The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History (59 page)

Kuhn walks out in a hurry, and Jack and Trevor follow. We talk as we walk down the hallway back to the sleepy security checkpoint. The grand jury is about to break for lunch, Jack says. I am scheduled to testify at 1:30. It is just now noon. Jack suggests we go next door to the City Cafe for lunch. As we walk, Jack coaches me on how to answer and what not to say. In a grand jury, I learn, I won't have my attorney with me. I can come outside to consult with him whenever I need to, and he talks to me about when to do that, but he can't come in with me.

At the City Cafe, I don't have much of an appetite, so I sit at a table while Jack and Trevor go through the line to fetch themselves sandwiches. Across the street in the US Attorney's Office, John Kuhn burns up the phone lines, asking questions about qualifications for membership in the "news media." Apparently, our First Amendment challenge blindsides Kuhn because if I do qualify as a member of the news media, then the US Attorney's Office has broken Justice Department guidelines in subpoenaing me.

Kuhn calls Trevor during lunch and starts asking him questions about my background. Jack asks me if I wouldn't mind talking with Kuhn myself, and I say sure. Minutes later, Kuhn arrives in a cold blast of air, his glasses fogging up from the change of temperature inside the cafe; we shake hands, and Kuhn sits down, wiping and rewiping his fogged-up glasses. In the few minutes since we last saw one another, Kuhn has been Googling me.

"What's this about you and conspiracy theories?" he asks me directly. "Is that you?"

"What do you mean?" I say. "You mean the fiber optics story?"

"I don't know," he says. "Conspiracy theories."

I think about it quickly. It seems bad at first. It won't look good for me if I have a bunch of blog posts online ranting about conspiracy theories. Thankfully, this is not the case.

"Well," I begin. "That was a freelance piece I wrote about a series of outages in the global underwater fiber optic Internet infrastructure." All eyes at the table are on me. "In the big places, like between the US and Europe, there are maybe a dozen fiber cables crossing the ocean. But in other places, like through the Suez Canal, into the Persian Gulf or around the tip of India, there are only one or two cables. At some point last year in a span of just a few days, several of these single cables were severed, causing lots of conspiracy theories to appear online as to its cause, ranging from al-Qaeda to the US government to the monster from the Cloverfield movie." Deep breath. "So that's the conspiracy theory story you saw."

Kuhn wants to know more about my background, so I rattle off my resume as fast as I can: a graduate fellowship at Brown, an honors graduate from Columbia, an internship at the Courier ,journal, web producer at the New York Times, selling my book proposal, getting my advance. I leave out the part about my book contract getting cancelled.

"Also," I say, "during 2007, I wrote freelance writing pieces for Silicon Valley-based tech-business news sites covering VoIP, Skype, 3G and 4G cellular, other forms of next-generation voice communication, green data center management, server virtualization, cloud computing, stuff like that. The `conspiracy theory'story was one of these."

After I finish, there is silence at the table.

"Did you understand any of that?"Jack asks, chuckling.

Apparently, Kuhn understands enough. We exchange goodbyes and shake hands, and then he goes back outside into the cold to cross the street with his BlackBerry glued to his ear. A few minutes later, Kuhn calls Trevor to tell him that I am released from my subpoena for now but that they will be subpoenaing me a second time, following proper procedures.

So, an hour before I am to enter the grand jury room without my attorney to be questioned by a prosecutor who has the power to imprison me for not talking, the specter of prison is suddenly lifted by a phone call that lasts less than a minute. My seemingly once-certain imprisonment for contempt collapses in a textbook case of a heavy-handed government overstepping its bounds: a guideline-breaking subpoena of a journalist based on an unlawfully charged UFTAP indictment.

I arrive at the Louisville airport a little after 3:00 p.m. for the 4:21 flight back to New York. Seventy percent of Marion County remains without power a week after the ice storm. Along whole stretches of highway, the ice not only downed the power lines but also splintered utility poles like pencils for miles at a stretch. As I go through security, I think about what my nephew Dawson told me yesterday about missing my flight, and I smirk, thinking the kid isn't as smart as he thinks he is.

Before my flight, I call several friends, giving each a full accounting of my last-second reprieve. Reporters from four news agencies want to run my story, but Jack advises me against talking to the press because Kuhn could still come after me. As I pace the concourse with my phone pressed to my ear, my flight is delayed once and then twice, and then my cell phone battery begins to die. When a blizzard in New York cancels my flight, I use the last bit of juice in my phone to call my sister to pick me up, then book myself on the first flight out the next morning.

When my sister's silver minivan pulls up at the curb by the baggage claim, I walk toward it with the anticipation of telling Dawson that he is right after all. But when I get into the front passenger seat and turn to talk to him in his car seat, my three-year-old nephew is dead asleep, his body leaning forward against his harness, lifeless except for the snoring, a Matchbox car clutched in each fist.

The next morning, Wednesday, I am in the taxi line at LaGuardia in New York City by 9:00 a.m. I take a cab straight to my Upper East Side tutoring firm, with nothing changed except that I have become the first journalist subpoenaed under the Obama administration.

Although I seem to be out of the US Marshals Service's crosshairs, the hunt for Johnny Boone is far from over. America's Most Wanted works on a segment for its show that its producers, including Justin Lenart, hope will nab the as-of-yet-unnabbable Johnny Boone. When the episode airs in October 2009, the hour-long interview I did with the producers does not appear. Apparently, an Ivy League-educated journalist in a Brooks Brothers suit explaining to them that Johnny Boone is a nonviolent criminal and that his community doesn't want him captured is not the sort of television they are looking for. The segment gives voice to defenders of Boone but only if they have beards, wear T-shirts and fit AMW's concept of a redneck Kentuckian.

"The Louisville USMS sent us this case and gave us access to every aspect of the investigation," AMW producer Justin Lenart wrote in a posting on Vimeo. "Once green-lit, I worked closely with New Yorkbased producer Keith Greenberg and AMW Correspondent Angeline Hartmann, as they set out to shoot the story in rural Kentucky. Keith cut the piece in New York, and I provided assistance throughout the production process. We are all very proud of this piece."

AMW creates a narrative of Boone as a violent criminal. The show invents nicknames and aliases for him that I had never heard in more than five years of reporting on him. It isn't enough that Boone faces life in prison without parole for the 2,421 seedlings the police found in flowerpots on his farm. The producers paint Boone in a more dangerous light with the help of US Deputy Marshal Jimmy Habib and AMW's correspondent, Angeline Hartmann:

Hartmann (voiceover): But in 1987, the law caught up with Johnny Boone when he was sentenced for twenty years for growing nearly two hundred tons ofpot, worth nearly a billion dollars by today's standards. With Johnny behind bars, his son Jeff allegedly ran the operation, spending some $200,000 to build himself a home next to his father's.

Habib: When Johnny was released from jail, he was not happy with Jeff at all for using that money.

Hartmann (vo): After one argument, cops say, Jeff was found with a gunshot wound to his head.

Habib: It's officially ruled a suicide. But you never know. I mean, you are dealing with Johnny Boone.

Hartmann (vo): Three years later, Boone's girlfriend Rosa gave birth to another son. Police say Johnny was overjoyed, believing the boy to be the reincarnation ofJej The relationship with his mother, though, would soon end badly.

Habib: Johnny had a falling-out with Rosa. She threatened him with going to the police with the information she knew that could incriminate him. Next thing you know, her parents are getting a phone call saying that Rosa had hung herself in a barn.

Along with many from Marion County who hear that America's Most Wanted's segment on Johnny Boone will air on Fox in October 2009, I watch Deputy Habib claim that Boone was "not happy with" his son Jeffrey, that the mother of his youngest son "threatened ... [to] incriminate him" and that even though both were ruled suicides, "you never know. I mean, you are dealing with Johnny Boone."

My heart sinks. One of two things is true, and neither is good. Either I just spent five years of my life writing a book about a nonviolent marijuana grower who is secretly a master murderer capable of doctoring crime scenes to fool multiple police agencies, or an employee of the federal government, whose salary is paid by taxpayers, just went on national television and implied that Johnny Boone is a killer when, in fact, he is not.

So, I look into it. I go talk to Jacky Hunt, the retired state trooper who investigated Jeff Boone's death.

"I was never contacted by the US Marshals Service or anyone else for my opinion on that," Hunt says.

"Without a witness, you know, [in] any crime there is always that doubt. And you approach a suicide not as a suicide but as a death investigation, and you look at all your facts. As a matter of fact, most of the time, when you title a report, you don't title it `suicide,' a lot of times you title it, `death investigation'. . . because you don't know what you got.

"One time I had a so-called suicide in Casey County and worked it as such and then found out later with more evidence that it wasn't a suicide. It was a murder, and somebody got charged with that. So, a lot of times, you really try to do what you can do to prove one way or another.

"He [Jeff] used a .22 pistol. He basically . . . I mean, the pistol was still clutched in his hand.' a word for it. I think it's called `cadaveric spasm,' caused by instant death, basically you go into rigor mortis, and you just kind of freeze in that position.

"The position he was in and the way the gun was fixed and everything. I'm not saying it would be impossible for somebody to set that up, but it was-based on my training and experience, and everybody else'sthe sheriff was there and other trained investigators. We usually do these things in teams, and I was the lead investigator at the time, and we analyzed all that stuff.

"I remember having to pry the gun out of his hand, and I remember the note. Like I said, that's been a lot of years ago, and I don't want to say something that ain't so. I can't remember a lot of the details, but I just remember Johnny Boone being there, and he seemed obviously distraught over his son. That seems apparent, and there was never any question that they were on the outs or anything like that. With all that went on, I think him and his son were fairly close. I mean, I don't know his personal life, but he seemed upset about it....

"When you're working a suicide, you're looking for motive. It's a basic investigator's tool. If you're working, specifically a suicide, and there's no motive, no motivation, that's when you really want to dig deep: Why did somebody kill himself?

"A lot of times, it's so painfully obvious why they did it. They've got a drug addiction or they're in pain. You know, people have injuries, and they're tired of dealing with their pain. Contrary to public opinion, not everybody leaves a suicide note. Matter of fact, not even half. Some people just check out for all kinds of different reasons.

"With the Jeff Boone case, he had a motive for wanting to commit suicide: He was facing federal prison. That's the stuff you look for. That's all I wanted to add. He fought and beat, thought he had beat, the search warrant. Without the search warrant you don't have any charges. It would make it really hard to prosecute him for hardly any of it.

"I think at one point he thought he was going to get out of it, and when they reinstated the search warrant I think that was a crushing blow. He'd already been to federal prison, you know. So, I think that was his motivation.

"That's my opinion on it, you know. Like I said, you always approach these things with caution because you never know when some evidence is going to come up to the contrary, but I never had that with that case."

Seems clear enough. Regarding the second tragic death to happen in Boone's orbit within four years, the death of Rosamond Hardin Goff, the mother of his youngest son, the facts appear to be even clearer and equally sad.

Johnny Boone is not a perfect person. Like anyone else, he has his flaws. Specifically, Johnny Boone can't resist the company of women. Even before his bust in Minnesota in 1987, Johnny Boone had a string of girlfriends and at least one child out of wedlock. Johnny Boone is not a perfect person; his weakness is women. He's like a marijuana Superman whose kryptonite is vagina.