The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History Read online

  "The state of Kentucky should declare itself the storytelling capital of the nation. The place is brimming with remarkable, colorful stories and some of the most natural storytellers you'll ever meet. James Higdon and his new book, The Cornbread Mafia, are the latest proof of that. This is a tale that is so rich and utterly startling that it's honestly hard to believe in parts. But Higdon's research is smart, and his writing is smooth. He's especially good on the history of this American saga, which may have fallen through the cracks of time without his hard work."

  -Ann Hagedorn, author of Wild Ride: The Rise and Fall of Calumet Farms, Inc., America's Premier Horseracing Dynasty

  "Who knew Kentuckians take marijuana as seriously as they do bourbon? James Higdon digs deep to document American pot pioneers and their extralegal escapades. Thoroughly researched, The Cornbread Mafia is chock-full of fascinating homegrown history, not to mention a plethora of entertaining anecdotes of illegality. Higdon provides an intimate look at an exceedingly wild bunch of outlaws. Most impressively, he gains exclusive access to Johnny Boone, an eccentric, pot-farming legend and longtime fugitive from the law."

  -Jason Ryan, author of Jackpot: High Times, High Seas, and the Sting That Launched the War on Drugs

  "Whether you are interested in learning more about a unique chapter of Kentucky's and our nation's history or just want to be entertained, you should read this book. More importantly, though, The Cornbread Mafia is a case study of the effects upon a single tightknit community of the drug laws put in place by successive administrations. Whether you support these laws or oppose them, this book provides a window into how those laws affect real families and their communities. Higdon's book is especially timely, coming on the heels of the Ken Burns documentary, Prohibition, and Ron Paul's presidential campaign."

  -Trev Gravson, Director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard University

  A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History

  JAMES HIGDON

  Preface: Tina Tells Ike: "It's Gonna Work Out Fine" . . . . . vii

  PART I

  CHAPTER I: A County Is Born: Catholic Migration, the Civil War, Prohibition and John Dillinger . . . . . 3

  CHAPTER 2: The Hot Air-Conditioner Incident, the Lebanese Mayor of Lebanon and the Killing of Charlie Stiles . 32

  CHAPTER 3: The Dark Side of Cornbread, Starring Garland Russell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

  CHAPTER 4: "This Is Some Absolutely Dynamite Pot Here," the Police Said . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89

  CHAPTERS: Cornbread in the Tropics, the Cops Don't Trust the DEA and Jimmy Bickett Sees Johnny Boone on Television . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130

  CHAPTER 6: Growers versus the Drought of 1983, a Rash of Raywick Killings and a Drug Investigation Gone Wrong . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150

  PART II

  CHAPTER 7: How the Jesuit College at St. Mary's Became the First Private Prison in America . . . . . . . . . . . . 166

  CHAPTER 8: Johnny Boone Becomes "Mr. Grass" . . . . . . . . . 200

  CHAPTER 9: The DEA Wants to Know, "Where Did You Get This Lion?" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239

  CHAPTER Io: The "Cornbread" Press Conference . . . . . . . . . . 265

  CHAPTER I I: "Welcome to the Gladiator Arena" . . . . . . . . . . 274

  CHAPTER 12: The US Marshals versus James Higdon . . . . . . . . 304

  Notes and Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 345

  Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 366

  Acknowledgments and About the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . 376

  WHEN JOHNNY BOONE VIOLATED HIS PAROLE IN THE EARLY SUMMER OF 1987 by leaving Kentucky via an Ohio River bridge en route to one of his secret farms in Minnesota, he set into motion a series of events that would define him and his associates as the largest homegrown marijuana syndicate in American history. The band of large-scale pot cultivators headquartered in a three-county Catholic enclave in central Kentucky would be tagged by the federal government and the media with a name a few of the men had already self-applied: the "Cornbread Mafia"-yet just as many members claim to never have heard the term until it was mentioned publicly by federal prosecutors and amplified by the media.

  "I wonder where they got that from?" Johnny Boone remembered thinking the first time he saw the term Cornbread Mafia in the newspaper. By then he was already in prison.

  As local law enforcement busted Boone and a dozen others in Minnesota, federal agents tracked another Kentuckian, Bobby Joe Shewmaker, who had been running from the law since being found guilty in 1985 of a pot-smuggling scheme dating back to 1979. Law enforcement agents assumed that Shewmaker was the sole kingpin of all the Kentucky marijuana growers, commanded from his home turf of Marion County. But the Minnesota bust suddenly forced the task force chasing Shewmaker to reevaluate its concept of the Marion County "cartel." It was much bigger and more complex than the agents had ever imagined. The busted Minnesota harvest alone weighed ninety tons, the police said, a number they calculated by weighing one dump truck load, then multiplying that by sixty-two-the number of trips it took to clear the fields-and then multiplying that number by two because so much marijuana remained in the field that estimating its weight was "inconceivable."

  When police nabbed Bobby Joe Shewmaker in a Canadian Great Lakes resort town in May 1989, the federal task force had identified as members of the Cornbread Mafia seventy rural Kentuckians-sixty-nine men and one woman, and almost all of them Catholic-from three years' worth of busts on twenty-eight farms in ten states, where police seized 182 tons of marijuana, starting in August 1985 when Michigan State Police seized 31,747 plants (but made no arrests) to early October 1988, when the Kansas Bureau of Investigation seized 68,300 plants over four days and arrested fourteen people from Marion County but not Shewmaker, who wouldn't be apprehended for another seven months.

  On June 16, 1989, a month after Shewmaker's arrest in Canada, the US Attorney's Office in Louisville called a press conference to declare these seventy people, whom the prosecutors referred to as the "Cornbread Mafia," to be "the largest domestic marijuana organization in American history." Thirteen days later, June 29, Illinois State Police arrested four men from Marion County growing fifty-eight thousand plants in White County. Because the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) figured one pound per plant, that's another twenty-nine tons.

  The prosecutors' designation of the "Cornbread Mafia" as the "largest" depends upon its designation as a "domestic" organization, as in only non-smuggled pot. Cornbread operations actually reached across several international borders: Shewmaker's 1979 smuggling scheme involved a routine shrimp-boat trip to the Caribbean coast of Colombia, and Boone would be busted in 1982 while meeting a plane that was returning from Belize. But because police nailed these two men and scores of their associates with 182 tons on farms in the South and Midwest, prosecutors didn't even bother with the Cornbread's international dalliances; the size of its domestic operation alone earned the Cornbread its superlative classification. Still, there was more to this group that made it unique in the eyes of the law. Federal task force documents obtained by Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests note that, unlike any other illegal drug operation of its size, the syndicate included no foreign nationals-that not only were all the participants American, but also they were from one state, from a three-county
area, and the vast majority from Marion County.

  And that's not all; one more Cornbread characteristic left a lasting impression-of the seventy Kentuckians arrested between 1987 and 1989, zero agreed to testify against the others in exchange for a lesser sentence, a record even the Sicilian Mafia would find impressive.

  The powerful form of solidarity displayed by the Cornbread types scuttled the federal government's plan to imprison men like Boone and Shewmaker for life without parole. Without cooperating witnesses, the government could not prosecute anyone as a "kingpin" under the Continuous Criminal Enterprise (CCE) statute, the only law at the time that provided a life sentence for nonviolent marijuana crimes.

  That's the basic who, what, when, where and how of it. The question is "Why?" Of the thousands of pot-growing syndicates broken up by federal law enforcement over the four decades of the War on Drugs, naturally one would be bigger than the rest. But why was this biggest organization headquartered in Marion County, Kentucky, and not in Vermont or California? Why Marion County-a community in the corner pocket of the Bluegrass, the buckle of the Bourbon Belt, the geographic center of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, the center of the universe for some but the middle of nowhere for most-why Marion County?

  After five and a half years investigating, researching, reporting and interviewing folks familiar with the events detailed in this book, I've concluded that in order to answer, "Why Marion County?" one needs to understand a series of cause-and-effect relationships throughout history, starting with refugee Catholics moving to the frontier and settling in central Kentucky's peculiar geography and climate, which fostered a robust whisky-distilling industry before, during and after the Civil War, interrupted only by Prohibition, which created a culture permissive of moonshining and bootlegging, which made Lebanon a hoppin' stop on the Chitlin' Circuit until the Vietnam War brought marijuana home, where the whole thing exploded like a science-fair volcano.

  The story starts at the beginning:

  In 1785, in the wake of the Revolutionary War and 150 years after their forefathers' landing, a group of persecuted Maryland Catholics sought its own freedom by migrating farther into the American wilderness, trekking three hundred miles across the Allegheny Mountains, taking flatboats another three hundred miles down the Ohio River and fending off the Shawnee, Chickasaw, Chickamauga Cherokee and other native tribes unhappy with their arrival as they made their way to what would become Holy Cross in Marion County-an expedition led by a distiller, Basil Hayden, whose surname would be among the Cornbread 70 and whose bourbon recipe would be passed down to his grandsons, who bottled it as "Old Granddad" and more recently in a single-barrel brand called Basil Hayden himself.

  The Catholic foothold at Holy Cross, the site of the first Catholic church west of the eastern continental divide, would become a font of American Catholicism, and Marion County became the home of its descendants: a rural region of tightly knit Catholic communities, suspicious of outsiders since the eighteenth century.

  The fertile Kentucky landscape supported the Catholic flock in its natural state-industrious farmers, ambitious builders, knowledgeable distillers and prodigious copulators. When Leonard Mattingly, an original Holy Cross settler, died in 1805, he left three hundred living descendants. The Mattinglys went on to represent a significant percentage of the Marion County phone book-a retired mail carrier said at one point that twenty-three men named Joseph Mattingly called Marion County home. It's a surname that might likely reappear in the stories that follow from Marion County and Lebanon, its county seat.

  The nineteenth century brought the railroad to Lebanon a few decades before it brought the Civil War, which Lebanon survived despite repeated Rebel raids as the Union fought to hold the town's railroad terminus. By the turn of the twentieth century, the combination of the railroad and Marion County's prodigious distilling industry made Lebanon a smalltown economic powerhouse, sending bourbon by rail to New York via Chicago and then by ship to Europe. By 1919, Marion County supported nine active distilleries, which provided a living for hundreds of hardworking Catholic families-until Congress passed and the states ratified a constitutional amendment to prohibit the manufacture, transport or sale of liquor. With the onset of Prohibition in 1919, the Great Depression hit Marion County a decade before it arrived on Wall Street.

  With the county's entire industrial base criminalized, the new law left hundreds of Marion County Catholics-and many from the community's minority Protestant population as well-out of work. Many of those former distillery workers, responsible for providing for an average of a dozen children each, chose to cash in on the higher-than-ever value of their skills at distilling, still construction, barrel making, gauging and store-keeping now that those trades were punishable by prison time. Within the broader community, there arose a method to rationalize the nonviolent criminal activities of one's neighbors and relatives: One could break "Man's Law" without violating "God's Law"-a Venn diagram drawn by the county's Catholic culture and expanded by the pressures of a depressed economy and the incursion of federal law enforcement.

  Newspaper headlines from this period reveal a Marion County approaching the action-packed absurdity of a comic book: car chases with revenuers leaping from the running boards of one moving vehicle onto another; gunfights between lawmen and big-city gangsters sent to free the bourbon locked in dormant distillery warehouses; federal agents finding commercial-sized stills hidden in Marion County barns, bigger than the legitimate distilleries from before Prohibition.

  If one peruses Lebanon's newspapers from 1919 to 1933, one can see headline after headline like this:

  FEDERAL MEN ARREST FOUR

  Find More Than 100 Gallons Of Liquor in Weeds Near Machine

  THREE PLEAD NOT GUILTY

  OFFICERS MAKE MANY ARRESTS

  Men Taken Into Custody Are Charged With Violating Liquor Laws

  PROHIBITION OFFICERS AT WORK IN COUNTY

  Five Stills Are Destroyed In This And Adjoining Counties-Two Men Are Arrested

  STILL CAPTURED NEAR LORETTO

  Shots Exchanged By Officers And 'Shiners But No One Seriously Hurt

  MANY DRAW FINES IN COURT FOR VIOLATING LIQUOR LAWS

  FOUR HELD OVER TO FEDERAL GRAND JURY

  Prohibition Officers Destroy Nine Stills On Their Recent Raid In This Territory

  MANY INDICTED BY GRAND JURY

  Nearly Half Of The Ninety-Six Found Charged With Liquor Law Violations

  TWO LARGE BOOZE FACTORIES ARE DESTROYED BY OFFICERS

  OFFICERS MAKE MANY ARRESTS

  Large 125-Gallon Copper Still Found On Raid In The Chicago Section

  OFFICERS TAKE EIGHT MEN ON RECENT RAID

  One Man Is Shot And Sixteen Stills Seized And Destroyed

  TEN "STILLS" ARE DESTROYED

  Successful Raid Made By Federal Officers

  Through these sorts of widespread shenanigans, Marion County gained a reputation among major crime fighters and criminals alike as a mecca for illegal booze. Al Capone, according to local legend, visited the moonshine factories in Marion County during his better-documented trips to Louisville, and Capone certainly passed through Marion County in May 1932, when the government shipped him by train to the federal prison in Atlanta following his conviction in Chicago, a route that could have passed only along the railroad tracks through Marion County.

  On the night of May 5, 1932-two days before Burgoo King would win the fifty-eighth running of the Kentucky Derby-Eliot Ness transferred Al Capone into the custody of the US Marshals Service at Dearborn Street Station in Chicago, where they boarded an eight-car train, the Dixie Flier, which left Chicago at 11:30 p.m.

  In the middle of the night, the moonshiners of Marion County lined up along the tracks with their sons to give one last salute to the man who had helped keep their families fed. At some late hour that night, the Dixie Flier rushed through Loretto at eighty miles an hour along Marion County's class 3 track, which ran along the foot of the Muldraugh's Hill escarpment, the train c
hugging along the scarp's foot through St. Francis, Loretto and St. Mary's, where the Marion County whisky men tipped their mason jars in salute as it passed. Then the men took their sleepy sons home as the train made its way through the night to Atlanta via Corbin.

  A year later, the year that would be Prohibition's last, John Dillinger came to Marion County after his parole from Indiana State Prison in May, enticed by a fellow inmate who told him that a person could hide out in Marion County as long as he wanted. In the summer of 1933, Dillinger used his Marion County hideout as a base of operations to rob at least four banks in Indiana and Ohio, while he also plotted the prison break for his gang still locked up in Indiana. On his way out of Kentucky for the last time, Dillinger robbed the Gravel Switch bank in eastern Marion County with the help of a few local boys on August 11, 1933.

  Marion County provided safe haven for a man like Dillinger because its people kept their mouths shut. After enough occasions of armed lawmen raiding family farmhouses, the children of those lawbreakers realized that silence was the only weapon they had to protect their fathers and grandfathers from the revenuers intent on taking them away in handcuffs; this understanding grew into an unofficial code of silence that would be passed down for generations and continues today.

  While Johnny Boone served hard federal time for his marijuana crimes, he learned from his fellow prisoners of Sicilian descent that such a code of silence had a name in the Old Country-omertd. Moved by what his Sicilian friends told him about its philosophy and how it related to his life, Boone had OMERTA tattooed across his back in red and blue ink. Omerta as a concept arose in Sicily by necessity as the island was continually conquered by a series of outside forces through the centuries. For Johnny Boone, the same concept arose in his community from a different conquering force: Prohibition.