The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History (60 page)

"They love it," Boone says about women. "They want to be taken."

Not long after he returns home to Springfield in 2000 after his twelve years in prison, he meets Rosamond, already divorced in her early twenties. Soon she gets pregnant with Johnny's son, Jesse. The out-of-wedlock relationship appears to strain Boone's marriage past its breaking point. After all, his wife Marilyn had waited for him for more than a decade while he was in prison, and after he gets out, he falls into the arms of Rosa Goff-hardly the Odysseus to Marilyn's Penelope.

Boone's relationship with Rosamond does not appear to last long. By mid-2005, Rosa has moved into the trailer of another man, Larry Milburn, although Johnny Boone continues to raise their son.

On August 22, Rosa Goff and Larry Milburn work together painting a house on Holderman Lane. While they paint the house, Milburn's cell phone rings, and Rosa sees that the call came from Milburn's ex-wife. They get into an argument, and Rosa wants Milburn to take her home, so he drops her off at his trailer at 10:00 a.m., and then he returns to the painting job on Holderman Lane.

Close to noon, Milburn returns to the trailer to take Rosa to lunch. He finds Rosa hanging by her neck by a green extension cord in the back bedroom of the trailer, not "in a barn," as Habib says on AMW.

From the Washington County sheriff's report:

On Monday August 22, 2005, Springfield dispatch called the Washington County office to report that Larry Milburn called advising that Rosamond Goff has hung herself. The call came into the sherjofice at 12:01.

Sher Bartley and Deputy Robert Osbourne [were] en route at 12:04 and arrived at 228 Cedarwood Lane at 12:08. There we found Larry Milburn sitting on the front steps crying. SherfBartley entered through the front door and found no one in sight, walked toward the back of the trailer, where he found Rosamond Goff hanging from a hook in the ceiling. There was a green electrical extension cord around her neck attached to the hook. Her feet were approximately two inches from the floor.

SherfBartley checked for a pulse and couldn't find one, plus she wasn't breathing. She was still warm to the touch....

Washington County EMS arrived on the scene at 12:11 and started to do CPR. They worked on her for 28 minutes and transported her to the Springview Hospital in Lebanon at 12:39. Her time of death was

Larry also told the sherfthat Rosamond's mother told him that when she lived in Nelson County, she used to carry a rope in herpocket and threatened to kill herself with it.

From the investigation, it was determined that Rosamond Gof's death is a suicide....

While she was at the hospital, they found a picture of her three children with a note on the back saying, "Please forgive me? Ilove you

Her toxicology report comes back negative for alcohol and positive for sertraline, an antidepressant marketed as Zoloft.

So, there you go. Deputy US Marshal Jimmy Habib claims that Rosa Goff's death was prompted by a "falling-out" with Johnny Boone and that she "tried to incriminate him"; that isn't true. He says her body was found "in a barn"; that's inaccurate. He says Johnny "was not happy with Jeff" for building his house; also not true, according to the police who responded to the scene of Jeff's death. And before going on national television to speak as an alleged expert in the case, Jimmy Habib never bothers to call any of the policemen who worked those cases, and neither does Keith Greenberg, Justin Lenart, Angeline Hartmann or anyone else atAmerica's Most Wanted.

And here's something else worth knowing about Deputy US Marshal Jimmy Habib: Ten days after I beat my subpoena, on February 13, 2009, he shoots an innocent pregnant woman, according to documents filed with US District Court.

That night the marshals receive intelligence that a fugitive from Chicago is spotted driving near the state fairgrounds in a rental car with his girlfriend, so Habib and a Louisville Metro police officer, both in plain clothes, jump into an unmarked van and head toward the fairgrounds south of downtown.

The unnamed fugitive has an outstanding arrest warrant for being a felon in possession of a firearm. The intel suggests the fugitive will be at a hotel, perhaps at the Ramada Inn. As Habib and the LMPD officer cruise the Ramada Inn parking lot, they see a man driving a rented Chrysler Sebring, whom they incorrectly identify as the fugitive, although he does have his girlfriend with him-and two children in the back seat.

They watch the Sebring drive into the parking lot of another hotel and park, but the occupants do not get out. The police officer drives Habib to a nearby Thornton's gas station to meet another deputy marshal driving an unmarked black Chevrolet Suburban. Then the Sebring pulls into the same Thornton's parking lot, so the fugitive squad decides to take the Sebring down.

The LMPD officer pulls the unmarked van along the Sebring's passenger side and cuts it off from the right, while the black Suburban parks on the Sebring's driver's side, surprising the Sebring's occupants: Marcus Brewer and Courtnie Pruitt. In the back seat are Pruitt's two children: their one-year-old son and her seven-year-old daughter. They're from Glasgow, Kentucky, and they rented a car to celebrate Valentine's Day and their son's one-year birthday.

What happens next remains in dispute: Either Habib approaches the Sebring from the front with his US marshal's badge hanging around his neck, announces, "Police, let me see your hands!" and then draws his handgun only after the Sebring starts to move, or, according to Marcus Brewer, something different happens-

While Brewer and Pruitt are looking for a hotel room, they pull into the gas station, where two unmarked cars attempt to block them, and men not wearing police uniforms leap out of the vehicles pointing guns at them. So, Brewer, thinking he is being robbed, hits the gas.

Brewer's Sebring does not touch Habib nor either unmarked vehicle, but after the car passes by Habib, the deputy marshal aims his service pistol and squeezes off three shots at the departing Sebring. One shot nearly hits the gas tank, and another blows out the back windshield, raining shattered glass over the children in the back seat and striking Pruitt, who is pregnant, in the back of the arm.

When Habib realizes that he has shot an innocent pregnant woman and traumatized her children, he attempts to save face by charging Brewer with committing wanton endangerment in the first degree and endangering the welfare of a minor, charges that a judge quickly dismisses.

As of the deadline of this book, Jimmy Habib remains a deputy marshal with a badge, a gun and a paycheck, even while being sued in federal civil court for excessive use of force. In addition to paying his full salary, the federal government is providing Habib's defense counsel at taxpayer expense.

Johnny Boone grew marijuana one time too many, exposing him to the life sentence imposed by the 1994 Three Strikes law. The 2,421 seedlings found in flowerpots on his property in May 2008 will send him to prison for the rest of his life if the authorities catch him, but according to the Washington County sheriff and the Kentucky State Police, he did not kill Jeffrey Boone nor Rosamond Goff, no matter what Jimmy Habib, the US Marshals Service or America's Most Wanted try to claim.

"Marshals is a dirty bunch of sons of bitches,"Johnny Boone tells me in 2007, a year before he becomes a fugitive, as we sit on the front porch of the house his son Jeff built on their Walker Lane farm. "Everybody will tell you DEA is the nastiest, dirtiest, most illegal organization, [but] marshals is right on top. You know what you got in the marshals is a lot of city cops, a lot of county cops, a lot of deputy sheriffs, a lot of even state policemen-I met one-that sign on to become a marshal.

"They usually start moonlighting with the marshals, and if they pass all the little inspections the marshals give'em, they'll take em on because they need marshals all the time.

"And so you got a lot of low-life motherfuckers. City cops who are usually fixing to lose the job they're in because some kind of heat coming down.... Hey, listen, marshals like a little motherfucker who will knock somebody out.

"You know, they have a crew that goes out every night in Kentucky. This is a night crew, and they got-the way I found out about it is I seen all this shit. In the old days, they had this little old office there, and they got this stuff written on the board, and you could see these chalk marks. I got to studying them, and I seen it was a night crew, and what they do is they go out and look for fugitives-and they beat them motherfuckers to death when they catch'em, if they have to. Stomp their ass to death."

As of the deadline of this book, Deputy US Marshal Jimmy Habib remains on the case of Johnny Boone because he has done such a good job of catching him so far-over three and a half years of taxpayer-funded searching with no results. If Boone and Habib ever make eye contact, Habib is going to say, "Stop!" and Boone isn't going to stop for a second because Boone has no respect for someone like Habib. What happens next seems clear, given Habib's trigger-happy background. The only thing that could prevent this likely outcome-the shooting death of Johnny Boone at the hands of the US Marshals Service-is if the charges against John Robert Boone are knocked down from the US Attorney's Office to statelevel charges in the Commonwealth Attorney's Office so that Boone is no longer facing life in prison for the crime of allegedly possessing seedlings in flowerpots. Or President Obama could grant Boone a pardon, but the likelihood of something like that happening is next to zero.

"I'm afraid they're going to kill him," Charlie Bickett says. "Just like they done Charlie Stiles."

When writing nonfiction, the quotation mark is king. Anything enclosed in quotation marks in this book was said, sung, written or testified to in court under oath. Inside the quotation marks, ellipses (...) indicate where I have pared down what people said, whereas dashes (-) indicate pauses in their speech, and brackets ([]) indicate words inserted to improve clarity or flow.

Sources for all quotes as well as other fact-based reporting or research along the way are cited chapter by chapter below, although much of the sourcing should be self-evident in the text because I left intact a lot of the texture on the police reports, court transcripts, press accounts, FOIA documents and interviews that constitute this story.

There are also a number of confidential sources in this book who provided information but who asked not to be named. Such is the reality of reporting in a world governed by a code of silence. I used anonymous sources only when necessary, and I will explain each instance as best I can in the following notes.

PREFACE

Because the preface functions as a sort of overture for the narrative arc of the whole book, its sources range from church historians to popular music to federal court transcripts.

The story arc of Johnny Boone comes from interviews with Boone, FOIA records from his DEA and FBI files and extensive transcripts from his 1987 bust in Minnesota. The phrases "Cornbread Mafia" and "largest domestic ... in American history" were first uttered by an assistant US attorney at a Louisville press conference on June 16,1989.'Ihe word cartel is used in many internal documents, released by FOIA, to describe this organization.'Ihe word inconceivable was used by Agent Phillip Wagner of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, from his sworn testimony.