.

When Shewmaker was extradited to the federal courthouse in Detroit, he found himself accompanied by a personal SWAT team with snipers lining the roofs of neighboring buildings. By pure coincidence, an attorney from Lebanon happened to be in Detroit that day to represent two clients from Gravel Switch who had been caught growing pot in Michigan. When the attorney and Shewmaker made eye contact in the courtroom, Shewmaker called him over.

"Is this all for me?" Shewmaker asked, referring to the SWAT team. It sure was.

On top of the twenty-five years on drug charges, the government sentenced Shewmaker to ten years for being a fugitive. He will be incarcerated until his projected release date, October 10, 2016, when he will be sixty-eight years old.

With Shewmaker behind bars, after various police agencies had spent more than five years trying to catch him, the task force began to focus its next attack. By May 6, 1989, when Sunday Silence won the 131st Kentucky Derby, the assembled members of the task force knew that the CCE investigation, which they fought so hard to keep out of the hands of DEA headquarters, had gone nowhere. None of the seventy members of the Marion County "cartel" could be persuaded to testify, an effort the task force itself would describe as "futile."

Without the life sentences imposable under a CCE conviction, the prosecutors on the task force grew creative. They were looking for ways to keep the Bicketts in prison for as long as they could, and the task force needed a way to prosecute the Marion County leadership without risking acquittals in court.

For this second problem, the task force found a simple solution: hold a press conference and try Marion County in the court of public opinion instead of the court of law. In the court of public opinion, the government's burden of proof was substantially lower, and those accused, without access to the media, would have no opportunity to defend themselves.

On June 5, 1989, the task force held a meeting to discuss plans for its press conference. US Attorney Joseph Whittle attended the meeting and suggested inviting the television stations from both the Louisville and Lexington network affiliates to maximize media exposure. They established a timeline to give member agencies deadlines for submitting press release drafts, charts and summaries of operations. Whittle agreed to lead the press conference at the state police post, but he would later back out. In the end, both the speaker and location would change. However, the task force's decision to use the term Cornbread Mafia at the press conference remained unchanged, "as this term has been applied to this group by some of the participants," according to an FBI memo.

IN I988, STEVE LOWERY left the Lebanon Enterprise to run the Kentucky Standard, the daily paper in Bardstown, and John Bramel took over at the helm of the Enterprise on the corner of Proctor Knott Avenue and Mulberry Street.

On Thursday, June 15, 1989, Bramel's phone rang. The caller was from the US Attorney's Office in Louisville, who told Bramel that there was going to be a press conference in Louisville on Friday morning at 10:30 a.m.

"What's this press conference all about?" Bramel asked.

"Well, we can't really say," the man told him, "but we want to make sure you'll be there."

The man wouldn't hang up until Bramel promised he would be there the next morning. The tenor of the conversation left Bramel feeling as though the US Attorney's Office would have sent a limo for him if he had asked for it. Why did the federal prosecutor's office want him, a little Podunk reporter for a weekly newspaper, to come to an important press conference up in Louisville on a moment's notice?

The next morning Bramel woke up to a drenching rainstorm. Because of the weather, he left early. As he drove the sixty-five miles to Louisville, he thought about Lebanon, his hometown. The era of teenage lawlessness that had lasted from the 1950s through the 1970s had ended; no longer would the Courier journal be accurate in calling Lebanon the "Fort Lauderdale of central Kentucky" due to its night clubs, live music and liberal attitude toward underage drinking. The live music circuit had long since passed Lebanon by, and most of the nightclubs were now ghosts of their former selves. Lebanon, as Bramel saw it, was beginning to reclaim its good name. The marijuana-related publicity and negative headlines the town had received in the earlier part of the 1980s seemed like ancient history, too.

A journalist seldom gets to edit his own hometown newspaper, and when Bramel stepped into that position after Lowery's departure, he felt it couldn't have been happening at a better time. He saw the silver lining in the dark cloud that had hung over Marion County for so long. When the state offered tax incentives to factories to relocate in Kentucky, it put the most economically desperate counties high on the list-and Marion County topped the list. When Toyota opened an assembly plant in Kentucky in 1986, a brake pad factory came to Lebanon.

When John Bramel enrolled his two sons, Zachary and Gordon, at St. Augustine, the Catholic school in Lebanon founded by the Sisters of Loretto during the Civil War, the Bramel boys matriculated along with two other new students, Mishi and Yoshi Ozone, children of the Japanese Toyota plant manager. Zach and Mishi joined St. As sixth-grade class, as Gordon and Yoshi entered fourth grade together.

The Japanese children wouldn't have recognized it, but Bramel saw them as a bellwether for Lebanon's future economic health: Those kids represented a few hundred jobs for residents in Marion County who graduated high school but weren't going to college. Folks who might have turned to growing marijuana just a few years before now had legitimate opportunities and benefits: health care, sick days and the opportunity to work without risking prison.

As Bramel approached downtown Louisville that Friday morning with these positive thoughts of Lebanon in his head, he exited Interstate 65 and drove down Broadway to the stately federal courthouse. He parked his tan Isuzu Trooper, grabbed his camera and notebook and walked into the grand, neoclassical building not knowing what to expect. When he entered the conference room, a staffer took him personally to a seat reserved for him in the front row.

Bramel looked around himself and saw representatives from 840 WHAS radio, Louisville's flagship talk radio station; all the major papers; the Associated Press; United Press International and every major television news crew in the state.

"What am I doing here?" Bramel thought. "And why did they escort me to a reserved seat in front-row middle?"

In front of the assembled press stood a podium to which reporters attached their microphones, and behind the podium was an easel with a four-by-eight-foot placard covered by a black sheet.

Soon enough, an assistant US attorney, David Grise, came to the podium and removed the sheet, revealing a poster-sized map very similar to the one reprinted in the Courier-journal the following day:

The location labeled number 1 on the map was Johnny Boone's Minnesota farm. Number 2 was Minnesota's sister farm in the far reaches of western Nebraska. Numbers 3 through 9 were in eastern Kansas, farms run by Bobby Joe Shewmaker. Numbers 10,11 and 12 in Michigan; 13 through 16 in Kentucky; 17 through 21 in northern Missouri, also run by Shewmaker. Numbers 22 through 27 in all parts of Illinois; 28 in Indiana; 29 in Wisconsin.

And all roads led to Marion County.

Bramel's stomach sank. As the shutters of the other cameras clicked and whizzed around him, he knew that in a matter of minutes, Marion County was going to be dealt a blow like it had never felt before-and just when he thought all this was behind them. Through Bramel's daze he heard the man at the podium talking, so he snapped out of it.

"What we are revealing today," David Grise said, "is the largest domestic marijuana-producing organization in the history of the United States."