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

by James Higdon

  Charles Price, a stocky, white-bearded man from Cynthiana, Kentucky, is known around Lebanon as FedEx Chuck because he has driven the FedEx route for fifteen years, from Lexington to Lebanon and then "out to Raywick and back through."

  "Every day I go to Wal-Mart delivering," Price says, "and after I do my delivering, I get something to eat and use the bathroom. I noticed a bunch of cop cars around there-state police and sheriff and everything out there.

  "So, I come out, as I was walking out, I think it was Carroll [Kirkland, the sheriff] said, `That ain't him.'

  "I didn't pay no attention to it, though. I walked on and went back to my truck. Just a couple of days later, I found out when I was delivering to the courthouse that they were laughing about it, but I don't know if he was out there, really out there, or not. But somebody did call in and say that Johnny Boone was at Wal-Mart.

  "So, I don't know if he was really down at Wal-Mart or if someone thought I was him out there.... I was wearing my uniform, my FedEx uniform.... I don't even know what he looks like."

  He looks like Chuck Price.

  "That's what I've been told," Price says.

  When Johnny Boone's daughter has her wedding, the US marshals arrive in force, with a helicopter and spotters writing down license plate numbers.

  Just down the road from the wedding reception, a man with a white beard sets up a watermelon stand on his property. Upon closer inspection, the marshals discover the bearded man has a handgun strapped to his hip. When he goes into his house to get something, an unmarked black SUV barrels into his driveway, pulls into his front yard, parks in the grass, and a female US marshal hops out with her gun drawn as the white-bearded man steps outside. She demands his identification, which he reluctantly provides.

  "Do you have a license for that firearm?" she demands.

  "Yes, I do," he responds. "And you're trespassing on my property."

  "Well," she tells him. "If we had had a shoot-on-sight order, you'd be dead right now."

  "Ma'am, if we was in Vietnam," he shoots back, "you'd already be dead."

  When the bridal party realizes a week or so later that the official wedding photographs are ruined, the Boone family's attorney asks the US marshals if they have any photos of the bride and groom they can have. The marshals are amused but say no.

  With the ground offensive going nowhere, the US marshals turn to the air war, launching a media campaign on the airwaves against Johnny Boone by sharing the photos of Boone in a tropical location with local media outlets and America's Most Wanted, which tries to portray Johnny Boone as equal to the cop-killers, child molesters and other scumbags usually showcased on that program.

  On its website, AMW posts a story about Boone rife with factual errors and a negative bias. I appeal to Justin Lenart, producer at AMW, to change the story to at least conform to the facts. The first draft of Lenart's AMWpost says that Boone's house is currently guarded by dogs without vocal cords, which is a classic mistake of confusing the Boone of today with the legendary Boone from 1987 Minnesota. His current dogs, I assure Justin Lenart, are barkers. Lenart invites me to Washington, D.C., for an on-camera interview about Johnny Boone, and I accept.

  I travel by Amtrak to D.C. on Monday, October 13, 2008, and go on camera for AMW the next day. The show records me for about an hour, and I remind the producers that they are violating my copyright by using my photographs of Johnny Boone without permission. On January 5j ustin Lenart ofAMWe-mails me again to dispute my copyright claims, so I pick up the phone and call the US Marshals Service in Louisville to nip this thing in the bud.

  I talk with the man in charge, Rick McCubbin, appointed by George W. Bush as chief US marshal for the Western District of Kentucky, and I ask him to stop distributing my photographs of Boone to the media. McCubbin asks me if I might know Johnny Boone's whereabouts.

  "Even if I knew where Johnny Boone was, I wouldn't tell you," I say, which upsets McCubbin.

  "What do you mean?" he asks aggressively. "Are you saying you're obstructing an investigation?"

  "I knew what you were saying," McCubbin tells me two years later when we meet in his office at the Bardstown Police Department. "But you weren't saying anything any different than anyone else was telling us, and they told us straight up, `If I knew where he was at, I wouldn't tell you."'

  "How many times did you hear that?" I ask.

  "Oh, countless," McCubbin says. "Most people we spoke with said that. Every now and then, you'd get that one person, or two people in a row who said, `Well, I hope you get him. I don't like him. I think it's wrong.' But say if you encountered ten people, eight of those ten would tell you, `I wouldn't tell you where he was at if I knew.'

  "You, in other words, were following a pattern that we had already heard, and were going to hear, for the next several months. You were right in the parade. You didn't tell us anything that shocked us. It made us mad, but it didn't shock us."

  So, on Friday, January 16, 2009, the last business day of the George W. Bush administration, the clerk of the US District Courthouse in Louisville signs a subpoena with my name on it. Four days later, the chief justice of the US Supreme Court swears in Barack Obama as the fortyfourth president.

  One week after the inauguration, on Tuesday morning, January 27, as I am in my third-floor apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, about to leave for work, the doorbell rings. Jehovah's Witnesses, I figure. Despite the cold, I open the window, lean out, look down and see a white-haired man in a black leather jacket.

  "Hello?"

  He looks up, revealing a white goatee to match his hair.

  "James Higdon?"

  "Who's asking?"

  "US marshals."

  "I'll be right down."

  They couldn't call first?

  I dash down two flights of stairs and open the door. The whitegoateed marshal eyes me up. He's about five-foot-ten; I'm half a foot taller. With his eyes to mine, he flips out his badge, a silver five-pointed star enclosed in a slim silver circle in a black leather case. I look down at it and nod.

  "You want to go get a cup of coffee around the corner?" I ask.

  "No, I'm just here to give you this," he says and hands me several folded pages stapled together on US District Court letterhead: a subpoena.

  I take it, look it over. He stands there casually.

  "So, you're not from the Kentucky office?"

  "No, I'm from the Eastern Division," of New York, he means. Brooklyn. "I have a few of these to give out today. I don't even know what it's for."

  "Oh," I say, trying to engage him, "it's because I'm a journalist and a known associate of a federal fugitive."

  He nods, shrugs and leaves, completely uninterested.

  That same morning, an ice storm of historic proportions encases the Commonwealth of Kentucky like that Alberta Clipper did once to Johnny Boone's Minnesota marijuana crop. By the end of the day, 700,000 Kentucky households are without power, more than three-quarters of the commonwealth's 120 counties are declared disaster areas, and twenty-six lives are lost in the worst natural disaster in modern Kentucky history. Marion County is one of the worst hit, with nearly 90 percent of the residents without electricity in the blistering cold; Lebanon's water supply shuts down because the pumping station at the reservoir freezes over. Meanwhile, I need an attorney, a good one, in Kentucky, on short notice.

  So, Wednesday morning I call Jack Smith. Even though it has been more than a year since we last spoke, he recognizes me immediately. He knows my family. His mother had been a long-time customer at my father's grocery store; she would come in every morning for a copy of the When she died, my father brought a final copy of the newspaper to the funeral home. Touched by the gesture, one of her sons put the newspaper on the closed casket for the funeral the following day.

  When Jack Smith took his seat at the front row at the cemetery, he saw the newspaper tucked under a spray of flowers on the casket lid and leaned over to his brother to ask, "Why the hell is that newspaper there?" His
brother told him that Jimmy Higdon had brought it the day before.

  So, that's why Jack Smith knows who I am when I call and why he sounds sincere when he asks how I'm doing, even though at that moment he is staying in a hotel with his wife, son, pregnant daughter-in-law and two grandchildren because the ice storm has cut power to his house.

  "I got subpoenaed yesterday,"I say. I don't need to tell him about what or regarding whom.

  "When's your court date?"

  "Next Tuesday."

  "OK, I'll go there with you. If any more law enforcement talk to you, don't answer anything and tell them that you've retained counsel."

  I relax a little. He tells me he will make some calls and see what's going on and tells me to check in with him in a few days, but it's Sunday before we speak again. I tell him I'll see him in his office tomorrow.

  The next morning, Monday, February 2, I wake up at 5 a.m., take a taxi to LaGuardia and board a nonstop flight to Louisville, paid for by the taxpayers of the United States. At 10:00, I land and go to the Brown Hotel, one of the most exclusive hotels in Louisville. The Gilded Age lobby is crowded with utility workers-men in hard hats and work boots, with gear slung over the shoulders of their Day-Glo hoodies. These emergency work crews have overtaken several floors of the Brown because the upscale hotel is one of the few places in town left with vacancies. I check in at the desk, and the clerk hands me a key-card for a club-level room with a king-sized bed and terrycloth bathrobes in the closet. Thanks, taxpayers.

  The US marshals and the US Attorney's Office have photos of Johnny Boone in a tropical location, and they know that I took them. They want me to tell them where that location is, but doing so will reveal the identity of a confidential source, so I prepare to not answer those questions, which will result in a contempt of court citation and up to eighteen months in federal prison. But wait! Don't journalists have a right to protect their sources? Nope, not in federal court they don't. In 1972, the Supreme Court ruled against reporters protecting their sources in court in Branzburg v. Hayes.

  Paul Branzburg worked for the the late 1960s and wrote two stories about marijuana in Kentucky-one about two hippies making hash in Louisville and another about cannabis use in Frankfort, including allegations of a pot deal inside the state capitol building itself. When a local prosecutor subpoenaed Branzburg to identify his sources, Branzburg refused. When the Supreme Court ruled against him, Branzburg never returned to Kentucky. After the Branzburg ruling, each of the eleven federal appeals courts set its own precedents for reporters' rights. I discover that the Sixth Circuit, which includes Kentucky, has a long history of being unfriendly to members of the press, which therefore grants me little if any protection against this sort of subpoena.

  The Bush administration subpoenaed sixty-five journalists between 2001 and 2006, at a rate of about one per month, but the Bush administration is over. How will this game play out under Obama? Because I am the first journalist subpoenaed during the new administration, a fact confirmed to me by the Society of Professional Journalists Legal Defense Fund committee chairperson, to find out Obama's policy toward freedom of the press will be to discover my own fate.

  I leave the Brown Hotel and head for Jack Smith's office on the north side of downtown, where I meet with Jack and his son, Trevor, who became an associate in his father's law practice after a punk-rock phase left a tattoo on his knuckle. The following day, Trevor's wife is due to deliver their third child, but Monday is a day for discussing strategy and potential outcomes of my current situation. First Jack Smith wants to know if I plan on pleading the Fifth, and I wave him off.

  "I haven't witnessed any criminal activity," I tell him. "And I certainly haven't participated in any."

  "Good," Smith says, leaning back in his chair. I tell him I want to plea the reporter's privilege of the First Amendment, and he nods supportively.

  "We're going to have to do some research on this," Smith tells me from his side of the conference table.

  "It's OK," I say. "I have it for you right here," as I hand him a twelvepage digest of the Sixth Circuit's opinions and precedents regarding cases that cite the First Amendment, not that any of them do my case any favors.

  "Let me take a look at that subpoena," Smith says, and I hand that over, too.

  He looks to see what they are charging Johnny Boone with. Jack Smith knows that the government has already indicted Boone once in absentia for the plants, so this indictment is for what? According to the subpoena, "Title 18, United States Code, Section 1073."

  "We'll have to look that up," Smith says.

  "You don't have to. I already did," I say. "It's `unlawful flight to avoid prosecution."'

  "Yeah, that's what I thought," Smith says. "UFTAP, we used to call it. You see, when I came back to Louisville from Washington, D.C., in the late seventies, I was the first assistant US attorney. The US attorney was about to retire, and I was going to take his place as US attorney for Carter's second term. So, there was this cop-killer loose down in Nelson County, in New Hope, who they ended up killing over in Indiana . . . "

  "Graham," I say, remembering the cop-killer's surname from my research into the seventies-era criminal history of Kentucky.

  "Yeah, that's right," Smith says. "Anyway, the FBI agent came up from Elizabethtown, and he and my boss went out to lunch. Before he went out, my boss handed me an indictment against Graham that he intended to file after lunch and asked me to look it over for him. So, that's what I did.

  "The indictment was for an UFTAP charge, and when I looked it up, it said that charging UFTAP for alleged crimes required the direct approval of the attorney general. So, when they came back from lunch, my boss asked me if I looked over it.

  "`Did you look over this?' he asked me.

  "`Yessir,'I said. `But do you know that this charge requires the approval of the attorney general?'

  "`Yeah.' He didn't want to admit it, but he did.

  "`Well, did you ask for it?'

  "`No,' he said. `If I did that, he wouldn't have given it to me!

  The point of Smith's story is that the basis for this second indictment against Johnny Boone is weak, even unlawful. We don't plan any tactics based on this information just yet, but it's something we have on our side. Smith calls the assistant US attorney assigned to the case, John Kuhn, to tell him we want a hearing with the judge before my scheduled grand jury appearance tomorrow.

  "John, listen," Smith says. "We're going to file a motion to quash this thing based on-"

  "the Fifth?" Kuhn says, interrupting. "Is he going to plea the Fifth?"

  "No, we're going to be pleading the First, John," Jack tells him in a calm and reassuring tone.

  The conversation goes back and forth, and I hear Kuhn say "obstructing," which I'm getting accused of a lot lately. After the phone call, Jack asks me what I want to do if it looks as if I am headed toward a contempt citation and looming jail time.

  "Let's go all the way then," I say, managing a smile. "If they want to throw me into the briar patch, it'll do wonders for my career."

  "Good. I'm glad you feel that way," Jack says. Trevor talks to me a bit about how federal prisoners get processed and which facilities I am likely to end up in. These are details I can't focus on, and I let them wash over me without listening too closely. At the end of our meeting, Jack tells me that he and Trevor will draft a motion to quash and tells me to meet them at the courthouse in the morning.

  With my legal needs taken care of, I meet my mother, sister and nephews-David, five, and Dawson, three-for lunch at Lynn's Paradise Cafe, a southern-style comfort food restaurant with mismatched lamps and plastic animals on the tables. My mother and sister talk on one side of our table while I play with plastic butterflies and horses with Dawson on the other.

  As we wait for our food, Dawson talks to me.

  "You're going to miss your plane tomorrow," the three-year-old tells me.

  "What did you say?" I ask him.

  "You're going to miss your p
lane tomorrow," he repeats for me, his big eyes looking straight into mine, a broad smile on his round face. I look over at his mother and at mine to see if either heard him.

  "Did you hear what Dawson just said to me?" I ask them; they haven't. "What did you tell them about why I was down here?"

  "Just that you were coming in for a meeting," my sister says, "and flying out tomorrow."

  "Well, Dawson doesn't think I'm flying out tomorrow," I say while thinking to myself. This toddler just predicted my imprisonment. How am I supposed to feel about something like that?

  That night, from my club-floor room at the Brown Hotel, I e-mail friends and former classmates from journalism school to prepare a phone tree and a system of communication in the near-certain event that I will be in federal custody within twenty-four hours. I write the telephone numbers for Jack Smith and the switchboard on my right forearm with a Sharpie.

  Across the street from the Brown, I discover that the bartender at the Bluegrass Brewing Company is Gordon Bramel, son of John Bramel, former editor of the Lebanon Enterprise, and younger brother of Zachary Bramel, my friend since sixth grade. I tell Gordon I might be going to federal prison for eighteen months tomorrow, and he pours me a few pints.

  The next morning I put on a white shirt, a black necktie and a gray suit, to which I affix an American flag lapel pin, the post-9/11 symbol of authoritarian obedience, in an attempt to thwart any first impressions of me as some sort of fugitive-loving obstructionist. I eat breakfast at the hotel, then walk the two blocks in the cold past the office to the courthouse, where I meet Jack and Trevor Smith in the lobby. Jack tells me that our judge will be Charles R. Simpson III, which Jack says is "good news" because the magistrate judge they originally scheduled us to see is a retired police officer.

  "But, Jack," I say. "Isn't Judge Simpson the one who sent the Bicketts away?"