by James Higdon
No one in Houston knows the details of that federal drug raid or that Bobby Joe Shewmaker bought Bruno and Lindi as cubs and kept them with a black bear on a marijuana farm in Princeton, Kansas, population 322; nor does anyone in Houston know about Bruno's connection to the male lion confiscated from Jimmy Bickett, Chico, who is said to have found a new life on a nature preserve and a role in a Steven Spielberg movie, possibly the lion on the circus train in the opening scene of IndianaJones and the Last Crusade.
In February 2006, I drive to New Orleans for a wedding of friends rescheduled for the weekend after Mardi Gras because the original date had been the weekend Hurricane Katrina hit. We attend Mardi Gras on Tuesday; on Wednesday, I drive to Houston, where I meet with the zookeepers, who introduce me to Lindi and Celesto. I record my interview with the zookeepers with an iPod, but the background rumblings of the lionesses' roars clip out the audio, rendering it useless. With a rope four inches thick, I play tug-of-war with one of them through the bars. It hurts my hands and scares me. In the Tunnels, I meet Waheed Agha. On Thursday, I head back toward New Orleans. As I drive Interstate 10 through scenic Beaumont, Texas, I contemplate the different fates of Bruno and Shewmaker, both imprisoned for life, wondering which one had it better off. I make it to the French Quarter in time for the bachelor party. From what I remember, the wedding on Saturday is very nice. (At this point, Lindi has less than a year to live; she will die on February 12, 2007.)
When I return home, I have trouble getting anyone to talk to me about anything not so legal that might have happened in Marion County. My great-uncle, who co-ran the Blue Room poker game in the back room of Club 68 back in the day, looks at me like I'm crazy when I tell him I'm writing a book. Will he talk to me? No. Will the nice lady from Loretto in her nineties talk to me about her father's moonshining during Prohibition? No, she won't, either-"Tell your parents I said hello," she says. As I have trouble getting even the nicer folks to talk to me, I do historical research, dig through church archives, graveyards, newspaper microfilm and congressional records and request documents from courts and police agencies at the federal level and in multiple states.
I find the phone number of Roland Villacci, one of the Fonzarellis from Maine, an informant against the Bicketts, and I book a ticket to visit him. Meanwhile, I work to find contact information for Miller Hunt, the main Maine man, because I want to interview him. He has no contact information online. I learn that people can be hard to find if they don't want to be found, so I look for information about the woman I know used to be his girlfriend, Debbie Lewis. I find a newspaper story that says she died in a camping accident and lists her mother as a survivor. At my layover at LaGuardia Airport in New York, I call the number of her mother and leave a message on the machine explaining that I'm looking for Miller Hunt. When I get to Portland, I meet with Roland Villacci at a local seafood restaurant in a suburban strip mall. He tells me about the time they brought lobsters to Raywick but doesn't answer all my questions.
"Hey, not so loud," he tells me over good seafood. "People know me around here."
He's a nice guy and friendly. He's out of prison, working as a personal trainer in a gym, can't drive because of too many DUIs and lives in his brother's basement.
That night in my hotel room, my cell phone rings at midnight.
"If you go to that house you called today, you're going to get shot," the male voice on the line tells me, referring to the place I called looking for Miller Hunt. "I'm not talking about maybes. This is Maine."
A few minutes later, my phone rings again; it is a Maine state policeman.
"You've got these guys pretty scared up here," he tells me. "They think you're here to kill them."
"What?" I explain to him what I'm doing.
"Look," he says, interrupting me. "If you say you're not going to that house tomorrow, we don't have a problem."
"I'm not going to go to that house tomorrow," I say, and the conversation ends.
After that, at 1:00 a.m., I call the airline to change my flight to the first one out of Portland the next morning.
Back in Kentucky l keep working. One day l drive down Johnny Boone's long driveway and see the thousands of cow bones that adorn his fence line. For one hundred yards, on the wire fence at the edge of the lane hangs the same leg bone from hundreds of cows, meticulously fastened at one-foot intervals. When the leg-bone segment ends, the fence starts with cow ribsevery twelve inches for another two hundred yards. When the road turns at a 90-degree angle, there is a tree with hundreds of bones hanging from it and stuffed in the crotch of the tree where two branches diverge. It has a Texas Chainsaw Massacre feel to it. As I get closer to Boone's house, I pass through a gate guarded by two cow skulls looking down at me. Then I arrive at his locked gate, guarded by more cow skulls, deer heads, KEEP OUT signs and a tattered, faded POW-MIA flag tied across the cattle gate that leads back to the cabin on his farm. He has two mailboxes: In one, a small deer head, with the skin still partially attached, grins at me; the other is empty.
In the empty mailbox, I leave Boone a note as his three dogs bark at me from the other side of the gate. Inside the gate, more skulls, more bones-lots more. Just inside the front gate, a pair of giant animal skulls with massive jawbones (which I later learned came from two draft horses) stare at anyone who crosses the cattle guard into his curtilage.
Boone does not respond to my note.
Back in Lebanon, when I ask older farmers about Cornbread-related activities, the first thing they want to talk about is Charlie Stiles and how the state police killed him. Looking into the Charlie Stiles story takes more time than I ever thought it might. I talk to Al Cross, the former reporter from the Courier journal about Charlie Stiles. For thirty years, Cross has been hanging onto a file an inch thick with all the reporting he did on the killing of Charlie Stiles for the back in the early 1980s, ten years after Stiles's death. Cross could never find a smoking gun that could clearly contradict the state police's version of events; and no guilty conscience came forward to confess. I take Stiles's coroner records to Dr. George Nichols, former state medical examiner, and to Jeffrey Scott Doyle, a forensic science specialist for the Kentucky State Police; both tell me the diagram of bullet wounds in Stiles's body do not conclusively disprove Detective Ralph Ross's official version, which Al Cross had also kept.
I talk to Charlie's widow, Mary Dee. I talk to old-school ex-convicts, each with his own conspiracy theory about who set up Charlie Stiles, who ratted him out. I talk to one of the police officers who was there that night; he looks at me as if I'm crazy for asking the questions I ask.
In May, I talk to a group of retired outlaws in an interview that begins on a back porch at 11:00 p.m. and ends just before dawn the next morning; we run out of beer twice. Two of them talk while one is quiet. I ask them about Charlie Stiles and his brother Paul. I take notes on a manila folder in the dark. Finally, the quiet one speaks up.
"If you want to know about outlaws, you should look into Garland Russell," he says.
"Garland Russell? Who's he?" I ask.
"He's a gangster motherfucker is who he is," the man says.
When I get home, I look at my notes. The humid Kentucky night saturated the manila folder, leaving it as limp as a cocktail napkin and bleeding the ink of all my notes, rendering them illegible. The only thing I can make out is something that I have underlined and circled: "Garland Russell/ gangster motherfucker." I start looking into him; I find a fifty-page FBI file from the weekend in 1956 when he hijacked the truck filled with bowling alley equipment and the testimony from J. W VanArsdale, the man who survived three gunshots fired into him by Russell from two different guns.
I meet Boone for the first time in the parking lot of the McDonald's in Springfield. He agrees to allow me to request his FBI and DEA files via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), on the condition that I allow him to see the paperwork before I look at it. I agree.
Months later, as the FOIA records trickle in, I bring them to Bo
one to review. 'hen, a few days later, I return to his farm, down the rows of bones and skulls that I now see more as outsider artwork than as Texas Chainsaw Massacre-impressive for its methodical nature and sheer size, a memento mori on the scale of Christo: the driveway of contemplating one's certain death. Mexican migrant workers won't come near the place.
When I get to the end of his drive, if his cattle gate is open, I cruise right past his three big barking dogs to the house, where Boone tells me what I will find when I review the documents that I dropped off a few days before. I discover that Johnny Boone possesses a natural intelligence; he understands how the world works as it truly is, not as one might like it to be.
At some point that summer, I arrive at Boone's gate with a thick box of FOIA documents and find his gate locked, but the box is too big to leave in his mailbox. I want to get at the documents as soon as possible, which means leaving the box at Boone's now, so I get out of my car. His dogs, three big Labrador-rottweiler mixes, tug at their chains and bark at me; they mean business.
I can hop the gate and put these on his porch, I think to myself. That's no big deal.
Even though it's a clear breach in the protocol that Boone and I established, I figure it will be OK, so in shorts and flip-flop sandals, I climb over Boone's cattle gate with a box of documents in my hands as his dogs continue to bark at me and tug at their chains. Boone keeps his dogs chained up to the left of his gate; his house sits about one hundred yards to the right across an open yard, through which I walk carrying this box. Then I remember something: Over by the dogs, behind the vintage Oldsmobile covered in jawbones, there is a tree with pieces of chain and rusty metal dangling from it. Boone told me once before what it is: It's the tree where he hangs all the chains that his dogs have broken. I remember this as I am halfway between the gate and Boone's porch in the open lawn. I hear the pieces of metal clinking against each other in the wind. I freeze and look behind me. The dogs are going crazy, tugging against their chains' anchors trying to get at the intruder on their property. I hustle to Boone's porch, drop the box, dash back across the yard and hop over the gate in a hurry.
Over time, Boone and I develop a rapport, and he speculates what I might do after finishing this book:
"Or you can stick to what you're doing and travel and get lots of pussy," he says to me. "Write wild books that people will buy for years in powerful places, probably. You're getting a pretty damn good lap around the field already. Just from when I've knowed you, I've just picked up and observed. Where did you go to school in London?"
I never told him I went to school in London. It seems like so long ago, but while at Centre College, I studied abroad in London in my sophomore year. I tell Boone that while studying in London, I traveled around Europe a little. I tell him I turned nineteen in Amsterdam, and we have a good laugh about that.
"I think something's happened in Amsterdam," Boone tells me. "They're writing about it now in High Times.... They began to see things happening in the breakdowns in the durability of the plants .... They finally figured out because they took them and kept them and redid them and kept them and didn't have no males and didn't have no seeds-they didn't want any seed nowhere. They started out making clones in Amsterdam. But they weren't getting no new fresh blood. Like a man bought a Angus bull and just kept him and when he died kept his sons and when they died kept his grandsons for fifty years. That's what you call `inbreeding.'
"They done that. All of a sudden, they woke up and said, `Goddamn, we got spider mites eating them up. The mold is overtaking them. They're not getting as high like they used to.' And then they said, Ah shit, we've been inbreeding for ten or fifteen years over here so now we got to go get some seed.'They're writing about it now in High Times: The breeds broke down inside their own breeds. Took about twenty years to break plumb down."
I find Boone's observation fascinating, so I reach out to an expert for confirmation.
"He's right about the fact that genetics became quite bottlenecked in Amsterdam," says Danny Danko, senior cultivation editor for High Times. "With few new additions to the gene pool, the waters became somewhat murky, and constant inbreeding as well as instances of stress passed down from generation to generation through cloning led to a lack of diversity that caused the end product to suffer [in terms of its] potency, flavor, odor, growth patterns and resistance to pests, molds and diseases."
My ongoing conversation with Johnny Boone at some point turns to contemporary marijuana smokers' culture, which Boone has missed out on because of his decades of incarceration.
"What is it, 4:12 that they all smoke at?"
I correct him.
"Oh, 4:20," Boone says. "I don't even know the right time. That's all over the world now, isn't it?"
I tell him that's right; it is.
The first person in Raywick to talk to me is Charlie Bickett. He kept the Bickett family tradition alive by operating a bar and grill inside a restored garage in Raywick around the corner from where Squire's Tavern used to be before it was dynamited in the 1980s. Charlie sold his place in the summer of 2011.
Despite its lack of liquor, Charlie's was a good place to go for a brew and a burger for lunch or for karaoke on Friday night. Sometimes I would go there with friends from high school, and Johnny Boone might show up, and if he did, he had a Ziploc bag in his pocket with five or ten joints of his private stash, each rolled his distinctive way-thin on the ends and bulging pregnant with pot in the middle. He would sit and chain-smoke two or three in a row. He would light a joint, take a few puffs on it and pass it to somebody next to him, and then he would light another joint before the first one made it around the table. Who's going to tell Johnny Boone to not do that? Nobody in Raywick.
"I've been around Charlie Bickett for a long time," Johnny Boone says. "He's part of the Bickett clan, which I'm very protective of. His daddy saved me from the US marshals [in the eighties].... I was going right into a trap.... They'd probably have held me and held me, and I would have to make a bond or something, or get Jack Smith to get me out.
"But see, I already had a mechanism set up through a lawyer's office in Louisville. Any time I was arrested by the feds, if it was a bondable situation, they take me straight in to whatever judge was sitting that day.' lawyer I was with could get in for fifteen minutes instead of maybe sitting two weeks in the system....
"These fucking marshals. One son of a bitch, me and him had words before, about him being a gung-ho guy, you know? I used to have a habit of talking straight to a cop, if he was an asshole, but that's not always the best thing to do.
"He had me down there to the marshal's office one day, I was being arraigned for something. It was a voluntary thing. If they call that lawyer and said they needed me, would I come in without them having to come down in two or three cars, I automatically go. Who the hell wants them at your house?
"So, I go in, surrender. There's other marshals moving around, and the old boss marshal sitting over there in the corner.
"And I say, `I need to take a shit. Is it all right if I go over there and take a shit in your bathroom? Is that OK?'
"He said, `Yeah.'
"So, I went over there. I bet I hadn't been in there long enough for you to drop two turds, and KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK.
"`Let's go.'
"I said, `Fuck you, man. I'm shitting.'
"Then about forty seconds, KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK.
"I said, `Let me tell you something, motherfucker. I'm going to shit. And be waiting at the door if you want to talk about it when I get up here. I'm wiping my ass.'
"So, I get up, and go out, and he's standing there.
"I said, `What the hell's the matter with you, man?'
"I looked at the supervisor, and the supervisor said, `Go on about your procedure now.'
"So, then we went on.
"Well, he come out there again to get me, and I knew that son of a bitch, there was no telling where they would take me, put me in jail. Probably would be a month before I got out.
I mean they could really fuck you or provoke something while you were in jail to lengthen it.
"Mr. Bickett come down there. He knew where I probably was, maybe. And he had entrance to all the places everywhere. Everyone was glad to see him because he was bringing you some news you needed to know if he ever showed up. He might never show up, but he did.
"He said, `They're up there.'
"I asked him, I said, `What's the best way out of here from what you can tell they're going to do?'
"He said, `They're sitting in there thinking you're going to come through town. They've been in every place up there. Go through Clear Creek.'
"I said, `I'm gone.'
"That's what I did, and then I come and made my arrangements, and then I still had to stay disappeared until arrangements got fixed. Saved me no telling how much time in jail, but they was aiming to fuck me around that time."
Because of stories like that, Johnny Boone has a great respect for Squire Bickett's sons and is especially fond of Charlie. On a late summer day in 2007, Johnny Boone meets Charlie Bickett in Raywick and rides in Charlie's truck down to visit Jimmy, who has returned to the Bickett family farm after his nearly twenty-year prison sentence to live in the white aluminum-sided house where Garland Russell hid out nearly thirty years before. As Charlie Bickett drives down the mile-long driveway toward the house, he and Boone see Jimmy driving toward them in an Oldsmobile with two passengers: a teenage stepson with a broken leg riding shotgun and Ben, his five-year-old stepson, in the back seat.
Charlie Bickett doesn't want to yield to Jimmy Bickett on the one-lane road, so he decides to play a little chicken with his brother. Jimmy, coming the other direction, isn't about to yield the road to Charlie, so Charlie's truck and Jimmy's Oldsmobile hit head-on at about twenty miles an hour-enough to stun Charlie Bickett into wide-eyed silence and to break up Johnny Boone into fits of laughter when he recounts the story later.
