The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History (52 page)

Johnny Boone had not associated with the Bicketts for a decade before they all arrived at the prison in Manchester. When cocaine had come to Marion County in the early 1980s, it had driven a wedge between those who dealt with it and those who saw it as a magic powder that turned good people into assholes. The Bicketts, along with men like J. C. Abell, followed Bobby Joe Shewmaker down the cocaine road, which distanced them all from men like Johnny Boone, who saw firsthand the problems and misery cocaine caused and avoided it altogether.

By 1985, cocaine had caused a fundamental rift in the once-friendly Cornbread Mafia. Shewmaker and his men were running in places like Kansas, and Boone had his crews in places like Minnesota. Before the net fell and they had all been rounded up, the Kansas and Minnesota "families" of the Cornbread Mafia were nearly at war with each otherdeath threats between them had been exchanged. The cocaine use of the Kansas men caused a fundamental communication breakdown between them and Johnny Boone, who wanted them to quit fooling with that shit.

But by the early 1990s, all that was behind everyone because most everyone involved was in the custody of the US Bureau of Prisons. Jimmy Bickett and Johnny Boone became fast friends again, just as they had been before the first kilo of cocaine came to Raywick.

Joe Keith Bickett, freed from the influence of cocaine, spent most of his time in the prison law library, learning about the laws the government used to sentence him to a quarter-century behind bars. Then he and his lawyers drafted a detailed appeal, based on what they learned about Hunt, Haskell and Villacci talking with each other in the Bullitt County jail. They hadn't known during the course of the trial the extent of collusion between the three informants from Maine, so they couldn't introduce it as evidence, which might have damaged the credibility of the witnesses enough to create reasonable doubt with the jury, or so Joe Keith Bickett argued in his appeal on behalf of himself and his brother Jimmy. Joe Keith also pointed to the allegations that the DEA had edited the surveillance tape and had provided Haskell with his prior sworn statements while he was under direct examination. A three-judge panel from the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected each of Joe Keith's claims and affirmed the Bickett brothers'sentences, with this unhelpful caveat:

"While we find that the trial court did not abuse its discretion ..." the court wrote, "the government's conduct in this matter is disquieting. Although there is no proof that the government's witnesses tailored their testimony, the government acted improperly by placing all three witnesses in the same cell for an extended period of time after the first day of trial. Such conduct raises the specter of impropriety, and, for that reason alone, should have been avoided."

After the Sixth Circuit denied the Bicketts' appeal, Jimmy Bickett accepted that he would be in prison for the better part of the next two decades. Yet, Joe Keith remained in the law library, finding new ways to challenge his sentence, which he continued to assert had been wrongly imposed. Although the two brothers differed in how they handled their fates, the Bicketts were of a single mind when they worried what effect their incarcerations might have on their family. Their pot-growing days might have been behind them, but their family's grief was not.

In 1995, when the Bickett brothers had been in prison for six years, their sister, Patricia, thirty-nine, and her husband, Richard Gaddie, fifty, sold a 1989 Bass Tracker fishing boat to a man named Altha "Junior" Cox, who paid with a check that bounced. When Patricia asked Cox either to pay for the boat or bring it back, Cox drove to their trailer parked on the Bickett family farm in Raywick and, finding both Patricia and Richard at home, shot them both twice in the head with a .22 Magnum.

To conceal the evidence of his crime, Cox set fire to the trailer, where Patricia's two schnauzers curled around the bodies of their owners as their home burned around them. The four bodies were found together. Cox pleaded guilty and received two life sentences of twenty-five years, to run concurrently, plus a ten-year arson sentence to run at the same time. For 150 pounds of marijuana and his connection to Shewmaker's Kansas operation, Joe Keith Bickett was sentenced to three hundred months in prison. For the double homicide of Bickett's sister and brother-in-law, Cox would be eligible for parole in the same amount of time.

In the late 1990s, as Johnny Boone's release date loomed only a few years away, the Bureau of Prisons transferred him to its facility in Lexington, Kentucky, just sixty miles from home. Not long after, it transferred Jimmy Bickett there, too.

Bickett and Boone spent as many hours together in Lexington as they could, remembering old times. When they went to the weight room together for the first time, however, the two Kentucky men were walking into a corner of the prison claimed by a Washington, D.C., gang, and led by a large man who called himself Money.

As Bickett and Boone started lifting at a weight station, Money came over to tell them that he and his crew wanted to use that bench.

"All right," Boone said. "We'll use this one over here."

"Naw," Money said as members of his gang stood behind him. "We need that one, too."

And then it was clear. Itwasn't the weight bench Moneywanted. Money wanted Bickett and Boone to leave. Money did not get what he wanted. Johnny Boone stood his ground; the years of hardening he had undergone at Terre Haute had further tempered his already strong, alpha-male physique behind his graying beard. Jimmy Bickett stood at his side the whole time.

Boone knew that Jimmy Bickett was a fighter, had seen him kick plenty of ass in Raywick; the fourth son of Squire Bickett was no coward. Here, in the face of certain defeat, outnumbered by a D.C. street gang five to one, Bickett didn't flinch, didn't leave Boone's side, and the two Kentucky men, one ten years younger than the other, stood their ground against nearly a dozen gangbangers, all with jailhouse physiques, ready for the fists to fly over a territorial fight on the weight pile.

But Money wasn't prepared to begin a battle until he calculated what damage each of these two Kentucky men might inflict on his own. The standoff ended, instead, with jailhouse respect, and Money and his men backed off, leaving Boone and Bickett at their weight bench. After that incident, Boone and Bickett were closer than they had ever been in the free world.

In the Lexington prison, Johnny Boone passed the time betting books of stamps, prison currency, on Jimmy Bickett's games of bocce-the Italian bowling game, much like horseshoes, in which players toss or roll four croquet-sized balls toward the smaller boccino, and each round's points are given only to the team with the ball nearest the boccino. The game had been imported into the prison system by incarcerated Mafiosi, and Jimmy Bickett was one of the best players on the yard.

Every wiseguy wanted Bickett on his bocce team, even though the Italians didn't have much respect for Bickett, Boone or the other incarcerated Kentuckians, whom the Italians would openly refer to as "hillbillies" and "rednecks." Bickett didn't like them using those words, so he decided he would badmouth the Italians' heritage, too. Having grown up in Raywick, though, Bickett had never learned the slurs used to disparage Italian Americans in East Coast cities, so he had to think of his own"spaghetti-eatin' motherfuckers."

The wiseguys didn't like that.

There was something else they didn't like about Jimmy Bickett. Traditionally, bocce was played by old men quietly with strategy and skill. But that's not how Jimmy Bickett played. He would stand at the end of the pit and talk trash to distract his opponent.

"You ain't no good," he would say. "You think you're smart, but you're locked up in here with the rest of us, spaghetti-eatin' motherfucker."

Johnny Boone wagered books of stamps on these games, betting on Bickett's team. Over time, Bickett's insults began to overshadow his usefulness as a bowler; some of the wiseguys grew tired of hearing Bickett call them his invented ethnic slur. So, one day an older Italian asked Bickett to take a walk with him around the track. When they were alone, the old man spoke.

"Why do you call us `spaghetti-eating motherfuckers'?"

"Because that's what you are,"Jimmy Bickett told him.

"What can we do to keep you from calling us that?"

"Just quit calling us `hillbillies."'

"Is that all?"

By the time the two men had walked a lap on the track, the problem had been solved without anyone getting hurt; the closest thing ever to a gang war between the Cornbread Mafia and the actual Mafia had been averted.

Meanwhile, as two Bickett brothers did their time in federal prison, another Bickett brother worked his way up the ranks at the Marion Adjustment Center, the prison in St. Mary's.

"I had a lot of knowledge about prisons," Charlie Bickett later said. "I was able to talk to inmates just like I'm talking to you right now. I got along with the inmates because they knew my background. They knew my brothers were in the pen, and they knew I come from a community there that had a lot of, I call them gangsters, there. So, they knew all about Charlie Bickett's profile.

"A lot of'em, some of'em, started saying that I was bringing drugs in, telling the deputy director of security, and that's when Cliff Todd called me up.

"He said, `Charlie, they're going to give you a polygraph test.'

"I said, `What for?'

"This was about 3:00 in the morning when Cliff called me.

"He said, `Well, they think you're bringing drugs in. Are you?'

"I said, `No sir. I'm not. Never have and never will.'

"So anyway, David Donahue [the warden] called me over to his office.

"He said, `Mr. Bickett, what if you had an employee here you think is selling drugs on campus, what would you do?'

"I said, `I'd require him to have a urinalysis and a polygraph test.'

"He said, `Guess who that is?'

"And I said, `Me.'

"And he looked at me.... He said, `Well, this morning, we're going to go to Frankfort to give you a polygraph so we can nip this in the bud or do what we gotta do.'

"I said, `Let's go.'

"So, we left that morning, about 7:00, and, of course, I came out smelling like a rose. Well, it wasn't but a week later that the guy that took me down there, the chief of security, they busted his ass for doing cocaine and bringing drugs in.