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

by James Higdon

  "Which one?" his client asked. "I'll cut it off."

  "Don't do that," his lawyer told him. "They already know its yours!"

  So, in Minnesota, the team of Kentuckians went through the barn and farmhouse wearing latex gloves, throwing every piece of trash or any object that could have been touched into black plastic garbage bags and loading them onto a truck. Then the team started in the far corner of every room, babystepping backward armed with Windex and paper towels, spraying all the flat surfaces-high and low, vertical and horizontalto remove any proof that fingers had been there.

  With all the surfaces cleaned, the crew loaded into different vehicles. Boone told them to go to a hotel for a week or two to ride it out, and he would be in touch with them when he felt certain it had been a false alarm. They herded the rottweilers, numbering nearly a dozen including puppies, into a trailer and drove them back to Kentucky. The crew broke up into small groups and headed out in different directions, and Johnny Boone left solo.

  Later that week Johnny Boone sat on a plain double bed in a nondescript motel room somewhere in the Midwest, keeping a low profile with two rottweilers. Still unsure if the nosy deputy had been a true threat or a false alarm, he felt he should wait a few more days before finding out. With nothing to do, holed up in the middle of the day, he turned on the television set. Soap operas and The Price Is Right should have been on, but Johnny Boone discovered that every channel broadcast the same thing: men in military uniforms testifying before Congress about Iran, Nicaragua and Contra resupply efforts. Like most Americans, Boone was hearing the names of Oliver North and John Poindexter for the first time; but unlike most Americans, Johnny Boone possessed a working knowledge of the subject at hand.

  In the evening, the news was more of the same, and in prime time, even more. From his motel room on July 11, Johnny Boone watched with rapt attention as the CBS newsmagazine West 57th Street reported that the CIA smuggled cocaine into America. The lead story was entitled, "CIA Front Dealing Drugs."

  "Our first story tonight," said journalist Jane Wallace, "concerns more information on the connection between the Contras in Central America, the United States government and cocaine. When we first reported that connection three months ago, we told you that the White House and the CIA had used known drug traffickers to arm the Contras.... The current congressional hearings investigating the Iran-Contra scandal have not dealt with these drug charges, even though many of those accused of drug trafficking worked for Oliver North in the network he set up to supply the Contras."

  During his Caribbean travels, Johnny Boone had always read the English-language newspapers to keep informed on the region; it was important for his job security. Consequently, he already knew about the war in Nicaragua between the Contras and the Sandinistas, and he suspected that Harold Brown, the Kentucky DEA agent, and his associate Andrew Thornton had been bringing drugs into America with some sort of secret approval from government agencies. Now, as the CBS newsmagazine interviewed drug traffickers who claimed the CIA was connected to their operations, Johnny Boone figured he finally understood what Thornton and Brown had been up to back home in Kentucky.

  "So, that's what they've been doing," Boone thought.

  He assumed that soon all this information would come to light, and the War on Drugs, which the government used with great success to stigmatize marijuana and lock up its growers, would be exposed as the fraud that Boone knew it to be. The drug war wasn't about controlling drugs, Boone realized; it was about suppressing competition. But by the time Johnny Boone would have the luxury to contemplate the macroeconomics of the drug economy again, the CIA's secret connection to it had been successfully swept away. Neither CBS News nor any other major news organization ran a followup to West 57th Street's allegations.

  After a few more long July days cooped up in his motel room watching Oliver North and John Poindexter testify on television, Johnny Boone decided it was time to see if his farm in Minnesota was swarming with cops or all clear. He drove his pickup back to the farm, alone, and parked on a back road several miles away. From there, he hiked crosscountry through the pastures, crops, forests and swamps until he reached the backside of the Jenkins farm, where he sat and waited. Patiently he watched the farm, looking for any movement or activity that would signal police surveillance. If cops watched from the farmhouse, Boone reasoned, the stakeout would relieve its shift at least every twenty-four hours. After a daylong study of the farm, with no evidence of human activity, Boone returned to his truck and sent word to Kentucky that the coast was clear.

  His contact in Kentucky kept in touch with the other groups ofworkers, holed up in hotels across several states. So, when Johnny Boone called him, he called all the crew members and told them to go back to work. Soon the Minnesota farm operated as normal.

  By September, all the males (about 60 percent of the total plants that had sprouted from seed) had been plucked, leaving the females cloistered, as if in a convent, from the corrupting influences of the opposite sex. Like guards at the gates of the harem, Boone and his men worked to ensure that no secret male could sneak into the garden and spoil several females before he was caught.

  Three members of Johnny Boone's crew were experts at finding male hemp organs while they were still immature and unable to produce pollen. Of all the specialized skills necessary to grow large quantities of high-quality marijuana, this keen eye for males was the most valuable. Every three days these three men walked the rows of marijuana, looking for anything that caught their sharp eyes. They not only looked for male plants that others might have overlooked during the initial sexing of the patch but also watched for the sinsemilla grower's greatest enemy: the secret hermaphrodite. After all the males have been plucked, a grower must be alert that no plant that appeared to be female suddenly decides to switch and become a male and begin producing pollen, seeding the females around it. The greater a female plant is stressed, either by lack of water or simply the strain of not being pollinated, the greater the chance of hermaphroditism.

  Boone's three experts combed the rows of the twined grid of the two secret patches, each man with a different technique of marking suspected hermaphrodites: One used yellow sewing thread to tie onto a suspect branch; another used red twist ties.' his way, they could mark suspected plants to check on them the next time around to see if they had changed any since the last check.' his system also allowed a fellow expert, knowing who had marked which branch by the color of the tie, to discuss what he thought about that particular plant when the two men met at the end of a row. If she was going to turn into a male, she might devalue $6,000 worth of plants around her. So, if she was bad, she needed to come out right away. But if she wasn't bad, she was worth at least $500 herself, and so it was important that she stayed until she was fully grown.' system that Boone's men constructed allowed them to deal with these problems swiftly and correctly.

  As September 23, the autumn equinox, neared, the female plants began redoubling their resin-production efforts in an emergency attempt to get themselves pollinated before the frost. It was the time when Boone stopped fertilizing the field, too, feeding the plants only water from then on to ensure there would be no chemicals in the plants' flowers at harvest time.

  At the same time, an Alberta clipper began to blow down from Canada and didn't stop for a week. One morning Boone woke up in the farmhouse around 4:00 a.m. and realized the Arctic wind had stopped. In the kitchen, his chief grower, Smith Fogle, brewed a pot of coffee. As the coffee woke them up, the dawn illuminated the nearest patch of formerly dark green marijuana plants, each six feet high, as bushy as they were tall, and acres of them. Watching through the window over the kitchen sink as the sunlight revealed the nearest rows of plants, the two Kentuckians, who together had more marijuana-growing experience than a busload of California hippies, saw something they had never seen before: ice completely encasing every single prized marijuana plant, the once-green buds now crystallized and white, reflecting the low-angled sunlight like f
aceted diamonds as long as baseball bats.

  "We had pictures of it ... of the goddamn frost and snow on it," Johnny Boone recalled. "The whole damn field was as white as that candle. . .. Every son of a bitch who worked up there could tell you: It froze and snowed the same night. September about twentieth up there and the motherfucker just like that tree standing there green-the fucking pot standing there white.

  "It had the frost and the freeze all on it at the same time. And then the sun came out, just like wintertime here-drip drip drip it started melting off. A little thin coat of ice on every fucking plant. Every boy busted with me could tell you the same story. I got every boy out of bed.

  "I said, `Come out here.'

  "4:30 in the morning.

  "`It's all dead.' [One of his workers said.]

  "I said, `What?'

  "He said, `It's all dead.'

  "I said, `It can't be dead.'

  "He said, `It's dead.'

  "I said, `If it's dead we're going to harvest it all today. Whatever's out there we're going to get it.'

  "So, we went out there, and it blew my shit away, man. Blew my shit

  It blew Boone's mind because these plants, although totally encased in ice and frost, did not die. Instead, the "strong ones lived," the females being shocked into even greater levels ofTHC-rich resin production.

  Boone had always trusted Mr. X, his seed-delivering friend, but this clinched that trust more than ever. Not only did this Russian strain survive a weeklong, nonstop Arctic onslaught, but also this crop was shaping up to be one of the finest marijuana harvests in Johnny Boone's career, which stretched back at least seventeen years by 1987.

  However, as soon as he peeled his eyes away from the green goldmine that he had seeded, staffed and grown, Boone realized his relief would be short-lived. Although his acres of marijuana survived, if not thrived, in the Alberta clipper, the surrounding corn crop, planted around the perimeter of the farm to hide its true nature, had not been as lucky. Unlike the hearty Russian genetics of the pot, the characteristics of the corn Johnny Boone planted were never designed to withstand such brutal conditions.

  The Alberta clipper killed the corn where it stood, as Vesuvius had killed the citizens of Pompeii, leaving the cornstalks upright but blanched, drained of all their color. Corn, with its twelve-week lifespan, was meant to be sown in June and reaped in August, but Johnny had waited until late July to plant his Minnesota corn so that it would still be growing until his secret crop was ready to harvest in October. Now in shades of yellow and white, the corn provided little camouflage for the acres of dark green marijuana it once concealed.

  Instantly Johnny Boone felt exposed. Without the cover the corn provided, he and his crew were screwed. His perfect crop must come in immediately-all of it, every plant, even though he could get another week of THC production out of his fields of females if he held out a little longer. Beginning immediately and working nonstop in shifts around the clock, the Kentucky crew chopped the plants down with long-bladed corn knives and hauled them into barns and outbuildings. Workers swung knives and stacked plants for twelve hours, then collapsed in the farmhouse for a nap, woke up, ate and returned immediately for another shift. In this way they filled up both barns and several outbuildings and stillafter a few weeks-had plenty yet to harvest.

  If Johnny Boone and his crew didn't get the crop in quickly, someone would certainly see it. Boone put in a call to Kentucky to spread the word that he needed more workers as fast as he could get them before any of his Minnesotan neighbors got wise, but it was already too late.

  From the air, it was unmistakable, but Agent Phillip Wagner of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) asked the single-engine airplane pilot to make a second pass over the 355-acre property known to the locals as the Jenkins farm, just to be sure. Yes, it was marijuanamore than the pilot or Wagner had ever seen, in two long rectangles of dark green, each longer than four football fields end to end. It was October 21, 1987.

  Quickly a meeting to plan a raiding party began inside the small office of the Otter Tail County Sheriff's Department in New York Mills-a place unaccustomed to drug operations of any size, much less to the tip of a green iceberg that would become, in the opinion of the FBI, the "largest domestic marijuana [syndicate] in American history."

  In ten days, November 1, President Reagan's new drug laws would finally take effect. The Minnesota detectives and deputies knew that if they waited until then, the DEA and other federal agencies would swoop in from St. Paul and take the case for themselves and deny the local officers any credit when prosecuting these out-of-state marijuana growers under the strict new law. If the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and the Otter Tail County Sheriff's Department wanted credit for their own work, they would have to act now.

  On the morning of October 23, snow fellwhile the Kentuckians worked feverishly to harvest, dry and pack their crop for shipment. At 10:00 a.m., the driveway alarm started ringing while Smith Fogle was working in the hayloft, clipping marijuana buds from their stalks with rosebush clippers while listening to his Walkman. Even with the music loud, he could hear the alarm, and so he pulled off his headphones and ran toward the window. At the end of the loft, Smith pulled back a sheet of black plastic that hung over the window to keep anyone from seeing inside. Peeking around the plastic, Fogle saw a truck towing a horse trailer approaching through the snow and told his companions it was a false alarm.

  "It's just a truck," he said, figuring it was the load of workers from Kentucky.

  But the next second, Fogle saw five armed policemen spring from the rear of the Trojan horse trailer, and his heart sank.

  "It's a bust!" Fogle shouted, and everyone dropped what he was doing and ran.

  Some didn't bother using the door, instead busting through the barn wall or sliding down a garden hose hung from the hayloft as the drainpipe for a makeshift urinal. They dashed past the firearms kept nearby for protection from rippers. As his workers broke out of the back of the farm, Johnny Boone went his own way, grabbing an AR-15 and Tech-9, along with two Smith & Wesson handguns, an automatic and a .38 revolver. If anyone was going to get a longer prison sentence because of the presence of firearms, Boone wanted it to be him and not his men.

  While all of his workers broke through the back of the barn and leaped and ran across the back end of the frozen farm, Johnny Boone hopped into his truck, a gray-over-black GMC two-ton pickup with tinted windows and a camper shell, and drove out the front of the farm, hoping to distract the police long enough to give his workers enough of a head start to escape. Members of the police raiding party observed Boone's exit at 10:00 a.m.

  At the end of the farm's gravel driveway, Boone turned south on County Road 58 and drove a short way, less than a mile, before two police cars turned southbound out of the Jenkins farm driveway to pursue him. Boone suddenly cut a U-turn and started coming straight at them.

  Deputy Thompson, in the lead squad car, turned on his blue lights and parked halfway into the northbound lane to force the oncoming truck to stop, but Johnny Boone steered into the ditch and drove around Thompson's position without losing speed. Deputy Lockhart, driving the second squad car, saw the truck evade the lead cruiser and head toward him. Quickly Lockhart turned on his lights and cut into the northbound lane, but the bearded driver steered into the ditch and drove around him. Lockhart then turned his cruiser around, gunned the accelerator, passed Boone's truck and forced it to stop by cutting it off on a diagonal.

  Although he couldn't get away himself, Johnny Boone managed to occupy three squad cars and five officers of a thirteen-man raiding party-enough, he hoped, to give his workers the chance they needed. Boone slowly complied with the arresting officers' demands to exit the truck and turned around to allow himself to be handcuffed.

  The arresting sheriff's deputy asked Boone to identify himself.

  "Charles Grass," Boone told him.

  Behind the seat of Boone's truck, the Minnesotan policemen found se
veral rolls of duct tape, the AR-15, the Tech-9, the two Smith & Wessons, plus more than a thousand rounds of ammunition for the AR-15, a few hundred rounds of 9-millimeter ammo and maybe a hundred rounds for the .38. All the guns were loaded, but Boone made no attempt to use them against the policemen. Under the truck's camper shell, the deputies found a number of machete-type knives, boxes of trash bags and the unmistakable scent of marijuana.

  Meanwhile, inside the farm, the raiding party worked to secure every building and found the place to be mostly deserted except for Mary Jo McDonald, the camp's only woman, who had stayed behind with the eight adult rottweilers she had spent all summer training.' dogs'vocal cords had been removed so that they wouldn't bark at intruders-only attack them in silence. She knew that if she ran, the aggressive dogs would lunge for the policemen, so she stayed to keep them calm, prevent anyone from getting hurt and make sure her dogs didn't get shot. Agent Wagner, who had been a dog handler in the Air Force, would later vouch that McDonald's actions kept the raiding party safe and kept any of the dogs from being fired upon in self-defense. With the dogs safely secured, Wagner asked McDonald for her name, but she refused to identify herself.

  In the aftermath of a Minnesota snowstorm, members of Boone's crew took off in a fast sprint across the snow-dusted cornfield wearing T-shirts, light jackets and camouflaged pants. As they came to a fence at the edge of the field, several of the men cleared it in a single leap. A chubby member of the group, a man known to the others as Possum, lagged behind and became hung up in the fence line as the others made it into the woods. Two men ran back to pull Possum over the fence and help him into the tree line. Inside the cover of the trees, they finally had a chance to catch their breath and look behind them, where they saw their footprints through the snow, a trail that would lead the police directly to them. They were cold and alone, and none of them knew where he was, other than somewhere in Minnesota.