The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History (18 page)

In the field cutting out males, Jimmy Bickett and Garland Russell were caught by Sheriff Jackie Wimsett, who arrested them and hauled them off to the Nelson County jail. They made bond that afternoon.

As soon as they were released, Russell and Bickett went straight back to Icetown Road with a bunch of tobacco knives, a covered truck and a big roll of twine, and they worked all night long stripping the pot patch clean-the same night that Muhammad Ali won his rematch against Leon Spinks, becoming the first three-time heavyweight champion in history. Like Ali, Jimmy Bickett worked in a profession that rewarded a disregard for long-term consequences; but on that night, September 15, 1978, both Ali and Bickett were winners.

The next morning Sheriff Wimsett brought a bunch of deputies to New Haven with wagons and bush hogs. The convoy waited on the side of Icetown Road as Wimsett walked down to the patch, where he saw that the whole patch had been cleared out overnight. He walked back to his deputies shaking his head. The owner of the farm would later tell Bickett what happened next.

"It's all gone," the sheriff told his deputies in disbelief. "You could sow oats down there."

When Bickett and Russell appeared in court, the judge gave them $100 fines for disorderly conduct. The next day Jimmy Bickett went out and bought his first Corvette.

There for a few years in the 1970s, Garland Russell lived a relatively peaceful Marion County life, while those around him worked nearly fulltime to keep him from killing again. One time Russell was hanging out in a gas station in downtown Lebanon, watching a baseball game on a little black-and-white television set, when a black man on a motorcycle pulled up to the gas pump and started revving his engine, drowning out the playby-play of the ball game. Russell was unamused.

When the black biker came inside the station, he continued to talk loud, and Russell told him to be quiet. The biker thought Russell was being rude to him because of his skin color and so jawed back at Russell. The owner of the gas station, fearing for the biker's life, got between the two men and pushed the biker out of the station, telling him he had to go. The biker, again, thought he was a target of racial prejudice and let the gas station owner know it, as Garland followed them outside on the way to his truck.

Finally the gas station owner got the biker onto his bike, and the biker gunned it down the street just as Garland Russell stepped out into the road with his pistol, squeezing off a few rounds, playing target practice with the disappearing motorcycle, leaving the black biker with a negative opinion of that gas station and maybe the whole county. But it hadn't been racism that had prompted the incident: Garland Russell would have shot at anyone who interrupted his ball game.

The next year, 1979, Garland Russell blew up his second Raywick residence, a duplex owned by Joe Mike Mouser, his partner in larceny, without concern about the small grocery store on the other side of the duplex, run by Joe Downs, Charlie Stiles's former truck driver, who now ran the Fifth Wheel across the street.

At 2:00 a.m. on a Monday morning in late September 1979, Russell snuffed the pilot light in the gas range and cranked the stove dials to HIGH and set the oven to BAKE. When the gas leak ignited, it blasted the front wall of the duplex into the street and engulfed what remained in fire.

The explosion rocked Raywick, blasting out the windows of Bickett's Tavern across the street and the stained-glass windows of St. Francis Xavier church. Flames cut the telephone lines, knocking out communication to part of the county. As the fire raged, residents formed a bucket brigade to rescue anything left from Joe Downs's grocery.

The next week prosecutors indicted Garland Russell in the federal courthouse in Louisville along with Joe Mike Mouser and three other men for stealing mobile homes from the Louisville Fair and Expo Center, an old Charlie Stiles trick. Now the FBI and the US attorney had Russell, a lifelong criminal, on interstate grand larceny charges that were enough to put Garland Russell away for life, and Russell knew it. So, he went underground as a fugitive.

Garland confined himself to a voluntary imprisonment from everyday life. He couldn't go to the grocery or drive through Lebanon in the daytime. Everyone knew the police were looking for him. So, he stayed cooped up in the Bicketts' farmhouse, getting nervous, impatient and bored. After a few days, some others-including Joe Downs's little brother-came to fetch him to work with them on a deal. Russell cleaned up the Bicketts' house and left them a neatly written thank-you note for letting him stay there.

Perhaps affected by cabin fever, Russell decided he could go out at night, if he went only to certain places where a wanted man wouldn't be ratted out. Only the worst, low-life places could accommodate him. Even the twin taverns of Raywick-the Fifth Wheel and Bickett's-as wild as they were, weren't safe for Russell. If Joe Downs saw Russell in Raywick, he wouldn't call the police until after he shot Russell dead himself. But Downs's younger brother still trusted Russell as a partner.

The younger Downs and his friends wanted Russell's help on a deal with Billy Smothers, proprietor of the infamous Jane Todd Inn and a notorious criminal himself, capable of killing a man for the money in his pocket. Smothers, known locally as "Smut," presided over the decline of the Jane Todd from a once-civil 1950s dance hall to a fist-fighting roadhouse, where men engaging in broken-bottle melees had replaced well-dressed young men dancing with poodle-skirted young ladies on a talcum-powder-coated dance floor as the bandleader played Hoagy Carmichael's "Stardust" on trumpet with one hand while keeping his band in time with the other.

By the late 1970s, the police referred to the Jane Todd as the "Grab and Stab," the "Blood and Guts" or the "Bucket of Blood"-all nicknames earned on Smut's watch. Once, a Lebanon city policeman responded to a call that five people had passed out drunk in the Jane Todd parking lot. When the policeman arrived on the scene, he discovered the men weren't passed out; they had all been shot.

"That was a real common occurrence back then," remembered retired State Police Detective Jacky Hunt. "Real common."

Smut told the younger Downs that he had a good-size load of pot. If Downs could get four guys together with $50,000 each, they could all make some money. Downs took the offer to Russell, and together they took the bait.

By 1979, the marijuana market had been running smoothly for nearly a decade, and the routine for marijuana transactions had long been established:lhe buyer would present the money, and the seller would take the money to a place, pick up the product and return with it. That way, the money and the drugs were never in the same place at the same time-an insurance policy against cops and robbers. However, the system required trust: The seller could run off with the buyer's money or deliver an inferior product or a product short on the weight paid for. In the old days, before cocaine, everyone still trusted everyone else-a weakness that Smut was counting on.

Garland Russell, the younger Downs and two other men pooled $200,000 for the deal. The four of them met Billy Smothers and three of his men in a prearranged spot: the Campbell House Inn, a sprawling hotel complex in Lexington, built out of whitewashed brick and in the style of a colonial mansion. There in the Campbell House parking lot, Smothers, Russell and Downs met Smothers's connection, a man from Nashville, who supposedly had the product to sell. The Nashville gent took the $200,000 into a room at the Campbell House after telling Russell and Downs that the shipment would be arriving soon. Except it never did.

After growing impatient, Garland Russell picked the lock of the room where Mr. Nashville had gone and discovered that he had crawled through the air-conditioning duct to the next room and then had fled with their money. Upset, Russell and Downs drew their guns on Billy Smothers and forced Smut into the trunk of their car. They were going to take Smothers to Nashville to get their money. (In another case when someone tried to take the money and run, that person found himself in the trunk of a car with a half-dozen snapping turtles.)

Before going to Nashville, Garland Russell wanted to take Smothers somewhere private to soften him up and to find out what he knew about Mr. Nashville. So, Downs drove the car out to an isolated farm, but when they opened the trunk to take hold of Smothers, Smut came out firing.

Exactly what happened next will never be clear, but in the end, Billy Smothers lost a finger; Downs, shot in the liver, was rushed to the University of Kentucky hospital in Lexington, where the doctors managed to save his life; and no one ever saw Garland Russell again.

During December 1979, the Kentucky State Police investigated three killings in the coverage area of the Columbia post, which includes Marion County; none of the victims was Garland Russell. By year's end, thirtythree people had been reported killed in the eleven counties covered by the Columbia Post, and 893 killed statewide. Neither of those tallies accounts for Garland Russell. He went underground to escape a federal indictment and was sent underground in a way he never intended-or so they say.

Ten years later the daughters of Garland Russell wished to have him declared legally dead so that they could claim what few assets he had left, including a little property in downtown Raywick, but at the hearing, which all expected to proceed proforma, a man arrived to say that Garland Russell was not dead. He knew because he had seen him just a few years earlier. The man had walked into his own barn and seen Garland Russell sitting in there. The judge had no option but to deny the daughters' claim that Garland Russell was dead.

And thus, the story of Garland Russell ends with a question mark. He was never seen again, but no one knows where he went-or if anyone knows, no one is talking.

IN MARCH 1977, ABOUT TWO AND A HALF YEARS BEFORE THE DISAPPEARance of Garland Russell, a rookie reporter for the Lebanon Enterprise went on a Saturday night ride-along with Officer Ed Baker, an eighteen-month veteran of the Lebanon force.

"Ready to go?" Baker asked as he started his blue-and-white police cruiser, one of five in the Lebanon squad, and pulled away from the police station, which sat next door to the Enterprise office on Proctor Knott Avenue between Main and Mulberry Streets.

At a nearby corner, Baker steered his police cruiser left into the bumper-to-bumper Main Street traffic like a shark slipping into a slowmoving current. As he passed the Galaxy Club downtown, Baker stopped to tell a group of burly men to take their beers inside.

On the west end of town, Baker slowly cruised the crowded parking lot of Club 68, where one in a group of pretty girls called him a "pig." As the reporter looked at the people in the club's parking lot, he started feeling old.

"I know some of these people can't be much older than fourteen or fifteen," the reporter said.

"The clubs have a dance license or restaurant license," Baker explained, "so they're allowed to go into them."

Still, Baker would look at some of the kids, shake his head and grin. He rolled down his window in front of one young couple and asked their ages.

"Seventeen," said the boy.