The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History (40 page)

Trooper Michael Hookum worked the adjacent sectors of the interstate to the east of Asp. He responded and said he would be at the north end of the county. District headquarters broke in and stated that Sauk County Sheriff's Department had units rolling. Then Hookum and Asp discussed the safest place to stage the takedown in case these armed and dangerous drug suspects engaged them in a gunfight from their stolen vehicle. They decided to take them down "textbook felony style."

At the state police academy, the troopers had learned to block traffic to the entire interstate behind the target vehicle and, if possible, to block all traffic in the other direction, too, so that there would be absolutely no innocent parties in the area in case of gunfire. Hookum and Asp decided that the best place would be milepost 89, within a quarter-mile of the Trout Road overpass, where there were only tillable fields to the west and woods to the east and south, with no houses or businesses nearby.

Inside the blue Impala, six Kentuckians slept soundly as Les Berry drove the speed limit. He saw headlights in his rearview mirror and reduced his speed, hoping the car would pass, but it didn't. For four or five miles, the car hung about a quarter-mile behind him, even though Berry decelerated to forty-five miles an hour. Then Berry saw a squad car for the Wisconsin Dells parked in the median. He watched in the rearview mirror as the parked squad car pulled in behind the first car tailing him. As soon as the two cars blocked both lanes of traffic, Berry watched through the Impala's rearview mirror as the two cars turned on their red and blue flashing lights. He immediately pulled over onto the shoulder and came to a stop. The Wisconsin Dells squad car cut a U-turn and drove west in the eastbound lane to stop traffic while the unmarked Grand Fury directly behind the Impala turned on its brights. Inside the blue Impala, Les Berry was still the only one awake.

"Wake up, boys,"Berry said, loud enough to rouse the six men. "We're caught."

Trooper Asp grabbed his shotgun, stepped out of his car and took a shooting position behind the open door. Over the Grand Fury's loudspeaker, Asp told the occupants of the Impala that this was a "felony stop." The suspects were to obey his commands "to the exact letter" and to make "no sudden moves or escape attempts," otherwise, they "would be shot."

Another squad car, Trooper Hookum's, arrived on the scene, taking a position in the middle of the interstate because traffic had been stopped. Asp couldn't see into the Impala because the back window had steamed up. He instructed the driver of the Impala to throw the keys out the window, hold both hands out the window, open the door from the outside and step out of the car with his hands raised. Les Berry obeyed.

Asp instructed the camouflage-wearing driver to turn around twice with his hands in the air so Asp could determine if he was armed. Then Berry was ordered to walk backward until Asp handcuffed him, led him back and placed him facedown on the freezing asphalt in front of Hookum's cruiser. One by one, the police repeated this procedure until all seven men, six in camouflage and one in a blue sweatsuit, were facedown on the cold highway, with Minneapolis- and Chicago-bound traffic blocked in both directions for as far as anyone could see.

The suspects' camouflage concerned Asp because of his training in extremist groups. As eight or nine squad cars from different agencies arrived, Asp heard "no sound" from the Impala "at all," and none of the men spoke as Asp cuffed him.

"It looks like a bunch of little commandos," one officer commented over the radio.

Ten minutes later all seven men lay facedown on the highway as the temperature dipped to twenty-eight degrees. The highway patrolmen and sheriff deputies on the scene searched each camouflaged man thoroughly, expecting him to be heavily armed, but found only two jackknives between seven men. Trooper Asp discovered something else on them: "an odor ... a very strong odor ... of marijuana."

The camouflaged Kentuckians, despite their situation, seemed to be "reasonably comfortable ... extremely indifferent ... very calm," a demeanor that "surprised" Asp. Normally subjects expressed "extreme indignation" while being arrested. Instead, the Kentuckians remained completely silent, not talking even to each other. Only one of the seven, Francis William Donahue, known to the other men as "Possum," broke the silence to ask Asp for a favor. As the Wisconsin police had manhandled him to the highway, Possum's pants had inched downward, exposing his butt crack to the cold night air. Handcuffed, Possum begged Trooper Asp to pull them up, but Asp ignored him. Smith Fogle, facedown and handcuffed beside Possum, couldn't keep from laughing.

After Asp peeled the camouflaged Kentuckians off the asphalt, he and other responding officers transported them to the Sauk County jail, where they booked the seven men on charges of possession of stolen property-a car that they had gone out of their way to pay for.

With the initial manhunt over, Special Agent Phillip Wagner and his six fellow officers from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and the Otter Tail County Sheriff's Department began to take inventory of Johnny Boone's operation: two Sears trash compactors, thirty compacted bales of marijuana sealed with duct tape, binoculars, walkie-talkies, police radio scanners and a list of radio frequencies used by the Otter Tail County sheriff, Becker County sheriff, New York Mills, Fergus Falls, Detroit Lakes, the game wardens, Perham police, the National Weather Service and Eagle Lake Patrol.

Up in the hayloft, the agents found the racked bins with the drying buds and evidence that they had been recently tended-music was still playing on the Walkman left near a pair of rose clippers. The agents found several similar pairs of clippers around the barns and property and concluded the Kentuckians bought them by the boxful.lhey found cigarettes still lit and cans of soft drinks and beer still cold and half full. In the barns and farmhouse, they found more than two hundred individual pieces of camouflaged clothing.

Men with rakes and shovels moved the marijuana stacked like Christmas trees inside the barns into front-end loaders, which loaded it into dump trucks, which took it all to an area directly east of the red barn and stacked it up in "a rather large pile." How large? Sixty-two dumptruck loads, the last one of which weighed 680 pounds, making the total amount seized from the barns-the amount Boone's crew managed to cut between the Alberta Clipper and the arrival of the Trojan horse trailermore than forty-two thousand pounds.

Police took photographs of this twenty-one-ton pile before, during and after they burned it. In one photo, later marked Exhibit 12, Agent Wagner and his team of police officers climbed on top of the marijuana pile as if it were Mount Suribachi and raised an American flag, playing the part of the Marines who had stormed the beach at Iwo Jima.

Outside the farm's curtilage, police found another whole field of marijuana that had not yet been cut, perhaps another forty acres, more than the police could estimate or eyeball-"there was just too much of it." Based on aerial photographs of the field, the police guessed that they were looking at another forty thousand-plus pounds, roughly the same amount seized in the barns, but they had no way to be certain because it was more marijuana than any of them had ever seen before, despite their decades of collective experience.

"If we could have saved the seed,"Johnny Boone later said. "Because there were some places where a male had pollinated maybe fifty females around it, happens in any big field. If we could have got the crop through and saved the seed, think about them seeds! Them sons of bitches were probably ready for northern Canada, them seeds was."

As Johnny Boone and his workers sat in their cramped holding cells in Minnesota, federal investigators began to understand the scope of the Kentucky connection. Although the forty-five-ton seizure in Minnesota was the largest in the state's history, it appeared that it wasn't alone. Investigators began to see connections to a web of farms in different states. All this evidence rattled the DEA. In 1987, the DEA was confident that the vast majority of the marijuana sold in America was being smuggled from south of the border, but Johnny Boone's farm opened the drug agency's eyes to a threat it never foresaw: a vast homegrown marijuana-growing empire.

Investigators burst forth with questions, but the nine men and one woman arrested outside New York Mills, Minnesota, and the seven more caught on the Wisconsin interstate weren't answering any of them. Although polite and friendly to their interrogators, the Kentuckians were collectively mute. No one talked, no matter what the federal agents threatened him with. Johnny Boone faced life in prison without parole; others faced potential sentences of more than twenty years. Talk to us, and we'll cut you a deal, the investigators told them; none did.

The uncooperative uniformity of the Kentuckians frustrated their interrogators and planted the seeds of legend. In the end, after all the arrests were made, the seventeen busted in Minnesota and Wisconsin would join fifty-three others to form the Cornbread 70-the ones identified in the 1989 press conference-and exactly zero agreed to talk to investigators in exchange for a lesser sentence (not at first, anyway)-a batting average that impressed even their prosecutors.

After they had all been arrested and placed in federal custody in Minnesota, each person was held in solitary confinement, kept away from the others to prevent them from talking to each other. Just before the suspects were to see the judge, the prison guards brought the Kentucky crew out into the hallway, each member handcuffed and shackled. It was the first time Boone had seen all his men since the horse trailer had pulled in a few days before.

"Men, we all share a secret," Boone told them. "Now, I've been down this road before, and I want you to know, you only have one chance to do this right. You do the right thing, and I guarantee you'll never regret it. But if you turn and rat out everybody to get out early, you'll never forgive yourself. There might not even be anyone out to kill you, but you'll kill yourself with paranoia."

That's all he had time to say before the bailiff led them into the courtroom for their collective bail hearing.

Marilyn Boone, Johnny's wife, called Jack Smith, his attorney, the Monday after things went bad in Minnesota, setting Smith and his partner Patrick Molloy into motion. Immediately they secured a Minnesotan lawyer, who met with the ten Kentuckians caught in Minnesota (all except the ones who had escaped in the blue Impala to Wisconsin) in their holding cells in the maximum-security wing of the Stillwater prison. Then Smith and Molloy learned that there were seven more clients in the custody of the state of Wisconsin, so they set about to secure a lawyer for them, too.

Then the case became a federal matter, and Smith and Molloy prepared to travel to Minneapolis on Thursday, November 5, and arrived there on Sunday, rented a car and drove thirty miles to the Stillwater prison. There they talked with Johnny Boone for three hours. As they drove back to Minneapolis in a snowstorm in the dark, Molloy failed to notice that traffic had stopped. He rear-ended the car in front of him, totaling their rental car.

The next morning, Monday, Jack Smith did something he had never done in his twenty-three years of practicing law: represent ten clients at once. Before the bail hearing started, he joked about it with the prosecutor. It wasn't a common scenario. At 10:00 a.m., the magistrate called the hearing to order.