The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History (44 page)

On Friday, September 30, police responded to a motel in Ottawa, population 11,016, after receiving noise complaints and reports of possible drug use. Backed by agents from the KBI, the police busted into one room and arrested two suspicious Kentuckians, Fred Elder and his girlfriend, who got herself into deeper trouble by offering sex to the police in exchange for their release. The police were not amused and booked her on charges of sodomy and solicitation.

When police busted into a second motel room, they found it empty but just recently abandoned-the TV was still warm, and a VHS video camera, pointing at an unmade bed, had been left on a tripod. The videotape left inside the camera revealed another scene: Bobby Joe Shewmaker, his young apprentice and their girlfriends, all naked and cavorting in the motel room only hours, maybe minutes, before the detectives arrived. The taped performance captured images of Shewmaker's legendary endowment, copious amounts of cocaine consumed by the foursome, and a Doberman pinscher joining the party in ways best left unwritten. Retracing their steps, detectives realized that Bobby Joe Shewmaker and his girlfriend must have been the twosome who had casually passed them in the hallway as the police were heading to his room.

Evidence collected from the hastily abandoned motel room led agents to a farmhouse nine miles away in Princeton, population 322. Besides finding "a lot of marijuana" and a pile of firearms, the KBI stumbled upon Bobby Joe Shewmaker's wildlife menagerie: a black bear and two African lion cubs, which were "a real surprise" to the raiding party.

"At first everyone was pretty nervous,"Joe Bret, the Franklin County jailer, told the Capital-Journal, "but we found out they were tame, and we started playing with them. Apparently, the neighbors knew about them."

The bear was only nine months old, weighed 120 pounds and had been declawed and defanged. The lion cubs, a brother and sister, were also nine months old and weighed one hundred pounds each. Workers from the Topeka Zoo came the sixty miles to the Princeton farmhouse to take the animals away. The zoo told the newspaper it would keep the animals for six months to try to find them a new home, but the defanged, declawed bear would be more difficult to place because it couldn't defend itself against other bears in an enclosed environment.

"We are real satisfied with this operation," Dave Johnson, director of KBI, told the Topeka newspaper. "With this type of plant that has been cultivated and carefully nurtured, the value is $3,000 per plant. Overall, I'd say the entire operation was worth $145 million, including the value of the plants we didn't get."

Yet, although KBI had found sixty-eight thousand marijuana plants, two lions, a bear and a sex tape, it had a more difficult time finding Bobby Joe Shewmaker.

While Jimmy Bickett nursed his lion cub back to good health in Raywick, the special agent in charge of the Louisville FBI office sent a memo to the FBI director, in an airtel marked PRIORITY, requesting "for the first time, authorization for an additional [dollar amount redacted].

"To date, Louisville division has expended [dollar amount redacted] (under [Special Agent in Charge] authority) regarding captioned matter." The special agent in charge of the Louisville office "anticipated expenses" related to tapping telephone lines, "for as yet undetermined length of time," in order to conduct a Continuous Criminal Enterprise investigation into the Marion County marijuana market, headquartered, they believed, at Bickett's Pool Hall in Raywick.

As background, the memo summarized the activities of the marijuana syndicate headquartered in "the Marion County, Kentucky, area and several other states," which the task force believed to be a supermarket in the marijuana marketplace. "The November 1986 seizure of 2.3 tons of marijuana in Woodford County, Kentucky ... further convinces law enforcement that indeed this was the case."

After the bust in Minnesota, federal investigators had another web of associations to link into the shadowy world of the Raywick marijuana market. How did Johnny Boone fit in? The Bickett brothers, and their pool hall, were somehow centrally involved, investigators knew, yet they never had anything solid that connected the dots.

The task force needed an insider, an informant, to help them understand the connections between the major players in this "cartel," how it was organized and how it operated. However, finding a local person to turn into an informant for them proved "impossible" and "futile," according to task force documents. Yet, at some point in 1988, the task force caught the break it had been looking for: a regular customer of Raywick who was locked up in a prison and willing to cooperate-in the state of Maine.

In 1945, Jack Anderson began working for Drew Pearson's syndicated investigative column, "Washington Merry-Go-Round," which Pearson had started in 1932. Anderson took over operation of the "Merry-GoRound" full-time after Pearson's death in 1969. With an estimated sixty million readers from "some 1,000 newspapers in its heyday," according to Anderson's 2005 obituary, the "Merry-Go-Round" broke a series of scandals, including printing excerpts from secret Watergate grand jury transcripts and uncovering the CIA's plot to help the Mafia kill Fidel Castro, stories that earned Anderson a place on President Nixon's "enemies list" and the Pulitzer Prize for his 1972 column stating that the Nixon administration secretly backed Pakistan in its war with India.

More than a decade later, in 1986, Anderson broke a key element of the Iran-Contra scandal, retaining his relevance in his fourth decade on the "Merry-Go-Round." In 1988, Anderson worked on a story, assisted by reporter Dale Van Atta, about the proliferation of the marijuana marketplace throughout America.

"The flower children have long been overrun by gun-toting thugs and behind-the-scene investors who use hired help to till the fields," Anderson wrote in an October 3, 1988, "Merry-Go-Round" column headlined "Marijuana Growers Proliferate" that ran in hundreds of newspapers across the country.

"Usually, the organized criminal groups have multiple fields," Anderson wrote. "If one or two are discovered, there are others that can be harvested. In business, it's called diversification....

"The biggest group found to date was stumbled upon when its 355-acre farm in New York Mills, Minn., was raided last year.... Investigators found another farm the group had in Nebraska, where an additional 34 tons worth more than $170 million was seized. Additional evidence suggested that the same group also had farms in Kentucky, Missouri and Maine."

This was as close as Jack Anderson would come to Marion County, but his sources within the federal law enforcement community had been impeccable, sharing with him actionable intelligence-the Maine connection. Anderson's column ran in the Topeka Capital-Journal the day after police found all that marijuana growing in Kansas. Had anyone from Shewmaker's Kansas crew seen that newspaper column, he would have known to be suspicious of anyone he knew from Maine, but October 3 was the day that some of them were in a Kansas jail, and the others were racing into Missouri, and they missed an opportunity to learn that the government knew about a link between Marion County and the northernmost state in New England.

The marijuana pipeline between Kentucky and Maine opened in 1984, when a man from Maine came to Kentucky laying power lines. He met a Marion County native who told him that he knew where to buy wholesale marijuana, and a friendship developed. Later that year, the power line layer invited the Marion County man to Maine, where he met Miller Hunt, a career drug dealer, who peddled marijuana and cocaine in upper New England.

Hunt then planned a trip to Lebanon, where at $1,100 per pound he bought eleven pounds of Kentucky marijuana that was stashed in a shed behind a two-story, aluminum-sided Cape Cod-style house in a quiet residential neighborhood in Lebanon.

As Hunt's trips to Kentucky became more frequent, the poundage increased and the price dropped. At his peak, Hunt bought one hundred pounds at $800 per pound, the reduced cost coming after he cut out the middleman in Lebanon and started dealing directly with the Bicketts or Bobby Joe Shewmaker in Raywick.

Nearly every month between 1984 and 1986, Hunt drove the thirteen hundred miles from Maine to Kentucky, or paid someone to do it for him, to buy marijuana in quantities ranging between ten and one hundred pounds. They made the drive without calling in advance so they wouldn't leave a phone record of their transaction. They just showed up at Bickett's Pool Hall, and amid the local commotion, the bartender called Jimmy or Joe Keith. As the New Englanders waited for the Bicketts, they bought a drink and soaked up the scene: fresh-faced high school students drinking and dancing with bearded outlaws. To regulars at Bickett's, the men from Maine stood out from the crowd. Wearing tight black jeans and leather jackets with their hair slicked back, Miller Hunt and his crew looked like greasers from the 1950s, or like "a gang of Fonzarellis," according to Charlie Bickett.

Once, Hunt flew down to Lebanon with his girlfriend, Debbie Lewis, and his business partner, Mike Haskell. They flew from Logan Airport in Boston to Bluegrass Field in Lexington and brought with them one hundred pounds of live Maine lobster, which they boiled in Jimmy Bickett's poker house as the stud poker and cocaine-fueled craps games whizzed on around them.

In the 1980s, Lebanon had two motels: the Holly Hill and the Golden Horseshoe. The Holly Hill's two wings of rooms branched out from a nineteenth-century, federal-style brick home, which had been a Confederate field hospital during the Civil War. The Golden Horseshoe motel sat behind the Golden Horseshoe nightclub, an establishment that, by 1989, had seen its glory days come and go. Hunt regularly used both motels when coming in from Maine.

Miller Hunt of Standish, Maine, was first arrested in 1979 on a marijuana possession charge in Portland. Law enforcement had been keeping tabs on him since 1985, when the Cumberland County Sheriff's Department in Portland learned that Hunt was selling large amounts of Kentucky marijuana. By 1986, he was dealing in cocaine pretty heavily, slowly becoming messed up from using his own product.

"When you're dealing cocaine," Hunt would later testify, "it's the lifestyle that leads you on having people around all the time, doing lots of cocaine with everyone. You know, it's the lifestyle."

The cocaine business was not like the marijuana business, he would later say.

"It's a whole different clientele," and cocaine "just messed up the whole business and everything." Hunt used more cocaine than he would have if he hadn't been selling it, and his business started going downhill because of his loss of focus. By the end of 1986, Miller Hunt's purchasing had fallen off following a series of events that had left him cash poor.

Then, in 1987, police in Louisiana busted Hunt with 191 pounds of marijuana, sending him to prison there. Through a favorable plea deal, Hunt managed to get his incarceration moved to Maine, to be closer to his family and his business. Little did he know that the Portland office of the DEA wanted him close to home, too, as it built a case against him as one of the biggest marijuana dealers in Maine. As soon as he realized he was under federal scrutiny, Hunt tried to get his people to lie to investigators for him and even to commit perjury for him to the grand jury, "like anybody else would," he would later testify.

He tried to get his friends, and his girlfriend Debbie Lewis, to lie for him. He didn't ask Mike Haskell because he knew Haskell was good for it. Hunt "didn't have to come out and tell him."

Hunt hoped that when he got out of jail he could get back into the marijuana business. He was released after seven months, in April 1988, and the feds arrested him on June 2 with 137 pounds of marijuana, and this time Hunt knew they had him good. Only three days after his arrest, he pleaded guilty to a fifteen-year cap and agreed to cooperate with the government. By the end of July, he made bond and was back on the street. By cooperating with the DEA in any federal investigations, Hunt was "in hopes" that his sentence would be even less than the fifteen years he had received. Though that might seem a long prison term, a fifteen-year sentence actually fell far below what the Reagan guidelines suggested. Because the 137-pound bust was his third felony conviction, Hunt should have been facing as much as twenty-seven years and three months based on Reagan's minimum sentencing guidelines. By cooperating, Hunt eventually received a sentence of almost half that, with the possibility of serving even less.