The Bluegrass Conspiracy

by Sally Denton

  Ralph noticed Drew Thornton’s conspicuous absence during Bradley’s trial, and assumed Drew was busy running the Company in Bradley’s stead.

  Not to be confused with the commonly used nickname for the CIA—or perhaps purposely named to create such confusion—the Company had emerged as a paramilitary narcotics organization comprised of mercenaries, lawyers, bankers, smugglers, arms merchants, pilots, polygraphers, renegade CIA agents, and assassins.

  Confidential documents in Ralph’s possession identified Bradley as the East Coast kingpin of a loosely organized group of three hundred members involved in drug smuggling, gunrunning, and international mercenary missions. Ralph thought that information dovetailed with rumors about stockpiled weapons and the training of Libyan terrorists at Drew Thornton’s Triad farm.

  Reading a classified report he had received from ATF, Ralph used a yellow marker to highlight a synopsis of the Company’s illegal activities:

  …the smuggling and domestic trafficking of narcotics and dangerous drugs; the infiltration and hidden control of gambling casinos domestically and internationally; the trafficking and smuggling of firearms and military hardware; the acquisition and diversion of large amounts of currency; contract assassinations; arson for profit; business scams; and the corruption of public officials in the U.S. and abroad…Bryant’s associates include organized crime leaders and attorneys; members of international drug organizations; paramilitary groups; those associated with the distribution and control of pornography; management level personnel of large casino operations; former and current law enforcement officers; and prominent political figures…traditional La Cosa Nostra crime families are involved with the Company for purposes of mutual benefit.

  A classified report issued by the El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC), further revealed that the Company was a widely diversified corporation with small suborganizations, the heads of which took orders and answered to a group of superiors. Each prospective member of the organization had undergone a screening process, including a polygraph examination, prior to his employment. The EPIC report indicated that the Company, which had $75 million banked, had a board of directors, divisions of securities, real estate, and distribution, a fleet of aircraft, at least nine airports owned or used by the group in the United States, a battery of attorneys across the country, and foreign bases in Colombia and the Caribbean.

  Ralph began to wonder if such a complex organization, with access to secret military weapons and sophisticated CIA apparatus, could really operate without government collusion at some level. But it was hard for him to believe that his own government would stoop so low as to sanction the activities of Bradley Bryant and Drew Thornton. As long as the CIA continued to deny any connection to the Company, Ralph felt he must assume no relationship existed.

  Law enforcement agencies from outside Kentucky started to flood Ralph with inquiries.

  In November 1980, a federal indictment was handed down in what the government contended at that time was the largest guns-for-drugs conspiracy ever uncovered in the history of the United States. The culmination of a fourteen state undercover investigation conducted by six federal agencies, which hinted for the first time publicly of ties between drug smugglers and the intelligence community, netted eleven individuals—including a Lexington polygraph expert.

  Operation Gateway, as it was called by its DEA creators in St. Louis, Missouri, detailed the inception of the Company which grew to a net worth of a billion dollars, and which had headquarters on the East Coast, in the Southern states, and in the Midwest. According to the indictment, “members of the enterprise would be furnished false means of identification so as to conceal their true identities and hinder police investigation of their illegal activities. Such false identification included false birth certificates and drivers’ licenses. Further, the defendants would employ the services of skilled electronics experts who would employ counter-intelligence equipment to identify and remove electronic tracking devices from aircraft used in smuggling operations… these co-conspirators derived a gross income in excess of $55 million…the co-conspirators obtained sensitive and confidential documents and materials of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in order to maintain an active counter-intelligence network and aid in the identification of law enforcement personnel and informants…and obtained the secret and classified radio frequencies utilized by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI, U.S. Customs, and other law enforcement activities during the pendency of a smuggling operation.”

  Robert Snyder, a nationally known polygrapher who had performed lie detector tests for the Lexington police, was charged with ordering the murder of two informants—one named “Big Red” from the St. Louis, Illinois, area and another named William Wade Hampton from Georgia. Snyder, who Ralph knew had been associated with Bradley Bryant and Drew Thornton since Snyder’s employment with the Lexington Police Department, immediately went into hiding.

  Whatever hopes Ralph had of a leisurely Christmas vacation were quickly dashed.

  On Sunday morning, December 21, 1980, at 12:30 a.m., a ringing phone awakened Ralph.

  “Sergeant Ross?”

  Ralph listened as one of his detectives told him a DC-3 was in the process of smuggling marijuana into an airport at Murray, a small town in western Kentucky. “Drew Thornton’s on board and might be the pilot.”

  “Did you arrest him?” Ralph asked.

  “No. He won’t let us search the plane. We don’t have a warrant.”

  Earlier that night, at about 9 p.m., the airplane had landed at the municipal airport in Murray. The airport manager called the state police to report the suspicious plane that hadn’t used its lights, or radioed ahead to the airport requesting that the runway be illuminated. By the time the detective had arrived at the airport, the plane had already taken off—its crew apparently spooked by something. An hour and a half later, at 10:30 p.m., the airport manager again called the state police. The same DC-3 was returning, again landing in total darkness.

  The plane was still parked at the airport when the detective arrived the second time. He blocked the runway with his car, and waited for the occupants—Drew and two men from Savannah—to disembark.

  “The pilot told us the plane had engine trouble. They had called a wrecker service to come tow the plane,” the detective told Ralph. Drew refused to sign a consent form allowing the state police to search the plane. While the plane was being hooked up to the tow truck, its three crew members jumped on board and remained there for several minutes. When deplaning, the three unloaded what appeared to be personal luggage, and Drew Thornton placed heavy locks on both cargo doors.

  “We think Harold Brown might have something to do with this,” the detective told Ralph, referring to the head of the DEA’s regional office in Louisville. The detective said a witness in the vicinity of the airport had sighted Brown when the plane came in.

  Ralph instructed the state troopers to glean as much information as possible from the three men. “Get a search warrant and put them all under surveillance,” Ralph said. “And stake out the airplane. Set up a roadblock on the Blue Grass Parkway, because they’ll probably rent a car or be picked up, and head back to Lexington. Get the dog ready just in case,” Ralph said, referring to the German shepherd trained to sniff out drugs.

  “What is the plane’s tail number?” Ralph asked.

  “N625E.”

  “I’ll check with the FAA for the ownership and registration,” Ralph said.

  “Thornton told us the plane is owned by Air Transport Systems… whoever they are.”

  Ralph hung up, tossing and turning for the next several hours. Just as he was about to doze off, the phone rang again. This time it was 6 a.m.

  “A couple of hours ago, we followed Drew and his buddies to a Holiday Inn in Murray,” his detective said. “They rented two rooms, and Drew made one phone call from the lobby
pay phone. At 3:45 a.m. a red Dodge van that is registered to Drew Thornton, and which was driven by an unidentified white male, came to the Holiday Inn, Drew loaded the van with three suitcases and an overnight bag and all three men got on board. They headed east on the Western Kentucky Parkway, and we assumed they were going to Lexington. We had a roadblock set up, but when they reached Elizabethtown they turned north toward Louisville instead. The van was obviously equipped with an extra fuel tank. I also think they were monitoring our radios.”

  Ralph sighed, wishing he had more thoroughly considered the options available to Drew. “Where are they now?”

  “They’ve all checked into one room at the Executive Inn West in Louisville. Drew keeps leaving the room to make phone calls from the pay phone in the lobby.”

  “Just keep on top of them,” Ralph said. “Don’t lose track of them. Get the maids at the Holiday Inn in Murray to search the rooms for anything left behind.”

  “By the way, Sergeant Ross,” the detective continued, “headquarters got a report from the Winchester police. It seems the same plane was spotted at eight-thirty Saturday night flying over Interstate 64 near Paris, where Drew’s parents live. Smoke was pouring out of the aircraft and witnesses thought it was about to crash. But apparently it continued on to land at Murray.”

  “Keep me posted,” Ralph said. Ralph decided he might as well go into the office, even though it was Sunday, and just four days before Christmas. Waiting, he heard nothing from the detectives until nearly 6 p.m. And then it wasn’t good news.

  “We lost them,” Ralph was told.

  “What happened?”

  “Around noon they left the hotel and drove to the airport. They parked the van and went to the Delta ticket counter to check the flight schedule. Then they went into the restaurant. We think they split up, using the restaurant and restrooms for cover, and maybe using disguises, and then all met up again back at the van. We didn’t have enough men to cover the ticket counter, the restaurant, and the parking lot. When we got back to the van, it was gone.”

  “Any flights scheduled from Louisville to Lexington?” Ralph asked.

  “Yeah. One arrived at 6 p.m., but none of them were on it. We also had Customs check the flights heading to Georgia. They just got away.”

  By the time the detectives’ paperwork was turned in to Ralph, a day or two later, one item stuck out like a sore thumb.

  “On Saturday, December 20, 1980, at approximately 11 a.m. before any of this came about, I received a call from Harold Brown,” the detective’s report stated. “Harold told me he was at the Holiday Inn in Gilbertsville, Kentucky. He said he had some information for me that might lead to something and that he would get back with me. After the DC-3 situation started later that night, I called his room at approximately 11:30 p.m. but received no answer.”

  The detective’s statement indicated he had no more contact with Brown until two days after the incident. “Brown called me a couple of times on Monday, December 22. He told me that the DC-3 landing was what he was down in Gilbertsville checking on. He said that he had an informant who told him that a DC-3 would be landing in the west Kentucky area to refuel. Harold said he was present at the Kentucky Dam Airport when the DC-3 landed there. This had to be between the time the plane first landed in Murray and its second landing in Murray. He told me that his informant locked himself in a room at the airport and that he [Brown] waved the plane off and told them that they would have to go to Paducah to get fuel.”

  It was clear to Ralph that his detective was suspicious of Brown’s motives. “I asked Harold Brown on December 22 if he knew Mr. Thornton. Mr. Brown told me that he used to work with Thornton when Thornton was a police officer in Lexington. He also told me that he was investigated about a year and a half ago in reference to Thornton, and was cleared of any wrongdoing. I asked if he now had anything to do with Mr. Thornton and he told me that he did not.

  Ralph made a note to himself to attempt to ascertain which agency previously investigated Harold Brown and Drew Thornton. He wondered if it was Brown’s own agency—the DEA—trying to weed out a bad apple.

  By the time the state police finally got a court order to board the plane, on December 22, they found that all of the seats of the aircraft had been removed to make room for cargo. Plans to bring the drug-sniffing dog on board were futile, as the entire plane had been doused with STP Motor Oil before the plane was abandoned.

  “The empty cans were still on board,” the detective said. “They had to have done this when they boarded the plane while it was being towed.”

  The DC-3 incident was as close as Ralph had come to actually catching Harold Brown with his paws in the middle of a drug deal. Was Drew a covert DEA agent, as was hinted by Brown whenever the subject of their relationship arose? Was he an informant for Brown? Ralph didn’t think so. He considered it highly unlikely that Drew was infiltrating drug rings on behalf of Brown or the DEA—hence, the lack of significant DEA arrests in Kentucky. Did Brown refuse to believe that his friend and former colleague, Drew Thornton, had become a drug smuggler? Possible, Ralph decided, but very improbable since such an attitude would require extraordinary naiveté on the part of Brown. Did Brown decide to turn his back on Drew’s activities out of loyalty to an old friend, asking nothing in return? Doubtful.

  What did that leave?

  Harold and Drew are partners, Ralph concluded. If Drew worked as an informant for the DEA, Ralph decided, he only snitched on his competitors in the drug business.

  The bottom line, Ralph thought, is that what had been identified by several federal agencies as the country’s largest narcotics, paramilitary, and weapons organization was masterminded by a nucleus of Kentucky men. For Harold Brown—the chief narcotics officer in the state, who had virtually unlimited resources available to him—to have failed to dismantle the group suggested nothing less than complicity.

  By May of 1981, it seemed to Ralph that every law enforcement agency in the country had an interest in the “Lexington Connection”—everyone except the Lexington Police Department, which was mysteriously silent about the sudden national notoriety of its native sons.

  Ralph was briefed by an assistant U.S. attorney in Fresno, California, about an upcoming indictment of Bradley and Larry Bryant on charges of embezzling and receiving stolen government property. The Bryants had been the subjects of a Naval Intelligence investigation into the theft of ten rifle scopes designed for night use, a low-light television camera, and a remote-control helicopter from China Lake Naval Base.

  Navy documents revealed the two Bryants had been under investigation since September 1979—about the time the FBI in Las Vegas surreptitiously watched Larry Bryant transfer the nightscopes from a garage of the eccentric inventor Alvin Snapper to the bed of Larry’s mini-truck. Ralph recalled the events of 1979, jotting down a crude chronology: The year had started off with the DC-4 loaded with ten tons of dope that flew into Lexington; that was followed by Judge

  Wood’s assassination in May; then the ill-fated drug venture in August that involved an airstrip in Starkville, Mississippi; that same month, some of the Lexington cops had been detained in Aruba on gunrunning suspicions, and the mercenary activity on Triad was in high gear; Bradley and Larry had been busted in Philadelphia with weapons and exotic spy paraphernalia.

  Ralph had spent most of 1979 preoccupied with the gubernatorial election of John Y. Brown, Jr. He speculated about what might have escaped his attention during that time. What Ralph did not yet know was that at least one of the stolen military devices had been used as currency in a South American drug deal.

  Actually, there was a lot Ralph didn’t know. But he felt he was on the verge of discovery.

  The internal Naval Intelligence documents read like a spy thriller. But the Navy’s files, when coupled with Ralph’s information, began to shed light on an even more bizarre world that had not yet
been explored by novelists.

  The Navy’s investigation had begun when the Starlight nightscopes were noticed missing from the China Lake weapons department. During an internal inquiry, a China Lake employee admitted he had stolen the scopes from the Department of Defense Surplus Property System, and had given them to Larry Bryant to be used in a classified project. The removal of the nightscopes was part of a complex, CIA-sponsored plan to trade U.S. military equipment in Libya for Soviet military equipment to be analyzed by American experts, the employee said in a statement that matched Larry Bryant’s earlier statement.

  At the time, Larry Bryant was a highly regarded electronics technician who at China Lake had participated in classified projects “of mutual interest to the Navy and the Air Force.”

  Faced with criminal prosecution, the China Lake employee was convinced by the Navy it would be in his best interest to cooperate with the government’s probe: In the fall of 1979, the witness set about to lure Bradley and Larry into the government’s trap by eliciting incriminating statements from them. Interviewed by Naval Intelligence in May 1980, one of the witnesses told federal authorities that the Bryants “had attempted to involve him in a business deal involving the acquisition of a hotel in Guatemala which would be a security retreat for dignitaries.”

  Another of the witnesses, a China Lake employee involved in “Special Projects,” said that Larry Bryant had asked him on several occasions to procure government property from the Naval Weapons Center at China Lake. The employee assumed the requests were for official purposes, given Larry’s Air Force status and top-security clearance. “Once he [Larry Bryant] called and asked [me] to get ahold of an AN/ALR-45 radar warning receiver.” Then, in September 1979, “he [Larry Bryant] said he was involved in an acquisition program involving a foreign country… that he was working for a country which had a contact in Libya, and that he was looking for an early warning-type radar known as Tall King.” The witness told authorities that Larry and Bradley had also tried to interest him in a “Guatemala Hotel deal that would be used as a ‘refuge’ for the Shah of Iran.”