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

by James Higdon

  As they caught their breath and gathered their thoughts, they realized that their numbers had dwindled. Of the nearly twenty who had run from the barn, only fourteen were huddled in the frozen woods. Outside in the snow, by mutual decision, the fourteen men agreed to split up into two groups of seven-Smith Fogle and Possum in one group along with Les Berry. Together they waded through a frozen swamp, hoping to shake their pursuers and remove any traces of the trail they had left through the snow but also exposing themselves to hypothermia and frostbite.

  Finding the road again, they came upon a house with a light on. Freezing and panicked, they were willing to consider anything. They could run in, they thought, overpower whoever was there and tie them up. They didn't want to hurt anyone, but they needed to get away. They could tie them up and cut the phone line; by the time someone found them, the Kentucky boys would be long gone, and the restrained people would tell their rescuers how nice the men who did that to them had been.

  Still, Les Berry, with his and his colleagues'faces blue and their clothes freezing to their skin, came up with a better plan. Each man still had most of the $500 in run money that Boone had given him upon arrival. Pooling their cash, they had almost $3,500. If they could get a ride to town, maybe then they could buy a car and get away without hurting anyone. It seemed unlikely to work, but it was better than doing something stupid.

  Les Berry took the run money to the house and knocked on the door, while the remaining six men hid in the woods, huddling close to keep warm. When Mrs. Jodie Ewert answered the door, Berry asked her to drive him to town. She said yes, taking her two young children with her. Berry paid Mrs. Ewert $20 for the ride when she dropped him off at Ness Motors, a used car lot in Wadena, about fourteen miles from New York Mills, where Berry bought a blue 1972 Chevrolet Impala from salesman Robert Brummer, paid for with the pooled run money.

  While in town, Berry gassed up the Impala, checked the oil and picked up some snacks before driving back out to the spot where he had left the others. Fogle, Possum and their colleagues were so happy to see Berry pull up in the fifteen-year-old Chevy that they "would have lined up and kissed his bare ass" if he had asked them to, according to Fogle. After the seven men had crammed into the car built for six, Berry drove off heading east toward Wisconsin.

  By the end of the morning, a manhunt for an unknown number of suspects had begun, but the agents failed to track any of them directly from the farm. A few hours into the search, a neighbor called the Otter Tail County Sheriff's Department to tell the dispatcher that four men wearing camouflage had just approached his house asking for shelter. Agent Wagner arrived at the house shortly after the call came through. The Kentuckians had left tracks through the snow away from the house after the homeowner turned them away; they were very easy to track to the field where Wagner caught them.

  None of the four men wore a heavy coat, only army fatigues. They were all "very, very cold" and "very, very wet,"Wagner would later testify in court. They surrendered without fighting or fleeing. Even though the men were wet, Wagner could tell "they reeked" of marijuana. While arresting them, Wagner discovered them to be "not impolite"; instead they were "very cordial" but "very uncooperative as well."

  Shortly before 5:00 p.m., Otter Tail County Sheriff's Lieutenant Ray Polensky spotted a man wearing camouflage walking down County Road 67. When Polensky arrived on the scene, another officer advised over the radio that he had earlier spotted the individual walking into the woods. With two other squad cars on the scene, Polensky grabbed his shotgun, got out of his cruiser, walked through a harvested cornfield to the edge of the woods and hollered for the man to come out. The weather had cleared by then, and the temperature was in the low thirties. After a long silent moment, Polensky saw the camouflaged man coming out of the woods with his hands raised.

  "Where are you going?" Polensky asked, pointing the shotgun into the air.

  "Home," the man said.

  "Where's home?"

  "Kentucky."

  "Have you been out here a long time?"

  "Yes."

  "Are you cold?"

  "I'm glad it's over with," he said. He was unarmed. By the time Polensky put him into the back of his cruiser, without handcuffs, ten policemen had arrived in response to the radio traffic.

  At 6:15, more than eight hours since the raid, the sun began to set, and the temperature quickly fell.Three hours later, a little past 9:00 p.m., the snow started falling again when another call came into the dispatcher from a farmhouse reporting that some camouflaged men had stopped by looking for shelter. Lieutenant Polensky responded to the Reger residence, where Mrs. Reger pointed in the direction the strangers had gone, leaving a clearly visible trail in the inch and a half of snowfall.

  Polensky took his flashlight and followed the tracks on foot, running for about a mile and a half, kitty-corner across a field toward County Road 67 and then along the road's shoulder, where the tracks would be on the east side for a while and then switch over to the west side. Polensky also saw where, every once in a while, the suspects had lain down in a ditch to hide from traffic. After a mile and a half of running, Polensky found four men huddled in the ditch on the west side of the road and signaled with his flashlight for backup. He told the four men to come up to the road one at a time, and they obeyed, wet and shivering. After five minutes, squad cars arrived. The arrested men said next to nothing in a southern accent. They were wet and smelled strongly of marijuana.

  At 10:00 p.m., BCA Agent Phillip Wagner learned that Mrs. Jodie Ewert had taken a camouflage-clad man to Wadena earlier that day. Within minutes, Wagner had Ness Motors salesman Robert Brummer on the phone and got the license plate number of the 1972 blue Impala. From the Ewerts' farmhouse, Wagner called his office's dispatcher and told the dispatcher to put out a nationwide teletype for a wanted vehicle.

  Twila Schott, the night dispatcher, tried over and over to enter the wanted blue Impala into the computer system, but the computer kept rejecting it. Finally, three hours after Wagner called her, Schott discovered a way to get the computer to accept the information: by entering the Impala as "stolen" instead of "wanted." The computer finally accepted the nationwide alert at 1:31 a.m., notifying every law enforcement dispatcher in every state to be on the lookout for a "stolen" blue Impala filled with drug suspects from Kentucky who were "armed and dangerous."

  Arden A. Asp worked the night shift for the Wisconsin State Patrol as Trooper 3. On October 23, his shift began at 11:00 p.m., patrolling the Interstate 90-94 corridor between Minneapolis and Chicago in an unmarked 1987 Plymouth Grand Fury, its blue lights concealed in its grille and dashboard. At 1:30 a.m., the Grand Fury idled between mileposts 72 and 74 in Juneau County. At 1:31, Asp's I-band radio squawked with a message from district headquarters: Minnesota authorities were attempting to locate a stolen vehicle.' he occupants, wanted in reference to a drug investigation, were armed and dangerous. Asp wrote the license plate number in his notebook and hoped he never saw it.

  At 2:45, Trooper Asp was parked under the crossover at milepost 74 watching eastbound traffic, his headlights illuminating the cars and trucks as they passed his location. At 2:46, a blue Chevy Impala bearing Minnesota plates Boy Charles Young-770 drove past at a little under the 65-miles-per-hour speed limit. After the Impala had traveled about a half-mile, Asp pulled into the eastbound lane and accelerated. He slowly approached the Impala to double-check the license number and noticed that the car was full of passengers. Then the unmarked Grand Fury passed the Impala at a high rate of speed, pulled off at the next exit a few miles east and killed its lights at the top of the ramp. Inside the Grand Fury, Trooper Asp called for backup on his radio.

  Trooper Michael Hookum worked the adjacent sectors of the interstate to the east of Asp. He responded and said he would be at the north end of the county. District headquarters broke in and stated that Sauk County Sheriff's Department had units rolling. Then Hookum and Asp discussed the safest place to stage the takedown in case these armed and
dangerous drug suspects engaged them in a gunfight from their stolen vehicle. They decided to take them down "textbook felony style."

  At the state police academy, the troopers had learned to block traffic to the entire interstate behind the target vehicle and, if possible, to block all traffic in the other direction, too, so that there would be absolutely no innocent parties in the area in case of gunfire. Hookum and Asp decided that the best place would be milepost 89, within a quarter-mile of the Trout Road overpass, where there were only tillable fields to the west and woods to the east and south, with no houses or businesses nearby.

  Inside the blue Impala, six Kentuckians slept soundly as Les Berry drove the speed limit. He saw headlights in his rearview mirror and reduced his speed, hoping the car would pass, but it didn't. For four or five miles, the car hung about a quarter-mile behind him, even though Berry decelerated to forty-five miles an hour. Then Berry saw a squad car for the Wisconsin Dells parked in the median. He watched in the rearview mirror as the parked squad car pulled in behind the first car tailing him. As soon as the two cars blocked both lanes of traffic, Berry watched through the Impala's rearview mirror as the two cars turned on their red and blue flashing lights. He immediately pulled over onto the shoulder and came to a stop. The Wisconsin Dells squad car cut a U-turn and drove west in the eastbound lane to stop traffic while the unmarked Grand Fury directly behind the Impala turned on its brights. Inside the blue Impala, Les Berry was still the only one awake.

  "Wake up, boys,"Berry said, loud enough to rouse the six men. "We're caught."

  Trooper Asp grabbed his shotgun, stepped out of his car and took a shooting position behind the open door. Over the Grand Fury's loudspeaker, Asp told the occupants of the Impala that this was a "felony stop." The suspects were to obey his commands "to the exact letter" and to make "no sudden moves or escape attempts," otherwise, they "would be shot."

  Another squad car, Trooper Hookum's, arrived on the scene, taking a position in the middle of the interstate because traffic had been stopped. Asp couldn't see into the Impala because the back window had steamed up. He instructed the driver of the Impala to throw the keys out the window, hold both hands out the window, open the door from the outside and step out of the car with his hands raised. Les Berry obeyed.

  Asp instructed the camouflage-wearing driver to turn around twice with his hands in the air so Asp could determine if he was armed. Then Berry was ordered to walk backward until Asp handcuffed him, led him back and placed him facedown on the freezing asphalt in front of Hookum's cruiser. One by one, the police repeated this procedure until all seven men, six in camouflage and one in a blue sweatsuit, were facedown on the cold highway, with Minneapolis- and Chicago-bound traffic blocked in both directions for as far as anyone could see.

  The suspects' camouflage concerned Asp because of his training in extremist groups. As eight or nine squad cars from different agencies arrived, Asp heard "no sound" from the Impala "at all," and none of the men spoke as Asp cuffed him.

  "It looks like a bunch of little commandos," one officer commented over the radio.

  Ten minutes later all seven men lay facedown on the highway as the temperature dipped to twenty-eight degrees. The highway patrolmen and sheriff deputies on the scene searched each camouflaged man thoroughly, expecting him to be heavily armed, but found only two jackknives between seven men. Trooper Asp discovered something else on them: "an odor ... a very strong odor ... of marijuana."

  The camouflaged Kentuckians, despite their situation, seemed to be "reasonably comfortable ... extremely indifferent ... very calm," a demeanor that "surprised" Asp. Normally subjects expressed "extreme indignation" while being arrested. Instead, the Kentuckians remained completely silent, not talking even to each other. Only one of the seven, Francis William Donahue, known to the other men as "Possum," broke the silence to ask Asp for a favor. As the Wisconsin police had manhandled him to the highway, Possum's pants had inched downward, exposing his butt crack to the cold night air. Handcuffed, Possum begged Trooper Asp to pull them up, but Asp ignored him. Smith Fogle, facedown and handcuffed beside Possum, couldn't keep from laughing.

  After Asp peeled the camouflaged Kentuckians off the asphalt, he and other responding officers transported them to the Sauk County jail, where they booked the seven men on charges of possession of stolen property-a car that they had gone out of their way to pay for.

  With the initial manhunt over, Special Agent Phillip Wagner and his six fellow officers from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and the Otter Tail County Sheriff's Department began to take inventory of Johnny Boone's operation: two Sears trash compactors, thirty compacted bales of marijuana sealed with duct tape, binoculars, walkie-talkies, police radio scanners and a list of radio frequencies used by the Otter Tail County sheriff, Becker County sheriff, New York Mills, Fergus Falls, Detroit Lakes, the game wardens, Perham police, the National Weather Service and Eagle Lake Patrol.

  Up in the hayloft, the agents found the racked bins with the drying buds and evidence that they had been recently tended-music was still playing on the Walkman left near a pair of rose clippers. The agents found several similar pairs of clippers around the barns and property and concluded the Kentuckians bought them by the boxful.lhey found cigarettes still lit and cans of soft drinks and beer still cold and half full. In the barns and farmhouse, they found more than two hundred individual pieces of camouflaged clothing.

  Men with rakes and shovels moved the marijuana stacked like Christmas trees inside the barns into front-end loaders, which loaded it into dump trucks, which took it all to an area directly east of the red barn and stacked it up in "a rather large pile." How large? Sixty-two dumptruck loads, the last one of which weighed 680 pounds, making the total amount seized from the barns-the amount Boone's crew managed to cut between the Alberta Clipper and the arrival of the Trojan horse trailermore than forty-two thousand pounds.

  Police took photographs of this twenty-one-ton pile before, during and after they burned it. In one photo, later marked Exhibit 12, Agent Wagner and his team of police officers climbed on top of the marijuana pile as if it were Mount Suribachi and raised an American flag, playing the part of the Marines who had stormed the beach at Iwo Jima.

  Outside the farm's curtilage, police found another whole field of marijuana that had not yet been cut, perhaps another forty acres, more than the police could estimate or eyeball-"there was just too much of it." Based on aerial photographs of the field, the police guessed that they were looking at another forty thousand-plus pounds, roughly the same amount seized in the barns, but they had no way to be certain because it was more marijuana than any of them had ever seen before, despite their decades of collective experience.

  "If we could have saved the seed,"Johnny Boone later said. "Because there were some places where a male had pollinated maybe fifty females around it, happens in any big field. If we could have got the crop through and saved the seed, think about them seeds! Them sons of bitches were probably ready for northern Canada, them seeds was."

  As Johnny Boone and his workers sat in their cramped holding cells in Minnesota, federal investigators began to understand the scope of the Kentucky connection. Although the forty-five-ton seizure in Minnesota was the largest in the state's history, it appeared that it wasn't alone. Investigators began to see connections to a web of farms in different states. All this evidence rattled the DEA. In 1987, the DEA was confident that the vast majority of the marijuana sold in America was being smuggled from south of the border, but Johnny Boone's farm opened the drug agency's eyes to a threat it never foresaw: a vast homegrown marijuana-growing empire.

  Investigators burst forth with questions, but the nine men and one woman arrested outside New York Mills, Minnesota, and the seven more caught on the Wisconsin interstate weren't answering any of them. Although polite and friendly to their interrogators, the Kentuckians were collectively mute. No one talked, no matter what the federal agents threatened him with. Johnny Boone face
d life in prison without parole; others faced potential sentences of more than twenty years. Talk to us, and we'll cut you a deal, the investigators told them; none did.

  The uncooperative uniformity of the Kentuckians frustrated their interrogators and planted the seeds of legend. In the end, after all the arrests were made, the seventeen busted in Minnesota and Wisconsin would join fifty-three others to form the Cornbread 70-the ones identified in the 1989 press conference-and exactly zero agreed to talk to investigators in exchange for a lesser sentence (not at first, anyway)-a batting average that impressed even their prosecutors.

  After they had all been arrested and placed in federal custody in Minnesota, each person was held in solitary confinement, kept away from the others to prevent them from talking to each other. Just before the suspects were to see the judge, the prison guards brought the Kentucky crew out into the hallway, each member handcuffed and shackled. It was the first time Boone had seen all his men since the horse trailer had pulled in a few days before.

  "Men, we all share a secret," Boone told them. "Now, I've been down this road before, and I want you to know, you only have one chance to do this right. You do the right thing, and I guarantee you'll never regret it. But if you turn and rat out everybody to get out early, you'll never forgive yourself. There might not even be anyone out to kill you, but you'll kill yourself with paranoia."

  That's all he had time to say before the bailiff led them into the courtroom for their collective bail hearing.

  Marilyn Boone, Johnny's wife, called Jack Smith, his attorney, the Monday after things went bad in Minnesota, setting Smith and his partner Patrick Molloy into motion. Immediately they secured a Minnesotan lawyer, who met with the ten Kentuckians caught in Minnesota (all except the ones who had escaped in the blue Impala to Wisconsin) in their holding cells in the maximum-security wing of the Stillwater prison. Then Smith and Molloy learned that there were seven more clients in the custody of the state of Wisconsin, so they set about to secure a lawyer for them, too.