by James Higdon
"I remember it because of the writing on the front of the refrigerator, `pop 50."' the deputy said.
Inside the refrigerator, detectives found a giant package of pork chops, net weight 19.46 pounds, purchased for $30.94 from Higdon's Foodtown in Lebanon. Elsewhere in the room, detectives found nearly two hundred rounds of .45-caliber ammunition, a hardback copy of Love and War by Patricia Hagen, a paperback edition of The Rider of the Ruby Hills by Louis L'Amour, a University of Kentucky Wildcat sportswear order form, a Kentucky High School basketball yearbook, the Kentucky basketball factbook for the 1986-87 season (Rex Chapman's freshman year) and the April 1985 issue of Penthouse magazine. In all, the crime lab team found forty-nine latent fingerprints in the room.
The detectives hauled from the scene six loads of marijuana, totaling 3,900 pounds. Sixty-five additional pounds of the processed pot was kept as evidence. The truck drivers delivered the six loads of pot to the county maintenance farm, where it was burned. The Woodford County sheriff, his deputy and a Lexington television news crew watched the bonfire.
Meanwhile, in the Woodford County jail, detectives began interrogating the ten men they had in custody, beginning with the first suspect at 3:25 p.m. Some of the interviews lasted less than a minute, as the ten arrested men responded to their interrogator's questions with a short list of answers, including, "I choose to remain silent," "I don't know" and "I want to see my attorney."
On Thursday, November 20, all ten defendants were charged on federal indictments. By January 21, 1987, the state crime lab had processed all the fingerprints collected from the Woodford County farm, connecting one suspect to the scene by prints lifted from a Styrofoam cup, a bottle of Kahlua liqueur and a spatula in the kitchen. Another print from a Campbell's tomato juice can matched the left thumb of another suspect; prints on another Styrofoam cup matched a third defendant's prints.
The lab dusted every piece of trash left on the scene and every conceivable surface, including each page of all the books and magazines left behind, finding fingerprints on five pages of The Rider of the Ruby Hills and twenty-three fingerprints, four full palm prints and two knuckle impressions in the April 1985 issue of Penthouse, which featured a black-haired, leather-wearing dominatrix named Fasha as the "Pet of the Month."
At the end of March 1987, the federal courthouse in Lexington issued subpoenas for two Marion County men who, prosecutors believed, had escaped the scene during the November raid. The subpoenas asked the men to "relinquish their finger and palm prints." Prosecutors hoped to link them to the Penthouse or to any other unidentified fingerprints scattered throughout the scene. On July 15, 1987, prosecutors made it official and charged the two remaining men with "possession with intent to distribute."The two men surrendered to US marshals on August 12.
On Wednesday, October 7, 1987, prosecutors brought the twelve defendants in the Woodford County case before a federal grand jury in Lexington. All ten men pleaded the Fifth Amendment and refused to answer questions, after which the US district judge explained the concept of forced immunity to them. All acknowledged that they understood that the judge, through a writ of forced immunity, could compel them to speak without Fifth Amendment protection because the court had immunized them against self-incrimination.
Despite understanding the writ, none of the men answered any questions put to him in the grand jury. The judge found them all to be in contempt of court and sentenced them to an additional eighteen months on top of their sentences for the crime of trimming pot in a barn. To the men from Marion County, an extra year and a half in prison was a small price to pay for the knowledge that no one else had been sent to prison because of them.
ONE WEEK BEFORE THE 1986 MIDTERM CONGRESSIONAL ELECTION, President Ronald Reagan signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, a muscular supplement to his 1984 anticrime package. The law was "the federal government's way of saying no," Reagan said, adding $1.7 billion in taxpayer dollars to the $2.2 billion already spent each year fighting drugs to improve enforcement programs, toughen sentences for drug violators and increase the size of the federal government's payroll by several thousand drug enforcement agents. That $3.9 billion that President Reagan spent fighting drugs is equal to $8.5 billion in 2011.
Following their president's orders, these agents worked to send a new wave of Americans convicted by its laws into the federal prison system, overwhelming facilities that were already crowded, according to a 1986 study by the United States Sentencing Commission. The federal prison system, with a capacity of twenty-eight thousand prisoners in 1986, already held forty-four thousand adults. The Justice Department estimated that at least half the convicts entering the system by the end of the decade would be drug violators. In the span of a single election cycle, President Reagan and the Democrats in the House had whipped the drug war into its highest state of alert since its declaration by Richard Nixon more than a decade before.
"The Administration has been remarkably successful in changing attitudes and norms," Mark Moore, a professor at Harvard University, told the New York Times. "The president's public role has legitimized the drug issue."
This new expansion of the federal prison system started a ticking time bomb: On November 1, 1987, all drug criminals would be sentenced by minimum guidelines. For the same crime that earned Paul Stiles a $500 fine and six months' probation in 1976, a farmer caught after November 1, 1987, would face a minimum of ten years in federal prison.
But it wasn't November yet; it was only April, and Johnny Boone had been out of prison on the Belize deal since 1984, or two growing seasons. Back home on Bloomfield Road, Boone and his son Jeffrey planned another big year for the Russian, which his son had kept going while Johnny was away.
"That's what we planted in Minnesota," Boone later said.
In the same month, another meeting took place in Louisville under the auspices of the newly created Organized Crime Drug Enforcement (OCDE) Task Force, bearing the newly designated FBI classification 245-F. For the first time, representatives from the Kentucky State Police, FBI, DEA, IRS and the US Attorney's Office sat around a table and discussed Bobby Joe Shewmaker, Raywick and the Marion County marijuana problem; Johnny Boone was not yet on the radar.
The task force's profile of Bobby Joe Shewmaker-fugitive from the law since he skipped out on his sentencing hearing in Savannah-was relatively accurate.
Shewmaker, it reported, "has been considered for many years as a result of reliable information to be a substantial, significant grower, distributor, and broker of multi-tons of marijuana in the Kentuckiana area ... and reportedly has assets and property valued in the millions in Kentucky, Indiana and Florida ... but local prosecution has been fruitless.... The rural, isolated nature of the area this group is located in has made penetration by local law enforcement agencies impossible.... It is felt that the only practical method to be used against [Shewmaker] is the task force concept."
Following its April meeting, the task force's efforts "centered around the gathering of intelligence information of each of the participating agencies." After the task force synthesized each agency's files on Marion County, "the use of aerial and ground surveillance, as well as pen registers [phone tapping machines] will begin." Because "conventional investigative methods directed against this group have failed," the task force determined success would be "dependent upon utilization of all available task force resources including informants, pen registers, Title III [a wiretapping statute], aerial surveillance, UCAs [undercover agents], federal grand jury and computers." Confident of its eventual victory, the task force predicted the investigation would "result in substantial seizure of drugs, money, conveyances and real estate."
Meanwhile in Marion County, men decided to leave their families for the summer to join growing operations run by Johnny Boone in Minnesota or Bobby Joe Shewmaker in Missouri and Kansas or any of a dozen or more crews operating independently of one another in a dozen states. The best way for them to make a living in the collapsed farm economy, they decided, was to b
reak the law. The men making those decisions agreed to work for Johnny Boone on an out-of-state farm with no contact with home or family until the job was done. Johnny Boone had the operation all lined up, with one last thing to take care of. criminal charges pending against him, alleging that he had grown marijuana the previous year in Nelson County.
In May, Johnny Boone walked into the Bardstown courtroom to face those charges. A stout farmer with a full, red beard, he entered wearing farm clothes, unadorned except for his wedding ring and a small silver hoop earring peeking out from between his curly hair and side whiskers. Without the earring, he would have resembled any other cattle farmer or burly woodsman; with it, as a token of his inner hippie, Boone projected the casual and confident nature of a man unashamed of his chosen line of work.
Boone stood before the judge, and standing next to Boone was his smartly dressed attorney, Jack Smith, the former federal prosecutor and US attorney. Long before Boone hired Jack Smith as his lawyer, Boone knew Jack's father, Henry Smith, the Marion County judge. Despite their differences in dress, stature and professional experience, Smith and Boone were products of the same central Kentucky culture.
Before the proceedings could begin, the state's witness dropped his face into his hands. The commonwealth attorney approached the bench to tell the judge that his witness, a farmer, couldn't testify because he was afraid of someone in the courtroom.
"Afraid?" the judge bellowed, as Jack Smith later remembered it. "Afraid of who?"
Without looking up, the farmer pointed at Johnny Boone, and the judge looked Boone over.
"We've got him on tape, Your Honor," a policeman said. "We don't need his testimony."
"No," the judge said firmly. "We're not going to use a tape if the man is sitting right here and can testify for himself. If he can't, the commonwealth will have to say the witness has recanted."
The judge looked again at the witness, who was still doubled over, face in hands; he could have been crying. The judge banged his gavel and dismissed the case against Johnny Boone without prejudice.
After the case concluded, Jack Smith walked with Johnny Boone to the parking lot. It was the last time the two men would see each other under pleasant circumstances. Johnny Boone hopped into his pickup and drove north out of Bardstown and past Rooster Run toward the interstate highway and his next major project: a substantial marijuana farm in northern Minnesota.
Even though Boone escaped the charges facing him in Bardstown, as soon as he crossed the Ohio River, he broke another law: Since his release from federal prison a few years before, his parole was conditional on Boone not leaving the commonwealth. To solve this problem, Boone a few weeks before had visited West Virginia, where he acquired a driver's license from a bearded man named Charles Lee Grass. As Mr. Grass, Johnny Boone left Kentucky a few weeks after Alysheba won the 113th Kentucky Derby.
Boone knew that the sentences for the sorts of crimes he was conspiring to commit had risen since his release from prison in 1984, but he had no way of knowing how pivotal the growing season of 1987 would be in the history of American law. If police found Boone's secret crop before November 1, Boone could be paroled after serving two-thirds of his time sentenced, which would largely be determined by the judge. If they busted him one day after November 1, he faced a sentencing hearing more strict than anyone in the legal profession had ever seen before; the sentence's length would be based not on the judge's discretion but rather on a chart handed down by the attorney general; and Boone would be forced to serve more than 90 percent of that time because the same law eliminated federal parole. Even a great defense attorney who knew the Justice Department as well as Jack Smith did would do Boone little good if he were arrested after the November 1 deadline, when the forty-four-year-old would be subjected to a mandatory minimum of twenty years in federal prison.
As Johnny Boone drove through Chicago on his 910-mile trip to his eventual destination in the Minnesota hinterland, he played over in his head the meeting he had with a colleague just a few days before he left Kentucky.
"Are you going out this year?" his friend had asked.
"Yes," Boone told him.
"Don't go. They've changed the laws, and if they catch you, they'll have you for good."
"I've got to," Boone told him. "I've got everything already set up."
This conversation played in a loop in Boone's mind, but he couldn't turn back now. When he crossed the Ohio River en route to Minnesota, he had crossed the Rubicon.
New York Mills, Minnesota, an old manufacturing town of 943 souls of Scandinavian descent, sat nearer to Fargo, North Dakota, than to Minneapolis-St. Paul. It was surrounded by streams, lakes and marshes popular with hunters and fishermen ("If you like swamps," one fishing guide reads, "you're in luck").
Once Johnny Boone arrived on the farm, he and his crew of nearly twenty Kentuckians set about to grow some of the best marijuana ever cultivated outdoors in America on an industrial scale.
"You do have good places to grow up there,"Johnny Boone later said. "You think cold weather, short summer, you wouldn't think that's a good place to plant tropical pot. There would be a few plants that won't mature by October or November up there, but the majority of them would make kick-ass pot. Good pot."
Forced from his natural habitat of central Kentucky by the state police helicopter, Boone ventured to places like New York Mills to find sleepy spots where cops didn't fly. On the Minnesota farm, Boone and his crew planted acres of corn around the fencerow for cover. Inside the perimeter, in the fields closest to the barns and farmhouse, the Kentuckians planted two patches of marijuana in one hundred rows, each row about thirteen hundred feet long-each patch capable of producing fifty thousand pounds of high-quality sinsemilla. Boone, from his farming experience, knew to plant his camouflage corn crop later than normal to ensure that it stayed green long enough to provide cover for his true crop. Corn's shorter growing cycle meant that if its planting was poorly timed, it would mature and wither by September, leaving the marijuana exposed to plain sight. The farm's Scandinavian neighbors thought the friendly-but-secretive southern-sounding farmers didn't know the first thing about farming. Why else had they planted their corn so late?
While the task force in Kentucky busied itself trying to find Bobby Joe Shewmaker, Johnny Boone and his crew tended two multiacre patches of Minnesotan marijuana. Every day men walked the rows as the plants shot upward during their vegetative stage, working to ensure that none of the plants grew tall enough to be seen growing above the corn by bending the stalks of the plants so that they would grow curved instead of straight. For plants that grew very fast, Boone's crew lashed the top of the stalk to the trunk of the next plant in the row, arching the spine completely over like a croquet wicket.
Boone had learned over the course of his career that bending a marijuana plant's stalk during its vegetative stage somehow jumpstarted its THC production, so many of the Minnesota plants curved as if in a strong breeze or tied down end to end like crochet stitching. To navigate through the expansive green labyrinths, the crew strung a grid across the field with white twine, each grid square about one half-acre in size.
By the first of July, the plants had matured enough to begin identifying the males. Workers walked row after row, looking at each plant's immature flowering parts and then plucking out the males before they could pollinate the females.
On July 2, word came across the police radio into the Otter Tail County Sheriff's Department to be on the lookout for a band of roving bank robbers. Because some neighbors had complained that they had heard some automatic gunfire on the old Jenkins farm, the sheriff thought one of his deputies ought to go take a look out there.
On Saturday, July 4, as several of Boone's men walked the fields plucking males, an Otter Tail County Sheriff's Department patrol car drove slowly down the driveway. Inside the barn and farmhouse, the pressureplate alarm system screamed its high-pitched alert. Everyone on the farm froze, watched and waited to see what the lone poli
ce cruiser would do. The job of one of Boone's men was to act as the farm's owner in any communication with the neighbors and community. This man walked out to talk to the sheriff's deputy as others watched closely from the cornfields and from the barn.
"One of the neighbors lost some cattle overnight," the deputy sheriff said as he stepped out of his cruiser, craning his neck to look around. "They still haven't found them all. None of them came onto your property, did they?"
"No, we haven't seen any," the Kentuckian said.
"Well," the deputy said slowly, with no apparent intention to leave, "if you see any, you'll be sure to let us know?"
The farmhand nodded and stood his ground as the deputy eventually decided to return to his patrol car and drive out the driveway as leisurely as he had arrived. As the squad car drove slowly away, all eyes were fixed on it, ready to tell legs to run if they saw the Scandinavian deputy do anything out of the ordinary.
The crew turned to Johnny Boone, who asked himself the same questions: Were they busted? Or was it really a clueless deputy looking for cattle? He couldn't be sure. The deputy seemed harmless enough, but he had been so deliberate, taken so long to do a simple thing. Maybe the deputy had been slow generally and did everything with the same pace from eating his dinner to making love to his wife. No one-including Johnny Boone-could be sure. But it was his decision to make, and all the eyes that watched the patrol car come and go now focused on him.
"OK," Boone said. "Let's clear out. Just to be safe."
Two men from Boone's crew had been trained exactly for this contingency. Since the bust in Woodford County the year before, marijuana growers understood that their fingerprints were a liability if police discovered a location, even if no one was caught. Fingerprint analysis became as terrible an enemy to the processing stage as helicopters had become to the growing stage. An attorney once told a client that the police had his fingerprints at a certain crime scene.
