The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History (48 page)

Pointing at the map, Grise said they had identified twenty-nine farms in nine states.

"Each of these farms," Grise said, pointing to the dots on the map, "has been traced back to the cooperative by documents seized at the farms, by fingerprints, by eyewitness accounts, by the arrest of cooperative members and by the method of operation of those farms."

Cleve Gambill, the first assistant US district attorney, stepped up to the podium as well. As certain as these prosecutors were of their facts, they weren't certain enough to present them to a judge and jury, only to a row of cameras and compliant reporters.

"The organization," Gambill said, "is a highly motivated, well financed and highly organized group of marijuana growers from Kentucky who are responsible for growing this vast amount of marijuana [and who] call themselves the Cornbread Mafia."

David Haight, the head of the Louisville office of the DEA, said that all other major trafficking organizations in the nation "have been foreign nationals, primarily Latins from either Mexico or Colombia.

"This is the first major trafficking organization in the United States that we have thus far identified ... that has not relied on foreign nationals for their production and distribution of marijuana," Haight said.

"The wholesale value of the marijuana we've seized is $364 million," Gambill said. "And we know the street value would be much, much more than that."

"A major dent has been made in the group," he explained, acknowledging that the Marion County cooperative continued to operate. "We intend to crush this organization."

Federal and state agencies had arrested seventy people-forty-nine from Marion County alone-and seized 182 tons of marijuana since the investigation began in 1985. Yet, the first busts they cited in connection with the cooperative hadn't occurred until November 1986, a multimilliondollar marijuana-processing plant in Woodford County, Kentucky, that netted twelve arrests-number 14 on the map.

This case was already public knowledge, having been reported upon and written about in the Lebanon Enterprise and Courier ,journal and all the other news organizations present, as was the other cornerstone of the vast alleged conspiracy: the October 1987 bust of Johnny Boone's farm in Minnesota (number 1 on the map). In fact, all the busts represented on the map had been previously reported.

Two of the cooperative's leaders, Grise said, were "Robert Joseph Shewmaker" and "John Robert Boone." Although he identified these two as "major figures," Grise was careful not to call them kingpins, bosses or anything that would perk a reporter's ears enough to ask, "If they are kingpins, are they being prosecuted under the CCE statute?"

Gambill echoed Grise, saying "two major figures in the cooperative" were Shewmaker and Boone. "Both of these persons are from Marion County, and all are in custody at this time," Gambill said.

"Wait a minute," John Bramel finally interjected from the front row. "You keep mentioning Johnny Boone's name. But he's not from Marion County. He's from Washington County."

The man behind the podium hardly acknowledged Bramel and presented his next piece of evidence.

"And wait," Bramel said. "You said Shewmaker was a major figure in the cooperative, and you also described him as one of the people who would arrive to purchase a farm. But Mr. Grise had said earlier that a `financier'would send his 'lieutenant'to purchase the farm. So, exactly what ..." Bramel was in the middle of his question when he was cut off again.

Other reporters asked other questions. For whom was the marijuana being produced? How was it sold and distributed? Who were the financiers? Nobody asked the government prosecutors why this evidence was being given at a press conference and not to a grand jury.

John Bramel sat there with a growing sense of nausea, ashamed to be sitting there with a reporter's notebook as the metropolitan media outlets uncritically accepted a story that, Bramel knew, was about to rip the heart out of his hometown. After the press conference concluded, John Bramel approached David Grise, the assistant US attorney, wanting to know if this vast marijuana conspiracy was an indictment or a criminal charge for which these men would be prosecuted.

"Well, no," Grise told him.

As the facts merged with their presentation at the press conference, John Bramel understood why he had been called, why his seat had been reserved. It wasn't just out of courtesy; it had been done with cold intention to maximize the effect of the news conference on the people against whom it was directed, a psy-ops campaign.

As he drove home in the rain, Bramel felt sick. He had witnessed firsthand the US Attorney's Office manipulating the press to seek a conviction in the court of public opinion while bypassing the courtroom completely. The federal prosecutors charged that all of the people they named were part of the Marion County marijuana cooperative, yet they had no intention of actually charging anyone with conspiracy as a leader or participant. Bramel saw it for what it was: an allegation with no chance for recourse, no chance for trial to be proven innocent. It was a guilty verdict read to the cameras without an indictment.

Bramel turned on the radio, switched to the AM frequency and found 840 WHAS, Louisville's most powerful talk radio station. When the news came on at the top of the hour, Bramel's day grew worse. WHAS reported that forty-nine residents of Marion County had been arrested in a roundup, as if the FBI had arrested nearly fifty men that day. Bramel turned off the radio.

"The DEA framed the story in a way that it was going to reflect poorly on Marion County, at least in some people's eyes," recalled Al Cross, who had moved from the city desk to the politics desk of the Courier .journal since leaving his Raywick beat. "They want to put a stereotype on it: If they are violating the law, they must be bad people."

John Bramel arrived back at the Enterprise office just after lunch. Not far behind him came the Action News vans from the Louisville and Lexington television stations. They came to shove microphones into people's faces and ask for a reaction. A reaction to what? The press conference hadn't made the papers yet, and the only news of it had come from WHAS radio, which had been dead wrong-there had been no fifty-person roundup. The six o'clock news made it worse, and then the 11:00 news hammered it home again.

One television crew drove into Loretto, where the reporter spent all day attempting to get someone to talk to him with no luck.

"Loretto, Kentucky," the reporter said, according to a Marion County viewer, "population two thousand, and nobody knows a thing."

Some people didn't believe it at all. Cornbread Mafia? Never heard of it. Others believed it but for all the wrong reasons. Some disgruntled citizens could give names of a whole string of people they saw with their own eyes get arrested with a whole busload of other people-and it wasn't just farmers and outlaws. It was prominent people and public servants. It was everyone but the talker's family. As the rumors spread, they took on a force of their own.

Suddenly phones started ringing everywhere-at the police station, the sheriff's office, the commonwealth attorney's office and the US Attorney's Office in Louisville. Misled by the press conference and the uncritical reporting that followed, people called to ask for details of the arrests that they assumed had occurred within the last few days, when in reality the arrests had taken place over four years. A newscast on Lebanon's radio station WLBN reported on Wednesday morning (five days after the press conference) what should have been obvious after the first day: Despite all your calls, folks, what you're saying just isn't true; there was no FBI roundup in Lebanon last week.

Meanwhile, as the rumors hit tidal wave proportions, John Bramel realized that when the Enterprise came out that week, people would read his factual account of the press conference; then the truth would be known, and the world would become sane again. Under a photo of Assistant US Attorney David Grise pointing to his big map, Bramel wrote the headline:

CORN BREAD MAFIA?

The question mark was his editorial statement, a mark of skepticism of Grise's claims.

"What makes you think it was an editorial statement?" Bramel asked defensively twenty-two years later. Then he smiled. "You're right. It was." As Bramel worked in his office Wednesday morning, a woman who refused to identify herself called his line.

"When are you gonna report the truth," she barked, "and report the names of those who have been arrested!"

By then news of Marion County and the Cornbread Mafia had acquired prominent placement on the front pages of newspapers across the country and around the globe. One Lebanon native saw the headline by chance in a suburban D.C. diner in northern Virginia. In Australia, Marion County native Sandra Gwinn worked as a tax accountant in Sydney and was surprised when her Price Waterhouse co-workers showed her the "Cornbread Mafia" headline from the Sydney Morning Herald.

"They didn't even know what cornbread was in Australia," Sandra Gwinn said twenty years later. "All they had there was polenta."

On the same day in June 1989, Johnny Boone, in federal custody for nearly two years by then, wondered if he would ever be able to see home again. Then, on television, he saw news of the press conference in Louisville where David Grise revealed the workings of the Cornbread Mafia.

"I wonder where they got that name," Boone thought to himself. He had certainly never applied the label himself to his operations, but there was David Grise on television, telling the world that it was a name the pot growers called themselves.

Johnny Boone was not alone in suspecting that the term Cornbread Mafia had been coined by the federal agents, eager to ignite the imagination of the public. Others in Marion County would blame the Courier ,journal, the first news outlet to use the term in print. Yet, an FBI memo obtained through the Freedom of Information Act stated "this term has been applied to this group by some of the participants," an allegation that many participants would later deny, which confirms the idea that this was no single organized "mafia" at all but rather many crews operating independently. James "Jim Bean" Cecil later said he was there when the infamous term was created.

"We were all sitting down here in this big metal shop," recalled Jim Bean, who served a four-year sentence for taking 733 pounds of marijuana to Florida with J. C. Abell in 1983. "Aaannnd, we were sitting there talking, and we all ... I don't know what year it was. It was either'79 or'80. It wasn't'81, I'm sure of it. I was thinking about'80, and we started talking about how we was, out in the cornfield, you know, 'cornfield'this and `cornfield' that. And the word, the best to my knowledge, and the word, what'd they call us? `Corn Boys.'

"Then we started talking about the mafia. Therefore, that's the first time I heard the word Cornbread Mafia. That was in about around '80, and from then on, I guess, you know, we would jokingly say, `Well, you know we're the Cornbread Mafia,' and that's when [the state police] come down there, and that's when they picked up on it.

"And the year, that one year there,'81, they were trying to follow some of us to a patch because we found this homer [homing device] because Bobby Joe had a black truck and took it down there to [a service station]. And they raised the truck up, you know, and the one of them told him, without saying anything ... He walked into the garage, and they pointed to this black box with an antenna and a magnet on it. What they were trying to do, they were trying to follow him, not knowing we'd find that box.

"We took it off, and they put it on someone else's truck. I don't know who or where or nothing, but I'm sure they got sent on a wild goose chase."

To briefly revisit the map revealed at the June 1989 press conference: Many retired Cornbreaders looking at it came to the same conclusion, which was that the government found only a fraction of Cornbread crops across the country.The map clearly showed busts to the west and north of Kentucky-9 o'clock to 12 o'clock-but nothing from 12:01 to 8:59. Three-quarters of the Cornbread clock face remained undiscovered, it would seem.