The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History (62 page)

"Getting caught with a gun..."comes from an interview with Warren "Sonny" Larue, as do "Paul!" and "Calm down, Sonny..."

The scene of Charlie Stiles's second medical examination at Bosley Funeral Home is reconstructed from the medical examiner's report, and "I'll get 'em ..." comes from an interview with the man who was the coroner at the time who wished to remain anonymous. Al Cross quotes come from an interview conducted in 2011.

Faulkner's "fecundity of dragons teeth" comes from Absalom, Absalom., page 313 of the Vintage paperback edition, regarding the Ahab-like Col. Sutpen's sowing the seeds of his own destruction.

"'Ihe first time I ever ..." comes from an interview conducted with Charlie Bickett in 2011.

"The first thing ..." comes from an interview with Johnny Boone conducted in 2007.

All references to "Mr. X" are due to reaching the limits of narrative nonfiction while reporting this book. The fact is that many involved in Cornbread-related activities were never arrested by police because they were protected by the code of silence-Mr. X was one of these. I made a deal at an early stage in the reporting of this book in 2006 that I would keep Mr. X's name out of the book in exchange for getting help to get Johnny Boone on the record, which was a success. I later attempted to get Mr. X's true name into the book by asking to be released from my original agreement, without success. Therefore, Mr. X will not be mentioned by name, nor are there any physical descriptions of him in the text. If this is frustrating to the reader, consider that in exchange for not knowing the identity of Mr. X, we get to know Johnny Boone. All references to Mr. X in the text come from interviews with Johnny Boone, Jimmy Bickett and anonymous sources.

News of the early busts from 1976 comes from the Lebanon Enterprise for the Paul Stiles bust and the Springfield Sun for the Johnny Boone bust and interviews with Johnny Boone, Jimmy Bickett and others in on the ground floor of the Cornbread business.

CHAPTER 3

This chapter is devoted to the reporting I managed to uncover on the life and disappearance of Garland Russell.

All the details, narratives and quotes related to the 1956 hijacking of the truck filled with bowling alley pinsetters come from a forty-five-page FBI report written by Special Agent Raleigh Bristow in 1956, which I acquired through a KORA (open records) request to the Kentucky State Police.

All of the details, narratives and quotes related to the June 1964 murder of Charlie Irvin and the attempted murder of J. W. VanArsdale come from coverage in the Lebanon Enterprise, KORA documents from Russell's police file and VanArsdale's testimony in court, reprinted nearly in its entirety by the Enterprise.

The narrative created from the period of Russell's release from prison in 1972 to his disappearance in 1979 comes from interviews with Joe Mike Mouser, Carlos Humphrey, Johnny Boone, Jimmy Bickett and other unnamed sources.

"Huh?!" comes from a story told by Johnny Boone. The story of the patch grown on Icetown Road was told by Jimmy Bickett. The explosion of Russell's house in Raywick was reported in the Enterprise, as was the federal indictment against him, in separate articles. Context for these stories was provided by interviews with Joe Downs and Jimmy Bickett. I could not reach "Joe Downs's younger brother" to interview him, so I thought it fair not to include his first name. Nicknames for the Jane Todd Inn come from a variety of sources, including interviews with retired police officers.

The story from the Campbell House Inn, the last place Garland Russell was seen alive, comes from an anonymous source.'Ihe anecdote of a person getting stuffed into the trunk of a car with a half-dozen live snapping turtles comes from a different anonymous source.'Ihe story of the court hearing to declare Russell legally dead comes from a third source who wished not to be identified.

CHAPTER 4

The March 1977 ride-along with Officer Baker comes from the Enterprise. I could not locate Baker to interview him. The story of the Black Bandit comes from Enterprise reporting and interviews with Steve Lowery and Johnny Boone.

Johnny Boone mistakenly thought that Ed Baker had been one of the police officers who beat Mose Willett, who later died. Details about Willett's death and funeral and public uproar come from reporting in the Enterprise and interviews of several men who remembered it happening.

Speculation that the Black Bandit ride was a decoy for another operation ran deep, but I never could pin it down. The closest I could get was Johnny Boone's saying, "I can tell you..."

Jody Greenwell declined a request to be interviewed.

Reporting of the helicopter-led busts in August 1980 comes from reporting from the Enterprise and internal state police files released through KORA requests. The time of sunset was determined by consulting a EarmercAlmanac.

Marion County's unemployment rate comes from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. "I got four kids ..."comes from the Enterprise.

Details related to the bust of the Bicketts come from press accounts from the Enterprise and Courier journal and interviews with Jimmy Bickett. Joe Keith Bickett declined to be interviewed for this portion of the book. Elmer George did not return calls requesting an interview. Discussion of Mr. X and "the Russian" comes from interviews with Johnny Boone, Jimmy Bickett and confidential sources.

The story of the raid on September 11, 1981, comes from Enterprise reporting and interviews with Johnny Boone. I heard the V-tailed plane referred to as the "DoctorLawyer Killer" by the manager of the Lebanon-Springfield airport. The times of day"At 5:45 pm ..., At 7:30..."-come from internal state police files released through KORA.

Details about the Lowerys' home life come from interviews with Steve Lowery and Susan Lowery. Further Lowery details were provided in interviews with Charlie Bickett and Al Cross.'Ihe sourcing for this section should be evident in the text, including quotes from the Lebanon Enterprise and Courier journal.

Regarding Harold Brown, the rogue DEA agent, my primary background source is Bluegrass Conspiracy by Sally Denton, which goes into great detail regarding Harold Brown and his partner Andrew Thornton trafficking marijuana and cocaine from South America into Kentucky in the late 1970s and early 1980s. To my knowledge, there has been no challenge to Denton's credibility or the veracity of Bluegrass Conspiracy.

The fact of an internal affairs investigation into allegations that Harold Brown was connected to the abandoned DC-4 from 1979 is reported in the Courier-journal and remembered by former Louisville narcotics Detective James Black and retired state police Detective Don Powers in interviews with me. James Black's former partner, Bud Farmer, is deceased. The allegation that Brown was selling ricin and curare in Soldier of Fortune classified ads comes from Bluegrass Conspiracy, pages 324-325.

Details related to Brown's death on March 20, 1984, come from the police report of the "corpse investigation" conducted by the Louisville Police Department. These details, uncovered by an open records request from me to the Louisville Metro Police Department, are new and are not reported in Bluegrass Conspiracy.

In 2011, I interviewed Don Powers and Jack Smith regarding Harold Brown's activities.

The goal of the reporting of this narrative was to tie Harold Brown to a larger web of covert operatives within the American intelligence community, specifically Lucien Conein, who "ran secret operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration" from 1973 to 1984, according to his June 7, 1998, New York Times obituary. In the 1960s, Conein had been the CIAs man in Vietnam, who coordinated the assassination of Vietnamese Prime Minister Diem and his brother.

On page 327 of Bluegrass Conspiracy, Sally Denton writes:

"On the heels of Harold Brown's death, [former Detective] Ralph [Ross] received a manila envelope full of what purported to be DEA documents. Sent to him by an anonymous source ...

"Marked Classified, the hundred pages detailed the existence of a quid-pro-quo arrangement between the CIA and DEA that allowed large-scale narcotics activities in return for intelligence information on Latin American countries.... Since the early 1970s, the documents suggested, the CIA had used the DEA for cover, and had employed known drug smugglers and mercenaries....

"'The original unit housed within the DEA was apparently codenamed Operation Buncin, an acronym for the Bureau of Narcotics Clandestine Intelligence Network.'Ihat pilot project, which provided cover for CIA covert operations at home and abroad, was the forerunner for Operation Deacon-Drug Enforcement Administration Covert Operations Network....

"The Office of Security of the CIA monitored the project, and all information originating from the unit was considered top secret. The intelligence information was .. . retrieved personally by DEA agent Lucien Conein."

However, Sally Denton did not reproduce these documents in the back of Bluegrass Conspiracy, and since Ralph Ross's death, his family no longer responds to journalists' requests, saying that all Ross's papers had been burned long ago. Ross's former partner, Don Powers, remains "highly skeptical" in my 2011 interview that such documents ever existed because Powers feels that if Ross had discovered information as explosive as this, he would have shared it with Powers, and he did not.

(For the record, this is the same Ralph Ross who was a detective on the Charlie Stiles squad and the one who wrote the official report of the circumstances surrounding his death.)

Therefore, Harold Brown's possible connection to Lucien Conein is one of those things that "we'll never know," in Powers's words. However, according to Jack Smith, although such accusations remain unprovable, they also remain "credible."

It should be noted that in his interview Jack Smith made a classic mistake while discussing the CIA by saying, "the first responsibility of any law enforcement agent ..." The CIA is not a law enforcement agency; its closest cousin is the military, not the FBI, which is why its charter makes it illegal for the CIA to practice its trade on American soil or against American citizens.

Fred Partin, an assistant US attorney when Harold Brown was Louisville's DEA agent and Harold Brown's defense attorney after both left government work, returned my initial phone call, but when I called back when he told me to in order to set up a face-toface interview, he didn't get back to me.

As background research for this section, I read a number of books covering this well-worn territory, including books that allege CIA-backed narcotics smuggling, such as Bluegrass Conspiracy by Sally Denton, Dark Alliance by Gary Webb and Barry & the Boys by Daniel Hopsicker.

I read books on this subject that deny or ignore these allegations, including Firewall by Lawrence E. Walsh, Veil by Bob Woodward, Legacy ofAshes by Tim Weiner and Under Fire by Oliver North. I also used as a reference The Iran-Contra Scandal: The Declassed History, a National Security Archive Documents Reader, edited by Peter Kornbluh and Malcolm Byrne.

Additionally, I reviewed transcripts from investigations into claims of CIA-backed narcotics trafficking conducted by both chambers of the US Congress, including hearings conducted in August and September 1979 in the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) concerning legislation to address something that became known as graymail. Here's the statement from Morgan F. Murphy, congressman from Illinois, chairman of the HPSCI subcommittee on legislation:

"For a variety of reasons, the past few years have witnessed a significant increase in the number of criminal prosecutions in which the use of disclosure of classified information has become an issue. Such cases are not confined to any particular area of alleged illegal activity. Crimes charged have included espionage, perjury, narcotics distribution, burglary, and civil rights violations, among others.... Whatever the charge, whenever classified information becomes involved the government is likely to be faced with the disclose-or-dismiss dilemma, with what has become popularly known as graymail."

Testifying before Rep. Murphy's subcommittee was Philip A. Lacovara, former deputy solicitor general in charge of the government's criminal and internal security cases before the Supreme Court and former counsel to Watergate Special Prosecutors Archibald Cox and Leon Jaworski:

"On that same subject, Mr. Chairman, it is true that the number of cases that are affected by this problem each year is a relatively small number, but I still submit that legislation is warranted because the cases tend to be of unusual public importance. Whether the matter involved is espionage, major drug trafficking, or misconduct by senior government officials, the underlying prosecution is one in which the people of the United States have a peculiarly grave interest in seeing to it that there are no unnecessary obstacles to going forward with a trial on the merits to determine guilt or innocence."

On the Senate side, I reviewed the transcripts of the hearings before the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Communications of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, 100th Congress, Second Session, April 4, 5, 6 and 7,1988, chaired by Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) with Mitch McConnell (R-KY) as ranking member, which explored these same allegations.

Again, the unsuccessful reporting in this chapter asked the question: Was the CIA involved in high-level narcotics smuggling in Kentucky while the government actively imprisoned local growers? The story of Harold Brown speaks for itself; a reader can draw his or her own conclusions. However, my reporting was unable to connect Harold Brown to Lucien Conein, the director of DEA covert ops, which would have been one step closer to the covert policymakers who set these covert operatives, if indeed they were, into action. In response to questions about "current operations in Nicaragua" in hearings before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in late September 1983, former Deputy National Security Advisor David L. Aaron testified:

"Again, the issue is covert policy, not covert action. I do not believe that in our democracy, any administration can for long pursue a duplicitous strategy. Usually, the credibility of the administration and of the United States suffers as a result. But to try to blunt the instruments used to implement that policy is not the proper course.'Ihe target should be the policy itself."