The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History (50 page)

Boone and Marks, both with a reputation on the inside as being "nonrats,"or "stand-up guys,"had little to worry about from rational threats. But inside Terre Haute, violence could come from an irrational source at any moment, as some gang initiation rituals required recruits to kill inmates at random. Even inmates with violent reputations weren't safe-like Chicago Vicelord gang leader Roosevelt Daniels, who was brutally murdered in the prison cafeteria. Child molesters were particularly vulnerable; other prisoners killed them just for sport. On some nights, inmates could watch movies in one of the television rooms. There, in the dark, someone would get behind the child molester and shiv him; the dead pedophile would slump over; and the rest of the inmates would quietly file out of the room, leaving the bleeding body on the floor as the movie continued to play in the empty room, leaving no witnesses.

If someone like Johnny Boone learned through the prison grapevine that someone else was plotting his death, then that someone would be forced to act on that bit of intelligence and kill his killer before his killer killed him. If the target was a "stand-up guy," most in the prison would be on his side. If a move was being plotted against him, especially by bad guys whom no one liked, word would travel quickly to the intended victim, who would take two UNICOR shivs and tape them into his fists so they couldn't be dropped or kicked out of his hands during the skirmish. Then, for body armor, he would cover his midsection with books and magazines. Fully prepared, he would find the man who was plotting his death, kill him before he had the chance and then slip away after the job was done. No one, of course, would have seen anything.

"I never felt safe," Marks would later write.

Johnny Boone, to take his mind off the constant dangers that surrounded him in Terre Haute, replayed memories over and over in his mind. What was winter like? What was spring like? What was summer like in the field? Even though his relationship with Bobby Joe Shewmaker had become strained to the point of breaking before the feds had closed in around him, some of Boone's fondest memories of the early years included Shewmaker, like one of the times they went to Las Vegas together and stayed at the Desert Inn, where the brother of a Marion County man worked as a vice president. Boone, Shewmaker and their crew were treated as VIPs.

As Boone sat locked away in Terre Haute, he remembered that trip to Vegas, where the hotel provided them with "a limousine, a big one," with a driver they called Mr. Bill.

"We were riding for a while," Boone recalled, "and Bobby decided it wasn't moving fast enough.... He kept sticking that joint over in the driver's mouth. And telling him he was going to take over and drive.

"`Move over or get out'[ Shewmaker said to the driver].

"So he took over driving. Went down through those fucking intersections ... I guess we were doing sixty through them intersections. That big ol'sideways car slide through there. [The driver] kept smoking pot. I guess that's the only way that driver can handle it. That son of a bitch got loaded.

"The driver in the passenger seat looked pretty official! Going through them intersections on yellow lights at fifty-five or sixty. Hoo boy, it was funnier than hell! I think Bobby tipped him pretty good, even on the start, so I guess he seen the promised land, there.

"Going to the Hoover Dam. Out there they wanted to rent a helicopter, and they did.

"And I said, `I ain't really scared of it, but I don't see no fucking use in getting into the goddamn thing.... It ain't going to make me no money. I'm not going.'

"They all got in it and went up there. Had a pretty good time.

"But that day, and that helicopter and the walls of the canyon and looking up there, and I thought, `Shit, fuck that shit. I'm going to do something else right now."'

In the years that followed, Boone and Shewmaker went their separate ways, and locked away in the belly of the Terre Haute penitentiary, Johnny Boone figured he would never see or hear from Bobby Joe Shewmaker again. Then, in the course of Shewmaker's federal custody, the Bureau of Prisons transferred him temporarily to Terre Haute.

Although they never made eye contact, Johnny Boone and Shewmaker talked to each other by shouting out their windows to each other.

"Well,"Boone shouted. "I guess Snake Lamkin went and fucked you," referring to the man whose report that the car had been stolen led to Shewmaker's arrest.

"No," Shewmaker replied. "It wasn't Snake. It was something that [my brother] did but didn't mean to do."

Boone never understood what Shewmaker meant by that.

Miller Hunt, the dealer from Maine who wore the wire on the Bicketts, began serving his reduced federal sentence in March 1989, less than a month after he returned to New England from the buy-bust sting in Lebanon and Raywick. His sentence would last fewer than nine years, far below Reagan's mandatory minimum. As Hunt began his prison term, Assistant US Attorney David Grise began preparing the government's case against the Bickett brothers, to be presided over by US District Judge Charles Simpson, a conservative Republican, who had served from 1978 to 1984 as part-time staff counsel to Jefferson County Judge Executive Mitch McConnell. When McConnell was elected to the US Senate, Simpson was nominated for the federal bench and approved by the Senate in 1986.

During the pretrial discovery process, Grise submitted to the five defense attorneys copies of the tape recording made by the body wires worn by Michael Haskell and Miller Hunt in their visit to Joe Keith Bickett's log cabin. Because their microphones transmitted, via FM-radio frequency, to a low-flying airplane on a rainy day, the transmission often sounded garbled and unintelligible. Consequently, one of the defense attorneys moved to suppress the tape as evidence, and Judge Simpson, who agreed that portions of the tape were too garbled to understand, ruled that the tape would not be admissible.

The motion to suppress the tape had not been filed by Joe Keith Bickett's attorney, Tim McCall. He wanted the tapes submitted as evidence because he felt the tape recording held the key to creating a jury's reasonable doubt about the credibility of the government's case.

Before the court ruled the recording inadmissible, McCall asked DEA Agent Richard Badaracco about the tape. When McCall said he thought there was some problem with the tape, Badaracco said the agents recording the transmission might have gone under a viaduct because of the rainy weather. McCall didn't know Marion County well, but he knew the rural, isolated county well enough to know it had no viaducts-no overpasses or road bridges under which a vehicle could park. So, Badaracco's explanation only propelled McCall forward.

To look into it further, McCall sent a copy of the tape to an audio expert at the University of Florida to get his opinion and sent another copy to an expert in Louisville. But for the experts to confirm anyone's suspicions of tampering, they would need to examine the original, which the government didn't want to give to the defense without a court order.

When the judge finally ruled the tape inadmissible because it was garbled and inaudible, the Louisville audio expert told Joe Keith Bickett that he had just lost his only shot at winning his case. The expert thought he could prove that the taped evidence had been altered purposefully three separate times. Without the tape, all the defense could do was attack the credibility of the government's witnesses, Hunt and Haskell.

Miller Hunt, the Cornbread Task Force's star witness, took the stand first to give his version of events inside Joe Keith Bickett's log cabin: Hunt told Bickett that his "business partner," Raymond Gagner (actually the undercover Maine narcotics officer), could get kilos of cocaine for $16,000.

"I mentioned that to [Bickett], and he said it sounded good, stuff like that," Hunt said about the cocaine. "And we mentioned the marijuana, you know, getting the marijuana together and everything, and prices a little bit, but not anything really firm said at the house."

The rest of Hunt's testimony related to Gary "Tank" Allen, Jimmy Bickett and Snake Lamkin-the three men who eventually made the marijuana transaction that led to their arrests.

The government had testimony from witnesses that Joe Keith Bickett had conspired to distribute marijuana in the past and within the five-year statute of limitations on federal drug charges. However, the only thing the government could tie to Joe Keith since November 1987 (the start of Reagan's minimum sentencing guidelines) was the episode in Bickett's log cabin with Hunt and Haskell. If Bickett could prove that he had withdrawn from the conspiracy before the start of Reagan's minimum sentencing guidelines, the court would have to sentence him under the "old law," which meant that he would have access to federal parole and would have to serve only two-thirds of his sentence. But the government was deeply invested in ensuring that Joe Keith Bickett and his brother Jimmy went to prison for as long as it could possibly send them. The feds needed to prosecute both Bicketts under Reagan's "new law."

Joe Keith's attorney believed that the government had purposefully altered the audio recording to remove evidence that would have been beneficial to his client's defense. During the government's direct examination of its star witness, Hunt described in detail the debt he said he owed the Bicketts and how he proposed to Joe Keith that he would pay it back by adding a surcharge per pound onto the purchase to pass along to his "partner," the undercover narcotics officer from Maine. Yet, these portions of the conversation were directly contradicted by Bickett, who claimed that in the cabin he had repeatedly denied that Hunt owed him any money. Bickett stated emphatically that he had not done any business with Hunt since Hunt had gone to prison for his Louisiana arrest.

Of course, this was not the first time in a federal courtroom where the word of one convicted criminal was contradicted by that of an accused criminal. Neither account, in any instance, would likely be the complete truth. Both men were in a fight for their freedom. However, in this case, the government had wired its informants with transmitters to record the true, unaltered conversation as it occurred. But when the tape of that conversation made it into defense counsels' hands in discovery, portions of the supposedly complete recording appeared to be missing, including the part of the conversation when Joe Keith Bickett denied the debt that Hunt kept insisting he owed. It was at this moment in the conversation that Danny Cecil and his daughter arrived on horseback, and that whole moment, too, was absent on the tape recording.

Danny Joe Maraman, an assistant jailer at the Bullitt County jail, usually worked the second shift in the three-story jail, which could house up to fifty-five prisoners. In January 1990, he became acquainted with three federal prisoners staying there during their trial in Louisville: Miller Hunt, Mike Haskell and Roland Villacci.

Haskell arrived at the jail on January 19, 1990, and Maraman placed him in a cell on the west end of the third floor, near the cell of Robert Lamb, a Vietnam veteran and former prisoner of war. By the mid-1980s, Lamb had fallen in trouble with the law and was staying at the Bullitt County jail as a sixteen-month guest of the federal government for lying to the Veterans Administration. Between January and February 1990, in the third floor cell block, Lamb and Haskell became friendly: Lamb lent Haskell clothes, and they began having conversations. At first, Haskell said only that he was in jail on narcotics charges stemming from his conviction in Maine and that he had been brought to Louisville to testify against others from Kentucky. Eventually Haskell asked Lamb if he knew any of the Cornbread Mafia and told Lamb he was going to testify against the Bicketts.

Before going to jail, Lamb had known the Bickett brothers' father, J. E. "Squire" Bickett, and had gambled with Jimmy and Joe Keith Bickett on several occasions in the back room of Club 68 in Lebanon, but at the time Lamb had known nothing of the Bicketts'role in the marijuana business.

Haskell told Lamb that his partner, Miller Hunt, had set him up in Maine and that he didn't want to testify against the Bicketts but that if he didn't, the prosecutor and a DEA agent had told him he would be indicted for the same charges that the Bicketts were facing and that he would get a ten-year sentence, at least. Lamb tried to make arrangements for Haskell to talk to his lawyer, but Haskell couldn't get the money together.

About three weeks after Haskell arrived at the jail, Hunt arrived on February 8 at 6:15 p.m., after his first day of testimony against the Bicketts, at which time he was placed in a cell near Haskell's on the third floor, where Roland Villacci, their co-conspirator from Maine, had also been placed three hours earlier. The US marshals who brought these men to the jail gave the jailers no orders to separate them.

Maraman would later recall that as soon as he brought Hunt into the cell block, Hunt and Villacci sat on the bunk in Haskell's cell, where the three talked in low voices. Maraman made three or four checks on the cell block that night; at each check, he saw that the three Maine men were still talking. Robert Lamb witnessed the same thing from his cell. Maraman's shift ended at 11:30 p.m. Haskell would later tell Lamb that the reason they had talked together was to get their stories straight so they could testify in the same manner.