The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History (56 page)

Jimmy Bickett backs away from the collision and pulls up alongside his brother rolling his window down. Boone sees young Ben in the back seat in his Cub Scout uniform, grinning ear to ear.

"We ain't got time for this,"Jimmy says, scolding his brother. "We're late for Cub Scouts!"

In 2008, after I had been driving down his bone-lined drive to see him at his cabin for more than a year, Johnny Boone visits me at my apartment in Lebanon for the first time on February 12, the night of the presidential primary elections in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C. Boone tells me that he isn't visiting for any specific reason, that he is just "making my rounds" and thinks he will come by and check on me. I invite him in, and we watch the election returns come in on the television, with Obama and McCain carrying the night.

When the news anchor announces that the network has the results in for the Republican primary for the District of Columbia, I laugh and say:

"There probably won't be five thousand Republican votes in D.C."

The results show John McCain with 3,929 and Mike Huckabee with 961, and Johnny Boone looks at me real fast with surprise behind his beard and bifocals.

"Well, how many can there be?" I say. "They're all staffers or lobbyists. Everybody else in that town's a Democrat."

Then the cable news shows the full results with "Other" receiving 911 votes.

"Besides, see? I missed a bunch," I say.

"Oh, off by a thousand!" Boone says, laughing.

Boone doesn't usually follow politics but stays glued to the television after the election returns are in and watches Senator Barack Obama give his victory speech of the night from Madison, Wisconsin:

"Today the change we seek swept through the Chesapeake and over the Potomac. We won the state of Maryland. We won the Commonwealth of Virginia. And though we won in Washington, D.C., this movement won't stop until there's change in Washington. And tonight, we're on our way...

"We can't keep playing the same Washington game with the same Washington players and expect a different result-because it's a game that ordinary Americans are losing....

"It's a game where the only way for Democrats to look tough on national security is by talking and acting and voting like Bush-McCain Republicans, while our troops are sent to fight tour after tour of duty in a war that should've never been authorized and should've never been waged.' what happens when we use 9/11 to scare up votes, and that's why we need to do more than end a war-we need to end the mind-set that got us into war...."

This line strikes Johnny Boone hard. I see him react to it, visibly moved by Obama's hopeful rhetoric-because when Boone hears "we need to end the mind-set that got us into war," he's not thinking Iraq; he's thinking about the war on him.

"He's the real fucking deal, isn't he?" Boone asks me after Obama finishes his speech to thunderous applause in Madison. I nod, feeling the same way.

"Do you ever think, if he's elected president, that he would legalize it so that a farmer could grow a little pot?" He looks at me after he asks it, waiting for me to answer.

"I don't know," I say. "I'd like to say yes, but probably not. Maybe in his second term."

Boone isn't the only one with whom Obama resonates. Out in Raywick, Charlie Bickett is feeling it, too. Back in the 1990s, Kentucky was a big state for Bill Clinton, who won the commonwealth's electoral votes in 1992 and 1996 and by huge margins in Marion County. So, in 2008, the Clinton boosters are out in force to drum up votes for Hillary, but Charlie Bickett holds firm in his support for the upstart.

The Obama campaign appears to evoke in Charlie Bickett a Huckleberry Finn moment, where he bucks the cultural status quo while still using racist language.

"I don't care what anybody says," Charlie Bickett says a number of times leading up to the Kentucky presidential primary in late May. "And I know it sounds crazy, but I'm going to vote for that nigger!"

In the course of my first two years of investigating the Cornbread Mafia, my editor at Putnam leaves the publishing house to become an agent. So, when I have a manuscript ready, I send it to Putnam, but none of the editors there seems interested. Finally, an editor bothers to look at the word count and tells me to cut it from 125,000 words to 85,000 before she will look at it again. I chop it down-cutting the Reverend DeRohan, Garland Russell, Charlie Stiles, the hot air-conditioner incident and lots more-and send it back to New York.

In March 2008, my agent calls me while I'm parked in the same McDonald's parking lot that Miller Hunt pulled into after getting 150 pounds of pot from the Bicketts twenty-nine years before. He tells me that in book publishing, orphans get killed and that Putnam wants to terminate my contract because my project had been orphaned by my former editor's departure. I decide to return to New York to facilitate the resale of my book. Before I go, I make one last visit to Johnny Boone on his farm.

The skeleton gate is open, and I drive up to Boone, who has his truck parked on his gravel driveway midway between his gate and his cabin. The bed of his truck is loaded with a mound of dark mulch, and he's covering the wildflower bed that lines his driveway, a bed that will produce the flowers he will cut and deliver to people he likes as he has done every summer since his return from prison. I grab a shovel to help.

"Naw," Boone says, stopping me. "You need the right tool for the job," and he hands me a pitchfork.

It looks to me like the mulch will fall through the pitchfork's tines, but Boone is right. Whereas I have to fight to get the spade into the mound of mulch, the pitchfork slides right in. Every so often, Boone moves his truck up ten feet, and we mulch the whole bed before taking a break. We talk for a bit about my going to New York. It's not anything formal or final. We'll see each other again, we figure.

By April, I find an apartment in Crown Heights in Brooklyn (on Bergen Street between Graham and Classon Avenues), and I work at an Upper East Side tutoring firm while I hustle to secure another book deal.

On May 20, Marion County voters go to the polls for the Kentucky primary, and 822 vote for Barack Obama versus 3,661 for Hillary Clinton. In Charlie Bickett's precinct of Raywick, the tally is 260 for Clinton and 50 for Obama. She beats him in every one of Marion County's seventeen voting precincts.

Some of his patrons can't believe that Charlie Bickett votes for a black man, so Bickett takes it one step further. With a permanent magic marker, he writes on the side of his bar's refrigerator:

"I, Charlie Bickett, bet John McKinsey $100 that Barack Obama will be the next president of the USA."

And below that: "I bet [another person's name] $150 that Barack Obama..."

And below that, more names and more dollar amounts, totaling $750, which Charlie Bickett will use at the end of 2008 to buy himself a new refrigerator. Perhaps because of Bickett's support, Barack Obama will beat John McCain in Raywick in November: 270 to 248, along with most of the precincts in Lebanon and in the rural, Catholic, pot-growing precincts of Loretto (323 to 238); St. Francis (166 to 100); and Holy Cross (161 to 71). Although Obama will lose to McCain in the countywide tally by 3.3 percent (3,842 to 3,596), McCain's advantage in surrounding counties will be much more extreme: Nelson County (McCain by 13.7 percent); Washington County (McCain by 26.9 percent) and Taylor County (McCain by 40.6 percent). McCain will win Kentucky by 16.4 percent.

In the last week of May 2008, the week after the primary election, Kentucky State Police and the DEA visit Johnny Boone's farm after conducting aerial surveillance paid for by the $1.15 million budget of the Kentucky State Police's Cannabis Suppression Branch (in 2009, the CSB budget will increase to $1.76 million). On Boone's farm, police discover 2,421 marijuana seedlings on two flatbed wagons that can be pulled out from a barn to get sunlight and then pushed back inside in an effort to keep anyone from spotting them-clones that would have produced hash pot with buds like rock candy if they had matured.

The police estimate the crop is worth "over $5 million," which is "one of the largest finds in the county's history," according to the June 4, 2008, issue of the Springlield Sun.

"It started with a routine marijuana eradication in Washington County on May 27," the newspaper reports, "but it ended up with one of the largest finds in the county's history."

The Sun then lists the drug task force's street value estimate: "The search turned up 2,421 marijuana plants and 200 pounds of processed marijuana. . . . The marijuana plants had an estimated street value of $4,842,000, while the processed marijuana was valued at $340,000."

These sorts of valuations for pot busts tend to wash over a reader. Those unfamiliar with the business tend to take police officers at their word, whereas smokers, growers and defense attorneys look at the numbers with a great deal of skepticism. Either way, it is important to understand how the police arrive at such a number.

To value the 2,421 plants at $4,842,000, it is clear that the police involved in the bust Western Kentucky Drug Task Force, Kentucky State Police, KSP DESI West and the KSP Cannabis Suppression Branchmultiplied the number of plants by $2,000 because 2,421 times 2,000 equals 4,842,000. This formula comes from the DEA's long-standing claim that each plant yields a pound and that each pound will be worth $2,000.

In addition to the plants, police find two hundred pounds of processed pot, and 2,000 times 200 should equal $400,000. However, the newspaper reports that the "processed marijuana was valued at $340,000," or $60,000 less than what it should be worth if a pound is worth $2,000, or thirty pounds went missing between the seizure of the pot and its valuation, or so it appears.

The value of the crop is the last thing on Johnny Boone's mind: He has bigger problems. This raid on his farm constitutes his third federal strike. Strike 1 was Belize in 1982; strike 2 was Minnesota in 1987; and if police catch him now, Johnny Boone will spend the rest of his life in prison without parole because of the 1996 federal Three Strikes law signed by President Bill Clinton-becoming another nonviolent outlaw serving a life sentence for persistent criminal farming.

With squad cars and agents from the federal-state task force swarming around Boone's barns, where the helicopter had spotted the two flatbed trailers covered in flowerpots filled with seedlings, each plant no more than two feet high, Boone's farm becomes a crime scene for the third time in ten suicide seven years before; the 1998 discovery of pot in Jeff's newly built cabin, where Johnny lives until this exact moment; and now this bust. It's the farm's fourth time as a crime scene if one also counts the 1976 bust of Johnny with a ten-year-old Jeff at his side.

Some in law enforcement now believe that Johnny Boone is on the farm when the task force squad cars arrive following the helicopter flyover. Yet, the police are so focused on seizing and counting the 2,421 flowerpot seedlings that they fail to determine if, in fact, their suspect remains on the property. Johnny Boone escapes.

When the Springlield Sun runs the "More Than $5 Million in Pot" headline a week later, the name of the suspect is not released because federal and state agents believe they are in hot pursuit, and they nearly catch him.