by James Higdon
At 3:30, Boone and the waiting detectives heard the sound of an approaching plane, and the shabby red-white-and-blue Piper Aztec landed, carrying 550 pounds of high-quality Belizean sinsemilla worth more than a half-million dollars if Boone could sell it for $1,000 per pound. The Aztec, stripped of its six passenger seats so it could carry its load, taxied into hangar 11, where Boone and Lanham loaded the twentyfive neatly packed cardboard boxes and five plastic containers into Boone's pickup and Lanham's Oldsmobile.
Boone and Lanham drove out of Bowman Field in a two-vehicle convoy onto Taylorsville Road, passing Air Devils Inn (a rowdy motorcycle bar) at its only quiet hour en route to the Watterson Expressway. As they left, the investigating team-formed of Jefferson County narcotics, Kentucky State Police and FBI agents-prepared for the takedown. The detectives waited to see if the departing car and truck would rendezvous with anyone else as they trailed them with two helicopters and a fleet of squad cars and unmarked sedans. As the 4x4 Ford led the Oldsmobile onto Interstate 65, then exited at the Bardstown ramp onto Bernheim Forest Road, the police realized that Boone and Lanham wouldn't be meeting any co-conspirators. As the two-vehicle convoy passed the Jim Beam distillery, the police radio started squawking.
"If you let them get into Washington County,"one state trooper advised Captain James Black, "you may lose them both if they escape on foot."
"If you let them get into Marion County," another said, "you might lose them, the drugs and everything."
So, Captain Black made the decision to arrest the Washington County men while still in Nelson County, and the helicopters-filled with SWAT team officers-moved into forward positions at the point of the takedown: Rooster Run.
"Done all that shit, and got out there to Rooster Run and here come that fucking SWAT team in them helicopters," Boone remembered.
Rooster Run wasn't the name of a town; it didn't have a post office or an intersection. The road wasn't even wider at Rooster Run. The name of the stretch of otherwise-lonely highway came from the only business for miles in any direction, a general store and gas station with a catchy, colorful name that gained popularity with its logo on ball caps and T-shirts and with Johnny Carson's occasional use of Rooster Run as a punchline. By 1982, to cement its own popularity, the Rooster Run General Store acquired a twenty-foot rooster on wheels, a blue bib around its neck, and permanently perched the bird on the roadside in front of the gas pumps. There, in front of the twenty-foot rooster, a state police cruiser turned on its blue lights behind Kenny Lanham's Oldsmobile, and two helicopters dropped out of the sky, their massive floodlights stopping Johnny Boone's truck on a dime.
"Son of a bitch had a light on it as big as this table here," Boone recalled.
Lanham tried to cut a U-turn and escape back toward Interstate 65, but an unmarked sedan blocked his path. By the time the Oldsmobile stopped, SWAT team officers had surrounded both vehicles, their weapons trained at the drivers' heads.
I don't know what this is, Johnny Boone thought to himself as the paramilitary agents closed in with automatic weapons aimed at him, but it's not what 1 planned on.
An arresting officer looked into the bed of Boone's truck at the neatly stacked cardboard boxes.
"How much you got in there?"
"How much what?" Boone said as the policeman handcuffed him.
"Pot in them boxes."
"News to me, motherfucker. Open one of them up."
Bud Farmer, James Black, and the Jefferson County narcotics squad had been following Jim Below the Apache for nearly a year, tracking down his associates in Denver, Detroit and Canada. The two narcotics detectives also knew that Below's wife, Constance, and her boss, Assistant County Attorney Donald Erler, were involved in this operation. Because of the Belize conspiracy's intimate connection to the Louisville courthouse, Farmer and Black thought it might involve other, more prominent members of the Louisville/Jefferson County legal establishment.
As Louisville police processed Johnny Boone, Lanham, Erler and the Belows at the downtown courthouse, Bud Farmer talked to a reporter for the Louisville Times, telling her that his investigation continued to track down leads in Cincinnati, Detroit and Colorado.
"We hope to get the connection in Central America, too, if we can," Farmer told the reporter.
While Farmer talked to the press, another member of his narcotics unit worked to determine if they could identify the typewriter used to type some of the documents found inside the Piper Aztec. Inside the courthouse after hours, investigators typed out sample documents on typewriters in various offices, using each office's letterhead for each example.' They checked the typewriters in the offices of the county attorney, the chief of police and the county judge/executive. On each sheet of letterhead, the detective typed the same sentence repeatedly:
A few hours later, inside an interrogation room at the Jefferson County jail, Bud Farmer pressed Johnny Boone over and over about his Central American associates, trying along the way to get something from Boone that would implicate someone in the Jefferson County courthouse. To Boone, this was funny; not only was he not going to tell Bud Farmer anything, but Farmer was barking up the wrong tree anyway.
"Y'all have been reading comic books again," Boone told Farmer. "You've been on the job too long."
Farmer eventually hung it up with Boone. He knew they weren't going to get anything out of the Sphinxlike outlaw. They were more confused after interrogating him than before they had started.
Yet, despite the dead end they encountered with Johnny Boone, Detectives Farmer and Black thought that they could still unravel the "large international conspiracy to import marijuana into Kentucky" with the help of the FBI. Wrong again. Like before, the Jefferson County narcotics unit ran into a conflict with federal law enforcement-this time with FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., who didn't like how Bud Farmer had conducted his investigation.
In an FBI airtel message from the FBI director's office to the special agent in charge of Louisville, dated March 10, 1982, four days after Johnny Boone and his associates were busted, an FBI supervisor ripped into the investigation, saying Bud Farmer's narcotics unit had displayed "an absence of candor" and that Farmer should have sought FBI or DEA assistance "well in advance."
"Instead, they developed the investigation based on a `buy-bust' scenario and sought the FBI's assistance only in the very final stages of the contrary to the investigative methodology subscribed to by the FBI for narcotics matters. [Therefore,] Louisville will conduct no further active investigation of this matter."
In response, the Louisville FBI office sent an airtel message to the director's office the next day, March 11, in a sharp rebuke of FBI headquarters' micromanagement:
"To clarify ... FBI Headquarters supervisor is not in a position to evaluate the candor of the Jefferson County Police Department.... The investigation by the FBI in this case is in the spirit of the law enforcement coordinating committee (LECC) mandated by the attorney general.... This is the primary function of the FBI and why we exist.... Therefore, investigation continuing."
Later that same day, FBI headquarters responded to Louisville. Although the headquarters had lost its primary argument against the FBI's continuing assistance of Bud Farmer's investigation into Johnny Boone's associates, the FBI supervisor chose to chastise Louisville for its classification of the type of criminal organization to which Johnny Boone belonged. Classification group 245-A would have designated the involvement of La Cosa Nostra (abbreviated "LCN" on FBI forms), the Italian mafia.Therefore, Louisville assigned Boone's organization the classification of 245-B, but the supervisor at D.C. headquarters took issue with this determination, saying the B group should be used to classify "major non-traditional organized crime groups such as outlaw motorcycle gangs, prison gangs, or ethnic/regional groups such as Israeli mafia, black gangster disciples, Yakuza [Japanese mafia] or Tong [Chinese mafia]." As of 1982, the FBI had no classification for what would later be called the Cornbread Mafia.
"You are
requested to review this matter," the supervisor from headquarters wrote, "and if not primarily an investigation of one of the above crime groups, FBIHQshould be notified of proper alpha character, i.e., `D' for major international narcotics trafficking groups."
While Johnny Boone was disappearing from Kentucky for weeks at a time to deal with his organization in Belize, Jimmy Bickett focused on growing locally. Because he knew the police would be watching him in Raywick and flying over Marion County, Bickett planted one of his fields at the top of Muldraugh's Hill in Mannsville, a tiny farming community built on the edge of the escarpment's ridge.
In April 1981, the year before Boone's Belize bust, Jimmy went back out to Mannsville with someone in the Brady family to check on their crop, budding on the backside of a dairy farm. It had just come a good rain, so it was a good time to side-dress the young plants. As they walked into the barn, Bickett saw two dead crows lying next to the bags of fertilizer they were about to use. A bad omen, he thought.
Bickett and Brady went ahead and poured the high-nitrogen fertilizer into the dispenser hooked to the side of a tractor. By side-dressing the plants at this early stage, Bickett would ensure healthier plants, fewer pests and higher yields.
Out in the field, Brady drove the tractor slowly down the rows of plants, applying the fertilizer in the balk between the rows of plants, careful not to let the fertilizer burn the plants' water leaves. As the tractor rolled, Brady twisted his body so he could look down and behind him to make sure he laid the fertilizer straight without touching the plants.
When he finished laying a row of fertilizer, Brady looked up to stretch his neck and saw a police cruiser's bubblegum blue light flashing as it bounced over a rough farm road behind a patch of young corn. Brady cut the tractor's engine, hopped out of the cab and signaled to Jimmy Bickett to run. Then Brady disappeared on foot through the trees.
Jimmy Bickett ran to his truck, which he had parked near the back of the pot patch, and drove over a hill. He didn't think he could escape the sheriff, so he drove around on the farm until he thought of something to say: He was looking for Hondo, the dairy farmer's son.
The sheriff drove toward him, and Bickett pulled up alongside with his window down.
"Where you going?" asked the sheriff, a real big guy.
"Not going nowhere," Bickett told him casually.
"I saw you coming out of that pot patch back there."
"What pot patch? I'm looking for Hondo. I'm wanting to buy his mud bike."
"Why don't you go on and get out of that truck," the sheriff said as he put his cruiser into park. "You're under arrest."
The sheriff locked Jimmy Bickett up in the Taylor County jail, and Bickett hired Elmer George, who had rapidly gained the reputation as the local marijuana growers' first choice of defense attorneys. At the trial, George put Hondo, the farmer's son, on the stand to testify that he did indeed have a mud bike for sale. Then George stood at the blackboard and drew the farm for the jury to show the jurors how the land lay and to show the routes of Bickett's truck and the sheriff's cruiser and where the two met.
Elmer George's courtroom performance created reasonable doubt in the Taylor County jury thanks to Jimmy Bickett's quick thinking at the time of his arrest, which made it appear that he wasn't trying to escape. Bickett walked away a free man, and Elmer George was pretty proud of himself for pulling it off. It would be a case George would brag about for years to come-a calling card for potential clients as to his prowess in certain arenas of criminal defense law.
Less than six months later Jimmy Bickett found himself in trouble in Taylor County once again. He had driven a girl to Louisville in a retired police cruiser, and the two ended up partying at the Toy Tiger, one of Louisville's best nightclubs in its heyday. With his sort of supplies, Jimmy Bickett could have partied for several days straight, but the girl wanted to go home around midnight. So, with a pound of marijuana in the former police car's trunk, an ounce of cocaine in the glove compartment and a box of one-gram glass bottles he had picked up in Louisville to facilitate his retail cocaine business, Jimmy Bickett pointed the cruiser south and slammed on the gas. If she wanted to get home fast, he would show her how fast they could go.
She held onto her door handle as the old cruiser ripped over the dark highways, getting her to Campbellsville in record time. As police Patrolman Clifton Price headed back toward Lebanon, he noticed the former cop car swerving and speeding on its way out of town. So, Patrolman Price switched on his blue lights and pulled over Jimmy Bickett at 3:15 a.m. Before Bickett stepped out of the car, he tossed the ounce of cocaine under the driver's seat.
Price locked up Bickett for drunk driving and possession of marijuana. As Bickett sat in the Taylor County jail sobering up, he figured he had gotten away with his biggest worry, the bag under the driver's seat. But during a second search of the car, Price found the ounce, the largest quantity of cocaine he'd ever seen. With Bickett locked up in the drunk tank, Price drove a sample of the cocaine to the state lab in Frankfort to have it tested. When the desk deputy released Bickett after sunrise, Price arrested him again for possession of cocaine and tossed him back into the Taylor County jail.
Prohibition ended in most of America in 1933, but it never ended in Taylor County. Many in the congregations of its twenty Baptist churches devoted their Sundays to their ministers' preaching of fiery sermons on a narrow range of topics, mostly the evils of sex, Catholicism, liquor and Communism.
The drinking Catholics of neighboring Marion County represented to these Taylor County Baptists the worst of sinful humanity. Just as Marion County typified the wets in the fight over the freedom to drink, Taylor County epitomized the drys. It was so dry in Taylor County that when one turned on the water faucet, crackers came out.
For a decade by then, Taylor County had been fighting the new menace of marijuana, and just as with liquor before it, Marion County was this new evil's source. Some worried that it would be only a matter of time before cocaine hit the streets of Campbellsville, and Price's diligent police work proved them right.
Jimmy Bickett, for his whole life until that moment, had danced on top of the justice system. He had walked away from a federal indictment with Frank Haddad's poker house defense, and Elmer George had sprung him of the Mannsville marijuana cultivation charges by convincing a Taylor County jury that he had been on the farm in question because he had been looking to buy Hondo's mud bike. Now he faced the same judge just a few months later with the first cocaine charge Taylor County had ever seen.
It didn't look good for Jimmy Bickett.
Before Bickett's arraignment, a friend introduced Bickett to Pete Gurton, a black bootlegger from Taylor County. Gurton had strong roots in Marion County because that's where he bought his liquor and a certain amount of pull in Taylor County-as any bootlegger has in any dry county. Gurton liked helping out folks from Marion County whenever he could, but Bickett's case seemed tricky, especially because he just walked away from that earlier marijuana charge. People in the community wanted to see Bickett go to jail.
"The best I can do for you," Gurton told Bickett, "is thirty days, shock probated."(Shock probation is the practice of granting a first-time offender early release after the initial "shock" of the prison system.)
Bickett thanked the bootlegger and went to see his lawyer, Elmer George.
"I've got you a good deal worked out," George told Bickett. "Thirty days, shock probated."
When Bickett went before the court, the judge asked him for his plea.
"Guilty, Your Honor" Bickett said.
"When can you go in?" the judge asked.
"Let's go right now," and the bailiff took Jimmy Bickett away.
The state sent Jimmy Bickett to the prison camp at Eddyville. While sitting on his prison bunk one evening in March 1982, Jimmy Bickett glanced up at the television during the local news and saw FBI agents leading a bearded, handcuffed man into the Louisville courthouse. Bickett jumped up.
"Hey," he sa
id, pointing at the television. "I know that guy right there. That's Johnny Boone!"
Sitting in his federal prison cell at the LaGrange Reformatory after the federal court had sentenced him to five years, Johnny Boone kept telling himself he should have never left Belize. He could have set up a nice life down there, living like a Mennonite farmer in a tropical paradise among the Maya ruins. Instead, he would lift weights, read books and stare at the walls for the next few years while his son Jeffrey continued to tend the Russian pot, working to get it crossbred just right for Kentucky.
"I had to go to jail, and my son kept working with it,"Johnny Boone recalled, "and the fourth year we just put seed out everywhere-we'd already smoked what little bit lived the first year we tried it, and it was the killer of killer. So, we kept after it, trying to get it to go. Finally we did."
IN THE SUMMER OF 1983, AS JOHNNY BOONE SAT IN THE LAGRANGE Reformatory doing time for his Belize conviction, Marion County marijuana growers worried about the ratcheted-up war on pot that risked sending them to join Boone in federal prison. But in 1983, pot growers, along with farmers of more-legal crops, faced a far more ancient enemy than the state police and DEA: drought.
The growing season of 1983 began with a wetter-than-usual spring that nearly washed out the Kentucky Derby, leaving Sunny's Halo galloping first past the muddy finish line during a "thunderstorm that had frightened off a third of the humans in the infield," according to New York Times sports columnist George Vecsey. That Derby Day drenching would be the last raindrops the Bluegrass State would see nearly all summer.
By the end of July, so little rain had fallen in central Kentucky that farmers had long stopped hoping for one good rain to solve their problems. Corn farmers had already lost 10 percent of their crops, and for every day it didn't rain, Marion County farmers lost a bushel out of every acre of the fifteen thousand acres of corn grown in the county. In the end, more than 50 percent of the corn would be lost, along with 15 percent of the soybeans.
