The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History (2 page)

WHEN JOHNNY BOONE VIOLATED HIS PAROLE IN THE EARLY SUMMER OF 1987 by leaving Kentucky via an Ohio River bridge en route to one of his secret farms in Minnesota, he set into motion a series of events that would define him and his associates as the largest homegrown marijuana syndicate in American history. The band of large-scale pot cultivators headquartered in a three-county Catholic enclave in central Kentucky would be tagged by the federal government and the media with a name a few of the men had already self-applied: the "Cornbread Mafia"-yet just as many members claim to never have heard the term until it was mentioned publicly by federal prosecutors and amplified by the media.

"I wonder where they got that from?" Johnny Boone remembered thinking the first time he saw the term Cornbread Mafia in the newspaper. By then he was already in prison.

As local law enforcement busted Boone and a dozen others in Minnesota, federal agents tracked another Kentuckian, Bobby Joe Shewmaker, who had been running from the law since being found guilty in 1985 of a pot-smuggling scheme dating back to 1979. Law enforcement agents assumed that Shewmaker was the sole kingpin of all the Kentucky marijuana growers, commanded from his home turf of Marion County. But the Minnesota bust suddenly forced the task force chasing Shewmaker to reevaluate its concept of the Marion County "cartel." It was much bigger and more complex than the agents had ever imagined. The busted Minnesota harvest alone weighed ninety tons, the police said, a number they calculated by weighing one dump truck load, then multiplying that by sixty-two-the number of trips it took to clear the fields-and then multiplying that number by two because so much marijuana remained in the field that estimating its weight was "inconceivable."

When police nabbed Bobby Joe Shewmaker in a Canadian Great Lakes resort town in May 1989, the federal task force had identified as members of the Cornbread Mafia seventy rural Kentuckians-sixty-nine men and one woman, and almost all of them Catholic-from three years' worth of busts on twenty-eight farms in ten states, where police seized 182 tons of marijuana, starting in August 1985 when Michigan State Police seized 31,747 plants (but made no arrests) to early October 1988, when the Kansas Bureau of Investigation seized 68,300 plants over four days and arrested fourteen people from Marion County but not Shewmaker, who wouldn't be apprehended for another seven months.

On June 16, 1989, a month after Shewmaker's arrest in Canada, the US Attorney's Office in Louisville called a press conference to declare these seventy people, whom the prosecutors referred to as the "Cornbread Mafia," to be "the largest domestic marijuana organization in American history." Thirteen days later, June 29, Illinois State Police arrested four men from Marion County growing fifty-eight thousand plants in White County. Because the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) figured one pound per plant, that's another twenty-nine tons.

The prosecutors' designation of the "Cornbread Mafia" as the "largest" depends upon its designation as a "domestic" organization, as in only non-smuggled pot. Cornbread operations actually reached across several international borders: Shewmaker's 1979 smuggling scheme involved a routine shrimp-boat trip to the Caribbean coast of Colombia, and Boone would be busted in 1982 while meeting a plane that was returning from Belize. But because police nailed these two men and scores of their associates with 182 tons on farms in the South and Midwest, prosecutors didn't even bother with the Cornbread's international dalliances; the size of its domestic operation alone earned the Cornbread its superlative classification. Still, there was more to this group that made it unique in the eyes of the law. Federal task force documents obtained by Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests note that, unlike any other illegal drug operation of its size, the syndicate included no foreign nationals-that not only were all the participants American, but also they were from one state, from a three-county area, and the vast majority from Marion County.

And that's not all; one more Cornbread characteristic left a lasting impression-of the seventy Kentuckians arrested between 1987 and 1989, zero agreed to testify against the others in exchange for a lesser sentence, a record even the Sicilian Mafia would find impressive.

The powerful form of solidarity displayed by the Cornbread types scuttled the federal government's plan to imprison men like Boone and Shewmaker for life without parole. Without cooperating witnesses, the government could not prosecute anyone as a "kingpin" under the Continuous Criminal Enterprise (CCE) statute, the only law at the time that provided a life sentence for nonviolent marijuana crimes.

That's the basic who, what, when, where and how of it. The question is "Why?" Of the thousands of pot-growing syndicates broken up by federal law enforcement over the four decades of the War on Drugs, naturally one would be bigger than the rest. But why was this biggest organization headquartered in Marion County, Kentucky, and not in Vermont or California? Why Marion County-a community in the corner pocket of the Bluegrass, the buckle of the Bourbon Belt, the geographic center of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, the center of the universe for some but the middle of nowhere for most-why Marion County?

After five and a half years investigating, researching, reporting and interviewing folks familiar with the events detailed in this book, I've concluded that in order to answer, "Why Marion County?" one needs to understand a series of cause-and-effect relationships throughout history, starting with refugee Catholics moving to the frontier and settling in central Kentucky's peculiar geography and climate, which fostered a robust whisky-distilling industry before, during and after the Civil War, interrupted only by Prohibition, which created a culture permissive of moonshining and bootlegging, which made Lebanon a hoppin' stop on the Chitlin' Circuit until the Vietnam War brought marijuana home, where the whole thing exploded like a science-fair volcano.

The story starts at the beginning:

In 1785, in the wake of the Revolutionary War and 150 years after their forefathers' landing, a group of persecuted Maryland Catholics sought its own freedom by migrating farther into the American wilderness, trekking three hundred miles across the Allegheny Mountains, taking flatboats another three hundred miles down the Ohio River and fending off the Shawnee, Chickasaw, Chickamauga Cherokee and other native tribes unhappy with their arrival as they made their way to what would become Holy Cross in Marion County-an expedition led by a distiller, Basil Hayden, whose surname would be among the Cornbread 70 and whose bourbon recipe would be passed down to his grandsons, who bottled it as "Old Granddad" and more recently in a single-barrel brand called Basil Hayden himself.

The Catholic foothold at Holy Cross, the site of the first Catholic church west of the eastern continental divide, would become a font of American Catholicism, and Marion County became the home of its descendants: a rural region of tightly knit Catholic communities, suspicious of outsiders since the eighteenth century.

The fertile Kentucky landscape supported the Catholic flock in its natural state-industrious farmers, ambitious builders, knowledgeable distillers and prodigious copulators. When Leonard Mattingly, an original Holy Cross settler, died in 1805, he left three hundred living descendants. The Mattinglys went on to represent a significant percentage of the Marion County phone book-a retired mail carrier said at one point that twenty-three men named Joseph Mattingly called Marion County home. It's a surname that might likely reappear in the stories that follow from Marion County and Lebanon, its county seat.

The nineteenth century brought the railroad to Lebanon a few decades before it brought the Civil War, which Lebanon survived despite repeated Rebel raids as the Union fought to hold the town's railroad terminus. By the turn of the twentieth century, the combination of the railroad and Marion County's prodigious distilling industry made Lebanon a smalltown economic powerhouse, sending bourbon by rail to New York via Chicago and then by ship to Europe. By 1919, Marion County supported nine active distilleries, which provided a living for hundreds of hardworking Catholic families-until Congress passed and the states ratified a constitutional amendment to prohibit the manufacture, transport or sale of liquor. With the onset of Prohibition in 1919, the Great Depression hit Marion County a decade before it arrived on Wall Street.

With the county's entire industrial base criminalized, the new law left hundreds of Marion County Catholics-and many from the community's minority Protestant population as well-out of work. Many of those former distillery workers, responsible for providing for an average of a dozen children each, chose to cash in on the higher-than-ever value of their skills at distilling, still construction, barrel making, gauging and store-keeping now that those trades were punishable by prison time. Within the broader community, there arose a method to rationalize the nonviolent criminal activities of one's neighbors and relatives: One could break "Man's Law" without violating "God's Law"-a Venn diagram drawn by the county's Catholic culture and expanded by the pressures of a depressed economy and the incursion of federal law enforcement.

Newspaper headlines from this period reveal a Marion County approaching the action-packed absurdity of a comic book: car chases with revenuers leaping from the running boards of one moving vehicle onto another; gunfights between lawmen and big-city gangsters sent to free the bourbon locked in dormant distillery warehouses; federal agents finding commercial-sized stills hidden in Marion County barns, bigger than the legitimate distilleries from before Prohibition.

If one peruses Lebanon's newspapers from 1919 to 1933, one can see headline after headline like this:

FEDERAL MEN ARREST FOUR

Find More Than 100 Gallons Of Liquor in Weeds Near Machine

THREE PLEAD NOT GUILTY

OFFICERS MAKE MANY ARRESTS

Men Taken Into Custody Are Charged With Violating Liquor Laws