The Bluegrass Conspiracy

by Sally Denton

  Ralph had two older sisters to contend with—Vernice and Sara— who, Ralph thought, acted like they hung the moon. Then there were Thelma and Shirley, who were younger than he, and his baby brother Lynn. Lynn would disappear after high school, leaving no trail. Throughout his life, from time to time Ralph would hear that Lynn had been arrested out West. But Lynn would never return to Dry Branch, Kentucky.

  His father had moved the entire family into the five-bedroom main house on the property after Ralph’s grandmother died. His parents took one bedroom, his grandfather another, and the rest of the kids shuffled for themselves. Four fireplaces were the only source of heat against the bitter-cold Kentucky winter, and the hearths became the focal point for evening conversation. Sometimes, in the days before electricity, Ralph’s dad would hook up a radio to a battery that had been charging all day long, and the family would listen to championship boxing matches. Entertainment was not as hard to come by in the late 1940s, though, when Ralph’s family became the first in Mercer County to own a television.

  A taciturn disciplinarian, Ralph’s father instilled fear in his children without raising his voice or striking them—a trait that Ralph would inherit. With his head cocked a certain way, his lips slightly parted, and his eyebrows raised, one look from Ralph’s father would let the kids know if they were in trouble. He left the spankings to Ralph’s mother, who kept a supply of maple switches for meting out her punishment and inspiring impeccable manners. “You could figure on two or three whippings a week until you were about ten years old,” Ralph would remember in later years. His mother handled the day-to-day problems with the children, dispensing permission and penalty alike. (Breakfast, lunch, and supper were all scheduled events, with each Ross kid expected to wash up before taking his place at the rectangular oak table.) One of the tasks Ralph’s dad took most seriously was planning the family vacation. His quiet, reserved manner must have belied an active imagination, for it seemed to Ralph his dad was constantly dreaming about the ocean. Every chance he got, Ralph’s dad loaded his family into the car and headed for the coast. “The crew of us young uns would be fightin’ and carryin’ on in the backseat the whole way,” Ralph remembered.

  Though both his parents made every effort to keep him in line, Ralph had the good fortune to have two sets of grandparents living on the adjacent property. “I went to their house for spoilin’,” Ralph recalled.

  He attended a one-room schoolhouse in nearby Harrodsburg, the county seat, where he was taught, among other things, to say: “Yes, sir,” and “Yes, ma’am”—a habit Ralph would never shake. There were six grades, and when the time came for the students to get their lessons for the day, each one got up, walked to the front of the room, and took a seat on the stage. One teacher taught all six grades, while the students were expected to sit in silence until everyone had finished.

  Ralph’s father decided to send all of his kids to Harrodsburg High School, which reputedly maintained high educational standards. Neither parent had had the advantages of a high school education, yet placed a high value on learning.

  Ralph, nicknamed “Buster,” was a strong, lanky boy—all arms and legs in his adolescence. His soul mate was his sister Thelma. The two of them used to invent games in search of some comic relief. They’d get up in the morning, eat breakfast, and each grab a hoe. With their dog—a conglomeration of breeds—they would head out to hunt snakes in the parched creek that ran through the farm. “We’d pick up them rocks with them hoes, the dog would jump in the middle of ‘em, and the snakes would come crawling out and we’d go after ‘em with the hoes. It was nothing to get two or three water moccasins out from under one rock.”

  Ralph was the kind of Southern man who had been indoctrinated with a sense of independence and self-reliance. He grew up fast, having been expected to take care of himself from a very early age. Kentucky men of his generation and rural heritage were not afforded the luxury of pondering their future. Upon graduation from high school in 1950 he was drafted into the Army. After nearly three years with the artillery outfit at Fort Knox, Kentucky, Ralph decided he was interested in communications. He wanted to become a code-breaker. Since the Army offered little advancement in that area, he switched to a four-year tour in the Air Force where he was trained in International Morse Code and communications basics. Before long he was an expert in encoding and decoding. Charged with communicating with the Philippines, Okinawa, Korea, Japan, and the Seventh Fleet of the Navy, Ralph’s unit roamed all over the world. He found himself most frequently in desolate areas where he worked out of the back of a pickup truck. Ultimately, he wound up at the Air Defense Control Center at Johnson Air Force Base in Japan where he sat in an enormous room filled with plastic boards monitoring unidentified aircraft. Although his outfit was stationed in Korea, Ralph was in constant motion, traveling to the various satellite and early-warning stations.

  Ralph had become a well-built man, whose six-foot-three height and large hands exuded self-confidence. A dead-ringer for the actor Robert Mitchum, he had been approached more than once for his autograph. War had made him more appreciative of Kentucky’s blue skies, languid hills, and lush greenery. A finicky eater, he longed for the sausage biscuits, salt-cured ham, corn bread and collard greens, and Kentucky bourbon. When he returned to Dry Branch in 1955, he had no desire to see any more of the world.

  He spent the first three months after his return wandering around central Kentucky, dating girls from Boyle, Mercer, and Anderson counties. In November 1955, Ralph and two buddies drove to Hartsville, South Carolina, where they had arranged three blind dates. A year later he was married to his date—a petite South Carolina native named Vivian.

  Having been trained by the military in the most sophisticated communications techniques of the time, Ralph Ross was unsure how he would apply his technical skills to civilian life. One thing he was sure of: He didn’t want to be a cop.

  One day he accompanied a friend who had decided to apply for employment with the Kentucky State Police. Ralph leafed through a magazine while waiting in an anteroom for his friend to complete his interview. A first sergeant came out and said to him: “Hello there. Put your application in.” Ralph replied: “Hell no! I don’t want to be no police officer!” But when the sergeant continued badgering him, Ralph finally succumbed and agreed to an interview. Two weeks later, he found himself at the police academy in Frankfort—the state capital.

  Ralph’s first assignment in 1956 was to the “Tip Top Post”— located at the intersection of U.S. 31W and Highway 60. Situated at the edge of the Fort Knox Army base, it seemed to Ralph as if he were policing an entire city. There was no typical day in the life of a trooper, Ralph quickly found out, as state police duties included a little bit of everything. Nicknamed the “Dixie Die-Way” because of the rampant bloodshed on the dangerous stretch of road, Ralph became accustomed to working all hours of the day and night. When he was-n’t investigating car accidents, Ralph was responding to homicides and assaults. He was faced with an exorbitant number of shootings, “where the GIs got off the base and brawled with each other.”

  Ralph spent the next ten years as a trooper, patrolling Kentucky’s state roads in various rural counties. Transferred from one post to another, sometimes with very little notice, Ralph would pack his little family and dutifully follow orders. First in Stanford, then in Lebanon, he personally built new homes for his wife and two toddler girls. He played basketball twice a week with a regular group of guys at the local high school gymnasium, which kept him in immaculate physical condition into middle age.

  By the mid-1960s, Ralph was tired of moving, and bored with traffic and homicides. Law enforcement was changing. Political assassinations, race riots, and student protests suddenly dominated the scene, challenging the nation’s police forces, which were ill-equipped to handle internal violence. The CIA’s Office of Security in 1966 began training certain police officers throughout the United States, and had
made overtures to him. The training courses, held at the CIA’s compound near Washington, D.C., included declassification of materials, foreign weapons, counteraudio measures, explosive devices and detection techniques, basic theories of intelligence and clandestine collection of information, covert photography, and photoanalysis, and Ralph found that he was a quick study.

  In 1968 Congress created a special appendage of the Justice Department to financially assist state and local police departments in battling the new, complex national crime wave that had accompanied the riots and demonstrations. President Richard Nixon announced drugs to be the evil force destroying American society, and made funds available for his much-publicized War on Drugs.

  Every police agency in the country scrambled to obtain the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration money allocated by the federal government, which was dished out only to agencies that established intelligence units. In 1969, Ralph became one of a handful of officers assigned to the first such unit created by the Kentucky State Police. The more violent and rebellious American society became, the more federal funds became available for training. Ralph’s superiors saw in him the right mix of intellect and levelheadedness. Inspiring their confidence, he was handpicked time and again as the state police designate-trainee to attend the country’s most renowned law enforcement academies. Before long, he had learned everything there was to know about lockpicking and wiretapping.

  In addition to the FBI and CIA programs, Ralph attended training courses offered by manufacturers of state-of-the-art electronic audio and video equipment. Even Smith & Wesson, which had primarily been an arms manufacturer, entered the business of night-vision cameras and scopes, recorders, and transmitters, offering training to its customers. Ralph was the Kentucky State Police representative at all the schools, including the National Intelligence Academy (NIA) in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Long rumored to be CIA-sponsored, NIA offered twenty-first-century training and technology to elite units of

  U.S. and Latin American police forces. Founded by a Kentucky native named Jack Holcomb, NIA existed hand-in-hand with Audio Intelligence Devices (AID), the manufacturer of the spy equipment used by NIA students. It was at NIA that Ralph perfected his electronic eavesdropping expertise.

  Ralph then became the tactician of the squad, training his unit in surveillance, countersurveillance, and most other investigative techniques, except for telephone wires. He guarded that specialty, keeping details of these unique abilities to himself.

  Soon he was not only the technical adviser, but also the strategist for the unit. The key to a successful probe, Ralph had come to believe, was in the accumulation of relevant intelligence information.

  As drugs began seeping into Kentucky, the Intelligence Division expanded to include investigations of narcotics trafficking and corruption of public officials. In 1971, Ralph was named the head of the larger, more inclusive division that was now called the Organized Crime Unit. Until then, the Kentucky State Police had been more like the FBI—it didn’t tackle big-time corruption cases. Corruption had always existed in Kentucky—from slavery to bootlegging to illegal gambling—and organized crime had operated openly for decades.

  But neither the feds nor the locals had ever taken them on. Now, the Organized Crime Unit of the state police would operate less like the FBI and more like the CIA—methodically and systematically collecting and analyzing data.

  For the first time in Kentucky history, a faction housed within the state police had become less a manipulative tool of the political machinery and more an autonomous mechanism that only a few men, including Ralph Ross, understood.

  It was in this climate that Ralph Ross learned that Drew Thornton and other members of the Lexington Police Department were dealing dope. As had become Ralph’s custom, he assigned his men to gather intelligence on their counterparts.

  Ralph considered police officers a strange breed. Some were zealots. Some were driven by a passion for truth and justice. Some were naive about the shortcomings of democracy, of politics, of human nature. Some were on a personal mission to clean up the world. Some enjoyed the power of a uniform, the discipline of a male-dominated organization. Ego and the desire to be revered as authority figures motivated some. Some were honest men dedicating their lives to public service.

  He hadn’t yet decided which category Drew fit into.

  Ralph Ross was himself an enigma. He was a seemingly uncomplicated man who believed he knew the difference between right and wrong and considered himself a peace officer in the truest sense of the word. He would be described as overzealous many times during his career, but no one would ever call Ralph Ross anything but honest. He was a good old boy who believed in doing his job well and going home to his family at night. But the bulldog commitment that accompanied those simple beliefs would prove to be a deadly challenge to Ralph’s adversaries.

  Ralph had come to enjoy a statewide reputation for his integrity and down-home charm. His lack of a formal higher education, which resulted in horrendous spelling on official reports and an often comical mispronunciation of words, coupled with a Southern drawl and rural colloquial expressions led some to dismiss him as a lightweight. But anyone who had an opportunity to work for or with him, as well as anyone who had the misfortune to be investigated by him, quickly had his doubts dispelled about Ralph’s intelligence and professionalism. Nobody ever considered Ralph to be dull in mind or spirit.

  For a man who didn’t want to be a police officer, Ralph had become the consummate cop. He had faith in his organization, he believed in the law enforcement and judicial systems—warts and all. He thought, perhaps naively, that he could make a dent in the war on drugs, and he considered it his duty to work long hours for little pay. He didn’t realize it at the time, but he was sacrificing his marriage for his profession. As the years went by, he returned home later and later at night, until, finally, Vivian and the girls hardly saw him at all.

  By the time Melanie Flynn disappeared in 1977, infiltrating Lexington’s elite had become one of Ralph’s favorite pastimes. The progeny of wealthy northeastern families, heirs to industrial fortunes, oversaw their empires from their mansions in the bluegrass that had lawns the size of parks. Ralph thought that the Scotch-Irish blood of Lexington’s natives had commingled with that of America’s Anglo-Saxon gentility, producing a new breed of flighty, eccentric patricians.

  In spite of the pretense and unabashed emulation of the world’s more refined societies, Ralph knew there existed in Lexington an insidious underbelly that was not without a certain diamond-in-therough charm. Though it cultivated correct form and good manners, gentlemanly grace and feminine sweetness and light, Ralph saw that as a facade to a decidedly offbeat society. As far as Ralph was concerned, Lexington’s rich had made their money off the blood and sweat of others. Before horse racing there had been moonshine. And before that, slave trading. To Ralph, it was all the same and not something of which the heirs should be proud. He knew that the same routes along the Kentucky River that were used to smuggle slaves and bourbon were now being used to transport guns, pot, bombs, and cocaine. He figured that Lexington’s big drug smugglers had learned the tricks of the trade from their bootlegger granddads.

  By 1977, Ralph had reformulated his view of the drug problem in Kentucky and started to take it much more seriously. Something had changed, and with that change had come an increase in violence. The days of campus marijuana smoking—which he never considered as big a deal as his colleagues did—had given way to a literal epidemic of cocaine.

  When the floodgates from Colombia opened, unleashing a torrent of the provocative white powder, Lexington’s elite were waiting with open arms. Not only did the humongous profit margin seduce even the most cautious investors, but the party-going horse crowd latched onto the luxury drug with fervor. Overnight cocaine had become a status drug, and Lexingtonians, not to be outclassed, were forerunners in incorporating the drug into high
society.

  The traffickers, Ralph noticed, were no longer University of Kentucky hippies whacking up bricks of marijuana, but lawyers and bankers, preppies and businessmen, horsemen and socialites, who were financing million-dollar loads of cocaine.

  Ralph had successfully avoided the drug interdiction level of law enforcement for nearly ten years. He didn’t believe in the traditional “buy-bust” methods that were in vogue. To him, it was similar to buying a half pint of whisky from a moonshiner in Pikeville. Narcotics enforcement was attracting a bunch of “cowboys” who liked to wear gold chains and flash buy money. Ralph had realized early on that he just wasn’t the “narc” type.

  But by the end of the 1970s, Ralph was astounded by the plethora of guns and explosives that accompanied the new cocaine trade. Not just a few guns here and there that the cocaine crowd carried for security. But lots and lots of guns. Enough guns to destabilize a continent.

  Shortly before Melanie Flynn disappeared, Ralph had infiltrated a gunrunning organization in Lexington. The fact that the group was also involved in drug smuggling was of only passing interest to Ralph.

  One of Ralph’s informants—a former military pilot from outside the state—told Ralph he had been hired to escort a load of guns from Kentucky to South America. Ralph directed him to accept the job and to report back on the details of the trip.

  Ralph breathed a sign of relief when his informant returned alive. As he listened to his story, Ralph realized for the first time the significance of the escapades of the Lexington group. His undercover source had driven from Lexington to Huntington, West Virginia, where he boarded a cargo plane that was filled with weapons—AR15s, Ingrams, Uzis, AK-47s, and military-type explosives. Ralph’s source was not told the destination of the plane, but was charged with making sure the load arrived safely.