The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History (54 page)

"Because this defendant has not shown entitlement to the relief of his requests, his motions are appropriately, and hereby are, DENIED." [emphasis his]

Because Judge Simpson stated no reason for his final denial, Bickett appealed his decision to the Sixth Circuit.

While Joe Keith Bickett remained in prison, his brother Jimmy was released in August 2006, first to a halfway house in Louisville and then home to Raywick. Jimmy's sentence had been five years shorter than Joe Keith's because ofJoe Keith's connection to Shewmaker's Kansas operation.

Less than a year after Jimmy Bickett returned home, former Enterprise editor Steve Lowery passed away, his death the result of a long fight against alcoholism.

"Steve Lowery was . . . one of the best rural journalists I've ever known," Al Cross said in his eulogy for Lowery on May 8, 2007, three days after Calvin Borel rode Street Sense to victory in the 133rd Kentucky Derby, which paid $11.80 on a $2 ticket.

"The best rural editors play two institutional roles," Cross said, "that of the journalist, independent to a fault, and the role of civic leader. You must be willing to call them as you see them, show courage and speak truth to power. But whatever passion you show in criticizing what you think is wrong, you must show that same passion in promoting what you think is right. Steve did both-and he did it, to be frank, in a place where that may have been a little more difficult than most."

MARY IMMACULATE HOSPITAL CHANGED ITS NAME TO SPRINGVIEW AND installed air-conditioning well before September 28, 1976, when I was born there. I attended St. Augustine School, where, in my sixth-grade class, we got two new students: Zachary Bramel, son of the new newspaper editor, and Michi Ozone, daughter of the new auto parts factory manager.' same year that the Bramel boys and the Japanese kids arrived at St. A., several uncles and fathers of our classmates started going to jail, then to trial and then to prison. At the end of seventh grade, 1989, the US Attorney's Office held the "Cornbread Mafia" press conference, and the media circus began.

At first, the adults around us appeared angry at the marijuana growers for bringing a fresh round of bad publicity upon Marion County-its third bad reputation in fifty years-but as the bad press continued, the community's animosity shifted toward the federal government and the media for maligning a whole community for the actions of a few.

To combat the mixed reputation that Club 68 had bestowed upon Lebanon in the 1960s, members of the community banded together to make Country Ham Days, established in 1970 on the last weekend in September, the best harvest festival in the region. By 1981, Marion County Country Ham Days depended on five hundred volunteers to serve to a crowd of twenty thousand visitors some 4,548 ham breakfasts, made with 15,000 biscuits, 600 hams, 10,320 eggs, 210 gallons of apples and 144 pounds of coffee.

In 1989, the first Ham Days after the "Cornbread Mafia" press conference, the rain and cold weather decreased Ham Days'breakfast sales by 550 from 1988's total, but overall revenue for the festival rose 9 percent from the previous year, from $98,677 to $107,706, despite the rain and cold.' That year I bused tables under the breakfast tent with the rest of the middle-school football team. To fight off the cold, I drank my first fifteen cups of coffee.

I graduated from Marion County High School in 1994 without ever smoking marijuana once. I attended Centre College; I attended Brown University; I moved to New York. In 2004, I enrolled at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, which I discovered offered a book-writing class taught by New York Times columnist and book author Sam Freedman.

I tell him I want in.

"What's your book about?" he asks.

"The biggest homegrown marijuana syndicate in American history," I tell him.

"Send it to me in an e-mail," he says.

In May 2005, I graduate Columbia with honors and a book proposal. I secure an agent. I intern at the Courier-journal in Louisville. I take a job as a web producer for the New York Times. In October, my agent sells the book to Putnam. I give my notice at the Times and return to Kentucky at the end of the year.

My advance arrives in January 2006, just as zookeepers in Houston notice that Bruno, the male lion and centerpiece of the zoo's big cat exhibit, is refusing food. Eventually he stops responding to his handlers altogether and shows signs of pain. After he has eaten a raw-meat diet for eighteen years (nearly double an African lion's lifespan in the wild), Bruno's kidneys are failing.

On a Saturday, Waheed Agha, a Houston resident and amateur photographer, takes photographs of Bruno in the morning sun nuzzling with his sister, Lindi, twenty, and daughter, Celesto, who was born on June 1, 1990, according to Kevin Hodge, a supervisor at the zoo's carnivore section. On Tuesday, as Agha works in the photo-processing storefront he manages in the downtown underground mall called the Tunnels, Houston Zoo veterinarians separate Bruno from his female kin through a series of steel cages, sedate him, and then euthanize him with an injection. On Thursday, January 19, the Houston Chronicle runs Bruno's obituary on the front page of its Metro section, headlined: "Zoo Bids Farewell to Its Reigning Feline."

"Bruno's deep-throated roar was a daily occurrence at the Houston Zoo," the story begins. "It could be heard throughout the grounds and, if the wind was right, beyond."

"He had a tendency to call first thing in the morning and last thing in the evening," Hollie Colahan, the zoo's curator for primates and carnivores, tells the Chronicle. "You could hear that all over the zoo."

However, even though Bruno's passing is well documented, his origins, as well as those of his sister, are less clear to their keepers.' heir birth date of December 1, 1987, was estimated because if anyone knows the lions' exact birthdates, he's not talking.

"Bruno's genetic pedigree was unknown," the Chronicle reports. "He was confiscated in a federal drug raid."

No one in Houston knows the details of that federal drug raid or that Bobby Joe Shewmaker bought Bruno and Lindi as cubs and kept them with a black bear on a marijuana farm in Princeton, Kansas, population 322; nor does anyone in Houston know about Bruno's connection to the male lion confiscated from Jimmy Bickett, Chico, who is said to have found a new life on a nature preserve and a role in a Steven Spielberg movie, possibly the lion on the circus train in the opening scene of IndianaJones and the Last Crusade.

In February 2006, I drive to New Orleans for a wedding of friends rescheduled for the weekend after Mardi Gras because the original date had been the weekend Hurricane Katrina hit. We attend Mardi Gras on Tuesday; on Wednesday, I drive to Houston, where I meet with the zookeepers, who introduce me to Lindi and Celesto. I record my interview with the zookeepers with an iPod, but the background rumblings of the lionesses' roars clip out the audio, rendering it useless. With a rope four inches thick, I play tug-of-war with one of them through the bars. It hurts my hands and scares me. In the Tunnels, I meet Waheed Agha. On Thursday, I head back toward New Orleans. As I drive Interstate 10 through scenic Beaumont, Texas, I contemplate the different fates of Bruno and Shewmaker, both imprisoned for life, wondering which one had it better off. I make it to the French Quarter in time for the bachelor party. From what I remember, the wedding on Saturday is very nice. (At this point, Lindi has less than a year to live; she will die on February 12, 2007.)

When I return home, I have trouble getting anyone to talk to me about anything not so legal that might have happened in Marion County. My great-uncle, who co-ran the Blue Room poker game in the back room of Club 68 back in the day, looks at me like I'm crazy when I tell him I'm writing a book. Will he talk to me? No. Will the nice lady from Loretto in her nineties talk to me about her father's moonshining during Prohibition? No, she won't, either-"Tell your parents I said hello," she says. As I have trouble getting even the nicer folks to talk to me, I do historical research, dig through church archives, graveyards, newspaper microfilm and congressional records and request documents from courts and police agencies at the federal level and in multiple states.

I find the phone number of Roland Villacci, one of the Fonzarellis from Maine, an informant against the Bicketts, and I book a ticket to visit him. Meanwhile, I work to find contact information for Miller Hunt, the main Maine man, because I want to interview him. He has no contact information online. I learn that people can be hard to find if they don't want to be found, so I look for information about the woman I know used to be his girlfriend, Debbie Lewis. I find a newspaper story that says she died in a camping accident and lists her mother as a survivor. At my layover at LaGuardia Airport in New York, I call the number of her mother and leave a message on the machine explaining that I'm looking for Miller Hunt. When I get to Portland, I meet with Roland Villacci at a local seafood restaurant in a suburban strip mall. He tells me about the time they brought lobsters to Raywick but doesn't answer all my questions.

"Hey, not so loud," he tells me over good seafood. "People know me around here."

He's a nice guy and friendly. He's out of prison, working as a personal trainer in a gym, can't drive because of too many DUIs and lives in his brother's basement.

That night in my hotel room, my cell phone rings at midnight.

"If you go to that house you called today, you're going to get shot," the male voice on the line tells me, referring to the place I called looking for Miller Hunt. "I'm not talking about maybes. This is Maine."

A few minutes later, my phone rings again; it is a Maine state policeman.

"You've got these guys pretty scared up here," he tells me. "They think you're here to kill them."

"What?" I explain to him what I'm doing.

"Look," he says, interrupting me. "If you say you're not going to that house tomorrow, we don't have a problem."

"I'm not going to go to that house tomorrow," I say, and the conversation ends.

After that, at 1:00 a.m., I call the airline to change my flight to the first one out of Portland the next morning.

Back in Kentucky l keep working. One day l drive down Johnny Boone's long driveway and see the thousands of cow bones that adorn his fence line. For one hundred yards, on the wire fence at the edge of the lane hangs the same leg bone from hundreds of cows, meticulously fastened at one-foot intervals. When the leg-bone segment ends, the fence starts with cow ribsevery twelve inches for another two hundred yards. When the road turns at a 90-degree angle, there is a tree with hundreds of bones hanging from it and stuffed in the crotch of the tree where two branches diverge. It has a Texas Chainsaw Massacre feel to it. As I get closer to Boone's house, I pass through a gate guarded by two cow skulls looking down at me. Then I arrive at his locked gate, guarded by more cow skulls, deer heads, KEEP OUT signs and a tattered, faded POW-MIA flag tied across the cattle gate that leads back to the cabin on his farm. He has two mailboxes: In one, a small deer head, with the skin still partially attached, grins at me; the other is empty.