The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History
Author: Higdon, James
Date: 2012-04-20 02:00:00+02:00
Keywords: General Non-Fiction
Description: The true story of the largest homegrown marijuana syndicate in American history, a band of Kentucky farmers descended from Prohibition-era moonshiners versus the War on Drugs. Review “[A] lucidly spun tale…. Think Tarantino on Kentucky bluegrass, scored with Creedence and vigorously reported.” —GQ “A boggling and wacky history that illuminates the shadowy area between the good guys and the bad guys, and vividly documents how far the temptations of one plant can take men—from the jungles of Belize, the hills of Afghanistan, and into the very soul kitchen of the American heartland.” —Geoffrey Gr
Publisher: Lyons Press

"The state of Kentucky should declare itself the storytelling capital of the nation. The place is brimming with remarkable, colorful stories and some of the most natural storytellers you'll ever meet. James Higdon and his new book, The Cornbread Mafia, are the latest proof of that. This is a tale that is so rich and utterly startling that it's honestly hard to believe in parts. But Higdon's research is smart, and his writing is smooth. He's especially good on the history of this American saga, which may have fallen through the cracks of time without his hard work."

-Ann Hagedorn, author of Wild Ride: The Rise and Fall of Calumet Farms, Inc., America's Premier Horseracing Dynasty

"Who knew Kentuckians take marijuana as seriously as they do bourbon? James Higdon digs deep to document American pot pioneers and their extralegal escapades. Thoroughly researched, The Cornbread Mafia is chock-full of fascinating homegrown history, not to mention a plethora of entertaining anecdotes of illegality. Higdon provides an intimate look at an exceedingly wild bunch of outlaws. Most impressively, he gains exclusive access to Johnny Boone, an eccentric, pot-farming legend and longtime fugitive from the law."

-Jason Ryan, author of Jackpot: High Times, High Seas, and the Sting That Launched the War on Drugs

"Whether you are interested in learning more about a unique chapter of Kentucky's and our nation's history or just want to be entertained, you should read this book. More importantly, though, The Cornbread Mafia is a case study of the effects upon a single tightknit community of the drug laws put in place by successive administrations. Whether you support these laws or oppose them, this book provides a window into how those laws affect real families and their communities. Higdon's book is especially timely, coming on the heels of the Ken Burns documentary, Prohibition, and Ron Paul's presidential campaign."

-Trev Gravson, Director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard University

A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History

JAMES HIGDON

Preface: Tina Tells Ike: "It's Gonna Work Out Fine" . . . . . vii

PART I

CHAPTER I: A County Is Born: Catholic Migration, the Civil War, Prohibition and John Dillinger . . . . . 3

CHAPTER 2: The Hot Air-Conditioner Incident, the Lebanese Mayor of Lebanon and the Killing of Charlie Stiles . 32

CHAPTER 3: The Dark Side of Cornbread, Starring Garland Russell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

CHAPTER 4: "This Is Some Absolutely Dynamite Pot Here," the Police Said . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89

CHAPTERS: Cornbread in the Tropics, the Cops Don't Trust the DEA and Jimmy Bickett Sees Johnny Boone on Television . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130

CHAPTER 6: Growers versus the Drought of 1983, a Rash of Raywick Killings and a Drug Investigation Gone Wrong . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150

PART II

CHAPTER 7: How the Jesuit College at St. Mary's Became the First Private Prison in America . . . . . . . . . . . . 166

CHAPTER 8: Johnny Boone Becomes "Mr. Grass" . . . . . . . . . 200

CHAPTER 9: The DEA Wants to Know, "Where Did You Get This Lion?" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239

CHAPTER Io: The "Cornbread" Press Conference . . . . . . . . . . 265

CHAPTER I I: "Welcome to the Gladiator Arena" . . . . . . . . . . 274

CHAPTER 12: The US Marshals versus James Higdon . . . . . . . . 304

Notes and Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 345

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 366

Acknowledgments and About the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . 376

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

PROHIBITION OFFICERS AT WORK IN COUNTY

Five Stills Are Destroyed In This And Adjoining Counties-Two Men Are Arrested

STILL CAPTURED NEAR LORETTO

Shots Exchanged By Officers And 'Shiners But No One Seriously Hurt

MANY DRAW FINES IN COURT FOR VIOLATING LIQUOR LAWS

FOUR HELD OVER TO FEDERAL GRAND JURY

Prohibition Officers Destroy Nine Stills On Their Recent Raid In This Territory

MANY INDICTED BY GRAND JURY

Nearly Half Of The Ninety-Six Found Charged With Liquor Law Violations

TWO LARGE BOOZE FACTORIES ARE DESTROYED BY OFFICERS

OFFICERS MAKE MANY ARRESTS

Large 125-Gallon Copper Still Found On Raid In The Chicago Section

OFFICERS TAKE EIGHT MEN ON RECENT RAID

One Man Is Shot And Sixteen Stills Seized And Destroyed

TEN "STILLS" ARE DESTROYED

Successful Raid Made By Federal Officers

Through these sorts of widespread shenanigans, Marion County gained a reputation among major crime fighters and criminals alike as a mecca for illegal booze. Al Capone, according to local legend, visited the moonshine factories in Marion County during his better-documented trips to Louisville, and Capone certainly passed through Marion County in May 1932, when the government shipped him by train to the federal prison in Atlanta following his conviction in Chicago, a route that could have passed only along the railroad tracks through Marion County.

On the night of May 5, 1932-two days before Burgoo King would win the fifty-eighth running of the Kentucky Derby-Eliot Ness transferred Al Capone into the custody of the US Marshals Service at Dearborn Street Station in Chicago, where they boarded an eight-car train, the Dixie Flier, which left Chicago at 11:30 p.m.

In the middle of the night, the moonshiners of Marion County lined up along the tracks with their sons to give one last salute to the man who had helped keep their families fed. At some late hour that night, the Dixie Flier rushed through Loretto at eighty miles an hour along Marion County's class 3 track, which ran along the foot of the Muldraugh's Hill escarpment, the train chugging along the scarp's foot through St. Francis, Loretto and St. Mary's, where the Marion County whisky men tipped their mason jars in salute as it passed. Then the men took their sleepy sons home as the train made its way through the night to Atlanta via Corbin.

A year later, the year that would be Prohibition's last, John Dillinger came to Marion County after his parole from Indiana State Prison in May, enticed by a fellow inmate who told him that a person could hide out in Marion County as long as he wanted. In the summer of 1933, Dillinger used his Marion County hideout as a base of operations to rob at least four banks in Indiana and Ohio, while he also plotted the prison break for his gang still locked up in Indiana. On his way out of Kentucky for the last time, Dillinger robbed the Gravel Switch bank in eastern Marion County with the help of a few local boys on August 11, 1933.

Marion County provided safe haven for a man like Dillinger because its people kept their mouths shut. After enough occasions of armed lawmen raiding family farmhouses, the children of those lawbreakers realized that silence was the only weapon they had to protect their fathers and grandfathers from the revenuers intent on taking them away in handcuffs; this understanding grew into an unofficial code of silence that would be passed down for generations and continues today.

While Johnny Boone served hard federal time for his marijuana crimes, he learned from his fellow prisoners of Sicilian descent that such a code of silence had a name in the Old Country-omertd. Moved by what his Sicilian friends told him about its philosophy and how it related to his life, Boone had OMERTA tattooed across his back in red and blue ink. Omerta as a concept arose in Sicily by necessity as the island was continually conquered by a series of outside forces through the centuries. For Johnny Boone, the same concept arose in his community from a different conquering force: Prohibition.

When Prohibition ended in 1933, Marion County refused to end its outlaw ways, and moonshining continued unabated, especially during World War II, when the government rationed alcohol along with sugar, a key ingredient of moonshine. The illegal trafficking of sugar may sound like a joke, but it was indeed a crime during the war and for nearly a year after. It's a crime that will serve as the introduction for a character who will play a supporting role in this story: Hyleme George, the child of Lebanese immigrants and the future mayor of Lebanon, Kentucky.

At 2:00 a.m. on November 6, 1946-after the Allied victory but before the end of rationing-Hyleme George deplaned a flight from Chicago carrying a suitcase. When he stepped onto the tarmac in the middle of a rainstorm, he was stopped by police and IRS agents, who knew him to be a former taxi driver with a record of gambling arrests. Inside George's suitcase, police found enough sugar ration stamps for 47,657 pounds of sugar-sugar allegedly destined to be made into moonshine. Given an average ratio of ten pounds of sugar to one gallon of moonshine, that's enough sugar to make 4,765 gallons of moonshine-plus three quarts.

Soon after the bust, in which the Courier journal in Louisville referred to George as a "sugar stamp racketeer," George moved from Louisville to Lebanon, where his Lebanese family had already set down roots: Dr. Eli George, one of the county's few physicians, had established a medical practice on Main Street years earlier, and Philip George owned a wholesale liquor distributorship on Water Street, the back street behind Main.

It didn't take long for Hyleme to go into business with his brother, Philip, as Hyleme felt comfortable in the liquor business, which was a growth industry in Marion County. After Prohibition, the Kentucky legislature deferred the issue of liquor legality to the counties, and each county voted itself "wet" or "dry."True to its nature, Marion proudly chose its fate as the last wet county to the Tennessee line, 108 miles away.

After establishing his foothold in Lebanon, Hyleme George bought another business on Water Street, a juke joint called Club Cherry, a music venue and watering hole that catered to the town's black folk. By 1950, Club Cherry had become a seminal stop on the Chitlin' Circuit, that network of black nightclubs throughout the South that thrived during and in spite of segregation. In 1951, a skinny piano player named Little Richard rolled into Lebanon singing a song about a drag queen from Georgia named Miss Sonya and left Lebanon having changed the song title and chorus in honor of Club Cherry's manager, Lucille Edelen; in 1955, when a locomotive rolled by Club Cherry's door on its way to Chicago or Atlanta, Junior Parker played "Mystery Train" in a double bill with Bobby "Blue" Bland; that skinny black kid in the army jacket playing the guitar with his teeth at Club Cherry in 1963, that was Jimi Hendrix.

Hyleme George hired Obie Slater to replace Lucille Edelen as Club Cherry's manager in the early 1950s; the Parker-Bland double bill had been Slater's first booking job. A year after he booked Hendrix, Slater booked a new Stax artist named Otis Redding for $300 for two nights of Redding singing "These Arms of Mine" and "Can't Turn You Loose."The second time Slater booked Redding, Redding's agent charged $600 for one show, which paid for a pre-Monterey Pop performance of Redding's "Respect" and his cover of"(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction,"with the horn section playing the Keith Richards guitar line.

Then Hyleme George made a business decision that changed the history of Lebanon and Kentucky-and of rock 'n' roll. In 1964, he opened Club 68, a nightclub named for the highway that ran through Main Street, a highway that would carry hundreds of cars bringing thousands of people-mostly wide-eyed teenagers-to Lebanon every weekend from a hundred miles away or more, young white kids who were drawn by the black musicians who had been playing to black folks on Water Street for more than a decade by then. Club 68 united, for the first time in those parts, black musicians with white audiences, brought together by a Lebanese immigrant in Lebanon, Kentucky. This strange brew, combined with lax enforcement of underage drinking laws, quickly catapulted Lebanon into a primary nightlife destination for young people across Kentucky and beyond, prompting the Courier ,journal to refer to Lebanon during an investigation of its club scene as "the Ft. Lauderdale of central Kentucky."

Of all the performers who passed through Hyleme's clubs, none of them-not even Jimi Hendrix-left a greater impression on audiences than Ike and Tina Turner, who played the Cherry and Club 68 between a dozen and twenty times, depending on whom one asks. The memories of these shows-from locals, out-of-town college boys and the gonzo disc jockeys from WAKY-AM, who could hardly believe what passed for normal in Lebanon-illuminate a page ripped from popular music history, with Hyleme George grilling steaks for the band as the bus arrived, Ike Turner firing his drummer for being ten minutes late and Tina shimmering on stage.

At some point in 1977 after Ike and Tina's final appearance in Lebanon, local legend claims that Hyleme George received a phone call from Tina Turner. She had just broken up with Ike, and if Hyleme could send her $5,000, she knew that she could make it on her own. Decades later, when Tina Turner performed in Louisville's Freedom Hall during a world tour, Obie Slater managed to get backstage to see if Tina remembered him, but she disappointed him.

"I think I might remember," she told Slater. "But I don't know."

What we do know is that this relationship between Hyleme George and the Turners began in 1961, when the jukebox man loaded a single into the Club Cherry jukebox that caught Obie Slater's ear-Ike and Tina's second hit record, "It's Gonna Work Out Fine."

Of course, Ike and Tina's relationship did not work out fine. Neither did the wild notion taken by many Marion County boys who drank and danced and fist-fought to this soundtrack that they could make a living by breaking the law, growing plants considered by the government to be a threat to society.

In the belly of Club 68-listening to the likes of Ike and Tinathose who became the Cornbread 70 received their education in life skills, where laws weren't so much broken as simply ignored, the outside world and its consequences held at bay by a multigenerational code of silence and a soundtrack of rock 'n' roll and rhythm and blues, where otherwise good Catholic boys learned to run from the law. The 1971 yearbook from Marion County High School contains numerous photos of young men who would be included among the Cornbread 70. Take, for instance, Jimmy Bickett.

Elected class clown in 1971, Jimmy Bickett spent his weekends in high school dealing cards at the endless game of seven-card stud run out of the Blue Room in the back of Club 68. When Hyleme George played, he always sat next to the dealer, and as soon as the other players were drunk or distracted, Hyleme would nudge Bickett under the table, and Bickett would rake the pot twice in the same hand. From watching the game played this way, Jimmy Bickett learned that even when he lost, Hyleme George found a way to win.

By the time Bickett graduated high school in 1971, enough boys from Marion County-including Bobby Joe Shewmaker-had returned from Vietnam as men who brought news that in the big cities, people paid a fortune for the weed growing wild behind their grandfathers' barns, forgotten remnants of the hemp-growing effort during World War II. Due to their upbringing, the young Marion County men viewed the criminality of growing weed as an afterthought at best.

"Oh yeah, it's illegal," Johnny Boone remembered being told. "So, don't get caught."

Thus it began.

Starting in 1971, a certain type of Marion County boy couldn't wait to graduate high school so he could grow himself a great big field of marijuana-and that's how the 1970s rolled into the 1980s, a phenomenon that did not go unnoticed by police and therefore generated a steady stream of headlines in the Lebanon Enterprise year by year, of which these are just a sample:

November 22, 1979: WHO GREW THE POT CROP? POLICE HAVE NO SUSPECTS

July 31, 1980: POLICE DISCOVER SEVEN ACRES OF MARIJUANA ON COUNTY FARM

August 7, 1980: MARIJUANA IS FOUND IN CORN FIELD

August 14, 1980: MORE THAN 45 ACRES OF "GRASS" ARE FOUND AND DESTROYED IN THE COUNTY

September 15, 1982: KENTUCKY STATE POLICE, SHERIFF HARVEST MORE POT

September 22, 1982: POLICE FIND 1,000 POT PLANTS IN RAYWICK BARN

July 9, 1986: POLICE FIND 60,000 MARIJUANA PLANTS

August 6, 1986: POLICE OFFICERS CONTINUE WAR ON MARION COUNTY MARIJUANA

An exhaustive list of marijuana-related headlines from the Lebanon Enterprise would go on for quite some time. Police were even stumbling onto it accidentally:

December 6, 1979: POLICE FIND POT WHILE SEARCHING FOR [COP KILLER] GRAHAM

September 22, 1982: HIGH SPEED CHASE RESULTS IN POT FIND

The story behind these headlines is partly one of how economic hardships manifested themselves in a particular community. By the 1980s, the family farm was crumbling-not just one farm or another particular family but the whole notion of one family sustaining a living off one farm, the notion upon which many in Marion County and elsewhere in America had staked their livelihoods for generations. At the same time, the free market eroded Marion County's primary crop, burley tobacco, from both ends-usage among American adults started to decline as the tobacco companies began buying burley from international markets for pennies on the dollar for what it cost them at home, even though Kentucky farmers practically gave it away at $1.60 per pound.

By 1985, the unemployment rate in Marion County reached 18 percent on its way to 20. While families found it harder to make a living on the farm, few viable alternatives existed for those who sought a way out. Many men from Marion County carpooled for more than an hour every morning to factory jobs in Louisville, working eight-hour assembly-line shifts at General Electric or Ford and carpooling home in time for supper.

The factory jobs inside Marion County, found in a small garment factory, a sheet-metal lithography plant, the bourbon-barrel cooperage and the Maker's Mark distillery-although essential to the county's survival during the Reagan years-couldn't begin to employ all the able-bodied adults looking for work. Many of these out-of-work farmers chose to break the law rather than take a check from the federal government for doing nothing. And as the stakes rose, it only increased their resolve to continue:

August 21, 1980: STATE POLICE SEEK INDICTMENTS IN FEDERAL COURT AGAINST THOSE WHO ALLEGEDLY CULTIVATED "GRASS"

July 28, 1982: STIFFER POT LAWS HAVE NOT STOPPED LOCAL MARIJUANA GROWERS

November 26, 1986: FBI SEIZES 37-ACRE FARM WHERE POLICE FIND DOPE

These headlines from the 1980s signal the changing game of cat and mouse between law enforcement and pot farmers. Stiffer state laws didn't work? Send the pot farmers to federal court. Not tough enough? Take their property. For every new weapon the law used to curtail the Marion County marijuana growers, the growers improvised strategies to beat it. But the law never backed down, and a steady stream of Marion County residentsseventy of them between 1987 and 1989-paid a visit to the inside of the federal prison-industrial complex as guests of the American taxpayer:

September 11, 1980 SIX ARE INDICTED BY FEDERAL GRAND JURY THEY'RE CHARGED WITH GROWING MARIJUANA

August 11, 1982: SECOND MARION COUNTIAN IS CHARGED IN CONNECTION WITH INDIANA MARIJUANA BUST

August 18, 1982: THREE MARION COUNTY MEN ARE ARRESTED ON MARIJUANA CHARGES

November 12, 1986: NINE MEN BUSTED ON POT CHARGES IN WOODFORD COUNTY

This march of headlines continued apace to Johnny Boone's bust in Minnesota in October 1987 and the arrests of Jimmy and Joe Keith Bickett in February 1989-the only ones of the seventy busted inside Marion County, which had been until then a virtual fortress of silence against outsiders.

Police arrested Jimmy at a downtown motel across the street from Club 68 in the act of selling 125 pounds of pot to a pair of informants from Maine.' federal agents went to the Bickett family farm in Raywick, where they arrested Joe Keith, who lived in a two-hundred-year-old cabin that had been in the Bickett family for six generations.

Bobby Joe Shewmaker would be arrested three months later. The press conference announcing the Cornbread Mafia and its connection to Marion County would be held in June 1989. The purpose of the press conference was for the federal government to tie a pretty bow on a case that it considered to be closed, but it was a story that was far from finished.

The story of the Cornbread Mafia is much greater than the simple arrests of seventy people who grew 182 tons of pot; it's a story that could have come only from a rural Catholic culture that survived and adapted to the outside forces exerted upon it by Prohibition, Vietnam and Ronald Reagan.

It's a story of exotic strains of a potent plant, of guard dogs without voice boxes, of guns and piles of ammunition left unfired, of buckets of emeralds used as currency in Belize, of lobsters and limousines and nuns in possession of stolen property.

It's a story of bloody bodies in the back seats of cars, of passions unchecked by law and pickup trucks used as weapons but also a story of generosity, of brotherhood, of criminals carrying Christmas presents through the snow. It's the story of marijuana seeds smuggled from Afghanistan, cocaine smuggled from Colombia and European bull semen smuggled in through Canada. It's the story of a rogue DEA agent who sells exotic poison in the classified ads of Soldier of Fortune magazine, of kidnappings, helicopters, lions and bears and an infamous sex tape involving cocaine, a Doberman pinscher and a fugitive with a legendary endowment.

It's a story of a culture that nurtured the ambitions of young adventurous men willing to take incredible risks with hard work and a story of the economy that made such risky work necessary-free spirits exercising their free will in the free market, the philosophical children ofJohn Stuart Mill, maximizing their liberty with the least possible harm to others while at work in Rousseau's natural state, which happens to be the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

Although the Cornbread folks remained relatively nonviolent as far as nationwide criminal enterprises go, this book still has a body count of nearly a dozen violent deaths, which doesn't even include some spectacular ones, like the 1983 shooting of Vietnam veteran and marijuana big shot Don Nalley, who took a rifle bullet to the head as he stepped onto his front porch in the summertime, not long after his girlfriend and crew left his house to go swimming at Monks Pond on the property of the nearby Trappist monastery; the case remains unsolved.

This is the story whose author becomes the first journalist subpoenaed under the Obama administration because its main subject, Johnny Boone, becomes a federal fugitive after getting caught growing the Colonel's twelfth secret herb one too many times.

It's the story in which Johnny Boone says:

"It had taken me seven years to get a variety so that it was whambam-get-it-done in Kentucky" and

"Kentucky has been a wonderful place for producing marijuana and more so than maybe any other state as far as volume goes. Well, wonder why?" and

"Pot breeding is really mentally enlightening."

This is the story of the Cornbread Mafia.

THE REVEREND WILLIAM DEROHAN-FORMER PROFESSOR AT THE SORBONNE in Paris, a Roman Catholic priest and an Irish drunk-drifted on horseback through the wilderness of Virginia and the territory that would become Tennessee in the twilight of the eighteenth century saying Mass to the frontier Catholics where he found them in ones and twos and drinking himself into a stupor in between.

He came northward from the south into the land that would become Kentucky in the autumn of 1790, when the white population numbered fewer than thirty thousand, until DeRohan's horse stopped short of the lip of a great tectonic escarpment, the ridge that would become known on maps as Muldraugh's Hill and locally as Scott's Ridge, where the land dropped five hundred feet nearly straight down and continued seemingly forever in both directions, giving DeRohan an unspoiled view of the entire Bluegrass basin laid out before him in the oranges and yellows of harvest time. The priest and his horse had found by accident the best vantage point to see the secret beauty of what would become known as Marion County.

"I remember as a kid, digging ginseng around there," retired State Police Detective Jacky Hunt said later. "And every weekend there was a fresh car run off Scott's Ridge up there. We always called it Horseshoe Bend because you got the Rolling Fork River shaped like a horseshoe looking out. People would steal a car and strip it and run it off there. Always all those cars down there ... I've taken a lot of people up there to Scott's Ridge, and they get up there and they're like, `I never knew this was here.' I've brought people from eastern Kentucky up there, and they're like, `Daggone! You got a mountain here, too."'

Fifty years before thieves used Scott's Ridge to dump stripped-out cars, Prohibition-era revenuers like Big Six Henderson looked out from the same vantage point and saw the white smoke of a dozen active moonshine stills; 140 years before that, in 1790, the Reverend DeRohan likely saw only one plume of smoke when he arrived, the only sign of civilization coming from Basil Hayden's bourbon still at Holy Cross, which had been distilling corn whisky for five years by then. After he descended through the trees and fog of the escarpment and forded the Rolling Fork as it horseshoed along the foot of the ridge, DeRohan crossed into territory just recently claimed by settlers of European descent but also by multiple native tribes who had been hunting and burying their dead in the region for centuries.

The Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768-signed by the Iroquois in presentday Rome, New York-ceded all of what is now West Virginia and Kentucky to the British, prompting a wave of immigration into the area as well as violent conflict between settlers and the Shawnee, Chickamauga Cherokee, Creek and Chickasaw, who used guerrilla tactics, including stealthy attacks upon settlements by canoe, plucking the lives from pioneers in the night. Bishop John Lancaster Spalding would later estimate that between 1783 and 1790, the confederacy of native tribes killed or captured at least fifteen hundred Catholic souls.

In 1785, five years before the Irish priest's arrival, Basil Hayden chose to establish his community on the banks of Pottinger Creek, a small waterway unnavigable by canoe. Few settlers in Kentucky at the time lived outside fortified encampments because attacks from natives came often and savagely. Hayden settled land about nine miles upstream from Pottinger Station, a fort built in 1781 between New Haven and the Trappist monks by Samuel Pottinger, a Revolutionary War veteran.

Hayden's band of fifty families immigrated together to the fertile center of Kentucky in a collective bargaining effort-the power of their numbers, they hoped, would force the church to send a priest to tend to them, but Archbishop Carroll of Baltimore, the only prelate in the New World, denied them. Then the Reverend DeRohan, the hopeless drunk, stumbled upon Holy Cross from the south.

When the archbishop learned that DeRohan was in Kentucky, he demanded that the Irish priest return to Baltimore, but DeRohan, insubordinate when he drank, refused. Instead, the Irish priest helped Hayden and his settlers build the first Catholic church west of the Appalachian Mountains out of rough-hewn logs.

Once Basil Hayden established a foothold at Holy Cross, more Catholics came, all seemingly possessing the same genetic predisposition toward bold action and risk-taking, a spirit of adventurism matched only by the community's devotion to the church. Fertilized in the fecund Kentucky bottomland, that devotion blossomed into abundant families of strong faith, who sent more than their share of sons and daughters into the clergy and cloistered religious life.

With the sudden abundance of frontier Catholics making a go of it deep in the uncharted darkness of Kentucky, Archbishop Carroll realized that his drunk priest in Kentucky needed help. At the same time, French and Belgian clergymen were fleeing to the New World by the boatload to escape the guillotine. Among them was a stern seminarian named Stephen Theodore Badin. Upon Badin's arrival in Baltimore, Archbishop Carroll promptly ordained him and sent the young priest to Kentucky.

It wouldn't go well.

For years Father Badin tried to impose his brand of Old World order upon the New World Catholics, with mixed results. Although Badin succeeded in founding the Sisters of Loretto, an order that continues today, he could never bend the people nor local church leadership to his will. In a letter to Archbishop Carroll, Badin speaks poorly of his whole flock, referring to one local patriarch, John Lancaster-a survivor of a storied Shawnee attack who was later sent to Frankfort by his peers as their representative and then their senator-as "the Kentucky Robespierre."

Badin's unpopularity extended to fellow clergymen as well, including Bishop Flaget, a Frenchman; the two agreed on very little. When Flaget decided to move the cathedral from rural Bardstown to the growing metropolis in Louisville, Badin would take no more. As soon as the bishop consecrated the ground for the new cathedral in Louisville, Badin circled the property chanting the Dies Irae, the Latin song of death, then left Kentucky for Europe. Among clergy even today, Badin is talked about as a stern authoritarian whose worldview, which teetered perilously close to Jansenism, made the Flemish cleric a borderline heretic.

Badin would later return to America but not to Kentucky. Instead, he traveled to northern Indiana, where he bought the land upon which the University of Notre Dame was founded. A dormitory there bears his name.

By the time Badin died, a small town bloomed about ten miles south of his convent in Loretto, built along a buffalo trace and a small river named the Jordan (pronounced locally as "JER-den"). They named the town Lebanon for the abundance of cedar trees. It was settled first by Presbyterians from Virginia, then the Catholics and some Methodists and Baptists sprinkled in to make things interesting. By 1840, Lebanon had three churches (Catholic, Methodist and Presbyterian), one coed school, six doctors, eight lawyers, three hotels, fourteen stores, a sawmill, fifteen mechanic shops and about 750 inhabitants in town and 11,032 in the county, including Benedict Spalding.

Benedict Spalding came to Kentucky as a boy in the last wave of Catholic emigration from Maryland. He became sheriff of Marion County at twenty-five, married at twenty-nine, and sold dry goods that he hauled from Louisville, selling $15,000 worth in his first year in the first store ever opened in Lebanon. From then on, Ben Spalding dedicated his life to building his town into something important and after years of public service earned the nickname Uncle Ben. Midway through his life, he accomplished his greatest goal: bringing the L&N Railroadnamed for its Louisville-to-Nashville line-to Lebanon. On the maiden voyage of the Lebanon spur of the L&N Railroad, the train hit a cow. But even nine hours behind schedule, a mob of people waited in trees and on rooftops to greet the train as it chugged into Lebanon, shouting, "Hurrah for the L&N and Uncle Ben!"

With the railroad, business in Lebanon boomed: Livestock could go as far as Chicago, and farmers from all over central Kentucky had to bring their goods to Lebanon to get them to market. The distilleries that had dotted the countryside grew bigger and closer to the railroad through the little communities of St. Mary's, Loretto, Dant Station and Chicago.

When the Civil War came to Kentucky, both sides battled over Lebanon's train depot, causing the Union to camp more than eight thousand men just outside of town. Although the war tore families apart-brothers against brothers and such-nothing stopped the distilling, and none of the Union officers ever went thirsty, nor did the dashing Kentuckian Confederate raider, John Hunt Morgan, who caused mayhem all along the western front of the war, including sacking the Lebanon depot and burning Lebanon-twice.

Morgan's raids caused panic in the Union leadership in Kentucky, particularly with General Boyle, who called for martial law in Lexington and implored Cincinnati to send artillery by special train. News of the commotion reached Washington.

"They are having a stampede in Kentucky," President Lincoln wrote to General Henry Halleck, then stationed in Mississippi. "Please look to it."

The day after Morgan left Lebanon, the Union retook the town. Among the Yankee occupiers was an Englishman lawyer named William H. Bradbury, who worked as a secretary for the Union generals of the 129th Illinois Infantry. Nursing an injured leg, Bradbury wrote to his wife from a private upstairs room in a Lebanon hotel in the summer of 1863:

Lebanon, Kentucky

August 16, 1863

My dearest wife,
lam writing this before breakfast at the hotel called the Campbell House in a bedroom in which are two beds. Last night was the first really cool night we have had & good sleeping was the consequence. My leg is still troublesome [...J

There is no restraint on the liquor saloons here. The quantity of whisky consumed (by officers chiefly) is enormous. The soldiers are encamped out of town about 5 miles distant where there is water. The number of shoulder straps staying at this & the other Hotel is very large. Colonels, Lieutenant Colonels, Majors, Capts, & Lieutenants swarm around, and the bar often is thronged from morning to night. Their officers ought to be with their commands & not loafing about town. [...J

I shall ride in a wagon or ambulance & my baggage will be carried-I must now conclude as there are papers to be made out.[..]

With best love to you & the children. I am your affect. husband.

WmHBradbury

Union-held Lebanon also provided refuge for the former slaves of central Kentucky. Slaves who escaped from their masters knew they would be safe there and could take the train north to freedom-the aboveground railroad, as it were.' President Lincoln ordered the railroad extended from Lebanon to Knoxville, and Congress appropriated funds to employ freed slaves working a thousand men per mile of track. Lebanon became the work camp, and the black population exploded in a shantytown built along the tracks on the backside of the depot, a neighborhood later to be known as Black Bottom, the neighborhood that would produce Club Cherry and other track-side entertainment that drew major Chitlin' Circuit musicians a hundred years later.

With the Civil War over, the train through Lebanon carried fewer soldiers and army supplies and began hauling what Uncle Ben had envisioned for it-Lebanon's imports and exports. In 1866, Lebanon shipped 16,105 bushels of grain, 2,081 hogsheads of tobacco, 202 barrels of flour, 1,067 carloads of stock, 158,087 pounds of government freight and 1,535,277 pounds of general freight to Louisville. Coming back from Louisville, Lebanon received 119 carloads of company freight, 457,853 pounds of government freight and 5,636,173 pounds of general merchandise. That year 17,435 people departed Lebanon as passengers on the train, and the exact same number returned.

While the federal government continued to keep soldiers stationed in Lebanon throughout Reconstruction, the town otherwise returned to its antebellum self St. Augustine School, founded by the Sisters of Loretto during the war, now began to grow while churches became houses of worship again instead of hospitals. The country merchants who had fled to town for protection from raiders during the war were able to return to the hills. Former slaves departed either on the train or with the army. In 1867, Lebanon had 2,905 residents: 1,967 white folks and 938 black folks. By 1870, the US Census counted 1,102 white and 823 black, or 1,925 totala loss of nearly one thousand people in three years, a postwar population realignment as the countryside became safe again.

Though the whisky stills never stopped for the war, the end of fighting allowed the distilling industry to really cook. By the end of the nineteenth century, Marion County produced bourbon with labels like "Cumberland," "Rolling Fork," "Grand Springs," "Maple Grove," "Old Happy Hollow," "Falcon," "Fern Hill," "Burks Spring," "Colonel Blair," "Nick Blair," "Blair's Old Club," "Mattingly and Moore," "Callaghan," "R. Cummins," "Cummins Sour Mash," "Ballard and Lancaster," "Smith and Smith,""Wm. Birkle,""J. G. Mattingly and Sons," "J.C.W.," "Marion County," "Marion," "Belle of Marion," "Belle of Loretto," and "Faymus," a bourbon whose brand seemed to encourage both egotism and bad spelling; it would be popular today.

Of course, given this output of world-renowned whisky, the retail consumption of the local product must have been, as William Bradbury noted in his letter, "enormous" and with "no restraint." So enormous that a substantial antidrinking movement began to brew-and not just in morally upright places but in Kentucky, too.

On June 8, 1872, on the grounds of St. Mary's College, the St. Charles Total Abstinence Society held a public rally. At two o'clock that afternoon, the college brass band, in uniform, struck up a bouncy yet sober tune and marched through the college gates to the campus, followed by hundreds of citizens of both sexes, to an opening on the campus where a stage had been erected for the speakers and benches placed on the lawn for the audience.

To combat this rising dry tide, distillery leaders banded together into a national association to protect their interests in Washington, forming the Wholesale Liquor Dealers' and Distillers' Association of the United States in 1893 and electing John B. Wathen, of Lebanon, as its first president.

"It looks as if the distillers and reform extremists will have to get together on a compromise middle ground," Wathen told the Washington Post from the lobby of the Raleigh Hotel in D.C. on April 1, 1901. "And it is probable that ultimately the anti-saloon people will assent to a more strict regulation of the saloons.... It is impossible to enforce prohibition in cities, and attempts to do so only result in multiplying boot-leggers. In Kentucky the distillers now sell in some of the best cities in prohibition districts great quantities of whisky."

Despite the organized opposition from the distillers, the temperance movement called a local option election in Lebanon in March 1907. Certainly Wathen and his fellow distillers felt confident that the wet votes would beat out the dries, especially in Lebanon-but they weren't taking any chances, either, which got them into trouble. News of the election made it to the New York Times:

LEBANON, KY., GOES DRY Several Prominent Men Arrested on Bribery Charges

LEBANON, Ky., March 25-A local option election was held here to-day, and the city went "dry" by 63 votes. A procession of 2,000 women and children paraded the principal streets, shouting and cheering for the abolishment ofsaloons.

Warrants were sworn out for S. N. Wathen, president of the Kentucky Distillers Association, and Col. Wallace Cardwell of the governor's staff, and about twelve other citizens, charging them with bribery.

fill gave bonds except for Wathen and Cardwell, who insisted on going to jail, but were allowed to go free. Ex-Chief of Police Yowell was arrested for carrying concealed weapons. Lebanon is in one of the largest distilling counties in the State.

Of course, the Wathens didn't give up the fight.Three years later the local option appeared on the ballot in Lebanon again. On August 11, 1910, Lebanon burst at the seams, with ten thousand people downtown, according to the Lebanon Enterprise, but they hadn't all come just to vote on whether liquor should be sold there; the circus was in town at the same time.' atmosphere in the crowds appeared as pleasant as the weather, nothing like the nastiness that had characterized the election three years before. Both sides were well organized, but this time the wets managed to get more honest votes than they had before, and the drys lost sixty-four votes.' That night the wets celebrated by getting drunk at the circus.

But the drys were far from finished fighting. As the wets enjoyed their victory, the drys were distilling a campaign of enforced temperance nationally. To accomplish their goal, they would require a US constitutional amendment. The temperance movement saw its crusade as a logical extension to the end of the forced imprisonment of slavery; only this time, the movement wanted to rid the world of its voluntary imprisonment to alcoholic beverages. The drys believed that once America sobered up, it would realize what shackles liquor had been.

By the summer of 1917, forty-five years after the Total Abstinence Society rally at St. Mary's College, the temperance movement in Lebanon received a huge shot in the arm: its third visit from William Jennings Bryan, who spoke to a gathered crowd of one thousand or more about the need to support the outlawing of liquor for the cause of the Great War brewing in Europe.

"The war is proving a substantial factor in hastening the day of Nationwide and world-wide-prohibition," Bryan said, predicting a global end of liquor in less than twenty years. "No doubt, you can pass prohibition by 100,000 majority in Kentucky if ever the people get a chance to vote on the question."

In July 1917, the Department of Justice began enforcing the "Reed bone-dry law," which banned the import of liquor into dry states, "even though those States may not prohibit such importation, and even though the States by law specifically permit such importation."

At 11:00 p.m. on September 8, 1917, a Saturday, the manufacture of all whisky in the United States ceased when the prohibition clause of the Food Control Act took effect. Millions of bushels of grain that would have been ground up for whisky would now be released for food to feed the growing Allied armies in Europe.

The closing of the distilleries, at least at first, did not spell doom for men like Charles Kobert, Hans Mueller, Charles Burks, John B. Wathen and other Marion County men likewise engaged (although Kobert and Mueller would later sell their interest to John B. Wathen's son, John A.). Economic forecasts claimed that the losses from the distilling halt during the war would be more than offset by the greater prices the distillers would obtain for their products already manufactured. In the hills of Marion and Nelson Counties, the five-story warehouses containing thousands of handmade fifty-gallon barrels were filled with whisky that matured in price as well as age. Some officials speculated that whisky would sell for $15 a gallon within a year, affording distillers enormous profits that would more than compensate for the loss of capital invested in plants.

But the predictions of great wealth didn't pan out. By January 1919, the three major distilleries in Marion County, then the largest distilling county in the commonwealth, had been sold-and at pennies on the dollar of what they were once worth. According to the Lebanon Enterprise:

The Mueller, Wathen & Kobert distillery, perhaps one of the best known in Kentucky, was sold at public auction to the highest bidder last Saturday. The plant, which was built at an original cost of thing like $52, 000 and which at one time was valued by its owners at $150, 000, was purchased by R. N. Wathen, one of the members of the firm, for $18,650.

The Wathens had built the Rolling Fork and Cumberland distillery in 1875 just outside of Lebanon's corporate limits. Recognized as one of the best-equipped distilleries in the state, the Rolling Fork sweet mash house had a capacity of four hundred bushels a day, and the Cumberland sour mash house had a one-hundred-bushel capacity. The grounds had four warehouses with room for forty thousand barrels, its own cooperage plant and stock pens to slop seven hundred cattle.

Three days after R. N. Wathen bought his own family's distillery for nothing, the superintendent of the R. Cummins & Co. distillery in Loretto bought his workplace for $6,205-less than one-third of what Wathen had paid for his. The buildings of the Cummins distillery cost $55,000 alone. One warehouse, erected just a few years before the forced closure, cost $7,000 itself. The deed to Burks Spring, the distillery that would one day produce Maker's Mark, had already exchanged hands.

That February the Lebanon City Council met on its regular Tuesday night, but "very little business of interest was transacted"-except for saloons and quart houses renewing their liquor licenses but renewing them for six months instead of a year because liquor sales would expire nationwide on July 1.

On the last day of June 1919, the legal sale of alcoholic liquors ceased in the United States, not yet because of the constitutional amendment but rather because further wartime prohibition measures went into effect on Monday night at midnight.

"In many cities," the Enterprise reported, "it was a night of revelry, but in Lebanon no celebration marked the passing of the `product that made Kentucky famous.'There were, however, many `last go rounds,' and dealers were taxed to take care of the trade."

Lebanon's four saloons and two quart houses had all employed extra help to keep up with the countdown's business; several closed down before the midnight deadline because they had run out of anything to sell. The evening train, which arrived in Lebanon from eastern Kentucky every night at 7:40, added an extra coach for several days to accommodate the increased traffic for those who needed to come the one hundred miles to Lebanon for "wet goods."

One dealer told the Enterprise that his business would be fine if the wartime prohibition lasted only three or four months, saying that everyone had enough stock stored away for this length of time-seemingly telling the newspaper that he and everyone else were moving immediately into the illegal whisky trade until things lightened up.

"We had disposed of practically all of our stock," said the dealer. "We were having many calls for case lots but we had none on hand. We could have supplied a few mixed cases, but most of the buyers did not wish these, so we decided to close up until the drouth passes over."

On Monday evening, America's last wet night, J. W. Reidel's saloon closed first, locking its doors at 7:00 p.m. after running out of stock. The Vaughn Hotel bar closed at about 9:30, just before B. J. Mattingly's saloon. No one knew how long the wartime ban would last; many were in denial that the new dry laws were permanent. Surely they would last only a few months.

The first night after official prohibition began, someone robbed the Vaughn Hotel bar by busting through a bolted door that connected the saloon with the baggage room of the hotel, stealing $150 in "prohibited" liquor (worth $1,957 in 2011 dollars) and more than a dozen bottles of Champagne. An automobile, police speculated, had aided the escape.

On August 1, the Enterprise reported the net effect of the first dry month of Lebanon's history:

AN UNUSUAL RECORD

Since July 1, when the "whole darn world went dry," there has been a marked falling off in the number of arrests in this city. Police Judge John Thomas stated yesterday that during the month ofJuly, just closed, there was one arrest for drunkenness. And this one, he said, was not a local man but one who came in on a train. In June there were between 80 and 90 arrests, but, of course, it would be unfair to compare July, or any other month, with June for the reason it was the month before prohibition became effective.

By February 1920, the prohibitionists were ready to declare mission accomplished. Looking back at 1919, with half the year wet and the other half dry, the supporters of forced temperance saw night followed by dawn. On February 27, Dr. G. G. Thornton wrote in the Lebanon Enterprise regarding 1919:

During the first six months (wet) there were 232 arrests for all causes, against 56 during the last six months (dry). Arrests for drunkenness during the first six months were 180, against 12 during the last six months. For other causes 53 arrests were made during the six months wet, against 44 during the six months dry. Who will look at the above figures and say that you can't help to make people better by legislation? This is better than I hoped for this soon and it is getting better all the time.

What Dr. Thornton called a plan to "make people better by legislation" began a thirteen-year crime wave across the country that ran deep into Marion County. The magic law of Prohibition forced the breadwinners of families on the brink of starvation into the criminal underworld to make a living by evading state and federal agents for doing what their families had done legally and peacefully for generations.

It wouldn't be long before outside criminal elements flocked to Marion County and its warehouses of earthly delights-and a dark period of theft, murder and other crime slowly took hold in the once-harmonious (although regularly intoxicated) communities. With the once-proud distilleries that dotted the county before Prohibition now crumbling in disrepair, those who had earned a living at those distilleries took their knowledge into the nearly impenetrable wooded knobs.

Moonshiners thrived everywhere in America during Prohibition, especially in those states contained by the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, but Kentucky had a few advantages over its neighbors to the south.

First, its proximity to thirsty northern cities like Detroit, Chicago and Cleveland; and second, in the case of Marion and Nelson Counties, firsthand knowledge of the distilling process on a commercial level.

Also, most moonshiners elsewhere used inefficient pot-bellied stills that made batches of no more than fifty gallons per day, which are fine for small-time operations. But in Marion County, moonshiners constructed versions of the steam stills that their former employers had used-clean and efficient, even a crude steam still could produce three hundred gallons of moonshine a day. More-efficient ones could produce up to one thousand gallons a day, like this one:

HUGE STILL IS DESTROYED BY OFFICERS

Federal Agents Say That Plant Is Largest Yet Seized In Kentucky

Where else would the biggest still in Kentucky be located except Holy Cross? When ten "dry officers" arrived in the hamlet that Basil Hayden had built, they almost immediately found and destroyed two one-hundredgallon stills on Ollie Thomas's farm. After that January morning's driving rain slackened, they went to Tom Cambron's farmhouse, where they found the still that broke the state record. All the agents were veterans of Prohibition raids by 1922, but none had seen anything like this before.

"All it needed was a storekeeper and gauger," one agent told the Lexington Herald, "to make of the plant a regular distillery."

Cambron had built onto his farmhouse a thirty-three-feet-square room out of galvanized iron sheeting. Lining the wall were eight fermenters, each with a 500-gallon capacity. A 110-gallon copper still rested on a carefully constructed brick furnace; its copper arm was more than six feet long; and the worm, made from inch-and-one-quarter copper pipe, measured thirty-eight feet long and was coiled nine times. The whole thing was valued by the revenuers at $1,500 (or $20,227 in 2011 dollars). They emptied the fifty-gallon-barreled fresh whisky they found along with 3,600 gallons of distiller's beer and mash.

The still had been operating twenty-four hours a day, so when the revenuers sacked it in the predawn hours, they caught Jesse Cecil, a farmhand, working the third shift. Running nonstop, the still could make more than a barrel of moonshine per day, valued at $300 in 1922 or $4,045 in 2011. After destroying the Cambrons' livelihood and arresting their help, agents found 1,500 pounds of meal and mash hidden in an outhouse and four cows feeding on the fermented grain tossed out by distilleries, a popular barnyard feed commonly referred to as "slop."

Although the Cambrons had their still confiscated, the cows that had been feeding on the slop managed to escape the long arm of the law. Other animals weren't so lucky. Again, from the Enterprise:

CONFISCATED MULES AGAIN IN CUSTODY

Team Seized with Alleged Shiners, Taken From Negro Man, Brought Here.

FEDERAL OFFICERS TAKE TWELVE HOGS IN RAID

Porkers Were Found Feeding At A Big Still-Several Plants Are Destroyed.

The federal agents and those deputized by them to uphold the Volstead Act took their jobs seriously; they didn't think taking twelve pigs prisoner was funny at all and saw no humor in arresting the same team of mules twice. Just a few years into Prohibition, the seizure of livestock and the arrest of people as if they were livestock had become commonplace as the criminalization of an entire people's way of life became normalized.

Meanwhile, the distilleries that once provided honest livings to whole communities now sat empty, rotting where they stood, their walls covered by encroaching Kentucky flora and becoming nests for northern cardinals, eastern bluebirds and barn warehouses, however, were still racked with thousands of barrels of whisky. Its existence was not illegal, but its manufacture, transport or sale was. So, as long as the whisky behaved itself and stayed in its barrels in its warehouses, the federal government didn't seem to mind, deputizing locals as warehouse agents to guard Kentucky's aging whisky. Twelve men-one-quarter of the total number of agents in the state-were posted to the Marion County warehouses. With unemployment high, the warehouse agent jobs were sought by scores of hardworking men; the men were hired based on a strict criterion-their political party affiliation. In 1920, the Democrats controlled the statehouse in Frankfort, and so Democrats guarded the whisky in Marion County, smuggling the contents of the barrels past the federal revenuers one sip at a time.

When forced to choose between liquor and the law, the community came down on the side of liquor nearly every time and therefore on the side of outlaws and criminals, dramatically eroding the respect for the rule of law-including a scene in 1921 when a mob of seventy-five citizens in New Haven faced off against two government agents attempting to arrest a pair of moonshining brothers.

While many were engaged in replicating Kentucky's once-legal bourbon in moonshine stills across the region, others kept busy trying to steal from the warehouses of those shuttered distilleries what remained of the bonded whisky that had been barreled there before Prohibition's dawn. Every day the bourbon sat in those charred oak barrels, becoming more delicious by the minute, its value on the black market ticked upward. If each warehouse had become its own Ft. Knox depository, then George Remus-a Cincinnati defense attorney and first-class gangster-played the role of Goldfinger.

A federal agent would later testify that all of central Kentucky's seventy-five distilleries were robbed during Prohibition-many of them by men working for Remus. A former pharmacist, Remus read the Volstead Act carefully, especially the sections dealing with the exemptions for medical liquor, and discovered that pharmacies could legally buy and pay taxes on the stockpiles of bonded whisky currently aging in warehouses like the ones in Loretto and elsewhere in Marion County. So, Remus bought a pharmacy called the Kentucky Drug Company, located just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati in Covington, from which he purchased whisky from distilleries, which he also owned, one thousand cases at a time in order to distribute them to the medical whisky market. Gangsters working for Remus would then hijack these convoys and redirect their thousands of cases of Kentucky bourbon to the black markets of Chicago and the Northeast. Using this method, Remus achieved a staggering level of wealth, and Marion County was a direct source of his income.

In January 1921, a man who called himself C. L. Lynn arrived in Loretto with his wife and at least one other man in a motorcade of three vehicles at a time when the newspaper still referred to them as "machines"-a Ford sedan, a Cadillac and an REO speed wagon, which resembled "very much an ambulance," according to the Lebanon Enterprise. Mrs. Lynn stepped out of the Cadillac wearing diamonds and furs, while Mr. Lynn displayed a great amount of cash and paid some Loretto men to help him build a garage adjoining the warehouse for his REO truck. Lynn wasted no time in showing the revenue officials his permits to bottle the warehoused whisky for medical purposes.

The Lynns hired twelve locals to bottle the thirty-five barrels of whisky that remained in the Cummins warehouse, which filled 4,644 quart bottles that were packed into 387 cases over the course of six weeks. At night some in Loretto heard Lynn's truck leave its garage, only to see it back in the garage the next morning. When asked about this pattern several times, Lynn said he sent his truck out to aid a stranded motorist.

On February 10, 1921, the Lynns drove their Ford from Loretto to a gas station in Lebanon to fill up three five-gallon external tanks in preparation for their trip out of town. But before they got out of Loretto, their Ford got stuck in the muddy front yard of Len Thompson, the superintendent of the Cummins distillery. Thompson and his wife came out of the house to help the Lynns out of the muck. That night the Lynns disappeared, taking the REO and Ford with them but leaving the Cadillac behind. The feds inspected the Cummins distillery seven days later and discovered the whole place empty of people and liquor, estimating the value of the lost whisky at $50,000 (nearly $672,000 in 2011 dollars).

News of the heist spread, and a newspaper reporter in Louisville received a phone call from a man identifying himself as C. L. Lynn.

"Officials in more counties than one are involved. A man who paid for the law enforcement was with me on the deal but he double-crossed me," Lynn said. "They are sitting on what they believe to be whisky out there in Marion County tonight, but it's not whisky-it's colored water."

When the feds came to the Loretto distillery to investigate, Mrs. Thompson, the superintendent's wife, provided them with a clue. When she had helped the Lynns get their Ford out of the mud, she somehow ended up with Mrs. Lynn's gloves in her handbag. After the Lynns disappeared, Mrs. Thompson discovered stitched into one of the glove's inside hem the owner's real name: Edna Lawrence.

Edna was married to Robert Lawrence, one of America's most wanted automobile thieves, with eighteen indictments against him in Columbus, Ohio, alone-undoubtedly one of Remus's men. Revenue agents from all over the country met in Louisville to discuss the case, and on February 24, Elwood Hamilton, collector of internal revenue, suspended the Marion County distillery guards, including one Harold Bickett, for failure to guard the warehouse.

In late October 1922, more than a year and a half later, whisky bandits (likely Remus's men) paid a visit to the Burks Spring distillery, a ramshackle set of little wooden buildings that lacked the charming aura that Maker's Mark would give it in 1958. Despite being run-down, there was one attractive thing about Burks Spring-the contents of its warehouses.

The bandits paid off the warehouse guards and storekeeper-no need to get into a gunfight when a little money would do the trick. Besides, the bandits didn't need to do anything as unseemly as roll the barrels from the warehouse into trucks where any revenuer could see. Instead, they had a subtler plan-from the inside, someone bored holes in the whisky barrels and inserted a hose. From the outside, someone else siphoned the whisky out of the barrels and into kegs already packed into the back of a waiting car. It's a technique that Remus duplicated elsewhere, including a siphoning operation at the Jack Daniel's warehouses, which Remus also owned.

But maybe the siphoning method didn't go fast enough, or maybe the warehouse guards grew itchy-because the next month, November 1922, Remus's whisky robbers went whole hog and decided to take everything they could from Burks Spring. Eleven men drove into Loretto in a convoy of five cars and loaded them up with 450 gallons of aged whisky in barrels marked "Loretto" and forty-five gallons of unaged white dog, popularly called moonshine, from the Burks Spring distillery and headed off in a caravan toward Lexington. Led by a Packard loaded down with 210 gallons, followed by a Buick, two Ford touring cars and a Ford truck filled with guns and ammunition bringing up the rear, the load was worth $25,000 on the bootlegger's market, or nearly $336,000 in 2011 dollars.

At midnight a revenuer roadblock stopped the convoy in Perryville, twenty miles away. When told to surrender, the whisky thieves opened fire. The gunfight lasted three hours-the most excitement Perryville had seen since the Civil War. During the shootout, revenue agents shot one of the bootleggers in the Buick, along with the tires of all the cars in the convoy. At the end of the gunfight, eight of the heavily armed men surrendered; the other three, at least one wounded badly, escaped. After processing these arrests, the federal agents went to Burks Spring and arrested the storekeeper, the gauger, the property custodian and two warehouse guards, charging that they were all complicit in the conspiracy. When the revenuers searched the warehouse, they discovered the leftovers of the siphoning operation-sixty-eight barrels empty in their ricks. At forty gallons a barrel, that's 2,720 gallons, worth over $323,000 in 1922 or $4.34 million in 2011. The next April government officials checking the distillery at Burks Spring found an additional 225 cases of whisky missing, every drop of bottled liquor in the house. The Enterprise reported:

MORE LORETTO LIQUOR TAKEN

The distillery nestled among the hills out a few miles from Loretto has been the scene ofseveral sensational robberies, and two or three persons accused of being implicated in the thefts are now under sentence to the federal prison in Atlanta. Others arrested in connection with the liquor raids on the plant are now under bond.

That the distillery has again been robbed will not come as a surprise to many. It has frequently been said that the robberies would continue until all of the whisky had either been removed or stolen. The barreled whisky is now being transferred to another storage center.

This decision to transfer what remained of Kentucky's whisky to centralized locations became widespread. Revenuers no longer wished to rely on local, politically appointed warehouse guards to act as a line of defense against those wishing to pollute the streets with the illegal sale of alcohol. In May 1933, the month John Dillinger moved to town amid the chatter following one of the most contentious Kentucky Derby finishes of all time, workers loaded train cars with what remained of Marion County's whisky-which would have been bottled and labeled as "Rolling Fork" and "Cumberland" if not for Prohibition. The Enterprise reported:

'TIS ALL GONE; NO MORE LEFT

Task of Transferring Whisky From Local Warehouses Is Completed.

Over A Month Required

The task of removing the whisky in the big iron-clad warehouses at the plant of the Mueller, Wathen & Kobert distillery was completed Monday, the last car load leaving that day for Louisville where much Kentucky liquor is being concentrated.

Shipments of the whisky was begun several weeks ago, and two or three car loads would be forwarded each day. The whisky was hauled from the warehouse to freight cars on a sidetrack at the plant, and few people knew that it was being transferred to another city. A Chicago firm of liquor dealers several months ago purchased all the whisky owned by Mueller, Wathen & Kobert, and that firm was not interested in the ownership of the liquor shipped. In the shipment were several thousand barrels.

The warehouses which have housed thousands of barrels of liquor during the years of their existence are now empty for the first time. The scenes of activity that once prevailed about them are gone. The sound of the cooper's hammer will not again be heard within their walls and a once prosperous industry in the community's midst is no more.

In Catholic communities like the ones in Marion County, where alcohol itself had never been considered sinful, the whole premise of Prohibition never made sense to begin with. How could the government say that whisky, beer or the blood of Christ was illegal? Seeing Prohibition as a law that attacked their way of life no differently from any of the decrees of authority figures who had persecuted them for centuries, the Catholics of Marion County rationalized a distinction that justified their lawbreaking-God's Law and Man's Law were not necessarily the same thing. Sure, there was plenty of overlap-both condemned murder, theft, prostitution-but in the eyes of Marion County Catholics, God's Law didn't condemn moonshining or bootlegging, and fifty years later, it wouldn't condemn growing marijuana, either.

Dry agents from the state and federal governments soon realized that in Marion County, arresting criminals was only half the job; getting charges to stick in court with a local jury was something else entirely.

In the last week of April 1926, a Marion County man accused of stealing bourbon at gunpoint appeared in Marion Circuit Court. The jury acquitted him, and in the next two days, juries would acquit a whole list of folks accused of a variety of crimes. A man charged with selling liquor: acquitted. A man charged with giving away liquor: acquitted. Three accused of disturbing a religious worship: acquitted. Six accused of possessing an illicit still: acquitted. Committing grand larceny: acquitted. Possessing an illicit still: acquitted. Manufacturing liquor: acquitted. Betting on a pool game: acquitted. Two men accused of possessing a still: $100 fines and sixty days in jail.

"Such a state of lawlessness exists in Marion County," the commonwealth attorney wrote in an effort to get these cases transferred to the federal courthouse in Louisville, "the jurors will be deterred from rendering an impartial verdict."

Consequently, liquor-related charges against Marion County men began to be tried in federal court instead of state court. The government wanted to get convictions and send these men to prison. The stiff federal sentence hoped for by prosecutors: one year.

From then on, a steady stream of men left Marion County for a year's stay in the federal prison in Atlanta. 'heir wives told their children that their fathers had gone off to be in the army or to see a sick aunt, and some were told the truth-the whole family of eight or ten kids (with three in diapers) all piled into one car for the two-day trip to Atlanta to see Daddy in prison. And still the moonshine kept flowing-the landscape of Marion County still dotted by the telltale signs of plumes of white smoke drifting up from behind wooded knobs or from inside a creek bottom.

The one-year sentence in federal court was for a moonshiner's first offense only; harsher penalties applied to repeat offenders, but no one from Marion County ever served a longer sentence for a second offense-although several did serve the one-year sentence several different times. In an age when bureaucrats still kept government records by hand, the Marion County moonshiner became skilled at convincing a judge that he wasn't the same man who had gone to prison the year before. No, that was his uncle; or he spelled his last name with two Ls, not one; or that was someone else entirely. So, even when the federal government put its foot down in Marion County, its residents found the spaces between the toes.

As the Depression and Prohibition continued, Marion County moonshiners sold their ware farther afield and spent time in other states' prisons, as did Frank Whitehouse of Gravel Switch, who found himself locked up in Indiana.

Whitehouse grew up in the eastern end of Marion County-the Protestant part-where modest wood-frame churches for the Methodists and Baptists stood where the larger brick Catholic chapels would be in the communities of Lebanon and westward. Even though they weren't Catholic in Gravel Switch, there were still plenty of men who moonlighted as moonshiners, like Whitehouse, who got himself arrested in Indiana trying to bootleg a load of Gravel Switch'shine. Convicted, Frank Whitehouse was sent to Indiana's state prison in Michigan City, where he met a fellow inmate named John Dillinger.

An Indiana judge had sentenced Dillinger to ten to twenty years for a botched robbery of an Indianapolis grocery store. Dillinger had confessed to his involvement in the heist, expecting leniency for his cooperation. The severity of his sentence shocked him in the courtroom and made him bitter in prison. He had big plans for when he got out, and maybe he shared those plans with Frank Whitehouse, the Kentucky moonshiner.

If you need a good place to hide out, Frank told Dillinger, you couldn't find a better place than Gravel Switch, where the road crossed the Rolling Fork River seventeen times with no bridges. People didn't go there unless they lived there-and even they couldn't get in or out when the river swelled up.

The state of Indiana paroled John Dillinger after eight and a half years on May 10, 1933, four days after Broker's Tip beat Head Play by a nose in one of the most controversial Kentucky Derby finishes of all time. After he was free, Dillinger made his way down to Kentucky and found Frank Whitehouse in Lebanon, almost a year to the day after Al Capone's train ride through Marion County en route to the federal prison in Atlanta.

While Dillinger waited for a place to stay in Gravel Switch, he holed up in an upstairs room on Main Street. Bored there, he borrowed a gun from someone in town to shoot at the pigeons that congregated on the courthouse, some have said. After Frank Whitehouse made arrangements, he took his guest back to Gravel Switch, where John Dillinger stayed for the whole summer of 1933, locals and Dillinger scholars agree.

Frank Whitehouse arranged for his friend to stay on the farm of an Arab peddler, George Shaheen, who had come to America at the turn of the century with a group of Lebanese Christians who settled together in Louisville. Several of these immigrant men employed themselves as pack peddlers across the countryside: carrying blankets, pots and pans, dry goods and animal feed to isolated country homes. George Shaheen supplied these peddlers and stationed himself at Gravel Switch because it was the farthest point that the railroad penetrated the wilderness.

Shaheen gave Dillinger a house on Hickory Corner in Gravel Switch, with nothing but farmland and knobs in every direction. Dillinger found the place nice and quiet, a place to rest between his time in the Indiana State Prison and the spree of bank robbing and jail breaking upon which he would soon embark. Shaheen gave him farm work to do, and Dillinger jumped right in, just for something to do to pass the time. On the backside of the farm, about a mile away, Dillinger parked a car in a barn that faced a back road in case any lawmen came for him from the front.

Dillinger hit four banks that summer: New Carlisle, Ohio, on June 10; Daleville, Indiana, on July 17; Montpelier, Indiana, on August 4; and Bluffton, Ohio, on August 14-all at least two hundred miles from Gravel Switch. These jobs paid for the guns that helped spring his gang from the Indiana State Prison later that year.

By the end of the summer, Dillinger had grown restless, and so were some of his new friends in Gravel Switch like Maurice "Tidbits" Lanham, twenty-three, and Jimmie Kirkland, a teenager. Because Dillinger decided to leave town, he and his buddies planned a parting gift for Gravel Switch-a daytime bank robbery.

On Tuesday morning, August 8, 1933, John Dillinger drove into Gravel Switch at 11:45 and parked diagonally across the intersection in a blue DeSoto coupe bearing Kentucky plates from McCracken County, license number 563-700. Kirkland and Lanham hopped out of the car and into the bank; one wore a straw hat and mechanics' overalls, and the other wore shabby clothes and a dark cap; neither had his face covered. Dillinger sat in the car and kept the engine running.

Inside the bank, Kirkland and Lanham pulled revolvers on four male bank employees and a customer.

"Stick em up!" they said, waving pistols.

While Kirkland held the men at bay with his pistol, Lanham leaped over the counter, handed a flour sack to Edward Isaacs and ordered him to fill it with cash. After Isaacs complied, Lanham led all the bank workers into the vault and closed it behind them, then leaped back over the counter, taking the change of a $5 bill from the customer.

Outside, Kirkland and Lanham hopped into the DeSoto coupe, which they had stolen from Bardstown specifically for the job, and Dillinger sped away with $1,235.55 in cash, which would be worth $21,453.14 in 2011. They headed for the Danville Pike, leaving it when they turned off toward Penick and passed a mail carrier, nearly blowing him off the road. After they split up the loot, Tidbits Lanham took his share and went home, but Jimmie Kirkland accompanied Dillinger out of town.

As soon as the Gravel Switch bankers extricated themselves from their own vault, they told the switchboard operator to alert surrounding communities. But by the time police were looking out for a blue DeSoto coupe, Dillinger and his Gravel Switch gang had already ditched the car in a Raywick cornfield on the other side of the county. Investigators would find it weeks later with the radiator cap off, indicating it had overheated after being driven incredibly hard.

The next day, Wednesday, about noon, Sheriff G. C. Spalding arrested Maurice "Tidbits" Lanham at a pool parlor in Lebanon. Lanham "emphatically denied the charges placed against him," despite the fact that the banker and his son identified him as one of the robbers. Police had arrested Lanham the previous year for "stealing gasoline from the machine of Ernest Gaillard while it was parked near the High School," and he was currently under indictment in Washington County for hijacking. The judge set his bond for $8,000, which he could not pay, and so they shipped him to the Louisville jail, where agents from the Department of Justice wanted to question him.

While police cornered Lanham in Lebanon, Jimmie Kirkland and John Dillinger arrived in Chicago, checked into a nice hotel and started spending their loot on new clothes-"gambling and enjoying the gay night life of the city," according to an account in the Enterprise. Kirkland's share of the take was $460; when the police arrested him nine days later on August 17,1933, only thirty-five cents remained in his new suit's pocket. According to the last-minute bulletin that ran in the Enterprise.

According to report received here early last night, Jimmie Kirkland and John Dillinger, alias Clarence Crews, alias Chord Martin, wanted in connection with the hold-up of the People's Bank at Gravel Switch, were taken into custody at East Chicago, Indiana, by authorities there. The men were said to have been taken to Indianapolis, where they are awaiting the arrival of officers from this county to return them here.

However, when Marion County Sheriff G. C. Spalding and his deputy Pete Glasscock returned from Indianapolis, they had only Jimmie Kirkland with them because "Dillinger has been returned to the Michigan City, Indiana, penitentiary from which he had been released on parole," according to the October 6, 1933, edition of the Lebanon Enterprise.

When the grand jury indicted Lanham, Kirkland and Dillinger for the robbery, it also returned indictments against Marion County residents for an assortment of crimes, including storehouse breaking, child desertion, carrying a concealed weapon, shooting with the intent to kill, malicious shooting with the intent to kill, malicious assault, malicious cutting with intent to kill, arson and chicken theft.

The Marion County jury, loath to sentence anyone for any crime, sent both Tidbits Lanham and Jimmie Kirkland to state prison for eight years. John Dillinger, however, remained elusive, as the Lebanon Enterprise kept track of his notoriety:

PAIR TAKEN TO PENITENTIARY

Lanham, Kirkland, Sentenced For Bank Robbery, Begin Eight-year Terms.

Dillinger Is Liberated

While Lanham was standing trial last Thursday evening for his part in the bank banditry, John Dillinger, also indicted on the same charge, was liberated from the jail at Lima, Ohio, by six gunmen who shot and killed Sher f Jesse L. Sarber. Dillinger was never returned here on the Gravel Switch bank robbery indictment but was confined to the Lima, Ohio, bastile [sic] following his arrest some time ago in East Chicago, Ind. He had been wanted in Ohio as well as several other States for bank robbery and a number of other criminal acts.

Both Lanham and Kirkland in their testimony in this city denied that Dillinger was their confederate in the Gravel Switch hold-up when $1,235.55 was taken.

Meanwhile, as the readers of the Lebanon Enterprise followed the weekly installments of the John Dillinger story, another historic narrative came to a close. On September 8, 1933, the Enterprise reported that the General Assembly in the state capital of Frankfort passed a bill by a vote of eighty-one to ten to "repeal ... the Eighteenth Amendment to the federal Constitution," also known as Prohibition.' he editor of the newspaper made clear that "national repeal is not sufficient" to allow Kentucky's own distilleries to resume operation, pointing out that an amendment to the state constitution would also have to be passed.

Nevertheless, construction and repairs to old distilleries in the area started up, first in neighboring Bardstown, then in Lebanon, as reported by this Enterprise headline:

DISTILLERY IS TO BE REBUILT

J. A. Wathen And St. Louis Men Buy Site Near Town For New Plant

Work To Start Soon

"The sale," the story tells its readers on November 3, 1933, "includes about five acres of land, all lying north of the stream, Jordan [with] a thirty-foot right-of-way from the Campbellsville Pike," the approximate site of the original Wathen Distillery, built in 1875, where "the famous `Rolling Fork' and `Cumberland' brands of whisky were made."The property had been dormant since a fire of mysterious origin had destroyed many of the buildings in 1931.

On Monday, November 27, 1933, Kentucky became the thirty-third state to ratify the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment.

"For the first time in the history of the State, duly-elected delegates have assembled for the purpose of ratifying an amendment to the Constitution of the United States," Governor Laffoon declared while expressing the hope that repeal of Prohibition would not lead to the return of "open saloons."

The governor apparently had not traveled much to Marion County, where "open saloons" had never departed. Just two days before the governor's speech on the subject, a thirty-five-year-old Raywick farmer named Felix Mattingly shot and killed Marion Bell, forty-four, whose body was found "on the Main Street of Raywick near the Earl Bickett Pool Parlor shortly before 10:00 o'clock Saturday night by a group who rushed from the pool room and a dance that was in progress to see what had happened after they had heard the shot." At his trial in April, Mattingly would claim self-defense, and a jury would deliberate for fifteen minutes before acquitting him.

Slowly Marion County began returning to its brand of normal. By May 18, 1934, the Wathen Distillery began production in a new facility with a capacity of 740 bushels per day and a payroll of $2,000 per week. By midyear, something of a final act of Prohibition occurred with the death of John Dillinger. As reported by the Lebanon Enterprise on July 27:

BANDIT CAREER IS CONCLUDED

Last Rites For John Dillinger Slain Super-Criminal, Held Wednesday.

Tip-Off Denied By Girl

FARMERS ALL ACROSS KENTUCKY GREW TONS AND TONS OF HEMP IN THE nineteenth century but not in Marion County. According to an 1877 edition of The History of Kentucky, Marion County annually produced 81,800 pounds of tobacco, 2,207 tons of hay, 413,760 bushels of corn, 88,690 bushels of wheat, 1,041 bushels of barley-but zero pounds of hemp on 193,074 acres of land valued at $9.89 per acre. Neighboring Washington County reaped 2,100 pounds of hemp in 1876, a fraction of the statewide market for a product destined to become rope, paper and cloth in products used at home and at sea. Fayette County, the capital of thoroughbred horse country surrounding Lexington, produced 4.3 million pounds of hemp along with its 5,879 horses that same year. Hemp farmers in the counties that surround Fayette grew another five million pounds.

In 1937, four years after repealing Prohibition, the federal government criminalized hemp and its sister plant, marijuana. Yet, even while outlawing it, the government still consumed a great deal of hemp, needing its fiber for the miles of rope used by the Navy, which grew its hemp on plantations in the Philippines, an American territory, until Japan attacked in December 1941. In the days just after Pearl Harbor, America lost its sole supplier of hemp when it lost the Philippines. So, at the dawn of the war, the Navy was taxed not only with rebuilding its Pacific fleet but also with resupplying that fleet with rope made from the fiber that Congress had outlawed four years before.

While women grew victory gardens and Boy Scouts collected tires and tin, farmers across America raised hemp for the war effort at the request of the federal government. Farms across the Midwest and South grew mountains of the tall green plants and then packed them off by the truckloads to warehouses. From there, hemp was shipped by rail to processing plants where it was turned into the rope necessary for the Allied naval victories in the Pacific and European fronts. Of the nine states that grew hemp for the war, the government asked only Kentucky for its seed, which it then planted in tropical places with longer growing seasons, like Brazil and Hawaii. In 1942, the US government asked Marion County to produce enough seed for five hundred thousand acres of hemp, roughly enough for 453,750 football fields.

Though they had never seen hemp grown before, young Marion County men not drafted into the war worked the fields, tending acres of hemp that towered over their heads with trunks as thick as bamboo. When they harvested it in the autumn, they ran the hemp stalks through a thresher, which separated the seeds from their husks. Because the government wanted only the seeds, the farmers burned everything else, sending big white clouds of hemp smoke wafting up from the barn lots-the tranquility of the quiet landscape interrupted only by the chugga-chuggachugga of the diesel-powered threshers.

Farmers caught on pretty quickly that this hemp crop made them feel a little funny. One boy, Al Brady, helped his family thresh its hemp seeds, and while walking home from the field one day, he told his friend that he felt dizzy.

"I think being up on top of that separator all day made me drunk," he said.

Advocates of industrial hemp often assert that hemp grown for fiber lacks enough tetrahydrocannabinol (commonly referred to as THC) to get a person "high," so why did the thresher make Al Brady feel drunk? Hemp, in common shorthand, refers to the male cannabis plant, whereas its female counterpart is called mar~uana. In a field grown for seed, both males and females would be present to ensure fertilization, and the females with their seeded flowers would be the ones run through the threshers to harvest the seeds. Although the flowers of the fertilized females would have dramatically lower THC levels than unfertilized flowers, there would still be enough present in a field's worth to perhaps cause the effect Brady described-not unlike a greenhorn tobacco farmhand contracting nicotine sickness by absorbing tobacco's active drug through his skin.

So, Brady brought an old medicine bottle down to the barn one day and scooped up some hemp seeds before they went off to the government. That night he hid them for safekeeping in a barn behind his parents' home.

Thirty-some years later in the 1970s, in the midst of the younger generation's cannabis bonanza, Brady went back to look for that medicine bottle of old seeds, thinking to himself how much money he could make from his heirloom hemp. He found it exactly where he left it, covered in cobwebs and three decades of barn dirt. Excited, he grabbed it, cleaned it off and opened it; but the seeds by then had turned to dust.

As Al Brady's medicine bottle full of hemp seeds slowly decomposed in the family barn, the farming folks went on trying to make a living growing burley tobacco and teaching their children to follow along. In April 1957, the state 4-H office in Lexington announced its annual awards for its youth farming program, presenting the district tobacco championship to a thirteen-year-old boy from Washington County named Johnny Boone.

Boone's family raised him on a Bloomfield Road farm that belonged to his mother's family. His father, the man who gave him the surname of Daniel Boone, gave Johnny little else besides the sorts of beatings that angry alcoholics administer to their children. A good day for Johnny and his siblings was when their father passed out before they came home from school; a bad day sent the Boone children diving under beds and out windows to escape their father's belt. Once, after their father had beaten their mother with a fishing pole, Johnny Boone, still a child, drove his mother to the doctor to remove the fishhook embedded in her cheek.

So, Johnny Boone looked elsewhere for a father figure and found it in his maternal grandfather, Poss Walker, the owner of the family's large tracts of farmland. Walker guided bright young Boone's development as a farmer, helping his grandson at eleven years old to grow the 0.7 acres of tobacco that finished in seventh place in the district 4-H competition.

In 1958, at fifteen years old, Johnny Boone won the state 4-H championship in sheep breeding, earning him a trip to Chicago for the National 4-H Congress. In 1960, Boone conquered Kentucky again, this time for his tobacco, giving him "the unique distinction of having attained two state 4-H championships," according to the Springfield Sun, his hometown newspaper. His winning tobacco project "was 2.6 acres which he irrigated, suckered carefully and saved all of the ground leaves."

Johnny Boone graduated from high school in 1961 as a three-time football letterman in the top sixth of his class. "He plans to enter the University of Kentucky in the fall," the Sun reported. Life had other plans. Although smart and ambitious, Johnny Boone started a family and stayed on the farm to continue the traditions of his grandfather.

A veteran of Prohibition, Poss Walker learned to supplement his family income with moonshining and bootlegging and whatever else seemed necessary to keep his farm afloat. These activities he included in the mentorship of his grandson, teaching young Boone skills for which the state 4-H board didn't award prizes. In addition to moonshining, Walker taught Boone how to grow more than one's allotted share of burley tobacco, a crop strictly monitored and regulated by the government. If agents from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) caught a farmer growing more than his share, his card at the tobacco warehouse would be marked red, and the excess tobacco would be confiscated. This "red-card tobacco" became an essential element to some farmers' meager incomes. The trick for Johnny Boone was to grow extra tobacco in secret patches tucked away in a corner of his grandfather's massive property. At harvest time, the managers of the tobacco warehouses, gentleman farmers who made their fortunes moonshining themselves, helped red-card tobacco growers elude the scrutiny of the federal agents.

Married and forgoing college, Johnny Boone started farming and distilling on both sides of the law to raise his family. Although his home and property were in Washington County, Boone gravitated toward Marion County, where some people considered obeying certain laws to be optional, where the wets continually defeated the drys in the fight for the soul of the place.

The fight flared red-hot one night in May 1958, when nitroglycerin blew sky high the partly constructed home of George Helm, the state Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) agent sent to look after Lebanon's notorious liquor merchants. The response from Frankfort, the state capital, came swiftly when thirty state troopers descended upon Lebanon at a time when the whole state force numbered only one hundred troopers. The state police succeeded in making only three arrests on misdemeanor charges: Hyleme George, owner of the Silver Dollar liquor store; his brother Philip of Phil's Dispensary, both on Water Street; and John Nelson, owner of the Corner Liquor Store on Main and Proctor Knott Avenue.

Making matters worse, Kentucky's public safety commissioner, a thirty-year-old Harvard alumnus named Don Sturgill, inflamed the postbombing atmosphere by telling a major newspaper that Lebanon fostered "open and commonplace gambling, prostitution and illegal whisky sales."

When challenged by representatives of Marion County, who drove to Frankfort to confront Sturgill about his allegations that Lebanon played host to prostitution, the Harvard grad dug himself in deeper.

"When I said [prostitutes] were 'commonplace,' l simply meant they were available," he said. "And when you've got gambling and illegal whisky sales, you're almost bound to have prostitution.

"I have evidence," Sturgill continued, "that twenty-seven persons living outside Marion County bought 4,300 cases of whisky in Lebanon between 1956 and 1957."

When Commissioner Sturgill appeared in Lebanon a few weeks later-the press pool in tow-with the intention of arresting Hyleme George, Marion County turned the tables on him. The county judge refused to issue warrants and denied Sturgill's claim that it was a state matter by claiming local jurisdiction. So, Sturgill stepped out of the courthouse empty-handed, facing a crowd of angry locals and the assembled media. Stunned, Sturgill faltered, and Hyleme George took to the courthouse steps for an impromptu press conference.

"Thirty patrolmen sent down here to arrest one liquor dealer for lending whisky to another one," Hyleme began, waving his cigar around for emphasis. "That's no charge. The charge is that they're hard losers. They're mad," Hyleme said, putting his arm around the man beside him, "because this man's brother was elected county clerk."

That man's brother, Paul Clark, had defeated a twenty-year incumbent and state party patronage dispenser with the help of Hyleme George's new loyal voting bloc, Lebanon's black folks, whom George treated just like anyone else.

"I don't think this is coming from the governor's office," George continued in remarks recorded by George Trotter, editor of the Enterprise. "He wouldn't tolerate it if he knew what was going on."

The Harvard grad expressed surprise at the sore-loser allegation.

"I'd be glad to take a lie-detector test to show that no politics were involved in this investigation here," Sturgill insisted over the jeers of the angry crowd.

The spontaneous assembly, partial to George's point of view, heckled Sturgill on those courthouse steps, reminding him of his charges of prostitution.

"Where are those girls?" the crowd shouted repeatedly. "Where are those girls!"

A reporter didn't understand the dynamics of the situation, so the editor of the Lebanon Enterprise explained.

"Gambling and liquor violations are a sin against the state," Trotter, the local newsman, said. "But prostitution is a sin against God. That's a serious charge," thereby articulating this Marion County notion that Man's Law and God's Law were not exactly the same.

"And if he's a crook," Trotter added, regarding Hyleme George, "he's the nicest crook you ever saw."

"For that time back when he was getting going, he was pretty powerful," Johnny Boone later said of Hyleme George, adding that George "loved to take chances . . . to gamble with circumstance, but he needed enough money to live on, had a big family to raise, so he wanted to make sure some of those gambles were for sure, too."

That nice crook who liked to bet on sure things went on to help fend off a wet/dry referendum placed on the 1958 ballot by out-of-town Protestant moralists. With the dry vote defeated and the ABC officer's housebuilding plans on hold, Lebanon's nightlife turned the dial from 9 to 10, on its way to 11, from "wide open" to wider open.

In 1964, George decided to build the business that would become the centerpiece of his legacy, Club 68, while he also decided to enter politics, which would become the other half of his legacy. He successfully ran for mayor of Lebanon in 1964, in part by charming voters when he chained two black bear cubs to the front of Club 68 to attract customers and voters. In one year he brought black music to a white audience at his club and gave black voters a seat at the table by relying on their vote in his mayoral run.

For the opening night of Club 68 in 1964, Hyleme George's club manager, Obie Slater, booked blues legend Lloyd Price to sing his hits, "(You've Got) Personality," "Stagger Lee" and "Gonna Get Married," a dialog song between Price and his backup singers:

The narrator of these Price lyrics could have been any of the bright young men who met their future wives in Club 68, relationships that often turned out surprisingly stable, given their tumultuous startsbonds that began as teenagers, dancing and drinking in Club 68 to first-class live music for years before they were old enough to vote, to serve in the military or to realize how good they had it. These teenagers who could buy beers by the dozen at Hyleme's bar were certain to vote for Hyleme when he ran for reelection, if they were old enough to vote by then.

By the mid-1960s, Hyleme George had parlayed his "nicest crook" persona into a successful political career as the mayor of Lebanon with a knack for solving the community's problems in his own unique way.

One such problem was the summer heat and humidity; Kentucky cooked in it. Being indoors without air-conditioning was practically unbearable, especially inside Mary Immaculate Hospital. In addition to fighting the pain of appendicitis or recovering from surgery or childbirth, patients lay in their hospital beds in the sweltering heat with windows open and fans running and flies landing on everything.

The Dominican sisters ran Mary Immaculate with unmeasured devotion, working diligently to comfort their patients during the summer months-sponging cool water on their brows and giving them ice water with flexible straws, but the relief they offered was insufficient. Without air-conditioning, their patients' misery continued.

So, during the scorcher of 1969, the nuns began raising money: A teen dance raised $71; a bake sale raised $700; a radio show raised another $225; tobacco farmers gave $2,200. By Christmas, the nuns had raised $5,592.58; estimated cost to air-condition the hospital: $100,000. It seemed hopeless, but the mayor of Lebanon knew of an alternative: Charlie Stiles in Raywick.

Since the 1940s, even before Hyleme George moved to Lebanon, he had associated with Charlie Stiles and his brother Paul. Although the Stiles brothers were best known as moonshiners and bootleggers, they also knew how to get wholesale appliances at a steep discount. Like Hyleme George, the Stiles brothers play a major role in setting the stage for the Cornbread Mafia. Although Charlie Stiles would be dead before the first pot harvest, his influence upon the Cornbread boys is difficult to overstate. If the Cornbread were a real "mafia," which it wasn't, then Charlie Stiles would have been the godfather.

Back in 1946, the Stiles brothers' commercial-sized moonshine still had been the likely destination of the 23.8 tons' worth of sugar ration stamps that federal agents caught Hyleme George toting on the Bowman Field tarmac in Louisville. Federal agents finally found that still in 1951, and the judge sentenced Paul and Charlie each to one year in federal prison, to be served alternately so that one could look after the family farm while the other went to prison.

Upon their return to Raywick, with wartime rationing over, the Stiles brothers diversified their outlaw holdings. While continuing to moonshine, they also began hijacking trucks and fencing stolen goods, enterprises that would span two decades, utilizing younger Raywick talent like Joe Downs, who had recently returned to Marion County from service in the US Marine Corps in California. Downs became a truck driver for Charlie Stiles, and they targeted the General Electric Appliance Park in Louisville, where GE assembled every refrigerator, oven range and clothes washer sold in America-the Detroit of home appliances.

Many in Marion County carpooled the hour to Louisville every morning for the good-paying union jobs at the GE plant, but the Charlie Stiles crew had no desire to work there when they could fleece GE by the truckload. Soon the cost of modernizing one's household in Marion County dropped dramatically as a flood of side-by-side refrigerators, freezers, washers and dryers in colors like turquoise, avocado and harvest gold washed into Lebanon's kitchens, garages and poker rooms. In this context, Hyleme George must have asked himself, "Why should the nuns pay retail to air-condition the hospital?"

So, Hyleme George, the mayor of Lebanon, sent someone to ask Sister Mary Dominic Stine, the chief administrator of Mary Immaculate Hospital, if she would like fifty window-unit air conditioners for onetenth the retail price.

"I never really saw Hyleme. I don't remember who it was," Sister Stine remembered years later. "It was some of Hyleme's relations, but I don't know who it was." She would know if it was Hyleme because, "I guess I knew him all my life."

On June 26-"I was very busy that day"-Sister Mary Dominic Stine wrote check number 7443 payable to "cash" in the amount of $10,000, which the bank paid in $100 bills. Within a day, she had fifty windowunit air conditioners stacked in the hospital's ambulance garage. Simple as that.

"Funny part of it is," Stine recalled, "I think everybody in Lebanon knew they were stolen but me. Sounded to me like a pretty good I wasn't around town much, you know...

"`Is everything all right with them?' I asked.

"`Oh yeah,' he said."

A nurse saw the air conditioners and the individuals who unloaded them, and she promptly called the police. At the state police post, Detective Ralph Ross answered the phone and then drove to the hospital garage, where he found fifty GE air conditioners, 23,500 BTUs, still in their boxes, which retailed for $419.95 each.

"If I had been in my right mind, I would have thought that there was something funny going on," Stine said. "I was in a hell of a mess."

Ross called GE to send a representative down. It looked like they had a truckload of hot air conditioners on their hands, and the nuns at the hospital seemed to be in possession of stolen property, apparently sold to them by an associate of the mayor.

"We had two of them put up, one in the emergency room and one on the second floor," Stine said. "When these big guys from GE came up and wanted to know who I had given the money to, I honestly couldn't remember his name. Good thing I couldn't. I was about the only one who didn't know anything."

The commonwealth attorney filed charges against Hyleme George, Joe Downs and another Raywick man. The men hired as their defense attorney the brilliant and well-connected Frank Haddad, a member of the same Lebanese immigrant clan that included the Georges and Shaheens.

Detective Ralph Ross had unraveled the whole Marion County hot appliance pipeline, but now the commonwealth attorney faced Frank Haddad in a Louisville courtroom. It took the prosecutor more than a year to bring the case to court due to Haddad's endless pretrial maneuvering.

"When I appeared before the grand jury, Frank Haddad told me, `Wear your habit, sister,' and I said, `What for?"' Stine remembered.

The Dominican sisters had just shed their habits after Vatican II, and even before, Stine had worn a nurse's uniform and then clothing fit for a hospital administrator-never a habit. Yet, when she appeared in the Louisville courtroom, a black-and-white veil covered her head. In it, she felt like she misrepresented herself; it made her uncomfortable.

"It was an awful thing to me, I tell you," she said. "I was so afraid.... My heart was in my mouth the whole time, you know. I don't remember a great deal because I didn't want to remember any of it."

Yet, she testified effectively enough for Haddad to strike a deal with the prosecutor. In the end, Lebanon Mayor Hyleme George pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of receiving stolen property without felonious intent and paid a $2,000 fine. Joe Downs and the other Raywick man pleaded guilty and received one-year sentences, but neither of them served a single day in jail. Further, Frank Haddad convinced the court to refund the hospital its $10,000, "with half of my skin on it," Sister Stine later recalled.

Joe Downs returned to Raywick and began to run several businesses, a small grocery store and a bar called the Fifth Wheel on the other side of the street, next door to the establishment owned by J. E. "Squire" Bickett, whose family will play a central role in the Cornbread story.

In 1945, Squire Bickett, a twenty-three-year-old tavern owner who had lost his leg in a motorcycle accident, married nineteen-year-old Coletta, a telephone operator. (He would later play tricks on people unaware of his false leg by stabbing himself in his wooden prosthetic with a buck knife.) Squire brought Coletta back to the Bickett family farm-more than five hundred acres of prime farmland, wooded knob land and river bottom just outside of Raywick's "city limits," originally settled by William and Jane Bickett in 1798 with a 1,800-acre Revolutionary War land grant.' in 1948, with four children in diapers, Squire Bickett moved his family to a downtown Raywick home with no electricity or running water to be close to the tavern opened by Squire's father at the end of Prohibition.

Over the years, Squire Bickett worked a wide array of jobs to feed his growing family: broom maker, grocery store owner, bulldozer operator, oil speculator and farmer. He also ran Squire's Tavern, later christened Bickett's Pool Hall when ownership passed to his sons. His nine children grew up on the farm and in the Raywick house, wearing homemade clothes and fed the food grown in the garden by their mother or hunted by their father.

Louis Earl Bickett, Squire's eldest son, sat at his father's bar as soon as he could drink and passed the time by picking fights with just about anyone who came in from outside Marion County. Squire's second son, Joe Keith, liked to work outdoors and had a sharp mind for business. Squire's third son, Charlie, named after family friend Charlie Stiles, helped his father around the saloon, working behind the bar as a teenager. Between serving drinks, Charlie worked the crowd like a budding politician. Jimmy Bickett, Squire's fourth son, sometimes woke up in the middle of the night and watched his mother fixing breakfast for Charlie Stiles after a long night of stealing something big enough to make him hungry. At other times, young Jimmy would crawl out his bedroom window onto the front porch roof to watch the men drink, fight, drag race and flip cars over to set them on fire.

That was Raywick, a place that suited men like Johnny Boone, who graduated from high school ten years before Jimmy Bickett. But because Boone hailed from neighboring Washington County, his entry into the Bickett family's tavern was not guaranteed; most outsiders had to fight Louis Earl Bickett first.

But not Johnny Boone.

"Johnny didn't have to fight," Charlie Bickett recalled later. "His reputation preceded him.... I mean, you take your kingpins or your big wheels, they all respected Johnny. He was well known and well liked, and he didn't go out of his way to hurt anybody."

The first time Charlie Bickett ever laid eyes on Johnny Boone, he saw the red-bearded farmer from Washington County passed out drunk on the floor of Squire's Tavern.

On the other side of Raywick, however, Father Thomas Caldwell could hardly sleep from the noise made by drunks fighting outside Squire's Tavern and cars racing up and down the road. Children and the elderly feared coming to Mass because drunks still roamed the street on Sunday mornings. Caldwell's predecessor, Father Brown, hadn't had a single good night's sleep in his nine years at Raywick, maintaining the long and tense relationship between Marion County's clergy and its people.

In January 1969, a fight broke out between thirty people on Raywick's main thoroughfare, paralyzing traffic for an hour. The next month, congregants from three Protestant churches met with the Catholics at St. Francis Xavier to discuss bringing law and order to their community; more than 125 concerned citizens attended. The county judge and the county attorney spoke, along with an ABC officer and Squire Bickett, the magistrate for that part of the county. At the meeting's conclusion, the assembly established a committee and charged it to study the situation and take action. Eight men were elected, including Squire Bickett and Charlie Stiles, with the goal of petitioning the sheriff for a deputy to serve the area.

"The people who attended this meeting," Father Caldwell told the Enterprise, "were enthused at the idea of getting something done to have law and order after living in terror of unrulies for so long."

Some time later a local teenager drove crazy through town in a pickup truck, cutting donuts in the St. Francis Xavier parking lot, squealing tires and hollering with the windows rolled down. Charlie Stiles, waking from bed, recognized the driver as J. C. Abell, a young man who had been courting Stiles's adopted daughter.

Acting on behalf of the committee to restore order to Raywick, Charlie Stiles took his shotgun out to his front porch. As the truck made another lap in the church parking lot, Stiles shot a hole through the driver's-side door, hitting Abell in the knee and giving him a limp for the rest of his life. The wound kept J. C. Abell quiet for a while but not forever. He will reappear in this story.

As Raywick's unelected leader, Charlie Stiles gave to his people many of the proceeds of his extralegal adventures. When winter would approach, he would stop at army surplus stores and stock up on boots and coats, take them to a storefront he kept in Raywick and give most of them away. He never locked the store at night. If someone needed something, Stiles just told that person to go take it. After a local marriage, he would take the newlywed couple inside and tell them to take what they needed. Mary Dee, Charlie's wife, tried to run the store when Charlie worked out of town, but he gave away any profit she could muster. So, she eventually made him close it down, but that didn't keep Charlie from giving back to his people, like employing Raywick youths in his more legitimate ventures.

The Bickett boys stripped tobacco on Charlie Stiles's farm every harvest season after they helped bring in their own family's tobacco. Like most farm boys, the Bicketts were often absent from school during these autumn days. Without hired help, farmers relied on their children as a source of labor; the family farm would be economically unsustainable otherwise. The strained tobacco market put even more stress on the children of farmers. Many parents couldn't afford farmhands any longer, so children became responsible for milking cows before and after school every day, setting tobacco in the spring, and stripping it in the autumn before hanging it in the barn to cure. Their classroom education came second.

Jimmy Bickett graduated from the first class of the newly consolidated Marion County High School in 1971; the year before, his brother Charlie had graduated from the last class at St. Charles High, the rural public high school for the Catholic part of the county. It's all the education they would ever need.

The day after Jimmy's graduation, Charlie Stiles put the fourth Bickett son on his work crew, tearing down the old barracks at Ft. Knox. He paid Jimmy the same as his other workers, two dollars a day, plus meals of bologna sandwiches and a bushel of apples.

"I heard a lot of Charlie Stiles stories growing up," retired State Police Detective Jacky Hunt said later. "I remember he was big on stolen bulldozers and all kinds of stuff...

"I grew up digging ginseng with my papaw, his name was Romey Hunt. Everybody knew him over there. He was a big card player; everybody played poker. What was that called at Club 68, the Blue Room? My granddaddy used to be a dealer at the Blue Room. Of course, that was before my time....

"When I was a little boy, my granddaddy would tell me all these stories. And he told me the story of Charlie Bickett-I mean, not Charlie Bickett, Charlie Stiles. Everybody liked Charlie, and he apparently was pretty personable.

"He told the story-I don't know what he was doing, out digging ginseng or something-but he was pulled over on the side of the road, and he was stuck. It was pouring down rain, and Charlie Stiles pulled up, and got out, got on his hands and knees, crawled underneath the truck, pulled a chain on it, and got him out. He got all muddy, but he got him out of the ditch. He always told that story about Charlie Stiles.

"Charlie had all this money, which he got from various ways, but you know, he took the time to pull him out of the ditch. So, you know, that's why a lot of people liked Charlie Stiles. I just remember hearing a lot of stories about that growing up."

Less than a month after Jimmy Bickett graduated from Marion County High School, the commissioner of the Kentucky State Police (KSP) called a meeting of the Organized Crime Unit in Frankfort on Thursday, June 17, 1971, with the sole purpose of planning "an investigation into the activities of Charles G. Stiles of Raywick," according to a report filed by Detective Ralph Ross, an attendee, who had never forgotten the "hot air-conditioner incident" and always suspected that Charlie Stiles had somehow been behind it.

After the meeting, four detectives checked out two unmarked cruisers and drove to the Holiday Inn in Bardstown. That night Ross gave the other detectives a tour of Nelson County, passing My Old Kentucky Home State Park and the Heaven Hill distillery on their way out of Bardstown before plunging into the knobs on a narrow strip of asphalt toward Marion County. The unlit, shoulderless highway wove itself through the deeply wooded hills before crossing the flat farmland that surrounded Holy Cross at the Marion County line. At Holy Cross, the highway veered left toward Loretto, but Ross turned right onto an even narrower road that led toward Raywick and the unit's principal surveillance points: Charlie Stiles's house in downtown Raywick and Paul Stiles's farm a mile away at the foot of the escarpment. From there, Ross drove his crew the eleven miles from Raywick into Lebanon to show them Club 68 and the state police post just down the road.

For a whole weekend, this crew staked out Raywick in teams of two around the clock, wearing suits in unmarked sedans, never seeing anything illegal until Sunday night, when a 1953 blue Chevrolet ran two detectives off a narrow farm lane in St. Mary's called Frogtown Roadthe blue Chevy driving off, leaving the sedan in the ditch, its headlights illuminating wire fencing, green pastures, dark trees.

"This is a typical act of harassment used by Stiles," Ross typed in his report.

The next day, all four detectives watched the Stiles farm from two unmarked cruisers, pulled off the highway on Stiles property. All day the Stiles brothers set tobacco. When it started to rain, Charlie and Paul hopped into Charlie's white truck and drove toward the police. When he approached them, Stiles sideswiped both unmarked cruisers, leaving Ross and his men cussing in Stiles's driveway as they inspected their damaged sedans. Stiles, an amateur legal expert, knew that because the detectives had entered onto his property, they couldn't do anything about the damage.

"Stiles is aware of our presents [sic] in the area," Ross reported.

When the detectives exchanged one of the damaged cruisers at headquarters, their supervisor assigned them two uniformed troopers.

The next Thursday the detectives couldn't find Charlie Stiles anywhere, so Ralph Ross ordered the two uniformed troopers to stop every car that passed through Raywick as the four detectives watched to see if the two troopers could rouse their quarry. The uniformed troopers found a wide spot in the road, parked their cruiser there, and pulled over every driver in and out of town-the cruiser's bubblegum light painting Raywick blue.

A crowd gathered outside Squire's Tavern, the Fifth Wheel and the liquor store to cuss the police. When the cruiser pulled out to chase yet another car, someone took a sack of roofing nails-short and sharp with wide heads so they stand up on their ends-and spread them around the little turnoff spot that the troopers had been using. When the troopers returned to their parking spot, laughter had replaced the cussing coming from the loitering locals.

Then, at 11:00 p.m., a man walked out of the liquor store and spoke his mind.

"I'm going to go home and get my shotgun and kill all these damn State Police," he crowed.

The detectives stepped out of their cruisers and arrested him on the spot, prompting a mob of men from the pool hall and bars to pour into the street and press in against the detectives and their cruisers. As the horde pushed in on the police, one detective said some things that soon after got him reassigned. Another officer pulled a shotgun from his cruiser to disperse the crowd. With the state policemen outnumbered ten to one, Ross hopped into the cruiser that contained the arrested man and drove him to a holding cell in Lebanon. As the commotion died down, three tires from the marked cruiser, filled with roofing nails, hissed air.

The next Tuesday, Elmer George, Stiles's young attorney (and Hyleme's nephew), called the state police to ask if there were warrants out for his client, who, he claimed, was out of state. But Detective Ross spotted Charlie Stiles the same day at Ft. Knox, demolishing old barracks with a crew of Marion County boys.

"All surveillance in the area from this date on will be on foot," Ross reported and then took a two-week vacation, leaving two detectives to watch Stiles and his crew at Ft. Knox, running the plates on every vehicle and piece of heavy equipment that arrived, hoping that something would come up stolen. It never did.

Several times that summer, Johnny Boone watched Charlie Stiles bring his work crew home from Ft. Knox, towing wagons filled with lumber salvaged from the old barracks. He would see Jimmy Bickett and his buddies riding on the back of a wagon, on the top of a heap of paint-flecked lumber filled with rusty nails, arriving in Raywick at top speed at the end of a fiftymile journey through the twisted highway as if they were kids on a hayride.

For a whole month, the state police charged with watching Charlie Stiles could not find him. When they finally did, they shot him dead. Exactly how Charles Griffin Stiles came to his death remains disputed; many in Marion County do not believe the official version, as filed by Detective Ralph Ross:

On September 5, 1971, the Kentucky State Police's Charlie Stiles squad discovered a stolen van filled with appliances. The vehicle was hidden in a cornfield behind a barn at the end of a Spencer County farm road, some forty-five miles from Raywick. They staked it out.

Friday night, September 10, 9:00 p.m. A white Ford pickup truck pulled into the gravel road in front of the barn and stopped; the driver cut the lights, stopped the engine and stepped out. Ross reported that the following happened next:

Detective Campbell said, `Kentucky State Police, "and at this time the subject turned and started firing a gun, hitting Detective Campbell. The fire was returned, resulting in the death of a subject later identified as Charles G. Stiles, Raywick, Kentucky.

At 2:00 a.m., a captain from the state police called Raywick to tell Charlie Stiles's wife and brother that he was dead. Word spread quickly through Marion County that the state police had killed the Robin Hood of Raywick. To those hearing it, everything about it seemed wrong.

Charlie Stiles had fought the law since he was a boy and, until he lost, had always won. The feds caught him twice, in 1951 and 1961, but went easy on him in sentencing. Courts dismissed his other nineteen arrests, or he beat them in court, with charges ranging from moonshining (two counts) and possessing and selling untaxed liquor (one count) to writing bad checks (four counts), committing grand larceny (seven counts) and knowingly receiving stolen property (three counts).

There was also an assault-and-battery charge filed by the state trooper whom Charlie Stiles had dragged down the street in his truck for attempting to arrest him without a warrant (acquitted) and a charge of aiding and abetting the uttering of a forged instrument (dismissed). A charge of giving a false statement to the Department of Agriculture added the USDA to the list of agencies that crossed Stiles's path, a list that included the FBI, the US Marshals Service, the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax Division of the IRS (precursor to the ATF), the IRS itself, the police forces of Louisville, the Commonwealth of Kentucky, the state of Indiana and a number of sheriff departments.

In his brushes with the law, Stiles had honed a sharp legal mind. For any unforeseen occurrence in federal court, Stiles hired Frank Haddad; for any problems locally, Stiles had Elmer George, Haddad's protege. Joe Downs, another Haddad client, later recalled that when he called Haddad's office after hours, Charlie Stiles would often answer the phone.

Charlie Stiles spent time in federal prisons in Alabama and Indiana, yet the Kentucky State Police could never catch him, could never pin a charge on him that would stick. So, a team of four detectives shot him dead, officially in self-defense. The Courier-journal ran a short notice of his death the next week:

RAYWICK MAN SHOT, DIES OF WOUND

LEBANON, Ky.-Charles Stiles, 55, of Raywick, was killed Friday night in an exchange of gunfire with Kentucky state police five miles southwest of Taylorsville.

Those who knew Charlie Stiles had a problem with this version of events. "An exchange of gunfire?" Charlie Stiles never carried a gun, they said to themselves. He had even chastised one of his drivers, Warren "Sonny" Larue, a real gun lover, for carrying a gun.

"Getting caught with a gun," Stiles told him, "will get you five years for nothing."

The only pistol Stiles ever owned lay where he had left it-in the kitchen cabinet in his home in Raywick, according to his widow, Mary Dee. All his criminal activity-moonshining, bootlegging, cattle rustling and larceny-had been nonviolent; never an armed robbery in his thirtyplus-year career as an outlaw. Of the nineteen times police arrested him, never once did they catch him in possession of a firearm.

After the state police examined Charlie Stiles's body in Spencer County, they sent his body to Bosley's Funeral Home in Lebanon, where the undertaker sutured his eighteen bullet holes, embalmed his body and prepared him for burial. His funeral service filled and overfilled the funeral home chapel as farmers and workers waited outside, their hats in hands, solemnly murmuring among themselves about the life and death of Charlie Stiles, exchanging stories about what he did to make the state police so angryabout how he buried one stolen bulldozer with another stolen bulldozer, how he switched a stolen backhoe for a not-stolen backhoe and made the policemen look like fools. Everyone had a favorite Charlie Stiles story.

The laughter and conversation of the overflow crowd loosely assembled in the front yard of the funeral home died away when the pallbearers carried the coffin outside, giving the assembled farmers their first glimpse of Charlie Stiles dead. As the hearse pulled away, a string of cars and trucks with their headlights on folded behind in a tight procession out of Lebanon, an eleven-mile-long snake of farm trucks and family sedans filled with people who gave their whole Monday morning to honor his passing. As the hearse arrived at St. Francis Xavier Cemetery in Raywick, vehicles were still just entering the procession in Lebanon.

That night, with the funeral and the era of Charlie Stiles over, Sonny Larue drove into the St. Francis Xavier Cemetery after dark to visit his grave, but when he approached the Stiles plot, Larue froze, staring down into the unbelievable: The grave was empty! Panicked, he ran to his car, slammed the accelerator down, ripped out of the cemetery drive and raced to the Stiles farm, fishtailing into the driveway, throwing gravel into the darkness and skidding to a stop in front of the farmhouse.

Larue hopped out and banged on the door. When Paul Stiles answered, he saw Larue-a short balding man, his panting chest heaving his potbelly up and down.

"Paul!" Larue sputtered, wide-eyed. "Something's happened to Charlie. His coffin's missing. His grave's empty!"

"Calm down, Sonny," Stiles said. "After some thinking, I got Mary Dee to agree to an autopsy. The medical examiner is coming tomorrow. Maybe we'll see if it's like they said it was or not."

Paul Stiles seemed tired and maybe drunk.

"Go home, Sonny," he said before going back inside.

The next day Paul Stiles walked into the back room of Bosley's Funeral Home and saw his dead brother laid out naked on a metal table, a sheet over his lower half and the makeup lines from the funeral visible on his neck and wrists. His suit had been cut off him and lay on a stainless steel counter nearby. The coroner stood in the back of the room with Paul as the doctor stood in front of Charlie with his tools spread out.

The medical examiner noted that he was examining a body of a "welldeveloped, well-nourished fifty-five-year-old white male," who would have been perfectly healthy if it wasn't for the eighteen holes in his chest, abdomen, back, right arm, left buttock and hip, which had been sutured after he was embalmed to prepare him for the biggest funeral Marion County ever saw. The state police had already recovered bullets from Stiles's body, but as the medical examiner clipped open the sutures on the entry and exit wounds, he found a few slugs that the Spencer County coroner had missed. He pulled one buckshot slug from the left side of Stiles's chest, under the fifth rib; a second slug from his right back; and a third from near Stiles's heart, lodged in the pericardial sac without rupturing the heart itself.

Each slug the doctor removed he dropped into a stainless steel pan, ringing out a metallic echo in the quiet, tiled room. And with each KLANG of a slug into the pan, Paul Stiles said quietly:

"I'll get'em for you, Charlie."

KLANG.

"I'll get'em for you, Charlie."

KLANG.

"I'll get'em for you, Charlie."

Paul Stiles lost a son to the Vietnam War and then his brother to the state police. Paul never did "get'em" in a direct sense because the four members of the state police's Charlie Stiles squad all rose to leadership positions within the force, and no questions were ever raised publicly as to the truth of the police's version of events.

Although those who shot Charlie Stiles were never forced to prove their version of events, Paul Stiles got his revenge-in his own way. In the years after the death of his brother Charlie, Paul Stiles turned to a new outlaw enterprise, growing plants similar to the ones he knew as hemp, which he had helped grow, reap and thresh as a child during World War II.

From the funeral of Charlie Stiles sprang a new generation of outlaw ready to break a whole new set of laws-not exactly what the state police had in mind when they set out to take care of their Charlie Stiles problem. The state police must have figured that they had tamed Marion County once and for all, but because of the law of unintended consequence (or "the fecundity of dragon's teeth," as William Faulkner put it), the killing of Charlie Stiles created for the state police a much larger problem: It gave Marion County a brand new reason to disrespect the badge just as local Vietnam veterans returned home with a brand new law to break. The killing of Charlie Stiles did not create the Cornbread Mafia, but his blood certainly fertilized the field.

"The first time I ever saw anybody smoke marijuana was down at Joe Downs's place," recalled Charlie Bickett, "and two guys that had just got out of the service, out of Vietnam, local boys, and they were smoking it. And I didn't know what marijuana was. You heard about it, you know, but it was sort of hush-hush.

"They got four or five more smoking it, but I never would fool with it because I was scared to death of it. I didn't know what marijuana was. That was the first time I had seen anybody smoke marijuana in my had to be around'71."

The shooting of Charlie Stiles and the emergence of marijuana on the Marion County scene would be the sorts of events that Charlie Bickett would chronicle in the old bank ledger that he kept under the bar.

"When I found this book, a whole stack of these books were given to me," Charlie Bickett said later, opening the 150-year-old ledger. "An outfit called Webster, they were president of the bank, they gave them all to the City of Raywick ... so anyway, I stole this one here. There's some really interesting stuff in here .. .

"Let me read you something from eighteen-something. This is a town ordinance, passed June 2, 1888-Ordinance to Prohibit Breaking Colts in the Streets of Raywick on Sundays or Holidays. Whoever shall drive or hit a colt as to break him to drive any kind of vehicle, he shall be fined five dollars for each and every offense, and if failure to pay the sum, he will be confined at hard labor in the streets of Raywick until said fine is paid....

"Then at one point the bank turned into a store, where people bought stuff-grindstone rocks, buggy, horse-one buggy, six dollars-Earl Bickett, that's my granddaddy, one quilt, $7.75 ... Paul Bickett, one horse, $21 ... Eugene Bickett, one hammer.

"That's why I added all my stuff to it:

"Approximately one-fourth of the poker room was occupied with ten Raywickians smoking grass and Mary Jane. They all seemed to be pretty high. This is 1973.. .

"I, Charles Bickett, declare that Bill Mattingly is under the influence of alcohol. I, William Mattingly, declare that it is true . . . "

Another entry described what Charlie Bickett referred to as the "mafia" versus the "vigilantes."

"The mafia struck Raywick again last night. They ventured themselves through Raywick two proceeding times creating a riot. They were shooting up the streets and the houses of the congested area of Raywick. To prohibit this uncalled-for vandalism to occur again, the vigilantes, which was us, was called. Stake-outs were made and guerrilla warfare was necessary.

"At approximately 12:00 midnight, the `mafia' drove through," Charlie Bickett said, reading more from his ledger. "Not the mafia we know, not the `Cornbread Mafia,' just a bunch of punks-Main Street of Raywick on Highway 84. The mafia had their weapons sticking out of the'62 Ford Galaxy and started shooting up the town.

"By the time they got halfway through Raywick, shooting began and gunfire was exchanged. A bystander received a flesh wound. The `mafia' lost control of the vehicle and proceeded into the park, where members escaped.

"Gunfire was again exchanged repeatedly between the mafia and the vigilantes. One of the mafia members proceeded to flee the scene of the accident, and guns were going off. The gang proceeded to escape in the opposite direction with a 16-gauge shotgun.

"Two of the instigators-I'm not going to mention their names here; they're dead-they got stranded in the vehicle. Merrill Mattingly, the assistant deputy sheriff, had drove through ...

"Merrill proceeded to back up the street and put his spotlight on the vehicle. At that time, the vandalizers raised up ... Merrill was bearing arms and he arrested four of them.lhat was 9-28-1977," Bickett said as he closed the dusty antique ledger.

"I put all kinds of old bullshit in there. I really enjoy this book here."

By 1977, when the "vigilantes" took on the "mafia" in the Ford Galaxy, the marijuana business was in full bloom. Men like Johnny Boone had applied his state champion 4-H tobacco-growing and sheep-breeding skills to a new agricultural problem entirely: building the best breed of marijuana ever grown in Kentucky.

"The first thing about rebreeding pot is you got to have a high THC that's pleasant and good for you," Johnny Boone said later. "It's no good if it gets you stoned if it knocks you down and gives you migraine headaches. It's got to be the good kind.

"I'll tell you what happened to us. We started out, we only had the seeds of whatever was around to smoke: in those days Mexican, Colombian. More Mexican real early than anything. It wasn't any good, and that's all people had. Started crossing it, and soon you could see the differences in the different pot.' you had to be religious, make every effort to let that be what you tried to breed. Don't just throw a bunch of other seeds in with it because you'll just diffuse and decrease the potency, [and do] anything else to try to get it to excellence.

"To be worth all the work going to go into it, it needed to do well in Kentucky because it wasn't going to be grown in Mexico or Colombia or something; it was going to be grown here. Mold in the field is a big problem; the denser your buds get, the bigger and better and denser your buds get, so there's really a lot of pot there-they can harbor molds. Good to breed something that's immune to that. Buds like corncobs because you're looking for density."

Johnny Boone learned his cannabis genetics from Mr. X, a local boy with a well-stamped passport whose identity remains secret because the police never apprehended him. Mr. X got out of Marion County early and knew where to find suppliers of the high-quality strains of pot from growers who retreated into the woods of northern California's Humboldt County and beyond.

Mr. X brought Boone early issues of High Times magazine as soon as the publication began in 1974. The magazine showed Boone how to pluck male plants from the juvenile females in order to produce a seedless crop of high-potency sinsemilla.

"Take out all the male plants early," he told Boone.

"We do that at the end," Boone replied.

"No," Mr. X. scolded him. "Do it before the males pollinate the females. Then they'll be seedless. It's called sinsemilla. Trust me."

Boone paid attention; his friend was right. Boone taught the other Marion County growers, who thought Boone was a genius for figuring it out on his own.

While Johnny Boone stayed on his farm on Bloomfield Road in Washington County, tending the fields the way Mr. X taught him, Mr. X went off to discover new cannabis cultivators in India, Pakistan and the Middle East. These growers, he learned, grew a different type of marijuana, another species entirely called Cannabis indica, which grew low to the ground with thick leaves-groomed for generations in their indigenous environments to produce high quantities of the THC-rich resin for use in hashish production, unlike the tall sativa plants, which were genetically selected for their height because taller plants made longer hemp fibers.

Mr. X discovered certain corners of the world where the hashish and marijuana markets flourished without state-sponsored prohibition, places overrun with hippies from America and western Europe on the dropout trail, like the hash houses on Chicken Street in Kabul, Afghanistan, where thousands of hippies had congregated by the early 1970s. When Mr. X found Chicken Street, he told the friendly English speakers there that he was looking for seeds, and they loaded him up. He returned to Chicken Street several times before hardliners overthrew Afghanistan's Westernfriendly king in 1973, ending the love affair between Western stoners and Kabul's hash dens and sending Mr. X to other global marijuana hotspots looking for seeds to support the Marion County seed bank.

Though the central Asian and Middle Eastern indica strains were highly potent, some early cannabis connoisseurs like Mr. X didn't like the stoned, narcotic high they produced; it felt more like a drugged-out opium effect than the good, cerebral high of the sativa varieties. Responding to the challenge, early breeders cross-bred the two cousin plants to produce hybrids that maintained the potency of indica with the heady, cerebral high of classic sativa while retaining other positive indica traits like shorter plants that matured earlier in the growing season.

When Johnny Boone first started growing, he soon realized that the tropical strains matured too late in the year for the Kentucky frost in October and that the old hemp plants weren't worth using at all, not if you wanted to get high. Through Mr. X, Boone discovered an indica strain to cross with the sativas he had, a hybrid that would do well in the temperate, humid growing season of central Kentucky. Boone wouldn't see Mr. X for six months or a year at a time. When Mr. X would return, he would bring more seeds.

"These are from Thailand; these are from Burma. This one here is from Tibet up in the Himalayas."

Boone would grow each strain, careful to keep the plants separate. Some would do well in Kentucky; others just wouldn't.

"Let me tell you another little trick; all agronomists can tell you this," Johnny Boone said later. "Plants climatize, so what works tremendously well here in Kentucky might not work in Alaska. So, not only do you need to seed for latitude ... but also for where you're going to grow.

"The landrace breeds, let's say high in the Himalayas, if you went over there and got a thousand of them seeds and stuck them in the heel of your boot and come back and plant them in an elevation lower, they probably wouldn't do as well here as they might if you took'em to a place like where they live at ... like the Rocky Mountain lowlands."

The landrace breeds best suited for Kentucky, Mr. X and Boone discovered by trial and error, were those from Afghanistan because the two places share the same approximate lines of latitude.

"You'll remember it's what made [Mr. X] king," Johnny Boone said, referring to Mr. X's access to international seed banks.

"I'd look forward to him coming home once a year," Boone said," cause he had these little old bags tied up with Pakistan seed over here. Seed over here from Burma or some fucking place. Now I would say, `Are you sure?' ... and he'd say, `Yeah, I know what this is,' and he would show it to me.

"He was a big help.... He was a Daniel Boone,"Johnny Boone later said of Mr. X. "He'd have to be, wouldn't he? ... Look what he did: He just went every fucking place in the world, a lot of times didn't have but blue jeans on. And then wherever he went, seems like the liberal community accepted him.... Obviously they did or he couldn't have done it as quick as he done it. Goddamn, he did it in just a few years.... He wasn't bullshitting, neither. Seeds are tricky things; they can be good or they can be bad. If they're bad, you ain't got nothing ... but every seed he gave me was good."

So, when Marion County growers wanted good seeds, they came to see Johnny Boone. Every seed Boone gave a farmer grew the biggest buds anyone had seen before. When Boone walked through his patch, he liked to feel the buds beat against his body with the mass and density of corncobs and the length of baseball bats.

"All these fucking people-all them guys you know, Jimmy and all of them-wanted the seed I had," Boone said, "because they wanted the best, and they knew I'd been working with seed here, there and yonder."

None of those growers working with Boone had any idea where his seeds came from. Some would speculate where he got them; none would be correct, and none would ever know Boone's connection to Mr. X, who would arrive in his hometown and disappear without warning or notice, each time bringing with him another batch of seeds from another set of exotic corners of the world and giving them to Johnny Boone and later to Jimmy Bickett, Joe Keith's younger brother, but to no one else.

As word spread of the quality and quantity of marijuana available in Kentucky, distributors from California started coming to Raywick looking for a bargain, tired of the Humboldt County hippies' escalating prices from competing strains in a widening menu of marijuana varieties: sativas like Maui Wowie, Kona Gold and Panama Red; pure indica strains like Afghani No. 1 and Hindu Kush; and popular hybrid varieties such as Early Girl, Purple Haze and Northern Lights.

Soon many distributors realized that Kentucky sinsemilla wasn't just some ugly cousin or second-class citizen to the boutique California hybrids dominating the marijuana connoisseur market; Johnny Boone's Kentucky Bluegrass was good, as cerebral and potent as anything California had to offer, cheaper by half and for sale by the ton. The only drawback that Boone and fellow farmers faced as they started selling their homegrown marijuana to the West Coast was that smokers there looked down their noses at Kentucky marijuana, calling it hillbilly pot.

To combat the prejudice, Marion County growers altered their crops' appearance and marketed them under different names. To replicate the brown, sticky quality of Jamaican pot, a grower might buy a barrel of cola syrup from the Coca-Cola distributor, water it down and spray it over his buds-not too much because any amount of moisture on the pot once it has been cut might cause it to mold. After it was compacted, the bale possessed the dark, sticky, sweet character of Jamaican ganja.

Another farmer, to replicate the golden quality of Colombian Gold, an early popular sativa strain, might spread his marijuana out on a black sheet of plastic, spray it with a mixture of water and allspice, then cover it with a sheet of clear plastic and let it sit out in the sun for a day.' sun would bleach the buds just enough to give them a golden color, and the spice gave it an exotic aroma that hid any moldy smell from the added water. One farmer even stenciled his own burlap sacks that read COLOMBIAN GOLD.

But once Kentucky growers grew more skilled at their craft, and as word spread across the country about the quality of Bluegrass homegrown, Marion County outlaws stopped worrying about disguising their product. Kentucky marijuana began to sell itself. Some big-time West Coast distributors could turn around a ton of Kentucky marijuana per week during the harvest season, from mid-October until midwinter.

Buyers with deep pockets sometimes ordered in advance, fronting the money for seed, fertilizer, planting, transplanting, cultivation, harvesting and security-usually costing the buyer $10,000 for a lease on an acre, $40,000 to tend the crop and $50,000 to harvest it and prepare it for sale, or $100,000 total. Sometimes the broker would hire others to grow and transport it to market, so the broker wouldn't ever touch it at a middleman with the right connections on both sides of the deal, bringing Kentucky pot to California smokers.

The first time police suspected that the secret herb grew in Marion County came on July 10, 1973, when a Lebanon police officer pulled over a car driven by a twenty-six-year-old Lebanon man. The officer spotted a brown paper grocery bag with a peculiar smell in the front passenger floorboard. Upon searching the trunk, the officer found fifty-nine other grocery bags. Each bag, he estimated, contained enough marijuana to make one hundred cigarettes, which the Kentucky Standard (the newspaper in neighboring Bardstown) valued at $1 each, bringing the total value of the bust to $6,000-or $30,530 in 2011 dollars.

In October 1976, two teenagers and their uncle from St. Joe were snooping through Paul Stiles's cornfield looking for some good roasting ears of corn to steal when they stumbled upon a patch of bright green plants covered in jagged leaves growing eight feet tall in the balk between the corn rows.

The plants reminded the boys' uncle of his wartime boyhood, when his family had grown hemp for the war effort. While he recounted tales of hemp farming, his teenage nephews laughed to themselves, knowing about the plants' extracurricular use. The old uncle pulled up a few plants by the root to show around the St. Joe store to reminisce about the war years. While their uncle tugged at the branches, his nephews took a few buds for themselves to smoke behind the barn later.

When the farmer returned to St. Joe, he couldn't stop talking about what he had seen growing down by the Rolling Fork. Those who knew something about that Stiles patch couldn't get the farmer to shut up fast enough, and some people who shouldn't have found out about it heard all they needed to know. When a Kentucky State Police trooper caught wind of Stiles's pot field, he called for reinforcements.

On the morning of October 1, 1976, the state police borrowed a helicopter from the Louisville police and flew it down to Marion County, where they spotted the five acres of marijuana laced in with the corn on the Stiles farm.' They arrested Paul Stiles at 3:30 p.m., and by the end of the day, the state police had the Stiles family farm under armed guard.

Before dark, a highway mowing crew arrived with three tractors and bush hog mowers. With the tractors' high-powered headlights, the mowing crew worked all night long, cutting down the largest marijuana crop ever discovered in Kentucky to that time, with a street value-state narcotics agents estimated-of $2 million. From the lookout on the top of Scott's Ridge five hundred feet above the river, one of the patch's growers looked down, watching the tractors swipe back and forth across the field all night long.

The next morning Paul Stiles called his lawyer in Lebanon and learned that he faced a $500 fine and six months' probation. Stiles drove into Lebanon and paid his fine in cash, then saw the judge when he needed to. For five acres of marijuana, Paul Stiles spent zero nights in jail.

Before Charlie Stiles had died, the Stiles brothers had stored countless stolen tractors, appliances and other pieces of heavy equipment on their farm. But since Charlie's death, Paul had spent more time teaching the kids coming back from Vietnam the ways of the outlaw farmer.

From Paul's point of view, growing this new crop far surpassed the sort of stealing that Charlie had perfected because it attracted much less police attention, like a return to the moonshining days, only perhaps better, the perfect victimless crime. The police wouldn't know it if they saw it and were lucky to find the patch they did.

After Paul Stiles's $500 fine, the growers worried little if at all about prison sentences and mostly about deer eating their buds or thieves stealing them. To keep the deer away, growers put radios in the trees, going back every few days to change the batteries. They also found moth balls, human hair and urine to be effective deer repellent.

Marijuana theft became a widespread problem as soon as everyone knew what it sold for. The thieves were known in the business as rippers, and growers set booby traps around their crops to teach them a lesson: fishhooks hanging at eye level, trip wires rigged with dynamite, live rattlesnakes tied to poles, and rottweilers with their vocal cords removed so they wouldn't bark before they attacked and fed with gunpowder to make them meaner.

In 1976, around the same time the state police found Paul Stiles's five-acre patch, Johnny Boone discovered that a ripper had visited a patch on his Washington County farm. He came out to tend it and found a whole row picked clean. So, Boone staked out the patch overnight with his sidekick, his ten-year-old son Jeffrey, and an AR-15 rifle-a civilian model M-16, the same sort of gun that Johnny would be caught with in Minnesota in 1987, that Jeffrey would be caught with in 1998 and that Johnny would be caught with again in 2008.

Meanwhile, a state police officer pulled over a car for speeding, and the driver happened to be the man stealing from Boone's pot patch. The driver negotiated his way out of the ticket by offering in exchange to give the location of the best patch of marijuana he had ever seen.

So, the state trooper drove out to Johnny Boone's farm at the end of Walker Lane (named after his grandfather) and pulled right up to his cattle gate, one hundred feet from where Boone hid in the darkness with a gun and his son. At first Boone thought he had found his thief, but the state troopers identified themselves before anyone got hurt. This wasn't Boone's first run-in with the law. In the late sixties, Boone had been arrested with a Marion County farmer when the two were caught sweating barrels, an old bootlegger's trick. If you put a few gallons of water into a used bourbon barrel and set it out in the sun, the heat will cause the barrel to "sweat," and the water will soak up the alcohol trapped in the staves of the barrel. It makes good whisky, but because Boone was making it and selling it without paying taxes on it, it wasn't exactly legal.

So, in the autumn of 1976, with the police closing in on his prized pot patch, Johnny Boone didn't panic. He simply surrendered, and the state police stumbled upon one of the first public examples of Johnny Boone's 4-H skills applied to his personal breed of marijuana, which he had been genetically crossbreeding for years by then, a strain of indica/ sativa hybrid that Boone initially named Kentucky Bluegrass but then had second thoughts.

"To me, calling it Kentucky Bluegrass sounded a little too much hillbilly,"Johnny Boone later said, "but High Times used to list the prices each month, and they would say `Kentucky Bluegrass.'This was in the old days."

CHARLIE STILES'S PHILOSOPHY OF UNARMED CRIME WAS NOT ESPOUSED by everyone within the Cornbread universe. There were those who exceeded all rational bounds of human restraint, who violated God's Law right along with Man's Law, psychopaths feeding on the silence offered by Marion County like a bull feeds on corn. Men like Garland Russell, who began his criminal career in the 1950s as a thief and truck hijacker but who would become a major player in the early Cornbread days, once he was released from prison in 1972 for horrific crimes that rattled even Lebanon's liberal moral core.

In 1956, downtown Lebanon hummed with activity by the railroad tracks.Three years after Little Richard recorded "Lucille"in honor of Club Cherry's patroness and two years before the ABC agent's house would be blown into smithereens, the business on Water Street had grown into a bustling strip of entertainment. In addition to Club Cherry, there was Philip's Dispensary, Sunnyside Saloon, the Kit Kat Club, the Water Street Cafe and Farmers Restaurant-the sorts of places where one could get a beer or two on a Friday night.

On the cold, rainy and foggy Friday night of December 14, 1956, Garland Russell-twenty-three years old, six-foot-three, 190 pounds with dark black hair-strode into Farmers Restaurant. He was accompanied by Marvin Briscoe, twenty-two, an inch shorter and ten pounds thinner with dark, wavy hair; Frank Durham, twenty-four; and Ben Wright, son of the Marion County sheriff.

Russell and Briscoe were young toughs from neighboring Boyle County, where they had conducted a "reign of terror" for the past year and a half. The chief of police in Danville considered them "ruthless"; the Kentucky Fire Marshal's Office called them "pyromaniacs"; and the National Fire Underwriters Association agreed. Briscoe and Russell had once beaten a man with tobacco sticks until he almost died, said a witness who testified against them, and then set fire to his automobile. In a separate incident, when a husband and wife ran outside to see their car on fire, Russell blasted at them with a shotgun, blinding the wife in one eye.

At Farmers Restaurant, the proprietor served beers to Russell, Briscoe and their two companions from 10:30 until last call at midnight, when he sold them six beers for the road. All four men piled into a 1952 gray Ford pickup that didn't belong to any of them, and Russell drove off through the rain and fog in the direction of Danville.

Sometime before 2:00 a.m., they arrived at the Danville Tire Center, a truck stop near an all-night diner, where two International tractortrailers painted orange and silver with "Huber and Huber" written across their sides were parked beside each other.

Doris Smith, a waitress in the diner, had started her shift at 10:00 p.m. She was talking to the Huber and Huber drivers when she noticed a gray pickup pull in and park in a no-parking zone across the street. She lit a cigarette and watched it.

"The boys in that truck are checking on me," she said to the truck drivers. When she stubbed out her cigarette about five minutes later, a police patrol car pulled up next to the gray pickup in the no-parking zone. The officer talked to the driver, and the gray pickup drove away. The police car parked, and Officer Jimmy Ryan entered the diner.

"What were they trying to prove?" the waitress asked the policeman.

Officer Ryan shrugged, ordered a coffee and left. The two truck drivers paid up and followed the policeman out the door. A few minutes later, as the waitress took another customer's order, one of the truck drivers ran back inside.

"Can I use your telephone?" he said. "My truck's been stolen." It was 2:20 a.m.

Ben Wright, the Marion County sheriff's son, drove the gray Ford pickup, following Marvin Briscoe, who drove the orange-and-silver semi down the narrow, curvy Highway 84 toward Lebanon with their hijacked load of four pinsetters, shipped from Yonkers, New York, en route to a new bowling alley on Cannons Lane in Louisville. The theft ignited a car chase with Boyle County law enforcement and resulted in Briscoe and Russell ditching the orange-and-silver semi along with its bowling alley equipment by sending it off the top of Mitchellsburg Knob to crash in a heap below, as the two hijackers escaped on foot.

At 5:25 a.m., Boyle County Sheriff Deputy Howard Overstreet and Perryville Police Chief William Davis spotted two men lying in the highway, as if hit by a car: Garland Russell on his back and Marvin Briscoe on his side, concealing the .22 rifle that earlier in the evening had fatally wounded the radiator of Chief Davis's 1956 Pontiac patrol car. As Overstreet's car came to a stop, Marvin Briscoe rose to his knees with the rifle aimed at the windshield.

"They've got a gun!" Overstreet yelled and slid down to the floorboard.

Davis opened the passenger-side door and rolled onto the highway with Overstreet's pump-action shotgun. It was not yet daylight. Davis circled the car with the shotgun in his hands. Briscoe escaped into the ditch with Russell running a few yards behind him, still in the road. Davis called for Russell to stop, and when he didn't, Davis pumped the shotgun and fired.

The shot struck Russell and flipped him over an electric fence into a field. From a distance, Davis assumed he had killed Russell. Overstreet shined his flashlight on the motionless body and agreed: Garland Russell was dead.

Because Briscoe remained armed and at large, Davis and Overstreet decided they needed backup and went together to a nearby farmhouse to use the telephone. When they returned to the scene, Garland Russell had disappeared. Only a shoe, knocked off by the impact of the shotgun blast, remained.

Two hours later, after hitching rides with two different drivers, Briscoe carried Russell, wet and bloody, onto the doorstep of the house owned by A. J. Hourigan, where he lived with his young wife, Freda. Then Hourigan drove the twelve miles into Lebanon in his 1941 Plymouth with Garland Russell bleeding in the back seat.

At 8:15 a.m., the Plymouth arrived at the house of Dr. Eli George, Hyleme's straight-laced brother. The man who knocked at the door told Dr. George that his friend had been shot in a hunting accident. Dr. George told the man to take the patient to his downtown office, where the son of Lebanese immigrants had been practicing medicine for a decade by then. After he was in his office, Dr. George examined the twenty-seven gunshot wounds to Russell's right leg and made arrangements for his admittance to Mary Immaculate Hospital, thirteen years before the hot air-conditioner incident.

The next evening, just as the sun set on Sunday evening, the .22 rifle that Marvin Briscoe fired at police passed into the possession of a nineteen-year-old farm girl named Agnes Smothers. Meanwhile, the Kentucky State Police and the FBI assigned multiple agents to the case. Special Agent Raleigh Bristow and Detective Lieutenant Charles Young found Agnes Smothers at Freda Hourigan's home, where they asked her if she had brought a .22 rifle into her home and if she had told her mother that Garland Russell gave it to her.

The agents continued to question Smothers when the Marion County sheriff drove by and called Smothers over to his patrol car. Smothers opened the door and sat in the back seat as her two interrogators watched from a distance.

"What are they talking to you about?" the sheriff asked.

"Nothing much," she said.

"You keep your mouth shut and don't tell them anything."

"Yessir."

"Get a hold of that rifle and get rid of it where it can't be found," the sheriff said.

"Yessir."

After Sheriff Will Wright drove away, Agnes Smothers gave this statement to the Kentucky State Police and the FBI:

I am nineteen years old. I have not seen Marvin Briscoe in three or four weeks, and l have never seen Marvin Briscoe or Garland Russell with a re of any kind. Marvin Briscoe did not bring a re to my home, and I did not sell a re to Willie Lee Lanham. I know what my mother told the oficers, and it is a lie, and I told her it was a lie. I have read this statement, and it is true to the best of my knowledge. I am not going to sign anything.

Later that day FBI agent Bristow telephoned Sheriff Wright at the courthouse in Lebanon, asking if he had seen his son, Benjamin, whom the FBI and KSP considered to be a suspect. The sheriff said he would try to find his son for them. Immediately after Bristow spoke to Wright, Bristow's telephone rang. Robert Spragens, a Lebanon attorney, was on the line.

"I represent Benjamin Wright," Spragens said, "and I have advised him not to answer any questions pertaining to the theft of any truck."

Frank Durham, Benjamin Wright and Marvin Briscoe surrendered themselves to authorities on Monday, December 18, the day that Ben Wright and Agnes Smothers were hiding his rifle. Police took Garland Russell into custody at Mary Immaculate Hospital; Russell made a $7,000 cash bond three days after Christmas. By that time, all four young men faced federal felony charges.

On January 23, 1957, Garland Russell and Marvin Briscoe pleaded guilty and were sentenced to five years in federal prison; the next day Frank Durham and Ben Wright pleaded guilty as accomplices and were sentenced to three years.

On April 8, 1957, just a few months after Garland Russell pleaded guilty, Freda Hourigan, twenty-five, divorced her husband, the father of her four children. She then married Garland Russell in a jailhouse ceremony at the LaGrange Reformatory a year later on June 3, 1958. Russell reunited with Freda upon his release from prison on April 30, 1964, and moved into her Gravel Switch home with her children, as her exhusband, A. J. Hourigan, built himself a new house just down the road.

A little more than a month later, on June 16, Russell reunited with two friends he had known since high school, Charlie Irvin and J. W. VanArsdale, to celebrate his newfound freedom. Irvin was the youngest of the group at twenty-six, and Russell was the oldest at thirty-five. VanArsdale, twenty-nine, had been a freshman at Danville High School when Russell was a senior.

They hopped into VanArsdale's 1958 turquoise-and-white Chevrolet ragtop convertible and drove to the Riverside Cafe, along the Rolling Fork River near Bradfordsville in Marion County, where Irvin and VanArsdale drank a dozen beers and a half-dozen shots of whisky between them, but neither, it was later claimed, was "real drunk," as Russell stayed perfectly sober.

They left the bar well past midnight, and as the three young men drove around, according to VanArsdale's sworn testimony, Russell asked Irvin:

"Have you heard anything about my wife stepping out on me?"

"Yes," Irvin said. "I've seen your wife with Carl Ray in the Water Street Cafe."

"Would you tell that to her face?" Russell asked.

"I'd tell it in front of anybody," Irvin said, shrugging.

So, Russell told VanArsdale to drive to Gravel Switch, and VanArsdale started getting nervous. He didn't want to cause any trouble, but Russell assured him they were just going down there to talk. After stopping at a gas station to fill up, they drove to Russell's wife's house in Gravel Switch. Russell got out, went inside; the two others stayed in the car.

After a few minutes, Russell stuck his head out the door.

"You boys come on in," he hollered.

When they went in, VanArsdale sat by the door, and Irvin sat across from him. Russell sat facing them on a sofa, and his wife sat in front of him on a stool, facing VanArsdale and Irvin courtroom-style with Russell as the judge.

"Do you know this girl?" Russell asked Irvin.

"Yes, I told you," Irvin said.

"Is this the girl you've seen with Carl Ray?"

"Yes, at the Water Street Cafe."

"Let's go outside," Russell told Irvin, without saying anything to his wife.

VanArsdale stepped outside first, walked about fifteen feet and looked back. Irvin came out next, then Russell. In the summer darkness, Russell told Irvin:

"I'm going to whip you for telling lies on my wife."

VanArsdale turned around, walked up to them and tried to break up the fight.

"You whip him," he told Russell, "and you've got me to whip, too."

So, Russell pulled a .22-caliber pistol out of his pocket and shot VanArsdale, who dropped to the ground with a bullet in his stomach. Russell stood above him with a smile on his face and shot VanArsdale a second time in the same spot without saying a word.

Russell then turned his attention back to Irvin, who worried less about his own safety than about the gut-shot and bleeding VanArsdale.

"He's going to die," Irvin pleaded.

Finally Russell relented and grabbed VanArsdale by the feet while Irvin held him under the arms, and they carried him to the back seat of the turquoise-and-white convertible. But they didn't leave right away. Russell and Irvin continued to argue as VanArsdale drifted in and out of consciousness, slumped longways in the back seat of his own car, bleeding all over its white vinyl interior.

When VanArsdale came to, the car was in motion. Irvin sat in the back seat with him, and Freda sat in the front next to Garland Russell, who was behind the wheel. Russell stopped the car and ordered Irvin to get out. The two men stood close enough to the car for VanArsdale to hear them argue, their feet scuffling.

"Garland, please don't kill me," VanArsdale heard Irvin say.

Russell didn't say a word.

Irvin must have convinced Russell of something because Russell let him get into the back seat again with VanArsdale. Russell started the car as his wife tried to talk to him.

Just as Irvin relaxed, Russell turned around, reached into the back of the car and wrapped his hands around Irvin's throat. Irvin hollered and jumped up. VanArsdale turned his head to look up from the floorboard to watch it all unfold. Irvin kicked the front seat with both legs to get free from Russell's grip, so Russell pulled Irvin by the throat across the seat and held his thumbs against Irvin's windpipe until his legs stopped twitching. After Irvin's body went slack, Russell left the body draped across the white vinyl passenger-seat headrest.

When they started driving again, VanArsdale asked Russell from the back seat what he and Charlie had done wrong. Russell didn't answer, but he stopped the car again and grabbed a rifle from the frontseat floorboard.

"Don't shoot me again," VanArsdale pleaded, and as if he had convinced Russell to spare his life, Russell put the gun away and started the car again.

"What's the matter with Charlie?" VanArsdale asked, referring to Irvin.

"You know," Russell said. "He's dead."

Then Russell stopped the car a third time and took a shotgun from the front seat. VanArsdale knew that this time Russell meant to kill him.

"Can I pray?" he asked Russell.

"Go ahead."

Russell walked outside and pointed the 20-gauge shotgun barrel over the back door of the convertible. VanArsdale looked right up the barrel into Russell's calm face.

"Did you know about Betty?" Russell asked him, referring to his first wife.

VanArsdale had no idea what Russell meant. Russell coolly squeezed the trigger, hitting VanArsdale in the left arm and left side of his torso with a point-blank blast of buckshot. VanArsdale fell into the floorboard on his face, clutching his arm. He felt blood running through his fingers; he passed out. Russell drove the car back to Freda's house, and they went inside.

Alone outside, VanArsdale regained consciousness around 4:00 a.m. on Wednesday, June 17. Irvin's body was slumped over the passenger seat. Climbing over the front seat, smearing blood all over the car's white interior, VanArsdale grabbed the steering wheel and drove off, hoping to get to Danville with Irvin's body riding shotgun. He drove fast and started getting dizzy, so he thought he should stop at the next house he passed.

Hubert Wren, forty-five, awoke when a car pulled into his yard blowing its horn. His mother, Dora, thought it was George Ed Tucker coming up to go fox hunting. When Wren went to the door and opened it, he saw a man he had never met before walking toward him and bleeding badly, holding his left arm with his right. Wren backed up and let VanArsdale walk into the front door, where Wren got a good look at him.

"What in the world is the matter with you?" Wren asked.

"Garland Russell shot me. Can you help me?"

Wren grabbed him by the good shoulder. He didn't know VanArsdale, but he knew Garland Russell. When he heard that name, he felt the blood drain from his body.

"Listen, buddy," Wren told him. "You will have to go. You can't stay here."

Wren gave VanArsdale a shove in his good shoulder, and VanArsdale turned and went out the screen door. A pair of headlights was approaching from Danville Highway, so VanArsdale started running. He ran until his body gave out; lying where he fell, he put his hand over his mouth to keep his breathing quiet and passed out again.

As soon as VanArsdale disappeared, Garland Russell pulled into the Wrens'yard driving A. J. Hourigan's 1941 Plymouth (the one that Russell had bled in the back seat of en route to the hospital seven and a half years before). Russell kicked in Wren's door carrying a shotgun.

"Where did he go?" Russell asked Wren.

"He's outside."

Russell dropped a shotgun shell on the floor and then bent over to pick it up. To Wren, Russell appeared "sober" and "calm as a leaf." Russell went outside, jumped over some steps and walked around the back of the house looking for VanArsdale. After about five minutes, Russell drove away in the '41 Plymouth.

Garland Russell drove back to Freda's house in the Plymouth and told her they would have to go. They climbed into A. J. Hourigan's 1947 black three-quarter-ton flatbed truck with Garland behind the wheel. A half-hour after Garland had left the Wrens' house, Hubert Wren saw the three-quarter-ton flatbed truck drive down Danville Highway toward Riley. Then, fifteen minutes later, he saw the same truck returning toward Gravel Switch. Meanwhile, Wren thought for sure the boy who had come to the door was dead in the woods.

The next thing VanArsdale knew, it was daylight. He saw sky; he could barely move. It was summer, but he was cold. He pulled himself up by a small tree and looked around. He saw a house and a smokehouse and started walking toward them without realizing it was the same place he had run away from just a few hours before. He came up on the back porch and beat on the Wrens' kitchen door.

"I've been shot. Help me," he hollered, but the Wrens didn't answer.

Inside the house, Hubert Wren's mother and his two handicapped sisters were crying.

"Hubert, just be still," his mother said, "and maybe the boy will go to sleep."

"All right, to satisfy you, I will be still," he said, according to his statement to the police later.

But Hubert Wren couldn't go back to sleep. VanArsdale kept "making kin outside." So, Wren went to the house of his father, Lucien Wren.

"Something's got to be done, Daddy," he told him.

Lucien Wren then went to the house of Wallace Smothers to call the sheriff, Ham Blandford. Hubert went back to his house. Before the sheriff arrived, his father and Smothers showed up.

"Where is this boy that got shot?" Smothers asked Hubert.

"Around there by the kitchen door."

Hubert's father and Smothers went around back. Smothers looked at Hubert.

"There's nobody here," Smothers said.

"He was here about two minutes ago."

Smothers scanned the landscape; there was nothing nearby except the Wrens'smokehouse, where VanArsdale woke up hearing voices.

"Mercy me!" he screamed. "Can you help me?"

Wallace Smothers opened the smokehouse door and looked down at VanArsdale huddled on the floor. Then he asked VanArsdale who he was and what had happened.

"Garland Russell shot me-killed Charlie-he's crazy-"

Shortly after, just as the sun rose, Marion County Sheriff Ham Blandford arrived, followed by an ambulance that rushed VanArsdale to Mary Immaculate Hospital in Lebanon, which would remain un-airconditioned for another five years.

Kentucky State Police Detective Billy Lloyd saw the ambulance blaze back toward Lebanon on his way to the smokehouse scene. A minute later Lloyd stepped out of his cruiser and onto the Wrens' property, where the sheriff and his deputies were just beginning to inspect VanArsdale's turquoise-on-white Chevy convertible.

What they found confused them.

From the state of Charlie Irvin's body, still draped facedown over the white vinyl front seat, a deputy speculated that he had been run over by a truck, and because of the significant amount of blood and bits of arm muscle that VanArsdale had spread around the front seat, back seat and floorboards, the sheriff thought there might be a third victim somewhere. When they eliminated the possibility of a third victim, they then assumed that both VanArsdale and Irvin had been shot.

The county coroner arrived and determined that, no, Irvin hadn't been shot at all, only strangled. All the blood and guts belonged only to VanArsdale, and somehow he was still alive.

Russell and his wife made their getaway in Freda's ex-husband's three-quarter-ton flatbed truck. Meanwhile, Sheriff Blandford obtained a search warrant for Freda's house, still legally owned by A. J. Hourigan. Blandford and State Police Detective Billy Lloyd found the Remington 20-gauge shotgun that had shot VanArsdale in the bedroom and a .22-caliber Remington pistol, loaded with six hollow-point rounds, tucked under the cushions of Freda's living room sofa. Then they searched all the barns and outbuildings on the property, including A. J.'s unfinished home, where they found the'41 Plymouth.

Sunday, June 21. Four days after the killing, eighteen miles from Gravel Switch on the other side of Marion County, Tommy Mattingly worked behind the counter at Mattingly's Grocery in St. Mary's while listening to the radio: The Cincinnati Reds split a doubleheader with the Los Angeles Dodgers; Jim Bunning pitched the first regular-season perfect game since Charlie Robertson in 1922; and three civil rights workers disappeared in Mississippi.

At 9:30 p.m., just before Mattingly locked up, Freda entered. She looked haggard; her legs were scratched. She asked for a razor and blades, but Mattingly didn't have any. She bought a box of Kotex tampons, two cans of orange juice, three packs of Viceroy cigarettes, five penny matchboxes, six Milky Way bars, two boxes of shampoo, one bottle of Head & Shoulders and a large cake.

When she left, Mattingly called the sheriff, suspecting she was one of the fugitives wanted in connection with the killing on the other side of the county. Within an hour, a state trooper arrived at the grocery with a photograph of Freda. Mattingly looked at the photograph and said he couldn't be sure it was the same person. He was certain about one thing: She hadn't bathed in days.

At 12:30 a.m., two Lebanon police officers saw a woman on the railroad tracks. It could have been Freda, but she disappeared before they could get close enough to be certain.

Word went out over the police channels that "Freda Hourigan" might be walking along the tracks to avoid detection. Two state troopers staked out the railroad five miles east of Lebanon, while another team searched the tracks on the other side of Gravel Switch until sunrise at 5:20. At 6:00 a.m., another search team formed by an L&N Railroad employee and an ABC agent found remnants of a trackside picnic about a mile west of Lebanon. Finding nothing else, they eventually called the search off after walking fifty miles of track between New Haven and Junction City across three counties.

On Monday morning, a state police detective drove to the Veterans Hospital in Lexington to interview J. W. VanArsdale in room 32 on the fourth floor. VanArsdale told the detective that after he had been shot the first time and was lying on the floorboard of the convertible in a semiconscious state, he heard Charlie Irvin screaming and believed that Garland Russell had choked him to death with a chain.

"What county did this occur in?" the detective asked. "Marion or Boyle?"

"Marion. On Freda Russell's farm on the Fork," meaning the Rolling Fork River. By calling Freda by Garland's surname, VanArsdale was the first to recognize the jailhouse matrimony that started all this trouble.' police were still searching for Freda Hourigan.

As the detective interviewed VanArsdale, Mr. and Mrs. Garland Russell were still on the run, trying to get into Washington County by hiking across farmland. Four nights before, when all this had started, Freda had been wearing high-heeled shoes. By the end, she was barefoot, her legs cut on barbed wire. She was getting sick, and Russell had to carry her. As they came across a herd of Black Angus cattle, they spotted a tenant farmer working the next field. Russell asked the man where they could find a telephone.

"Go to the house," he replied.

Once the two suspicious drifters were out of sight, the tenant alerted the property owner, who called the police from the milk parlor. Garland and Freda walked another mile before the state police arrested them by a wooded clearing about four hundred yards off Danville Highway. When the police booked them, Garland had $33 in bills in his wallet, a tape measure and a set of keys in his pockets, and he wore a felt hat and a twenty-three-jewel Bulova watch. Freda, five-foot-six and 125 pounds, had a $5 bill in her purse.

A story started circulating through the Lebanon rumor mill that an Angus bull had chased the Russells out of hiding into the arms of the police, but sitting in a cell in the Marion County jail, Garland Russell quickly discounted that story.

"I don't know where it got started," he told a local reporter, "but I certainly did not get run out by a bull." He told the reporter that his wife was sick, so "I had to get her out and get her to a doctor."

Two and a half months later, in September 1964, judge George Bertram moved Garland Russell's trial to Taylor County, seeking a more impartial jury.

When VanArsdale testified against Russell, he had part of his intestines in a bag on the outside of his body and had just recovered from an abdominal cyst caused by his gunshot wounds. He testified to a packed courthouse, answering all the detailed questions from the night that Russell shot him and killed his friend. As he testified, VanArsdale looked at Russell only once, when a lawyer asked how much he thought Russell weighed.

In December, the Taylor County jury failed to reach a verdict on the three-count indictment: shooting with intent to kill, habitual criminal and murder. To avoid a second trial, Russell pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter, and Judge Bertram sentenced him to ten years in the LaGrange Reformatory, from which he had been released just eight months before.

While in prison for this, his third time, Garland Russell met Joe Mike Mouser, a Raywick-born outlaw doing time for various offenses: grand larceny, attempted bribery of a state policeman, cattle rustling-the usual.' he two men got along, and Mouser invited Russell back to Raywick when he finished serving his time. When the state paroled Russell in 1972, he headed straight for Raywick and bought the house once owned by Charlie Stiles.

Though people would not soon forget Charlie Stiles or the impact he had upon their lives, the two-story white frame house in downtown Raywick that had been the hub of Raywick life during the Stiles era had begun to deteriorate. Charlie and Mary Dee Stiles not only had lived in that house for nearly twenty years but also had raised about a dozen foster children there, kids collected from families who couldn't care for them on their own. And it was the house where the black bear that Charlie had acquired from Hyleme George lived until someone got it so drunk that it tore up the house and Mary Dee made Charlie get rid of it. After Charlie's death, Mary Dee moved into a smaller, one-story brick ranch house just around the corner, and the house that had been her home with Charlie Stiles began to crumble from neglect-as if Russell's mere presence accelerated the fall of the house of Stiles, the once-handsome white facade quickly morphing into that of a paint-flecked haunted house.

When the Stiles home had crumbled beyond Russell's standard of living, he paid his insurance bill, turned on the gas and blasted the house's facade across the street into the parking lot next to Bickett's Pool Hall. If he hadn't said it before, he said it then: Garland Russell had arrived in Raywick.

Garland Russell soon established himself among the Raywick crew considered to be the first generation of Kentucky marijuana growers, men who were much younger than he but who already had a few growing seasons' experience. How many young men engaged in the illegal cultivation of Marion County cannabis around 1972 would be impossible to calculate, but they likely numbered in the dozens, and they included Johnny Boone, the Bickett brothers, and a number of Vietnam veterans like Bobby Joe Shewmaker, Meece Williamson, who would kill Paul Stiles's son inside the Fifth Wheel in the early 1990s, and Don Nalley, whose career would end abruptly in 1983 when a high-caliber bullet ripped through him in his New Haven driveway.

Johnny Boone never served in Vietnam, but Bobby Joe Shewmaker told him about a few of his experiences there:

"He said he was downriver where he could see. He said there was a bunch of guys up there whose lieutenant was killed just then," Boone recalled later. "He said a bunch of what they called `gooks,' which meant they figured they were fighting for the North Vietnam.' They was wearing Vietnamese clothes. I guess it's hard to tell ...

"The river wasn't very deep, but they were wide where they had eroded over the centuries, they come across there. And when it didn't look like no more were going to come out of the jungle ... they just opened up, guns clacking, clacking.

"He said you could see them fall off them water buffalo, killed every one of them, shot a couple buffalo, too. He said, whatever went down in the water you could see it floating down the river ...

"He said taking prisoners there was about a joke because nobody enforced it. Nobody instrumented any transfer or anything. Recon lieutenant and captain would come out there if you captured five men, you call it in on the radio and recon would come out there and question them, might beat the shit out of them, try to get them to talk or something. When they were done with them, recon left.

"You ain't got enough food for yourself. You don't want to stay up all night awake watching those prisoners. If you turn them loose they're going to try to kill you tomorrow, ain't they?

"Each war is different," Boone said. "That surely was that one."

Nothing could have prepared anyone for those sorts of wartime experiences, but fighting in a war that seemed to lack rules certainly prepared men like Bobby Joe Shewmaker to succeed in a world back home where obeying the law kept a person poor and breaking it turned farmers into millionaires.

The Vietnam veterans returning home helped the lawless elements of Marion County plug into a nationwide network of fellow veterans who understood how the world truly worked when one stripped away the surface. With this underground network seemingly in place from the start, Raywick and Marion County entered a gold rush, selling mountains of well-grown pot to buyers from the East and West Coasts and from one side of Marion County to the other as well because often one grower needed a few more dozen pounds to fill an order.

The first time Jimmy Bickett tried to sell a load of pot to Johnny Boone, Boone sent Bickett back to clean the product up, pointing to a thick stem between two buds.

"See this right here?" Boone asked. "I don't want to pay for this wood."

After a long growing season and seemingly endless hours of work bringing in a load of pot, no one wanted to take the time to manicure the final product. Of all the jobs associated with creating desirable marijuana, manicuring consumed the most time and required attention to annoyingly minute detail after a season of strenuous labor.

"If you're trying to move a lot of pot,"Johnny Boone later said, looking back, "you don't want it sitting and sitting in somebody's house for a month waiting for someone to decide if they want it because it ain't good enough to impress them the first time they look at it. That shit could be caught or stolen or burned up or mold or something.

"It's a commodity that's great to have, but you don't want it sitting in one spot. It needs to be moving to the consumer. If it's got a bunch of wood in it, or a bunch of water in it, or something it don't need to have, some kind of trash hooked to it, it's not going to go nowhere. Somebody's got to clean it up, and it don't need to be cleaned up in New York. It needs to be cleaned up here before it goes there.

"And sticks don't weigh a goddamn thing, but they are tedious to take out, and it costs a lot in labor to get them out. Talk about an aggravating job. You got a couple hundred pounds of pot to come out of a field, and you got to sit around on buckets and chairs and take all the sticks and trash out of it. You got to sit around and sit around and sit the fuck around."

there was a lot of marijuana to sit around and manicure, always a lot of marijuana.

"As you well know," Johnny Boone recalled, "Kentucky has been a wonderful place for producing marijuana and more so than maybe any other state as far as volume goes. Well, wonder why? It sure as hell grows good here, and it's not necessarily up in the fertile horse Bluegrass region but in all the peripheral regions everywhere Even those boys up in the mountains seem to do very well.... I farmed it in a lot of other states, and you could produce pounds there. But I think even anybody else who ever ran a group would say that the quality of the Kentucky-grown was still superior, the smoke, the THC, et cetera.

"I traveled to other places, and people in other places way, way off know that Kentucky is the superior pot in America.... Guys in Amsterdam know about it. I have a friend traveling right now, and that's what he does.... He says the guys in Amsterdam ask him if he can bring them Kentucky seeds. They believe in the superiority of it as a breed.

"High Times has a thing they call `landrace'seeds; those are seeds specific to the area they are in. Let's say Afghanistan. They are known to be there for a long time, to where they are looked at as a breed. You got places like Colombia, Mexico, Hawaii, Burma, Thailand, [even] South Africa is getting a really good name.... Kentucky is now getting that name. We're not yet included on what they call the Landrace List, but I say we will be."

So that's a lot of sitting around on buckets and chairs, cutting and trimming pounds and tons of marijuana one branch at a time-and only with men one trusted enough to keep their mouths shut.

All that sitting around forced men who wouldn't spend much time together otherwise to tolerate each other for longer periods of time than many thought possible, putting Marion County natives like the Bicketts and Bobby Joe Shewmaker with outsiders like Johnny Boone and Garland Russell. Boone fit naturally into the Marion County lifestyle because of his similar upbringing as a rural Catholic. Russell, on the other hand, didn't fit as well into the Raywick scene, but who was going to tell him no? Everyone decided that if something bad happened, they wanted Garland Russell on their side, not against them.

During the boring parts of the marijuana business, like when the buds needed to be cut from the stalks, the men would sit in a barn and clip the buds from the branches with rose clippers-a giant pile of dried marijuana on one side of them and neat piles of groomed buds spread out carefully on plastic on the other. In these circles, the workers often rolled joints made from balls of the resin that clung to their fingertips from handling pounds of the sticky, green buds, or they would set fire to a goodsized bud and pass it around, inhaling the white smoke directly into their noses-no paper or pipe required. Despite their buzz, these farmhands learned to quickly clip through a mountain of marijuana in the dimly lit barn without losing a finger to the rose clippers, while Garland Russell, who didn't drink or smoke at all, made even faster time using an old buck knife, its blade edge concave from years of sharpening.

As they sat in a circle chopping buds off stalks, Russell told them about what he learned in prison. As he talked, the young ones paid attention, carefully eyeing Russell: a neatly dressed, bald-headed man-an otherwise-ordinary-looking man except for a deep scar across the top of his brow and the tombstones in his eyes.

Russell's stories motivated the greenhorn recruits not to slack on the job. The workers would take regular breaks from clipping buds by walking to the beer cooler or going outside to urinate, but Russell never moved off his bucket, steadily chopping buds with his concave-sharp buck knife, waiting for the youngsters to come back so he could tell them another story.

Finishing a manicure job on a whole load of pot could take days or weeks and required that everyone stay from beginning to end.

"They need to stay until it's done," Johnny Boone later said. "They don't need to go home, and that's hard to do. They got wives and girlfriends at home wondering where the hell you're at, and you're gone two weeks. But if you have much trouble between the spot and home, you'll have a problem.

"And you got to sit around, and it's hard to get ten guys to get along for that long, too. Every so often somebody will get mad at somebody, but everybody knows the bottom line: If very many people have to go home for any emergency reason or any goddamn thing they say, somebody's got to go home to check on their wife to see if she's out fucking, all that other shit, somebody's going to know something. So, you can't go home. That's the real hard thing to think about.

"It's like a National Guard bivouac. We're going to go there; we're going to stay there; when we get done, we're going to leave there. That's the ideal, but it's hard to get that way. Two men might, but when you are talking about ten, twelve, fifteen at harvest time, hard to get that way."

If someone started trouble in one of these bivouacs, someone else would have to finish it. None of the older men wanted to take a whiner out back and beat him. They would if they needed to, but the need hardly ever arose if Garland Russell stood nearby. The deep fear that he engendered acted as a perfect motivational tool. Once, when one young worker wouldn't stop complaining, Russell's head snapped up from the stalk he was trimming.

"Huh?!" Russell barked as he scanned the circle, looking for the complainer.

But as soon as Russell spoke, the complainer's head dropped, and he began working again as fast as anyone. No one wanted Russell to single him out as a crybaby. He might not make it home.

But although Russell's reputation helped get business done at times, his unchecked rage and capacity for violence often became a liability. Once, some young men from Raywick and St. Joe planted two patches at either end of a farm that lined the Rolling Fork River near Bradfordsville in eastern Marion County. When tending the patch one day, they discovered that someone had been poaching from the plants in a patch that abutted the river. Just across the river sat a shack where a sharecropping family lived. Russell assembled his crew, and they crossed the river armed with shotguns to teach a lesson to this poor family, whom they suspected of stealing their marijuana.

They opened fire on the shack, shooting out windows, hitting the beat-up car and killing the family mutt. The message had been sent, but Russell wanted more. He kicked in the door and wanted to exterminate every living soul-the children, the old people, everybody.

But one young Raywick man held Russell at the door and convinced him to leave it alone. And very calmly Russell backed away, smiled and moved on, as if it didn't even bother him-the same feeling he would have had if he had killed them all.

It wouldn't be the last instance when someone stopped Garland Russell from adding to his body count. Another time Garland Russell nearly killed two rippers he caught stealing plants from his pot patch.

As Russell tended to a row, he discovered that another row of plants had been ripped out by the roots. Patiently he scanned the surrounding field and located a path through the tall grass, as if beaten by a dog or by a person dragging a trash bag filled with pot plants behind him. Russell tracked the rippers through the weeds back to an abandoned house on the back of the farm property. There the two thieves had stopped to cut the buds off the stalks of the plants they had stolen.

When Russell caught them, he beat both into submission before restraining them hand and foot with a logging chain. He chained one thief like a cowboy ropes a calf, ankles and wrists bound together, and hung the other one upside-down from the ceiling of the abandoned house, chains holding his ankles in the air with his hands tied behind him. Then Russell doused them both with gasoline to teach them a lesson that no one would ever forget.

Thankfully, a young grower from Raywick pulled Russell away, begging him not to do it. Without such an intervention, the thieves' families would have been planning a pair of closed-casket funerals.

In 1978, Garland Russell grew a crop with Jimmy Bickett outside New Haven on Icetown Road. On a hot September day, Bickett, Russell and their crew were in the field stripping the male plants out. Any field of pot would have at least 60 percent male plants; they would never see a field as good as 50-50 male-to-female ratio. It's hard work out in a field with a long-handled tobacco knife looking for immature stamens of the male plants and cutting them out before they have a chance to pollinate the females. Jimmy Bickett had learned from Mr. X., just as Johnny Boone had, that it was best to pluck the males out of the field before they began making pollen because once pollinated, the female plant puts all her energy into making seeds, and a grower wants the female to continue to produce the sticky THC-rich resin that the female is making to get herself pollinated.

In the field cutting out males, Jimmy Bickett and Garland Russell were caught by Sheriff Jackie Wimsett, who arrested them and hauled them off to the Nelson County jail. They made bond that afternoon.

As soon as they were released, Russell and Bickett went straight back to Icetown Road with a bunch of tobacco knives, a covered truck and a big roll of twine, and they worked all night long stripping the pot patch clean-the same night that Muhammad Ali won his rematch against Leon Spinks, becoming the first three-time heavyweight champion in history. Like Ali, Jimmy Bickett worked in a profession that rewarded a disregard for long-term consequences; but on that night, September 15, 1978, both Ali and Bickett were winners.

The next morning Sheriff Wimsett brought a bunch of deputies to New Haven with wagons and bush hogs. The convoy waited on the side of Icetown Road as Wimsett walked down to the patch, where he saw that the whole patch had been cleared out overnight. He walked back to his deputies shaking his head. The owner of the farm would later tell Bickett what happened next.

"It's all gone," the sheriff told his deputies in disbelief. "You could sow oats down there."

When Bickett and Russell appeared in court, the judge gave them $100 fines for disorderly conduct. The next day Jimmy Bickett went out and bought his first Corvette.

There for a few years in the 1970s, Garland Russell lived a relatively peaceful Marion County life, while those around him worked nearly fulltime to keep him from killing again. One time Russell was hanging out in a gas station in downtown Lebanon, watching a baseball game on a little black-and-white television set, when a black man on a motorcycle pulled up to the gas pump and started revving his engine, drowning out the playby-play of the ball game. Russell was unamused.

When the black biker came inside the station, he continued to talk loud, and Russell told him to be quiet. The biker thought Russell was being rude to him because of his skin color and so jawed back at Russell. The owner of the gas station, fearing for the biker's life, got between the two men and pushed the biker out of the station, telling him he had to go. The biker, again, thought he was a target of racial prejudice and let the gas station owner know it, as Garland followed them outside on the way to his truck.

Finally the gas station owner got the biker onto his bike, and the biker gunned it down the street just as Garland Russell stepped out into the road with his pistol, squeezing off a few rounds, playing target practice with the disappearing motorcycle, leaving the black biker with a negative opinion of that gas station and maybe the whole county. But it hadn't been racism that had prompted the incident: Garland Russell would have shot at anyone who interrupted his ball game.

The next year, 1979, Garland Russell blew up his second Raywick residence, a duplex owned by Joe Mike Mouser, his partner in larceny, without concern about the small grocery store on the other side of the duplex, run by Joe Downs, Charlie Stiles's former truck driver, who now ran the Fifth Wheel across the street.

At 2:00 a.m. on a Monday morning in late September 1979, Russell snuffed the pilot light in the gas range and cranked the stove dials to HIGH and set the oven to BAKE. When the gas leak ignited, it blasted the front wall of the duplex into the street and engulfed what remained in fire.

The explosion rocked Raywick, blasting out the windows of Bickett's Tavern across the street and the stained-glass windows of St. Francis Xavier church. Flames cut the telephone lines, knocking out communication to part of the county. As the fire raged, residents formed a bucket brigade to rescue anything left from Joe Downs's grocery.

The next week prosecutors indicted Garland Russell in the federal courthouse in Louisville along with Joe Mike Mouser and three other men for stealing mobile homes from the Louisville Fair and Expo Center, an old Charlie Stiles trick. Now the FBI and the US attorney had Russell, a lifelong criminal, on interstate grand larceny charges that were enough to put Garland Russell away for life, and Russell knew it. So, he went underground as a fugitive.

Garland confined himself to a voluntary imprisonment from everyday life. He couldn't go to the grocery or drive through Lebanon in the daytime. Everyone knew the police were looking for him. So, he stayed cooped up in the Bicketts' farmhouse, getting nervous, impatient and bored. After a few days, some others-including Joe Downs's little brother-came to fetch him to work with them on a deal. Russell cleaned up the Bicketts' house and left them a neatly written thank-you note for letting him stay there.

Perhaps affected by cabin fever, Russell decided he could go out at night, if he went only to certain places where a wanted man wouldn't be ratted out. Only the worst, low-life places could accommodate him. Even the twin taverns of Raywick-the Fifth Wheel and Bickett's-as wild as they were, weren't safe for Russell. If Joe Downs saw Russell in Raywick, he wouldn't call the police until after he shot Russell dead himself. But Downs's younger brother still trusted Russell as a partner.

The younger Downs and his friends wanted Russell's help on a deal with Billy Smothers, proprietor of the infamous Jane Todd Inn and a notorious criminal himself, capable of killing a man for the money in his pocket. Smothers, known locally as "Smut," presided over the decline of the Jane Todd from a once-civil 1950s dance hall to a fist-fighting roadhouse, where men engaging in broken-bottle melees had replaced well-dressed young men dancing with poodle-skirted young ladies on a talcum-powder-coated dance floor as the bandleader played Hoagy Carmichael's "Stardust" on trumpet with one hand while keeping his band in time with the other.

By the late 1970s, the police referred to the Jane Todd as the "Grab and Stab," the "Blood and Guts" or the "Bucket of Blood"-all nicknames earned on Smut's watch. Once, a Lebanon city policeman responded to a call that five people had passed out drunk in the Jane Todd parking lot. When the policeman arrived on the scene, he discovered the men weren't passed out; they had all been shot.

"That was a real common occurrence back then," remembered retired State Police Detective Jacky Hunt. "Real common."

Smut told the younger Downs that he had a good-size load of pot. If Downs could get four guys together with $50,000 each, they could all make some money. Downs took the offer to Russell, and together they took the bait.

By 1979, the marijuana market had been running smoothly for nearly a decade, and the routine for marijuana transactions had long been established:lhe buyer would present the money, and the seller would take the money to a place, pick up the product and return with it. That way, the money and the drugs were never in the same place at the same time-an insurance policy against cops and robbers. However, the system required trust: The seller could run off with the buyer's money or deliver an inferior product or a product short on the weight paid for. In the old days, before cocaine, everyone still trusted everyone else-a weakness that Smut was counting on.

Garland Russell, the younger Downs and two other men pooled $200,000 for the deal. The four of them met Billy Smothers and three of his men in a prearranged spot: the Campbell House Inn, a sprawling hotel complex in Lexington, built out of whitewashed brick and in the style of a colonial mansion. There in the Campbell House parking lot, Smothers, Russell and Downs met Smothers's connection, a man from Nashville, who supposedly had the product to sell. The Nashville gent took the $200,000 into a room at the Campbell House after telling Russell and Downs that the shipment would be arriving soon. Except it never did.

After growing impatient, Garland Russell picked the lock of the room where Mr. Nashville had gone and discovered that he had crawled through the air-conditioning duct to the next room and then had fled with their money. Upset, Russell and Downs drew their guns on Billy Smothers and forced Smut into the trunk of their car. They were going to take Smothers to Nashville to get their money. (In another case when someone tried to take the money and run, that person found himself in the trunk of a car with a half-dozen snapping turtles.)

Before going to Nashville, Garland Russell wanted to take Smothers somewhere private to soften him up and to find out what he knew about Mr. Nashville. So, Downs drove the car out to an isolated farm, but when they opened the trunk to take hold of Smothers, Smut came out firing.

Exactly what happened next will never be clear, but in the end, Billy Smothers lost a finger; Downs, shot in the liver, was rushed to the University of Kentucky hospital in Lexington, where the doctors managed to save his life; and no one ever saw Garland Russell again.

During December 1979, the Kentucky State Police investigated three killings in the coverage area of the Columbia post, which includes Marion County; none of the victims was Garland Russell. By year's end, thirtythree people had been reported killed in the eleven counties covered by the Columbia Post, and 893 killed statewide. Neither of those tallies accounts for Garland Russell. He went underground to escape a federal indictment and was sent underground in a way he never intended-or so they say.

Ten years later the daughters of Garland Russell wished to have him declared legally dead so that they could claim what few assets he had left, including a little property in downtown Raywick, but at the hearing, which all expected to proceed proforma, a man arrived to say that Garland Russell was not dead. He knew because he had seen him just a few years earlier. The man had walked into his own barn and seen Garland Russell sitting in there. The judge had no option but to deny the daughters' claim that Garland Russell was dead.

And thus, the story of Garland Russell ends with a question mark. He was never seen again, but no one knows where he went-or if anyone knows, no one is talking.

IN MARCH 1977, ABOUT TWO AND A HALF YEARS BEFORE THE DISAPPEARance of Garland Russell, a rookie reporter for the Lebanon Enterprise went on a Saturday night ride-along with Officer Ed Baker, an eighteen-month veteran of the Lebanon force.

"Ready to go?" Baker asked as he started his blue-and-white police cruiser, one of five in the Lebanon squad, and pulled away from the police station, which sat next door to the Enterprise office on Proctor Knott Avenue between Main and Mulberry Streets.

At a nearby corner, Baker steered his police cruiser left into the bumper-to-bumper Main Street traffic like a shark slipping into a slowmoving current. As he passed the Galaxy Club downtown, Baker stopped to tell a group of burly men to take their beers inside.

On the west end of town, Baker slowly cruised the crowded parking lot of Club 68, where one in a group of pretty girls called him a "pig." As the reporter looked at the people in the club's parking lot, he started feeling old.

"I know some of these people can't be much older than fourteen or fifteen," the reporter said.

"The clubs have a dance license or restaurant license," Baker explained, "so they're allowed to go into them."

Still, Baker would look at some of the kids, shake his head and grin. He rolled down his window in front of one young couple and asked their ages.

"Seventeen," said the boy.

"Sixteen," said the girl.

Baker nodded and rolled up the window.

"I just wanted to satisfy my curiosity," he told the reporter. "They each probably added a year or two."

Then Baker laughed again when he saw a boy make a suspicious movement, rolling a beer can under a car. Baker made the kid-who said he was seventeen-pour the beer out.

"They always tell on themselves. They make that one movement that gives them away."

After the nightclub rounds, Baker pulled over three drivers in a row. The first, a kid from Louisville, violated several driving rules at once. When Baker pulled him over, the boy promised to drive better after his warning and then darted back into traffic, narrowly missing an oncoming truck. The second violator moved his car slowly in front of Baker's cruiser, weaving back and forth. The driver's turn signal came on for no reason.

"Now there," Baker pointed out, "is your typical drunk driver."

The seventeen-year-old from another county admitted his crime.

"There's no use in lying to you," the boy said. "I admit that I've been drinking beer. I've had four or five. Don't you think it's better to tell the truth?"

The Breathalyzer confirmed the teen's confession, and Baker locked him up in the juvenile area of the jail after the boy called his parents to tell them where he was spending the night.

Back on the street, a speeder shot right past Baker's cruiser. He put on his blue lights and pulled the car over. The driver, a local teenager, knew Baker by sight.

"Yessir, Mr. Baker," the young driver said over and over. "Yessir, Mr. Baker."

Baker gave the kid a warning and said he could go, but before Baker could walk back to his cruiser, the Marion County teenager slammed on the gas and tossed gravel behind him as he sped out onto the dark highway.

At 3:00 a.m., the end of his six-hour shift, Baker told the reporter that it had been as quiet a Saturday night as he had seen in Lebanon in his eighteen months on the job. Not that Baker was disappointed by the night's inactivity, the reporter noted, just "a little surprised."

In March 1980, five months after Garland Russell's disappearance, Ed Baker, now a sergeant, squeezed all the excitement he could handle out of a Saturday night in Lebanon. As the clock moved toward midnight, Baker and the rest of the department's weekend night shift had their collective feet propped up in the station house between rounds. So far, the usual assortment of disorderly conduct, drunk driving and public intoxication arrests kept the evening moving for the Lebanon Police Department, a force entrusted with maintaining the peace while the town's half-dozen nightclubs were in charge of the opposite.

At some time past midnight, the phone started ringing in the dispatcher's office. Excited callers reported that a black truck just drove through their yard, ran over their mailbox, nearly killed their cat.' hen the police in the station began hearing for themselves the sounds of squealing tires, unmuffled exhaust and excessive RPMs echoing through the streets of Lebanon, but they couldn't pinpoint the offending vehicle's location.

Officer Carrico was looking out a window of the station, and suddenly there it was. A black-and-chrome half-ton Chevy pickup fishtailed around the corner of Main Street and Proctor Knott Avenue, gunning for the police station head-on.

"Here he comes!" Officer Carrico hollered.

Ed Baker raced to the window and watched as the black-and-chrome blur ran full-speed onto the sidewalk between the parked police cruisers and the brick station house-inches from the window-knocking down three OFFICIAL PARKING ONLY signs and scraping against the cruisers parked there before accelerating around the corner and out of sight.

Sergeant Baker ran out the front door to inspect the damage with his flashlight. The OFFICIAL PARKING ONLY signs at the curb had been sheared off level with the sidewalk, and the chrome door handles of the police cruisers had been busted off their anchors, left dangling on the scraped and dented doors.

As Baker stood there, he heard the engine again and the tires again. He looked up to see the chrome bumper and black flared fenders of the Chevy pickup aimed at him, not moving. The engine revved.

"When they got in front of the police station," recalled Steve Lowery, then the editor of the station's neighbor, the Lebanon Enterprise, "they did a little Coyote thing, `beep beep.'They literally did. They stopped in front of the police station and did the, what's the Wile E. Coyote and uh? Yeah, Road Runner. They do a `beep beep."'

Then the driver popped the truck into gear and barreled straight at Sergeant Baker, who identified two of the three men in the truck's cabJohnny Boone and J. C. Abell, the same J. C. Abell whom Charlie Stiles had peppered with buckshot for cutting donuts in the Raywick church parking lot eleven years before.

As the truck came at Ed Baker for the second time, Baker started waving his flashlight at it. The relationship between the local police and resident outlaws had seen better days than this Saturday night, perhaps its lowest moment since the 1974 beating death of Mose Willett.

"Mose Willett, owner of Sunnyside Dispensary," Johnny Boone later recalled. "They beat him up, and he suffered a head injury, and he died in Loretto in a brush pile."

Lebanon's wide-open nightclub culture had corrupted the local police into a cowboy-style outfit designed to deal harshly with the rowdiest visitors to a town that had become a weekend magnet for every teenager and crazy person within 150 miles. This cowboy attitude, left unchecked for a decade, permitted the Lebanon police chief to coerce signed confessions from suspects by pressing a loaded gun to their heads, a later case would reveal. It also permitted police officers to administer beatings to anyone they thought had it coming.

In April 1974, two Lebanon police officers beat Mose Willett, the forty-eight-year-old co-owner of Sunnyside Saloon on the corner of Water and Depot Streets, nearly to death with nightsticks. Willett, a member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the Knights of Columbus, certainly had his demons. In retrospect, some say he might have been bipolar due to his bouts of depression and tendency to get "redneck drunk." On April 18, 1974, when he talked back to two Lebanon policemen for pulling him over just a few blocks from his home, the officers pulled him from his car and thrashed him.

Willett couldn't leave his house for days, refusing to go to the hospital and gripped by a downward spiral of shame and embarrassment for not being able to defend himself. He was last seen alive on the first Wednesday in May 1974, about two weeks after the attack. At 11:00 a.m. that Friday, the day before Cannonade won the 100th Kentucky Derby, someone found Mose Willett's body in the undergrowth in Loretto, dead from a cerebral hemorrhage. At his funeral, six pallbearers and eight honorary pallbearers carried Mose Willett's coffin down the steps of St. Augustine Church and into the waiting hearse. The next day a judge ordered the grand jury to investigate Willett's death because of "rumors and innuendo" surrounding the circumstances of his passing. By the end of the week, the officers who beat Mose Willett to death were suspended for ninety days, seemingly ending the story.

But six years later, the moment after that black-and-chrome Chevy pickup had taken one run at the police station and Sergeant Ed Baker ran outside with his flashlight, the men in the truck didn't see Baker at all. They saw Mose Willett caught in a thunderstorm of nightsticks and Sergeant Baker as one of the policemen who had killed him, even though he wasn't.

"Baker, he's out there with a flashlight. This was the second run," Johnny Boone said later. "We went through the first time and come back, and [two of us] thought, `Better not go through there,' and the driver said, `Yeah, we're going through there. We need to tidy it up a little.'

"Baker thought sure we'd stop and be good humans, so he's out there like a man on an old-time train caboose waving that light, standing between the building door of the police station and the police cars.

"`He ain't doing that, is he?Johnny Boone said, re-creating the dialog from inside the truck.

"`Yeah, he's standing there with that light.'

"`Motherfucker better move."'

The front door of the police station was recessed about three feet off the sidewalk, making a brick entryway protected from the elements. As the black pickup roared toward him, Sergeant Ed Baker dove into that doorway, barely avoiding the oncoming truck.

"It's like a movie-Rambo or something," Johnny Boone recalled. "He's diving across the walkway as best he can as a train is coming right up through there. What in the hell is he trying to do?"

The truck had barely missed Baker, clipping the corner of the brick entryway instead, crushing a few bricks and knocking the mortar loose. After the truck bounced back onto the street, it peeled off heading southbound on Proctor Knott Avenue in the direction of the city park. Baker and other policemen shook off their shock, raced to their cruisers and gave chase in a high-speed pursuit.

But why? Why would a group of Cornbread types antagonize the police by attacking police headquarters with a pickup? And why in March? March is a down month in the growing season. Before the days of indoor growth operations, not a lot of farming activity happened in March, and all the product harvested in October of the previous year had been sold by February.

Maybe March was a time when large amounts of imported marijuana came into the area to be sold to Marion County's growing customer base. If so, perhaps those driving the product into Marion County from whoknows-where wanted insurance that no police officer would pull them over, and it just might be that the Black Bandit was just an aggressive decoy to keep the local policemen busy while something else traveled on the road.

"I can tell you," Johnny Boone later said cryptically, "that it is a possibility that this was an absolute necessity in that context."

In order to achieve whatever mystery goal he and his cohorts had, Johnny Boone had volunteered the black Chevy half-ton pickup for the job.

"Nineteen seventy-nine black half-ton S-10, Chevy," Johnny Boone recalled. "Seemed like they always run forever even when you try to tear em up. And it come off a car lot ... had about fifteen thousand miles on it. It was the nicest damn truck. Everybody that rode in it or worked in it, or somebody would drive it down to Tennessee or something, they'd say, `Damn, that's a hell of a nice truck.'

"It would jump through fence lines, go down into hollers with the lights off. They weren't the first police who couldn't find that truck when they was looking for it. That's why we took it that night. We already knowed what that truck could do, but we never dreamed that the night would go on and on and on. The driver decided we needed some contact."

After its second run at the police station, the black truck bounded around the city park, up the hill on Country Club Drive, past Golf View Terrace and then right onto Old Calvary Road, where, to the police cars in hot pursuit, the truck seemed to vanish.

When he turned onto Old Calvary Road, and before the cops had made the same turn behind him, the driver turned off the black truck's headlights and pulled a hairpin turn into the unlit entrance of the Lebanon Country Club, surrounded by its nine-hole golf course. While the cops raced by with their red-and-blue lights blaring toward Calvary, the invisible truck cut donuts in the fairways with its lights off.

If the driver saw a row of shrubbery he didn't like, he took it out. The two passengers held on tight as the truck bounced through a sand trap and then slammed head-on into a telephone pole, which snapped in half about three feet from the ground.

"Ran over that goddamn pole," Johnny Boone recalled. "And listen, I'm telling you that truck was built to take most things and keep going. It needed to [for] what it was used for. That son of a bitch hit that poleand that was a good pole, just like that one right down there-it hit that motherfucker and hardly stopped. Top part went over top the truck, stub pushed over. I mean a big pole now. This truck was made to try to keep going if it had to, and it just went on through there."

The bandits hadn't noticed yet, but when they snapped that utility pole, they cut power to half the county as they continued to tear the hell out of the golf course.

"For some reason the driver could see the greens come up, and they were really perfect," Boone said. "So, he just went right down through the middle of them sons of bitches."

A half-hour later, after losing the truck's trail completely, the police began to conduct a systematic search of the area in the power-outage darkness, when Jody Greenwell, a Kentucky State Police detective, called into the station from his house in Loretto, on the opposite side of the county. He knew the truck's location-it had just left his front yard!

Detective Greenwell was at home, his gray KSP cruiser parked in his driveway, when he heard a Road Runner-like "beep beep" come from outside.

"They get in front of Jody Greenwell's house," Steve Lowery recalled. "They do the Road Runner deal again."

Greenwell looked out his front door and saw the black Chevy halfton pickup revving its engine in his driveway. Inside the truck, Johnny Boone didn't want to ram Greenwell's cruiser, but after all that had come before so far that evening, it seemed at that moment to be inevitable.

So, Greenwell watched as the black truck popped into gear, rammed into the rear end of his cruiser and pushed it into the garage with the garage door down. Greenwell ran in to call the police, and when he did, the black truck disappeared again.

The day after the truck rampage, the police came to see Johnny Boone at his house on Bloomfield Road on the other side of Springfield, where he lived with his wife and kids in a one-story brick ranch house on the top of a hill. Along his driveway, Boone had staked rottweilers every twenty feet with about ten feet of leash, giving each one the chance to chew the tires off any car that climbed up toward his house. Boone's television antenna, which reached into the sky from behind his house, had been decorated with a cow skull in each ladderlike rung-an ominous sight and effective deterrent against unwanted visitors.

Once the officers made it to Boone's door, they told him they were looking for the black truck in which they had seen him the night before. Johnny Boone told them he didn't know what they were talking about.

"I'm just an old man with a bunch of kids to feed," Boone said. "If you don't have a way for me to make some money, I'm not going to talk to you about shit."

"Well, we're going to lock you up then," one of the policemen told him.

"I don't give a fuck about all that, let's go," Boone said, grinning under his beard. "Sooner in, sooner out. Who gives a fuck?"

At the jail in Lebanon, Boone bumped into J. C. Abell and the third accused man, Selix Thomas. They had been arrested on similar charges. While the three men were in the jail, phone calls started flooding the police station, each caller claiming to be the "Black Bandit," but none could verify details of the black truck's wild ride. The three accused bandits stayed in the jail Sunday night for a bond hearing Monday morning.

Meanwhile, at the Lebanon Enterprise office next door to the police station, editor Steve Lowery raced to get the story into the paper on deadline, cramming it onto the front page above the newspaper's masthead with the headline, "Bandits!"

"The score is now Smokeys three. Bandits nothing,"said Sam Deacon, Lebanon's police chief, after Boone, Thomas and Abell had been arrested.

"We heard on the C.B. about the Dukes of Hazzard and Smokey and the Bandit. People called us claiming to be the `Black Bandit,' but they were all cranks," Deacon said. "It's the most exciting thing that's happened in Lebanon in weeks."

At the bond hearing on Monday, Johnny Boone saw state police Detective Jody Greenwell, dressed smartly in a suit and busying himself about the courtroom-talking to the defense lawyers, then to the prosecutor and then to the judge. Boone could see the anger in Greenwell's face. After all, he had been personally disrespected, and the main symbol of his authority-his police cruiser-had been treated poorly when the black truck pushed it through his garage door.

"It made Jody so mad.... Somebody rammed his car sitting in his driveway, pushed it into his garage door, and he didn't catch him and he's in the house, and then the truck took off," Boone recalled, laughing at the memory. "It made him look bad. I didn't want to.... We get along good now when I see him, but I know he wanted to beat the hell out of me back then."

In the courtroom, Greenwell certainly wanted to get even, to reassert himself as a symbol of law and order. But there was one problem: The truck had disappeared. Searches of the three men's farms had failed to locate the 1979 black Chevrolet half-ton pickup.

As the court proceeding dragged on and on, as if someone were waiting for someone else to run in and say he'd just found the truck, the city attorney asked the defendants if they were in the habit of driving around at night together.

"With these two?" J. C. Abell shot back. "You think I'm going to ride around with these sons of bitches? Every truck they got is tore up. I don't want to ride with them. They'll get somebody killed. They don't know how to drive. I wasn't driving. You got the wrong people."

J. C. Abell knew that the charges filed against them-wanton endangerment, criminal mischief and leaving the scene of an never stand up in trial unless the prosecution could connect these men to the hell-raising truck, and he also knew that the truck the police were looking for, a 1979 black Chevy, had been chopped with a torch hours before the police arrested him. The three men each posted $7,500 bond and walked away, leaving the cops in the courtroom steaming.

The next week a Lebanon policeman found Johnny Boone at the Springfield car wash. The cruiser pulled into the lot but wouldn't get close to Boone.

"Come on up here," Boone said.

The officer got out of his cruiser but still wouldn't get too close.

"We just want the truck," the policeman shouted across the parking lot.

"I told you a hundred fuckin' times, I don't know what you're talking about," Boone told him.

"We seen it! We seen you in it!"

"Then how come you ain't got the son of a bitch?" Boone asked him. "You're making me wonder now."

"Come on, now," the policeman said. "Make it easy on yourself."

"I am making it easy on myself," Boone replied. "You see me having any problems?"

Without the truck, the state dropped the case. Sergeant Ed Baker, after his near-death experience with the Black Bandit, decided he had seen enough of Lebanon's nightlife. In less than a year, he moved to Louisville to work for the US Marshals Service.

"This is where this story is going," Steve Lowery later said. "What that did, that pissed the state police [Boone and others] were making all their money off of dope. And the police had not really been on their case until [the Black Bandit incident]. But that's when the war started. That's the most defining moment that happened, in my view.

"Up to that point, it wasn't uncommon to see state police sit down at old Bickett's before it burned down. It wasn't uncommon to see them drinking a beer with everybody else. They were not in collusion, either. I don't think."

Five months after Johnny Boone's Black Bandit ride, the Kentucky State Police introduced a new weapon in this new Bluegrass marijuana war: the eye in the sky. KSP's single-engine airplane had never been able to fly low enough or slow enough to spot a marijuana field. The state police needed a helicopter, like they had used back in 1976 to spot Paul Stiles's crop after receiving a tip. In developing a response to the unique threat to law and order posed by Marion County, the Kentucky State Police were among the first police forces in the country to employ helicopters in the hunt.

On the morning of August 5, 1980, two Kentucky State Police detectives drove to Louisville to meet a helicopter pilot for the Jefferson County Police. They pointed him in the direction they knew would be the most lucrative marijuana hunting in all of Kentucky: Marion County.

At 11:45 a.m., the detectives in the air spotted a half-acre of marijuana on the farm of Larry Jones outside Loretto, a hamlet of two thousand souls anchored on one end by Maker's Mark distillery and by the Sisters of Loretto Motherhouse on the other-both landmarks simultaneously visible from the police helicopter. And there sat a pot patch in between.

At 12:30 p.m., the detectives spotted another half-acre in a cornfield on the Stiles farm outside of Raywick. With Charlie Stiles dead for nearly a decade, and his brother Paul having died in 1979, the family farm had been left to Paul's surviving son, Johnny. Here he was, carrying on the family tradition. After spotting this second patch, the detectives guided the pilot to a landing spot and continued the investigation on the ground.

At 2:20 p.m., the detectives drove to the farm in Loretto, advised the farmer that they had observed a marijuana patch on his property and led him back to it, across a soybean field into a horseshoe-shaped patch of woods. As they walked, the detectives noticed a path that had been worn into the earth, leading out of the soybean field into the woods, down over a bank and into a clearing, where they found the marijuana. As the farmer watched, one of the detectives hopped onto the landowner's tractor and bush-hogged the patch until it was gone.

At 7:34 that evening, with the sun still hanging above the Muldraugh's Hill escarpment that formed the southwest boundary of Marion County, the two detectives pulled off Highway 527 onto the gravel drive marked by a green road sign that read PAUL STILES Co. ROAD. Before they could drive the length of the long farm driveway, Johnny Stiles, Paul's twentyeight-year-old son, drove out to meet them.

Stiles tried to call off the heat. He said that the sheriff had already come and cut up the acre of pot they were looking for, trying to talk his way out of it. But the detectives explained that they weren't after that old patch; they'd located a half-acre of pot in his cornfield about twelve rows into the corn. Stiles knew the gig was up, so he volunteered to bush-hog it himself, working a half-hour past the sunset at 8:45.

Three days later, August 8, the detectives hopped back into the helicopter, circling Marion County. At 12:45 p.m., they spotted another acre of marijuana growing on another farm in Loretto that belonged to a Hayden, a descendant of Basil.

The detectives then drove out to that farm at 2:20 p.m. There they found a trail leading from the right side of the house directly to the cornfield that had concealed the marijuana. As they neared the pot patch, the detectives observed a flatbed wagon piled full of marijuana that had been pulled out by the roots, as if in a hurry. Continuing down the lane, the detectives saw that in the ninety-five minutes since they'd spotted it, the marijuana patch had been harvested.

Looking closer, the detectives found a tent that was pitched on the edge of the woods and that had a clear view of the pot patch. They recorded what they found in and around the tent: a lawn chair, water jugs, a hoe, a shovel, an ax, a Coleman heater and a bed with blankets. They collected a sample of the marijuana from the wagon at 4:39 p.m. and returned to the farmhouse, where they saw an International Loadstar 1600 truck with a covered trailer.

The next Monday, August 11, the helicopter went back to work in Marion County, spotting at 11:45 a.m. five acres in a cornfield on top of Muldraugh's Hill, the escarpment, near a little community called Finley.

That night, it came a hard rain.

The following Tuesday, the detectives drove up the escarpment to Finley, where they met the farmer driving a four-wheel-drive pickup. The detectives identified themselves and drove back into his farm, only to discover that someone had harvested most of the marijuana. Muddy tire tracks criss-crossed the ground. The detectives took pictures of the scene and collected samples of what remained of the five-acre pot patch.

Within a week, Kentucky State Police, aided by Jefferson County's helicopter, found and destroyed more than forty-five acres of marijuana in Marion County, mostly near the remote Catholic hamlets of Loretto, Holy Cross, Raywick, St. Joe and Calvary. In neighboring Washington County, Johnny Boone's neck of the woods, they found another twenty acres on a single Sunday. The following week, the Lebanon Enterprise reported the next aggressive move in KSP's escalating battle with Raywick. The growers caught in the August sweep would face federal charges, the first marijuana farmers in Kentucky history to do so.

"It's the first time that I've ever tried it," Detective Jody Greenwell told the Enterprise. "And I've never heard of any other officers trying it."

Detective Greenwell had finally taken the upper hand following the Black Bandit incident of six months before by using the one-two punch of helicopter enforcement and federal charges. Under state law in 1980, marijuana cultivation in Kentucky was still a misdemeanor. Taking six Marion County men (including the nephew of Charlie Stiles) to federal court, KSP detectives hoped to lock up those growers for the maximum felony penalty under federal law: five years with a $5,000 fine.

While those half-dozen cases waited for their court dates, the detectives were back at work preparing more. On September 13, 1980, a detective found marijuana growing in thirteen acres of corn. Staking out the farm, the lawman found no traffic coming or going. He tried to get a search warrant for the farmhouse but was denied. Permitted to search only the field, he found the illegal plants growing in the corn. Some of the marijuana stalks had been cut at four feet, their tops already harvested, and the marijuana left in the field had "suckered out."

The detective noted that the field had been driven upon and that marijuana had been harvested from all sides. The field itself had lots of ragweed and Johnson grass in it, a sign of neglect, and the paths leading through the center of the field were well-worn. The marijuana had been stripped in one corner of the field and placed in plastic bags. Inspecting the bags of pot and the condition of the ground beneath them, the detective estimated they'd been there several days. Over half the thirteen-acre field, he estimated, had marijuana in it.

When the farmer heard that state police had taken a federal indictment out on him, he drove to Louisville and voluntarily surrendered himself to US Marshal Ed Baker, formerly of the Lebanon Police Department-the easiest arrest of a Marion County man that Baker ever made.

While nine Marion County men faced charges in federal court in Louisville, Lebanon and its surrounding farming communities faced the toughest economic climate since Prohibition. By the end of 1980, Marion County's unemployment rate ticked up to 11.5 percent, the highest in a ten-county region. After layoffs at the GE Appliance Park in Louisville and the bourbon cooperage in Lebanon, Marion County saw the largest number of food stamp applications, 973, in its history.

As Christmas neared, the economic outlook for Marion County remained bleak. On Christmas Eve, no fewer than four dozen people huddled in the circuit courtroom to sign up for unemployment checks. Ninie Glasscock, a reporter for the Lebanon Enterprise, spent part of her Christmas Eve with them.

"I got four kids, all of'em little," a Lebanon man said on the condition he remain anonymous. "I ain't worked since July. I've tried everywhere I know, but nobody's hiring, and I got bills to pay. And it hurts, you know, not to be able to do for your little ones on Christmas.

"We went out and cut us down a tree, and it's all decorated pretty. And I've tried to tell the kids that this Christmas won't be like some others we've had. But they're little, and three of them still believe in Santa Claus. They tell me, `Santa ain't been out of work, Daddy."'

The man stood silent for a moment.

"It's hard," he said quietly. "It's real hard."

Another Lebanon man said that he had two small children and that the bourbon cooperage had laid him off five months ago.

"When I got laid off this last time, I said to myself that even if the bills have to wait the kids'll get Christmas," he said. "Kids aren't little but once."

A mother of seven was laid off a week before Christmas.

"This Christmas won't be like it would have been cause money's short," she said. "And we've had a lot of sickness in the family. My husband's had three heart attacks, and I've got a grandson that was struck by lightning. We lost our house in a fire last year, and it takes a lot to build back.

"Instead of being in the courthouse, I could be out trying to get in the Christmas spirit, but we don't even have a Christmas tree this year. We're more fortunate than some," she added. "A lot don't have anything at all."

The Bicketts had once had their share of modest Christmases in Raywick, back when Coletta still made the clothes for all nine of her children, with as many as four in cloth diapers at the same time, when Charlie Stiles used to dress up like Santa Claus and give the Bickett children toys as he made his rounds through Raywick. But 1980 wasn't a lean Christmas in Raywick. The town of two hundred had struck it rich like a California gold rush boomtown. Corvettes had begun to replace pickups in the parking lot outside Bickett's Pool Hall and the Fifth Wheel.

To Jimmy Bickett, those people at the courthouse waiting for someone to offer them jobs were lost sheep. They didn't get it; there was no point waiting in a line for a job that wasn't there. The Bicketts had taken to heart the lessons of self-reliance their elders had learned during Prohibition by adapting to the times with an entrepreneurial spirit. Combining their community's knowledge of farming and bootlegging, the Bicketts were engaged in the freest of free enterprise without taking a dime from the government.

Despite the loss of forty-five acres of marijuana during the 1980 season, Marion County growers had diversified their holdings sufficiently to bring enough product to market through a system that had been going strong, uninterrupted for nearly a decade by the end of 1980. Some had begun to operate as though they might never be caught.

A week after Christmas, on New Year's Eve 1980, federal agents served a search warrant to a house on the Bickett farm, where Jimmy and Joe Keith lived, and found 150 pounds of homegrown marijuana therethe home that Garland Russell had used as a hideout the previous year.

The government indicted the Bickett brothers on March 18, 1981, and tried them three months later. The evidence: sixteen garbage bags filled with homegrown marijuana, about 150 pounds. For their legal defense, the Bickett brothers retained the legendary Frank Haddad with Elmer George as co-counsel.

The jury found Joe Keith guilty with the intent to distribute and Jimmy guilty of simple possession, a lesser charge, but Judge Thomas Ballantine made a mistake, accidentally sending evidence back to the jury room that he had previously ruled inadmissible-a sifter with cocaine residue and three bottles of amphetamines. Haddad and the prosecutor approached the bench to discuss the error with the judge, and Elmer George looked over his shoulder and winked at Jimmy Bickett.

Because of his own error Judge Ballantine declared a mistrial-a classic example of Frank Haddad's magical touch with the judges, a special relationship gained from years of courting the class of black-robed men, including once when he defended a judge accused of holding a police officer as someone else punched him during a barroom brawl. Against seemingly irrefutable eyewitness accounts, Haddad managed to win an acquittal for the judge. Although he didn't win an acquittal for the Bicketts, Haddad had managed to force the government to prosecute them a second time.

Before the Bicketts'second trial, Frank Haddad worked to get Jimmy dropped from the indictment altogether by arguing that Jimmy didn't live in the house where the police found the marijuana. Jimmy lived in the poker house, Haddad said, and he could prove it.

The Bicketts owned several houses within a mile of each other. In addition to the two-story house in downtown Raywick, where Coletta and Squire raised enough children to field their own baseball team, the Bickett farm, just down the road, had at least three houses on it, including two old log cabins, a couple of house trailers and an aluminum-sided farmhouse, where the 150 pounds of homegrown had been found in December. And lastly, near where the Bickett family property adjoined Raywick's city limits, behind the firehouse, sat the poker house.

The Bicketts' poker house was the latest incarnation of the nonstop high-stakes craps and stud-poker games that had sent Cadillac-driving high-rollers hitchhiking home from Raywick since the 1950s. In the Bicketts' poker house, Jimmy played seven-card stud, and Joe Keith faded at the craps table. During harvest time, growers with money bursting from their pockets couldn't find ways to spend the cash fast enough. There weren't many places where someone could spend $25,000 in one night, so during the harvest season, the poker game ran nonstop. Jimmy practically lived there because he never stopped dealing and playing poker.

To prove that claim, Haddad called a string of witnesses to the stand: the mailman, the utilities man and the Western Kentucky Gas Co. manall of whom testified that Jimmy Bickett lived in the poker house. The court dropped Jimmy from the indictment, leaving Joe Keith to stand trial a second time alone.

In January 1982, more than a year after the initial bust, a jury returned a second guilty verdict on Joe Keith, but Frank Haddad again approached the bench and asked the judge, "Guilty of what?"

The jury, Haddad argued, was supposed to find Bickett either not guilty, guilty of possession with the intent to distribute or guilty of simple possession. Because the jury did not make a clear distinction on the form, simply returning a verdict of guilty without identifying the charge, US District Judge Thomas Ballantine declared a second mistrial.

"While we do not relish the prospect of a third trial," Ballantine wrote, "this court made a mistake."

Before a third trial could commence, in early August 1982, Joe Keith Bickett pleaded guilty to possession with the intent to distribute, was fined $15,000 and sentenced to five years' probation, becoming the fifth Marion County man to plead guilty in federal court so far that year. The two mistrials had cost the government $100,000 by its own estimate, and Joe Keith Bickett walked away.

As the Bicketts fended off the federal charges against them, work in Marion County continued to produce more pot, and more pot of greater quality in order to make its value worth the actual labor involved. In this time period, the early 1980s before President Ronald Reagan really came down hard on marijuana, Marion County operated at a high level, with growing crews multiplying across the county, largely independent of one another and made up of brothers and cousins, who had learned the ropes during the previous growing season from someone's uncle or classmate. And Johnny Boone continued to engineer a superior breed of marijuana as Mr. X dropped by intermittently.

"He brought us some Russian," Johnny Boone recalled, "and it took us four years, and he kept saying, `It is the best, and it will do the best, and it won't get very tall."'

After he visited Johnny Boone, Mr. X would go see Jimmy Bickett.

"I remember he brought up that great big seed," Jimmy Bickett recalled. "And he would say, `This is what you boys ought to grow up here.' ... And that pot would get real mature."

Until 1981, the DEA office in Louisville focused on interdicting largescale smuggling operations, schemes that used planes as big as DC-3s and DC-4s, but on September 11, 1981, the state police enlisted the help of the DEA to take down a pot farm bigger than any airplane, in what would become the most valuable marijuana raid in Kentucky's historyup to that point. The location: eastern Marion County, near Bradfordsville, where Johnny Boone, Bobby Joe Shewmaker, the Bickett boys and others had pooled their resources to grow a dense, potent patch not far from where Garland Russell had grown patches since the early 1970s. But instead of growing on the riverbanks where any hunter could stumble upon its secret, the growers' co-op used backhoes and bulldozers to carve out a section of knob land that no one could see from the road or discover by accident. In this patch, the collected Marion County growers nursed a crop of perfect sinsemilla of Russian origin. With less than two weeks before the autumnal equinox, the female marijuana plants were beginning to redouble their resin-producing efforts to try to get themselves pollinated before the frost. These superplants in this patch, the growers figured, were safe from anything but a helicopter.

But instead of a helicopter, the state police used a high-performance, single-engine airplane with a V-shaped tail lent to them from DEA. The unusual tail design allowed the plane to dip below the tree line, scan a crop closely and then pull up just in time to avoid slamming into the wall of trees at the end of a field.' V-tailed airplane style, popular for a while with recreational pilots because of its maneuverability, lost its appeal once it acquired the nickname as the "Doctor-Lawyer Killer" for self-explanatory reasons.

When Johnny Boone first saw that V-tailed plane swoop over the field early that morning, he knew it was time to go. As much as Boone hated to see that V-tailed plane, he couldn't help but to stop running for a minute to watch it dive in and out of the field with aerial agility like he had never seen before, flying below the tree line and then pulling up at the last second. Boone hated to see that plane, but he respected a strong thing when he saw it, and that V-tailed plane was something else.

When the plane disappeared, the growers knew it wouldn't be long before the cavalry arrived, so they grabbed as much of the not-quitemature sinsemilla as they could load into every pickup truck on-site, and then they got the hell out of there.

When the V-tailed plane landed at the Lebanon/Springfield Airport about ten miles away, a raiding party of seven heavily armed state police narcotics agents, troopers and detectives set out on its search-and-destroy mission, double-timing it to Bradfordsville. But when the officers got there, they couldn't find any road going back to the patch. They looked for two hours. Finally they gave up and decided to go to where they knew they could find some marijuana to bust: Raywick.

Raywick was about twenty miles from Bradfordsville for the state police pot squad, but maybe only ten miles as the V-tailed plane flies. Just to the north of Raywick at 5:45 p.m., the state police found and destroyed three acres of marijuana in two different cornfields, about three thousand plants in all. A half-hour later, they discovered another three-quarters of an acre on the other side of Raywick on Hazy Downs Road. At 7:30, police found another four thousand plants on Hawk Mattingly's farm on Clell Mattingly Road. All the evening's marijuana had been spotted from the air by the V-tailed plane.

When the growers realized that the cops were making busts in Raywick, they returned to the Bradfordsville patch to grab as many pickup truckloads as they could while the state police were on the other side of the county. When word spread, anyone with a truck who wanted to make a year's salary in one day drove out to Bradfordsville. A full-scale free-pot bonanza ensued. Each truckload could be worth $30,000.

After cleaning out Raywick for three or four hours, the state police returned to Bradfordsville well after dark, where they gave up on trying to find the road themselves and started knocking on doors until just before midnight, when a compliant neighbor finally showed them the entryway to the rough-cut road, which led to the backside of the knob and six acres of Russian Bluegrass-worth at least $12 million.

As the policemen entered the patch from one side, Johnny Boone and other growers loaded up a last round of pickup trucks full of plants and disappeared out the other side-there had been two roads back to the patch, and the police couldn't find either of them.' detectives spotted two trucks in the act, but they couldn't do anything about it because the trucks were too far away, and it was too damned dark.

It was unusually brazen-even by Marion County standards-to load a pickup truck full of pot within eyesight of an incoming raiding party, but the male plants had already been cut out, and the females had already begun to bud into the highly potent strand of Kentucky sinsemilla that Johnny Boone had perfected through years of selective breeding. It was worth the risk.

One of the trucks, its bed loaded with marijuana plants with stalks two inches thick, got stuck on the freshly bulldozed road. Even with the four-wheel drive engaged, it still spun mud. With the police closing in, everyone in the vehicle fled on foot, and the owner of the truck promptly reported it stolen. Unable to chase the fleeing pickups, the state police narcotics agents camped out overnight, guarding the crop with automatic weapons so they could chop it down Friday morning with a state highway mowing crew.

"This is just an unbelievable sight," a trooper told the the next morning.

"And we may never see another patch like this one again," a narcotics officer added. "This is very high-quality pot."

The Bradfordsville patch was the tenth destroyed in Marion County so far in 1981 by the state police, a number higher than that in any other county in Kentucky and accounting for more than one-third of the thirty- two acres of marijuana destroyed by KSP statewide.

"This is some absolutely dynamite pot here,"a detective told the Courier- journal as he displayed a plant six feet tall and three feet in diameter.

As usual, when the Kentucky State Police rang the marijuana bell in Marion County, news editors in Louisville salivated. On Friday morning Marion County became a media-rich war zone as camouflage-clad policemen directed the landing of a television station helicopter from Louisville, while other photographers circled overhead in airplanes like buzzards. When a television reporter and cameraman tried to set up a live shot on Hazy Downs Road in Raywick, a tenant farmer pulled a pistol on them. The action news team retreated to its van, which made a slow escape like a wounded elephant, the pistol-packing farmer laughing in its rearview mirror.

"When I started working in Lebanon [it] was 1979," Steve Lowery recalled later, referring to his job as the editor of the Lebanon Enterprise, "it was still a misdemeanor to grow marijuana. It was nothing. It was being grown like tobacco. I could remember some busts where I went out, there would be twenty acres, like Christmas trees. I have pictures of them."

Lowery soon adopted Marion County as his new home, along with his wife, Susan, a back-to-the-lander hippie who had found Kentucky on her own, looking for a place to raise animals and grow an organic garden. Steve and Susan made a home for themselves on Sally Ray Pike, a small farm lane that backs up against the Bickett property on the outskirts of Raywick, where the Lowerys raised a pair of twin daughters. On his time off, Lowery liked to belly up to the bar at Squire's Tavern, and soon he started bringing a few other reporters around with him.

"They just hung out here, Steve [Lowery] and Al Cross," remembered Charlie Bickett. "We had a lot of people, what do you call'em, correspondents? They was always hanging out. Raywick was the spot where you hear about a lot of interesting things.

"Steve Lowery-me, him and Daddy got to be the best of friends. And Al Cross came into the picture through Steve. They were both writing and sharing information and this and that, and they hung out at the bar. Seemed like marijuana was the big story back then. Anytime anybody got busted they were there, of course, but they were just doing their jobs, I reckon....

"Steve and me was always big friends.... Steve was always involved in Raywick activities. You know, he loved Raywick. He brought his two daughters down. They were twins. They weren't two years old, and he put them on the bar, buy em suckers and this and that. Oh, he loved those two girls. I don't think his wife loved it too much."

Although Steve Lowery was born and raised in Michigan, he learned how to operate in Marion County, dealing with the lawmen and the outlaws.

"When I started [at the Lebanon Enterprise], the state police, they did not want to pop people," Lowery recalled. "I had an understanding with the state police: If I'm working a story with you, then that's what's going in the paper. And if I was down in Raywick at the bar and people were talking, I'm not working. So what goes on in the bar stays in the bar.

"I told both sides that. I said, `I'm not going to work both sides against each other. I'm not going to tip anybody off to anything.'

"I told the guys in Raywick, `If you get popped, you go on the front page. That's all there is to it. But on the other hand, I'm not going to run around to see you get popped.'

"So, the state police trusted me. This is why I got to do the stuff I did. And the people down in Marion County trusted me. They knew I wasn't going to turn them out. They knew I wasn't going to cover for them, either, but they knew I wasn't going to turn them out."

Therefore, Steve Lowery was often the first photographer the state police called after a bust, and Lowery would be right on the scene, snapping away with a manual-action Canon, shooting with Kodak T-Max 400 black-and-white film. The police even played to Lowery's lens and choreographed shots of a helicopter landing in a cornfield. Lowery was happy to play to what he perceived to be the policemen's ego because when they weren't looking, Lowery was loading up his camera bag with buds that no one would ever miss.

Once, approaching a bust site, he must have arrived a few hours after the police had started chopping down the crop because it was clear from the road Lowery was driving down that the police had already taken a load out; there were leaves and bits of plants all over the road. Then Lowery hit the brakes-

In the middle of the road was a marijuana bud at least a foot long.

Lowery couldn't believe it. He hopped out, grabbed the bud, tossed it under the driver's seat and continued to the site of the bust. Over the many years of busting pot crops, the busts acquired some of the characteristics of a social event, with policemen and deputies and different sorts of people coming and going. It just so happened this particular time that the last two men at the scene were Lowery and the sheriff. A deputy had left in the sheriff's squad car. So, the sheriff asked Lowery for a ride.

Sure, Lowery said.

The whole ride back into Lebanon, the musky scent of that foot-long bud under the seat made the car reek like a family of skunks.

"That smell sure stays on you, doesn't it?" Lowery offered to the sheriff, as they both rolled down their windows. Lowery was sweating bullets, but the sheriff never said a word.

Steve Lowery's photographs remain superlative examples of the reporting of the day. However just like all the other pot-related stories coming out of the statewide media, Lowery's reports and photographs were reacting to police action; Lowery just happened to have a front-row seat. Al Cross, the reporter for the wanted to go deeper, to look into the world of pot cultivation proactively, so he pitched a long-form story to his editors in September 1981 and reported it for a solid month.

At the end of October 1981, the peak of harvest season, the Courierjournal ran Cross's reporting in a three-part front-page series with datelines from Lebanon, Raywick and Frankfort, the state capital-a lot of ink and newsprint that stirred the pot-growing community into a simmer.

"I knew we needed to do something greater with it because you kept getting these stories about bigger and bigger fields and about more numerous fields being found," Al Cross said thirty years after the series ran. "I knew when I moved to Bardstown in '79 that there was a marijuana industry within the state ... but it wasn't too long before I became aware that Marion County was really a hotbed of it."

From part one of his series, which ran on Sunday, October 18, 1981:

LEBANON, Ky.-When it was called hemp, and was legal, Kentucky led the nation in producing it.

Now that it's called mar~iuana and is a high stakes but short-odds gamble for the people who grow it illegally, Kentucky is again a leading producer, officials say ...

"`High stakes but short-odds,'that's a good line," said Cross, rereading his decades-old work.

Each of these stories ran on page Al of the with a full page of newsprint after the jump with photos, maps and sidebars, also written by Cross.

"That was fairly typical for the in those days," Cross recalled. "There was an expectation that if you wanted to move up, then you needed to produce stuff like this.... I didn't really feel like I needed to move up, but I did want to prove that I belonged....

"This was an ideal project for me to propose because I had gotten to know people at the grassroots, no pun intended, and that's the kind of reporting that I really like to do. I like to deal with plain folk out in the country and seeing what I can find out, and that was how I approached this one. I had to work at it a little bit to find growers willing to talk with you, but all it took was time, really."

From part two of Cross's 1981 series, which ran on Monday, October 19:

RAYWICK, Ky.-In step with the march offrost and of the fall colors, dozens of mar~uana buyers are moving south through Kentucky this month, looking for the best of this year's illicit crop.

That's the report from several pot growers in Central Kentucky, which appears to have become one of the major sources of domestic marjuana in the United States.

This story is based partly on interviews with people who said they grow mar~juana, or he p to sell or harvest it. They agreed to be interviewed on the condition that they not be named...

"Finding a market is especially hard for novices, "said one grower, adding that he and others have been approached by poor `straight' farmers" wanting to sell marijuana that they said was grown "by a friend."It was obvious that the farmers grew the pot themselves, he said.

Because mar~uana is harder to move this year, one grower said, many producers are fronting" lots of2O to 30 pounds-instead of the usual 50- to lots-to people who make connections with buyers in cities, and pay the growers after the lots have been sold.

He said many of the "traveling salesmen" are partners in the cultivation of crops. He said few large crops are raised by people working alone, because raising high-quality marjuana requires quite a bit of labor...

Some buyers from the western United States say they can handle 1,000 to 2,000 pounds of mar~uana a week during the harvest season, the grower said...

Yet another grower said he has been supporting himself for seven years by cultivating a small crop ofhigh-quality marjuana each year... .

Mar~uana money isn't tainted for some people in Central Kentucky, who argue that it bolsters a depressed agricultural economy.

It's better to keep mar~iuana money at home than to send it to Colombia or to the smuggling rings of Florida, said Charles Bickett, mayor ofRaywick, a village in western Marion County.

State police have found several marijuana crops near Raywick. Two of Bickett's brothers have been charged with growing pot, and Bickett's bar has sold baseball-type caps boasting, "Marion County homegrown-the best-1981. "

Bickett's attitude resembles that of oficials in Humboldt County, Calif., who two years ago rejected a federalgrant aimed at curbing the area's multimillion-dollar pot industry.

Reporting on illegal activity is tricky business, as newshounds for the Courier ,journal were all too aware, given that the limits of press freedom were defined by the 1972 Supreme Court case Branzburg v. Hayes, a case involving a Courier-journal reporter, Paul Branzburg, who wrote a series on marijuana growing in Kentucky.

"I did my best to avoid witnessing any felonies," Cross remembered. "I think going into it, I probably said that very thing, you know: `I'm going to have to go out and talk to people out in the field, and I may witness some misdemeanors, but I will do my best to avoid witnessing any felonies,'because that was indeed the issue in Branzburg....

"As it turns out, I did witness a felony or two-by pure inadvertence, you know? When a guy pulls down five pounds of marijuana from the rafter [in the ceiling], you know, you just witnessed a felony."

But that moment didn't make it into the paper?

"No, of course not."

Did that happen in Squire's Tavern?

"I don't want to tell you where it was, but you could probably guess."

The last of Cross's three-part series, datelined from Frankfort on October 20, focused on what would be only a temporary problem, the relatively lax nature of Kentucky's state laws concerning marijuana:

Under Kentucky law, sale or manufacture of mar~uana is a misdemeanor,punishable on first offense by up to a year in a county jail and a maximum fine of $500. The only other states where the maximum penalty for growing pot is a year or less are Alaska, Hawaii, Kansas, Maine, New York, South Dakota, Virginia and Wyoming.... Kentucky, Kansas and Wyoming make no distinction between large and small growers, as do most states....

A bill pre-filed by a Kentucky legislative committee would make growing any amount of marjuana a felony punishable by one to five years in prison and a fine of $3, 000 to $5,000. The bill would establish a presumption, however, that anyone growing less than 25 marjuana plants was doing so for personal use. Prosecutors would have to prove otherwise to make the felony penalties apply....

But some people think convictions, st~er laws and regulatory action will do nothing to achieve the ultimate goal of mar~iuana laws-decreased use of the drug.

"7here's nothing they can do to change it. If it's notgrown here, it'll be shipped in here, "said one man who said he has grown marijuana.

Another grower said federal convictions might discourage some growers, but he added, "Iftimesget rougher, it might not stop them

The Courier-journal had plenty of home subscribers in Marion County, and they all read Cross's work. Few were happy with the bringing more attention to Marion County's flexible interpretation of the law, but Cross's first thought after his series ran was to return to the scene of the crime.

"Alvin was living in Bardstown," Lowery recalled, referring to Cross, "but he stayed in my house more than he was in Bardstown because it was such a big story.

"He says, `Steve, I want you to do [me] a favor.'

"I said, `What is it?'

"`I want you to go down to Bicketts with me.'

"This is after he ran that whole series on pot.

"I said, `OK, I'll go with you.'

"We went in. At the back of the bar, the biggest dope guys in three counties. They recognize Alvin immediately. They recognize me, too.

"Charlie [Bickett] said, `Sit down and I'll get you a beer and don't worry about it.'

"Anyway, they were sitting back there, and Alvin is sitting there. He did what he had to do. He had to make an appearance to let them know he wasn't intimidated even though he was shitting a brick."

Cross later agreed with Lowery's memory of those events.

"It's been thirty years, so it's hard for me to remember exactly," Al Cross said, "but Steve is correct that he recalled that I wanted to show to them that I wasn't intimidated because I liked going to Marion County to see Steve and [his wife] Susan and other folks in Raywick. I didn't want to feel like I had to avoid the place."

Lowery and Cross were not the only two to recall the get-together.

"You're talking about that time that Joe Keith, and maybe Bobby Joe [Shewmaker], J. C. Abell, I think two or three of 'em, they caught Al Cross outside there, in the back of our place," Charlie Bickett recalled. "I think they were going to try to muscle him around a little bit, but me and Daddy got involved there.... They cornered them out back, and somebody came in and said there was going to be some trouble, so me and Daddy walked back there.

"I think Daddy jumped Joe Keith's shit. They didn't like that too much, but that was tough shit, you know? It was our place. We didn't give a damn what they thought. They [Lowery and Cross] was customers. They was friends. They was people who would do you a favor, you know, if it was possible to.

"Steve thanked us every which way there. Steve tried to explain to Joe Keith and Bobby Joe and whoever else was down there, but they were playing the big time, but the big time hadn't hit yet, you know? All your big wheels hadn't really started surfacing in Raywick yet, but before it was over they did."

"And they left us alone," Lowery recalled. "Charlie went back and said, `Look, they're just drinking a beer. Not hurting anyone."'

"And... my experience was that people who have been operating outside the law," Al Cross remembered, "as long as they get the notion that you are not out to get them personally, individually, then they probably play on, and they also probably have a certain deal of respect for people who are willing to come look them in the eye, or at least come to the same place of business, so that's why I did it."

"Of course, they were mumbling and grumbling and ready to roll some heads," Lowery said, "but nothing happened."

Lowery wrote a response to Cross's series on the Enterprise opinion page:

Marion County was once again thrown into the media spotlight earlier this week when the Louisville Courier-journal published a series on marjuana.

1..1

The stories point out that more marjuana crops have been seized in Marion County this year than in any of the other 119 counties in Kentucky.

But what the stories neglected to say was that the state police narcotics unit-which totals less than 30 men, if I'm correct-has spent more time investigating reports of mar~uana crops in Marion County than in the rest of the counties combined.

Ben Hadley, a narcotics agent who has worked many of the busts in Marion County, told me earlier this year that the state police have concentrated their efforts on Marion County. The Courier neglected to report that information.

1..1

The fact is this: Marjuana is being grown throughout the state. Cultivation is hardly restricted to Marion County.

1..1

There have been several other major marijuana hauls throughout the state this year, and not one has received half the attention that the busts in Marion County have received.

1..1

I think that the editors who determine how stories will be played and where they will be placed in the Courier-journal are insensitive at best and prejudiced at worst.

I think they have created a mental image of Marion County and that they use stories about the county to support that image.

Following the incident at Squire's Tavern in 1981, Al Cross became a regular. Even after his assignment changed with his newspaper, and he was covering the metro desk or Frankfort, he always liked to come back to Raywick, especially for the annual Derby parties, where one could bet track odds with the local bookie and be drunk by noon.

In the 1986 Kentucky Derby, Willie Shoemaker was slated to ride Ferdinand. Cross figured that it would be the last derby run for Shoemaker, a legendary jockey, so he bet on Ferdinand at 17 to 1, and apparently so did lots of other people because the bookie couldn't pay out the bets right away. He had to go to the local businessmen and borrow some cash. So, it was no surprise to anyone when Cross's wife decided to host his thirtieth birthday party at Squire's Tavern, which wouldn't have been complete without a birthday cake.

"When I went to blow out the candles," Cross recalled, "they had those nonextinguishable candles. So, we were all two or three sheets to the wind, so we wound up pouring beer and whisky on the cake to extinguish them, and it created quite a weird scene for the locals.' They had never quite ever seen a thing like that at Squire's Tavern-dousing a cake with alcoholic beverages."

"Al loved Raywick so much that he had a birthday party at my place," Charlie Bickett recalled. "Before it was over, the cake was slamming and throwing it through the bar and smacking going on. I mean, it was crazy.

"Nobody got hurt. It was all in fun, but it was funny to look at it. They done everything. Anyway, everybody was pretty well liquored up or having a good time. That was back in Al's younger days."

"Raywick was the friendliest place I ever lived, including my hometown in Michigan," Steve Lowery recalled. "I have never lived in a place where people were kinder or more giving or more loving than in Raywick, Kentucky.. . people took care of each other.

"I didn't lock my doors for years. You didn't have to lock your doors because you trusted your neighbors, and you knew your neighbors were watching your back. If you go out of town for two weeks, shit, there'd be somebody going by your house every twenty minutes to make sure nothing was going on.

"That's why I got so pissed off at the Courier[-Journal]. The projection was that this was a lawless county ... that had gone way, way over the pale. The truth of the matter was that this was a very friendly, loving place. They just happened to be in agri-pharmaceuticals."

It would be bad enough if, as Lowery claimed, the Courier-journal was characterizing Marion County unfairly by using selective editing to support conclusions that the editors had already drawn, but in addition to that, the newspaper acted as an uncritical stenographer for DEA agent Harold Brown. From part one of Cross's pot series:

"From the seizures by state police and all, it would certainly appear that there's more being grown this year," said Harold Brown, who headed the Louisville office of the US Drug EnforcementAdministration for 11 years before he resigned earlier this month.

In part two of Cross's series, Brown advocated harsher prison sentences for marijuana growers:

"That's really the heart of the problem.... You're probably not going to know what goes on in the brokerage system until the penalties are severe enough that a guy finds a reason to talk or cooperate. As long as he's facing misdemeanor penalties, he's going to pay that, keep his mouth shut, come back and try to recoup his losses by growing it again next year. "

Al Cross quoted Harold Brown extensively in his three-part pot series, even though Brown had resigned under a cloud of suspicion weeks before.

"Harold Brown, the top federal drug enforcement agent in Kentucky, has resigned," the Courier ,journal reported on October 3, 1981, under the headline, "US Drug Official in State Quits, Is Being Investigated."

"My recollection is that I talked to [Brown] before he resigned," Cross remembered. "Of course, I was working on this thing for a month or so. I would like to think that we were cautious about what we used from him, but he was just talking in general terms about the situation. We had no reason to believe anything he told us was inaccurate or designed to help his own cause. We had no idea what his own cause was.... What ever happened to Harold Brown?"

That's a good question. As Cross reported on the pot-growing in Marion County, internal DEA investigators had connected Harold Brown to large-scale drug crimes of his own, including the mysterious case of an abandoned DC-4, a World War II-era, four-engine cargo plane that appeared on the end of a Bowman Field runway in Louisville on January 11, 1979, with nothing on board except marijuana residue, some halfeaten sandwiches and a few empty Champagne cases.

In investigating the DC-4, detectives found that it had been in military service until 1978 and then auctioned off and resold to associates of Brown, who flew the plane to Houston, Texas, where they called Dan Chandler, son of A. B. "Happy" Chandler, two-time Kentucky governor and former commissioner of Major League Baseball. The younger Chandler worked as a greeter at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas. DEA's internal investigation linked Harold Brown directly to this smuggling operation but handled the case lightly, as an "administrative investigation," not as a criminal investigation.

So what was Harold Brown, the DEA agent, up to?

"Well, nothing that I can prove," recalled retired Kentucky State Police Detective Don Powers. "I remember that we had some raw intelligence that indicated strongly that Harold Brown was running interference for [dirty cop and drug trafficker] Andrew Thornton and them. Especially, I remember a plane that landed ... out in western Kentucky, and all of a sudden, Harold Brown showed up on the scene and supposedly waved the plane off.

"And I remember that particular case where they were tracking a particular load of marijuana, but by the time they got to the plane and got on it, there wasn't anything left in it. We always suspected very strongly that Harold Brown was running interference for Thornton [and his crew]."

What would that mean?

"It would mean that he was protecting the shipment of drugs, and, if I'm not mistaken, the DEA forced Harold Brown to retire early."

Harold Brown began his career as Kentucky's chief federal drug enforcement agent in 1970, working in the Louisville office of the agency that preceded the DEA, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD). In 1973, President Richard Nixon consolidated the BNDD with other agencies: the US Customs drug unit; the Narcotics Advance Research Management Team, from the Executive Office of the President; and two offices from the Department of Justice-the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement (ODALE) and the Office of National Narcotics Intelligence. It was all done under Reorganization Plan No. 2, and it created the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

During this bureaucratic transition, Harold Brown remained in Louisville, first as the head BNDD agent-an expert chemist with a military background-and then as the chief DEA agent for Kentucky. As part of his job coordinating drug investigations with state, local and other federal law enforcement agencies, Brown liaised with a federal drug trafficking task force, which included Jefferson County narcotics Detective Bud Farmer.

Due to their close association from the task force, Harold Brown and Bud Farmer worked together on numerous occasions, including an August 1979 bust of a DC-3 that landed at an isolated western Kentucky airport with 2,500 pounds of Colombian marijuana on board, valued at more than $1 million, or $3.12 million in 2011 dollars. They arrested seven men at the airfield, and at the time Brown said that as many as a dozen more could be arrested by the end of the investigation.

After the agents loaded the ton and a quarter of confiscated Colombian pot onto the back of a truck to transport it to an evidence facility, a staff photographer snapped a shot of the task force: Bud Farmer, a tall, middle-aged man in white pants, a short-sleeved collared shirt and Ray-Ban sunglasses whose wire rims disappear underneath the graying temples of his hair; behind Farmer stands a Jefferson County policeman under Farmer's command; Harold Brown sits on the bed of the truck, one leg crossed over the other knee, wearing blue jeans, a plaid short-sleeved shirt, sunglasses, shaggy dark hair, sideburns and a broad mustache; behind Brown, a sergeant for the DEA sits on a bale of confiscated marijuana. Brown looks away in the photograph, toward the unseen distance, while Bud Farmer stares directly at Brown, seeming to eye him more as a suspect than as a fellow law enforcement officer.

By 1979, cops throughout Kentucky distrusted Harold Brown. Investigations seemed to unravel when he became involved, and he associated with a wild element of Lexington nightlife, including cowboy narcotics cop and drug trafficker Andrew Thornton, who came from a blue-blooded horse-breeding family with experience fighting in the Caribbean as a member of the 82nd Airborne Division.

Thornton joined the Lexington police after his military service in 1968 and worked his way through the ranks of patrol, narcotics, detective and criminal intelligence before resigning from the force in 1977 after getting his law degree.

"All I can tell you is that we had a very strong suspicion at the time that Harold Brown and Andrew Thornton ... were all in a group," recalled retired Detective Don Powers. "And [Brown] was just as much a part of it as the rest of them.... When they had those DC-3s gutted out, they were hauling planeloads of marijuana in them....

"There was even-and I wish I could remember more about this-but there was even strong suspicion that they were taking guns to South America and trading them for drugs. But as far as I know, no one ever proved that....

"There was just so much raw intelligence during this time that Thornton was really working for the CIA.... There was just all kinds of rumors floating around, and as far as I know, none of that was ever really substantiated....

"I can tell you with some assurance that no law enforcement wanted anything to do with Harold Brown during this time, because of the suspicion that Thornton would hear about it....

"There always was the thought-you know-whether there was really suspicion of this, or whether Thornton and his associates wanted to make people to believe it, but there was always suspicion and talk that somehow they were connected to the CIA."

Frustrated, Louisville narcotics Detective Bud Farmer alerted DEA Internal Affairs that its chief agent in Kentucky was corrupt. Detective Don Powers with the Kentucky State Police came to the same conclusion.

After he was tossed out of the DEA in late 1981, Harold Brown continued to operate in his secretive capacity with his trafficking partner, Andrew Thornton. On the side, Brown established a mad scientist's laboratory, selling deadly poisons like ricin (made from castor beans) and curare (a rare South American blowgun toxin) in the classified section of Soldier ofFortune magazine. A teenager in Florida who wanted to kill his parents found Brown's ad and sent a friend to Louisville to pick up the poison he ordered.

Brown sold ricin to the kid's friend, but the friend had a change of heart and turned the ricin over to the police. Cops in Florida were about to discover that the maker of the poison in Louisville had a very shady past, but before they could turn the heat up on Harold Brown and get to the bottom of his involvement in ricin distribution, Brown turned up dead on March 20, 1984, shot in the head by the .32-caliber blue-steel Llama automatic pistol found in his hand.

From the police report:

"The victim was known by the undersigned as the former head of the local federal Drug Enforcement Administration.... A contact gunshot entrance wound was noted on the right side of the victim's head approximately two inches above the ear and near the mid-line of the ear.... There was a large amount of blood underneath the victim's head. Blood was also noted on his face, upper body, right leg near the gun and on the pillow by the right hand."

Although initial reports indicated suicide, Andrew Thornton thought otherwise. He contacted the police, wanting answers, as the Louisville homicide detective reported seven days after Brown's death:

"Thornton thinks it is a murder. Thornton said Brown was killed with a.32-caliber automatic and that Harold Brown never owned a.32-caliber automatic."

The investigating officer called the Thornton family horse farm, Thrive Main Stud, near Paris, Kentucky, and got a pager number for Andrew, which he called.

"At 0955 hours, Andrew Thornton called me on the telephone. I explained to Andrew that we were investigating the death of Harold Brown and that I understood he was a friend of Harold Brown's. Mr. Thornton interrupted and said, `His best friend.' I asked Mr. Thornton if or when he would be in Louisville, that we would like to talk with him about Harold Brown. Mr. Thornton asked me if I was with the `Special Investigations' or `Homicide.' I advised him that I only worked Homicide and Robbery. His reply was `OK, I will talk with you,' Mr. Thornton advised that he would be at Sport Shooters in Louisville tonight at 1830 hours ... and our conversation was terminated."

Later that day, when police arrived at the shooting range, Andrew Thornton was not there, and in his place was Harold Brown's attorney, Fred Partin, who had also beat the police to Brown's apartment at the time of his death. Although Thornton claimed that Brown never owned a .32, Partin seemed to know its exact provenance.

"Partin ... stated that he believed it was a weapon that Brown had loaned him three or four years ago ... [which] had been stolen from [Partin's] home and had been reported to the Louisville Police Department. After he reported the weapon stolen, his wife received a call from a subject who stated that the weapon was in the back yard ... wrapped in plastic and it was returned to Brown. A check with L.P.D. records revealed Partin had reported a .32-caliber automatic stolen on November 18, 1979 ..."

Therefore, it was the word of Brown's "best friend," Andrew Thornton, against his attorney, Fred Partin, as to whether or not Brown owned a .32 automatic.

"I wasn't aware of that," Don Powers said decades later. "That's interesting ... I don't know. I just never in my own mind ever believed that Harold Brown shot himself, but I don't know what sort of pressure he was under at the time, what was about to happen that might have caused it. That case you were talking about, about that boy from Florida, maybe that was enough to tip the scales for him."

The police detectives and Andrew Thornton weren't the only ones skeptical of Brown's suicide. Even Fred Partin, Brown's attorney, raised his own concerns to the

"For one thing," Partin told the newspaper, "Brown had always said if he was going to kill himself, he would imitate his hero Ernest Hemingway and shoot himself in the mouth. Brown's fatal wound, though, was to the side of the head."

In June 1982, Andrew Thornton pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor marijuana-smuggling conspiracy charge, paid a $5,000 fine and served six months in prison. On Wednesday, September 11, 1985, Thornton jumped from an airplane and fell to his death onto a gravel driveway outside Knoxville, Tennessee, after his parachute failed to open.

"Of course, when Thornton bailed out of the airplane he had cocaine strapped on him," Don Powers recalled, cocaine valued at $15 millionor $35.2 million in 2011 dollars. "Supposedly, the CIA had some kind of special phone number, and it was found on Thornton."

From the report:

KNOXVILLE, Tenn.-Andrew Carter Thornton II apparently set a twin-engine plane on auto pilot over Knoxville before parachuting to his death early Wednesday morning with about 75 pounds of cocaine, authorities said yesterday.

I•.1

Thornton, a pilot and holder of an eighth-degree black belt in [Wing-Chun, Bruce Lee's fighting style], was carrying several papers in a coat pocket, including his passport and verses citing the virtues O fa mercenary lifestyle.

He also was wearing a bulletproof vest and was carrying two pistols, a stiletto, special goggles for seeing at night ... about $4,500 in cash, six gold krugerrands and identcation papers in at least two names.

"He almost made the landing," [Lieutenant Charles] Coleman said.... "He landed on the cocaine, broke his ribs and stretched his aorta to the breaking point. "

And thus, this strange chapter of the history of drugs in the Bluegrass State ended with no real resolution. Two men who officially were responsible for stopping men like Johnny Boone and Bobby Joe Shewmaker appeared to be engaged in bigger drug deals than anything attempted by Marion County folk, and yet these same men were the Kentucky faces of the federal War on Drugs.

To Johnny Boone, it was clear that secret agents inside the government got away with bigger scores than he could ever imagine; and to the police detectives watching from the sidelines, it seemed clear to them that while they spent their time chasing men like Johnny Boone, the really big fish made mockeries of them.

"You're absolutely right," Don Powers recalled. "There's two things we'll never know out of all this: whether there was some involvement with the CIA and whether they were giving the green light to haul weapons south .. . and drugs north."

Johnny Boone and Don Powers, outlaw and detective, were not the only two who suspected the corruption of DEA Agent Harold Brown. The two-time former US attorney in Louisville, Marion County native John L. "Jack" Smith, saw it with open eyes as well.

Smith possessed ironclad law enforcement credentials: His father, Henry Smith, was the Marion County judge executive and raised three sons. One became an FBI agent, one became a Secret Service agent, and Jack, a precocious federal prosecutor, became the US attorney for the Western District of Kentucky in Louisville in January 1969-only five years after passing the bar. In November 1970, Jack Smith moved to New Orleans to lead the Justice Department's Organized Crime and Racketeering Strike Force for a year and a half.

In New Orleans, Smith worked to uncover public corruption, starting with Jim Garrison, the district attorney of Orleans Parish, best known for his portrayal by Kevin Costner in Oliver Stone's movie JFK, which tells the story of Garrison's prosecution of Clay Shaw for Shaw's connection to an alleged conspiracy to kill President John F. Kennedy. But Jack Smith's task force was not interested in grand conspiracies. Rather, the task force looked into a much simpler sort of crime: payoffs to government officials by, in this case, people from "pinball machines ... Bally Manufacturing," Smith said.

In the course of his investigation, Smith captured the local crime boss's moneyman, who agreed to become an informant for Smith's task force. Smith sent the informant to the home of Jim Garrison with a briefcase full of payoff money, a payment that Garrison was expecting. The FBI coated the cash with a fine powder visible only to ultraviolet light. The next day Smith's men arrested Garrison and tested his hands, catching him ultraviolet-handed.

Yet, despite the overwhelming evidence of his corruption, a New Orleans jury found Jim Garrison not guilty. When he walked out of the courtroom a free man, a crowd of three hundred gathered to greet him.

"They don't tolerate public corruption in New Orleans," Smith was fond of saying in later years, "they demand it."

After that, Smith planned on continuing his career as a strike force prosecutor.

"The Department of Justice called," Smith remembered, "and they wanted me to go to Cleveland to start up one of those strike forces. Well, you'll remember that was the year that the Cuyahoga River caught on fire. In my mind, Cleveland was a shithole. So the process then was, you could turn down the first one but if you wanted to stay in the strike force in the Justice Department, you had to take the second one, and the opening was in New York, and I was not going to go up there, and I was not going to raise my son up there, so I came back to Louisville ... in January'72."

Three years later Senator Walter Huddleston hired Smith to come to Washington, D.C., to work as counsel on the US Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, commonly referred to as the Church Committee, named after its chairman, Senator Frank Church of Idaho, who led the investigation into allegations of the CIA violating its own charter.

"Serving on the committee," Smith recalled, "reading a lot of reports and being at the hearings and everything-I think everybody has a thought in their mind that American intelligence officials that they're all wonderful people and wear a white hat and abide by the law. I think my experience taught me that the first responsibility of any law enforcement agent is not to enforce the law, it is for they themselves to obey the law...

"A person's experiences teach you a lot that you can make an assumption on.... You know, you are always surprised when you hear about drugs, or, weapons for hostages, and you hear that and your first reaction, perhaps, is to disbelieve it, but over the years it's been proven so many times that it's true....

"I told you the story of when I was in Washington, I got a call from a lawyer, and he wanted to talk to some people from the [Church] committee staff, and his client was [also] a lawyer, so they were trying to layer it, I guess, to protect ...

"But anyway, the deal was, it was a retired CIA agent-and I think I told you this story-about [William] Harvey going into the White House to see Kennedy and how Kennedy was enamored with James Bond and somebody told Kennedy, `[Harvey] is the American James Bond,' and what he did in Cuba and so forth.

"They gave a big going-away party because Harvey's friends thought the Kennedy brothers had really mistreated Harvey [for sending him to Rome after Bay of Pigs].... A terrible meeting ... and one of the-I don't know whether he was a CIA agent at the time or a former CIA agent-he kinda quoted Macbeth and ended up saying, `The blood of the Kennedy brothers will flow in the streets of America for what they've done,' and in less than a year, John Kennedy was assassinated, and then, a couple of years later, of course, Bobby was, too....

"I realized that there were people who I thought were white hat people that were really black hat people."

Following his experience on the Church Committee, Smith returned to Kentucky and became US attorney in Louisville for a second time, appointed toward the end of the Carter administration. That's when he ran into DEA Agent Harold Brown.

"I guess that I would have been naive to think that a DEA agent could be involved in something illegal, because when I was United States attorney I put a heap of stock in those people," Smith said. "I think by and large they are really good people, but I guess you learn that there's a bad apple just about anywhere....

"When I came into the office in 1979, the office was just overwhelmed .... So, I told the assistants that I would help any of them prepare for trial if they had any problems. So we could go on and get our cases tried, so this female assistant came to me and said here's our file, we're going to go to trial next week.

"And I said, `OK, where are your 302s from the agent?"'

A "302" was Justice Department-speak for an agent's report. The female prosecutor told Smith that the agent on the case, DEA Agent Harold Brown, "didn't do 302s."

"What?" Smith asked, surprised.

To Smith, a 302 was a basic necessity of any case. So, he picked up his phone to call Brown, but his prosecutor stopped him.

"Please don't call him," she said. "He scares me."

"Scares you?"

"He hit me," she said.

"What!?" Smith couldn't believe it.

Smith never followed up on the allegation that Harold Brown smacked around the female assistant US attorney. Instead, he went to every agency head to remind them of the importance of drafting 302s for his prosecutors:

"Listen, Secret Service man ... Listen, FBI man ... Listen, DEA agent, this is important..."

When Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in November 1980, Jack Smith's days as US attorney were numbered. In 1981, the same year Harold Brown resigned in disgrace from the DEA, Smith stepped down when a Republican was appointed to his post. Yet, there for a period of time, Smith was in a position to evaluate the sorts of accusations that would follow Harold Brown to the grave. So, did Jack Smith think the drug-trafficking allegations against Brown and Thornton were credible?

"Well, of course, I don't know for sure," he later said. "I don't have any facts to back that up, but that's not what you asked. You asked if it was credible, and yeah, I'd say it's credible."

NEXT STOP: BELIZE.

"I went down there in seventy the first time I went," Johnny Boone said later, referring to his maiden voyage to the only English-speaking country in mainland Latin America, tucked under Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula and just north of Guatemala. "I should have moved there, is what I should have done, but I didn't."

So, Johnny Boone went to the tropics in 1970; that's a year before the state police killed Charlie Stiles. It wouldn't be until 1973 that the name of the country would officially change to Belize from British Honduras.

"Anybody want to go there, work, take a chance and send shit up here could have been a millionaire in a short time. Twenty-five, thirty dollars a pound. Fifty would buy you the very goddamn best. I mean them son of a bitches knew it had to be the best, had to be sinsemilla for fifty dollars a pound."

Boone didn't go there alone, but the full extent of his friendly Belize network will never be known. His partners selected him for his role in the operation because they knew he kept his secrets.

"I can't tell you a lot about down there,"Johnny Boone said, "because there were a couple of guys who were protected and hidden."

What about his first trip to Miami?

"I guess I ain't decided to talk about all that," Boone said.

Despite his hesitance to discuss the topic years later, one could learn from Johnny Boone that he and his silent partners discovered they could buy all the land in Belize they wanted for $10 an acre in 1970. A British tomato company vacating the country left behind whole swaths of farmland that the jungle was quickly overtaking.

"Buy all you want," Boone said. "They was begging some son of a bitch to take it because it wasn't doing nothing but sitting out in the bushes."

Only constant work could keep a piece of land there out of the jungle's grip, as Boone and his partners learned watching an unlikely group of indigenous farmers: the Mennonites. Decades earlier the blond Germanic sect had come to the Yucatan paradise with their antiquated buggies and Dutch wardrobes and turned untended jungle into productive farmland. To have come thousands of miles from Kentucky to Belize and find something as familiar as bearded Mennonite farmers surprised Boone, made him feel at home.

Boone watched the Mennonites work with tractors and earth-moving equipment and let them get used to seeing him around. He finally asked where they bought their heavy machinery. America, a Mennonite told him, and they had to pay for each item three times: once at the dealership, then at the port in New Orleans for export duties and a third time in tariffs when the item arrived in Belize. So, when Boone and his partners needed similar equipment, they followed the Mennonites' example: buying tractors in Kentucky, shipping them from New Orleans and, finally, seeing their tractors and heavy equipment arrive, at a steep cost, in the port at Belize City.

When establishing roots in their new environment, Boone and his partners met with a banker, a white-haired American expatriate, living a comfortable retired life as a money manager in paradise. One of Boone's partners asked the banker directly how he felt about drugs and the escalating American war against them. In response, the man reached out and grabbed a pitcher of water that had been sitting on a table between himself and Boone's associates. He tipped the pitcher and filled a glass half-full with water.' hen he filled a second glass half-full with water. He set the pitcher down, picked up the second glass and poured it into the first, so that the water filled the glass to the rim.' he lifted the pitcher a second time and filled the now-empty glass half-full of water again.

"Now I may hate this water," the banker said. "But here comes more of it."

As Johnny Boone watched, the banker took the half-full glass and poured it into the already-full glass, causing water to spill across the table.

"No matter how hard I try to stop this water, there will always be more. You see out there?" The banker pointed out his window, which offered a long view deep into the jungle. "The Indians out there run naked until they are ten or eleven years old. They don't have anything except what they can grow, and they will grow it. And if it gets caught, they'll grow more and send that, too."

Soon Johnny Boone and his partners had a marijuana plantation running in Belize with the help of a local assortment of English-speaking black Creoles, Maya natives and Caucasian expatriates.

Cannabis was not a native species to Belize; it did not grow there when the ancient Maya built their temples scattered across the region's low-lying landscape. The Spanish and Portuguese first brought the little, round seeds to the New World in the sixteenth century to grow hemp for their navies and hemp's sister for smoking.

Four hundred years later, deep upstream on the Belize River, one of Johnny Boone's partners, a full-blooded Apache named Jim Below, found Maya tribesmen nurturing sativa marijuana strains that had grown in the Yucatan jungle for centuries by then. It was seeds from these fragrant, potent strains that Boone and his partners sowed on the old Belize tomato plantation for export back to Kentucky. In the days before the huge cocaine epidemic, and before serious government efforts to prevent smuggling, small planes leaving Belize for America could fly into Florida low and unnoticed, as long as all the planning had been worked out neatly beforehand.

To work out those logistics, Johnny Boone traveled much of the southern Florida coastline, looking for good landing strips for his in-bound planes. A proper landing place was essential-it had to be remote so it wouldn't attract attention but still close enough to a highway for an easy exit. It couldn't be in a dead-end or a cul-de-sac-that would be flying into a trap if the cops were there waiting. Boone inspected one runway that looked ideal-until he looked out into the water and saw two small planes floating belly-up in the bay. A nasty crosswind? Something else bad about the place? It wouldn't do.

The logistics eventually worked themselves out (with plenty of legwork), and soon Johnny Boone and his partners were flying small planeloads of high-quality Belizean pot into Florida and then transporting it by land back home to Kentucky.

"This is good shit, Johnny," a Kentucky colleague told him. "Where did it come from?"

"Belize," Boone said.

"No, come on. Tell us the truth."

If they weren't going to believe him, Boone thought, it wasn't worth lying to them, either. So, Boone stopped telling people where it came from, letting them suspect he got it in Florida or Mexico like everyone else.

As the Marion County marketplace relied more heavily on imported product to fill the demand during the homegrown off-season, high-level operators soon discovered that the trickiest element of the operation was transporting the contraband across state lines.

As Boone worked to find a better route from Belize into Kentucky, the federal government was learning about the wholesale pot connection to Marion County through an investigation that began on the road in 1980, developing a pretty good idea of how one Kentucky pot broker, known to the feds as Robert Joseph Shewmaker, operated on the highway. Even though he proceeded with characteristic caution, Shewmaker would be undone by a five-year investigation and thirty cooperating witnesses.

In the autumn of 1980, Shewmaker should have been overloaded with product, but increased efforts by the Kentucky State Police had put a dent in production. Of the forty-five acres of Marion County marijuana busted in one week, a good deal of it could have belonged to Shewmaker. Trying to find a solution to his supply problem, Shewmaker dropped in on Big Fred Sykes unannounced at Sykes's home in Roswell, Georgia. Big Fred said that a high-level Savannah smuggler had just asked him to help move a shipment, and Shewmaker was glad to assist, saying that he wanted a reason to buy a new van.

Bobby Joe first met Big Fred at Tug's house on Cujoe Key at some point in the 1970s. Tug's real name was Ralph Ramano, and he was a tugboat captain and pot smuggler. When Tug decided to retire in 1979, he passed his business to Big Fred, telling Shewmaker that Fred was his 50-50 partner and that whatever Big Fred wanted to buy from Marion County, Shewmaker should give to him on credit just as he would if he were selling it to Ramano. For every pound of Shewmaker's marijuana they sold, Big Fred and Ramano would each make a $25 commission, and what was left over was Shewmaker's profit.

By 1980, the government estimated that Shewmaker sold forty thousand to fifty thousand pounds of homegrown marijuana per year, a certain percentage of which headed southeast through Big Fred.* But Fred wasn't just Shewmaker's client; the two also bartered marijuana between each other. Although Shewmaker grew marijuana by the ton, he could sell it only while supplies lasted-from October to February. After he sold out of his high-grade homegrown stockpile for the year, Shewmaker turned to Big Fred-like Johnny Boone turned to Belize-to replenish his supply and fulfill the demand that Marion County's reputation created, a demand that could gobble up twenty-five tons of potent sinsemilla in less than four months.

Likewise, Big Fred's overseas supply followed a cycle, dependent on shipments from the sea and air while evading federal interdiction efforts. When Big Fred didn't have supply enough to satisfy his customers, he often turned to Shewmaker, who could usually lend a hand. If Big Fred knew of a boat or a plane coming in, he might call Shewmaker to help move part of the load. Their business relationship was not static-one buyer and one seller-instead, it was dynamic and depended on where the marijuana was, who had it and what the prices were.

On November 26, 1980, Big Fred drove Shewmaker around Atlanta, shopping for a van. Shewmaker settled on a white 1979 Chevy G-10 for $4,597.50 cash, license plate number WL 4793. On the bill of sale, Shewmaker listed his business as Barr Cabinet Shop in Savannah and signed it at the bottom, "Bob Shewmaker."

Then, in the second week of December 1980, the Savannah smuggler called Big Fred and told him that the ship had come in and that they needed four or five vehicles. Big Fred called Bobby Joe Shewmaker, who rounded up two more drivers, and they all headed for St. Augustine, Florida. Their prearranged destination: the Best Western on Interstate 95 at the Highway 16 exit, room 141.

Bobby Joe Shewmaker and his team showed up at 9:30 a.m., Shewmaker driving an Oldsmobile, Ron Barr (Shewmaker's fat friend who had moved from Annapolis, Maryland, to Raywick) driving the new white Chevy van, and a Shewmaker associate known as Guardrail driving a black pickup with a false-bottomed external gas tank mounted in the truck bed (good for stashing several hundred pounds). He was known as Guardrail because he liked to use them to keep himself on the road when he was drinking.

Once they assembled, their Florida contact took Shewmaker and Big Fred to the stash house out of town on a pig farm, where the bales of Colombian marijuana were stashed in a semi-truck trailer. They stayed there about a half-hour and then went back to the motel.

When Big Fred and Shewmaker returned from the hog farm to check out at 10:35 a.m., the woman behind the desk slipped them a note that said, "Police investigating."They went back to the rooms and told the others it was time to go. They all headed out in a mismatched caravan to the stash house on the hog farm. Shewmaker in his Oldsmobile and Big Fred in his Corvette drove in first while their crews waited at a nearby store, driving into the hog farm one at a time: a Cadillac and green van from Big Fred's crew, then Barr in the new white van and Guardrail in the black pickup.

They loaded the Cadillac with 350 pounds, the green van with one thousand pounds, the white Chevy van with twelve hundred pounds, and the false bottom of the gas tank in Guardrail's black pickup with another five hundred pounds. After they were all loaded up, the convoy took off with Shewmaker and Big Fred riding clean as escorts. The next stop-a motel just a mile before the weigh station at the Georgia state line on Interstate 95. They planned for the loaded vehicles to wait at the motel while Big Fred and Shewmaker cruised past to see if the weigh station was open.

Once they saw that the coast was clear, they returned to the motel, but when they pulled into the parking lot, they realized that Ron Barr, driving the white van loaded with twelve hundred pounds, hadn't stopped. Shewmaker tried to reach Barr on the C.B. radios they carried, but Barr didn't answer. To find him, Big Fred drove his silver Corvette up Interstate 95, and Shewmaker drove southbound in his Oldsmobile, but they couldn't find the white van anywhere.

After they regrouped, Big Fred and his crew drove north to Savannah before returning to Atlanta. When he arrived at his son's house, Big Fred sent Little Fred with eight hundred pounds to the big man in Savannah who had called Big Fred into the deal in the first place. Then Big Fred called Bobby Joe in Kentucky to ask about Barr.

"Is everything all right up there?" Big Fred asked.

"Yeah," Shewmaker said. "Everything arrived safe and sound."

Safe and sound, but it had all been for nothing. This batch of Colombian Gold, once a potent variety, was now brown, seedy and brittle. Totally worthless. Shewmaker tried to sell some of the load to Johnny Boone, but Boone told Shewmaker it wasn't worth buying.

Marion County had high standards; its residents and customers had been smoking good pot for a decade. This Colombian stuff that Shewmaker brought back from Florida on Christmas was garbage. No one would touch it. A week after Shewmaker brought back this bad load of Colombian, the state police kicked in the door to the Bicketts'farmhouse and confiscated 150 pounds of good Kentucky homegrown.

Two months later a man from Savannah told Big Fred Sykes he wanted the money from the marijuana he helped move. Sykes told him the problem: There wasn't any money on the deal because none of it sold. The Savannah man said he wanted the money or the marijuana back, so Big Fred drove his green van to Kentucky to load up what Shewmaker couldn't sell to return it to Savannah. After paying his drivers $15,000, Shewmaker lost money on the deal.

The next autumn, 1981, Big Fred Sykes came to Marion County to oversee the loading of a big shipment of Shewmaker's pot that he would be taking south. As Shewmaker's workers loaded up the truck, Big Fred saw Shewmaker's tally sheet in the hands of Bobby Joe's brother. The sheet showed that Tug Ramano, the man who had put them together, had lied to Big Fred about Tug's share of the sales between Shewmaker and himself. Tug said when they cut the deal that he would get a $25-per-pound commission, just like Fred, but the tally sheet showed Tug taking $50 per pound-double the payment under the table.

Six months before, Big Fred had borrowed $50,000 from Tug to buy a house in Roswell, Georgia. The loan was just now coming due as Big Fred discovered that Tug was cheating him. He asked Shewmaker about it, and Shewmaker came clean, telling Big Fred that he recently paid Tug $47,000, which Big Fred used to estimate that Tug owed him more than double that, $100,000.

Some time later, Tug demanded repayment from Big Fred on his home loan, and Big Fred turned the tables on him, taping the phone call with a recorder from Radio Shack.

"I just learned that you and Bobby Joe been screwing me," Big Fred told Ramano, according to transcripts of a phone conversation later read in open court. "I've been out here selling your marijuana, and you've been making a lot more money than you ever told me. So, I don't owe you money. You owe me money. If you pay me the hundred grand you owe me, I'll pay you the fifty I borrowed."

In response, Tug began sending Big Fred threatening letters. So, to protect himself, Big Fred recorded a telephone conversation with Shewmaker as an insurance policy against Tug. In the call, Big Fred asked Shewmaker when he would travel from Kentucky to Florida.

"Maybe by the end of the week," Shewmaker said. "I might come down before then, though."

"All right," Big Fred replied.

"I have had this cold, or I'd have come down the last part of last week."

"Yeah, I had one, too." Big Fred said. "Have you heard from the boys any?"

"Yeah."

"Jimmy and them," referring to associates from Savannah.

"Yeah, I took care of them, I reckon."

"Are they doing anything?" Big Fred asked.

"Probably they ain't yet."

Later in the conversation, Big Fred and Shewmaker discussed Big Fred's problem with Tug.

"Well, I was wondering if you have any suggestions," Big Fred said. "I don't. I don't guess he's buying that story," referring to Shewmaker's brother.

"What? ..."Shewmaker asked.

"Well, you know, he's-I guess he's not wanting to buy that, you know. But I got that information from [your brother], but I don't-but I don't know what to tell them unless I just tell them that I got it from you and you can keep on denying it, I guess. Have you got any thoughts [how] I can bring it to a head without creating a big problem?"

Shewmaker didn't.

"So, all I did," Big Fred said later in the call. "I told him it come from the horse's mouth, you know. I didn't mention any names, but that ain't satisfying him, evidently. Is it?"

"Evidently," Shewmaker replied. "I don't know-too stubborn."

Then Big Fred began to question Tug's outlaw ethics.

"Well, I guess he's just an honorable-he's just honorable if he has to be honorable. All that honorable talk doesn't seem to mean much, but as far as I'm concerned, he owes me money. I could be sending him the same letters. I wonder how that'd work."

"I believe that's the thing to do," Shewmaker said. "You know what I mean?"

Toward the end of the call, Shewmaker decided that maybe it would be best if he went down and talked to Tug and Big Fred face-to-face.

"I might come down Tuesday or Wednesday-it's according-and get a load. I was wanting to wait for my truck to come in so I could put a few miles on it, but I don't know. It might not be in. Supposed to be here on the twenty-second."

And with that, everything seemed to go on as it always did, except the wheels of the federal government turn slowly sometimes, and its agents were methodically gathering evidence against Shewmaker on this one deal that went bad in too many ways to count.

It would be months still before agents decided it was time to arrest Shewmaker; they had five years on the statute of limitations, and they planned on using every day of it. Meanwhile, a separate police agency in a different city began investigating a seemingly unrelated case.

Detective Bud Farmer, the lead narcotics officer for the Louisville/ Jefferson County Police Department, learned from a source at Bowman Field that someone from the county attorney's office had contracted a pilot to fly in a load of marijuana from Central America. Under ordinary circumstances, Farmer knew he should report this case to the federal, state and local drug enforcement task force run by the DEA, on which Farmer once served. But by this time, he suspected that the task force's leader, DEA agent Harold Brown, was a dirty cop. Farmer didn't trust anyone from that agency, even after Brown's hasty resignation.

With Farmer's narcotics squad and the DEA office in Louisville on less than the best of terms, and with this airplane load of marijuana due to Bowman Field, Farmer asked the FBI instead of the DEA for assistance. Although this was against standard procedure, Farmer concluded it was his only choice. If he told the DEA, Farmer figured, they might tip off the smugglers as Harold Brown had done so many times in the past.

So, Detective Farmer met with the pilot of the Piper Aztec before it lifted off for Belize. The police would be waiting for the plane when it returned, Farmer explained, and the pilot agreed to go along with the plan so that the police could catch their suspects in the act of drug trafficking.

The idea to fly directly from Belize into Kentucky was born out of the desire to eliminate interstate ground transportation. One of Johnny Boone's associates, the full-blooded Apache named Jim Below, had a wife who worked as a secretary in the county attorney's office in Louisville. One of her bosses, Below explained, flew planes at Bowman Field in Louisville; and this boss, Assistant County Attorney Donald Erler, hired the pilot who eventually revealed the operation to Detective Farmer.

The first run of this new transportation route happened when the turncoat pilot took off in a red-white-and-blue, twin-engine Piper Aztec. After the plan was in motion, Jim Below hopped a commercial flight to Belize on March 1, 1982, to meet the Aztec pilot there. As soon as Below's flight departed Staniford Field, Louisville's commercial airport, the surveillance team shifted into high gear at Bowman Field, the city's smaller airfield.

On Friday, March 5, US Customs alerted Jefferson County police that their red-white-and-blue Piper Aztec had entered US airspace and would arrive in Louisville that night. Two detectives parked at Bowman Field at 8:00 p.m. in an unmarked van equipped with night-vision telescopes. Another eighteen agents and detectives, including Bud Farmer and his partner James Black, took positions in seven undercover vehicles around the airport's perimeter: on Taylorsville Road, on Dutchmans Lane and on the Watterson Expressway.

At 10:00 p.m., two vehicles arrived, a 1981 Oldsmobile and a 1981 Ford 4x4 pickup, both driven by bearded men. The surveillance team had yet to identify the drivers: Johnny Boone, thirty-nine, and his friend from Washington County, Kenny Lanham, thirty-five. The detectives watched as Boone, in the pickup, circled the airport parking lot to check for any activity; he didn't see the policemen waiting for him. As Boone kept guard in the truck, Lanham entered a hangar to check it out. Then, as the policemen had been doing for two hours by then, Boone and Lanham parked their vehicles and waited in the cold March night for the Piper Aztec to arrive.

"I sat in the motherfucking hangar, and the weather was colder than fuck,"Johnny Boone later said. "And I'm waiting for that fucking airplane to come, and that son of a bitch is late. I've been sitting in that motherfucker for about five hours. I wouldn't let nobody else sit in there with me because if something goes wrong I didn't want nobody else caught."

The plane should have landed by 2:00 a.m., but by 3:00, as snow flurries circled the tarmac, it hadn't yet arrived.

"But they were close," Boone recalled, "you know?" Every time Boone felt frozen enough to leave, he would tell himself, "He'll get here. He'll be here."

At 3:30, Boone and the waiting detectives heard the sound of an approaching plane, and the shabby red-white-and-blue Piper Aztec landed, carrying 550 pounds of high-quality Belizean sinsemilla worth more than a half-million dollars if Boone could sell it for $1,000 per pound. The Aztec, stripped of its six passenger seats so it could carry its load, taxied into hangar 11, where Boone and Lanham loaded the twentyfive neatly packed cardboard boxes and five plastic containers into Boone's pickup and Lanham's Oldsmobile.

Boone and Lanham drove out of Bowman Field in a two-vehicle convoy onto Taylorsville Road, passing Air Devils Inn (a rowdy motorcycle bar) at its only quiet hour en route to the Watterson Expressway. As they left, the investigating team-formed of Jefferson County narcotics, Kentucky State Police and FBI agents-prepared for the takedown. The detectives waited to see if the departing car and truck would rendezvous with anyone else as they trailed them with two helicopters and a fleet of squad cars and unmarked sedans. As the 4x4 Ford led the Oldsmobile onto Interstate 65, then exited at the Bardstown ramp onto Bernheim Forest Road, the police realized that Boone and Lanham wouldn't be meeting any co-conspirators. As the two-vehicle convoy passed the Jim Beam distillery, the police radio started squawking.

"If you let them get into Washington County,"one state trooper advised Captain James Black, "you may lose them both if they escape on foot."

"If you let them get into Marion County," another said, "you might lose them, the drugs and everything."

So, Captain Black made the decision to arrest the Washington County men while still in Nelson County, and the helicopters-filled with SWAT team officers-moved into forward positions at the point of the takedown: Rooster Run.

"Done all that shit, and got out there to Rooster Run and here come that fucking SWAT team in them helicopters," Boone remembered.

Rooster Run wasn't the name of a town; it didn't have a post office or an intersection. The road wasn't even wider at Rooster Run. The name of the stretch of otherwise-lonely highway came from the only business for miles in any direction, a general store and gas station with a catchy, colorful name that gained popularity with its logo on ball caps and T-shirts and with Johnny Carson's occasional use of Rooster Run as a punchline. By 1982, to cement its own popularity, the Rooster Run General Store acquired a twenty-foot rooster on wheels, a blue bib around its neck, and permanently perched the bird on the roadside in front of the gas pumps. There, in front of the twenty-foot rooster, a state police cruiser turned on its blue lights behind Kenny Lanham's Oldsmobile, and two helicopters dropped out of the sky, their massive floodlights stopping Johnny Boone's truck on a dime.

"Son of a bitch had a light on it as big as this table here," Boone recalled.

Lanham tried to cut a U-turn and escape back toward Interstate 65, but an unmarked sedan blocked his path. By the time the Oldsmobile stopped, SWAT team officers had surrounded both vehicles, their weapons trained at the drivers' heads.

I don't know what this is, Johnny Boone thought to himself as the paramilitary agents closed in with automatic weapons aimed at him, but it's not what 1 planned on.

An arresting officer looked into the bed of Boone's truck at the neatly stacked cardboard boxes.

"How much you got in there?"

"How much what?" Boone said as the policeman handcuffed him.

"Pot in them boxes."

"News to me, motherfucker. Open one of them up."

Bud Farmer, James Black, and the Jefferson County narcotics squad had been following Jim Below the Apache for nearly a year, tracking down his associates in Denver, Detroit and Canada. The two narcotics detectives also knew that Below's wife, Constance, and her boss, Assistant County Attorney Donald Erler, were involved in this operation. Because of the Belize conspiracy's intimate connection to the Louisville courthouse, Farmer and Black thought it might involve other, more prominent members of the Louisville/Jefferson County legal establishment.

As Louisville police processed Johnny Boone, Lanham, Erler and the Belows at the downtown courthouse, Bud Farmer talked to a reporter for the Louisville Times, telling her that his investigation continued to track down leads in Cincinnati, Detroit and Colorado.

"We hope to get the connection in Central America, too, if we can," Farmer told the reporter.

While Farmer talked to the press, another member of his narcotics unit worked to determine if they could identify the typewriter used to type some of the documents found inside the Piper Aztec. Inside the courthouse after hours, investigators typed out sample documents on typewriters in various offices, using each office's letterhead for each example.' They checked the typewriters in the offices of the county attorney, the chief of police and the county judge/executive. On each sheet of letterhead, the detective typed the same sentence repeatedly:

A few hours later, inside an interrogation room at the Jefferson County jail, Bud Farmer pressed Johnny Boone over and over about his Central American associates, trying along the way to get something from Boone that would implicate someone in the Jefferson County courthouse. To Boone, this was funny; not only was he not going to tell Bud Farmer anything, but Farmer was barking up the wrong tree anyway.

"Y'all have been reading comic books again," Boone told Farmer. "You've been on the job too long."

Farmer eventually hung it up with Boone. He knew they weren't going to get anything out of the Sphinxlike outlaw. They were more confused after interrogating him than before they had started.

Yet, despite the dead end they encountered with Johnny Boone, Detectives Farmer and Black thought that they could still unravel the "large international conspiracy to import marijuana into Kentucky" with the help of the FBI. Wrong again. Like before, the Jefferson County narcotics unit ran into a conflict with federal law enforcement-this time with FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., who didn't like how Bud Farmer had conducted his investigation.

In an FBI airtel message from the FBI director's office to the special agent in charge of Louisville, dated March 10, 1982, four days after Johnny Boone and his associates were busted, an FBI supervisor ripped into the investigation, saying Bud Farmer's narcotics unit had displayed "an absence of candor" and that Farmer should have sought FBI or DEA assistance "well in advance."

"Instead, they developed the investigation based on a `buy-bust' scenario and sought the FBI's assistance only in the very final stages of the contrary to the investigative methodology subscribed to by the FBI for narcotics matters. [Therefore,] Louisville will conduct no further active investigation of this matter."

In response, the Louisville FBI office sent an airtel message to the director's office the next day, March 11, in a sharp rebuke of FBI headquarters' micromanagement:

"To clarify ... FBI Headquarters supervisor is not in a position to evaluate the candor of the Jefferson County Police Department.... The investigation by the FBI in this case is in the spirit of the law enforcement coordinating committee (LECC) mandated by the attorney general.... This is the primary function of the FBI and why we exist.... Therefore, investigation continuing."

Later that same day, FBI headquarters responded to Louisville. Although the headquarters had lost its primary argument against the FBI's continuing assistance of Bud Farmer's investigation into Johnny Boone's associates, the FBI supervisor chose to chastise Louisville for its classification of the type of criminal organization to which Johnny Boone belonged. Classification group 245-A would have designated the involvement of La Cosa Nostra (abbreviated "LCN" on FBI forms), the Italian mafia.Therefore, Louisville assigned Boone's organization the classification of 245-B, but the supervisor at D.C. headquarters took issue with this determination, saying the B group should be used to classify "major non-traditional organized crime groups such as outlaw motorcycle gangs, prison gangs, or ethnic/regional groups such as Israeli mafia, black gangster disciples, Yakuza [Japanese mafia] or Tong [Chinese mafia]." As of 1982, the FBI had no classification for what would later be called the Cornbread Mafia.

"You are requested to review this matter," the supervisor from headquarters wrote, "and if not primarily an investigation of one of the above crime groups, FBIHQshould be notified of proper alpha character, i.e., `D' for major international narcotics trafficking groups."

While Johnny Boone was disappearing from Kentucky for weeks at a time to deal with his organization in Belize, Jimmy Bickett focused on growing locally. Because he knew the police would be watching him in Raywick and flying over Marion County, Bickett planted one of his fields at the top of Muldraugh's Hill in Mannsville, a tiny farming community built on the edge of the escarpment's ridge.

In April 1981, the year before Boone's Belize bust, Jimmy went back out to Mannsville with someone in the Brady family to check on their crop, budding on the backside of a dairy farm. It had just come a good rain, so it was a good time to side-dress the young plants. As they walked into the barn, Bickett saw two dead crows lying next to the bags of fertilizer they were about to use. A bad omen, he thought.

Bickett and Brady went ahead and poured the high-nitrogen fertilizer into the dispenser hooked to the side of a tractor. By side-dressing the plants at this early stage, Bickett would ensure healthier plants, fewer pests and higher yields.

Out in the field, Brady drove the tractor slowly down the rows of plants, applying the fertilizer in the balk between the rows of plants, careful not to let the fertilizer burn the plants' water leaves. As the tractor rolled, Brady twisted his body so he could look down and behind him to make sure he laid the fertilizer straight without touching the plants.

When he finished laying a row of fertilizer, Brady looked up to stretch his neck and saw a police cruiser's bubblegum blue light flashing as it bounced over a rough farm road behind a patch of young corn. Brady cut the tractor's engine, hopped out of the cab and signaled to Jimmy Bickett to run. Then Brady disappeared on foot through the trees.

Jimmy Bickett ran to his truck, which he had parked near the back of the pot patch, and drove over a hill. He didn't think he could escape the sheriff, so he drove around on the farm until he thought of something to say: He was looking for Hondo, the dairy farmer's son.

The sheriff drove toward him, and Bickett pulled up alongside with his window down.

"Where you going?" asked the sheriff, a real big guy.

"Not going nowhere," Bickett told him casually.

"I saw you coming out of that pot patch back there."

"What pot patch? I'm looking for Hondo. I'm wanting to buy his mud bike."

"Why don't you go on and get out of that truck," the sheriff said as he put his cruiser into park. "You're under arrest."

The sheriff locked Jimmy Bickett up in the Taylor County jail, and Bickett hired Elmer George, who had rapidly gained the reputation as the local marijuana growers' first choice of defense attorneys. At the trial, George put Hondo, the farmer's son, on the stand to testify that he did indeed have a mud bike for sale. Then George stood at the blackboard and drew the farm for the jury to show the jurors how the land lay and to show the routes of Bickett's truck and the sheriff's cruiser and where the two met.

Elmer George's courtroom performance created reasonable doubt in the Taylor County jury thanks to Jimmy Bickett's quick thinking at the time of his arrest, which made it appear that he wasn't trying to escape. Bickett walked away a free man, and Elmer George was pretty proud of himself for pulling it off. It would be a case George would brag about for years to come-a calling card for potential clients as to his prowess in certain arenas of criminal defense law.

Less than six months later Jimmy Bickett found himself in trouble in Taylor County once again. He had driven a girl to Louisville in a retired police cruiser, and the two ended up partying at the Toy Tiger, one of Louisville's best nightclubs in its heyday. With his sort of supplies, Jimmy Bickett could have partied for several days straight, but the girl wanted to go home around midnight. So, with a pound of marijuana in the former police car's trunk, an ounce of cocaine in the glove compartment and a box of one-gram glass bottles he had picked up in Louisville to facilitate his retail cocaine business, Jimmy Bickett pointed the cruiser south and slammed on the gas. If she wanted to get home fast, he would show her how fast they could go.

She held onto her door handle as the old cruiser ripped over the dark highways, getting her to Campbellsville in record time. As police Patrolman Clifton Price headed back toward Lebanon, he noticed the former cop car swerving and speeding on its way out of town. So, Patrolman Price switched on his blue lights and pulled over Jimmy Bickett at 3:15 a.m. Before Bickett stepped out of the car, he tossed the ounce of cocaine under the driver's seat.

Price locked up Bickett for drunk driving and possession of marijuana. As Bickett sat in the Taylor County jail sobering up, he figured he had gotten away with his biggest worry, the bag under the driver's seat. But during a second search of the car, Price found the ounce, the largest quantity of cocaine he'd ever seen. With Bickett locked up in the drunk tank, Price drove a sample of the cocaine to the state lab in Frankfort to have it tested. When the desk deputy released Bickett after sunrise, Price arrested him again for possession of cocaine and tossed him back into the Taylor County jail.

Prohibition ended in most of America in 1933, but it never ended in Taylor County. Many in the congregations of its twenty Baptist churches devoted their Sundays to their ministers' preaching of fiery sermons on a narrow range of topics, mostly the evils of sex, Catholicism, liquor and Communism.

The drinking Catholics of neighboring Marion County represented to these Taylor County Baptists the worst of sinful humanity. Just as Marion County typified the wets in the fight over the freedom to drink, Taylor County epitomized the drys. It was so dry in Taylor County that when one turned on the water faucet, crackers came out.

For a decade by then, Taylor County had been fighting the new menace of marijuana, and just as with liquor before it, Marion County was this new evil's source. Some worried that it would be only a matter of time before cocaine hit the streets of Campbellsville, and Price's diligent police work proved them right.

Jimmy Bickett, for his whole life until that moment, had danced on top of the justice system. He had walked away from a federal indictment with Frank Haddad's poker house defense, and Elmer George had sprung him of the Mannsville marijuana cultivation charges by convincing a Taylor County jury that he had been on the farm in question because he had been looking to buy Hondo's mud bike. Now he faced the same judge just a few months later with the first cocaine charge Taylor County had ever seen.

It didn't look good for Jimmy Bickett.

Before Bickett's arraignment, a friend introduced Bickett to Pete Gurton, a black bootlegger from Taylor County. Gurton had strong roots in Marion County because that's where he bought his liquor and a certain amount of pull in Taylor County-as any bootlegger has in any dry county. Gurton liked helping out folks from Marion County whenever he could, but Bickett's case seemed tricky, especially because he just walked away from that earlier marijuana charge. People in the community wanted to see Bickett go to jail.

"The best I can do for you," Gurton told Bickett, "is thirty days, shock probated."(Shock probation is the practice of granting a first-time offender early release after the initial "shock" of the prison system.)

Bickett thanked the bootlegger and went to see his lawyer, Elmer George.

"I've got you a good deal worked out," George told Bickett. "Thirty days, shock probated."

When Bickett went before the court, the judge asked him for his plea.

"Guilty, Your Honor" Bickett said.

"When can you go in?" the judge asked.

"Let's go right now," and the bailiff took Jimmy Bickett away.

The state sent Jimmy Bickett to the prison camp at Eddyville. While sitting on his prison bunk one evening in March 1982, Jimmy Bickett glanced up at the television during the local news and saw FBI agents leading a bearded, handcuffed man into the Louisville courthouse. Bickett jumped up.

"Hey," he said, pointing at the television. "I know that guy right there. That's Johnny Boone!"

Sitting in his federal prison cell at the LaGrange Reformatory after the federal court had sentenced him to five years, Johnny Boone kept telling himself he should have never left Belize. He could have set up a nice life down there, living like a Mennonite farmer in a tropical paradise among the Maya ruins. Instead, he would lift weights, read books and stare at the walls for the next few years while his son Jeffrey continued to tend the Russian pot, working to get it crossbred just right for Kentucky.

"I had to go to jail, and my son kept working with it,"Johnny Boone recalled, "and the fourth year we just put seed out everywhere-we'd already smoked what little bit lived the first year we tried it, and it was the killer of killer. So, we kept after it, trying to get it to go. Finally we did."

IN THE SUMMER OF 1983, AS JOHNNY BOONE SAT IN THE LAGRANGE Reformatory doing time for his Belize conviction, Marion County marijuana growers worried about the ratcheted-up war on pot that risked sending them to join Boone in federal prison. But in 1983, pot growers, along with farmers of more-legal crops, faced a far more ancient enemy than the state police and DEA: drought.

The growing season of 1983 began with a wetter-than-usual spring that nearly washed out the Kentucky Derby, leaving Sunny's Halo galloping first past the muddy finish line during a "thunderstorm that had frightened off a third of the humans in the infield," according to New York Times sports columnist George Vecsey. That Derby Day drenching would be the last raindrops the Bluegrass State would see nearly all summer.

By the end of July, so little rain had fallen in central Kentucky that farmers had long stopped hoping for one good rain to solve their problems. Corn farmers had already lost 10 percent of their crops, and for every day it didn't rain, Marion County farmers lost a bushel out of every acre of the fifteen thousand acres of corn grown in the county. In the end, more than 50 percent of the corn would be lost, along with 15 percent of the soybeans.

Pastures were so burnt that there was no clover or grass for cattle to eat, forcing farmers to feed them the hay they had been storing for the winter. Of the county's seventy thousand acres of pastureland, 50 percent of it was dead. In the blistering heat, the cattle had stopped eating anyway, forcing farmers to sell more than six hundred head of livestock to slaughter by August.

Lebanon's railroad tracks, long since abandoned by the regular train traffic that had given Lebanon its early vitality, had one last use. To combat the drought, trains rolled into town loaded with hay from ranchers out West, who were returning the favor of Kentucky farmers sending them hay during bad western winters. Like a scene from a half-century before, farmers lined Water Street in downtown Lebanon with their flatbed trailers to load as much hay as they could for their starving herds. Families brought their children to watch.

The tobacco crops, more easily irrigated than cornfields because the plots are smaller, still returned the lowest yields in decades. All across the middle of America, stretching north to Indiana and west to Missouri, states began asking for federal relief because of the worst drought in fifty years.

By the beginning of August, only twelve hundred marijuana plants had been found and uprooted in Marion County. By the same point in the growing season a year before, the state police had found thousands and thousands of plants in the farmland surrounding Lebanon; in 1981, Marion County had played host to the largest single marijuana bust in the state's history; in 1980, state police had found forty-five acres of marijuana in Marion County in a single week. In the historic drought of 1983, all they were finding were small clusters of poorly grown, badly nourished pot.

"The marijuana we're finding, most of it anyway, looks like it's been planted by people who don't know what they're doing," a state police detective told the Lebanon Enterprise in August. "They're hoping it will grow and that they can make some money off of it, but they haven't taken care of it."

So, had the state police, combined with drought conditions, solved Marion County's marijuana problem? Sheriff Eddie Masterson didn't think so.

"I can't believe that large-scale cultivation is all gone," the sheriff said.

He was right. A week later two Marion County men, both named Mattingly, were caught in Hart County, sixty miles west, on a farm with seven thousand plants valued by police at $12 million-or $27.3 million in 2011 dollars.

The next week the state police uprooted 750 "very healthy" plants, all of them at least eight feet tall, growing three miles outside Raywick on Hazy Downs Road. The tall, green female plants had been well fertilized and irrigated by a system connected to the water supply of a nearby home. In the house, the raiding team found a handgun, a semiautomatic .22 rifle, a fully loaded 12-gauge shotgun and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. They also found a vast array of plant foods and a "virtual library on how to grow marijuana."

This fresh bust on Hazy Downs Road reinvigorated the state police, and they redoubled their marijuana-hunting efforts. On top of the drought, the marijuana growers began to feel the heat from the police. Charlie Downs, Joe's older brother, still lived on a piece of the family farm, not far from where the 750 plants were found. Charlie decided it would be a good idea to go ahead and harvest those still-standing marijuana plants, even if they hadn't fully matured, before the police harvested them for him.

During the next week of blazing August heat in 1983, while the state police found and destroyed more than 2,100 plants scattered in small clusters around the county, Charlie Downs and his crew began chopping down his well-irrigated but immature twelve-foot plants.

"They had a truckload of marijuana,"Joe Downs said later. "And they had a bunch of boys back there in the bushes a-stripping, and then they were bringing it out and laying it out on the plastic out here in the fields. And a'copter went over and seen that."

By now in the game played between cops and growers, the state police had gained a psychological advantage over the growers; no longer did Charlie Downs and others like him feel safe on their home turf.

As soon as the helicopter flew over, Charlie Downs ordered his workers to load up one last truckload of marijuana. He looked at the pile of pot they didn't have room for in their trucks-pounds of it laid out to dry on sheets of black plastic-and then the helicopter turned around for a second pass.

"They dumped a pile of marijuana out," Joe Downs recalled, "and dumped a bucket of diesel on it and set it on fire."

In the sun-scorched field, the fire quickly found more than the marijuana to burn. The flames spread fast across the brown grass of the pasture, toward a barn and the deep forest on the back edge of Downs's property known as the Cameron Woods, which many claimed to be haunted. Downs hopped into his truck to go dump its valuable contents somewhere safe so he could rush back to his burning field. In those nearby woods, he knew he had bigger problems than just the pot or the fire.

When he returned, eight members of the Loretto Volunteer Fire Department had responded to the grass fire on his farm at the woods' edge, and Charlie Downs didn't want anyone, even the local firemen, looking in Cameron Woods.

Three weeks before, a semi-truck trailer belonging to a trucking contractor for General Electric had disappeared in Louisville, along with fifty-four clothes dryers and 180 air conditioners. Most of those air conditioners and a couple of the dryers had found their way from Louisville to Raywick and down into "haunted" Cameron Woods.

In order to keep the firefighters from entering the woods, Charlie Downs charged at them with his truck. As the eight men tried to contain the spreading brush fire, they had to keep dodging Downs's pickup. In one pass, the pickup sideswiped the fire engine and nearly ran over two firefighters as they held the hose.

"He lost momentary control," Johnny Boone remembered, "which is a Downs asset."

A firefighter on the scene radioed the police dispatcher to ask for a state trooper to come and arrest the man attacking them with his pickup. But, at that precise moment, all available police units were responding to another emergency: A crazy woman outside Loretto had been in a standoff with the police for more than four hours, armed with a hunting rifle and a razor blade.

The dispatcher told the firefighter there were no units available and asked if it was a life-threatening situation. The firefighter said no.

When Charlie Downs realized that the firemen wouldn't leave after barely flinching as he almost killed a few of them, he drove away hatching another plan. Just minutes later he returned and fired a shotgun into the air. That almost made the firefighters quit with the job half-done.

Later that night a sheriff's deputy came and arrested Charlie Downs, charging him with wanton endangerment and leaving the scene of an accident. In the process, the deputy also found 180 air conditioners, still in their boxes and worth about $20,000, in the woods behind Downs's house. Downs spent the night in jail, posted his $1,000 bail the next morning and received a September court date. By the time he sprang himself from jail, word of his pickup ride had spread across town. Everyone had questions.

When Downs stopped for groceries at Higdon's Key Market, coowner Jimmy Higdon (the author's father) wanted to know more about it.

"What's that I heard about your truck, Charlie?" Higdon asked.

"I've learned a valuable lesson," Downs told him. "Always be careful who you lend your truck to."

At his trial, Charlie Downs stuck to his "someone borrowed my truck" defense, which created enough reasonable doubt with the Marion County jury to win his acquittal, confirming to the state police what they already knew: The only way to get charges to stick against someone from Marion County was to take him to federal court.

In the autumn of 1983, the federal courthouse in Louisville sent another batch of Marion County men to federal prison for their part in a massive marijuana-growing operation in Hart County. The group included the nephew of a former Republican governor. Police considered the haul to be the largest marijuana bust in the state's history, obliterating the record set in Marion County in 1981.

In November, the Supreme Court affirmed the hard line taken against Marion County by the Kentucky State Police and the US Attorney's Office in Louisville with its ruling in Oliver v. the United States.

Police had arrested Ray Oliver, a Kentucky farmer, for growing marijuana after officers hopped his locked fence, ignored his No TRESPASSING and KEEP OUT signs and dismissed verbal warnings from someone on the property to "get out"-all without a warrant. In the field, the police found a marijuana patch. Then they went to a judge, obtained a warrant and arrested Oliver. Although he claimed the police had violated his Fourth Amendment rights, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 against him, forever limiting the privacy rights of all property owners for the sake of the war on pot.

By the autumn of 1983, thirty federal court cases in the western district of Kentucky had been postponed, awaiting the Supreme Court's decision. Of those thirty cases, seventeen came from Marion County. Of those seventeen, Elmer George represented twelve. He considered the Oliver ruling "an erosion of people's rights."

"When Reagan gets through with the Supreme Court," George told the Lebanon Enterprise, "people won't have any rights."

Between the increased powers granted to the state police by the Supreme Court, the increased funds for aerial surveillance granted to the DEA and the National Guard and the five-to-ten-year prison sentences imposed by the US district court system, Marion County's outlaw culture began to feel the steady encroachment of the overwhelming power of the federal government.

In Raywick, all the recreational outlaws, the hard partiers and weekend warriors began to stay away. After the crowd thinned, the locals and professional outlaws remained to do business with big-money buyers. The intense scrutiny of the police and pressure of federal prison sentences began to crack the foundations already loosened by the influx of cocaine since 1980.

There had always been guns, shootings and a crazy streak in Raywick. In the April 5,1882, edition of the Lebanon Standard and Times, the paper ran these Raywick headlines:

RELIGIOUS.

Last Sunday being Palm Sunday and a lovely day, there was a large congregation in attendance at High Mass at St. Francis Xavier's Church.

GONE CRAZY.

'Squire Skaggs, of Scott's Ridge, reports that "Doctor" David Alvey, of Clear Creek Valley, has gone crazy, and has taken to the forest with his gun.

Until the mid-1980s, these strands of devout piety and "gone crazy" gunplay somehow coexisted in relative peace. The warning shots, parting shots and otherwise recreational gunfire, both indoors and out, rarely resulted in death, although celebratory gunfire had kept Father Clarence Schwartz awake in the St. Xavier rectory more nights than he could have ever counted. But murder was rare.

By July 1984, that was no longer the case. Within the first six months of that year, four people murdered four victims in Raywick, a place with a total population of two hundred. In addition to the four murders, there was a fatal heart attack in the Fifth Wheel, leaving 2.5 percent of Raywick's population dead with noteworthy exits.

The trend began on Friday, January 13, at 3:15 a.m., when seventy-oneyear-old Jack Lamkin shot and killed twenty-five-year-old Billy Downs in Lamkin's house on the back street in Raywick. Downs, a bartender at the Fifth Wheel, had moved in with Lamkin after his trailer had burned down a few months before. A third man, Gene Rogers, also lived there.

Billy Downs, nephew to Joe and Charlie, had grown like the other Downs men-big and tall. Billy was six-foot-five, weighed three hundred pounds and used his size to bully some people, whereas other folks thought he "wouldn't hurt a fly." Some of the girls had nicknamed him "Meat." On the last night of his life, Downs came home at 2:30 a.m. Friday morning after working the Thursday night bartending shift at the Fifth Wheel in Raywick. He was drunk and not finished partying. He flipped on the lights, turned on the radio and told seventy-one-year-old Lamkin to wake up and dance. As they were dancing, Downs picked up a 12-gauge shotgun and aimed it at the old man. Lamkin left the room and came back with his own 12-gauge shotgun.

"If you want to play with guns," Downs said to Lamkin, "I'll show

In reply, Lamkin aimed and shot, firing a deer slug into the left side of Downs's chest between his breast and armpit. Downs flew backward, slammed into the wall behind him and dropped into a seated position on the floor, leaving a blood trail down the wall. He was alive when he landed but died within minutes.

Gene Rogers, who had witnessed the whole incident, sprinted out of the house looking for help. He crossed the churchyard and banged on the front door of the rectory. A sleepy Father Clarence Schwartz answered. Rogers told him to come quick. When Father Schwartz arrived at the trailer, he knelt beside Downs and administered his last rites.

Charlie Bickett had just closed up Squire's Tavern when he heard the shot a block away and saw Gene Rogers run for the priest. Bickett followed Father Schwartz and saw Downs, dead where he sat, still holding his shotgun, the blood trail still fresh on the wall. Then the ambulance arrived. Johnny Boone learned the news from the prison grapevine: Old Jack Lamkin shot Billy Downs dead.

Following the shooting, an old-fashioned family feud nearly erupted in Raywick between the Lamkin family and the Downs family. Tommy Downs, Billy's father, wanted to kill old Jack Lamkin and any other Lamkin who didn't like it, but Joe Downs managed to mediate between the two sides to keep anyone else from getting killed. Everyone knew how Billy could be, so maybe he had gone too far.

Not long after, old Jack Lamkin pulled a knife on someone in the Fifth Wheel. Jimmy Thomas, who co-owned the Wheel with Joe Downs, jumped over the bar and snatched the knife from the old man's hand.

"Not everybody's as slow as Billy Downs," Thomas said and then kicked the old man out.

Just a few weeks later in Raywick, a local man killed his mother and held his father and brother hostage with a deer rifle during a schizophrenic fit. After a few hours, the state police disarmed him and sent him off to the state mental hospital for a few weeks.

Four months later, on Saturday, May 12, seven days after Laffit Pincay Jr. rode Swale to victory in the 110th Kentucky Derby, Raywick chalked up its third murder of the year when thirty-three-year-old Terry Williams shot twenty-seven-year-old Ronnie Ellis. Both men were in the marijuana business, although the killing wasn't work-related at all; it was personal.

Ronnie Ellis had first made a name for himself in October 1981, when he and two other Marion County men were arrested in Atlantic City, New Jersey, while delivering fifty pounds of Kentucky marijuana.

"They made such a fuckup of what they did,"Johnny Boone recalled.

When the men arrived at the buyer's house, they discovered he wasn't home. Instead of waiting for him, Ellis kicked in his door, and someone called the police. Soon after, the Galloway Township Police Department arrested Ellis and his two fellow Marion County men after discovering fifty pounds of Kentucky Bluegrass in the trunk, along with two loaded handguns, brass knuckles and a few knives.

"It used to be that money was forgiven if there was a bust-a real bust ... to help you get going again on your feet because you suffered the bust and didn't rat," Boone later said. "But they didn't do it that way. They went up there fucked up on coke and bullshit pills, and they went to the man to receive the pot, and he wasn't home. I'm guessing they probably went at the wrong time. Then they broke in the goddamn house door, and the cops got called immediately. They tried to break in to put it in there!"

Each man made $200,000 bail, and none of the charges against them stuck. So, Ronnie Ellis returned home, where he married Terry Williams's sister and promptly began beating her. Finally she divorced him for her own safety, but Ellis told her he planned on killing her and her whole family.

When Terry Williams finally met Ellis face-to-face in front of the Fifth Wheel in Raywick at 7:00 p.m. on Saturday, May 12, 1984, it was time for one of them to kill the other. Ellis stepped out of his car holding a brass-knuckle knife with a ten-inch blade.

"Pills, coke, I guess he was juiced to the max," Johnny Boone later said about Ronnie Ellis. "He was going to dare Terry to kill him, I guess is what he did."

Joe Downs reached behind the bar and handed Terry Williams the gun he kept there.

"I was in the pen, and they tell me he ran at him to stab him," Boone recalled. "Big old commando knife with brass knucks on them."

When Ellis charged Williams with his knife, Williams blew him away, then handed the gun back to Downs, who surrendered it to the police when they arrested Williams two hours later.

A month later a thirty-one-year-old Raywick native killed a nineteenyear-old Raywick man riding a red Honda motorcycle. The older man intentionally hit the motorcycle with his truck, knocked the teenager rider off and shot him in the head with a .22 pistol. To hide his tracks, he cut the dirt bike up into pieces and hid them in the woods, disposing of the body somewhere else. When police found parts of the motorcycle, the older man confessed and pointed police to the body.

As sensational as that killing was, the death of Ronnie Ellis was the one that really sent shock waves through the outlaw world. Suddenly the young cowboys realized they could die just as easily as anyone else. The only thing that would make them feel secure again was to kill Terry Williams.

"Some group members, they were good boys, they could kill male [hemp plants], they chopped out weeds, they could trim, they all said, 'OK, we're going to kill Terry Williams now."' Johnny Boone remembered. "I was sitting in prison, and a man was coming to see me in prison each week, telling me this.

"I said, `Go back and tell those boys they aren't going to kill nobody without climactic consequences,"' Boone said he told his visitor. "Terry was one of our main men, and they were saying they were going to kill him. I really liked those boys, but I told him, `Enough of that shit, because a smart person asks the question, Do you want to get killed?'

"I said, `You know, I'm trying to get to the bottom of it. Who the hell wants to die around here?'

"I sent them one more message. I said, `Look, think about it. You talking about all this killing shit. You need to shut the fuck up. Go on and have yourself a life, motherfuckers. Stay home with your girlfriend and stop talking about all this shit.'

"But it upset them to see that blood come out of one of them. And they thought, `My God, somebody's killing us.' So I asked them to think about that fact.

"You know, some people talk and play about this or do that ... but the real deal is when grown men kill each other. If you kill someone, that's it; they're not going to live no more. That's a different world."

On top of the drama spurred on by these killings, another man died in the Fifth Wheel as he tried to pay his bar tab with a check.

"If this check is cold,"Joe Downs said, "I'm going to kill you."

Downs never had the chance; the man had a heart attack and dropped to the floor. Downs hopped over the bar and pulled the man up onto the bowling machine to beat on his chest.

"Is he dead?" someone asked.

"Fuck yeah, he's dead," Downs said.

When Downs turned around, he realized he had been speaking to Father Schwartz, who had arrived just in time to administer last rites.

Raywick was turning darker and more ruthless than ever before, largely because of the twin stress inducers: law enforcement and cocaine. The cocaine supercharged the already wild side of Raywick. But even with such visible and noisy offenses, state police detectives and federal agents were unable to unravel the secret and complicated world of Raywick, which they knew was the headquarters for a nationwide network of marijuana production and distribution. They had attacked the drug network on the roads and from the sky, but had they done any good?

One by one, every law enforcement branch in the state had taken a crack at Raywick: the detectives stationed at the KSP post in Columbia, undercover narcotics officers working out of headquarters in Frankfort, pilots flying at least three sorts of aircraft, the National Guard, even the DEA and FBI agents in Louisville. And still Raywick and the rest of Marion County remained open for business.

So, in January 1984, Detective Mike Moulton, commander of Kentucky State Police Special Investigations Unit, decided it was time for his squad to do the job that no other agency could do. Special Investigations, headquartered in Louisville and then consisting of seventeen detectives and two sergeants, specialized in organized crime, political corruption, white-collar crime and prostitution. It was a crack squad of investigators with experience unraveling sophisticated urban and suburban criminal syndicates but with zero experience past the city limits, where the concrete ended and the hills began. Now Detective Moulton had caught wind of these organized hillbilly outlaws and wanted their scalps on his wall.

"Why Marion County?" Steve Lowery, editor of the Lebanon Enterprise, asked Moulton in an interview six months later.

"Why Marion County?" Moulton repeated softly, smiling to himself before answering. "One reason was notoriety," he finally said. "Marion County is the prime place to grow marijuana in the state. We wanted to try to get involved with that group of people and gather information."

At the beginning of February, a new bar opened in Lebanon in a long-dormant building on the corner of Water and Depot Streets. The out-of-towners who seemed to own the bar hoisted a sign into place one day and ran an ad in the Enterprise announcing the grand opening ofTom Foolery's. When people stopped in to see the new place, they found the three strangers running it.

"Lebanon is a small community where everybody knows everybody else," Moulton said. "That made it a lot harder. When we were given an opportunity to work in the bar, we took our time getting to know people and getting accepted.... The officers sat around and listened and made friends and that's all. We were just listening. After a while, we put the word out. Slowly, of course, but we let it be known that we were interested in making some buys."

As Sunday church bells rang on April 15, one of Moulton's detectives decided to dip his toe into the Marion County underworld by buying liquor on Sunday at Votaw's Grocery in St. Mary's. At 3:40 p.m., the detective walked into Votaw's, and there were about a dozen people there, some sitting at a table, others at the game machines and some playing pool. Jimmy Votaw was working behind the counter when the detective asked to buy a Pepsi and a half-pint of whisky.

Votaw told him that the ABC had raided the grocery last week, so he had to keep the whisky across the street. Votaw went outside and returned with three bottles of Very Old Barton. He put one on the counter for the detective and tucked the others behind the scales at the deli counter. The detective paid him $3.50 and left.

Five days later the detective was ready for a bigger score. He met a small-time dealer and tried to buy a pound of marijuana from him just past midnight at the Golden Horseshoe Club for $150. Later, at 1:45 a.m., the short, overweight twenty-four-year-old with a mullet met the detective in the Jane Todd parking lot, gave him a small sack of marijuana and returned $130-turning the transaction into a misdemeanor, barely more illegal than buying liquor on a Sunday. The mullet-headed dealer told the undercover detective he could get the pound in the morning.

The next day the detective met the dealer again at the Jane Todd parking lot, where the dealer handed the detective a pound of low-grade marijuana for $150.

"I've got thirteen more pounds ready to go," the dealer said. "If you've got the money."

Five days later the dealer came into Tom Foolery's to tell the detective he had more marijuana than he could handle.

"I've got about two hundred pounds, and I'm selling it at bargain prices. I'll sell you five pounds for three hundred dollars."

The detective agreed and followed the dealer to his sister's house, where the siblings showed the detective five large garbage bags filled with marijuana in the sister's bedroom closet. As the dealer was pulling buds from the large bag into a small bag for the detective, his sister's nine-yearold daughter watched from the doorway.

"Don't worry about her," he said. "She's seen more marijuana than most grownups."

The detective gave him the money, took the marijuana and left.

"Of course, when you start buying drugs you expect the word to get around that you're a cop. That always happens when you start making buys," Moulton would later say. "But what happened in Lebanon wasn't the usual `Hey, these guys are nares!' kind of thing.

"We started getting rumors about our people being burned around the first of May. At first we weren't sure how serious it was. Then it started getting heavy. One of our men was told that if he ever showed his face in Raywick again, it would be the last time he ever showed his face anywhere. Then the threats started to get more frequent. One of the detectives who works this county got wind of threats on the lives of the officers in the operation. When you start hearing serious talk about killing police officers, it's time to consider pulling out."

And that's exactly what Moulton did in the first week of May, just days before Swale won the 110th Kentucky Derby and ten days before Terry Williams shot Ronnie Ellis. They kept Tom Foolery's open for a few weeks after the three detectives had bugged out, but then they shuttered it for good.

"It was just starting to get successful.... We were just starting to get some really good information when we had to pull out."

Information gleaned from the three months Moulton's men spent at Tom Foolery's led to the arrests of five Marion County residents-two on marijuana charges, two on cocaine charges, and Jimmy Votaw on charges of selling liquor on Sunday. Six months after the arrests, Detective Mike Moulton still wondered how his investigation had been compromised. He couldn't understand how Marion County had seen straight through Tom Foolery's.

"I don't know how we got burnt. I can't figure it out. I don't know why the whole thing went sour."

TWENTY-NINE YEARS AFTER THE ARRIVAL OF THE REVEREND DERoHAN IN 1790, a second Irish priest reached the Catholic settlements in the land that would become Marion County-the Reverend William Byrne from County Wicklow, who saw the need for an educational institution among the settlements and founded a school for fifty boys on a farm at St. Mary's, which included in its charter class a young John Martin Spalding, the future archbishop of Baltimore, a youth who demonstrated such natural intelligence that he taught his classmates mathematics when he was fifteen.

After running the school for twelve years and educating some twelve hundred students, Byrne put the St. Mary's school into the hands of a band of French Jesuits. But after an argument with Bishop Flaget in Bardstown, the Jesuits left St. Mary's for the newly founded Fordham University in the Bronx-yet another example of in-fighting within the church hierarchy in Kentucky to the detriment of the flock. In the end, Bishop Flaget's two greatest accomplishments were running out of Kentucky the founders of Fordham and Notre Dame Universities. And they didn't leave with mixed feelings: Father Badin left Louisville chanting the Dies Irae, the Latin song of death, while the Jesuits were known to have said on their way out of St. Mary's: "Nothing good would come from Kentucky."

After the departure of the Society of Jesus, care of the college at St. Mary's fell into the hands of the Resurrectionists, an order headquartered in Kitchener, Ontario. Through the nineteenth century, the Resurrectionists educated a number of notable luminaries, clergy, governors and congressmen at St. Mary's, including J. Proctor Knott, who used his St. Mary's education to deliver one of Congress's most famous sarcastic speeches ever, a ripsnorter about the proposed funding for a railroad to Duluth, Minnesota.The New York Times headlined his obituary:

PROCTOR KNOTT, WIT OF POLITICS, IS DEAD

Former Congressman and Governor of Kentucky Passes Away at 82, Leaving a Widow.

SPEECH ON DULUTH A CLASSIC

His Satire on Promoters of a Railroad In the Northwest Attracted Attention Across the Country.

... Although he was later to become governor of Kentucky, it was as a Democratic representative in Congress, to which he was first elected in 1866, that he made his famous Duluth speech, for which he will-probably be longer remembered than for any ofhis more serious efforts. It was practically his introduction to Congress, but it lingers in the traditions of that body as one of the most keenly humorous satires ever delivered. One can't go to Duluth today without hearing the story of it...

"Where is the patriot who is willing that his country shall incur the peril of remaining another day without the amplest railroad connection with such an inexhaustible mine of agricultural wealth?" Knott said from the floor of the House of Representatives.

"I was utterly at a loss to determine where the terminus of this great and indispensable road should be until I accidentally overheard some gentleman the other day mention the name of Duluth. Duluth! The word fell upon my ear with a peculiar and indescribable charm-like the gentle murmurs of a low fountain stealing forth in the midst of roses, or the soft sweet accents of an angel's whisper in the bright, joyous dream of sleeping innocence. Duluth! Twas the name for which my soul had panted for years as the hart panteth for the waterbrook. But where was

Another noteworthy St. Mary's alumnus, John Lancaster Spalding, nephew to Archbishop John Martin Spalding, became an archbishop himself, presiding over the diocese of Peoria, Illinois. The New York Times headlined his obituary:

BISHOP SPALDING DIES IN 77TH YEAR

Roman Catholic Prelate of Peoria, Ill., Was Once Chancellor of New York Diocese.

AN AUTHORITY ON LABOR

One of the Arbitrators Chosen by President Roosevelt in the Coal Strike of 1902.

St. Mary's continued to educate young men through the twentieth century, bringing aspiring priests by train into the wilderness of Marion County from Chicago, Milwaukee and beyond. A young Jerry Eifler came from Louisville.

"When I decided I wanted to be a priest, I entered St. Mary's College in 1953 in the fall to study in Latin," Eifler later said.

"My days at St. Mary's College were very positive because I had the opportunity to make lifelong friends with a number of people.' he unique thing about St. Mary's was that it was very poor.' here were no frills, and if anything was to be done, whether it be athletics, or art, or theater or music, it had to be done by the students."

The world outside the 150-acre campus did not exist for its students. Newspapers were censored by the priests before students could see them, and no one was allowed to venture off campus, certainly not into Lebanon.

"We could not leave the seminary property from when we got there in September until we went home for Christmas," Eifler recalled.

What about the wild side of Marion County?

"We knew nothing about it."

The students' only exposure to the greater community was through the staff who worked at the college.

"Billy Elder was the head of food service," Eifler remembered. "He was from St. Mary's town, and he and his quote-unquote `staff' would cook our meals for us. Of course, Billy was a known drunk. It wouldn't be unusual at all for Billy to serve-and he did, a number of times-he'd go into the cupboard and get out the large gallon cans of what he thought was fruit cocktail and put it in a bowl and serve it to us as dessert. Where, in reality, it was mixed vegetables.

"And his menus were quite varied and unusual, to say the least.... We suspect that it might be wild game or varmint, but it wasn't. Once he got through with a chicken, you weren't quite sure where he got it."

After Vatican II, when Latin was no longer a clerical requirement, and after the pope declared that each diocese should have its own seminary, enrollment at St. Mary's continued to atrophy, another victim of diocesan mismanagement. What finally killed it off for good?

"A number of things," said Eifler. "After we graduated, if you were going to go on and do any graduate work, you had to have your degree validated by additional classes by an acceptable school, except for Catholic University in Washington, D.C., but no other reputable institution would do that because [St. Mary's] had some type of accreditation, but it wasn't full accreditation.

"Then, when the Archdiocese of Louisville opened its seminary in 1961, or thereabouts, all the seminarians from the archdiocese were transferred from St. Mary's to St. Thomas in Louisville."

The archdiocese sunk $800,000 into its new seminary at St. Thomas when it already had a perfectly good one at St. Mary's, and St. Thomas closed fewer than ten years after it opened. St. Mary's finally shut its own gates in 1975, 154 years after its foundation by the Reverend Byrne and the "no good will come from Kentucky" Jesuits.

In a strange turn, the property of the seminary was purchased by an eccentric millionaire, Ken Keyes (whose surname rhymes with eyes or thighs), a man born into money, married first at twenty and stricken with polio at twenty-five, which left him nearly quadriplegic-an affliction that did not stop Keyes from enjoying multiple sexual partners from his electric wheelchair.

In Berkeley, California, in the late 1960s, Keyes founded the "Living Love Center" in an old fraternity house. There he taught a New Age "method" of removing the jealousy inherent in multipartner sexual relationships, a field in which Keyes was an expert, having been married and divorced twice already.

Looking for a larger property to accommodate his growing following, Keyes saw an ad for a college campus on 150 acres in the middle of Kentucky, and he bought it in 1977, bringing with him about seventy-five staff members, workshop attendees and assorted weirdoes who raised the eyebrows of even back-to-the-land hippies like Steve and Susan Lowery of Raywick.

Keyes renamed the college the Cornucopia Institute, and the place that once educated governors and archbishops now tied students' wrists together in mixed-sex pairs, and together they would lead their lives and attend workshops for two weeks while literally bound together, each doing everything with the other-sleeping, eating and defecating.

The neighbors who remembered the finely mannered young men once schooled at St. Mary's could hardly conceive of what was happening in those classroom buildings now. Occasionally one of the Cornucopia people knocked on someone's door to ask if there was any work he or she could do and then refused payment for his or her time.

No one could quite figure them out. They were either a crazy cult or a bunch of drug-using freaks or both-but Keyes expressly forbade drug use at Cornucopia. The institute served no alcohol during its open-tothe-public events, and Keyes would later forbid his followers to engage in sex, while he pleasured one young woman after another-with his tongue, one assumes, because he was paralyzed from the neck down-in his specially designed bed.

This sort of thing continued for five years before Cornucopia shuttered in 1982, leaving the once-proud St. Mary's College empty again, leaving the next chapter of St. Mary's to be written by J. Clifford Todd.

A former epidemiologist, public health official, cattle breeder, gentleman farmer, property developer and avid long-distance runner and cyclist, Todd found himself by chance in the prison-building business, setting into motion a series of events that would turn St. Mary's College into the first private prison in America "by three years," according to Todd.

No one locally wanted the once-great St. Mary's turned into a prison. A prison was a place you went to, not a place that came to your town. Under normal circumstances, Cliff Todd would have never succeeded, but in Reagan's first term, the unemployment rate in Marion County climbed to 20 percent. A prison meant prisoners, but it also meant jobs. Any last lingering hope of the archdiocese reinvigorating the property was dashed by the news in the July 28, 1982, edition of the Enterprise that the archdiocese gave as a gift to Mother Teresa the chalice from the St. Mary's chapel.

Cliff Todd was an interesting character. Decades before coming to Marion County with the prison, he worked as an epidemiologist, testing the sex workers at Pauline Tabor's brothel in Bowling Green for sexually transmitted diseases, and according to Todd, the girls were always clean.

He found himself in the prison-building business by complete accident when in 1982 he bought at auction the old Waverly Hills Tuberculosis Hospital and Sanatorium in southern Louisville, while at the same time the state was undergoing an acute prison shortage. Strong local opposition in Louisville doomed the Waverly Hills project, but Cliff Todd kept his eye out for a property that might be suitable to refurbish into a prison.

"Then I heard that St. Mary's Seminary was for sale,"Todd later said.

To make the deal for the college at St. Mary's, Cliff Todd traveled to Coos Bay, Oregon, to meet the property's previous owner, Ken Keyes, and stayed with Keyes for four days.

"Oh, he was incredibly smart," said Cliff Todd of Keyes. "He had more intelligence than most people in his thumb, which is about all he could move below his neck.

"I took him to the doctor-apparently being paralyzed like that is bad on your kidneys. So, I took him to the doctor and helped him up onto the table. I really enjoyed talking with him. You know, he got stricken with polio the week after he got out of the Navy...

"He was so smart, I just never understood why all those beautiful young women practically threw themselves at him. He had been divorced two or three times, and when I was there, he was about to marry this other one."

When Todd returned home, he possessed a deed to 150 acres and campus buildings, but he had no guarantee that the state would grant him a contract to run a prison there.

"And I bought it without ever having a contract, without ever knowing it was going to be a prison. And then, when the residents of Marion County found out it was going to be a prison, there was going to be a hell of a fight there."

In urban Jefferson County, the county judge executive controlled the fiscal court like a CEO, but in rural Marion County, the court's magistrates, elected from the county's nine precincts, held more power. While Todd was in Texas at a conference for prison administrators, he received a phone call from a person who told him that the Marion County Fiscal Court had met that Thursday night. The courtroom had been so full of people that they had to move the meeting to a bigger courtroom. The people in attendance demanded that Todd not build a prison in Marion County, and the fiscal court agreed.

"But I couldn't give up ... so I hired lawyers," recalled Todd. Among Todd's lawyers was local-boy-made-good Jack Smith, whose effectiveness as a local boy was greatly diminished when he arrived in Lebanon driving a new Mercedes-Benz.

Despite the court's first vote, Todd and his team realized that the magistrates on the fiscal court would have to vote again on the prison.

"I think all the magistrates were sort of, in a way was, uh-not `bought,' but I don't know what word you want to use with Cliff Todd," Charlie Bickett later said, "because a lot of people were against it at first."

"We reached out to all of them [the magistrates], but some were more easy to work with than others, certainly [J. E. `Squire'] Bickett," Todd said. "Seems like all of them would be on my side one week, and then come back and say, `I can't do that. I'd be going against my people.'

"But finally we were close enough that we thought it was time to really dig our heels in and do or die. So, we rented an empty office building across from the courthouse and put an ad in the paper that we would be taking applications on the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of a certain week. It was the week that the fiscal court would be meeting on Saturday to approve or disapprove of the prison.

"So, in three days we gave out 2,800 applications for sixty-five jobs, but they could not fill them out and leave them.' They had to bring them back on Saturday morning. So, when they brought them back at 8 or 8:30, the fiscal court meeting was to convene at nine o'clock.

"I will never forget. People walked across the street and filled that courthouse. They had tobacco sticks and signs-anything that they thought would be helpful-and they chanted, in unison, with those tobacco sticks banging on the floor, `We want jobs! We want jobs! We want jobs!'

"Well, how could the magistrates sit there and look at them and not vote for the prison? And that's what got it done."

For the elected officials, the vote carried with it the consequences of any divisive public issue.

"Of course, that's why Judge Donahue got beat; that's why Daddy got beat; that's why Caldwell got beat," Charlie Bickett recalled. "Because of that prison because they all voted for it. After the election it was in the paper, `Courthouse cleaned.'... Cliff was a good man, but he wasn't too liked in Marion County because of that. You know, an outsider come in and put up a prison."

"I was driving out to the facility one day," Cliff Todd recalled, giving an example of the local hostility toward him. "And there was a dairy farm before you get to St. Mary's. And a cow had had a calf, and the creek was up because it had just rained. Well, I was sure that that calf was surely going to try to get up and fall into the creek.

"So, I stopped and knocked on the dairyman's door, and I said, `You have a cow over here with a calf, and I'm afraid it's going to jump in that creek.'

"`I know who you are, and we don't like your kind around here,' and that's all he said.

Yet, despite the difficult dealings with the locals, Cliff Todd wasn't ignorant of the ways of Marion County. Todd was born in 1928, and his father brought him on several occasions in their Model T Ford to Marion County in search of moonshine, which they bought by the gallon. And along his eccentric career path, Todd met a few people with connections to Marion County in other ways.

"Cliff was just a good man, had plenty of money and the foresight to see about private prisons," Charlie Bickett recalled. "Johnny Boone and him had previous-uh-relations, as far as under the table and all that."

The prison developer and former prisoner had done business in the past through their mutual interest in cattle breeding.

"I came upon a breed that people were trying to import from Europe," Cliff Todd said, "Maine-Anjou from the area of Maine-Anjou, France. But you can't import cattle, so we brought in the semen through Canada [mislabeled as a domestic breed].

"So, we bred our cows-first we'd have half-breeds, the next generation three-quarters, and so on until eventually you have a purebred. And that's where I met Johnny Boone.

"Johnny Boone and I were directors of the Maine-Anjou Association, and we met usually once a month somewhere, in Louisville or wherever. He built up quite a herd.... We got into this in about 1969.

"We were very friendly then, socially friendly, but along the way another breed was brought into the United States-Chianina-and that's an Italian cow. And they are wild; they're crazy! They would run like a quarter horse. When they turn, they would go with both front hoofs at once.

"Anyway, I went to South Dakota and bought seventy-five heifer calfs that were still nursing their mommas, but they were to be delivered in November at no less than 350 pounds.

"Well, the man I bought them from delivered them, but he-we knew he was in Kentucky by noon, but he didn't deliver the cows until it was after dark. The next morning, I could tell that quite a few of them were very much underweight. So, I pulled out seventeen of the seventy-five and weighed them, and they were like 225 pounds. So, I stopped payment on his check.

"He didn't want to give me a refund or take them back. He didn't want to do anything. I later found out that he hired Johnny Boone to rustle those cows. They were on a farm where no one was living at the time.

"Johnny Boone, with a crew, came in-and we never could understand how you could do it-and rounded up those seventy-five wild-ass heifers, got them on trucks in trailers and took them to Washington County.

"But some people saw these-they didn't know they were my cattle-but they saw cows drove through Finchville that looked like they were sardines. Some of their heads were on top like they were walking on one another.

"Anyway, that night-I felt like Johnny Boone had done it, and he had several farms. Between twelve midnight and four a.m., I was visiting every farm he was known to have been and didn't find them.

"Finally, on Saturday, I was in Springfield, and somebody told me to go to the stockyards. Well, there were my heifers with padlocks on the gates.

"Well, I thought: `OK, no big deal. I'll go have Johnny Boone arrested.'

"So, I go to the sheriff's office.

"The sheriff looked at me, and he said: `Mr. Todd, I could give you a warrant, but do you see that burned lot over there?' He was pointing out of the window of his office. `That used to be a big tobacco warehouse, but Johnny Boone had a disagreement with the owner of that, and it burned down.' He said: `I would advise you to get you a truck and take your cattle home, and I'll cut the locks for you.'

"So, that's what I did. I ended up hiring the same guy that Johnny used to take them, at my expense, of course.

"But later on, a few years later, Johnny and I became definitely speaking friends and talking. Bygones were bygones."

Yet, the people of Marion County had a much more difficult time letting go of their animosity toward Cliff Todd and his prison. Little did they realize that had they been successful in stopping Todd's plans, St. Mary's could have become something its Catholic founders would have deemed far worse.

"As the deed was given to me, and all papers were signed, the attorney handling the closing on the deal told me," Cliff Todd recalled.

"He said, `Mr. Todd, I've been authorized to offer you a profit of $100,000 on the facility if you will close within thirty days.'

"Well, that was hard to say `no' to because I had nothing really. I was hopeful of getting a contract, but it was a long way off-but I gritted my teeth, and said, `no.'

"I found out later that the interested buyer was a Baptist organization out of Texas."

Luckily, it never came to that, and Cliff Todd brought only prisoners to Marion County and not Texas Baptists. With the plan for the prison approved, Todd focused on honoring his commitment to fill his job openings with locals looking for work.

"I promised to give jobs, and I promised to give jobs only to Marion County people,"Todd said, "with the exception of three or four top people like my warden, and I stuck to that.

"So, we employed Marion County people, and we paid more than the regular minimum wage. And some of the businesses were fighting us, I found out later, because they thought we were lifting the wage scale.

"One man came up to me and asked for a job. He told me his name, and his last name was Tabor.

"I asked him: Are you related to Pauline Tabor?'

"He said: `She's my aunt.'

"I said: `You're hired.'...

"J. E. Bickett wanted his son [Charlie] to have a job. Well, without a doubt, his son was going to get a job. J. E. was a big help, not just as a magistrate, but in many ways. He was a generous man and helpful in any way he could be. If we needed a tractor, he helped with that. If we needed vehicles, he helped us get them, and I'm sure he made some money on it, too, but who cares?

"For some reason, I became a friend with Charlie Bickett more than any other officer I had. He seemed like a genuine person."

"I was on drugs bad then," Charlie Bickett recalled regarding his life before starting work at the prison. "I was on cocaine, and my marriage was shaky. I knew I had to get out of that bar. I seen two or three people get killed in that bar. Quack Livers shot hisself there ... and Ronnie Ellis got shot right below me there. I found a guy hung himself, me and Joe Downs found him dead. Billy Downs, Jack Lamkin shot him.... Then I seen a couple of shootouts."

Although the killings of Ronnie Ellis and Billy Downs had been shocking and perhaps avoidable, the suicide of Quack Livers had been far less surprising because Quack made a habit of punctuating his point of view with a game of Russian roulette. He would say things like, "I don't care what anybody thinks. If anybody tries to stop me, I'll shoot 'em just like this," and then he would pull his revolver, spin the cylinder, put it to his head and pull the trigger. Every time, the hammer hit an empty chamber, and the gun said, "click." Every time except the last time.

Quack was at Squire's Tavern, and old Jack Lamkin, the man who killed Billy Downs, came in and told Quack that the air in one of his tires was low.

"Nobody tells me what to do with my car!" Quack shouted.

"I don't care what you do," Lamkin said. "I'm just telling you your tire is low."

"If anybody touches my car, I'll shoot'em," Quack said. "Just like this."

Pull, spin, point, squeeze and BLAM! The body of Quack Livers dropped to the floor, and Charlie Bickett called the priest for the all-tooregular duty of administering last rites in Raywick.

Soon the door opened, and Joe Keith Bickett entered, stepping over Livers's body.

"Give me six beers," he told his brother Charlie.

"Did you see Quack there?" Charlie asked him.

"Yeah,"Joe Keith said. "He's dead. Give me six beers."

Charlie gave him the beer, and Joe Keith left. After the door shut behind him, someone in the bar said, "That's one cold motherfucker."

"Anyway, I had enough of it," Charlie recalled nearly thirty years later. "I just figured sooner or later, my odds were getting slim. People getting locked up ...

"I was one of the first twenty people they hired [at the prison], I reckon, and that's when I approached Johnny Boone one day when I had a chance. I'd been running that old bar down there since 1971 up to that date, and I was sort of half-crook anyway because I knew all the-knew everybody I needed to know, let's just put it like that."

Charlie Bickett wanted the job at St. Mary's, but he was concerned about what people would think about a Bickett working at a prison. He didn't want to ruin his reputation.

"And so I approached Johnny one day and told Johnny I had an opportunity to get a good job ... and he said, `Man, go for it.' Johnny Boone of all people! You know, I always respected him, so I thought if I got an endorsement from Johnny Boone, I could give a shit less what everybody else thinks."

Once Bickett got the job, how did he like it?

"I loved it. I loved it," he recalled. "When they hired me, I was in charge of cleaning the place all up. They gave me a road crew, and three out of the ten people were all from Marion County, local boys, doing time up here.

"Hell, I went through the ranks from an officer to a corporal to a sergeant to a lieutenant to unit director to, uh, assistant temporary deputy of security and programs. When they left-the deputy director of security or programs-went on vacation or went to a seminar, I took their place."

What would have happened to Charlie Bickett without the prison?

"I'd probably be doing time," he said. "There's not a doubt in my mind. There wouldn't have been a way out for me if I would have stayed in that bar. It's not because I wanted to be there. It's not because I wanted to see the things I saw there. It was just the times.

"So, anyway, Johnny Boone and Cliff Todd saved my life."

On July 25, 1984, in the middle of the prison drama gripping Marion County, President Ronald Reagan held a rare evening press conference at the White House, during which he discussed a wide range of foreign and domestic affairs in order to shape the public debate before the political and media elites departed Washington for their August vacations.

"Please be seated," the president said to the assembled press corps. "I have a brief statement here. The Congress is back this week for a session that's lasting only until August 10. But that's enough time for the House of Representatives to approve legislation that would benefit all Americans.

"Among the many important issues now facing the Congress is legislation that will help reduce deficits, reward work and thrift, make our cities and neighborhoods safer and increase personal liberties throughout our land....

"I have talked with the House Republican leadership. They have pledged to try again to bring six key measures to the floor for a vote. "First, a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget....

Second, a proposal granting spouses working in the home [equal] retiring rights....Third, a proposal offering incentives for investment in seventyfive enterprise zones.... Fourth, a bill allowing tuition tax credits.... Fifth, a comprehensive anticrime package to crack down on criminals through restrictions on bail, tougher sentencing and stricter enforcement of drug trafficking laws. And sixth, an equal access bill permitting religious student groups the same freedom to meet in public high schools....

"These reforms are long overdue, and they would benefit all the people.... It's time to test the new realism and to see if the Democratic leadership will move from words to action."

In the ensuing press conference, the president answered questions from reporters on topics ranging from tax policy to Geraldine Ferraro's claim that Reagan wasn't a good Christian because his budget cuts had hurt the poor and disadvantaged.

"Well, Helen, the minute I heard she'd made that statement I turned the other cheek," the president quipped.

Others asked the president about the CIA's secret war in Nicaragua, about negative campaign tactics, about entitlement programs, interest rates, voting registration in the South and access of American nuclearpowered ships to the ports of New Zealand. But no one asked the president anything about his views on the potential long-term costs of his proposed anticrime legislation.

Two months later, on September 26, the House approved the president's anticrime package as the 98th Congress hurried to clean up its business before its imminent adjournment. When President Reagan signed the bill into law, he enacted the most far-reaching expansion of the federal government's law enforcement powers in its history.

"The legislation, for the first time.... abolishes parole and completely overhauls the Federal bail and sentencing systems," reported the New York Times. Twenty years later the Supreme Court would rule whole sections of this law unconstitutional.

When Johnny Boone returned home from prison in the autumn of 1984, he did not yet understand the far-reaching implications of President Reagan's new drug-fighting policy. Washington politics was not his primary focus. While locked away on the Belize deal, time on the outside had stopped for Boone. He saw family and visitors regularly and received news from the prison grapevine, such as about the death of Ronnie Ellis, but like any ex-convict returning home, Boone found the world around him to be not as he remembered it: Things at home had changed.

Before he had gone to prison, he had seen cocaine around, used mostly by higher-ups with Florida connections, but it hadn't yet exploded onto the wider market. When he drove his truck into Raywick for the first time since his release, Johnny Boone discovered that cocaine had blasted through Marion County like a snowplow, leaving in its wake the remains of the benevolent moonshine culture that had once been the linchpin for generations of good-ol'-boy outlaws. Cocaine had magnified the wild nature of Marion County while stripping it of its humility and cunningtempting fate at both ends.

Raywick had always maintained a cartoon level of excitement and violence; cocaine put that cartoon on fast-forward, changing Johnny Boone's world so dramatically that it left him, to some degree, in denial:

"I honestly never seen [cocaine] on a farm, but my own men now tell me that it was probably there. I don't believe it," Boone recalled. "I didn't see it; I didn't see nobody acting batshit crazy, but they said maybe so."

Yet, despite his uncertainty about whether his workers had been using cocaine without his knowledge, Boone held a clear understanding of the new drug's effect on his business:

"I can tell you it is a death blow to a [marijuana] farm. Anybody can tell you that," Boone said. "Makes people go fucking nuts right in the middle of everything going on. Makes people get their guns out-for no reason except they've done the coke and they've got so paranoid. Paranoid about the sun coming up. Paranoid about all the partners stealing their part, but they're sitting there watching it, but they're paranoid. They get an idea up in their head.

"You know what it is? A lot of them fucked someone before, and now they're worried that they're going to get fucked. That's what puts that shit in there. Projection. That's why they have all them nightmares. Vampires coming at you because you're a vampire yourself. That coke actually fucked up quite a few good deals for good people on them farms.

"It infiltrated Bobby Joe's system very much."

Johnny Boone wasn't the only one watching cocaine take hold. Steve Lowery, the newspaper editor, saw it, too:

"On Leap Year Night, February 29," Lowery said later, "my buddy was playing harp for a band that was playing at Bickett's, and I got behind the bar with Charlie.' was right after cocaine was introduced.' his was right after Mike Hall got elected [in a judge's race] because I supported Spragens.

"Joe Keith came in, and he was rockin' and rollin'. He sat down and put out two great big lines of coke, and he said, `Let's do it.'

"I said, `Man, this is not the place or the time. Thank you, but no thank you.'

"He started cussing me, calling me `cocksucker,"Spragens' blah blah blah.

"I said, `I'm not going to talk politics with you, either. I'm here to celebrate my two friends' birthdays.'

"Squire Bickett comes in ... he and I got along famously. He and Charlie started jumping Joe Keith's shit. Well, about that time, Shewmaker walks in, and he's wired up, too. And these guys are both ready to rock and roll. I was behind the bar, fortunately, and there was a back way out. I'm thinking, `I gotta grab my jacket at the first opportunity and exit right,' because it was about to get ugly.

"I got along great with Jimmy ... he was the best-looking of them. Nice guy, though. One of those snowy winters ... my wife with our two little baby girls in the back in car seats, she goes off in the ditch, out in the cold. He happened to come up on them. He hooked them up, pulled them out of the ditch, wouldn't take any money for it. That was the thing....

"These people were very kind. There's a real human side to these people. People like to demonize folks who are in this particular industry. They're no different from people that grow tobacco unless they're doing really serious drugs."

In order to evade law enforcement, marijuana growers relied on legitimate farmers allowing them to grow a certain number of plants mixed into the farmers' cornfields. The marijuana man would usually pay a farmer a good-faith deposit; the farmer would plant his corn, and the grower would go in behind him and plant marijuana, either in the cornrows or in the balk between the rows. At the end of the season, the marijuana would be taken away to market, and the marijuana man would be responsible for bringing the straight farmer his cut of the deal, which was usually around $10,000. It was a system that worked well for years, but it depended upon the farmers' trust in the integrity of the marijuana men, once an honorable lot, until "really serious drugs" came and ruined half of them.

For a few months after returning home, Johnny Boone tried to address some of the problems he kept hearing about, especially regarding Shewmaker's crew, by trying to talk to one of his old friends, J. C. Abell. But Boone had trouble getting Abell to pay attention.

In the early 1980s, J. C. Abell had been a reliable marijuana man, working in partnerships with many in the same line of work, including Johnny Boone in the 1981 field that was busted by the DEA's V-tailed plane and during the ride of the Black Bandit, when Boone and Abell had been cohorts. But when Boone went away to federal prison, J. C. Abell gravitated toward Bobby Joe Shewmaker and his endless supply of cocaine, becoming by 1986 no longer an independent operator but rather an integral part of Bobby Joe's system, which was a completely different operation from Johnny Boone's operation or any of a dozen working independently from the others.

Several farmers came to Johnny Boone to complain that Abell owed them money for doing their part. This sort of discontent bred disharmony in a network that depended on everyone keeping his word so that everyone else would keep his secrets. Cocaine turned once-reasonable men into ego-driven narcissists with little regard for the consequences of their fastliving behavior. Johnny Boone recognized it as bad for business. Cocaine was unraveling the delicate marijuana network that Boone had spent fifteen years helping to create.

Boone knew that if he didn't act quickly, that network would be damaged beyond repair. When he had the chance, he took J. C. Abell aside and told him Abell needed to pay the farmers whom he had stiffed from the previous year, but Abell didn't even acknowledge Boone other than to say goodbye or hello. The cocaine, in addition to rotting his mind and inflating his ego, had clogged Abell's ears. Johnny Boone needed to do something dramatic to get his attention.

"We ... had it out in the doorway of Bickett's bar," Johnny Boone recalled. "Same ol'shit, went bad.

"A month or two later, still nothing straightened out. Nobody come sit down and said, `OK, we can try to do this this week, something else next month.'There was no good talk about nothing.

"I said, `Fuck."'

Right at the end of that "month or two," Billy Thompson, a Raywick war veteran, died and joined his wife, Yun Sun Pok Thompson, in the Raywick cemetery. Due to Thompson's military service, Ft. Knox sent an army chaplain to Marion County to conduct the funeral rite alongside Father Clarence Schwartz in the cemetery where Charlie and Paul Stiles, the grandfathers of a new generation of outlaws, had been buried in 1971 and 1979, respectively.

From the back of the assembled mourners, Johnny Boone kept an eye on Abell, who befriended the army chaplain, a sandy-haired military man in his forties. After the services concluded, Abell offered the chaplain a ride back into town in his red Corvette.

Whereas J. C. Abell and many others began driving Corvettes as soon as they could afford them, Johnny Boone always drove a sturdy Chevrolet pickup, no matter how much money he made. His truck blended into its agricultural surroundings. If an IRS agent began asking questions, what excuse did Abell, a man without employment, have for owning a red Corvette?

After the funeral, J. C. Abell took the army chaplain on the grand tour, likely telling him stories about Raywick and all the crazy things that happened there, maybe even telling the story of when Charlie Stiles shot him in the knee for cutting donuts in the church parking lot.

"They went to the Fifth Wheel ... and proceeded to get as drunk as they fucking could,"Johnny Boone recalled.

Boone stayed in his truck and waited. Soon enough, they emerged from the Fifth Wheel and into the street.

"So, I seen him," Boone said. "They'd probably been doing coke, to tell you the fucking truth."

At that moment, Boone committed himself to getting his message across to Abell in one way or another.

"I just played up the part of the scorned partner," Boone said. "That [chaplain] just happened to be there on the wrong day."

So, as J. C. Abell staggered into the red Corvette with his new friend, the Ft. Knox chaplain, Johnny Boone watched them from his pickup. The red Corvette disappeared down Highway 84 toward Hodgenville.

"They'll be back," Boone thought and waited in his truck.

When the red Corvette returned to Raywick, it came to a stop in front of the Bickett family home, where Highway 84 intersects the road where Boone was parked in front of the Fifth Wheel.

The chaplain sat in the Corvette's passenger seat as Abell let the engine idle at the only stop sign in Raywick when an oncoming pickup didn't stop and didn't turn. Instead, it made contact with the driver's-side door-not with the full impact of a head-on collision but with the gentle, deliberate thud of train cars coupling.

"I got my truck underneath him and just raised him up," Boone said. Johnny Boone, after gently T-boning the Corvette, dropped his truck into low gear and pushed the red fiberglass sports car up into the air onto two wheels, sending Abell and the chaplain grasping for anything to keep from falling out the passenger-side window. Then Boone backed up, let the Corvette fall back onto all four tires and gave Abell and the chaplain a chance to breathe. And then-

"I did it again," Boone said.

The spectacle drew a crowd outside the Fifth Wheel and Bickett's Pool Hall. During the spontaneous demolition derby, Coletta Bickett, the woman who had raised the Bickett boys, ran out her front door into the street, trying to stop Boone from hurting Abell any further.

"Johnny! Stop!" Coletta yelled over the sounds of the Corvette's fiberglass body crunching and the pickup's engine revving and the crowd of drunk spectators continuing to gather. "Johnny! Johnny!"

Jimmy Bickett, just a face in the mob outside his family's pool hall, tried to keep his mother out of it.

"Mamma!" Jimmy shouted, waving his arms. "Get back in the goddamn house!"

"Funniest part of it was Mrs. Bickett standing out there in her yard," Boone said, looking back twenty years later. "It was the funniest shit in the world."

Boone raised and lowered the Corvette a third time, which he figured was enough to get J. C. Abell's attention. So, after setting the Corvette down onto all four tires, Johnny Boone stepped out of his pickup to talk to Abell face to face but not before grabbing the handgun he kept in his truck. Gone were the days of Charlie Stiles, when one could go around without a firearm.

"I got out to go see J. C.," Boone said. "And the chaplain got out and came around that fucking car. I had something [a pistol] in my hand, but he didn't know it when he came charging around that car. Hair up like this, still had his tie on, eyes wild."

Only when the chaplain was face to face with Boone did he see the steel in his hand.

"Are you sure?" Boone asked him.

"And that motherfucker ran around the car and slammed the fucking door," Boone said later.

Then Boone leaned down to J. C. Abell's window.

"So much for your help," Boone said. "Now what?"

There were dozens of witnesses, including Steve Lowery, the newspaper editor.

"He [Boone] casually got into his pickup truck," Lowery said later, "and knocked that Corvette all the way into about next week. I mean, it just tore the hell out of it. The Corvette was destroyed. Then he got out and said, `You want to fuck with me now? You want some more?'

"No report was ever made. A lot of this stuff was folklore, but it happened."

This incident caused relations to sour between the crews of Johnny Boone and Bobby Joe Shewmaker, to which J. C. Abell belonged. Boone wanted them out of the cocaine business, and to Shewmaker and his men, that was just inconceivable. The conversation ended in a standoff, culminating in death threats from both sides. But no one wanted to be the man who shot Johnny Boone, and Johnny Boone didn't want to shoot anyone at all. He just wished they would pay attention and see that he was right and they were wrong, but that wasn't going to happen, either.

In November 1984, Ronald Reagan coasted into a second term in office, defeating the Mondale-Ferraro ticket in a forty-nine-state landslide. President Reagan won even in Lebanon, Kentucky, a historically Democratic stronghold. In a story headlined "Reagan Victory over Mondale Makes Marion County History," the Enterprise reported that 53 percent of Marion County, which was registered Democratic at a ratio of more than 20 to 1, voted for the reelection of the president by a margin of 470 votes. Before 1984, only two Republican presidential candidates had won in Marion County: Dwight Eisenhower in 1956 and Richard Nixon in 1972-and then only by eighteen and nineteen votes, respectively.

Neither Johnny Boone nor Jimmy Bickett voted in 1984; their voting rights had been stripped from them as convicted felons. Despite their exclusion from the voting process, Boone, Bickett and others in their business kept abreast of the changing political landscape. They didn't need their defense attorneys to know which way the wind blew.

Seeing the mounting federal government pressure, Johnny Boone took his operation underground and out of sight. The growers who once raised the large marijuana fields in the deep corners of Marion County had begun to take those operations to other states, where the state police were less adept at spotting marijuana from the air. Marion County had given the Kentucky State Police too much target practice to make any location in the Bluegrass, no matter how isolated, safe enough to grow a multiacre patch as Marion County had grown in the early days. With the increased threat of long prison sentences, Cornbread growers quietly began organizing in rural enclaves of states like Missouri, Kansas, Michigan and Minnesota, to name a few.

The police and journalists in Kentucky wondered where all the big marijuana farms had gone. The secondary evidence-Raywick's parking lots filled with cars with out-of-state license plates and new sports cars with Marion County tags-was as abundant as ever; but the primary evidence-big patches of marijuana spotted from the air-had long ago disappeared. More and more, the pot sold in Raywick was being grown far away and then trucked back to town, marketed to buyers nationwide as Kentucky Bluegrass. A buyer might drive all the way in from Cleveland to buy Kentucky pot that was grown in Ohio.

"One of the main reasons we brought everything back was because we could control and protect it, and the workers lived here," Johnny Boone recalled. "But another reason was it needed to be here, preferably in Raywick, to be loaded into buyers' cars, one-ton truck, whatever it was, all kinds of vehicles. It needed to be loaded right here because they were paying for Kentucky Bluegrass, baby. They wanted it.

"I told my men we would probably load [buyers' trucks] out of [the out-of-state farm]. I didn't tell them I intended to bring every pound coming back to Kentucky to load out of Raywick. It would bring $500 per pound extra premium to sell it out of Raywick."

While Raywick pot began to bring a premium price, federal law enforcement members began to zero in on the man they believed to be Marion County's number 1 distributor: Bobby Joe Shewmaker. For the past five years, federal agents had worked one imprisoned accomplice against another from Savannah to St. Augustine to Big Fred and his recorded phone conversations until a full picture of Shewmaker's role in the smuggling operation emerged.

Thirty witnesses from Florida and Georgia cooperating with the federal government detailed a plan to navigate a stolen shrimp boat from Key West to the Caribbean coast of Colombia, where it was loaded with thousands of pounds of baled marijuana before returning to the waters off the coast of St. Augustine, Florida. Men with nicknames like "Pretty Boy," "Tug," "Big Fred" and "Little Fred" told federal agents that Bobby Joe Shewmaker took more than one thousand pounds of that shrimp boat load of marijuana by truck to Kentucky.

Of the thirty-two conspirators identified in the indictment handed down in the closing days of December 1985, just days before the statute of limitations expired on the charges, Bobby Joe Shewmaker would be one of only three who eventually stood trial because he refused to plead guilty and inform on his associates. Even in the tough, anticrime era of Reagan's second term-a period marked by lengthy prison sentencesShewmaker held strong to his code of silence. When he was convicted, Shewmaker paid his $250,000 cash bond in Savannah and returned to Kentucky. When it came time for Shewmaker to surrender for sentencing in the Savannah courthouse on Wright Square, federal officials found themselves waiting in an empty courtroom: Bobby Joe Shewmaker decided to become a fugitive instead.

As a man on the run, Shewmaker continued to manage a multistate pot-farming network so extensive and elaborate that he purchased one of his Missouri farms specifically not to grow marijuana at all; it was located too close to town for that. But with the increasing size of the growing operation, Shewmaker's Missouri farm managers needed a location just to store and pool the tractors, combines and other heavy farm equipment that they moved from one farm to another. Because all the in-and-out traffic could cause increased scrutiny of the property, Shewmaker kept it clean of contraband and used it exclusively as an equipment depot.

While these sorts of elaborate farming networks were being run by Raywick graduates in other states, local activity in Marion County had dropped off to an amateur level. The professionals had moved on to other pastures, returning at harvest with their yields.

The only signs that the marijuana marketplace continued to thrive would appear briefly and unannounced, like Bigfoot. One such sighting occurred on March 1, 1986, when three teenage boys, while running across farmland outside St. Mary's, discovered something they had not anticipated. Two local brothers showed a visiting city boy around the farm. The new kid had never been on a farm before and asked the brothers to show him a silo, something he had never seen.

As the boys ran across the farmland, they hopped the fence onto the neighbor's property, where they discovered a ramshackle barn in disrepair. Curious, the boys decided to explore it. When they entered the barn, the older brother discovered a $20 bill on the dirt floor.

"Look!" he said, picking up the twenty.

"Split it three ways!" the other two demanded.

But while the little brother and the visiting boy debated how to split the $20, the older brother saw something most people only dream about: bundles of $50, $20 and $10 bills stacked on a mound of dried cow manure.

"Look at all that money," he said, and the two other boys stopped fighting.

In unison, the three boys jumped at the cash and started stuffing their pockets, shirts and pants, then ran home across fields and over fences at a full sprint. At the house, the boys hid their loot-in a cigar box, in the back of a boom box, in a tackle box. After it was stashed, the boys contemplated their situation for forty-five minutes and then decided they should tell their mothers.

"Mom," one said. "What would you do if we found $10,000?"

"We'd blow it," she told him.

So, the boy fetched his cigar box and showed his mother. She knew it was too much. She called the police; they arrived in ten minutes. The police officers quizzed the boys, wanting to know everything they could about the money and where the boys had found it. Then the police asked for the money. The boys, reluctantly, fetched their stashes.

One brought $600 from his room; another handed over $2,000 from the inside of his radio; the other brother gave the policemen half the money he had found. His mother found the rest a few days later when she was cleaning his room.

The police helped the boys retrace their steps, finding $1,000 in cash that the boys had dropped like accidental breadcrumbs on their sprint home, but there wasn't a single bill left in the barn where it had been found. In the end, the police counted $16,000, cash, which they locked away in an evidence locker until an investigation could be completed. The boys would never see the money again.

In 1986, despite declining eradication numbers in Marion County, the state police planned another pot-clearing campaign. They had some new hardware, the Kentucky State Police's first helicopter of its very own, a jet Bell Ranger, leased with funds from the DEA, along with a mobile command post and radio center, which they set up at the Lebanon/Springfield Airport.

In late June 1986, police had used the helicopter to find just fortyseven plants in one county, twenty-three plants in another and sixty-five plants in a third. So, when the state police took to the air above Marion County in early July, they expected to find equally small patches. Instead, less than thirty minutes after leaving the airport, detectives found sixty thousand plants growing in two patches-huge busts even though the male plants had not yet been removed from the patches and especially significant because fields of this size hadn't been seen in Marion County for years. The police, journalists and everyone else had concluded that crops of this size had long since moved out of state. Yet, despite the losses from those two plots, the Kentucky marijuana market continued to produce some of the most potent marijuana available in the nation because of the syndicate's geographic diversification.

According to the National Narcotics Consumers Intelligence Committee, the average THC level was 4 percent for marijuana grown in the United States and 8 percent for sinsemilla. Kentucky's marijuana, on average, doubled the THC level of the national baseline, and homegrown Kentucky outdoor sinsemilla, like Johnny Boone's Kentucky Bluegrass, was testing at 14 percent by 1986. In 1989, the Louisville office of the DEA reported that it tested Kentucky samples that surpassed 18 percent, more than double the potency of marijuana grown elsewhere in America at the time.

Much of that highly potent Kentucky sinsemilla left Raywick in the backs of trucks, vans and cars with big trunks. This was no secret; police knew it, but there wasn't much the authorities could do to stop it. By 1984, Raywick had proved itself to be invulnerable to undercover police work after it had sniffed out the Tom Foolery's "undercover bar" investigation and ran it out of town.

Folks in Raywick were well trained at spotting a "narc" before he opened his mouth. The state police undercover narcotics force made it easier on the outlaws by its consistent and obvious choices of cover. Every undercover narcotics detective working for the Kentucky State Police wore his hair shaggy, drove a Trans Am and drank Sterling beer, according to one retired detective. In some parts of the state, this was enough of a disguise to make a few small buys and move up the supply chain before making an arrest. In Raywick, Trans Am-driving, Sterling beer-drinking strangers were given the Raywick special.

Had the police decided to roll into Raywick disguised as a motorcycle gang, they might have had better luck or at least generated a little more respect. But even that plan could have been disastrous because the Mongols, the nastiest of the West Coast motorcycle gangs, met more than they could handle when they roared into Raywick on their chop-shopped Harleys in 1988, thinking they could take over Bickett's Pool Hall and the Fifth Wheel just as they had everywhere else they had conquered.

When the Mongols parked in Raywick, roughing up Bickett's clientele and starting fights in the parking lot, Jimmy Bickett learned their weakness. In downtown Lebanon, the Mongols had parked their mobile headquarters: a sixteen-wheel semi-truck and trailer, from which its mismatched motorcycles had spewed. While the Mongols raised hell in Raywick, Jimmy Bickett and a carload of buddies paid a visit to the unguarded semi-truck.

When no one was looking, they worked the truck over: slashing tires, breaking out windows and lifting the hood to cut out every wire, hose and belt they could see. Then they drove back to Raywick, where the Mongols thought they had planted a flag. A predatory and violent criminal organization like the Mongols would have substantial interest in controlling the marijuana distribution out of a place like Raywick, and for most of an evening, the Mongols thought they had.

When they returned to their truck and surveyed the damage, they roared back to Raywick to raise hell again. The leader asked Jimmy Bickett if he had heard anything about a truck getting vandalized, and Bickett shook his head and told them no. He didn't know anything about it. The Mongols, chastened, disappeared the way they had come.

Bickett's Pool Hall outlasted generations of police work, fires, gunshots and repeated assaults by invading outsiders, culminating in the Mongol horde. Like a rock against the ocean, when the waves receded, Bickett's remained. Yet, like every invincible thing in history and myth, Bickett's Pool Hall had one enemy too small to consider but too great to defeat. Its Achilles' heel would be a wounded teenage ego.

On Tuesday night, September 2, 1986, a nineteen-year-old Nelson County native, the son of a construction contractor, came to Raywick looking for a good time. Inside Bickett's Pool Hall, he began flirting with a good-looking woman who was out of his league.

"A punk from Nelson County whose father was a contractor-that's where he got the dynamite," Steve Lowery recalled. "And he was in Bickett's playing pool and hitting on this lady, who just so happened to be married to one of the `boys.'

"So, the guy came in, and she told him, `This guy's been hitting on me all night, we want to whip his ass.' . . . They whip his ass and tell him, `Don't ever come back here.' He left with his friend, and his friend dragged him out of there.

"He went home and got a bunch of his dad's dynamite out of his shop. He comes back into Raywick and throws two or three sticks of dynamite into Bickett's, and it just blows the hell out of the place. No one was there, fortunately. When he did that, it was going to cause a lot of trouble, obviously."

The blast created a vacuum that sucked open the doors to all the cabinets and refrigerators, so the floor was littered with glasses and full cans of beer, some spewing foam from holes busted in their sides.

"I was in my house asleep about three in the morning, and there was an explosion; my house started shaking," Lowery remembered. "It actually cracked the foundation of the church across the street. It was a hell of an explosion.

"`What the hell was that?' I thought.

"Immediately, a contingent of boys got together and formed the crew that was going to re-create the bar immediately and the crew that was going to go out and-They knew, pretty much, who had done it....

"So, the crew that stayed, before one or two o'clock in the afternoon, they had the walls back up, they had all brand new furniture in there. It looked great ... so by the time the state police arson investigator showed up in the late afternoon-no one reported anything, either. There was no report.

"He said, `I heard there was an explosion.'

"And they said, `What? What explosion? We don't know what you're talking about.'

"He said, `Well, wait a minute. What's all this?'

"And they say, `We're redecorating.'

"The other boys, who were sent out on a mission to get the son of a bitch, they get themselves armed up to the teeth. They get their machine guns out, and they knew where the guy lived. There was about five or six of them, and they all have machine guns, and they all roll up to the house. The father comes out; he's nervous.

"He says, `What's my boy done?'

"And they explain what he had done.

"He says, `Give me a bill, and I'll pay for it.'

"They say, `That's part of it. The other part is, tell him: We don't ever want to see him in Raywick again, or we're going to kill him.'

"He says, `I'll make sure he understands it, and I'll kick his ass myself.'

"So, it was all settled without police interference, which is the way things usually went down in Raywick. They preferred not to have police involved in things. They take care of themselves."

Two months later, November 1986, the Kentucky State Police caught a glimpse of something that they knew to exist but that had been kept from their view: a pot-processing factory, where marijuana, cut and cured, was trimmed and groomed into a final product. The police had never seen a pot-processing factory before because such factories remained well hidden. The police knew that such places must exist, but like the Loch Ness monster, it was a fact many detectives took on faith.

For the first decade of the marijuana era in Marion County, all processing from a number of top growers was centralized in one location, a place no one would ever suspect of housing a multimillion-dollar illicit factory-on a farm owned by a prominent doctor, whose brother had once been mayor of Lebanon. No one would have ever guessed that the stately proportioned barns and outbuildings concealed several tons of high-grade sinsemilla in any given October between 1972 and 1980, drying on blue tarpaulins. Yet, there it was, the processing headquarters for Johnny Boone, Bobby Joe Shewmaker and a dozen other growers.

The most stressful job at this particular location was that of the tenant farmer, whose surname was Brady. Although he had a variety of tasks to perform throughout the season, his chief duty was to take the fall if the operation was ever uncovered. The property owner knew nothing about these activities and would have been genuinely shocked and embarrassed if police had found marijuana on his land.

At some point the constant stress of running an industrial-sized marijuana-processing plant began wearing on Brady, and he decided he couldn't take it anymore. So, he curled up with a bottle of liquor in a bottom bunk bed in the back of the farmhouse, where he drank himself to sleep. When Bobby Joe Shewmaker found him there, Shewmaker leaped onto the top bunk, sending it crashing down onto Brady in the bunk below. Then Shewmaker grabbed him and pulled him to his feet.

"I want out," Brady begged.

"You can't get out," Shewmaker told him. "You are in," he said as he kicked Brady down the hallway toward the door. "You hear me? You are in!"

Once the state police started flying helicopters, beginning in 1980, the sprawling farm no longer provided the sort of cover it once had when the police searched only from the road. With the changing nature of the cat-and-mouse game, the growers moved their processing plants elsewhere, leaving them more vulnerable to exposure. But still, the processing barns remained hidden until Thursday morning, November 6, 1986.

On that day, a Lexington narcotics detective received information from a confidential informant that there was a barn in Woodford County with a bunch of marijuana in it. The Lexington cop called a Kentucky State Police detective to relay the information, asking to meet him at the McDonald's in the Woodford County seat, Versailles (pronounced "Ver-sails").

At the Versailles McDonald's, the two detectives met and waited as others joined their conference, including two DEA agents and two IRS agents. The barn in question, the Lexington detective said, was two miles out of town, and they should call the Woodford County sheriff. Shortly after, the sheriff arrived at McDonald's, and he led a convoy of police vehicles out McCracken Pike toward the 175-acre Lewis farm in the late morning.

At the farm, the sheriff talked with a farmhand who had managed the Lewis property for eleven years. The farmhand told them that Lewis wasn't home but that he was in charge of the farm when Lewis was away. The sheriff asked if they could look around, and the farmhand said that would be fine with him.

As the detectives prepared a consent-to-search form, they saw an unidentified man run from the silos in the near distance into a barn. The sheriff asked if the farmhand knew that man, and the farmhand said no. It was 12:15 p.m.

The agents raced to the barn, where they watched the man enter. Inside, the state police detective looked up and saw marijuana plants hanging from the rafters, as if they were a crop of burley tobacco curing in the cool darkness. The police announced themselves and told everyone to come out. Immediately a dozen or more unidentified men scattered from the barn in all directions like mice; the detectives and agents, like cats, gave chase. Two of the men fled out of the back of the barn and fell, chest-deep, into the dairy farm's manure pond, where the police held them at gunpoint, their hands in the air as they sank deeper into the liquefied feces, until eight of their co-workers had also been arrested.

Upon further investigation, the lawmen realized they had found a "sophisticated marijuana-processing operation," according to the police report. Marijuana was hanging in two of the three barns on the farm; the cattle shed had been converted into a sleeping and eating quarters, where detectives found thirteen sleeping bags. State police radioed headquarters to request a crime lab unit, and the federal agents called their superiors in Louisville and suggested they come see for themselves. No one had ever seen anything quite like it.

By the end of the day, the farm was crawling with law enforcement of every stripe: In addition to the initial raiding party, there were ten Woodford County officials (six sheriff deputies, a city policeman, the county attorney and two truck drivers), a sergeant with Lexington Metro Narcotics, four Kentucky State Police narcotics officers, a videographer, two members of the KSP public affairs team, five state troopers, an officer with KSP vehicle enforcement, four members of the KSP crime identification team and two additional DEA agents from Louisville.

In the first barn, detectives found ten folding chairs arranged in a circular pattern. Beside each chair was a box of untrimmed marijuana. Beside each box was a pair of scissors (three red-handled, six orangehandled). Above their heads were forty tobacco sticks, each holding fifty to sixty stalks of marijuana, hanging on barbed wire that had been strung from the rafters. In the rear of the barn, they found a sifting operation consisting of a wire mesh screen attached to wooden studs, raised off the floor by plastic buckets. Each sift was three by six feet and used, the detectives speculated, for separating the seeds from the marijuana. (In fact, this was a drying rack.)

In the second barn, the detectives found nineteen pounds of processed marijuana, eight pairs of scissors, one pack of cigarette papers and assorted trash, from which the crime scene unit pulled sixteen fingerprints.

The investigators found that the third building, made of white block and formerly a cattle shed, had been converted into living quarters by hanging a sheet of plastic over the west side of the structure, which was not enclosed. Bales of straw were stacked outside the plastic, and a propanefueled barbecue grill sat just outside the plastic wall with three Igloo coolers nearby. The room's interior was crowded with sleeping bags, suitcases, duffel bags, clothing, shoes and a kerosene heater. In the middle of the room, a portable TV had been placed atop a folding metal table along with two TV Guides and two decks of cards, one blue and one red.

Along one of the block walls, another table had been set up as a dining table, lined with benches. There had been a hot pork chop dinner served on the table when the raiding party sent the workers fleeing in all directions. As the investigators combed the scene, the coffee was still hot in the Styrofoam cups on the table.

Next to the stove stood a refrigerator with a sign on the front that read Pop 5o, which led investigators to conclude that the workers were being charged fifty cents per soft drink by the operation's boss. A Woodford County sheriff's deputy recognized the refrigerator. He had seen the farmhand driving down Main Street in Versailles with the refrigerator on the back of a blue Chevy S-10 pickup truck.

"I remember it because of the writing on the front of the refrigerator, `pop 50."' the deputy said.

Inside the refrigerator, detectives found a giant package of pork chops, net weight 19.46 pounds, purchased for $30.94 from Higdon's Foodtown in Lebanon. Elsewhere in the room, detectives found nearly two hundred rounds of .45-caliber ammunition, a hardback copy of Love and War by Patricia Hagen, a paperback edition of The Rider of the Ruby Hills by Louis L'Amour, a University of Kentucky Wildcat sportswear order form, a Kentucky High School basketball yearbook, the Kentucky basketball factbook for the 1986-87 season (Rex Chapman's freshman year) and the April 1985 issue of Penthouse magazine. In all, the crime lab team found forty-nine latent fingerprints in the room.

The detectives hauled from the scene six loads of marijuana, totaling 3,900 pounds. Sixty-five additional pounds of the processed pot was kept as evidence. The truck drivers delivered the six loads of pot to the county maintenance farm, where it was burned. The Woodford County sheriff, his deputy and a Lexington television news crew watched the bonfire.

Meanwhile, in the Woodford County jail, detectives began interrogating the ten men they had in custody, beginning with the first suspect at 3:25 p.m. Some of the interviews lasted less than a minute, as the ten arrested men responded to their interrogator's questions with a short list of answers, including, "I choose to remain silent," "I don't know" and "I want to see my attorney."

On Thursday, November 20, all ten defendants were charged on federal indictments. By January 21, 1987, the state crime lab had processed all the fingerprints collected from the Woodford County farm, connecting one suspect to the scene by prints lifted from a Styrofoam cup, a bottle of Kahlua liqueur and a spatula in the kitchen. Another print from a Campbell's tomato juice can matched the left thumb of another suspect; prints on another Styrofoam cup matched a third defendant's prints.

The lab dusted every piece of trash left on the scene and every conceivable surface, including each page of all the books and magazines left behind, finding fingerprints on five pages of The Rider of the Ruby Hills and twenty-three fingerprints, four full palm prints and two knuckle impressions in the April 1985 issue of Penthouse, which featured a black-haired, leather-wearing dominatrix named Fasha as the "Pet of the Month."

At the end of March 1987, the federal courthouse in Lexington issued subpoenas for two Marion County men who, prosecutors believed, had escaped the scene during the November raid. The subpoenas asked the men to "relinquish their finger and palm prints." Prosecutors hoped to link them to the Penthouse or to any other unidentified fingerprints scattered throughout the scene. On July 15, 1987, prosecutors made it official and charged the two remaining men with "possession with intent to distribute."The two men surrendered to US marshals on August 12.

On Wednesday, October 7, 1987, prosecutors brought the twelve defendants in the Woodford County case before a federal grand jury in Lexington. All ten men pleaded the Fifth Amendment and refused to answer questions, after which the US district judge explained the concept of forced immunity to them. All acknowledged that they understood that the judge, through a writ of forced immunity, could compel them to speak without Fifth Amendment protection because the court had immunized them against self-incrimination.

Despite understanding the writ, none of the men answered any questions put to him in the grand jury. The judge found them all to be in contempt of court and sentenced them to an additional eighteen months on top of their sentences for the crime of trimming pot in a barn. To the men from Marion County, an extra year and a half in prison was a small price to pay for the knowledge that no one else had been sent to prison because of them.

ONE WEEK BEFORE THE 1986 MIDTERM CONGRESSIONAL ELECTION, President Ronald Reagan signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, a muscular supplement to his 1984 anticrime package. The law was "the federal government's way of saying no," Reagan said, adding $1.7 billion in taxpayer dollars to the $2.2 billion already spent each year fighting drugs to improve enforcement programs, toughen sentences for drug violators and increase the size of the federal government's payroll by several thousand drug enforcement agents. That $3.9 billion that President Reagan spent fighting drugs is equal to $8.5 billion in 2011.

Following their president's orders, these agents worked to send a new wave of Americans convicted by its laws into the federal prison system, overwhelming facilities that were already crowded, according to a 1986 study by the United States Sentencing Commission. The federal prison system, with a capacity of twenty-eight thousand prisoners in 1986, already held forty-four thousand adults. The Justice Department estimated that at least half the convicts entering the system by the end of the decade would be drug violators. In the span of a single election cycle, President Reagan and the Democrats in the House had whipped the drug war into its highest state of alert since its declaration by Richard Nixon more than a decade before.

"The Administration has been remarkably successful in changing attitudes and norms," Mark Moore, a professor at Harvard University, told the New York Times. "The president's public role has legitimized the drug issue."

This new expansion of the federal prison system started a ticking time bomb: On November 1, 1987, all drug criminals would be sentenced by minimum guidelines. For the same crime that earned Paul Stiles a $500 fine and six months' probation in 1976, a farmer caught after November 1, 1987, would face a minimum of ten years in federal prison.

But it wasn't November yet; it was only April, and Johnny Boone had been out of prison on the Belize deal since 1984, or two growing seasons. Back home on Bloomfield Road, Boone and his son Jeffrey planned another big year for the Russian, which his son had kept going while Johnny was away.

"That's what we planted in Minnesota," Boone later said.

In the same month, another meeting took place in Louisville under the auspices of the newly created Organized Crime Drug Enforcement (OCDE) Task Force, bearing the newly designated FBI classification 245-F. For the first time, representatives from the Kentucky State Police, FBI, DEA, IRS and the US Attorney's Office sat around a table and discussed Bobby Joe Shewmaker, Raywick and the Marion County marijuana problem; Johnny Boone was not yet on the radar.

The task force's profile of Bobby Joe Shewmaker-fugitive from the law since he skipped out on his sentencing hearing in Savannah-was relatively accurate.

Shewmaker, it reported, "has been considered for many years as a result of reliable information to be a substantial, significant grower, distributor, and broker of multi-tons of marijuana in the Kentuckiana area ... and reportedly has assets and property valued in the millions in Kentucky, Indiana and Florida ... but local prosecution has been fruitless.... The rural, isolated nature of the area this group is located in has made penetration by local law enforcement agencies impossible.... It is felt that the only practical method to be used against [Shewmaker] is the task force concept."

Following its April meeting, the task force's efforts "centered around the gathering of intelligence information of each of the participating agencies." After the task force synthesized each agency's files on Marion County, "the use of aerial and ground surveillance, as well as pen registers [phone tapping machines] will begin." Because "conventional investigative methods directed against this group have failed," the task force determined success would be "dependent upon utilization of all available task force resources including informants, pen registers, Title III [a wiretapping statute], aerial surveillance, UCAs [undercover agents], federal grand jury and computers." Confident of its eventual victory, the task force predicted the investigation would "result in substantial seizure of drugs, money, conveyances and real estate."

Meanwhile in Marion County, men decided to leave their families for the summer to join growing operations run by Johnny Boone in Minnesota or Bobby Joe Shewmaker in Missouri and Kansas or any of a dozen or more crews operating independently of one another in a dozen states. The best way for them to make a living in the collapsed farm economy, they decided, was to break the law. The men making those decisions agreed to work for Johnny Boone on an out-of-state farm with no contact with home or family until the job was done. Johnny Boone had the operation all lined up, with one last thing to take care of. criminal charges pending against him, alleging that he had grown marijuana the previous year in Nelson County.

In May, Johnny Boone walked into the Bardstown courtroom to face those charges. A stout farmer with a full, red beard, he entered wearing farm clothes, unadorned except for his wedding ring and a small silver hoop earring peeking out from between his curly hair and side whiskers. Without the earring, he would have resembled any other cattle farmer or burly woodsman; with it, as a token of his inner hippie, Boone projected the casual and confident nature of a man unashamed of his chosen line of work.

Boone stood before the judge, and standing next to Boone was his smartly dressed attorney, Jack Smith, the former federal prosecutor and US attorney. Long before Boone hired Jack Smith as his lawyer, Boone knew Jack's father, Henry Smith, the Marion County judge. Despite their differences in dress, stature and professional experience, Smith and Boone were products of the same central Kentucky culture.

Before the proceedings could begin, the state's witness dropped his face into his hands. The commonwealth attorney approached the bench to tell the judge that his witness, a farmer, couldn't testify because he was afraid of someone in the courtroom.

"Afraid?" the judge bellowed, as Jack Smith later remembered it. "Afraid of who?"

Without looking up, the farmer pointed at Johnny Boone, and the judge looked Boone over.

"We've got him on tape, Your Honor," a policeman said. "We don't need his testimony."

"No," the judge said firmly. "We're not going to use a tape if the man is sitting right here and can testify for himself. If he can't, the commonwealth will have to say the witness has recanted."

The judge looked again at the witness, who was still doubled over, face in hands; he could have been crying. The judge banged his gavel and dismissed the case against Johnny Boone without prejudice.

After the case concluded, Jack Smith walked with Johnny Boone to the parking lot. It was the last time the two men would see each other under pleasant circumstances. Johnny Boone hopped into his pickup and drove north out of Bardstown and past Rooster Run toward the interstate highway and his next major project: a substantial marijuana farm in northern Minnesota.

Even though Boone escaped the charges facing him in Bardstown, as soon as he crossed the Ohio River, he broke another law: Since his release from federal prison a few years before, his parole was conditional on Boone not leaving the commonwealth. To solve this problem, Boone a few weeks before had visited West Virginia, where he acquired a driver's license from a bearded man named Charles Lee Grass. As Mr. Grass, Johnny Boone left Kentucky a few weeks after Alysheba won the 113th Kentucky Derby.

Boone knew that the sentences for the sorts of crimes he was conspiring to commit had risen since his release from prison in 1984, but he had no way of knowing how pivotal the growing season of 1987 would be in the history of American law. If police found Boone's secret crop before November 1, Boone could be paroled after serving two-thirds of his time sentenced, which would largely be determined by the judge. If they busted him one day after November 1, he faced a sentencing hearing more strict than anyone in the legal profession had ever seen before; the sentence's length would be based not on the judge's discretion but rather on a chart handed down by the attorney general; and Boone would be forced to serve more than 90 percent of that time because the same law eliminated federal parole. Even a great defense attorney who knew the Justice Department as well as Jack Smith did would do Boone little good if he were arrested after the November 1 deadline, when the forty-four-year-old would be subjected to a mandatory minimum of twenty years in federal prison.

As Johnny Boone drove through Chicago on his 910-mile trip to his eventual destination in the Minnesota hinterland, he played over in his head the meeting he had with a colleague just a few days before he left Kentucky.

"Are you going out this year?" his friend had asked.

"Yes," Boone told him.

"Don't go. They've changed the laws, and if they catch you, they'll have you for good."

"I've got to," Boone told him. "I've got everything already set up."

This conversation played in a loop in Boone's mind, but he couldn't turn back now. When he crossed the Ohio River en route to Minnesota, he had crossed the Rubicon.

New York Mills, Minnesota, an old manufacturing town of 943 souls of Scandinavian descent, sat nearer to Fargo, North Dakota, than to Minneapolis-St. Paul. It was surrounded by streams, lakes and marshes popular with hunters and fishermen ("If you like swamps," one fishing guide reads, "you're in luck").

Once Johnny Boone arrived on the farm, he and his crew of nearly twenty Kentuckians set about to grow some of the best marijuana ever cultivated outdoors in America on an industrial scale.

"You do have good places to grow up there,"Johnny Boone later said. "You think cold weather, short summer, you wouldn't think that's a good place to plant tropical pot. There would be a few plants that won't mature by October or November up there, but the majority of them would make kick-ass pot. Good pot."

Forced from his natural habitat of central Kentucky by the state police helicopter, Boone ventured to places like New York Mills to find sleepy spots where cops didn't fly. On the Minnesota farm, Boone and his crew planted acres of corn around the fencerow for cover. Inside the perimeter, in the fields closest to the barns and farmhouse, the Kentuckians planted two patches of marijuana in one hundred rows, each row about thirteen hundred feet long-each patch capable of producing fifty thousand pounds of high-quality sinsemilla. Boone, from his farming experience, knew to plant his camouflage corn crop later than normal to ensure that it stayed green long enough to provide cover for his true crop. Corn's shorter growing cycle meant that if its planting was poorly timed, it would mature and wither by September, leaving the marijuana exposed to plain sight. The farm's Scandinavian neighbors thought the friendly-but-secretive southern-sounding farmers didn't know the first thing about farming. Why else had they planted their corn so late?

While the task force in Kentucky busied itself trying to find Bobby Joe Shewmaker, Johnny Boone and his crew tended two multiacre patches of Minnesotan marijuana. Every day men walked the rows as the plants shot upward during their vegetative stage, working to ensure that none of the plants grew tall enough to be seen growing above the corn by bending the stalks of the plants so that they would grow curved instead of straight. For plants that grew very fast, Boone's crew lashed the top of the stalk to the trunk of the next plant in the row, arching the spine completely over like a croquet wicket.

Boone had learned over the course of his career that bending a marijuana plant's stalk during its vegetative stage somehow jumpstarted its THC production, so many of the Minnesota plants curved as if in a strong breeze or tied down end to end like crochet stitching. To navigate through the expansive green labyrinths, the crew strung a grid across the field with white twine, each grid square about one half-acre in size.

By the first of July, the plants had matured enough to begin identifying the males. Workers walked row after row, looking at each plant's immature flowering parts and then plucking out the males before they could pollinate the females.

On July 2, word came across the police radio into the Otter Tail County Sheriff's Department to be on the lookout for a band of roving bank robbers. Because some neighbors had complained that they had heard some automatic gunfire on the old Jenkins farm, the sheriff thought one of his deputies ought to go take a look out there.

On Saturday, July 4, as several of Boone's men walked the fields plucking males, an Otter Tail County Sheriff's Department patrol car drove slowly down the driveway. Inside the barn and farmhouse, the pressureplate alarm system screamed its high-pitched alert. Everyone on the farm froze, watched and waited to see what the lone police cruiser would do. The job of one of Boone's men was to act as the farm's owner in any communication with the neighbors and community. This man walked out to talk to the sheriff's deputy as others watched closely from the cornfields and from the barn.

"One of the neighbors lost some cattle overnight," the deputy sheriff said as he stepped out of his cruiser, craning his neck to look around. "They still haven't found them all. None of them came onto your property, did they?"

"No, we haven't seen any," the Kentuckian said.

"Well," the deputy said slowly, with no apparent intention to leave, "if you see any, you'll be sure to let us know?"

The farmhand nodded and stood his ground as the deputy eventually decided to return to his patrol car and drive out the driveway as leisurely as he had arrived. As the squad car drove slowly away, all eyes were fixed on it, ready to tell legs to run if they saw the Scandinavian deputy do anything out of the ordinary.

The crew turned to Johnny Boone, who asked himself the same questions: Were they busted? Or was it really a clueless deputy looking for cattle? He couldn't be sure. The deputy seemed harmless enough, but he had been so deliberate, taken so long to do a simple thing. Maybe the deputy had been slow generally and did everything with the same pace from eating his dinner to making love to his wife. No one-including Johnny Boone-could be sure. But it was his decision to make, and all the eyes that watched the patrol car come and go now focused on him.

"OK," Boone said. "Let's clear out. Just to be safe."

Two men from Boone's crew had been trained exactly for this contingency. Since the bust in Woodford County the year before, marijuana growers understood that their fingerprints were a liability if police discovered a location, even if no one was caught. Fingerprint analysis became as terrible an enemy to the processing stage as helicopters had become to the growing stage. An attorney once told a client that the police had his fingerprints at a certain crime scene.

"Which one?" his client asked. "I'll cut it off."

"Don't do that," his lawyer told him. "They already know its yours!"

So, in Minnesota, the team of Kentuckians went through the barn and farmhouse wearing latex gloves, throwing every piece of trash or any object that could have been touched into black plastic garbage bags and loading them onto a truck. Then the team started in the far corner of every room, babystepping backward armed with Windex and paper towels, spraying all the flat surfaces-high and low, vertical and horizontalto remove any proof that fingers had been there.

With all the surfaces cleaned, the crew loaded into different vehicles. Boone told them to go to a hotel for a week or two to ride it out, and he would be in touch with them when he felt certain it had been a false alarm. They herded the rottweilers, numbering nearly a dozen including puppies, into a trailer and drove them back to Kentucky. The crew broke up into small groups and headed out in different directions, and Johnny Boone left solo.

Later that week Johnny Boone sat on a plain double bed in a nondescript motel room somewhere in the Midwest, keeping a low profile with two rottweilers. Still unsure if the nosy deputy had been a true threat or a false alarm, he felt he should wait a few more days before finding out. With nothing to do, holed up in the middle of the day, he turned on the television set. Soap operas and The Price Is Right should have been on, but Johnny Boone discovered that every channel broadcast the same thing: men in military uniforms testifying before Congress about Iran, Nicaragua and Contra resupply efforts. Like most Americans, Boone was hearing the names of Oliver North and John Poindexter for the first time; but unlike most Americans, Johnny Boone possessed a working knowledge of the subject at hand.

In the evening, the news was more of the same, and in prime time, even more. From his motel room on July 11, Johnny Boone watched with rapt attention as the CBS newsmagazine West 57th Street reported that the CIA smuggled cocaine into America. The lead story was entitled, "CIA Front Dealing Drugs."

"Our first story tonight," said journalist Jane Wallace, "concerns more information on the connection between the Contras in Central America, the United States government and cocaine. When we first reported that connection three months ago, we told you that the White House and the CIA had used known drug traffickers to arm the Contras.... The current congressional hearings investigating the Iran-Contra scandal have not dealt with these drug charges, even though many of those accused of drug trafficking worked for Oliver North in the network he set up to supply the Contras."

During his Caribbean travels, Johnny Boone had always read the English-language newspapers to keep informed on the region; it was important for his job security. Consequently, he already knew about the war in Nicaragua between the Contras and the Sandinistas, and he suspected that Harold Brown, the Kentucky DEA agent, and his associate Andrew Thornton had been bringing drugs into America with some sort of secret approval from government agencies. Now, as the CBS newsmagazine interviewed drug traffickers who claimed the CIA was connected to their operations, Johnny Boone figured he finally understood what Thornton and Brown had been up to back home in Kentucky.

"So, that's what they've been doing," Boone thought.

He assumed that soon all this information would come to light, and the War on Drugs, which the government used with great success to stigmatize marijuana and lock up its growers, would be exposed as the fraud that Boone knew it to be. The drug war wasn't about controlling drugs, Boone realized; it was about suppressing competition. But by the time Johnny Boone would have the luxury to contemplate the macroeconomics of the drug economy again, the CIA's secret connection to it had been successfully swept away. Neither CBS News nor any other major news organization ran a followup to West 57th Street's allegations.

After a few more long July days cooped up in his motel room watching Oliver North and John Poindexter testify on television, Johnny Boone decided it was time to see if his farm in Minnesota was swarming with cops or all clear. He drove his pickup back to the farm, alone, and parked on a back road several miles away. From there, he hiked crosscountry through the pastures, crops, forests and swamps until he reached the backside of the Jenkins farm, where he sat and waited. Patiently he watched the farm, looking for any movement or activity that would signal police surveillance. If cops watched from the farmhouse, Boone reasoned, the stakeout would relieve its shift at least every twenty-four hours. After a daylong study of the farm, with no evidence of human activity, Boone returned to his truck and sent word to Kentucky that the coast was clear.

His contact in Kentucky kept in touch with the other groups ofworkers, holed up in hotels across several states. So, when Johnny Boone called him, he called all the crew members and told them to go back to work. Soon the Minnesota farm operated as normal.

By September, all the males (about 60 percent of the total plants that had sprouted from seed) had been plucked, leaving the females cloistered, as if in a convent, from the corrupting influences of the opposite sex. Like guards at the gates of the harem, Boone and his men worked to ensure that no secret male could sneak into the garden and spoil several females before he was caught.

Three members of Johnny Boone's crew were experts at finding male hemp organs while they were still immature and unable to produce pollen. Of all the specialized skills necessary to grow large quantities of high-quality marijuana, this keen eye for males was the most valuable. Every three days these three men walked the rows of marijuana, looking for anything that caught their sharp eyes. They not only looked for male plants that others might have overlooked during the initial sexing of the patch but also watched for the sinsemilla grower's greatest enemy: the secret hermaphrodite. After all the males have been plucked, a grower must be alert that no plant that appeared to be female suddenly decides to switch and become a male and begin producing pollen, seeding the females around it. The greater a female plant is stressed, either by lack of water or simply the strain of not being pollinated, the greater the chance of hermaphroditism.

Boone's three experts combed the rows of the twined grid of the two secret patches, each man with a different technique of marking suspected hermaphrodites: One used yellow sewing thread to tie onto a suspect branch; another used red twist ties.' his way, they could mark suspected plants to check on them the next time around to see if they had changed any since the last check.' his system also allowed a fellow expert, knowing who had marked which branch by the color of the tie, to discuss what he thought about that particular plant when the two men met at the end of a row. If she was going to turn into a male, she might devalue $6,000 worth of plants around her. So, if she was bad, she needed to come out right away. But if she wasn't bad, she was worth at least $500 herself, and so it was important that she stayed until she was fully grown.' system that Boone's men constructed allowed them to deal with these problems swiftly and correctly.

As September 23, the autumn equinox, neared, the female plants began redoubling their resin-production efforts in an emergency attempt to get themselves pollinated before the frost. It was the time when Boone stopped fertilizing the field, too, feeding the plants only water from then on to ensure there would be no chemicals in the plants' flowers at harvest time.

At the same time, an Alberta clipper began to blow down from Canada and didn't stop for a week. One morning Boone woke up in the farmhouse around 4:00 a.m. and realized the Arctic wind had stopped. In the kitchen, his chief grower, Smith Fogle, brewed a pot of coffee. As the coffee woke them up, the dawn illuminated the nearest patch of formerly dark green marijuana plants, each six feet high, as bushy as they were tall, and acres of them. Watching through the window over the kitchen sink as the sunlight revealed the nearest rows of plants, the two Kentuckians, who together had more marijuana-growing experience than a busload of California hippies, saw something they had never seen before: ice completely encasing every single prized marijuana plant, the once-green buds now crystallized and white, reflecting the low-angled sunlight like faceted diamonds as long as baseball bats.

"We had pictures of it ... of the goddamn frost and snow on it," Johnny Boone recalled. "The whole damn field was as white as that candle. . .. Every son of a bitch who worked up there could tell you: It froze and snowed the same night. September about twentieth up there and the motherfucker just like that tree standing there green-the fucking pot standing there white.

"It had the frost and the freeze all on it at the same time. And then the sun came out, just like wintertime here-drip drip drip it started melting off. A little thin coat of ice on every fucking plant. Every boy busted with me could tell you the same story. I got every boy out of bed.

"I said, `Come out here.'

"4:30 in the morning.

"`It's all dead.' [One of his workers said.]

"I said, `What?'

"He said, `It's all dead.'

"I said, `It can't be dead.'

"He said, `It's dead.'

"I said, `If it's dead we're going to harvest it all today. Whatever's out there we're going to get it.'

"So, we went out there, and it blew my shit away, man. Blew my shit

It blew Boone's mind because these plants, although totally encased in ice and frost, did not die. Instead, the "strong ones lived," the females being shocked into even greater levels ofTHC-rich resin production.

Boone had always trusted Mr. X, his seed-delivering friend, but this clinched that trust more than ever. Not only did this Russian strain survive a weeklong, nonstop Arctic onslaught, but also this crop was shaping up to be one of the finest marijuana harvests in Johnny Boone's career, which stretched back at least seventeen years by 1987.

However, as soon as he peeled his eyes away from the green goldmine that he had seeded, staffed and grown, Boone realized his relief would be short-lived. Although his acres of marijuana survived, if not thrived, in the Alberta clipper, the surrounding corn crop, planted around the perimeter of the farm to hide its true nature, had not been as lucky. Unlike the hearty Russian genetics of the pot, the characteristics of the corn Johnny Boone planted were never designed to withstand such brutal conditions.

The Alberta clipper killed the corn where it stood, as Vesuvius had killed the citizens of Pompeii, leaving the cornstalks upright but blanched, drained of all their color. Corn, with its twelve-week lifespan, was meant to be sown in June and reaped in August, but Johnny had waited until late July to plant his Minnesota corn so that it would still be growing until his secret crop was ready to harvest in October. Now in shades of yellow and white, the corn provided little camouflage for the acres of dark green marijuana it once concealed.

Instantly Johnny Boone felt exposed. Without the cover the corn provided, he and his crew were screwed. His perfect crop must come in immediately-all of it, every plant, even though he could get another week of THC production out of his fields of females if he held out a little longer. Beginning immediately and working nonstop in shifts around the clock, the Kentucky crew chopped the plants down with long-bladed corn knives and hauled them into barns and outbuildings. Workers swung knives and stacked plants for twelve hours, then collapsed in the farmhouse for a nap, woke up, ate and returned immediately for another shift. In this way they filled up both barns and several outbuildings and stillafter a few weeks-had plenty yet to harvest.

If Johnny Boone and his crew didn't get the crop in quickly, someone would certainly see it. Boone put in a call to Kentucky to spread the word that he needed more workers as fast as he could get them before any of his Minnesotan neighbors got wise, but it was already too late.

From the air, it was unmistakable, but Agent Phillip Wagner of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) asked the single-engine airplane pilot to make a second pass over the 355-acre property known to the locals as the Jenkins farm, just to be sure. Yes, it was marijuanamore than the pilot or Wagner had ever seen, in two long rectangles of dark green, each longer than four football fields end to end. It was October 21, 1987.

Quickly a meeting to plan a raiding party began inside the small office of the Otter Tail County Sheriff's Department in New York Mills-a place unaccustomed to drug operations of any size, much less to the tip of a green iceberg that would become, in the opinion of the FBI, the "largest domestic marijuana [syndicate] in American history."

In ten days, November 1, President Reagan's new drug laws would finally take effect. The Minnesota detectives and deputies knew that if they waited until then, the DEA and other federal agencies would swoop in from St. Paul and take the case for themselves and deny the local officers any credit when prosecuting these out-of-state marijuana growers under the strict new law. If the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and the Otter Tail County Sheriff's Department wanted credit for their own work, they would have to act now.

On the morning of October 23, snow fellwhile the Kentuckians worked feverishly to harvest, dry and pack their crop for shipment. At 10:00 a.m., the driveway alarm started ringing while Smith Fogle was working in the hayloft, clipping marijuana buds from their stalks with rosebush clippers while listening to his Walkman. Even with the music loud, he could hear the alarm, and so he pulled off his headphones and ran toward the window. At the end of the loft, Smith pulled back a sheet of black plastic that hung over the window to keep anyone from seeing inside. Peeking around the plastic, Fogle saw a truck towing a horse trailer approaching through the snow and told his companions it was a false alarm.

"It's just a truck," he said, figuring it was the load of workers from Kentucky.

But the next second, Fogle saw five armed policemen spring from the rear of the Trojan horse trailer, and his heart sank.

"It's a bust!" Fogle shouted, and everyone dropped what he was doing and ran.

Some didn't bother using the door, instead busting through the barn wall or sliding down a garden hose hung from the hayloft as the drainpipe for a makeshift urinal. They dashed past the firearms kept nearby for protection from rippers. As his workers broke out of the back of the farm, Johnny Boone went his own way, grabbing an AR-15 and Tech-9, along with two Smith & Wesson handguns, an automatic and a .38 revolver. If anyone was going to get a longer prison sentence because of the presence of firearms, Boone wanted it to be him and not his men.

While all of his workers broke through the back of the barn and leaped and ran across the back end of the frozen farm, Johnny Boone hopped into his truck, a gray-over-black GMC two-ton pickup with tinted windows and a camper shell, and drove out the front of the farm, hoping to distract the police long enough to give his workers enough of a head start to escape. Members of the police raiding party observed Boone's exit at 10:00 a.m.

At the end of the farm's gravel driveway, Boone turned south on County Road 58 and drove a short way, less than a mile, before two police cars turned southbound out of the Jenkins farm driveway to pursue him. Boone suddenly cut a U-turn and started coming straight at them.

Deputy Thompson, in the lead squad car, turned on his blue lights and parked halfway into the northbound lane to force the oncoming truck to stop, but Johnny Boone steered into the ditch and drove around Thompson's position without losing speed. Deputy Lockhart, driving the second squad car, saw the truck evade the lead cruiser and head toward him. Quickly Lockhart turned on his lights and cut into the northbound lane, but the bearded driver steered into the ditch and drove around him. Lockhart then turned his cruiser around, gunned the accelerator, passed Boone's truck and forced it to stop by cutting it off on a diagonal.

Although he couldn't get away himself, Johnny Boone managed to occupy three squad cars and five officers of a thirteen-man raiding party-enough, he hoped, to give his workers the chance they needed. Boone slowly complied with the arresting officers' demands to exit the truck and turned around to allow himself to be handcuffed.

The arresting sheriff's deputy asked Boone to identify himself.

"Charles Grass," Boone told him.

Behind the seat of Boone's truck, the Minnesotan policemen found several rolls of duct tape, the AR-15, the Tech-9, the two Smith & Wessons, plus more than a thousand rounds of ammunition for the AR-15, a few hundred rounds of 9-millimeter ammo and maybe a hundred rounds for the .38. All the guns were loaded, but Boone made no attempt to use them against the policemen. Under the truck's camper shell, the deputies found a number of machete-type knives, boxes of trash bags and the unmistakable scent of marijuana.

Meanwhile, inside the farm, the raiding party worked to secure every building and found the place to be mostly deserted except for Mary Jo McDonald, the camp's only woman, who had stayed behind with the eight adult rottweilers she had spent all summer training.' dogs'vocal cords had been removed so that they wouldn't bark at intruders-only attack them in silence. She knew that if she ran, the aggressive dogs would lunge for the policemen, so she stayed to keep them calm, prevent anyone from getting hurt and make sure her dogs didn't get shot. Agent Wagner, who had been a dog handler in the Air Force, would later vouch that McDonald's actions kept the raiding party safe and kept any of the dogs from being fired upon in self-defense. With the dogs safely secured, Wagner asked McDonald for her name, but she refused to identify herself.

In the aftermath of a Minnesota snowstorm, members of Boone's crew took off in a fast sprint across the snow-dusted cornfield wearing T-shirts, light jackets and camouflaged pants. As they came to a fence at the edge of the field, several of the men cleared it in a single leap. A chubby member of the group, a man known to the others as Possum, lagged behind and became hung up in the fence line as the others made it into the woods. Two men ran back to pull Possum over the fence and help him into the tree line. Inside the cover of the trees, they finally had a chance to catch their breath and look behind them, where they saw their footprints through the snow, a trail that would lead the police directly to them. They were cold and alone, and none of them knew where he was, other than somewhere in Minnesota.

As they caught their breath and gathered their thoughts, they realized that their numbers had dwindled. Of the nearly twenty who had run from the barn, only fourteen were huddled in the frozen woods. Outside in the snow, by mutual decision, the fourteen men agreed to split up into two groups of seven-Smith Fogle and Possum in one group along with Les Berry. Together they waded through a frozen swamp, hoping to shake their pursuers and remove any traces of the trail they had left through the snow but also exposing themselves to hypothermia and frostbite.

Finding the road again, they came upon a house with a light on. Freezing and panicked, they were willing to consider anything. They could run in, they thought, overpower whoever was there and tie them up. They didn't want to hurt anyone, but they needed to get away. They could tie them up and cut the phone line; by the time someone found them, the Kentucky boys would be long gone, and the restrained people would tell their rescuers how nice the men who did that to them had been.

Still, Les Berry, with his and his colleagues'faces blue and their clothes freezing to their skin, came up with a better plan. Each man still had most of the $500 in run money that Boone had given him upon arrival. Pooling their cash, they had almost $3,500. If they could get a ride to town, maybe then they could buy a car and get away without hurting anyone. It seemed unlikely to work, but it was better than doing something stupid.

Les Berry took the run money to the house and knocked on the door, while the remaining six men hid in the woods, huddling close to keep warm. When Mrs. Jodie Ewert answered the door, Berry asked her to drive him to town. She said yes, taking her two young children with her. Berry paid Mrs. Ewert $20 for the ride when she dropped him off at Ness Motors, a used car lot in Wadena, about fourteen miles from New York Mills, where Berry bought a blue 1972 Chevrolet Impala from salesman Robert Brummer, paid for with the pooled run money.

While in town, Berry gassed up the Impala, checked the oil and picked up some snacks before driving back out to the spot where he had left the others. Fogle, Possum and their colleagues were so happy to see Berry pull up in the fifteen-year-old Chevy that they "would have lined up and kissed his bare ass" if he had asked them to, according to Fogle. After the seven men had crammed into the car built for six, Berry drove off heading east toward Wisconsin.

By the end of the morning, a manhunt for an unknown number of suspects had begun, but the agents failed to track any of them directly from the farm. A few hours into the search, a neighbor called the Otter Tail County Sheriff's Department to tell the dispatcher that four men wearing camouflage had just approached his house asking for shelter. Agent Wagner arrived at the house shortly after the call came through. The Kentuckians had left tracks through the snow away from the house after the homeowner turned them away; they were very easy to track to the field where Wagner caught them.

None of the four men wore a heavy coat, only army fatigues. They were all "very, very cold" and "very, very wet,"Wagner would later testify in court. They surrendered without fighting or fleeing. Even though the men were wet, Wagner could tell "they reeked" of marijuana. While arresting them, Wagner discovered them to be "not impolite"; instead they were "very cordial" but "very uncooperative as well."

Shortly before 5:00 p.m., Otter Tail County Sheriff's Lieutenant Ray Polensky spotted a man wearing camouflage walking down County Road 67. When Polensky arrived on the scene, another officer advised over the radio that he had earlier spotted the individual walking into the woods. With two other squad cars on the scene, Polensky grabbed his shotgun, got out of his cruiser, walked through a harvested cornfield to the edge of the woods and hollered for the man to come out. The weather had cleared by then, and the temperature was in the low thirties. After a long silent moment, Polensky saw the camouflaged man coming out of the woods with his hands raised.

"Where are you going?" Polensky asked, pointing the shotgun into the air.

"Home," the man said.

"Where's home?"

"Kentucky."

"Have you been out here a long time?"

"Yes."

"Are you cold?"

"I'm glad it's over with," he said. He was unarmed. By the time Polensky put him into the back of his cruiser, without handcuffs, ten policemen had arrived in response to the radio traffic.

At 6:15, more than eight hours since the raid, the sun began to set, and the temperature quickly fell.Three hours later, a little past 9:00 p.m., the snow started falling again when another call came into the dispatcher from a farmhouse reporting that some camouflaged men had stopped by looking for shelter. Lieutenant Polensky responded to the Reger residence, where Mrs. Reger pointed in the direction the strangers had gone, leaving a clearly visible trail in the inch and a half of snowfall.

Polensky took his flashlight and followed the tracks on foot, running for about a mile and a half, kitty-corner across a field toward County Road 67 and then along the road's shoulder, where the tracks would be on the east side for a while and then switch over to the west side. Polensky also saw where, every once in a while, the suspects had lain down in a ditch to hide from traffic. After a mile and a half of running, Polensky found four men huddled in the ditch on the west side of the road and signaled with his flashlight for backup. He told the four men to come up to the road one at a time, and they obeyed, wet and shivering. After five minutes, squad cars arrived. The arrested men said next to nothing in a southern accent. They were wet and smelled strongly of marijuana.

At 10:00 p.m., BCA Agent Phillip Wagner learned that Mrs. Jodie Ewert had taken a camouflage-clad man to Wadena earlier that day. Within minutes, Wagner had Ness Motors salesman Robert Brummer on the phone and got the license plate number of the 1972 blue Impala. From the Ewerts' farmhouse, Wagner called his office's dispatcher and told the dispatcher to put out a nationwide teletype for a wanted vehicle.

Twila Schott, the night dispatcher, tried over and over to enter the wanted blue Impala into the computer system, but the computer kept rejecting it. Finally, three hours after Wagner called her, Schott discovered a way to get the computer to accept the information: by entering the Impala as "stolen" instead of "wanted." The computer finally accepted the nationwide alert at 1:31 a.m., notifying every law enforcement dispatcher in every state to be on the lookout for a "stolen" blue Impala filled with drug suspects from Kentucky who were "armed and dangerous."

Arden A. Asp worked the night shift for the Wisconsin State Patrol as Trooper 3. On October 23, his shift began at 11:00 p.m., patrolling the Interstate 90-94 corridor between Minneapolis and Chicago in an unmarked 1987 Plymouth Grand Fury, its blue lights concealed in its grille and dashboard. At 1:30 a.m., the Grand Fury idled between mileposts 72 and 74 in Juneau County. At 1:31, Asp's I-band radio squawked with a message from district headquarters: Minnesota authorities were attempting to locate a stolen vehicle.' he occupants, wanted in reference to a drug investigation, were armed and dangerous. Asp wrote the license plate number in his notebook and hoped he never saw it.

At 2:45, Trooper Asp was parked under the crossover at milepost 74 watching eastbound traffic, his headlights illuminating the cars and trucks as they passed his location. At 2:46, a blue Chevy Impala bearing Minnesota plates Boy Charles Young-770 drove past at a little under the 65-miles-per-hour speed limit. After the Impala had traveled about a half-mile, Asp pulled into the eastbound lane and accelerated. He slowly approached the Impala to double-check the license number and noticed that the car was full of passengers. Then the unmarked Grand Fury passed the Impala at a high rate of speed, pulled off at the next exit a few miles east and killed its lights at the top of the ramp. Inside the Grand Fury, Trooper Asp called for backup on his radio.

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.

"I would like the record to reflect that the ten defendants ... are all present in court this morning," the magistrate said. "And I would like Mr. Smith or Mr. Molloy to tell me what the intent is with respect to the individual representation of these ten defendants."

"Your Honor, I'm Mr. Smith, for the record. We were contacted on last Monday by the family of one of the defendants.... For purpose of this hearing ... we would be willing to represent everybody.... I cannot remember in my experience, either as a prosecutor or as a defense attorney, where I had ten clients; and I understand the problems that are inherent in that situation."

"Well, I'm not sure what to do," the magistrate said. "Each of you has a right to be separately represented by your own lawyer. I see as far as I can tell right now that perhaps five of you are represented, and I have no clue about the rest of you. And I can ask you if you want to go forward today with this hearing or whether you want to have lawyers present, but we cannot go forward today ... without this whole thing being clarified."

One by one, the magistrate read the names of the ten Kentuckians present, and each in turn said that he or she wanted Jack Smith as his or her lawyer, saying: "I thought Jack Smith was going to be my lawyer," "I want Mr. Smith to be my lawyer," "Jack Smith," "Jack Smith," "Jack Smith, Your Honor."

The magistrate took some time to explain to them "the problems about joint representation," telling them that joint defendants usually have "some conflicting interests. One defendant may want to say it wasn't me, it was him."This sort of problem, perhaps common to common criminals, was irrelevant to Johnny Boone and his crew: None was going to point the finger at others and claim his own innocence.

"Do all of you understand that there may be other conflicts that exist among yourselves on legal issues and fact issues?" the magistrate asked. "Everybody understand that? I see that everybody says they do understand."

Jack Smith had never before had ten clients at once, and by the end of the day, he would have seventeen when the Wisconsin Seven (all residents of Loretto) came before the magistrate for a similar hearing.

After the hearing, in the Minnesota holding cell, Smith Fogle finally had time to think, and he didn't like what he was thinking about. It wasn't just Minnesota that concerned him. Fogle was already out on bond for another pot-growing incident just the year before back home, where the Kentucky State Police caught Fogle growing a half-acre of marijuana (about five thousand plants) between the cornfield and wood line on a Hardin County farm.

At trial, the commonwealth's attorney presented a compelling case based on circumstantial evidence. The state police hadn't caught Fogle in his patch, so there was no smoking gun that connected him to the crime, but there was a path that led from the back door of the house, through the cornfield, and right to his secret garden. Fogle's lawyer, Elmer George, thought this was a tough piece of evidence to get around, but he advised Smith to hire an investigator, who took aerial photos of the farm. It turned out that cow paths criss-crossed every part of the farm and that it was impossible to say whether the path that led to Fogle's alleged marijuana patch was made by Smith Fogle or a herd of cattle.

So, with the positive turn in the case, George had managed to settle Fogle's case, getting him released on bond. The whole thing was behind him, Fogle thought, until it hit him like a brick in the nine-by-six-foot cell in the Sauk County jail. When the Wisconsin seven were eventually reunited with the Minnesota ten, Johnny Boone saw Smith Fogle's face and knew just what he was thinking.

"Don't worry," Boone told him. "Everything's going to be all right."

But it wouldn't be.

Before the magistrate ruled on bail, Johnny Boone's wife and mother wrote letters to the magistrate, asking for him to allow Boone to return home before his trial:

To whom it may concern,

I have been married to John Boone for 26 years.... We have four children and have always been a very close family. John's mother is not in very good health. It would be a human kindness ifyou would grant him bond so that he could see his family again.

Thank you for considering my request.

Sincerely, Marilyn Boone

November 16, 1987

To whom it may concern,

My son, John, has always felt that keeping his word is very important. He can be depended on to be available if he is released on bond. He has never tried to evade an obligation such as this.

lam a sixty-seven-year-old widow and not in good health. I hope that my remaining son can be released on bond.

Thank you, Jean W. Boone

The magistrate granted bail to everyone except Johnny Boone, who waited in the Stillwater prison until the trial, set for the end of April. In the meantime, Smith and Molloy began working on the case, having numerous phone conversations with the federal prosecutor in St. Paul and filing discovery motions. Smith traveled again to St. Paul to examine evidence gathered at the Boone farm, which filled an entire room of the Federal Building-books, pictures, firearms and about two hundred pieces of camouflage clothing.

On November 1, 1987, President Reagan's pet project, the 1984 anticrime law, finally took effect, imposing tight restrictions on the 550 federal district judges' discretion when sentencing the defendants before them, removing all human judgment from the determination of sentencing. A commission formed in response to the legislation created a complex chart with forty-three levels of offenses and seven levels of offenders. The commission then ordered judges to use the chart, like a slide rule, to determine a guilty party's sentence without any consideration for any cause for deviation. In addition, November 1 was the last day anyone convicted in federal court could be eligible for parole. The Federal Parole Board took no new cases; in five years, it would be totally dissolved.

As Johnny Boone sat in his cell in Stillwater, Minnesota, he had only a vague idea of the seismic shifts in federal criminal law happening beneath his feet. Given his experience in federal court before, and having a seasoned federal prosecutor like Jack Smith as his attorney, Boone felt reasonably confident that even if he couldn't beat the charges he faced, he would be back home in less than five years. Prison wasn't something that scared Boone; it was an accepted risk of doing business, but he had no idea what he was about to face.

The US attorney in St. Paul had targeted Boone as a "class I cannabis cultivator" with a prior record, which meant that under the second and third counts in the indictment Boone would be exposed to a potential life sentence if convicted at trial.

Even though Boone had been arrested on October 23, one full week before the tough anticrime measures took effect, the mood of the Justice Department had grown tough on enforcement. The St. Paul office of the US attorney worked to pin as many years on Boone as possible.

Boone's only saving grace was that because of his pre-November arrest, his sentence, no matter how long, would be served under the "old law," in prison lingo, not the "new law" that took effect November 1. Consequently, Boone would serve 66 percent of his allotted sentence; had he been busted eight days later, he would have been forced to serve more than 85 percent of his time.

Even before Johnny Boone and his crew saw the Minnesota magistrate to set their bail, agents from the DEA and FBI started working to understand how Johnny Boone's operation fit into what the Justice Department already knew about the Marion County marijuana "cartel," according to internal documents released through the Freedom of Information Act.

The first government files pertaining to Marion County men engaged in the marijuana business date back to 1975. By 1985, federal agencies knew of Marion County connections to multiton shipments of Colombian marijuana, linking Kentuckians to the coastal underworlds of Savannah, St. Augustine and Key West; they knew of Marion County links to the transport of kilos of cocaine aboard northbound Amtrak trains from Florida to Washington, D.C.; they knew that tough enforcement by the Kentucky State Police had forced "these career violators into expanded geographical areas" and a distribution network that stretched the entire length of the East Coast and included cities in the Midwest and as far away as Los Angeles. But they had no idea how big or complex the organization had grown by 1987, when Minnesota officials stumbled upon Johnny Boone's operation.

"Initially" the DEA thought this Kentucky pot syndicate "was one complex organization with one head." However, the man the government pegged as the godfather of Kentucky marijuana, Bobby Joe Shewmaker, had nothing to do with Johnny Boone's operation. After Boone's bust in Minnesota, "the priorities of the [DEA's] investigation shifted." Instead of a rigid, La Cosa Nostra-style pyramid structure with capos, lieutenants and soldiers organized by rank, the Marion County "cartel" was more organic, "a multi-faceted conspiracy ... with more than one head," like a "co-op or corporation." Far from being partners or co-conspirators, the government learned, Johnny Boone and Bobby Joe Shewmaker were "fiercely competitive" with each other and additional men operating on the "upper echelon" in the underground Kentucky marketplace.

In the wake of the spectacular harvest on Johnny Boone's Minnesota farm, the prosecution of what would become known as the Cornbread Mafia reached the highest levels of the DEA, which declared this case "a special events operation (SEO)" due to its significance as the "largest marijuana production case within the confines of the United States." In March 1988, bureaucrats from the DEA presented the Kentucky marijuana cases to a congressional committee, likely the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Justice, which met that month to determine the DEA's budget for the next year, "to illustrate the magnitude of the marijuana dilemma and the vast amounts of money generated by this cartel."

Long before Johnny Boone's bust in Minnesota, federal agents and Kentucky State Police had worked together in an Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, headquartered in Louisville, which followed the activities of Bobby Joe Shewmaker since 1984. But the task force had begun full force and full-time only in April 1987, employing agents from three federal agencies, the state police and a computer with two full-time analysts to keep track of the "complicated and massive nature" of Marion County's secret economy. In fact, the task force admitted candidly that "very little [was] presently known about" the Marion County outfit's "extremely high" level of wealth, other than "certain attorneys in Kentucky [were] assisting ... in laundering the assets."

Once Johnny Boone's operation was busted in late October 1987, members of the Kentucky-based task force scrambled to understand how Boone fit into what they already knew about Marion County. By December, the unit had shared "vast background data, intelligence information and organizational information" with the arresting agencies in seven states concerning the "heads of this domestic marijuana operation." However, during that same month, "the flow of information from the arresting agencies" coming into the task force's Louisville office suddenly "ceased."

A Kentucky State Police captain discovered the reason for the cessation of information flow: A supervisory agent from DEA headquarters in Washington, D.C., visited all the states where Kentuckians had been arrested: Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, Indiana, Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska. After he visited each one, communication with the Louisville task force ended.

"Concerned," the task force called a meeting of its representatives from the DEA, FBI, IRS, US Attorney's Office and the Kentucky State Police. The DEA agent present "informed the task force" that the DEA headquarters-the top-level folks in D.C.-had adopted all the cases "to conduct a CCE [Continuous Criminal Enterprise] investigation," a statute designed to target drug kingpins with life sentences, into the Cornbread Mafia without the help or input from the Louisville-based task force, which had been working to put the Marion County marijuana operators out of business for years. Assistant US Attorney Cleve Gambill "expressed concern" that the investigation should be conducted by the locally knowledgeable and boots-on-the-ground task force in Louisville "and not by DEA headquarters."

On December 14, the FBI office in Louisville sent an airtel message to the FBI's new director, William Sessions, who had been sworn in only a month before, to inform the director's office of the ongoing investigation into the Marion County "cartel."The agent in charge of the Louisville office wanted the director's office to know that a supervisor from DEA headquarters in Washington, D.C., was interfering with the task force's investigation, "visiting all the states where the arrests have taken place. Since then the flow of information from the arresting agencies ... has ceased."

The next day an FBI supervisor spoke with a DEA supervisor in Washington, who "assured him that no CCE investigation would be conducted outside the present task force investigation."

A month later, on January 11, 1988, the Louisville-based task force met in Minneapolis with representatives from Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska and Wisconsin-each of which had "ongoing investigations" related to "the cultivation, processing and distribution of marijuana by residents of Marion County, Ky."By then, thirty-two people had been arrested with eighty tons of marijuana valued at $144 million. Subsequent to that meeting, the US attorney for the Western District of Kentucky, Joseph Whittle, "confirmed that a CCE prosecution" would be "attempted in Louisville" and not from DEA headquarters.

However, the task force soon encountered the same roadblocks that other law enforcement agencies had discovered: the "politely uncooperative" nature of the Kentucky outlaws. "This is a very close-knit group," according to an FBI memo from September 1988, "and is virtually impossible to penetrate with conventional investigative techniques." Unlike the way the DEA could handle other drug hotspots in metropolitan areas, the DEA couldn't send an undercover agent or informant into Marion County because "all strangers are suspected to be policemen." Traditional stakeouts and other eyes-on surveillance were considered to be "fruitless due to the wariness of the subjects."

For two weeks in 1988, leading up to Johnny Boone's scheduled trial date, Jack Smith did nothing else but prepare for Boone's defense in St. Paul. He knew that two of the charges facing Johnny Boone carried life sentences. With the help of an associate, he prepared jury instructions and voir-dire questions and created folders for all the witnesses the government intended to call. Smith also called Boone's wife several times. The day before the trial was to start, Smith returned to the evidence room and reexamined some things after talking with Boone. Despite their hustle, the case never came before a jury.

Although Smith and Boone fully anticipated taking the case to trial, the government threw them a curveball when the assistant US attorney told them that the last three remaining defendants in the Minnesota case must collectively agree to a "package deal" plea bargain. If any of them decided to take their chances at trial, then they all would have to go. Each, therefore, was responsible for the fate of the others.

If Boone accepted the plea deal, he would be sentenced to twenty years. So, at the last moment the day before he was to go to trial, faced with carrying the fates of two others if he decided to fight and staring at the possibility of life in prison if he lost, Boone waived his constitutional right to trial by jury and accepted a twenty-year sentence-two consecutive tenyear terms. After his bust in the Belize deal, Boone had managed to get immunity for anything he may have done prior to that time, but when he tried to get a similar deal from the prosecutor in St. Paul, he had no luck.

The only saving grace for Johnny Boone and his crew had been that his arrest had come in the last week of October, not the first week of November. Because he was busted before the November 1 start date for the 1984 anticrime law's mandatory sentencing guidelines, Johnny Boone would have to serve only 66.6 percent of his time.

"I'll be in until the year 2000," Boone thought. "But at least I won't be in until 2005 or for life. In 2000, I'll be fifty-seven years old." At the time, he was forty-four.

On April 29,1988, the last of Boone's Kentucky crew-the ones who hadn't already been sentenced to six months' jail time and three years' probation-met their sentencing fate, beginning at 10:30 a.m.

"Now, we'll turn to ... Mr. Berry?" the judge said, referring to Les Berry, the driver of the getaway car.

"Yes sir," replied Les Berry. "I'd just like to state that I fully regret my actions in this matter here."

"Earl?" the judge asked, referring to Earl Gray, Berry's attorney.

"Good morning, Your Honor . . . I'll be brief," Gray said. "But I would like to point out that Mr. Berry stands among the farmhands here who had been there for a week or so, yet he's thirty-six years old. In the thirty-six years that he has lived, this is the first time ever that he's even been arrested. He's a Marine, honorable discharge, and he spent six years in the Guards.

"The only explanation that he makes, and he realizes it was wrong when he did it, was that he had grown up in a split family, he had been raised by his aunt and uncle, and because of the dire economic problems where he lived, there was no money, and he was afraid that he would lose his wife and three children. He made the only mistake he's made so far in his life, Your Honor. There's no-nothing in the presentencing investigation that shows that this man's ever been involved in anything like this before. And he spent 120 days in lockup at Stillwater.

"He's got three children; two, he's adopted, and one of his own. It just seems to me, Your Honor, that a man thirty-six years old should be entitled to some consideration based on his past record, and I'd ask the court to sentence Mr. Berry to a split sentence, to give him some time in jail, but to put him on probation and credit the 120 days he served at hard time in the Stillwater prison.

"If the court feels that this is not an appropriate sentence and decides to send him to prison, we would request voluntary surrender, Your Honor. But he's got a job now. He's got his family back together.

"Frankly, I read his [presentencing report], and I've talked with Les for a long time here, and in my years of experience of representing defendants in federal court, he's the best one I've ever represented. And I think that says something for him. I've represented a lot of people, Your Honor. He's a good guy. There's no question about it. I mean, you know, basically a heck of a good guy."

The judge then turned to the lawyer for the second member of the plea bargain, who asked the judge to give his client a reduced sentence and requested voluntary surrender. Finally, the judge turned to Johnny Boone's attorney, Jack Nordby. (When Boone reluctantly accepted his package-deal plea bargain, his Kentucky attorney, Jack Smith, advised his client that local attorneys who knew the judge, such as Jack Nordby, would be better suited to represent him in his sentencing hearing.)

"OK," the judge said. "Jack?"

"Your Honor . . ." Nordby said, "I think there's something obscene in even considering putting someone in jail for ten or twenty years for manufacturing a product which I believe is going to be sold across the counter by the drug companies shortly. That doesn't mean it's legal, but there's something gravely disproportionate in taking these gigantic amounts of time out of people's lives, any amount of time out of a young person's life, especially in days when we have what I believe to have been a very serious Supreme Court nominee who's used this substance. It's a violation of law, and Mr. Boone, as compared to these other folks, doesn't look very good. But there's still something obscene about saying that even a man with a long prior record should do that kind of time for this offense....

"The obscenity I refer to, of course, has nothing to do with this court. It's the Congress who enacted this law. There are people who should be in jail forever and for long terms, but not people who are manufacturing, selling marijuana.

"I'd ask Your Honor to sentence Mr. Boone to a period of five years in prison ... lodged in Lexington, Kentucky, which is nearest his home.

"Thank you, Your Honor."

"Mr. Boone," the judge said. "Do you want to say something?

"Yes, I would, Your Honor," Johnny Boone said. "Your Honor, what we did was wrong, it caused many, many problems for all of our families. We don't deny that we broke the law.

"I ask the court-I've had a lot of time, I've been over six months now in jail, and I've sat and done a lot of thinkin'. On this as a group of people, I ask the court when you sentence these people-we're from a poor place, and what we did, we-I don't think anybody here is into any kind of thievery. There are many hard drugs that are being sold in the United States now. In the area we're from, you know, things like cocaine and-we just-you know, we look on them as very bad and bad for all of America. I offer no excuse. I only say that because of the property in our area, marijuana is one of the things that sometimes helps put bread on the table for people....

"We're not criminals, Your Honor. We're not-we're not the kind of people that go out and harm people. The only thing we try to do is-I know myself and several people here even feed families that are not their own. They feed little children that don't have breadwinners at home, back home where we come from. This is somethin'we do....

"I don't understand this law, either; how people that are not into personally harmin'other people and are into workin'with their hands on the earth that God gave us, I don't understand the law takin' us for the long periods of time that it dictates it's going to. If we were physically harmin' people, or I read in the newspapers of people that actually take people's lives or bodily harm them, they don't get the kind of terms that we're facin' here. I guess I really don't understand how it can be done to a group of people like this. This group of people here are really good people. And you don't personally know them, but they stand out back home as hard-workin', honest people. Nobody here causes anybody any trouble back home.

"And I personally am very sorry for what has happened. It has caused many problems for the families, much grief, and I hope that the court looks with mercy on this group of people. We didn't intend any harm to anyone.

"Thank you," the judge said.

Despite Boone's eloquent speech, the court sentenced him to twenty years in federal prison and the two others in the package-deal plea bargain to ten years each, stiff sentences compared with the six months in prison and three years of probation that the rest of Boone's Minnesota crew received.

By the close of 1988, seventy federal prosecutions against Kentucky marijuana growers from in and around Marion County had resulted in fifty-six convictions. At the time, there were still many cases yet to be concluded: eight charged in the Western District of Kentucky; fourteen charged in Kansas; five in Illinois and one in Missouri. Of these twentyeight cases in progress, twenty-six were Kentuckians, with twenty-two from Marion County.

With the task force working overtime to centralize intelligence on the Cornbread Mafia, federal law enforcement and prosecutors had a good understanding of exactly what Marion County had been up to for the past few years; the FBI had been keeping a list:

A. On August 23,1985, Michigan State Police seiz[ed] 31,747 plants.... The prior year a couple lived on the farm, both from Marion County, Kentucky.

B. On November 6, 1986, approximately 4,600 pounds of marijuana were seized in Woodford County, Kentucky.... Twelve were arrested, all of whom dressed in camouflage fatigues, and all but one were from Marion County, Kentucky.

C. On August 20,1987... Indiana State Police ... 27,000 marijuana plants. Two were arrested from ... Marion County, Kentucky.

D. On October 9, 1987, the Michigan State Police ... 20,000 marijuana plants.... All three were from Marion County, Kentucky.

E. On October 12, 1987, Indiana State Police discovered 28,000 marijuana plants ... Marion County, Kentucky ... Documentary evidence discovered provided leads to a farm in Paris, Missouri.

F. On October 23, 1987, information provided to the Minnesota State Bureau of Crime Prevention led DEA task force officers to a farm ... where they seized 96,000 pounds of marijuana and arrested 17 individuals ... from Marion County, Kentucky.

G. On October 30, 1987, the DEA task force searched a farm in Paris, Rails County, Missouri, and seized 6,475 plants. One arrest was made, and he was from Marion County, Kentucky.

H. On November 12, 1987, the Nebraska State Police ... seized 68,000 pounds of marijuana. The individual who was arrested ... is linked by his association with John BOONE.

1. On November 15,1987, the Lebanon, Kentucky Police Department seized 1,700 pounds of marijuana from a truck.

J. During the growing season of 1987, a total of 29,635 marijuana plants were seized from the following counties in Illinois ... all from Marion County, Kentucky.

It was a working list. An FBI memo from 1989 would add to the catalog, along with its running cumulative totals of seizures and arrests:

K. On August 22, 1988 the Missouri State Highway Patrol ... seized 25,000 marijuana plants and 800 pounds of marijuana ... seven individuals were indicted by the Western District of Kentucky, all but one from Marion County, Kentucky.

L. Between October 2 and October 5, 1988 the Kansas Bureau of Investigation seized 68,300 marijuana plants ... fourteen individuals were indicted from Marion County, Kentucky.

M. On 6-29-89, the Illinois State Police, DCI, searched a farm in White County, Illinois, seizing 58,000 marijuana plants. Four individuals were arrested, all from Marion County.

At the conclusion of these busts-A through M-authorities seized a total of 487,250 pounds of marijuana. As impressive a list as it is, it would appear that even with the combined manpower and resources of two federal law enforcement agencies and police forces in eight midwestern states, the law never found Cornbread crops any farther south than Kentucky, didn't find any in the coastal South, nor any in the mountain West.The FBI had a long list, but it was not exhaustive.

Though the list wasn't encyclopedic, it gave the federal government a good idea of what it was dealing with: "The evidence collected thus far has revealed that the 487,250 pounds of marijuana seized was produced by an organized group of Kentucky residents who ... create[d] the largest domestic marijuana-producing organization in the history of the United States."

While the task force developed a much clearer understanding of the Marion County marijuana "cartel" with seventy of its members behind bars, it still had not made a single arrest inside Marion County, whose fortress of silence had repelled every attack.' Raywick stronghold was still open for business. Even with Johnny Boone's operation unraveled, Marion County still held a firm home court advantage-an advantage that was slowly crumbling.

A GOOD ROTTWEILER WAS LIKE A GUN THAT THOUGHT FOR ITSELF, keeping a pot patch safe from rippers while the farmhands slept. Consequently, Johnny Boone liked to breed rottweilers big and strong to maximize their effectiveness in the field, culminating in Rex, Boone's champion-caliber rottweiler, who could chase a cow and take it down as a cheetah would a Boone had seen it happen.

Once, when Boone took Rex to Raywick before the 1987 Minnesota bust, a man brought his Great Dane to Bickett's Pool Hall, bragging that his big dog could whip any other dog in the state of Kentucky. Johnny Boone laughed and introduced him to Rex.

Even after the introduction, the man stood by his claim. His Great Dane could whip Rex. At Boone's command, within seconds, Rex pinned the Great Dane by the throat, as the big horselike Dane struggled and whimpered against the crushing weight of Rex's jaws, and a crowd of Raywick drunks assembled around the action.

"Now, I'll tell you what he's going to do," Boone told the man. "He's going to kill your dog. I've watched him do it before. Now what do you want me to do?"

The man begged Boone to call Rex off, and Boone did, leaving the Great Dane gasping for air as the crowd dispersed.

Whereas Johnny Boone was a dog person, Jimmy Bickett was more of a cat person, acquiring a male lion cub in October 1988; he named him Chico.

Although Chico, as an African lion, was not a native species in Raywick, Marion County had once been a wonderland of dangerous animals, where they feasted on buffalo, elk and venison. As late as 1810, wolves forced farmers to impound all their sheep nightly if they wanted to keep them. Not long thereafter, the settlers chased away or killed the animals that threatened their farms and families. In 1824, the last panther was seen below Raywick, running toward Scott's Ridge, where someone killed the last wild bear in the county eleven years later, according to a 1977 edition of the Lebanon Enterprise-the last wild bear but not the last bear ever.

A tamer black bear came to Raywick in 1968, when Hyleme George sold one of his two Canadian black bear cubs to Charlie Stiles as a pet. George had purchased the bears for a publicity stunt during his election campaign, keeping them in a cage near his 68 Liquor Store, which stood in the lot in front of his famous Club 68. Voters who would never stop for liquor might stop so their children could see the bears, giving Hyleme an opportunity to shake hands with their parents. After his successful election, George sold one bear to a farmer in Loretto and the other to Charlie Stiles. Although Charlie Stiles's bear escaped and got drunk a few times, it never harmed anyone in town, which perhaps led Jimmy Bickett to believe that his lion wouldn't hurt anyone, either.

Exactly how Jimmy Bickett acquired his lion in 1988 remains unclear. One day his friends just saw him playing with the young cub, still immature at about eighty pounds but already dangerous to most. He kept the cat in his backyard, tied to his porch with a rope. When he would show it to people, he would jump down into the yard, grab Chico in a headlock and smack him on the head.

"Good kitty," Bickett would say, slapping the cub's crown as Chico struggled to get out of his headlock. "Good kitty. Nice kitty."

Roped up behind the house and fenced in with a regular wire fence that could keep cows out of the yard and dogs inside the yard, Chico could chew through his rope and conquer the fence as if it were nothing. So, every now and then Jimmy Bickett's phone would ring.

"Hey, your lion's out here in the road," somebody would tell him, and Bickett would go pick Chico up.

Once, when Jimmy Bickett came back from Louisville just as it was getting dark, he went to his backyard and saw that Chico had chewed through his rope again. Standing on his back porch, Bickett figured Chico hadn't run down the road, or else someone would be calling him on the phone. The lion must have gone into the cornfield on the back of his property, which dropped off straight to a creek bed.

Bickett and a friend walked through that cornfield and beyond hollering for the cat until it was too dark to see. As they walked back toward the house, Bickett was sad, "tore all to pieces," because he loved that cat. Then, just as they crossed back over the creek bed, there was Chico in front of them, covered in mud and cockleburs, with ten feet of rope dangling from his neck.

Chico and Bickett stared at each other. Bickett knew that Chico wanted to come home, but Chico wouldn't come to Bickett like a dog. Bickett had to trick the eighty-pound lion cub when he didn't have meat in his hand to lure him closer.

"Come here, Chico," Bickett said before leaping onto the cub to hold him still.

After that, Bickett kept Chico in the red barn behind his house on Sally Ray Pike, in a wooden stall built for horses, where the boys who lived across the street would hardly believe what they were seeing.

"I was probably about seven or eight [years old], just started second grade," recalled Paul Miles, who grew up on Sally Ray Pike in Raywick, across the road from where Jimmy Bickett lived. "The most commotion I remember was just late night partying, squealing tires and stuff," referring to the silver Corvette Stingray that Jimmy Bickett owned at the time.

"Well, my [older] brother come in one day and says he thought he saw a couple of mountain lions over in the field ... back behind the house over there. I just thought it was him fucking with me.

"Then it was probably a couple weeks later, and I was shooting ball at this old dirt basketball court ... and I heard people talking over in the barn. I was picking up the ball; it was a bad rebound, terrible shot. If it came off wrong, the son of a bitch would roll all the way down the driveway. So, I was running down the driveway to pick up the ball, and I heard people talking in the barn, and I looked up and saw a couple of guys, and I shit you not, they were looking at a lion cub.

"I instantly believed my brother's story. At the time, we thought they were mountain lions. It was only later that I learned they were African lions."

When the cat seemed to get sick, Jimmy Bickett went to an amateur veterinarian in Loretto, who gave him a Folger's coffee can filled with a sandlike powder to pour over Chico's meat.

While Chico's health improved in his Raywick horse stall, Bobby Joe Shewmaker kept two lions of his own 625 miles away in a remote farm in rural Kansas.

In late September 1988, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation (KBI) began conducting aerial surveillance to look for marijuana. Agents flew with Sheriff Ron Moore when spotting in the air above his turf, the farmland of Allen County outside Iola, population 6,302. They hoped to bust some pot growers, but they had "no idea" they would find a field of thirty thousand well-groomed marijuana plants in full mature bloom.

"We spotted the field Tuesday afternoon," Sheriff Moore told the Topeka Capital-journal. "But by the time we got the search warrant and the manpower to take it down, most of the field had been harvested."

Police arrested five Kentuckians, who had returned to the crime scene to collect marijuana scraps. Evidence from the patch led agents of the KBI to other counties, where they found that fifteen thousand plants had already been harvested in Linn County near Mound City, population 821. In Pottawatomie County, Sheriff Dean Taylor found seven hundred high-grade mature marijuana plants in a field near Olsburg, population 192. Seven of Taylor's deputies spent three hours chopping down the plants with corn knives. In the farmhouse, Taylor's men found a semiautomatic weapon, a handgun and a bulletproof vest-but no one to arrest. In Wabaunsee County, another fifteen thousand plants were discovered near Eskridge, population 589. Shirley Roark, the dispatcher for the Wabaunsee County Sheriff's Department, told the Mercury of Manhattan, Kansas, that officers began harvesting the plants on Monday at 1:00 p.m. and worked until 8:30 p.m., then returned at first light Tuesday and continued cutting until 2:30 p.m. On Thursday morning, county workers were still hauling away the machete-cut plants. Roark said officers commented on how "bushy" the pot plants were and "said they appeared to be a superior grade of marijuana."

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.

On October 4, 1988, Louisville DEA Agent Richard Badaracco and Assistant US Attorney David Grise visited Miller Hunt and his business partner, Michael Haskell, in Maine. It was the first time they had met, although Hunt had met with other federal agents twice since pleading guilty in June. They discussed Kentucky, marijuana, Raywick and the Bicketts. Hunt and Haskell said they would do anything to reduce the sentences they faced, including wearing a wire into Raywick.

Before using Hunt and Haskell, the task force members wanted to follow up on another lead. They had evidence that Jimmy Bickett owned a lion cub, which they thought they could connect to the cubs found in Shewmaker's operation in Kansas. By accompanying game wardens, the task force hoped to witness Jimmy Bickett doing something else he wasn't supposed to be doing with his lion.

On November 4, 1988, DEA Agent Badaracco, a Kentucky State Police detective, a US marshal and three US Fish and Wildlife officers paid a visit to Jimmy Bickett's house in Raywick to see about allegations that Bickett, "a distributor of multi-kilogram quantities of marijuana," according to Badaracco's DEA report, was "caring for a lion cub."

The team of state and federal officers arrived in Raywick at 12:35 p.m. and visited Jimmy Bickett's house on Sally Ray Pike, where Bickett's 1984 cream-colored Oldsmobile was parked in the driveway. As a US Fish and Wildlife agent banged on the door, attempting to arouse anyone inside, State Police Detective Leo Mudd looked inside the Olds. He saw the keys in the ignition, the center arm rest in an up position and a bottle of whisky lying next to a bank deposit bag in the front seat. No one answered the door.

As the wildlife agent walked to Bickett's next-door neighbor's house and the other cops hung back, Jimmy Bickett hopped into his creamcolored Olds and sped away from his home. The police followed with blue lights and sirens on. Before the police could get behind him, Bickett pulled into Blandford's Store, the grocery and hardware store in Raywick, and went inside as though he didn't realize he was being chased. While Bickett was inside, Detective Mudd noticed that the arm rest in the center of the Oldsmobile front seat had been lowered. Lifting it, he discovered a .38-caliber Walther semiautomatic pistol.

A few minutes later, Jimmy Bickett walked out of Blandford's Store with a sandwich and a pint of milk, and the state and federal agents wanted to talk with him.

"Do you have an African lion up there at your house?"

"Yeah," Bickett told them.

"Well, we need to go talk about it."

Bickett and the detectives returned to the house, where police handcuffed Bickett on a state charge of carrying a concealed weapon.

"That's my girlfriend Angela's gun," Bickett told them.

He sat handcuffed in his own home. The phone rang three times, and he couldn't answer it as the detectives interrogated him about his lion.

"Where did you get this lion?"

Bickett told them that a man had come by Bickett's Pool Hall and sold it to him.

"Yeah, the guy had two of'em," Bickett said and described the man, what the other lion looked like and the kind of car the man drove. "He had Taylor County plates."

Despite Bickett's answers, the police arrested him on the gun charge but uncuffed him because the game wardens were afraid of handling his eighty-pound lion cub. So, Jimmy Bickett picked Chico up and put him in the cage in the back of the game wardens' Chevy Blazer.

In December 1988, about a month after confiscating Jimmy Bickett's lion, DEA Agent Badaracco called Miller Hunt in Maine and told him to get ready to do what he had agreed to: come to Kentucky to be Badaracco's informant against the Bicketts.

On January 23, 1989, the FBI office in Louisville sent an "immediate" priority airtel to the FBI director to follow up on a telephone conversation dated January 19, in which the OCDE Task Force requested that the FBI send an expert "to assist Louisville division technical agents, in the installation of CCTV, Nagra recorders and the hardwiring of a transmitting device."

Following confirmation from headquarters, all the pieces were finally in place for the takedown. For a decade, various police agencies had tried to nail the Marion County marijuana "cartel" on its home turf; none had succeeded. Now they planned on succeeding by resorting to a street-level buy-bust operation, the sort of tactic that the DEA officially dismissed as rudimentary and that the FBI considered "contrary to the investigative methodology ... for narcotics matters." Yet, in Raywick, it was the best they could do, and they planned to make the most of it.

On the cold, wet Sunday afternoon of February 12, 1989, Miller Hunt and Mike Haskell flew into the Louisville airport, where they met Ray Gagner, a state drug enforcement officer from Maine in charge of their case, along with agents from the FBI and DEA.1he agents gave Hunt and Haskell a silver Lincoln Continental, more than a few years old, and some cash in case they had the opportunity to buy small amounts of drugs before making the big deal.

Hunt, Haskell and Gagner drove south in the Lincoln on Interstate 65, the first leg of the hour-long drive from Louisville to Marion County. Hunt knew the way. The silver Lincoln coasted through Lebanon and braked just before Club 68 in front of the Golden Horseshoe's tall neon sign that read MOTEL, the letters stacked vertically, each in its own lit-up square. A neon arrow behind the sign's letters pointed across West Main Street to an alley on the side of the Golden Horseshoe, where the motel sat-a strip of out-facing rooms that looked across a parking lot at the back of the disco.

Gagner went into the office to register them. Hunt and Haskell checked into room 27; Gagner stayed next door. At 2:00 p.m., Gagner frisked Hunt and Haskell and then sent them off to Raywick. They drove the familiar route down Highway 84, a two-lane road that weaved through the hills like the underage drinkers who drove it.

In Joe Keith Bickett's two hundred-year-old log cabin off of Sally Ray Pike, the cocaine waited in a cereal bowl next to a handgun on the kitchen table. A 12-gauge shotgun, loaded with double-aught buckshot, leaned in the corner next to an unloaded .22 rifle. Gary "Tank" Allen, Bickett's lifelong friend, stirred a pot on the stove, cooking cocaine down to a paste so that he and Bickett could freebase it. Bickett and Allen had been "partying" with several women for "what seemed like a month."

"Tank's in the kitchen, and I'm in the living room nursing one terrible hangover," Bickett wrote in a July 2006 letter from the federal prison camp in Manchester, Kentucky.

"Someone's coming in the drive!" Allen yelled to Bickett.

"Shit," Bickett said to himself. "Who the hell could that be?"

Bickett walked out onto his cabin's back deck and saw a 1970s Continental pulling into the drive. Bickett stood there, waiting.

"One man gets out, and the other stays in the car. It's Miller Hunt," Bickett wrote. Bickett hadn't seen Hunt "since around September 1987 when he went to prison."The two stood on the deck for a while, "shooting the shit," as Hunt's body wire transmitted the audio of their conversation to an FBI airplane circling overhead. Hunt explained why he hadn't been down for so long and how he planned to pay off the debt he said he owed.

"This is the deal," Hunt said several times. "Here is what I want to do. I owe you money, and I want to get your money back to you, and here's what we're going to do."

"Look," Bickett said, according to his letter, "I told you the last time I saw you, you don't owe me nothing. I told you I was out. Forget about it! See Jimmy, not me."

While still on the back deck, Hunt started to tell Bickett that he had with him a big dealer with a lot of money looking to buy 150 pounds of marijuana. The dealer had come to Kentucky, Hunt said, and was down in Lebanon at the Golden Horseshoe motel. Hunt proposed that they add $150 per pound to the asking price as a way of working off most of Hunt's "old debt."

"Look, you don't owe me nothing," Bickett repeated. Hunt made him uneasy. "Who's that you got with you in your car?"

"Mike."

"Mike who?"

"Mike Haskell. You remember Mike, don't you?"

"Yeah."

"We've been on the road for a couple of days," Hunt said.

"Come on in and have a cold one then," Bickett told him.

Hunt yelled for Haskell, and the three went into the cabin. As they passed through the kitchen, Bickett grabbed three beers from the refrigerator, and Hunt said hello to Allen, who still stood at the stove.

The two men from Maine sat on the couch in front of a glass-topped coffee table littered with Bickett's loose change, an ashtray, an aspirin tin, rolling papers, a remote control and a small black notebook that Bickett used to keep his business straight.

Exactly what happened next would remain in dispute for more than twenty years. According to Hunt and the US government, Joe Keith Bickett at this point in the conversation agreed to do the deal with Hunt, telling Hunt that he needed to get a shower and come down off his cocaine high before he could do business. Bickett later insisted that this never happened.

Hunt's body wire, which the Quantico-based FBI technical expert had installed, should have proved one account truthful and the other false. However, when the government turned the tapes over to defense counsel, parts of the conversation had seemingly vanished.

Bickett later claimed that in this missing portion of their conversation, after about ten minutes inside, Bickett denied that Hunt owed him any money and told Hunt he didn't want to be involved in any more business together.' hen, voices from outside the cabin interrupted them. "It scared the hell out of all of us," Bickett wrote in his letter.

When he went to the front door, Bickett saw his brother-in-law, Danny Cecil, and Cecil's twelve-year-old daughter, Kristen, both on horseback. Bickett walked outside to talk with them; Hunt followed Bickett but stopped at the threshold to listen to the conversation without being seen.

Danny Cecil and his daughter would both later testify under oath that they had left their home in Louisville earlier that Sunday morning, where Cecil worked at the Ford assembly line for sixteen years, to drive to Raywick, where Cecil kept a horse-drawn buggy that he had restored. As he drove on Bernheim Forest Road, between the Jim Beam distillery and Rooster Run, Cecil and his daughter passed Jimmy Bickett headed the other direction on his way to Louisville.

"There goes Jimmy," Kristen told her father.

"Well, I don't know if we'll be able to get the buggy or not," her father told her, because he kept the buggy locked up in Jimmy Bickett's garage.

When they arrived in Raywick, Cecil went to Jimmy's house to see if the garage was unlocked; it wasn't.

"Well," he told his daughter, "we'll just ride horses instead."

So, they drove up to the Bickett farm and caught the horses. For about an hour in the damp February daylight, they rode around on the 196-acre farm that had been in the Bickett family since the eighteenth century.

As they rode along the farm's perimeter, they turned up the half-mile gravel driveway leading back to the cabin where Joe Keith lived. Cecil hopped out of his saddle to open the gate to Joe Keith's drive. He looked at his watch; it was 2:00 p.m.

They planned to ride down the gravel drive to visit with Joe Keith, but when Danny Cecil saw an unfamiliar Lincoln Continental with outof-state plates parked in the driveway, he changed his mind about trying to go inside.

"Joe Keith has company," he told his daughter, "so we're just going to ride on."

Before they left, Cecil hollered out for Bickett a few times, and finally Joe Keith answered the door.

"What are you doing?" Cecil asked.

"Oh, nothing." Bickett told him. "Just got some company."

To Cecil, Bickett looked like he had been drinking.

"You want to go riding horses with us?"

"No, not right now. Maybe later on. Where are you going?"

"We're going to ride over to your dad's farm."

"I might join you over there later on."

"OK."

As Danny Cecil turned his horse to ride away, Joe Keith Bickett hollered back at him.

"Hey, have you seen Jimmy?"

"Yeah, we passed him halfway to Raywick headed to Louisville."

As Bickett turned to go back into the house, Cecil could see a man standing behind the door.

"Is anything wrong?" Cecil asked Bickett.

"No, it's fine. Maybe I'll catch up with you later."

As Danny Cecil turned to ride away, he overheard Joe Keith Bickett talking to his unfamiliar guest.

"Oh, it's just somebody riding some horses," Bickett said as he walked back into his house.

When Joe Keith Bickett returned to the living room with Hunt, Haskell was sitting at the fireplace.

"Look," Bickett said, "I'm out of this stuff you're talking about. But when Jimmy gets back from Louisville, I'll tell him you all are looking for him."

"Well, at least let me tell you about this deal," Hunt said. "It won't hurt to listen, will it?"

Then Hunt detailed his proposal to Bickett, and Bickett led Hunt toward the door. As they passed through the kitchen, Hunt saw Allen cooking cocaine on the stove.

"You guys basing coke?" Hunt asked. "My man can get you all the coke you want if you all can find him some pot."

This conversation continued for a while in the kitchen.

"You should come on up to the Horseshoe motel and talk to this guy," Hunt said.

"Sure," Bickett said, finally, to get Hunt out of the house.

After this factually disputed conversation, Bickett walked the Maine men to the door and watched them drive off, the silver Continental bouncing through the gravel-filled ruts of the washed-out drive. When the car weaved out of sight, obscured by the thick trunks of oak, walnut and sycamore trees, Joe Keith shut the door and rubbed his face.

Hunt and Haskell returned to Lebanon, where they bought a pizza at Pizza Villa to take back to the motel. They ate with Gagner and waited.

A few hours later Tank Allen drove to the motel in a gray Oldsmobile to say they were still working on the deal. To make Allen more comfortable, Hunt introduced him to Gagner, their so-called investor. They offered to show Allen the money, but he said it wasn't necessary. Gagner offered Allen a drink from a fresh bottle of Jack Daniel's, and Allen cracked the seal and drank straight from the bottle. Haskell took a swig, too.

Gagner brought bottles of whisky to his undercover drug operations as props. In the event that a drug dealer asked him to do drugs, Gagner would say he only drank, and he would drink the Tennessee whisky instead. But in the motel room with Allen, he didn't drink at all.

Not long after Tank Allen left the Horseshoe motel, Jimmy Bickett arrived in a cream-colored Oldsmobile with Stevie "Snake" Lamkin riding shotgun. They wanted Hunt and Haskell to come back out into the country with them, so Hunt and Haskell followed the cream Olds in their silver Continental the eleven miles from Lebanon to Raywick and then onto an unpaved, rural road and parked in a dirt patch at the base of a wooded hill. Haskell recognized it when they pulled off the road-the same spot where Jimmy had sold him twenty-one pounds once before. Hunt opened the Lincoln's heavy door and walked across the cold ground toward the other car; Haskell stayed put. Hunt sat in the back seat of the Olds, with Bickett and Lamkin in front. Jimmy said the deal would be later on, probably in the morning. After that, Hunt walked back to the Lincoln and returned with Haskell to the Horseshoe a little less nervous.

The next morning, 7:15 a.m., the phone rang in room 27 at the Horseshoe motel. Hunt answered. After a short conversation, he hung up the phone.

"Let's go," he told Haskell. "We're going to Stevie's."

They told Gagner where they were going and left in the Lincoln.

Stevie "Snake" Lamkin lived in a cream-colored trailer in Raywick next to a garage where he fixed cars as a part-time job. When Hunt pulled the Lincoln up to the garage, Lamkin pulled in behind. He had two girls with him. He needed to drop them off at school and pick up scales, so he backed out of the drive, leaving Hunt and Haskell waiting. A few minutes later Lamkin returned with the scales and without the girls.

Lamkin took Hunt and Haskell into his two-car garage. A gray'88 Oldsmobile was on one side, and on the other side was the hood of an El Camino resting upside down on the smooth concrete floor. Lamkin set the scales up on the El Camino hood, opened the trunk of the Oldsmobile and started pulling ten-pound bags of marijuana from the trunk. They emptied the trunk and put all the bags next to the El Camino hood. When they emptied the Oldsmobile, they backed it out of the garage and pulled Hunt's Lincoln in so it could be loaded up without attracting attention from the road.

Then they weighed all the bags, and the total came up short-139 pounds. Hunt said he wanted the full 150 pounds, that they had the money to pay for the full quota and that the full quota was what their investor wanted. Lamkin didn't seem to mind. He left to get another bag or two of marijuana while Hunt and Haskell waited in the garage, loading the 139 pounds into the trunk of the Lincoln. While Lamkin was gone, Jimmy Bickett arrived in his cream Olds. Hunt went outside to talk to Jimmy while Haskell waited in the garage. Lamkin returned with two more bags, carrying them into the garage without bothering to hide them. After weighing out the full amount, Lamkin and Haskell finished loading the trunk. The Lincoln's trunk wasn't large enough for all 150 pounds, so they put two or three bags in the back seat, and Lamkin covered them with a blanket. With business done, they talked about going back to town.

"Well, how about if Mike rides with us?" Bickett asked, referring to Mike Haskell. Hunt and Haskell agreed. Hunt would park at the shopping center in Lebanon across the street from the Horseshoe, and Haskell would go with Jimmy Bickett and Lamkin to the motel to get the money. Haskell rode in the back seat of Bickett's Oldsmobile, and Hunt drove the Lincoln by himself.

Taking Haskell along on the cash pickup was security against Hunt's driving off with a load of dope for free. In the cream Olds, Bickett made small talk with Haskell. He asked a few times about the new investor and how Haskell knew him. Haskell told Bickett that the investor was someone Hunt had dealt with in the past with coke. Haskell didn't know the guy that well, but he seemed to be OK. When Hunt drove into Lebanon, he turned his headlights on as a signal to the numerous law enforcement officials monitoring the transaction that he had the drugs. Hunt pulled into the Market Square shopping center and parked between Higdon's Foodtown and McDonald's, opened the hood of his car (his prearranged signal) and waited for the police to pick him up.

Jimmy Bickett pulled the Olds into the alley beside the Golden Horseshoe. Twenty years before, the Horseshoe had been the country music alternative to Club 68 across the street. Whereas Club 68 booked musicians who played rock'n'roll and rhythm and blues, the Horseshoe was a country-western place that hosted the likes of Kenny Rogers and the First Edition, Hank Williams Jr., Johnny Cash and Barbara Mandrell. By 1989, however, the Horseshoe was nearly abandoned, and the motel behind the Horseshoe was well on its way to becoming a first-class dump.

Haskell opened the back door of Jimmy's Oldsmobile and walked toward the motel. As far as Jimmy Bickett knew, Haskell was picking up the cash. Haskell went into Gagner's room, and Gagner asked if there were any weapons in the vehicle. Haskell said no.

"OK. Get down on the floor," Gagner said.

Haskell lay down, and Gagner radioed the Kentucky State Police to tell them Jimmy was in the lot. Gagner and Haskell waited in the motel room for the next thing to happen. Outside, Bickett revved his engine, growing impatient.

"He's going to go," Gagner said into his radio.

Gagner and another officer burst into the parking lot with their guns out. Haskell stayed on the floor and didn't look outside.

There were two exits to the motel parking lot, one on each side of the nightclub-Kentucky State Police cruisers blocked both. Bickett tried to escape but then stopped the car when he realized he was trapped. State Police Detective Mike Bandy didn't show his face to Bickett at first because he was a familiar law enforcement face in the area. But after Bickett was cornered, Bandy stepped forward, cuffed Bickett and read him his rights. In Bickett's pockets, the police found a few Valium, a halfounce of cocaine and the business card for a Miami resident, who was formerly an officer of the Colombian air force.

At 11:00 a.m., Monday, February 13, after they arrested Jimmy Bickett, DEA agents and state troopers drove up to Joe Keith's farmhouse under a gray, rainy sky. By chance, Beverly Bickett, Joe Keith's sister, drove up right behind them. With his gun drawn, DEA agent Richard Badaracco told Beverly to go tell Joe Keith there were people there to see him. He told her to keep her voice up so they could hear her. It wasn't her family's first run-in with the law, but that didn't make it any easier to have guns pointed at her. Her eyes wide, she tried to count the men coming toward her. She backed up against her brother's back door, knocked loudly and yelled for Joe Keith.

Beverly and her boyfriend managed the Bickett family bar now that Charlie worked at the prison. On Mondays she would always go over to Joe Keith's and tell him how the bar's business had been that week. She also liked to straighten the house up a bit. Mondays were the only days Beverly could clean the house because the gambling parties always started on Tuesday nights and usually didn't end until Sunday.

With guns pointed at her, Beverly walked into the kitchen, yelling loudly to Joe Keith that there were people there to see him. She was scared. Joe Keith, groggy and half-awake, stepped out of his bedroom, saw the police outside and knew he was under arrest.

"Is Bobby Joe Shewmaker here?" Agent Badaracco asked.

"No,"Joe Keith said. "Do you have a search warrant?"

The police told him they could do this the easy way or the hard way.

Telling Joe Keith that they were searching for Shewmaker was a way to buy time so that a judge would sign a search warrant for the residence. The real reason the police came was to grab Joe Keith before he could find out that they had arrested his brother in Lebanon. With their guns drawn, state troopers and federal agents swarmed the kitchen and living room. Tank Allen came out of the downstairs bedroom, and agents told him to sit at the kitchen table. Joe Keith took Agent Badaracco and other officers on a tour of the house, opening closet doors for them as the agents pretended to search for Shewmaker for about a half-hour. When Joe Keith came back downstairs, he tried to pick up the black notebook on his coffee table, but Badaracco stopped him. In the kitchen, Beverly watched the police handcuffJoe Keith and lead him out to sit in the back of a police cruiser. Joe Keith asked numerous times if Beverly could leave, but the police ignored his requests. Beverly nervously watched the cops mill around her brother's house.

In Joe Keith's cabin, police found the homemade freebasing pipe, a digital scale with cocaine residue, a package of cocaine, a pen tube and a cup with cocaine residue, the rifle and shotgun, the black notebook with marijuana distribution records, cutting agents, a Ziploc baggie floating in the commode and a road map of Kansas.

Joe Keith sat in the cruiser until around 2:00 p.m., when State Trooper Mike Bandy finally wrote him a citation and showed him the warrant that gave them the right to search the house. Joe Keith again asked if his sister could leave, and the police finally consented. She went to the store and bought cigarettes, returned and gave Joe Keith a smoke in the cruiser. The police booked Joe Keith Bickett in the Marion County jail by 3:00 p.m.

Louis Earl Bickett, eldest brother of Jimmy and Joe Keith, had been a GE employee for twenty-three years. Like many Marion County workers, he commuted the hour each direction every day to the General Electric factory in Louisville for the union pay and benefits. Louis Earl heard about Joe Keith's arrest from Beverly around 4:45 p.m., when he returned home from work.

Louis Earl drove his silver Dodge Daytona straight to Joe Keith's house in the rain. Officers on the scene wore ponchos. As Louis Earl approached the house, an officer came out carrying the rifle they had found in the kitchen.

"That rifle there is mine," Louis Earl said.

"That belongs to the federal government now," the officer replied.

Louis Earl stood out in the rain for four or five minutes before one of the officers said he could come inside. Then Detective Bandy arrived along with a blue van carrying a K-9 unit. As the K-9 officer opened the back of the van for the dog, Bandy made small talk with Louis Earl, asking him what ever happened to the guy in Raywick who used to change tires and all that. Louis Earl told him the guy was dead.

That evening Jimmy and Joe Keith were moved to the Jefferson County jail in Louisville, where all the state's federal defendants were housed. A search of Snake Lamkin's trailer yielded prescription drugs, eight wristwatches, including four Rolexes, and fourteen firearms.

In the sixteen months since Johnny Boone's farm in Minnesota had alerted federal agents to the scope of Marion County's reach, no one had been able to infiltrate the county's home turf. So, as the DEA agents drove the Bickett brothers to Louisville to place them in federal custody, they sent a clear signal to what remained of the Marion County underworld: We can catch you where you sleep, even in Raywick. We've got your number now.

"For the information of the bureau," the Louisville FBI chief wrote in a "priority"-level airtel to the director's office in Washington, federal agents just arrested "five Marion County, Kentucky, residents ... for selling 158 pounds of marijuana," saying that Jimmy and Joe Keith Bickett "are two of the main suppliers of marijuana in the ... area.

"To date, this task force has been unable to identify the distribution network of this Marion County marijuana cartel because of the remote area and also because this is a very close knit group, who have pooled resources and often work in conjunction with one another.

"It has been virtually impossible to penetrate this group with conventional investigative techniques, and attempting to convince an insider to provide information against this organization has proven to be futile."

The arrests of the Bicketts "has proven to be a very significant step in the dismantling of the Marion County marijuana cartel, an extremely productive marijuana cultivation/distribution organization, which has existed in this area for several years.

"For additional information of the bureau ... the case is receiving extensive media coverage.

"Also, DEA headquarters has declared this case a special events operation (SEO) and presented this case to a congressional committee in March, 1988, to illustrate the magnitude of the marijuana dilemma and the vast amounts of money generated by this cartel."

"Then, I think in '89, that's when everybody got busted," Charlie Bickett recalled. "I was [working at the prison] for two or three years, and I'm sure my name floated around in the DEA office or whatever. You know, `How does Charlie Bickett play into it?' But I didn't. I was just there. I was sort of a pawn."

Two and a half months after the Bicketts' arrest, on April 27, 1989, in Grand Bend, Ontario, a resort town on the Canadian shore of Lake Huron, authorities finally caught up with Bobby Joe Shewmaker, who had been a fugitive for more than four years. Grand Bend's population of two thousand swelled to fifty thousand in the summer months, as its hundreds of miles of open beach became the "West Coast of Ontario," with all the active nightlife that title entailed. With gently sloping beaches and sunsets over the water, Grand Bend's shoreline attracted visitors from all over.

But in April 1989, Grand Bend was still a quiet town of two thousand. A month later, when the summer season officially opened on Victoria Weekend, police would arrest 318 people on alcohol-related charges. The police of this quiet, sleepy community planned for such annual binges, but the force was quite surprised when a patrolman ran the Kentucky plate of a Buick Grand National, the fastest American sports car to ever come off the assembly line, and discovered that it had been reported stolen and that the driver, Bobby Joe Shewmaker, was an American fugitive.

When Shewmaker's girlfriend, using the alias "Pamela Anderson," left the cottage for the car, police moved in to arrest her. During the scuffle, Shewmaker sprinted from the cottage, but police caught him a few blocks away with a West Virginia driver's license in his pocket that said his name was Ronald A. Treadway. Shewmaker and his girlfriend had been in Grand Bend since February and had recently purchased a substantial farm that he named Treadway Stables on the paperwork.

When Shewmaker was extradited to the federal courthouse in Detroit, he found himself accompanied by a personal SWAT team with snipers lining the roofs of neighboring buildings. By pure coincidence, an attorney from Lebanon happened to be in Detroit that day to represent two clients from Gravel Switch who had been caught growing pot in Michigan. When the attorney and Shewmaker made eye contact in the courtroom, Shewmaker called him over.

"Is this all for me?" Shewmaker asked, referring to the SWAT team. It sure was.

On top of the twenty-five years on drug charges, the government sentenced Shewmaker to ten years for being a fugitive. He will be incarcerated until his projected release date, October 10, 2016, when he will be sixty-eight years old.

With Shewmaker behind bars, after various police agencies had spent more than five years trying to catch him, the task force began to focus its next attack. By May 6, 1989, when Sunday Silence won the 131st Kentucky Derby, the assembled members of the task force knew that the CCE investigation, which they fought so hard to keep out of the hands of DEA headquarters, had gone nowhere. None of the seventy members of the Marion County "cartel" could be persuaded to testify, an effort the task force itself would describe as "futile."

Without the life sentences imposable under a CCE conviction, the prosecutors on the task force grew creative. They were looking for ways to keep the Bicketts in prison for as long as they could, and the task force needed a way to prosecute the Marion County leadership without risking acquittals in court.

For this second problem, the task force found a simple solution: hold a press conference and try Marion County in the court of public opinion instead of the court of law. In the court of public opinion, the government's burden of proof was substantially lower, and those accused, without access to the media, would have no opportunity to defend themselves.

On June 5, 1989, the task force held a meeting to discuss plans for its press conference. US Attorney Joseph Whittle attended the meeting and suggested inviting the television stations from both the Louisville and Lexington network affiliates to maximize media exposure. They established a timeline to give member agencies deadlines for submitting press release drafts, charts and summaries of operations. Whittle agreed to lead the press conference at the state police post, but he would later back out. In the end, both the speaker and location would change. However, the task force's decision to use the term Cornbread Mafia at the press conference remained unchanged, "as this term has been applied to this group by some of the participants," according to an FBI memo.

IN I988, STEVE LOWERY left the Lebanon Enterprise to run the Kentucky Standard, the daily paper in Bardstown, and John Bramel took over at the helm of the Enterprise on the corner of Proctor Knott Avenue and Mulberry Street.

On Thursday, June 15, 1989, Bramel's phone rang. The caller was from the US Attorney's Office in Louisville, who told Bramel that there was going to be a press conference in Louisville on Friday morning at 10:30 a.m.

"What's this press conference all about?" Bramel asked.

"Well, we can't really say," the man told him, "but we want to make sure you'll be there."

The man wouldn't hang up until Bramel promised he would be there the next morning. The tenor of the conversation left Bramel feeling as though the US Attorney's Office would have sent a limo for him if he had asked for it. Why did the federal prosecutor's office want him, a little Podunk reporter for a weekly newspaper, to come to an important press conference up in Louisville on a moment's notice?

The next morning Bramel woke up to a drenching rainstorm. Because of the weather, he left early. As he drove the sixty-five miles to Louisville, he thought about Lebanon, his hometown. The era of teenage lawlessness that had lasted from the 1950s through the 1970s had ended; no longer would the Courier journal be accurate in calling Lebanon the "Fort Lauderdale of central Kentucky" due to its night clubs, live music and liberal attitude toward underage drinking. The live music circuit had long since passed Lebanon by, and most of the nightclubs were now ghosts of their former selves. Lebanon, as Bramel saw it, was beginning to reclaim its good name. The marijuana-related publicity and negative headlines the town had received in the earlier part of the 1980s seemed like ancient history, too.

A journalist seldom gets to edit his own hometown newspaper, and when Bramel stepped into that position after Lowery's departure, he felt it couldn't have been happening at a better time. He saw the silver lining in the dark cloud that had hung over Marion County for so long. When the state offered tax incentives to factories to relocate in Kentucky, it put the most economically desperate counties high on the list-and Marion County topped the list. When Toyota opened an assembly plant in Kentucky in 1986, a brake pad factory came to Lebanon.

When John Bramel enrolled his two sons, Zachary and Gordon, at St. Augustine, the Catholic school in Lebanon founded by the Sisters of Loretto during the Civil War, the Bramel boys matriculated along with two other new students, Mishi and Yoshi Ozone, children of the Japanese Toyota plant manager. Zach and Mishi joined St. As sixth-grade class, as Gordon and Yoshi entered fourth grade together.

The Japanese children wouldn't have recognized it, but Bramel saw them as a bellwether for Lebanon's future economic health: Those kids represented a few hundred jobs for residents in Marion County who graduated high school but weren't going to college. Folks who might have turned to growing marijuana just a few years before now had legitimate opportunities and benefits: health care, sick days and the opportunity to work without risking prison.

As Bramel approached downtown Louisville that Friday morning with these positive thoughts of Lebanon in his head, he exited Interstate 65 and drove down Broadway to the stately federal courthouse. He parked his tan Isuzu Trooper, grabbed his camera and notebook and walked into the grand, neoclassical building not knowing what to expect. When he entered the conference room, a staffer took him personally to a seat reserved for him in the front row.

Bramel looked around himself and saw representatives from 840 WHAS radio, Louisville's flagship talk radio station; all the major papers; the Associated Press; United Press International and every major television news crew in the state.

"What am I doing here?" Bramel thought. "And why did they escort me to a reserved seat in front-row middle?"

In front of the assembled press stood a podium to which reporters attached their microphones, and behind the podium was an easel with a four-by-eight-foot placard covered by a black sheet.

Soon enough, an assistant US attorney, David Grise, came to the podium and removed the sheet, revealing a poster-sized map very similar to the one reprinted in the Courier-journal the following day:

The location labeled number 1 on the map was Johnny Boone's Minnesota farm. Number 2 was Minnesota's sister farm in the far reaches of western Nebraska. Numbers 3 through 9 were in eastern Kansas, farms run by Bobby Joe Shewmaker. Numbers 10,11 and 12 in Michigan; 13 through 16 in Kentucky; 17 through 21 in northern Missouri, also run by Shewmaker. Numbers 22 through 27 in all parts of Illinois; 28 in Indiana; 29 in Wisconsin.

And all roads led to Marion County.

Bramel's stomach sank. As the shutters of the other cameras clicked and whizzed around him, he knew that in a matter of minutes, Marion County was going to be dealt a blow like it had never felt before-and just when he thought all this was behind them. Through Bramel's daze he heard the man at the podium talking, so he snapped out of it.

"What we are revealing today," David Grise said, "is the largest domestic marijuana-producing organization in the history of the United States."

Pointing at the map, Grise said they had identified twenty-nine farms in nine states.

"Each of these farms," Grise said, pointing to the dots on the map, "has been traced back to the cooperative by documents seized at the farms, by fingerprints, by eyewitness accounts, by the arrest of cooperative members and by the method of operation of those farms."

Cleve Gambill, the first assistant US district attorney, stepped up to the podium as well. As certain as these prosecutors were of their facts, they weren't certain enough to present them to a judge and jury, only to a row of cameras and compliant reporters.

"The organization," Gambill said, "is a highly motivated, well financed and highly organized group of marijuana growers from Kentucky who are responsible for growing this vast amount of marijuana [and who] call themselves the Cornbread Mafia."

David Haight, the head of the Louisville office of the DEA, said that all other major trafficking organizations in the nation "have been foreign nationals, primarily Latins from either Mexico or Colombia.

"This is the first major trafficking organization in the United States that we have thus far identified ... that has not relied on foreign nationals for their production and distribution of marijuana," Haight said.

"The wholesale value of the marijuana we've seized is $364 million," Gambill said. "And we know the street value would be much, much more than that."

"A major dent has been made in the group," he explained, acknowledging that the Marion County cooperative continued to operate. "We intend to crush this organization."

Federal and state agencies had arrested seventy people-forty-nine from Marion County alone-and seized 182 tons of marijuana since the investigation began in 1985. Yet, the first busts they cited in connection with the cooperative hadn't occurred until November 1986, a multimilliondollar marijuana-processing plant in Woodford County, Kentucky, that netted twelve arrests-number 14 on the map.

This case was already public knowledge, having been reported upon and written about in the Lebanon Enterprise and Courier ,journal and all the other news organizations present, as was the other cornerstone of the vast alleged conspiracy: the October 1987 bust of Johnny Boone's farm in Minnesota (number 1 on the map). In fact, all the busts represented on the map had been previously reported.

Two of the cooperative's leaders, Grise said, were "Robert Joseph Shewmaker" and "John Robert Boone." Although he identified these two as "major figures," Grise was careful not to call them kingpins, bosses or anything that would perk a reporter's ears enough to ask, "If they are kingpins, are they being prosecuted under the CCE statute?"

Gambill echoed Grise, saying "two major figures in the cooperative" were Shewmaker and Boone. "Both of these persons are from Marion County, and all are in custody at this time," Gambill said.

"Wait a minute," John Bramel finally interjected from the front row. "You keep mentioning Johnny Boone's name. But he's not from Marion County. He's from Washington County."

The man behind the podium hardly acknowledged Bramel and presented his next piece of evidence.

"And wait," Bramel said. "You said Shewmaker was a major figure in the cooperative, and you also described him as one of the people who would arrive to purchase a farm. But Mr. Grise had said earlier that a `financier'would send his 'lieutenant'to purchase the farm. So, exactly what ..." Bramel was in the middle of his question when he was cut off again.

Other reporters asked other questions. For whom was the marijuana being produced? How was it sold and distributed? Who were the financiers? Nobody asked the government prosecutors why this evidence was being given at a press conference and not to a grand jury.

John Bramel sat there with a growing sense of nausea, ashamed to be sitting there with a reporter's notebook as the metropolitan media outlets uncritically accepted a story that, Bramel knew, was about to rip the heart out of his hometown. After the press conference concluded, John Bramel approached David Grise, the assistant US attorney, wanting to know if this vast marijuana conspiracy was an indictment or a criminal charge for which these men would be prosecuted.

"Well, no," Grise told him.

As the facts merged with their presentation at the press conference, John Bramel understood why he had been called, why his seat had been reserved. It wasn't just out of courtesy; it had been done with cold intention to maximize the effect of the news conference on the people against whom it was directed, a psy-ops campaign.

As he drove home in the rain, Bramel felt sick. He had witnessed firsthand the US Attorney's Office manipulating the press to seek a conviction in the court of public opinion while bypassing the courtroom completely. The federal prosecutors charged that all of the people they named were part of the Marion County marijuana cooperative, yet they had no intention of actually charging anyone with conspiracy as a leader or participant. Bramel saw it for what it was: an allegation with no chance for recourse, no chance for trial to be proven innocent. It was a guilty verdict read to the cameras without an indictment.

Bramel turned on the radio, switched to the AM frequency and found 840 WHAS, Louisville's most powerful talk radio station. When the news came on at the top of the hour, Bramel's day grew worse. WHAS reported that forty-nine residents of Marion County had been arrested in a roundup, as if the FBI had arrested nearly fifty men that day. Bramel turned off the radio.

"The DEA framed the story in a way that it was going to reflect poorly on Marion County, at least in some people's eyes," recalled Al Cross, who had moved from the city desk to the politics desk of the Courier .journal since leaving his Raywick beat. "They want to put a stereotype on it: If they are violating the law, they must be bad people."

John Bramel arrived back at the Enterprise office just after lunch. Not far behind him came the Action News vans from the Louisville and Lexington television stations. They came to shove microphones into people's faces and ask for a reaction. A reaction to what? The press conference hadn't made the papers yet, and the only news of it had come from WHAS radio, which had been dead wrong-there had been no fifty-person roundup. The six o'clock news made it worse, and then the 11:00 news hammered it home again.

One television crew drove into Loretto, where the reporter spent all day attempting to get someone to talk to him with no luck.

"Loretto, Kentucky," the reporter said, according to a Marion County viewer, "population two thousand, and nobody knows a thing."

Some people didn't believe it at all. Cornbread Mafia? Never heard of it. Others believed it but for all the wrong reasons. Some disgruntled citizens could give names of a whole string of people they saw with their own eyes get arrested with a whole busload of other people-and it wasn't just farmers and outlaws. It was prominent people and public servants. It was everyone but the talker's family. As the rumors spread, they took on a force of their own.

Suddenly phones started ringing everywhere-at the police station, the sheriff's office, the commonwealth attorney's office and the US Attorney's Office in Louisville. Misled by the press conference and the uncritical reporting that followed, people called to ask for details of the arrests that they assumed had occurred within the last few days, when in reality the arrests had taken place over four years. A newscast on Lebanon's radio station WLBN reported on Wednesday morning (five days after the press conference) what should have been obvious after the first day: Despite all your calls, folks, what you're saying just isn't true; there was no FBI roundup in Lebanon last week.

Meanwhile, as the rumors hit tidal wave proportions, John Bramel realized that when the Enterprise came out that week, people would read his factual account of the press conference; then the truth would be known, and the world would become sane again. Under a photo of Assistant US Attorney David Grise pointing to his big map, Bramel wrote the headline:

CORN BREAD MAFIA?

The question mark was his editorial statement, a mark of skepticism of Grise's claims.

"What makes you think it was an editorial statement?" Bramel asked defensively twenty-two years later. Then he smiled. "You're right. It was." As Bramel worked in his office Wednesday morning, a woman who refused to identify herself called his line.

"When are you gonna report the truth," she barked, "and report the names of those who have been arrested!"

By then news of Marion County and the Cornbread Mafia had acquired prominent placement on the front pages of newspapers across the country and around the globe. One Lebanon native saw the headline by chance in a suburban D.C. diner in northern Virginia. In Australia, Marion County native Sandra Gwinn worked as a tax accountant in Sydney and was surprised when her Price Waterhouse co-workers showed her the "Cornbread Mafia" headline from the Sydney Morning Herald.

"They didn't even know what cornbread was in Australia," Sandra Gwinn said twenty years later. "All they had there was polenta."

On the same day in June 1989, Johnny Boone, in federal custody for nearly two years by then, wondered if he would ever be able to see home again. Then, on television, he saw news of the press conference in Louisville where David Grise revealed the workings of the Cornbread Mafia.

"I wonder where they got that name," Boone thought to himself. He had certainly never applied the label himself to his operations, but there was David Grise on television, telling the world that it was a name the pot growers called themselves.

Johnny Boone was not alone in suspecting that the term Cornbread Mafia had been coined by the federal agents, eager to ignite the imagination of the public. Others in Marion County would blame the Courier ,journal, the first news outlet to use the term in print. Yet, an FBI memo obtained through the Freedom of Information Act stated "this term has been applied to this group by some of the participants," an allegation that many participants would later deny, which confirms the idea that this was no single organized "mafia" at all but rather many crews operating independently. James "Jim Bean" Cecil later said he was there when the infamous term was created.

"We were all sitting down here in this big metal shop," recalled Jim Bean, who served a four-year sentence for taking 733 pounds of marijuana to Florida with J. C. Abell in 1983. "Aaannnd, we were sitting there talking, and we all ... I don't know what year it was. It was either'79 or'80. It wasn't'81, I'm sure of it. I was thinking about'80, and we started talking about how we was, out in the cornfield, you know, 'cornfield'this and `cornfield' that. And the word, the best to my knowledge, and the word, what'd they call us? `Corn Boys.'

"Then we started talking about the mafia. Therefore, that's the first time I heard the word Cornbread Mafia. That was in about around '80, and from then on, I guess, you know, we would jokingly say, `Well, you know we're the Cornbread Mafia,' and that's when [the state police] come down there, and that's when they picked up on it.

"And the year, that one year there,'81, they were trying to follow some of us to a patch because we found this homer [homing device] because Bobby Joe had a black truck and took it down there to [a service station]. And they raised the truck up, you know, and the one of them told him, without saying anything ... He walked into the garage, and they pointed to this black box with an antenna and a magnet on it. What they were trying to do, they were trying to follow him, not knowing we'd find that box.

"We took it off, and they put it on someone else's truck. I don't know who or where or nothing, but I'm sure they got sent on a wild goose chase."

To briefly revisit the map revealed at the June 1989 press conference: Many retired Cornbreaders looking at it came to the same conclusion, which was that the government found only a fraction of Cornbread crops across the country.The map clearly showed busts to the west and north of Kentucky-9 o'clock to 12 o'clock-but nothing from 12:01 to 8:59. Three-quarters of the Cornbread clock face remained undiscovered, it would seem.

Two MILES SOUTHWEST OF TERRE HAUTE, INDIANA, NEAR THE ILLINOIS state line, a bus driven by the US Marshals Service turned at the intersection of State Road 63 and Springhill Drive, carrying a load of convicted felons, Johnny Boone among them, to their new home: the United States Penitentiary at Terre Haute, the prison with the reputation as the worst in the federal corrections system, where the federal government sends prisoners it would rather see dead than alive. Terre Haute, unofficially, was a death sentence to most who entered, either dying by natural causes before their long sentences expired or being killed by the most violent prison population in America.

Boone's first impression of his new home, like that of every incoming inmate of Terre Haute, was the sprawling cemetery in the front of the compound, where the warden had planted fifty years' worth of dead prisoners.

"Welcome to the gladiator arena," the prison guard at the front of the bus announced as the vehicle passed through the first set of gates into the Terre Haute compound. Boone and the rest of his busload became the latest addition to USP Terre Haute's population of fourteen hundred inmates, of whom 39 percent were white and 57 percent were black; he was one of the 25 percent there on drug charges. At forty-four years old, Johnny Boone was seven years older than the median age of the inmates there.

Built in 1940 on 1,126 acres of land, USP Terre Haute was one of the first federal prisons to emphasize rehabilitation by providing psychological and psychiatric treatment, referring to prisoners by names as opposed to numbers and allowing prisoners to talk during meals instead of eating in silence.' he institution initiated the use of the word inmate as opposed to other less-appealing labels such as convict or criminal. It also became one of the first federal prisons to implement educational programs with sessions devoted to improving the inmates'skills in reading, writing, math, as well as trades.

Inside its fenced perimeter, Terre Haute offered its inmates a hundred tons of weight-lifting equipment; courts for racquetball, handball, tennis and basketball; pitches for bowling and horseshoes; fields for baseball and football; a running track; an outdoor gymnasium; a covered, casino-style card-playing area and an eighteen-hole miniature golf course. Near the casino was the Native American sweat lodge and sacred area; near the totem pole was UNICOR, the prison factory, where inmates could work for pennies a day.

Inside its walls were a chapel used for every conceivable religion, a law library with rudimentary photocopiers and typewriters, a leisure library, a cafeteria, a pool hall, two recording studios, a cinema, a school, a hobby shop, a supermarket and thirty television rooms.

Yet, despite these amenities and the high-minded goals of its prewar founders, by the end of the 1980s, the residents of Terre Haute referred to their home as "Terror Hut," and, according to the only published memoir from inside its walls, Mr. Nice by Howard Marks, Terre Haute had "the worst reputation for slaughter and gang rape," adding that the Indiana prison "resembles an enormous insect whose outside skeleton is razor wire, whose body is the main thoroughfare, whose legs are cell blocks for prisoners, whose claws are holes for administering torture, whose arms are mindless facilities for its 1,300 inhabitants, whose compound eyes are TV cameras, and whose head is a gymnasium."

The prison had become, according to Marks, "America's `gladiator school' and provided an arena for tough redneck US government hacks, black inner-city gang leaders, bikers and psychopaths," along with "Indian braves, terrorists, bank robbers, presidential assassins, spies, interstate hooker transporters, dope smugglers and any state convict too butch for the state authorities to handle."

Like Marks, Boone quickly discovered that Terre Haute's cell blocks overflowed with a cross-section of American criminals of every conceivable stripe: black, white, Native American, Latino and Asian. As one grew accustomed to one's surroundings there, a clearer picture of each group emerged. The black population represented members of gangs from all over: Black Panthers from Oakland, Bloods and Crips from Los Angeles, Blackstone Rangers and Gangster Disciples from Chicago, plus gangsters from Washington, D.C., New York and Jamaica.

Among the all-white gangs were the Aryan Brotherhood, the Dirty White Boys, the Dixie Mafia, the Winter Hill Gang from Boston and the Westies from Manhattan. Plus an assortment of ethnic gangs like the Latin Kings, the Mexican Mafia and syndicates from Cuba, Puerto Rico and Colombia, not to mention motorcycle gang members from the Hells Angels, Mongols, Pagans and Outlaws.

Terre Haute housed its share of famous Italian Mafiosi, including first among equals Joseph "Joe Bananas" Bonanno, the patriarch of the Bonanno crime family and one of Mario Puzo's influences for his Vito Corleone character in The Godfather. Bonanno was sent to Terre Haute for part of his fourteen-month confinement in 1986 for contempt of court because he refused to answer questions from a federal grand jury.

Whereas Bonanno stayed for only a short time, some of his associates called Terre Haute home for much longer.These were men like Colombo family underboss Gennaro "Jerry Lang" Langella, serving a one hundredyear sentence; Gambino family member and convicted heroin dealer John Carneglia, whose release date is set for 2018; Victor Amuso, the boss of the Lucchese family; Frank Locascio, consigliere in the Gambino organization under John Gotti; Anthony "Whack-Whack" Indelicato, a top capo in the Bonanno family; and Joseph Testa of the Gambino family, who as half of the "Gemini Twins" and a member of the so-called Murder Machine participated in as many as two hundred mob-related killings in the back room of the Gemini Club in Brooklyn's Bushwick neighborhood before his conviction in 1989 on federal charges for killing a government witness. Testa arrived at Terre Haute a year and a half into Johnny Boone's tenure there, and he and Boone became close friends.

Early in Testa's stay, a jailhouse rat told the prison guards that the mobster was planning an escape. Prison officials locked Testa up in solitary confinement while they "investigated the charges," a tactic that Boone and other inmates understood as a method for the prison to break Testa, a potentially headstrong citizen of Terre Haute.

With Testa in solitary, the prison sent three prison snitches to fetch Testa's footlocker, the repository of all his personal possessions, ostensibly so the prison officials could investigate. When Johnny Boone saw the snitches pushing a cart toward Testa's cell, Boone ran to it first and blocked the cell door by pushing the bed against it. Boone knew that the prison wanted to take Testa's locker just to break him psychologically and that these snitches the prison sent to do the job were nothing but trash.

"If you want it that bad," Boone told them from inside Testa's cell, "you come and get it. You'll probably end up killing me, but I'll get at least one of you before I go. Which one's it going to be?"

They stood their ground for a while, thinking about what to do, but eventually backed down. Nobody wanted a fight to the death with the bearded Kentucky outlaw. When word got back to Testa from the orderlies who passed him meals through a slot in the door that Johnny Boone had saved his footlocker, a bond of mutual respect formed between the two men and, by extension, Testa's Italian family.

Boone learned he had a good deal in common with the Mafiosi he met in Terre Haute. Although the wiseguys were there for murder, extortion, racketeering and other violent, predatory crimes and Boone was there as a nonviolent marijuana cultivator, they were all sentenced to lengthy terms because they kept their mouths shut and didn't inform on their friends. Had any of them turned state's evidence against his organization, what little jail time he did would not have been in Terre Haute.' here was a sense that the federal courts sent this type of uncooperative convict to Terre Haute to administer prison justice beyond the Thunderdome style-"Two men enter; one man leaves!"-and in Terre Haute, that was a real thing.

Boone's Cosa Nostra friends taught him the word they used for the code of silence that Boone sacrificed more than twenty years of his life to defend; they called it omerta. To the Sicilians, omerta signified manhood beyond simple silence. It prohibited not just cooperating with state authorities but relying on them at all, even if one was the victim of a crime-like on Christmas Eve 1981, when a nineteen-year-old Marion County man told police at a hospital in Louisville that he hurt himself when he slipped and fell against a bumper while trying to get a drunk friend into a car, even after the police showed him the X-rays that showed a broken-off knife blade lodged near his spinal cord in his back. If a court convicted a man of a crime he didn't commit, omerta dictated he not give police information about the true criminal-a philosophy of self-reliance and complete independence from the state.

When Johnny Boone understood what his Italian friends were describing to him, he had a revelation: He had been following the laws of omertd his whole life and learned the term for his personal philosophy only after suffering the consequences of the silence that it insists upon. Johnny Boone had a Terre Haute tattoo artist ink OMERTA across his back in blue and red.

Even though statistics indicate that 350 of Boone's fellow inmates had been sent to Terre Haute on drug charges, few fit his profile as a nonviolent, high-level marijuana broker. Of those 350, the nearest to Boone in career choice and demeanor was Howard Marks, even if the two men were polar opposites in most other respects-Marks: a thin-statured, cosmopolitan Welshman with the debonair swagger of a British rock star; and Boone: a stocky, bearded, Kentucky-bred farmer.

Although clean-shaven in prison, Marks had at times worn a beard and other facial hair designs as part of the cover for his numerous disguises, aliases and passport photos. He could look like a banker with a meticulous Dutch-boy haircut and a crisply trimmed mustache as he famously smuggled bricks of hashish into America inside the speaker cabinets for rock'n'roll concert tours for bands like Pink Floyd; or he could look like a Marxist revolutionary with a bushy mane and a full, bushy beard.

Johnny Boone stopped trimming his beard when he was first arrested in Minnesota, and because the federal government kept custody of him from the moment of his arrest, denying him both bail and voluntary surrender, his beard grew bushy and long and had begun to turn gray prematurely because of the stress of his arrest, the preparation for a trial that never came and his incarceration in the roughest hole in the federal prison system. In Terre Haute, Johnny Boone found that his big beard had a certain psychological advantage.

"In there," Johnny Boone said later, referring to Terre Haute, "it helped to look a little bit crazy."

Howard Marks's displeasure with his accommodations at Terre Haute extended to the prison's staff-"the hacks," he calls them in his bookwhich he categorized as ranging from "fat military megalomaniacs to fat and demented local Ku Klux Klan rejects."

Johnny Boone's opinion of the guards and warden staff was a little different, perhaps because Boone had more exposure to redneck types in his Kentucky world than had Marks during his days at Balliol College, Oxford, or in the Mod scene of swinging London. To Boone, the guards and warden were better than some in the American prison system-to be called by your name instead of by a prison-issued number was an important gesture, not to be taken for granted. It meant that the prison guards saw the inmates as humans and not just as walking statistics. If an inmate had a problem, Boone saw that the guards would actually listen to the inmate's issue and treat him with consideration-unlike guards in some places, where the inmate would be told just to get back in line.' he Terre Haute staff knew that the whole place was a teetering powder keg, Boone reasoned. At any moment, the whole place could erupt into full-scale riot. Listening and responding to inmates' concerns were some of the few pressure valves the staff could use to relieve some tension at America's gladiator school.

In keeping with this philosophy, the warden of Terre Haute contacted any prisoner of interest to the media. It was the inmates' constitutional right to speak to the press. If a journalist wanted to speak to a convicted felon in Terre Haute, the warden always let the inmate know of the request and allowed him to talk with the journalist if he wanted. In this way, the warden called Johnny Boone to his office on three separate occasions, telling him a newspaper wanted to talk to him about his case, and in each instance Boone declined, refusing to talk with the Wall Street Journal, the Detroit News and the Chicago Tribune. Boone remembered the news stories that had been written about his business in the earlier in the decade, and he saw nothing good come from those stories, only more heat and harsher sentences. As he sat in his cell in Terre Haute, where his life was in danger every day from random violence, Boone thought that silence was best.

In Terre Haute, stabbings, murders and brawls occurred daily. Inmates crafted homemade knives, called shivs, while working at UNICOR, the prison factory, or stole real knives from the kitchen, where inmates worked for $25 per week. Lifers working at UNICOR became expert shiv makers, crafting long blades with hilts and handles to protect the shiv wielders' hands.

Boone and Marks, both with a reputation on the inside as being "nonrats,"or "stand-up guys,"had little to worry about from rational threats. But inside Terre Haute, violence could come from an irrational source at any moment, as some gang initiation rituals required recruits to kill inmates at random. Even inmates with violent reputations weren't safe-like Chicago Vicelord gang leader Roosevelt Daniels, who was brutally murdered in the prison cafeteria. Child molesters were particularly vulnerable; other prisoners killed them just for sport. On some nights, inmates could watch movies in one of the television rooms. There, in the dark, someone would get behind the child molester and shiv him; the dead pedophile would slump over; and the rest of the inmates would quietly file out of the room, leaving the bleeding body on the floor as the movie continued to play in the empty room, leaving no witnesses.

If someone like Johnny Boone learned through the prison grapevine that someone else was plotting his death, then that someone would be forced to act on that bit of intelligence and kill his killer before his killer killed him. If the target was a "stand-up guy," most in the prison would be on his side. If a move was being plotted against him, especially by bad guys whom no one liked, word would travel quickly to the intended victim, who would take two UNICOR shivs and tape them into his fists so they couldn't be dropped or kicked out of his hands during the skirmish. Then, for body armor, he would cover his midsection with books and magazines. Fully prepared, he would find the man who was plotting his death, kill him before he had the chance and then slip away after the job was done. No one, of course, would have seen anything.

"I never felt safe," Marks would later write.

Johnny Boone, to take his mind off the constant dangers that surrounded him in Terre Haute, replayed memories over and over in his mind. What was winter like? What was spring like? What was summer like in the field? Even though his relationship with Bobby Joe Shewmaker had become strained to the point of breaking before the feds had closed in around him, some of Boone's fondest memories of the early years included Shewmaker, like one of the times they went to Las Vegas together and stayed at the Desert Inn, where the brother of a Marion County man worked as a vice president. Boone, Shewmaker and their crew were treated as VIPs.

As Boone sat locked away in Terre Haute, he remembered that trip to Vegas, where the hotel provided them with "a limousine, a big one," with a driver they called Mr. Bill.

"We were riding for a while," Boone recalled, "and Bobby decided it wasn't moving fast enough.... He kept sticking that joint over in the driver's mouth. And telling him he was going to take over and drive.

"`Move over or get out'[ Shewmaker said to the driver].

"So he took over driving. Went down through those fucking intersections ... I guess we were doing sixty through them intersections. That big ol'sideways car slide through there. [The driver] kept smoking pot. I guess that's the only way that driver can handle it. That son of a bitch got loaded.

"The driver in the passenger seat looked pretty official! Going through them intersections on yellow lights at fifty-five or sixty. Hoo boy, it was funnier than hell! I think Bobby tipped him pretty good, even on the start, so I guess he seen the promised land, there.

"Going to the Hoover Dam. Out there they wanted to rent a helicopter, and they did.

"And I said, `I ain't really scared of it, but I don't see no fucking use in getting into the goddamn thing.... It ain't going to make me no money. I'm not going.'

"They all got in it and went up there. Had a pretty good time.

"But that day, and that helicopter and the walls of the canyon and looking up there, and I thought, `Shit, fuck that shit. I'm going to do something else right now."'

In the years that followed, Boone and Shewmaker went their separate ways, and locked away in the belly of the Terre Haute penitentiary, Johnny Boone figured he would never see or hear from Bobby Joe Shewmaker again. Then, in the course of Shewmaker's federal custody, the Bureau of Prisons transferred him temporarily to Terre Haute.

Although they never made eye contact, Johnny Boone and Shewmaker talked to each other by shouting out their windows to each other.

"Well,"Boone shouted. "I guess Snake Lamkin went and fucked you," referring to the man whose report that the car had been stolen led to Shewmaker's arrest.

"No," Shewmaker replied. "It wasn't Snake. It was something that [my brother] did but didn't mean to do."

Boone never understood what Shewmaker meant by that.

Miller Hunt, the dealer from Maine who wore the wire on the Bicketts, began serving his reduced federal sentence in March 1989, less than a month after he returned to New England from the buy-bust sting in Lebanon and Raywick. His sentence would last fewer than nine years, far below Reagan's mandatory minimum. As Hunt began his prison term, Assistant US Attorney David Grise began preparing the government's case against the Bickett brothers, to be presided over by US District Judge Charles Simpson, a conservative Republican, who had served from 1978 to 1984 as part-time staff counsel to Jefferson County Judge Executive Mitch McConnell. When McConnell was elected to the US Senate, Simpson was nominated for the federal bench and approved by the Senate in 1986.

During the pretrial discovery process, Grise submitted to the five defense attorneys copies of the tape recording made by the body wires worn by Michael Haskell and Miller Hunt in their visit to Joe Keith Bickett's log cabin. Because their microphones transmitted, via FM-radio frequency, to a low-flying airplane on a rainy day, the transmission often sounded garbled and unintelligible. Consequently, one of the defense attorneys moved to suppress the tape as evidence, and Judge Simpson, who agreed that portions of the tape were too garbled to understand, ruled that the tape would not be admissible.

The motion to suppress the tape had not been filed by Joe Keith Bickett's attorney, Tim McCall. He wanted the tapes submitted as evidence because he felt the tape recording held the key to creating a jury's reasonable doubt about the credibility of the government's case.

Before the court ruled the recording inadmissible, McCall asked DEA Agent Richard Badaracco about the tape. When McCall said he thought there was some problem with the tape, Badaracco said the agents recording the transmission might have gone under a viaduct because of the rainy weather. McCall didn't know Marion County well, but he knew the rural, isolated county well enough to know it had no viaducts-no overpasses or road bridges under which a vehicle could park. So, Badaracco's explanation only propelled McCall forward.

To look into it further, McCall sent a copy of the tape to an audio expert at the University of Florida to get his opinion and sent another copy to an expert in Louisville. But for the experts to confirm anyone's suspicions of tampering, they would need to examine the original, which the government didn't want to give to the defense without a court order.

When the judge finally ruled the tape inadmissible because it was garbled and inaudible, the Louisville audio expert told Joe Keith Bickett that he had just lost his only shot at winning his case. The expert thought he could prove that the taped evidence had been altered purposefully three separate times. Without the tape, all the defense could do was attack the credibility of the government's witnesses, Hunt and Haskell.

Miller Hunt, the Cornbread Task Force's star witness, took the stand first to give his version of events inside Joe Keith Bickett's log cabin: Hunt told Bickett that his "business partner," Raymond Gagner (actually the undercover Maine narcotics officer), could get kilos of cocaine for $16,000.

"I mentioned that to [Bickett], and he said it sounded good, stuff like that," Hunt said about the cocaine. "And we mentioned the marijuana, you know, getting the marijuana together and everything, and prices a little bit, but not anything really firm said at the house."

The rest of Hunt's testimony related to Gary "Tank" Allen, Jimmy Bickett and Snake Lamkin-the three men who eventually made the marijuana transaction that led to their arrests.

The government had testimony from witnesses that Joe Keith Bickett had conspired to distribute marijuana in the past and within the five-year statute of limitations on federal drug charges. However, the only thing the government could tie to Joe Keith since November 1987 (the start of Reagan's minimum sentencing guidelines) was the episode in Bickett's log cabin with Hunt and Haskell. If Bickett could prove that he had withdrawn from the conspiracy before the start of Reagan's minimum sentencing guidelines, the court would have to sentence him under the "old law," which meant that he would have access to federal parole and would have to serve only two-thirds of his sentence. But the government was deeply invested in ensuring that Joe Keith Bickett and his brother Jimmy went to prison for as long as it could possibly send them. The feds needed to prosecute both Bicketts under Reagan's "new law."

Joe Keith's attorney believed that the government had purposefully altered the audio recording to remove evidence that would have been beneficial to his client's defense. During the government's direct examination of its star witness, Hunt described in detail the debt he said he owed the Bicketts and how he proposed to Joe Keith that he would pay it back by adding a surcharge per pound onto the purchase to pass along to his "partner," the undercover narcotics officer from Maine. Yet, these portions of the conversation were directly contradicted by Bickett, who claimed that in the cabin he had repeatedly denied that Hunt owed him any money. Bickett stated emphatically that he had not done any business with Hunt since Hunt had gone to prison for his Louisiana arrest.

Of course, this was not the first time in a federal courtroom where the word of one convicted criminal was contradicted by that of an accused criminal. Neither account, in any instance, would likely be the complete truth. Both men were in a fight for their freedom. However, in this case, the government had wired its informants with transmitters to record the true, unaltered conversation as it occurred. But when the tape of that conversation made it into defense counsels' hands in discovery, portions of the supposedly complete recording appeared to be missing, including the part of the conversation when Joe Keith Bickett denied the debt that Hunt kept insisting he owed. It was at this moment in the conversation that Danny Cecil and his daughter arrived on horseback, and that whole moment, too, was absent on the tape recording.

Danny Joe Maraman, an assistant jailer at the Bullitt County jail, usually worked the second shift in the three-story jail, which could house up to fifty-five prisoners. In January 1990, he became acquainted with three federal prisoners staying there during their trial in Louisville: Miller Hunt, Mike Haskell and Roland Villacci.

Haskell arrived at the jail on January 19, 1990, and Maraman placed him in a cell on the west end of the third floor, near the cell of Robert Lamb, a Vietnam veteran and former prisoner of war. By the mid-1980s, Lamb had fallen in trouble with the law and was staying at the Bullitt County jail as a sixteen-month guest of the federal government for lying to the Veterans Administration. Between January and February 1990, in the third floor cell block, Lamb and Haskell became friendly: Lamb lent Haskell clothes, and they began having conversations. At first, Haskell said only that he was in jail on narcotics charges stemming from his conviction in Maine and that he had been brought to Louisville to testify against others from Kentucky. Eventually Haskell asked Lamb if he knew any of the Cornbread Mafia and told Lamb he was going to testify against the Bicketts.

Before going to jail, Lamb had known the Bickett brothers' father, J. E. "Squire" Bickett, and had gambled with Jimmy and Joe Keith Bickett on several occasions in the back room of Club 68 in Lebanon, but at the time Lamb had known nothing of the Bicketts'role in the marijuana business.

Haskell told Lamb that his partner, Miller Hunt, had set him up in Maine and that he didn't want to testify against the Bicketts but that if he didn't, the prosecutor and a DEA agent had told him he would be indicted for the same charges that the Bicketts were facing and that he would get a ten-year sentence, at least. Lamb tried to make arrangements for Haskell to talk to his lawyer, but Haskell couldn't get the money together.

About three weeks after Haskell arrived at the jail, Hunt arrived on February 8 at 6:15 p.m., after his first day of testimony against the Bicketts, at which time he was placed in a cell near Haskell's on the third floor, where Roland Villacci, their co-conspirator from Maine, had also been placed three hours earlier. The US marshals who brought these men to the jail gave the jailers no orders to separate them.

Maraman would later recall that as soon as he brought Hunt into the cell block, Hunt and Villacci sat on the bunk in Haskell's cell, where the three talked in low voices. Maraman made three or four checks on the cell block that night; at each check, he saw that the three Maine men were still talking. Robert Lamb witnessed the same thing from his cell. Maraman's shift ended at 11:30 p.m. Haskell would later tell Lamb that the reason they had talked together was to get their stories straight so they could testify in the same manner.

The next morning, February 9, Lamb saw the three Maine men talk again briefly before Hunt went back to the courthouse. Later that day Maraman received word to separate the three men because the judge had issued a sequestration order. Maraman then split up Hunt, Haskell and Villacci, leaving Haskell in his original cell on the west end of the third floor.

With Hunt gone, Haskell began to confide in Lamb even more and even asked his advice. Haskell, Lamb would recall, was very confused about what to do. Haskell told him that the DEA had set him up in Maine and that Hunt, his friend, had ratted him out. Haskell was afraid to testify against the Bicketts, he said, because the whole thing was a setup, but he felt compelled to go along with it because he didn't want to lose his family or be confined for a long time. Haskell, depressed, said he was going to lose either way.

On the day Lamb pleaded guilty to his own federal case, he rode with Haskell in the same van from the jail to the courthouse. They were placed in the same holding cell, near the marshal's office, where Lamb saw Hunt and Villacci.

After Lamb entered his plea, as he walked to the bathroom, he saw Hunt, Haskell and Villacci together in the first holding cell with a television just outside the cell. Lamb could hear a VCR machine playing tapes and could hear laughing and talking from the holding cell.

"That's not the house you were in," he heard one say to another.

An hour or two later, during another bathroom break, Lamb saw the three Maine convicts still in the same cell together. Later Lamb rode back to the jail with the three witnesses against the Bicketts. After Hunt and Villacci were dropped off at another jail, Haskell told Lamb that they had been viewing VCR tapes of houses and people related to the case to get their stories straight.

The evening after Haskell's first day on the stand, he returned to his cell and told Lamb that he had gotten his story all confused and mixed up. That night a US marshal delivered to Haskell a copy of his statement.

"You may want to look at this," the marshal told Haskell. Haskell spent the whole night reading and rereading the statement that he had signed before the trial had begun.

On the morning of Friday, February 16, before Mike Haskell took the stand for the second day of his direct examination by Assistant US Attorney David Grise, Judge Simpson held a colloquy at Grise's request because Grise wanted to introduce as evidence the fact that Hunt had been wearing a wire. Even though Grise wasn't allowed to discuss the content of the suppressed tapes, Grise was concerned that the credibility of his witnesses was in jeopardy.

"What I intend to do," Grise proposed, "is reveal that the setup for the microphones was that their conversation concerning this marijuana transaction would be broadcast over transmitters to government agents with receivers ... to show Mr. Hunt and Mr. Haskell had every reason in the world to play it straight with the law enforcement officers because they believed that the police could hear everything that was being said over the monitors . . . "

"Let's make it clear," Judge Simpson said. "You are talking aboutyou want to get in evidence the fact that they were wearing transmitters and so-called body wires, not that the transmissions were tape recorded at a remote reception post."

"That's correct," Grise said.

Judge Simpson asked to hear from the other attorneys.

"Judge, I'm going to add a little something new to this problem," said Tim McCall, Joe Keith Bickett's attorney.

"Go ahead," the judge said.

"We believe-my client and I believe-that the tapes do not represent the entire conversation that took place on that occasion....These tapes had been, in fact, tampered with.... Remember, I asked Miller Hunt if he knew about the fact that somebody had come up on horseback at the time during this conversation? We have witnesses that came up during the conversation, and that part of it is out of there [not on the tape]. So, I don't want you to think that I'm not going to seek to introduce at that point in time either the tapes or some testimony about the tapes based upon the court's ruling."

"I may affect this by giving Mr. McCall some news he didn't know," Grise offered.

"Let's have a free-for-all here," the judge said. "Tell everybody."

"The fellows who went in, Mr. Hunt and Mr. Haskell, neither of them was wearing a tape recorder. They could not turn off the tape because they didn't have a tape on them."

"I didn't say, `turn on,"' McCall replied, frustrated by Grise's strawman argument.

"There were two recording places," Grise continued. "One in the airplane and one on the ground.... The only people who could have turned off the [tape]-"

"Are the agents," McCall interjected.

"Are the agents," Grise said, nearly at the same time.

"All right," McCall said.

"And they had to get together-the people on the ground had to get together with the people in the plane and decide to turn it off at the exact same place and turn it on at the exact same places in advance when they didn't know exactly what was going to occur."

"All I can tell you is-" McCall started before the judge interrupted.

"Well, I appreciate everybody saying-well, let me say this,"Judge Simpson said. "It occurred to me that, Mr. McCall, the evidence that ... what is on the tapes is only a selected transmission, in which case the inference would be that the United States only wanted to show the bad parts of the tape as opposed to other parts, which might be neutral or of benefit to your clients.... If the inference can be drawn from your evidence most favorably to your position, it would be that the tapes were stopped and started by the United States in order to basically set up your client and eliminate from the tapes any information which may have exculpated himself or made statements that indicate a lack of any element of the crimes. [But] that would not be necessary if this jury did not hear the tapes.

"In other words, your evidence is: Here is the rest of the story. But they don't need to hear the rest of the story if they don't hear the first part of the story.... If they don't hear what was on the tape, they don't need to know what was on the tape may-that may have been started and stopped. I can't see myself . . . "

"I view it differently than you," McCall told the judge, "but I respect your position."

"I don't see how it would be relevant," the judge said.

"Judge, I think it would be relevant in this respect," Robert Fleming, Gary Allen's lawyer, said. "The premise that David [Grise] relies on [is] that these people had to be telling the truth because they knew the law enforcement officers were listening to their every word, and that is based on the premise that the law enforcement officers are straight guys, wouldn't do anything underhanded. But if the law enforcement officers told them, don't worry about a thing, fellows. If you get into there and we don't want to hear it, we'll turn off the tape ... then I think that destroys the premise that this was an up-and-up deal from the get-go.

"I think Mr. McCall would be entitled to introduce that so that there was collusion between these people that anything we don't want to hear ain't going to be on there, so don't worry about that, fellows.... If you get into something that might be beneficial to the defendant, we'll take care of that. We'll just press a button and stop the tape....

"I think that attacks or rebuts the proposition that the guy that went in there is, you know, just so worried about every word being recorded for posterity."

"Judge," Grise said quickly, "I am compelled to mention the preposterous nature of a conspiracy between the FBI and the DEA and the Kentucky State Police to edit these tape recordings while the events are occurring and then to share that information, this conspiracy information, with Mr. Haskell and Mr. Hunt, so they sure would never tell anybody."

"Well, Mr. Grise,"Judge Simpson said from the bench, "you lose me when you start telling me how preposterous things are because that's not my function, to determine whether it's preposterous or not.... The defense lawyers, I don't think, are necessarily smearing anybody. They're doing their job.... I will just rule on this and move along.

"All right. Mr. Grise, I am not going to permit you to prove [that Haskell and Hunt were wearing body wires].... The defendants have come up with clever arguments that would implicate the entire tape, and that's getting into issues too ancillary. So, I'm going to not permit you to get into that.

"Bring the jury in," the judge said to the bailiff.

At 10:45 a.m., after an argument of more than an hour over whether the witnesses' body-wire transmitters could be discussed in open court in order for the government to bolster their credibility, the jury entered the courtroom.

"Good morning, ladies and gentlemen," Judge Simpson said to the jurors. "So much for our 9:30 starting time."

After the colloquy, Assistant US Attorney David Grise began reexamining Michael Haskell-after Haskell's memory had been refreshed by the US marshal, who had delivered Haskell's previous statement to him in his jail cell.

"OK. Now where did you go after you left Joe Keith Bickett's house?" Grise asked. "Oh, excuse me. One more question, one more question about Joe Keith before I leave. Anybody ride up on horseback while you were there?"

"No, not that I know of," Haskell said.

"OK. Didn't see anybody riding a horse?"

"No."

"Is that something you think you'd remember, seeing somebody ride up on a horse?"

"Yeah, I would if I had seen somebody. No, I didn't see anybody on any horse."

On March 9, 1990, the Courier journal announced the Bicketts case verdict with the headline, "US Jury Convicts Three More Members of Marion `Corn Bread Mafia' Drug Ring." The jury deliberated for a day and a half, the Courier journal stated, and reached its verdict without information related to the possibly tampered-with audio tape or the collusion of the government's witnesses in the Bullitt County jail.

On the day after the Bicketts'conviction, at 2:38 p.m., the phone rang in the US Attorney's Office. Assistant US Attorney Cleveland Gambill answered.

"For David Grise, concerning the case yesterday," the caller said rapidly in a husky voice, "I'm going to get you."

When Gambill asked the caller for his name, he hung up.

Despite this threatening call, David Grise declined the extra security detail offered to him by the US Marshals Service. The Jefferson County Police Department patrolled Grise's residence three or four times a night to ensure his safety while Jimmy and Joe Keith Bickett prepared to serve their 240-month and 300-month sentences, respectively.

With that, the Cornbread Mafia, as it had become known to the public a year earlier during the task force's press conference, had effectively been shuttered. Although many men continued the tradition of growing marijuana in and around Marion County, it would never be at the size or scale it had once been.

"USP Terre Haute had one major advantage," according to Howard Marks. "One couldn't be transferred to anywhere worse." Within a few years of arriving at "Terror Hut," Marks would be transferred elsewhere, which, by definition, was a step up. In April 1995, Howard Marks was granted parole and deported home to the United Kingdom, where he was later released.

In 1992, a new prison opened in eastern Kentucky. FCI Manchester was established to help house the rising federal prison population, a growing percentage of it POWs in the War on Drugs. Jimmy and Joe Keith Bickett were two of Manchester's first residents, entering just after it opened in January. Built for six hundred medium-security inmates and 150 minimum-security inmates in its camp, Manchester has been described by a former inmate as a "fortified college campus," filled mostly with men coming to a lower-security facility from the USPs in Terre Haute, Atlanta and Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

Johnny Boone received word in January 1993 that he, too, would soon call Manchester his home, but he would come later because of paperwork problems, arriving in April. In Terre Haute, Boone felt like a caged animal in a deadly circus, where any day could be his last. His three years in the "gladiator school" caused him to be on alert at all times, ready to spring into deadly force at a moment's notice. As soon as he arrived in Manchester, a wave of stress left his body, as if the caged animal had been released onto a nature preserve. And there waiting for Boone were the Bickett brothers and a whole assortment of Kentucky men locked up for the same reason as himself. It was homecoming, of sorts.

Johnny Boone had not associated with the Bicketts for a decade before they all arrived at the prison in Manchester. When cocaine had come to Marion County in the early 1980s, it had driven a wedge between those who dealt with it and those who saw it as a magic powder that turned good people into assholes. The Bicketts, along with men like J. C. Abell, followed Bobby Joe Shewmaker down the cocaine road, which distanced them all from men like Johnny Boone, who saw firsthand the problems and misery cocaine caused and avoided it altogether.

By 1985, cocaine had caused a fundamental rift in the once-friendly Cornbread Mafia. Shewmaker and his men were running in places like Kansas, and Boone had his crews in places like Minnesota. Before the net fell and they had all been rounded up, the Kansas and Minnesota "families" of the Cornbread Mafia were nearly at war with each otherdeath threats between them had been exchanged. The cocaine use of the Kansas men caused a fundamental communication breakdown between them and Johnny Boone, who wanted them to quit fooling with that shit.

But by the early 1990s, all that was behind everyone because most everyone involved was in the custody of the US Bureau of Prisons. Jimmy Bickett and Johnny Boone became fast friends again, just as they had been before the first kilo of cocaine came to Raywick.

Joe Keith Bickett, freed from the influence of cocaine, spent most of his time in the prison law library, learning about the laws the government used to sentence him to a quarter-century behind bars. Then he and his lawyers drafted a detailed appeal, based on what they learned about Hunt, Haskell and Villacci talking with each other in the Bullitt County jail. They hadn't known during the course of the trial the extent of collusion between the three informants from Maine, so they couldn't introduce it as evidence, which might have damaged the credibility of the witnesses enough to create reasonable doubt with the jury, or so Joe Keith Bickett argued in his appeal on behalf of himself and his brother Jimmy. Joe Keith also pointed to the allegations that the DEA had edited the surveillance tape and had provided Haskell with his prior sworn statements while he was under direct examination. A three-judge panel from the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected each of Joe Keith's claims and affirmed the Bickett brothers'sentences, with this unhelpful caveat:

"While we find that the trial court did not abuse its discretion ..." the court wrote, "the government's conduct in this matter is disquieting. Although there is no proof that the government's witnesses tailored their testimony, the government acted improperly by placing all three witnesses in the same cell for an extended period of time after the first day of trial. Such conduct raises the specter of impropriety, and, for that reason alone, should have been avoided."

After the Sixth Circuit denied the Bicketts' appeal, Jimmy Bickett accepted that he would be in prison for the better part of the next two decades. Yet, Joe Keith remained in the law library, finding new ways to challenge his sentence, which he continued to assert had been wrongly imposed. Although the two brothers differed in how they handled their fates, the Bicketts were of a single mind when they worried what effect their incarcerations might have on their family. Their pot-growing days might have been behind them, but their family's grief was not.

In 1995, when the Bickett brothers had been in prison for six years, their sister, Patricia, thirty-nine, and her husband, Richard Gaddie, fifty, sold a 1989 Bass Tracker fishing boat to a man named Altha "Junior" Cox, who paid with a check that bounced. When Patricia asked Cox either to pay for the boat or bring it back, Cox drove to their trailer parked on the Bickett family farm in Raywick and, finding both Patricia and Richard at home, shot them both twice in the head with a .22 Magnum.

To conceal the evidence of his crime, Cox set fire to the trailer, where Patricia's two schnauzers curled around the bodies of their owners as their home burned around them. The four bodies were found together. Cox pleaded guilty and received two life sentences of twenty-five years, to run concurrently, plus a ten-year arson sentence to run at the same time. For 150 pounds of marijuana and his connection to Shewmaker's Kansas operation, Joe Keith Bickett was sentenced to three hundred months in prison. For the double homicide of Bickett's sister and brother-in-law, Cox would be eligible for parole in the same amount of time.

In the late 1990s, as Johnny Boone's release date loomed only a few years away, the Bureau of Prisons transferred him to its facility in Lexington, Kentucky, just sixty miles from home. Not long after, it transferred Jimmy Bickett there, too.

Bickett and Boone spent as many hours together in Lexington as they could, remembering old times. When they went to the weight room together for the first time, however, the two Kentucky men were walking into a corner of the prison claimed by a Washington, D.C., gang, and led by a large man who called himself Money.

As Bickett and Boone started lifting at a weight station, Money came over to tell them that he and his crew wanted to use that bench.

"All right," Boone said. "We'll use this one over here."

"Naw," Money said as members of his gang stood behind him. "We need that one, too."

And then it was clear. Itwasn't the weight bench Moneywanted. Money wanted Bickett and Boone to leave. Money did not get what he wanted. Johnny Boone stood his ground; the years of hardening he had undergone at Terre Haute had further tempered his already strong, alpha-male physique behind his graying beard. Jimmy Bickett stood at his side the whole time.

Boone knew that Jimmy Bickett was a fighter, had seen him kick plenty of ass in Raywick; the fourth son of Squire Bickett was no coward. Here, in the face of certain defeat, outnumbered by a D.C. street gang five to one, Bickett didn't flinch, didn't leave Boone's side, and the two Kentucky men, one ten years younger than the other, stood their ground against nearly a dozen gangbangers, all with jailhouse physiques, ready for the fists to fly over a territorial fight on the weight pile.

But Money wasn't prepared to begin a battle until he calculated what damage each of these two Kentucky men might inflict on his own. The standoff ended, instead, with jailhouse respect, and Money and his men backed off, leaving Boone and Bickett at their weight bench. After that incident, Boone and Bickett were closer than they had ever been in the free world.

In the Lexington prison, Johnny Boone passed the time betting books of stamps, prison currency, on Jimmy Bickett's games of bocce-the Italian bowling game, much like horseshoes, in which players toss or roll four croquet-sized balls toward the smaller boccino, and each round's points are given only to the team with the ball nearest the boccino. The game had been imported into the prison system by incarcerated Mafiosi, and Jimmy Bickett was one of the best players on the yard.

Every wiseguy wanted Bickett on his bocce team, even though the Italians didn't have much respect for Bickett, Boone or the other incarcerated Kentuckians, whom the Italians would openly refer to as "hillbillies" and "rednecks." Bickett didn't like them using those words, so he decided he would badmouth the Italians' heritage, too. Having grown up in Raywick, though, Bickett had never learned the slurs used to disparage Italian Americans in East Coast cities, so he had to think of his own"spaghetti-eatin' motherfuckers."

The wiseguys didn't like that.

There was something else they didn't like about Jimmy Bickett. Traditionally, bocce was played by old men quietly with strategy and skill. But that's not how Jimmy Bickett played. He would stand at the end of the pit and talk trash to distract his opponent.

"You ain't no good," he would say. "You think you're smart, but you're locked up in here with the rest of us, spaghetti-eatin' motherfucker."

Johnny Boone wagered books of stamps on these games, betting on Bickett's team. Over time, Bickett's insults began to overshadow his usefulness as a bowler; some of the wiseguys grew tired of hearing Bickett call them his invented ethnic slur. So, one day an older Italian asked Bickett to take a walk with him around the track. When they were alone, the old man spoke.

"Why do you call us `spaghetti-eating motherfuckers'?"

"Because that's what you are,"Jimmy Bickett told him.

"What can we do to keep you from calling us that?"

"Just quit calling us `hillbillies."'

"Is that all?"

By the time the two men had walked a lap on the track, the problem had been solved without anyone getting hurt; the closest thing ever to a gang war between the Cornbread Mafia and the actual Mafia had been averted.

Meanwhile, as two Bickett brothers did their time in federal prison, another Bickett brother worked his way up the ranks at the Marion Adjustment Center, the prison in St. Mary's.

"I had a lot of knowledge about prisons," Charlie Bickett later said. "I was able to talk to inmates just like I'm talking to you right now. I got along with the inmates because they knew my background. They knew my brothers were in the pen, and they knew I come from a community there that had a lot of, I call them gangsters, there. So, they knew all about Charlie Bickett's profile.

"A lot of'em, some of'em, started saying that I was bringing drugs in, telling the deputy director of security, and that's when Cliff Todd called me up.

"He said, `Charlie, they're going to give you a polygraph test.'

"I said, `What for?'

"This was about 3:00 in the morning when Cliff called me.

"He said, `Well, they think you're bringing drugs in. Are you?'

"I said, `No sir. I'm not. Never have and never will.'

"So anyway, David Donahue [the warden] called me over to his office.

"He said, `Mr. Bickett, what if you had an employee here you think is selling drugs on campus, what would you do?'

"I said, `I'd require him to have a urinalysis and a polygraph test.'

"He said, `Guess who that is?'

"And I said, `Me.'

"And he looked at me.... He said, `Well, this morning, we're going to go to Frankfort to give you a polygraph so we can nip this in the bud or do what we gotta do.'

"I said, `Let's go.'

"So, we left that morning, about 7:00, and, of course, I came out smelling like a rose. Well, it wasn't but a week later that the guy that took me down there, the chief of security, they busted his ass for doing cocaine and bringing drugs in.

"So, what do they say? What's the old expression? I was in the kitchen, but it wasn't me . . . "

Further mixups with the bosses convinced Charlie that maybe what some people said was true: A Bickett couldn't work in a prison. After a minor prank involving a mounted deer head, Charlie was suspended, demoted and had his pay docked.

"Finally, I quit the fucking place. They wanted me to come back so bad."

Not long after Charlie Bickett quit the prison, his new friend, Cliff Todd, found himself in trouble with the law after he blew the whistle on extortionists in the Louisville corrections system.

"Louisville was so overcrowded that they were letting them out after serving only 5 percent of their time," Cliff Todd recalled. "So, without any contact with county officials, I bought the Goodwill Industries of Kentucky building. It had five stories with a one-story building across the parking lot with a large tunnel connecting the two. I then went to the county officials and told them that I bought it ... and the fiscal court approved [my plan to build a private jail]."

Todd soon found out that to do business in Louisville, he had to grease a few wheels. When he didn't pay a judge to help with a previous home incarceration business, suddenly none of the judges in Louisville would sentence convicts to his program, forcing Todd to sell the business to the city. So, when the county's director of prisons asked for a monthly payoff for Todd's Goodwill-into-jail project, Todd agreed to pay the man's father in Los Angeles $4,000 a month, which he did for fifty months. As Todd was about to sell the jail business (together with the Marion Adjustment Center in St. Mary's), the director of corrections told him he wanted $50,000. Instead of paying it, Cliff Todd went to the FBI.

Yet, despite being responsible for the fate of a public corruption whistleblower, the judge in the case against the corrupt prison director sentenced Cliff Todd to six months in federal prison, breaking the FBI's promise to Todd that he wouldn't do any time at all and raising suspicions in Todd's mind that his sentence had something to do with his failure to pay off another judge in the home incarceration program.

So, to get back at the judge who sentenced him, Cliff Todd decided to bicycle himself from Shelby County, Kentucky, to the prison in Beckley, West Virginia-and promoted his cycling trek as a fundraiser for the Shelby County battered women's shelter.

"You know he rode a bike all the way to prison," Charlie Bickett recalled. "That made national news right there."

The world that remained behind after Johnny Boone, the Bickett brothers and Cliff Todd were incarcerated continued its endless cycle of boom and bust in the usual places.

On October 5, 1998, at the peak of harvest season, the Kentucky State Police flew pot-spotting missions over Washington County, and Lieutenant Shelby Lawson, coordinator of the KSP Cannabis Suppression Branch, called Post 15 in Columbia to inform the post that there might be some marijuana growing on the Boone farm. Three state troopers arrived at the gate to Boone's farm at the end of Walker Lane about 2:00 p.m.

The squad cars pulled into the two hundred-yard-long gravel driveway leading up to Jeff Boone's new home-a one-story wood-and-glass house with a wrap-around deck and a walk-out basement, built just a few hundred yards from the Boones' previous address on Walker Lane. The police could see a woman, Jeff Boone's wife, pacing back and forth along the deck. When the squad cars parked, she met them in the driveway, along with "the odor of marijuana," according to the police report.

The policemen told her they suspected there was marijuana growing on the property, and she invited them to look around. Almost instantly, one cop hollered to the others and pointed to two well-manicured plants in a blue plastic tub right behind the house. There were also piles of pot leaves and trimmings covering the back deck.

The officers showed the pot to Mrs. Boone and advised her of her rights.

"I guess I'll remain silent," she said but asked if she could get her children ready for the babysitter.

When she wouldn't let the policemen into the house, they arrested her for misdemeanor marijuana cultivation. One trooper called for backup, and Mrs. Boone asked if she could use the phone to call her lawyer.

"Because I don't want to get dicked around," she said.

The officer told her that was fine but said that they didn't intend on asking her any more questions. She called her father instead. A trooper called for a search warrant, using Mrs. Boone's driver's license for the address to be searched. Then they waited.

"During this time," the police report states, "Detective Wells walked around the farm and located fifty-five marijuana plants growing in a manure spreader. This was located over the hill to the side of the residence. This marijuana was equal in quality and had also had the leaves removed. I also called post again and requested further help.

"At about 4:45 p.m., Trooper Williams returned with the search warrant. Police entered the house and then went to the basement. We first saw a marijuana plant hanging on the back side of a bathroom wall. We then walked past that to a wall which had a large door made of the same wood as the walls. We opened that door and entered the room. Once through the door we could see marijuana everywhere. We opened the basement garage door for light and were able to survey the enormity of the find.

"There were large sheets of clear plastic covering most of the floor with marijuana spread out on those sheets. The marijuana was at different stages of the curing process, but most appeared ready for sale."

The police search yielded a find of 153.4 pounds of processed marijuana; $78,211.25 in cash; two bulletproof vests; six guns, including an AR-15 (a civilian model M-16), a rusty Russian-made Nadant boltaction rifle and several other items, including a "large sword ... pair of scissors ... [and] novelty handkerchief."

An officer arrived on the scene with his drug dog "but stated that there was so much marijuana in the house that the dog would be ineffective. He left a short time later."

A records search revealed that Jeff Boone's wife had a clean record and that Jeff previously had served four years on a federal count of conspiracy to manufacture marijuana for his role in the Minnesota bust. Jeff had escaped the initial raid in Minnesota by hiding himself inside a hay bale for three days in the freezing cold-only to be arrested three years later.

(How did the feds finally connect the younger Boone to the Minnesota raid? By analyzing the scraps of papers, records and receipts left behind during the chaotic chase sequence combined with the testimony supplied by a rare animal once thought not to exist-the Marion County rat.

As one will recall: Just before Johnny Boone had been set to take his Minnesota case to trial, he had discovered that his fate would be tied to two of his workers in a package deal. If one refused to take the plea that the prosecutors were offering, then all three would have to go to trial. Each man refusing to take the fate of the others in his hands, Boone accepted his twenty-year sentence, and the other two accepted their tenyear terms. The two ten-year recipients-whose names are unimportant since they are deceased-were released from federal custody at two different times: one on January 19, 1995, and the other, who apparently got tired of prison life after about a year of it, decided he would help prosecutors nab the men from the Minnesota deal who had successfully escaped the raid in exchange for an early release. Consequently, that man's tenyear sentence ended a bit early-on July 30, 1991. About the same time, Jeffrey Boone was arrested as he walked out of a classroom at Eastern Kentucky University. He served four years.)

In October 1998, returning to prison was not on Jeff Boone's to-do list, so, like many accused marijuana growers in central Kentucky before and since, he and his wife hired Elmer George as their defense attorney. George filed a motion to suppress the evidence acquired during the search because the address on the search warrant was incorrect. The arresting officers took Mrs. Boone's address on Walker Lane from her driver's license, but that address was for the Boones' older house about two hundred yards up the road, not the new wooden house with the wrap-around deck.

"Because the search warrant was invalid on its face, and because application of the good-faith exception test does not save this search warrant, the evidence obtained pursuant to the search warrant must be suppressed," ruled Washington County Circuit Judge Doughlas "Dotie" George, Elmer's first cousin, on June 1, 1999. "The court does not condone the behavior or approve of the practice which generated the evidence seized in the residence.... The search of the Walker Lane residence was illegal, and any evidence seized therefrom shall not be admissible at trial."

"The search warrant was suppressed," remembered retired state police Detective Jacky Hunt. "So, I think Jeff thought it was going to get dismissed. But then the commonwealth's attorney's office apparently appealed to a higher court, and the higher court overturned the judge's decision and reinstated the search warrant, which reapplied the charges, the way I remember it."

Hunt remembered correctly. On September 13, 2000, an assistant commonwealth's attorney informed the state police that the Court of Appeals had reversed the lower court's decision to suppress the search warrant.

"I was there on the search warrant," recalled Hunt. "I remember helping with the search. I knew Jeff Boone prior to that because a year prior to that we had a serial burglar in the area.... Actually Jeff Boone's mother's house got robbed. I worked that burglary and took fingerprints. I remember taking his thumb print. He didn't do it; he didn't have anything to do with it. I didn't know who he was at the time. Then I figured out who they were. Johnny was in prison, I think, then ...

"Of course, when Johnny was ripping and roaring back in the eighties, I was in the Marine Corps. I wasn't around when they took down those `Cornbread Mafia' guys. My grandfather was from Raywick, so I knew a lot about that stuff growing up."

The US Bureau of Prisons released Johnny Boone back into the world in December 2000, and he returned home to a Washington County even more altered than the Washington County to which he had returned after his Belize prison time in the early 1980s. The son he loved was hooked on cocaine and facing another stiff prison sentence now that the appeals court had reinstated the search warrant from 1998. Johnny had taught Jeff everything he could about the marijuana business, but Jeff had to face the consequences himself. With his marriage unraveling, his passions let loose by cocaine and a prison sentence looming, Jeff's life spun out of control, as documented by the state police in their file on him:

"On 3-25-01 an accused in this case, Jeffrey Boone, died of a single, self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head at his residence on Walker Lane.... During the investigation, Detective [Jacky] Hunt located a letter written by Boone in which he attempted to take full responsibility for the evidence in this case."

"I believe Johnny is the one who found him, if I remember correctly," Jacky Hunt said later. "When I arrived, Johnny was there. Of course, he was upset about his son. His only statement was he found him like that.

"I believe there was a suicide note, and it pretty much led to the fact that he didn't want to go back to prison and he was facing these charges. I don't remember exactly what the note said, but I believe there was a note."

While the Boones faced their family tragedies, the Bicketts continued to receive bad news from the courts. On June 25, 2007, after six appeals to various federal courts, including the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, Joe Keith Bickett received the ruling from his original trial judge, Charles Simpson.

"Upon review and consideration," Judge Simpson wrote, "the court concludes that Joseph K. Bickett has not demonstrated entitlement to the relief of his requests. The court does not believe that `old Rule 35' applies in this matter, but even if it did, the court would not be inclined to alter the sentence this court imposed many years ago. The court has already ruled with respect to Mr. Bickett's claims concerning alleged moisture in the marijuana.

"Because this defendant has not shown entitlement to the relief of his requests, his motions are appropriately, and hereby are, DENIED." [emphasis his]

Because Judge Simpson stated no reason for his final denial, Bickett appealed his decision to the Sixth Circuit.

While Joe Keith Bickett remained in prison, his brother Jimmy was released in August 2006, first to a halfway house in Louisville and then home to Raywick. Jimmy's sentence had been five years shorter than Joe Keith's because ofJoe Keith's connection to Shewmaker's Kansas operation.

Less than a year after Jimmy Bickett returned home, former Enterprise editor Steve Lowery passed away, his death the result of a long fight against alcoholism.

"Steve Lowery was . . . one of the best rural journalists I've ever known," Al Cross said in his eulogy for Lowery on May 8, 2007, three days after Calvin Borel rode Street Sense to victory in the 133rd Kentucky Derby, which paid $11.80 on a $2 ticket.

"The best rural editors play two institutional roles," Cross said, "that of the journalist, independent to a fault, and the role of civic leader. You must be willing to call them as you see them, show courage and speak truth to power. But whatever passion you show in criticizing what you think is wrong, you must show that same passion in promoting what you think is right. Steve did both-and he did it, to be frank, in a place where that may have been a little more difficult than most."

MARY IMMACULATE HOSPITAL CHANGED ITS NAME TO SPRINGVIEW AND installed air-conditioning well before September 28, 1976, when I was born there. I attended St. Augustine School, where, in my sixth-grade class, we got two new students: Zachary Bramel, son of the new newspaper editor, and Michi Ozone, daughter of the new auto parts factory manager.' same year that the Bramel boys and the Japanese kids arrived at St. A., several uncles and fathers of our classmates started going to jail, then to trial and then to prison. At the end of seventh grade, 1989, the US Attorney's Office held the "Cornbread Mafia" press conference, and the media circus began.

At first, the adults around us appeared angry at the marijuana growers for bringing a fresh round of bad publicity upon Marion County-its third bad reputation in fifty years-but as the bad press continued, the community's animosity shifted toward the federal government and the media for maligning a whole community for the actions of a few.

To combat the mixed reputation that Club 68 had bestowed upon Lebanon in the 1960s, members of the community banded together to make Country Ham Days, established in 1970 on the last weekend in September, the best harvest festival in the region. By 1981, Marion County Country Ham Days depended on five hundred volunteers to serve to a crowd of twenty thousand visitors some 4,548 ham breakfasts, made with 15,000 biscuits, 600 hams, 10,320 eggs, 210 gallons of apples and 144 pounds of coffee.

In 1989, the first Ham Days after the "Cornbread Mafia" press conference, the rain and cold weather decreased Ham Days'breakfast sales by 550 from 1988's total, but overall revenue for the festival rose 9 percent from the previous year, from $98,677 to $107,706, despite the rain and cold.' That year I bused tables under the breakfast tent with the rest of the middle-school football team. To fight off the cold, I drank my first fifteen cups of coffee.

I graduated from Marion County High School in 1994 without ever smoking marijuana once. I attended Centre College; I attended Brown University; I moved to New York. In 2004, I enrolled at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, which I discovered offered a book-writing class taught by New York Times columnist and book author Sam Freedman.

I tell him I want in.

"What's your book about?" he asks.

"The biggest homegrown marijuana syndicate in American history," I tell him.

"Send it to me in an e-mail," he says.

In May 2005, I graduate Columbia with honors and a book proposal. I secure an agent. I intern at the Courier-journal in Louisville. I take a job as a web producer for the New York Times. In October, my agent sells the book to Putnam. I give my notice at the Times and return to Kentucky at the end of the year.

My advance arrives in January 2006, just as zookeepers in Houston notice that Bruno, the male lion and centerpiece of the zoo's big cat exhibit, is refusing food. Eventually he stops responding to his handlers altogether and shows signs of pain. After he has eaten a raw-meat diet for eighteen years (nearly double an African lion's lifespan in the wild), Bruno's kidneys are failing.

On a Saturday, Waheed Agha, a Houston resident and amateur photographer, takes photographs of Bruno in the morning sun nuzzling with his sister, Lindi, twenty, and daughter, Celesto, who was born on June 1, 1990, according to Kevin Hodge, a supervisor at the zoo's carnivore section. On Tuesday, as Agha works in the photo-processing storefront he manages in the downtown underground mall called the Tunnels, Houston Zoo veterinarians separate Bruno from his female kin through a series of steel cages, sedate him, and then euthanize him with an injection. On Thursday, January 19, the Houston Chronicle runs Bruno's obituary on the front page of its Metro section, headlined: "Zoo Bids Farewell to Its Reigning Feline."

"Bruno's deep-throated roar was a daily occurrence at the Houston Zoo," the story begins. "It could be heard throughout the grounds and, if the wind was right, beyond."

"He had a tendency to call first thing in the morning and last thing in the evening," Hollie Colahan, the zoo's curator for primates and carnivores, tells the Chronicle. "You could hear that all over the zoo."

However, even though Bruno's passing is well documented, his origins, as well as those of his sister, are less clear to their keepers.' heir birth date of December 1, 1987, was estimated because if anyone knows the lions' exact birthdates, he's not talking.

"Bruno's genetic pedigree was unknown," the Chronicle reports. "He was confiscated in a federal drug raid."

No one in Houston knows the details of that federal drug raid or that Bobby Joe Shewmaker bought Bruno and Lindi as cubs and kept them with a black bear on a marijuana farm in Princeton, Kansas, population 322; nor does anyone in Houston know about Bruno's connection to the male lion confiscated from Jimmy Bickett, Chico, who is said to have found a new life on a nature preserve and a role in a Steven Spielberg movie, possibly the lion on the circus train in the opening scene of IndianaJones and the Last Crusade.

In February 2006, I drive to New Orleans for a wedding of friends rescheduled for the weekend after Mardi Gras because the original date had been the weekend Hurricane Katrina hit. We attend Mardi Gras on Tuesday; on Wednesday, I drive to Houston, where I meet with the zookeepers, who introduce me to Lindi and Celesto. I record my interview with the zookeepers with an iPod, but the background rumblings of the lionesses' roars clip out the audio, rendering it useless. With a rope four inches thick, I play tug-of-war with one of them through the bars. It hurts my hands and scares me. In the Tunnels, I meet Waheed Agha. On Thursday, I head back toward New Orleans. As I drive Interstate 10 through scenic Beaumont, Texas, I contemplate the different fates of Bruno and Shewmaker, both imprisoned for life, wondering which one had it better off. I make it to the French Quarter in time for the bachelor party. From what I remember, the wedding on Saturday is very nice. (At this point, Lindi has less than a year to live; she will die on February 12, 2007.)

When I return home, I have trouble getting anyone to talk to me about anything not so legal that might have happened in Marion County. My great-uncle, who co-ran the Blue Room poker game in the back room of Club 68 back in the day, looks at me like I'm crazy when I tell him I'm writing a book. Will he talk to me? No. Will the nice lady from Loretto in her nineties talk to me about her father's moonshining during Prohibition? No, she won't, either-"Tell your parents I said hello," she says. As I have trouble getting even the nicer folks to talk to me, I do historical research, dig through church archives, graveyards, newspaper microfilm and congressional records and request documents from courts and police agencies at the federal level and in multiple states.

I find the phone number of Roland Villacci, one of the Fonzarellis from Maine, an informant against the Bicketts, and I book a ticket to visit him. Meanwhile, I work to find contact information for Miller Hunt, the main Maine man, because I want to interview him. He has no contact information online. I learn that people can be hard to find if they don't want to be found, so I look for information about the woman I know used to be his girlfriend, Debbie Lewis. I find a newspaper story that says she died in a camping accident and lists her mother as a survivor. At my layover at LaGuardia Airport in New York, I call the number of her mother and leave a message on the machine explaining that I'm looking for Miller Hunt. When I get to Portland, I meet with Roland Villacci at a local seafood restaurant in a suburban strip mall. He tells me about the time they brought lobsters to Raywick but doesn't answer all my questions.

"Hey, not so loud," he tells me over good seafood. "People know me around here."

He's a nice guy and friendly. He's out of prison, working as a personal trainer in a gym, can't drive because of too many DUIs and lives in his brother's basement.

That night in my hotel room, my cell phone rings at midnight.

"If you go to that house you called today, you're going to get shot," the male voice on the line tells me, referring to the place I called looking for Miller Hunt. "I'm not talking about maybes. This is Maine."

A few minutes later, my phone rings again; it is a Maine state policeman.

"You've got these guys pretty scared up here," he tells me. "They think you're here to kill them."

"What?" I explain to him what I'm doing.

"Look," he says, interrupting me. "If you say you're not going to that house tomorrow, we don't have a problem."

"I'm not going to go to that house tomorrow," I say, and the conversation ends.

After that, at 1:00 a.m., I call the airline to change my flight to the first one out of Portland the next morning.

Back in Kentucky l keep working. One day l drive down Johnny Boone's long driveway and see the thousands of cow bones that adorn his fence line. For one hundred yards, on the wire fence at the edge of the lane hangs the same leg bone from hundreds of cows, meticulously fastened at one-foot intervals. When the leg-bone segment ends, the fence starts with cow ribsevery twelve inches for another two hundred yards. When the road turns at a 90-degree angle, there is a tree with hundreds of bones hanging from it and stuffed in the crotch of the tree where two branches diverge. It has a Texas Chainsaw Massacre feel to it. As I get closer to Boone's house, I pass through a gate guarded by two cow skulls looking down at me. Then I arrive at his locked gate, guarded by more cow skulls, deer heads, KEEP OUT signs and a tattered, faded POW-MIA flag tied across the cattle gate that leads back to the cabin on his farm. He has two mailboxes: In one, a small deer head, with the skin still partially attached, grins at me; the other is empty.

In the empty mailbox, I leave Boone a note as his three dogs bark at me from the other side of the gate. Inside the gate, more skulls, more bones-lots more. Just inside the front gate, a pair of giant animal skulls with massive jawbones (which I later learned came from two draft horses) stare at anyone who crosses the cattle guard into his curtilage.

Boone does not respond to my note.

Back in Lebanon, when I ask older farmers about Cornbread-related activities, the first thing they want to talk about is Charlie Stiles and how the state police killed him. Looking into the Charlie Stiles story takes more time than I ever thought it might. I talk to Al Cross, the former reporter from the Courier journal about Charlie Stiles. For thirty years, Cross has been hanging onto a file an inch thick with all the reporting he did on the killing of Charlie Stiles for the back in the early 1980s, ten years after Stiles's death. Cross could never find a smoking gun that could clearly contradict the state police's version of events; and no guilty conscience came forward to confess. I take Stiles's coroner records to Dr. George Nichols, former state medical examiner, and to Jeffrey Scott Doyle, a forensic science specialist for the Kentucky State Police; both tell me the diagram of bullet wounds in Stiles's body do not conclusively disprove Detective Ralph Ross's official version, which Al Cross had also kept.

I talk to Charlie's widow, Mary Dee. I talk to old-school ex-convicts, each with his own conspiracy theory about who set up Charlie Stiles, who ratted him out. I talk to one of the police officers who was there that night; he looks at me as if I'm crazy for asking the questions I ask.

In May, I talk to a group of retired outlaws in an interview that begins on a back porch at 11:00 p.m. and ends just before dawn the next morning; we run out of beer twice. Two of them talk while one is quiet. I ask them about Charlie Stiles and his brother Paul. I take notes on a manila folder in the dark. Finally, the quiet one speaks up.

"If you want to know about outlaws, you should look into Garland Russell," he says.

"Garland Russell? Who's he?" I ask.

"He's a gangster motherfucker is who he is," the man says.

When I get home, I look at my notes. The humid Kentucky night saturated the manila folder, leaving it as limp as a cocktail napkin and bleeding the ink of all my notes, rendering them illegible. The only thing I can make out is something that I have underlined and circled: "Garland Russell/ gangster motherfucker." I start looking into him; I find a fifty-page FBI file from the weekend in 1956 when he hijacked the truck filled with bowling alley equipment and the testimony from J. W VanArsdale, the man who survived three gunshots fired into him by Russell from two different guns.

I meet Boone for the first time in the parking lot of the McDonald's in Springfield. He agrees to allow me to request his FBI and DEA files via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), on the condition that I allow him to see the paperwork before I look at it. I agree.

Months later, as the FOIA records trickle in, I bring them to Boone to review. 'hen, a few days later, I return to his farm, down the rows of bones and skulls that I now see more as outsider artwork than as Texas Chainsaw Massacre-impressive for its methodical nature and sheer size, a memento mori on the scale of Christo: the driveway of contemplating one's certain death. Mexican migrant workers won't come near the place.

When I get to the end of his drive, if his cattle gate is open, I cruise right past his three big barking dogs to the house, where Boone tells me what I will find when I review the documents that I dropped off a few days before. I discover that Johnny Boone possesses a natural intelligence; he understands how the world works as it truly is, not as one might like it to be.

At some point that summer, I arrive at Boone's gate with a thick box of FOIA documents and find his gate locked, but the box is too big to leave in his mailbox. I want to get at the documents as soon as possible, which means leaving the box at Boone's now, so I get out of my car. His dogs, three big Labrador-rottweiler mixes, tug at their chains and bark at me; they mean business.

I can hop the gate and put these on his porch, I think to myself. That's no big deal.

Even though it's a clear breach in the protocol that Boone and I established, I figure it will be OK, so in shorts and flip-flop sandals, I climb over Boone's cattle gate with a box of documents in my hands as his dogs continue to bark at me and tug at their chains. Boone keeps his dogs chained up to the left of his gate; his house sits about one hundred yards to the right across an open yard, through which I walk carrying this box. Then I remember something: Over by the dogs, behind the vintage Oldsmobile covered in jawbones, there is a tree with pieces of chain and rusty metal dangling from it. Boone told me once before what it is: It's the tree where he hangs all the chains that his dogs have broken. I remember this as I am halfway between the gate and Boone's porch in the open lawn. I hear the pieces of metal clinking against each other in the wind. I freeze and look behind me. The dogs are going crazy, tugging against their chains' anchors trying to get at the intruder on their property. I hustle to Boone's porch, drop the box, dash back across the yard and hop over the gate in a hurry.

Over time, Boone and I develop a rapport, and he speculates what I might do after finishing this book:

"Or you can stick to what you're doing and travel and get lots of pussy," he says to me. "Write wild books that people will buy for years in powerful places, probably. You're getting a pretty damn good lap around the field already. Just from when I've knowed you, I've just picked up and observed. Where did you go to school in London?"

I never told him I went to school in London. It seems like so long ago, but while at Centre College, I studied abroad in London in my sophomore year. I tell Boone that while studying in London, I traveled around Europe a little. I tell him I turned nineteen in Amsterdam, and we have a good laugh about that.

"I think something's happened in Amsterdam," Boone tells me. "They're writing about it now in High Times.... They began to see things happening in the breakdowns in the durability of the plants .... They finally figured out because they took them and kept them and redid them and kept them and didn't have no males and didn't have no seeds-they didn't want any seed nowhere. They started out making clones in Amsterdam. But they weren't getting no new fresh blood. Like a man bought a Angus bull and just kept him and when he died kept his sons and when they died kept his grandsons for fifty years. That's what you call `inbreeding.'

"They done that. All of a sudden, they woke up and said, `Goddamn, we got spider mites eating them up. The mold is overtaking them. They're not getting as high like they used to.' And then they said, Ah shit, we've been inbreeding for ten or fifteen years over here so now we got to go get some seed.'They're writing about it now in High Times: The breeds broke down inside their own breeds. Took about twenty years to break plumb down."

I find Boone's observation fascinating, so I reach out to an expert for confirmation.

"He's right about the fact that genetics became quite bottlenecked in Amsterdam," says Danny Danko, senior cultivation editor for High Times. "With few new additions to the gene pool, the waters became somewhat murky, and constant inbreeding as well as instances of stress passed down from generation to generation through cloning led to a lack of diversity that caused the end product to suffer [in terms of its] potency, flavor, odor, growth patterns and resistance to pests, molds and diseases."

My ongoing conversation with Johnny Boone at some point turns to contemporary marijuana smokers' culture, which Boone has missed out on because of his decades of incarceration.

"What is it, 4:12 that they all smoke at?"

I correct him.

"Oh, 4:20," Boone says. "I don't even know the right time. That's all over the world now, isn't it?"

I tell him that's right; it is.

The first person in Raywick to talk to me is Charlie Bickett. He kept the Bickett family tradition alive by operating a bar and grill inside a restored garage in Raywick around the corner from where Squire's Tavern used to be before it was dynamited in the 1980s. Charlie sold his place in the summer of 2011.

Despite its lack of liquor, Charlie's was a good place to go for a brew and a burger for lunch or for karaoke on Friday night. Sometimes I would go there with friends from high school, and Johnny Boone might show up, and if he did, he had a Ziploc bag in his pocket with five or ten joints of his private stash, each rolled his distinctive way-thin on the ends and bulging pregnant with pot in the middle. He would sit and chain-smoke two or three in a row. He would light a joint, take a few puffs on it and pass it to somebody next to him, and then he would light another joint before the first one made it around the table. Who's going to tell Johnny Boone to not do that? Nobody in Raywick.

"I've been around Charlie Bickett for a long time," Johnny Boone says. "He's part of the Bickett clan, which I'm very protective of. His daddy saved me from the US marshals [in the eighties].... I was going right into a trap.... They'd probably have held me and held me, and I would have to make a bond or something, or get Jack Smith to get me out.

"But see, I already had a mechanism set up through a lawyer's office in Louisville. Any time I was arrested by the feds, if it was a bondable situation, they take me straight in to whatever judge was sitting that day.' lawyer I was with could get in for fifteen minutes instead of maybe sitting two weeks in the system....

"These fucking marshals. One son of a bitch, me and him had words before, about him being a gung-ho guy, you know? I used to have a habit of talking straight to a cop, if he was an asshole, but that's not always the best thing to do.

"He had me down there to the marshal's office one day, I was being arraigned for something. It was a voluntary thing. If they call that lawyer and said they needed me, would I come in without them having to come down in two or three cars, I automatically go. Who the hell wants them at your house?

"So, I go in, surrender. There's other marshals moving around, and the old boss marshal sitting over there in the corner.

"And I say, `I need to take a shit. Is it all right if I go over there and take a shit in your bathroom? Is that OK?'

"He said, `Yeah.'

"So, I went over there. I bet I hadn't been in there long enough for you to drop two turds, and KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK.

"`Let's go.'

"I said, `Fuck you, man. I'm shitting.'

"Then about forty seconds, KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK.

"I said, `Let me tell you something, motherfucker. I'm going to shit. And be waiting at the door if you want to talk about it when I get up here. I'm wiping my ass.'

"So, I get up, and go out, and he's standing there.

"I said, `What the hell's the matter with you, man?'

"I looked at the supervisor, and the supervisor said, `Go on about your procedure now.'

"So, then we went on.

"Well, he come out there again to get me, and I knew that son of a bitch, there was no telling where they would take me, put me in jail. Probably would be a month before I got out. I mean they could really fuck you or provoke something while you were in jail to lengthen it.

"Mr. Bickett come down there. He knew where I probably was, maybe. And he had entrance to all the places everywhere. Everyone was glad to see him because he was bringing you some news you needed to know if he ever showed up. He might never show up, but he did.

"He said, `They're up there.'

"I asked him, I said, `What's the best way out of here from what you can tell they're going to do?'

"He said, `They're sitting in there thinking you're going to come through town. They've been in every place up there. Go through Clear Creek.'

"I said, `I'm gone.'

"That's what I did, and then I come and made my arrangements, and then I still had to stay disappeared until arrangements got fixed. Saved me no telling how much time in jail, but they was aiming to fuck me around that time."

Because of stories like that, Johnny Boone has a great respect for Squire Bickett's sons and is especially fond of Charlie. On a late summer day in 2007, Johnny Boone meets Charlie Bickett in Raywick and rides in Charlie's truck down to visit Jimmy, who has returned to the Bickett family farm after his nearly twenty-year prison sentence to live in the white aluminum-sided house where Garland Russell hid out nearly thirty years before. As Charlie Bickett drives down the mile-long driveway toward the house, he and Boone see Jimmy driving toward them in an Oldsmobile with two passengers: a teenage stepson with a broken leg riding shotgun and Ben, his five-year-old stepson, in the back seat.

Charlie Bickett doesn't want to yield to Jimmy Bickett on the one-lane road, so he decides to play a little chicken with his brother. Jimmy, coming the other direction, isn't about to yield the road to Charlie, so Charlie's truck and Jimmy's Oldsmobile hit head-on at about twenty miles an hour-enough to stun Charlie Bickett into wide-eyed silence and to break up Johnny Boone into fits of laughter when he recounts the story later.

Jimmy Bickett backs away from the collision and pulls up alongside his brother rolling his window down. Boone sees young Ben in the back seat in his Cub Scout uniform, grinning ear to ear.

"We ain't got time for this,"Jimmy says, scolding his brother. "We're late for Cub Scouts!"

In 2008, after I had been driving down his bone-lined drive to see him at his cabin for more than a year, Johnny Boone visits me at my apartment in Lebanon for the first time on February 12, the night of the presidential primary elections in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C. Boone tells me that he isn't visiting for any specific reason, that he is just "making my rounds" and thinks he will come by and check on me. I invite him in, and we watch the election returns come in on the television, with Obama and McCain carrying the night.

When the news anchor announces that the network has the results in for the Republican primary for the District of Columbia, I laugh and say:

"There probably won't be five thousand Republican votes in D.C."

The results show John McCain with 3,929 and Mike Huckabee with 961, and Johnny Boone looks at me real fast with surprise behind his beard and bifocals.

"Well, how many can there be?" I say. "They're all staffers or lobbyists. Everybody else in that town's a Democrat."

Then the cable news shows the full results with "Other" receiving 911 votes.

"Besides, see? I missed a bunch," I say.

"Oh, off by a thousand!" Boone says, laughing.

Boone doesn't usually follow politics but stays glued to the television after the election returns are in and watches Senator Barack Obama give his victory speech of the night from Madison, Wisconsin:

"Today the change we seek swept through the Chesapeake and over the Potomac. We won the state of Maryland. We won the Commonwealth of Virginia. And though we won in Washington, D.C., this movement won't stop until there's change in Washington. And tonight, we're on our way...

"We can't keep playing the same Washington game with the same Washington players and expect a different result-because it's a game that ordinary Americans are losing....

"It's a game where the only way for Democrats to look tough on national security is by talking and acting and voting like Bush-McCain Republicans, while our troops are sent to fight tour after tour of duty in a war that should've never been authorized and should've never been waged.' what happens when we use 9/11 to scare up votes, and that's why we need to do more than end a war-we need to end the mind-set that got us into war...."

This line strikes Johnny Boone hard. I see him react to it, visibly moved by Obama's hopeful rhetoric-because when Boone hears "we need to end the mind-set that got us into war," he's not thinking Iraq; he's thinking about the war on him.

"He's the real fucking deal, isn't he?" Boone asks me after Obama finishes his speech to thunderous applause in Madison. I nod, feeling the same way.

"Do you ever think, if he's elected president, that he would legalize it so that a farmer could grow a little pot?" He looks at me after he asks it, waiting for me to answer.

"I don't know," I say. "I'd like to say yes, but probably not. Maybe in his second term."

Boone isn't the only one with whom Obama resonates. Out in Raywick, Charlie Bickett is feeling it, too. Back in the 1990s, Kentucky was a big state for Bill Clinton, who won the commonwealth's electoral votes in 1992 and 1996 and by huge margins in Marion County. So, in 2008, the Clinton boosters are out in force to drum up votes for Hillary, but Charlie Bickett holds firm in his support for the upstart.

The Obama campaign appears to evoke in Charlie Bickett a Huckleberry Finn moment, where he bucks the cultural status quo while still using racist language.

"I don't care what anybody says," Charlie Bickett says a number of times leading up to the Kentucky presidential primary in late May. "And I know it sounds crazy, but I'm going to vote for that nigger!"

In the course of my first two years of investigating the Cornbread Mafia, my editor at Putnam leaves the publishing house to become an agent. So, when I have a manuscript ready, I send it to Putnam, but none of the editors there seems interested. Finally, an editor bothers to look at the word count and tells me to cut it from 125,000 words to 85,000 before she will look at it again. I chop it down-cutting the Reverend DeRohan, Garland Russell, Charlie Stiles, the hot air-conditioner incident and lots more-and send it back to New York.

In March 2008, my agent calls me while I'm parked in the same McDonald's parking lot that Miller Hunt pulled into after getting 150 pounds of pot from the Bicketts twenty-nine years before. He tells me that in book publishing, orphans get killed and that Putnam wants to terminate my contract because my project had been orphaned by my former editor's departure. I decide to return to New York to facilitate the resale of my book. Before I go, I make one last visit to Johnny Boone on his farm.

The skeleton gate is open, and I drive up to Boone, who has his truck parked on his gravel driveway midway between his gate and his cabin. The bed of his truck is loaded with a mound of dark mulch, and he's covering the wildflower bed that lines his driveway, a bed that will produce the flowers he will cut and deliver to people he likes as he has done every summer since his return from prison. I grab a shovel to help.

"Naw," Boone says, stopping me. "You need the right tool for the job," and he hands me a pitchfork.

It looks to me like the mulch will fall through the pitchfork's tines, but Boone is right. Whereas I have to fight to get the spade into the mound of mulch, the pitchfork slides right in. Every so often, Boone moves his truck up ten feet, and we mulch the whole bed before taking a break. We talk for a bit about my going to New York. It's not anything formal or final. We'll see each other again, we figure.

By April, I find an apartment in Crown Heights in Brooklyn (on Bergen Street between Graham and Classon Avenues), and I work at an Upper East Side tutoring firm while I hustle to secure another book deal.

On May 20, Marion County voters go to the polls for the Kentucky primary, and 822 vote for Barack Obama versus 3,661 for Hillary Clinton. In Charlie Bickett's precinct of Raywick, the tally is 260 for Clinton and 50 for Obama. She beats him in every one of Marion County's seventeen voting precincts.

Some of his patrons can't believe that Charlie Bickett votes for a black man, so Bickett takes it one step further. With a permanent magic marker, he writes on the side of his bar's refrigerator:

"I, Charlie Bickett, bet John McKinsey $100 that Barack Obama will be the next president of the USA."

And below that: "I bet [another person's name] $150 that Barack Obama..."

And below that, more names and more dollar amounts, totaling $750, which Charlie Bickett will use at the end of 2008 to buy himself a new refrigerator. Perhaps because of Bickett's support, Barack Obama will beat John McCain in Raywick in November: 270 to 248, along with most of the precincts in Lebanon and in the rural, Catholic, pot-growing precincts of Loretto (323 to 238); St. Francis (166 to 100); and Holy Cross (161 to 71). Although Obama will lose to McCain in the countywide tally by 3.3 percent (3,842 to 3,596), McCain's advantage in surrounding counties will be much more extreme: Nelson County (McCain by 13.7 percent); Washington County (McCain by 26.9 percent) and Taylor County (McCain by 40.6 percent). McCain will win Kentucky by 16.4 percent.

In the last week of May 2008, the week after the primary election, Kentucky State Police and the DEA visit Johnny Boone's farm after conducting aerial surveillance paid for by the $1.15 million budget of the Kentucky State Police's Cannabis Suppression Branch (in 2009, the CSB budget will increase to $1.76 million). On Boone's farm, police discover 2,421 marijuana seedlings on two flatbed wagons that can be pulled out from a barn to get sunlight and then pushed back inside in an effort to keep anyone from spotting them-clones that would have produced hash pot with buds like rock candy if they had matured.

The police estimate the crop is worth "over $5 million," which is "one of the largest finds in the county's history," according to the June 4, 2008, issue of the Springlield Sun.

"It started with a routine marijuana eradication in Washington County on May 27," the newspaper reports, "but it ended up with one of the largest finds in the county's history."

The Sun then lists the drug task force's street value estimate: "The search turned up 2,421 marijuana plants and 200 pounds of processed marijuana. . . . The marijuana plants had an estimated street value of $4,842,000, while the processed marijuana was valued at $340,000."

These sorts of valuations for pot busts tend to wash over a reader. Those unfamiliar with the business tend to take police officers at their word, whereas smokers, growers and defense attorneys look at the numbers with a great deal of skepticism. Either way, it is important to understand how the police arrive at such a number.

To value the 2,421 plants at $4,842,000, it is clear that the police involved in the bust Western Kentucky Drug Task Force, Kentucky State Police, KSP DESI West and the KSP Cannabis Suppression Branchmultiplied the number of plants by $2,000 because 2,421 times 2,000 equals 4,842,000. This formula comes from the DEA's long-standing claim that each plant yields a pound and that each pound will be worth $2,000.

In addition to the plants, police find two hundred pounds of processed pot, and 2,000 times 200 should equal $400,000. However, the newspaper reports that the "processed marijuana was valued at $340,000," or $60,000 less than what it should be worth if a pound is worth $2,000, or thirty pounds went missing between the seizure of the pot and its valuation, or so it appears.

The value of the crop is the last thing on Johnny Boone's mind: He has bigger problems. This raid on his farm constitutes his third federal strike. Strike 1 was Belize in 1982; strike 2 was Minnesota in 1987; and if police catch him now, Johnny Boone will spend the rest of his life in prison without parole because of the 1996 federal Three Strikes law signed by President Bill Clinton-becoming another nonviolent outlaw serving a life sentence for persistent criminal farming.

With squad cars and agents from the federal-state task force swarming around Boone's barns, where the helicopter had spotted the two flatbed trailers covered in flowerpots filled with seedlings, each plant no more than two feet high, Boone's farm becomes a crime scene for the third time in ten suicide seven years before; the 1998 discovery of pot in Jeff's newly built cabin, where Johnny lives until this exact moment; and now this bust. It's the farm's fourth time as a crime scene if one also counts the 1976 bust of Johnny with a ten-year-old Jeff at his side.

Some in law enforcement now believe that Johnny Boone is on the farm when the task force squad cars arrive following the helicopter flyover. Yet, the police are so focused on seizing and counting the 2,421 flowerpot seedlings that they fail to determine if, in fact, their suspect remains on the property. Johnny Boone escapes.

When the Springlield Sun runs the "More Than $5 Million in Pot" headline a week later, the name of the suspect is not released because federal and state agents believe they are in hot pursuit, and they nearly catch him.

One member of the task force wisely stakes out St. Dominic Cemetery in Springfield, where Jeff Boone is buried. It's a grave that Johnny is known to visit often, because the headstone is covered with small cow bones, seashells, bird feathers, dream catchers and other totems of the Native American shamanism that Johnny acquired in federal prison sweat lodges. Sure enough, the cop's hunch is correct: As a fugitive running for his life from the law, Johnny Boone visits his son's grave, perhaps for the last time, and the cop radios it in.

But as the squad car arriving as backup comes toward the cemetery, Johnny Boone is on his way out. For some reason, perhaps a miscommunication between the units, Johnny Boone gets away-again. With the DEA-led task force unable to apprehend its suspect in the case of the 2,421 flowerpots, the US Marshals Service steps up to the plate.

"Most of those deputies in the Louisville office aren't from Kentucky; being a federal agency, they come from all over," says Rick McCubbin, former US marshal in Louisville under George W. Bush and currently a captain with the Bardstown Police Department. "In fact, I remember the deputy that got the case and said, `Man, who's this? You ever heard of Johnny Boone?'

"And I said, `Well, heck yeah! Who hasn't?'

"But again, I'm from Kentucky, and he wasn't. That was ... after the DEA did their investigation on him. When they can't apprehend [their suspect], it's turned over to the US marshals. DEA handed over the indictment and told us, `We want this guy.'

"We adopted the case. It rotated through. Deputy came to me and said:

"`I just picked up this case, marshal. You're a Kentucky boy. Who is this guy?'

"I said, `Well, I've never met him. Don't know a whole lot about him.' But I said, `He's just synonymous with, you know, marijuana, Springfield, Washington County, Marion County, Kentucky.'

"And I said, `I've never dealt with him in Louisville-up north, if you will. But you just knew the name, you know. And you probably heard good and bad, and I did.'

"Always heard good and bad about Johnny Boone, you know. The one always washed the other. I would call him old-school, uh, you know, involved in drugs-I don't want to call him a drug dealer, but you know. He was just old-school. You know? You got the old-school cops and you got the old-school..."

"Outlaws?" I suggest.

"Yeah, basically. That's Johnny Boone. The deputy, I remember the first thing he said was:

"`My God! He looks like Santa Claus."'

But Boone's good looks wouldn't save him this time. The marshals don't care who Boone resembles or if the law they are enforcing is wrong or immoral, as illustrated by this famous exchange from The Fugitive:

"I didn't kill my wife," says the convicted wife-killer played by Harrison Ford.

"I don't care," replies the US marshal played by Tommy Lee Jones, who won an Oscar for the role.

In the US Marshals Service office in Louisville, a framed movie poster from U.S. Marshals, the sequel to The Fugitive, hangs on the wall. The US marshals don't care how they find Johnny Boone; their job is to find him. So, when they search Boone's farm and house and find photographs of Boone in a tropical location taken by me in 2007, the marshals collect them as evidence.

"US marshals can be relentless on their fugitive," says Rick McCubbin. "As corny as it is, just like the movies, we're just there to get the guy. We don't know anything about the case, and it's true. We just got a warrant. Again, going back to that corny movie ...

"Basically what we would do, like any fugitive ... Just like a police department, but the benefit of the marshals: They're not tied to the radio. So, we can dedicate 100 percent of our time looking for the fugitive.... So, obviously you go to point A: What's his address?

"You start there and spoke out: You go everywhere. So, we hit known associates, family, places he frequents-and I'm saying this overall, as any fugitive-places of employment, any investigative tool we need we can use within the legality end of it, and look for this person.

"So, that's when we hit the Springfield area, his home, and we started from there.... We can do things like we did in Marion County that night.... We knew the area that he frequented, and everyone around there knew him. So, we had an idea, we said, `Well, let's set up a roadblock' and just put out his picture. Not that we needed to; everybody knew Johnny Boone. But we wanted everybody to know that we were serious.

"He's a fugitive wanted by the DEA, and our job is to catch him. So that's why we set up the roadblock [in Loretto] that weekend. It was the weekend of the September 11th anniversary...

"Right in front of Hawks [Place] and Cozy [Corner], where it all comes together. People kept telling us-they wouldn't tell us much!-but when they told us they would say, `Oh, he hangs over here or hangs over there.'...

"So, we knew that was a regular spot that he frequented. So, we thought we'd just let everybody know, `We're here. We know you don't want us here, but we're here....'

"In most cases that works, across the country: roadblocks, you saturate an area, and you just wear people down:

"`Look, we're sick of you. What do you want?'

"`We want him.'

"`There's where he's at. Just go get him and leave us alone. Take your fugitive and please leave.'

"Always works. Always works. This was just one of those times when it didn't work. It wasn't gonna work! But we wanted to be consistent.

"But we got some people to talk to us. Some were like, `Yeah, I know him.' A few that didn't like him, some that loved him. Some said, `Good luck,' and some said, `You ain't never going to find him. You're wasting your time,'which we kinda knew going in.

"This is Johnny Boone. He's a well-respected man, believe it or not. And that's probably the hardest thing for some of these deputies who couldn't comprehend, not being from here:

"`But this guy's a fugitive!' [his deputies said]

"And I tried to explain, `But this is Kentucky. This is central Kentucky. This is just, to some, an accepted way of life. Yeah, on the books it's against the law, but it's an accepted way of life.'

"And most people are like, `You don't bother me, and I won't bother you,' even ones who don't like it. Most people will tell you, `I don't like it. I hope you arrest them, but you don't bother me, and I don't bother you.'

"So, that was kind of a learning experience for our deputies."

At another roadblock, this one in Raywick in front of Blandford's Store, the US marshals stop a carload of young Marion County menincluding Paul Miles, the same guy who saw Jimmy Bickett's lion as a boy. The marshals hand each member of the car a "wanted poster" of Johnny Boone.

"Oh, I know this guy," the driver says. "That's the motherfucker we got in the trunk!"

The marshals do not ask to look in the trunk.

That summer of 2008, the US marshals respond to all the actionable intelligence they have: When they get a tip that Johnny Boone is at the Lebanon Wal-Mart, they arrive on the scene in force and find FedEx Chuck instead.

Charles Price, a stocky, white-bearded man from Cynthiana, Kentucky, is known around Lebanon as FedEx Chuck because he has driven the FedEx route for fifteen years, from Lexington to Lebanon and then "out to Raywick and back through."

"Every day I go to Wal-Mart delivering," Price says, "and after I do my delivering, I get something to eat and use the bathroom. I noticed a bunch of cop cars around there-state police and sheriff and everything out there.

"So, I come out, as I was walking out, I think it was Carroll [Kirkland, the sheriff] said, `That ain't him.'

"I didn't pay no attention to it, though. I walked on and went back to my truck. Just a couple of days later, I found out when I was delivering to the courthouse that they were laughing about it, but I don't know if he was out there, really out there, or not. But somebody did call in and say that Johnny Boone was at Wal-Mart.

"So, I don't know if he was really down at Wal-Mart or if someone thought I was him out there.... I was wearing my uniform, my FedEx uniform.... I don't even know what he looks like."

He looks like Chuck Price.

"That's what I've been told," Price says.

When Johnny Boone's daughter has her wedding, the US marshals arrive in force, with a helicopter and spotters writing down license plate numbers.

Just down the road from the wedding reception, a man with a white beard sets up a watermelon stand on his property. Upon closer inspection, the marshals discover the bearded man has a handgun strapped to his hip. When he goes into his house to get something, an unmarked black SUV barrels into his driveway, pulls into his front yard, parks in the grass, and a female US marshal hops out with her gun drawn as the white-bearded man steps outside. She demands his identification, which he reluctantly provides.

"Do you have a license for that firearm?" she demands.

"Yes, I do," he responds. "And you're trespassing on my property."

"Well," she tells him. "If we had had a shoot-on-sight order, you'd be dead right now."

"Ma'am, if we was in Vietnam," he shoots back, "you'd already be dead."

When the bridal party realizes a week or so later that the official wedding photographs are ruined, the Boone family's attorney asks the US marshals if they have any photos of the bride and groom they can have. The marshals are amused but say no.

With the ground offensive going nowhere, the US marshals turn to the air war, launching a media campaign on the airwaves against Johnny Boone by sharing the photos of Boone in a tropical location with local media outlets and America's Most Wanted, which tries to portray Johnny Boone as equal to the cop-killers, child molesters and other scumbags usually showcased on that program.

On its website, AMW posts a story about Boone rife with factual errors and a negative bias. I appeal to Justin Lenart, producer at AMW, to change the story to at least conform to the facts. The first draft of Lenart's AMWpost says that Boone's house is currently guarded by dogs without vocal cords, which is a classic mistake of confusing the Boone of today with the legendary Boone from 1987 Minnesota. His current dogs, I assure Justin Lenart, are barkers. Lenart invites me to Washington, D.C., for an on-camera interview about Johnny Boone, and I accept.

I travel by Amtrak to D.C. on Monday, October 13, 2008, and go on camera for AMW the next day. The show records me for about an hour, and I remind the producers that they are violating my copyright by using my photographs of Johnny Boone without permission. On January 5j ustin Lenart ofAMWe-mails me again to dispute my copyright claims, so I pick up the phone and call the US Marshals Service in Louisville to nip this thing in the bud.

I talk with the man in charge, Rick McCubbin, appointed by George W. Bush as chief US marshal for the Western District of Kentucky, and I ask him to stop distributing my photographs of Boone to the media. McCubbin asks me if I might know Johnny Boone's whereabouts.

"Even if I knew where Johnny Boone was, I wouldn't tell you," I say, which upsets McCubbin.

"What do you mean?" he asks aggressively. "Are you saying you're obstructing an investigation?"

"I knew what you were saying," McCubbin tells me two years later when we meet in his office at the Bardstown Police Department. "But you weren't saying anything any different than anyone else was telling us, and they told us straight up, `If I knew where he was at, I wouldn't tell you."'

"How many times did you hear that?" I ask.

"Oh, countless," McCubbin says. "Most people we spoke with said that. Every now and then, you'd get that one person, or two people in a row who said, `Well, I hope you get him. I don't like him. I think it's wrong.' But say if you encountered ten people, eight of those ten would tell you, `I wouldn't tell you where he was at if I knew.'

"You, in other words, were following a pattern that we had already heard, and were going to hear, for the next several months. You were right in the parade. You didn't tell us anything that shocked us. It made us mad, but it didn't shock us."

So, on Friday, January 16, 2009, the last business day of the George W. Bush administration, the clerk of the US District Courthouse in Louisville signs a subpoena with my name on it. Four days later, the chief justice of the US Supreme Court swears in Barack Obama as the fortyfourth president.

One week after the inauguration, on Tuesday morning, January 27, as I am in my third-floor apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, about to leave for work, the doorbell rings. Jehovah's Witnesses, I figure. Despite the cold, I open the window, lean out, look down and see a white-haired man in a black leather jacket.

"Hello?"

He looks up, revealing a white goatee to match his hair.

"James Higdon?"

"Who's asking?"

"US marshals."

"I'll be right down."

They couldn't call first?

I dash down two flights of stairs and open the door. The whitegoateed marshal eyes me up. He's about five-foot-ten; I'm half a foot taller. With his eyes to mine, he flips out his badge, a silver five-pointed star enclosed in a slim silver circle in a black leather case. I look down at it and nod.

"You want to go get a cup of coffee around the corner?" I ask.

"No, I'm just here to give you this," he says and hands me several folded pages stapled together on US District Court letterhead: a subpoena.

I take it, look it over. He stands there casually.

"So, you're not from the Kentucky office?"

"No, I'm from the Eastern Division," of New York, he means. Brooklyn. "I have a few of these to give out today. I don't even know what it's for."

"Oh," I say, trying to engage him, "it's because I'm a journalist and a known associate of a federal fugitive."

He nods, shrugs and leaves, completely uninterested.

That same morning, an ice storm of historic proportions encases the Commonwealth of Kentucky like that Alberta Clipper did once to Johnny Boone's Minnesota marijuana crop. By the end of the day, 700,000 Kentucky households are without power, more than three-quarters of the commonwealth's 120 counties are declared disaster areas, and twenty-six lives are lost in the worst natural disaster in modern Kentucky history. Marion County is one of the worst hit, with nearly 90 percent of the residents without electricity in the blistering cold; Lebanon's water supply shuts down because the pumping station at the reservoir freezes over. Meanwhile, I need an attorney, a good one, in Kentucky, on short notice.

So, Wednesday morning I call Jack Smith. Even though it has been more than a year since we last spoke, he recognizes me immediately. He knows my family. His mother had been a long-time customer at my father's grocery store; she would come in every morning for a copy of the When she died, my father brought a final copy of the newspaper to the funeral home. Touched by the gesture, one of her sons put the newspaper on the closed casket for the funeral the following day.

When Jack Smith took his seat at the front row at the cemetery, he saw the newspaper tucked under a spray of flowers on the casket lid and leaned over to his brother to ask, "Why the hell is that newspaper there?" His brother told him that Jimmy Higdon had brought it the day before.

So, that's why Jack Smith knows who I am when I call and why he sounds sincere when he asks how I'm doing, even though at that moment he is staying in a hotel with his wife, son, pregnant daughter-in-law and two grandchildren because the ice storm has cut power to his house.

"I got subpoenaed yesterday,"I say. I don't need to tell him about what or regarding whom.

"When's your court date?"

"Next Tuesday."

"OK, I'll go there with you. If any more law enforcement talk to you, don't answer anything and tell them that you've retained counsel."

I relax a little. He tells me he will make some calls and see what's going on and tells me to check in with him in a few days, but it's Sunday before we speak again. I tell him I'll see him in his office tomorrow.

The next morning, Monday, February 2, I wake up at 5 a.m., take a taxi to LaGuardia and board a nonstop flight to Louisville, paid for by the taxpayers of the United States. At 10:00, I land and go to the Brown Hotel, one of the most exclusive hotels in Louisville. The Gilded Age lobby is crowded with utility workers-men in hard hats and work boots, with gear slung over the shoulders of their Day-Glo hoodies. These emergency work crews have overtaken several floors of the Brown because the upscale hotel is one of the few places in town left with vacancies. I check in at the desk, and the clerk hands me a key-card for a club-level room with a king-sized bed and terrycloth bathrobes in the closet. Thanks, taxpayers.

The US marshals and the US Attorney's Office have photos of Johnny Boone in a tropical location, and they know that I took them. They want me to tell them where that location is, but doing so will reveal the identity of a confidential source, so I prepare to not answer those questions, which will result in a contempt of court citation and up to eighteen months in federal prison. But wait! Don't journalists have a right to protect their sources? Nope, not in federal court they don't. In 1972, the Supreme Court ruled against reporters protecting their sources in court in Branzburg v. Hayes.

Paul Branzburg worked for the the late 1960s and wrote two stories about marijuana in Kentucky-one about two hippies making hash in Louisville and another about cannabis use in Frankfort, including allegations of a pot deal inside the state capitol building itself. When a local prosecutor subpoenaed Branzburg to identify his sources, Branzburg refused. When the Supreme Court ruled against him, Branzburg never returned to Kentucky. After the Branzburg ruling, each of the eleven federal appeals courts set its own precedents for reporters' rights. I discover that the Sixth Circuit, which includes Kentucky, has a long history of being unfriendly to members of the press, which therefore grants me little if any protection against this sort of subpoena.

The Bush administration subpoenaed sixty-five journalists between 2001 and 2006, at a rate of about one per month, but the Bush administration is over. How will this game play out under Obama? Because I am the first journalist subpoenaed during the new administration, a fact confirmed to me by the Society of Professional Journalists Legal Defense Fund committee chairperson, to find out Obama's policy toward freedom of the press will be to discover my own fate.

I leave the Brown Hotel and head for Jack Smith's office on the north side of downtown, where I meet with Jack and his son, Trevor, who became an associate in his father's law practice after a punk-rock phase left a tattoo on his knuckle. The following day, Trevor's wife is due to deliver their third child, but Monday is a day for discussing strategy and potential outcomes of my current situation. First Jack Smith wants to know if I plan on pleading the Fifth, and I wave him off.

"I haven't witnessed any criminal activity," I tell him. "And I certainly haven't participated in any."

"Good," Smith says, leaning back in his chair. I tell him I want to plea the reporter's privilege of the First Amendment, and he nods supportively.

"We're going to have to do some research on this," Smith tells me from his side of the conference table.

"It's OK," I say. "I have it for you right here," as I hand him a twelvepage digest of the Sixth Circuit's opinions and precedents regarding cases that cite the First Amendment, not that any of them do my case any favors.

"Let me take a look at that subpoena," Smith says, and I hand that over, too.

He looks to see what they are charging Johnny Boone with. Jack Smith knows that the government has already indicted Boone once in absentia for the plants, so this indictment is for what? According to the subpoena, "Title 18, United States Code, Section 1073."

"We'll have to look that up," Smith says.

"You don't have to. I already did," I say. "It's `unlawful flight to avoid prosecution."'

"Yeah, that's what I thought," Smith says. "UFTAP, we used to call it. You see, when I came back to Louisville from Washington, D.C., in the late seventies, I was the first assistant US attorney. The US attorney was about to retire, and I was going to take his place as US attorney for Carter's second term. So, there was this cop-killer loose down in Nelson County, in New Hope, who they ended up killing over in Indiana . . . "

"Graham," I say, remembering the cop-killer's surname from my research into the seventies-era criminal history of Kentucky.

"Yeah, that's right," Smith says. "Anyway, the FBI agent came up from Elizabethtown, and he and my boss went out to lunch. Before he went out, my boss handed me an indictment against Graham that he intended to file after lunch and asked me to look it over for him. So, that's what I did.

"The indictment was for an UFTAP charge, and when I looked it up, it said that charging UFTAP for alleged crimes required the direct approval of the attorney general. So, when they came back from lunch, my boss asked me if I looked over it.

"`Did you look over this?' he asked me.

"`Yessir,'I said. `But do you know that this charge requires the approval of the attorney general?'

"`Yeah.' He didn't want to admit it, but he did.

"`Well, did you ask for it?'

"`No,' he said. `If I did that, he wouldn't have given it to me!

The point of Smith's story is that the basis for this second indictment against Johnny Boone is weak, even unlawful. We don't plan any tactics based on this information just yet, but it's something we have on our side. Smith calls the assistant US attorney assigned to the case, John Kuhn, to tell him we want a hearing with the judge before my scheduled grand jury appearance tomorrow.

"John, listen," Smith says. "We're going to file a motion to quash this thing based on-"

"the Fifth?" Kuhn says, interrupting. "Is he going to plea the Fifth?"

"No, we're going to be pleading the First, John," Jack tells him in a calm and reassuring tone.

The conversation goes back and forth, and I hear Kuhn say "obstructing," which I'm getting accused of a lot lately. After the phone call, Jack asks me what I want to do if it looks as if I am headed toward a contempt citation and looming jail time.

"Let's go all the way then," I say, managing a smile. "If they want to throw me into the briar patch, it'll do wonders for my career."

"Good. I'm glad you feel that way," Jack says. Trevor talks to me a bit about how federal prisoners get processed and which facilities I am likely to end up in. These are details I can't focus on, and I let them wash over me without listening too closely. At the end of our meeting, Jack tells me that he and Trevor will draft a motion to quash and tells me to meet them at the courthouse in the morning.

With my legal needs taken care of, I meet my mother, sister and nephews-David, five, and Dawson, three-for lunch at Lynn's Paradise Cafe, a southern-style comfort food restaurant with mismatched lamps and plastic animals on the tables. My mother and sister talk on one side of our table while I play with plastic butterflies and horses with Dawson on the other.

As we wait for our food, Dawson talks to me.

"You're going to miss your plane tomorrow," the three-year-old tells me.

"What did you say?" I ask him.

"You're going to miss your plane tomorrow," he repeats for me, his big eyes looking straight into mine, a broad smile on his round face. I look over at his mother and at mine to see if either heard him.

"Did you hear what Dawson just said to me?" I ask them; they haven't. "What did you tell them about why I was down here?"

"Just that you were coming in for a meeting," my sister says, "and flying out tomorrow."

"Well, Dawson doesn't think I'm flying out tomorrow," I say while thinking to myself. This toddler just predicted my imprisonment. How am I supposed to feel about something like that?

That night, from my club-floor room at the Brown Hotel, I e-mail friends and former classmates from journalism school to prepare a phone tree and a system of communication in the near-certain event that I will be in federal custody within twenty-four hours. I write the telephone numbers for Jack Smith and the switchboard on my right forearm with a Sharpie.

Across the street from the Brown, I discover that the bartender at the Bluegrass Brewing Company is Gordon Bramel, son of John Bramel, former editor of the Lebanon Enterprise, and younger brother of Zachary Bramel, my friend since sixth grade. I tell Gordon I might be going to federal prison for eighteen months tomorrow, and he pours me a few pints.

The next morning I put on a white shirt, a black necktie and a gray suit, to which I affix an American flag lapel pin, the post-9/11 symbol of authoritarian obedience, in an attempt to thwart any first impressions of me as some sort of fugitive-loving obstructionist. I eat breakfast at the hotel, then walk the two blocks in the cold past the office to the courthouse, where I meet Jack and Trevor Smith in the lobby. Jack tells me that our judge will be Charles R. Simpson III, which Jack says is "good news" because the magistrate judge they originally scheduled us to see is a retired police officer.

"But, Jack," I say. "Isn't Judge Simpson the one who sent the Bicketts away?"

"Yeah,"Jack says. "I think that's right."

If this were a novel, I think, it would make sense that all these characters come together at the end. As I think about being at the mercy of the judge who sentenced the Bickett brothers to fifty-five years of prison between them, I remember that Johnny Boone once told me that Judge Simpson had been good to him. Not long after Jeff Boone's suicide in 2001, police caught Johnny at a gas station with a bagful of joints and a handgun in his truck-clear parole violations, which sent him before Judge Simpson. But Boone says that Simpson got him in and out as quickly as possible. Boone often cussed certain sorts of police officers, but he just as quickly acknowledged when good officers of the law did things the right way, and he approved of Judge Simpson.

When the elevator opens on the sixth floor, we pass a security checkpoint manned by two relaxed marshals.

"You don't have to give us your cell phones," one tells us, "as long as you turn them off."

We walk through the metal detectors and down the marble corridor to a door with a ten-pound brass plaque that reads JUDGE SIMPSON. Inside the green carpeted room sits the receptionist behind her desk, a flat-topped marshal leaning against it and John Kuhn: a federal prosecutor of average height with a neatly trimmed brown beard flecked with gray, glasses and a double-breasted navy blue pin-stripe suit. Kuhn seems anxious as we enter; he won't make eye contact with me.

Kuhn grabs his boxy briefcase and waves Jack and Trevor Smith back into Judge Simpson's inner sanctum, where they stay for what seems like an hour. At some point a court reporter dashes in with her little typing machine on a tripod. Meanwhile, I sit outside on a leather chair, making small talk with the receptionist and flat-topped marshal. I hear a burst of laughter coming from Judge Simpson's chambers-the result, I later learn, of Jack telling his UFTAP story.

Inside the judge's chambers, Kuhn dismisses as absurd the notion that I qualify as a journalist or for protection under the First Amendment. Jack and Trevor, capable as they are, don't have a precise knowledge of my work history and education, so they aren't prepared to answer that threshold question. In any event, Judge Simpson shuts the door on it, saying that even if I do qualify as a member of the news media, I still am not protected from testifying before the grand jury. Therefore, he denies my motion to quash.

Kuhn walks out in a hurry, and Jack and Trevor follow. We talk as we walk down the hallway back to the sleepy security checkpoint. The grand jury is about to break for lunch, Jack says. I am scheduled to testify at 1:30. It is just now noon. Jack suggests we go next door to the City Cafe for lunch. As we walk, Jack coaches me on how to answer and what not to say. In a grand jury, I learn, I won't have my attorney with me. I can come outside to consult with him whenever I need to, and he talks to me about when to do that, but he can't come in with me.

At the City Cafe, I don't have much of an appetite, so I sit at a table while Jack and Trevor go through the line to fetch themselves sandwiches. Across the street in the US Attorney's Office, John Kuhn burns up the phone lines, asking questions about qualifications for membership in the "news media." Apparently, our First Amendment challenge blindsides Kuhn because if I do qualify as a member of the news media, then the US Attorney's Office has broken Justice Department guidelines in subpoenaing me.

Kuhn calls Trevor during lunch and starts asking him questions about my background. Jack asks me if I wouldn't mind talking with Kuhn myself, and I say sure. Minutes later, Kuhn arrives in a cold blast of air, his glasses fogging up from the change of temperature inside the cafe; we shake hands, and Kuhn sits down, wiping and rewiping his fogged-up glasses. In the few minutes since we last saw one another, Kuhn has been Googling me.

"What's this about you and conspiracy theories?" he asks me directly. "Is that you?"

"What do you mean?" I say. "You mean the fiber optics story?"

"I don't know," he says. "Conspiracy theories."

I think about it quickly. It seems bad at first. It won't look good for me if I have a bunch of blog posts online ranting about conspiracy theories. Thankfully, this is not the case.

"Well," I begin. "That was a freelance piece I wrote about a series of outages in the global underwater fiber optic Internet infrastructure." All eyes at the table are on me. "In the big places, like between the US and Europe, there are maybe a dozen fiber cables crossing the ocean. But in other places, like through the Suez Canal, into the Persian Gulf or around the tip of India, there are only one or two cables. At some point last year in a span of just a few days, several of these single cables were severed, causing lots of conspiracy theories to appear online as to its cause, ranging from al-Qaeda to the US government to the monster from the Cloverfield movie." Deep breath. "So that's the conspiracy theory story you saw."

Kuhn wants to know more about my background, so I rattle off my resume as fast as I can: a graduate fellowship at Brown, an honors graduate from Columbia, an internship at the Courier ,journal, web producer at the New York Times, selling my book proposal, getting my advance. I leave out the part about my book contract getting cancelled.

"Also," I say, "during 2007, I wrote freelance writing pieces for Silicon Valley-based tech-business news sites covering VoIP, Skype, 3G and 4G cellular, other forms of next-generation voice communication, green data center management, server virtualization, cloud computing, stuff like that. The `conspiracy theory'story was one of these."

After I finish, there is silence at the table.

"Did you understand any of that?"Jack asks, chuckling.

Apparently, Kuhn understands enough. We exchange goodbyes and shake hands, and then he goes back outside into the cold to cross the street with his BlackBerry glued to his ear. A few minutes later, Kuhn calls Trevor to tell him that I am released from my subpoena for now but that they will be subpoenaing me a second time, following proper procedures.

So, an hour before I am to enter the grand jury room without my attorney to be questioned by a prosecutor who has the power to imprison me for not talking, the specter of prison is suddenly lifted by a phone call that lasts less than a minute. My seemingly once-certain imprisonment for contempt collapses in a textbook case of a heavy-handed government overstepping its bounds: a guideline-breaking subpoena of a journalist based on an unlawfully charged UFTAP indictment.

I arrive at the Louisville airport a little after 3:00 p.m. for the 4:21 flight back to New York. Seventy percent of Marion County remains without power a week after the ice storm. Along whole stretches of highway, the ice not only downed the power lines but also splintered utility poles like pencils for miles at a stretch. As I go through security, I think about what my nephew Dawson told me yesterday about missing my flight, and I smirk, thinking the kid isn't as smart as he thinks he is.

Before my flight, I call several friends, giving each a full accounting of my last-second reprieve. Reporters from four news agencies want to run my story, but Jack advises me against talking to the press because Kuhn could still come after me. As I pace the concourse with my phone pressed to my ear, my flight is delayed once and then twice, and then my cell phone battery begins to die. When a blizzard in New York cancels my flight, I use the last bit of juice in my phone to call my sister to pick me up, then book myself on the first flight out the next morning.

When my sister's silver minivan pulls up at the curb by the baggage claim, I walk toward it with the anticipation of telling Dawson that he is right after all. But when I get into the front passenger seat and turn to talk to him in his car seat, my three-year-old nephew is dead asleep, his body leaning forward against his harness, lifeless except for the snoring, a Matchbox car clutched in each fist.

The next morning, Wednesday, I am in the taxi line at LaGuardia in New York City by 9:00 a.m. I take a cab straight to my Upper East Side tutoring firm, with nothing changed except that I have become the first journalist subpoenaed under the Obama administration.

Although I seem to be out of the US Marshals Service's crosshairs, the hunt for Johnny Boone is far from over. America's Most Wanted works on a segment for its show that its producers, including Justin Lenart, hope will nab the as-of-yet-unnabbable Johnny Boone. When the episode airs in October 2009, the hour-long interview I did with the producers does not appear. Apparently, an Ivy League-educated journalist in a Brooks Brothers suit explaining to them that Johnny Boone is a nonviolent criminal and that his community doesn't want him captured is not the sort of television they are looking for. The segment gives voice to defenders of Boone but only if they have beards, wear T-shirts and fit AMW's concept of a redneck Kentuckian.

"The Louisville USMS sent us this case and gave us access to every aspect of the investigation," AMW producer Justin Lenart wrote in a posting on Vimeo. "Once green-lit, I worked closely with New Yorkbased producer Keith Greenberg and AMW Correspondent Angeline Hartmann, as they set out to shoot the story in rural Kentucky. Keith cut the piece in New York, and I provided assistance throughout the production process. We are all very proud of this piece."

AMW creates a narrative of Boone as a violent criminal. The show invents nicknames and aliases for him that I had never heard in more than five years of reporting on him. It isn't enough that Boone faces life in prison without parole for the 2,421 seedlings the police found in flowerpots on his farm. The producers paint Boone in a more dangerous light with the help of US Deputy Marshal Jimmy Habib and AMW's correspondent, Angeline Hartmann:

Hartmann (voiceover): But in 1987, the law caught up with Johnny Boone when he was sentenced for twenty years for growing nearly two hundred tons ofpot, worth nearly a billion dollars by today's standards. With Johnny behind bars, his son Jeff allegedly ran the operation, spending some $200,000 to build himself a home next to his father's.

Habib: When Johnny was released from jail, he was not happy with Jeff at all for using that money.

Hartmann (vo): After one argument, cops say, Jeff was found with a gunshot wound to his head.

Habib: It's officially ruled a suicide. But you never know. I mean, you are dealing with Johnny Boone.

Hartmann (vo): Three years later, Boone's girlfriend Rosa gave birth to another son. Police say Johnny was overjoyed, believing the boy to be the reincarnation ofJej The relationship with his mother, though, would soon end badly.

Habib: Johnny had a falling-out with Rosa. She threatened him with going to the police with the information she knew that could incriminate him. Next thing you know, her parents are getting a phone call saying that Rosa had hung herself in a barn.

Along with many from Marion County who hear that America's Most Wanted's segment on Johnny Boone will air on Fox in October 2009, I watch Deputy Habib claim that Boone was "not happy with" his son Jeffrey, that the mother of his youngest son "threatened ... [to] incriminate him" and that even though both were ruled suicides, "you never know. I mean, you are dealing with Johnny Boone."

My heart sinks. One of two things is true, and neither is good. Either I just spent five years of my life writing a book about a nonviolent marijuana grower who is secretly a master murderer capable of doctoring crime scenes to fool multiple police agencies, or an employee of the federal government, whose salary is paid by taxpayers, just went on national television and implied that Johnny Boone is a killer when, in fact, he is not.

So, I look into it. I go talk to Jacky Hunt, the retired state trooper who investigated Jeff Boone's death.

"I was never contacted by the US Marshals Service or anyone else for my opinion on that," Hunt says.

"Without a witness, you know, [in] any crime there is always that doubt. And you approach a suicide not as a suicide but as a death investigation, and you look at all your facts. As a matter of fact, most of the time, when you title a report, you don't title it `suicide,' a lot of times you title it, `death investigation'. . . because you don't know what you got.

"One time I had a so-called suicide in Casey County and worked it as such and then found out later with more evidence that it wasn't a suicide. It was a murder, and somebody got charged with that. So, a lot of times, you really try to do what you can do to prove one way or another.

"He [Jeff] used a .22 pistol. He basically . . . I mean, the pistol was still clutched in his hand.' a word for it. I think it's called `cadaveric spasm,' caused by instant death, basically you go into rigor mortis, and you just kind of freeze in that position.

"The position he was in and the way the gun was fixed and everything. I'm not saying it would be impossible for somebody to set that up, but it was-based on my training and experience, and everybody else'sthe sheriff was there and other trained investigators. We usually do these things in teams, and I was the lead investigator at the time, and we analyzed all that stuff.

"I remember having to pry the gun out of his hand, and I remember the note. Like I said, that's been a lot of years ago, and I don't want to say something that ain't so. I can't remember a lot of the details, but I just remember Johnny Boone being there, and he seemed obviously distraught over his son. That seems apparent, and there was never any question that they were on the outs or anything like that. With all that went on, I think him and his son were fairly close. I mean, I don't know his personal life, but he seemed upset about it....

"When you're working a suicide, you're looking for motive. It's a basic investigator's tool. If you're working, specifically a suicide, and there's no motive, no motivation, that's when you really want to dig deep: Why did somebody kill himself?

"A lot of times, it's so painfully obvious why they did it. They've got a drug addiction or they're in pain. You know, people have injuries, and they're tired of dealing with their pain. Contrary to public opinion, not everybody leaves a suicide note. Matter of fact, not even half. Some people just check out for all kinds of different reasons.

"With the Jeff Boone case, he had a motive for wanting to commit suicide: He was facing federal prison. That's the stuff you look for. That's all I wanted to add. He fought and beat, thought he had beat, the search warrant. Without the search warrant you don't have any charges. It would make it really hard to prosecute him for hardly any of it.

"I think at one point he thought he was going to get out of it, and when they reinstated the search warrant I think that was a crushing blow. He'd already been to federal prison, you know. So, I think that was his motivation.

"That's my opinion on it, you know. Like I said, you always approach these things with caution because you never know when some evidence is going to come up to the contrary, but I never had that with that case."

Seems clear enough. Regarding the second tragic death to happen in Boone's orbit within four years, the death of Rosamond Hardin Goff, the mother of his youngest son, the facts appear to be even clearer and equally sad.

Johnny Boone is not a perfect person. Like anyone else, he has his flaws. Specifically, Johnny Boone can't resist the company of women. Even before his bust in Minnesota in 1987, Johnny Boone had a string of girlfriends and at least one child out of wedlock. Johnny Boone is not a perfect person; his weakness is women. He's like a marijuana Superman whose kryptonite is vagina.

"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.

The story arc of Bobby Joe Shewmaker in this chapter and the rest of the book is based largely upon the court documents from his 1985 trial. Shewmaker declined requests to be interviewed for this book. Plans for a CCE prosecution are revealed in internal task force documents, released through FOIA.

The sources for the early history of Catholics in Kentucky, including the foundation of Holy Cross, will be covered in my notes for Chapter 1.

The concept of "God's Law" versus "Man's Law" bubbles up in several family histories but is specifically mentioned by one newspaperman to another in an episode from 1958 that will be covered in Chapter 2.'The parade of Prohibition-era headlines comes from the Lebanon Enterprise from 1919 to 1933.

Information about Al Capone's last trip aboard the Dixie Flier comes partly from Capone: The Life and World ofAl Capone by John Kohler and partly from interviews con ducted at the Kentucky Railway Museum in New Haven, Kentucky, where Engine No. 152 is housed.'Ihe sources related to John Dillinger will be discussed in the notes for Chapter 1.

'Ihe story of Hyleme George getting caught in 1946 with sugar ration stamps came from the file kept on Hyleme by the librarians at the Courier journal. Details about who played Club Cherry come from interviews with Obie Slater and others.

On page 76 of The Life and Times of Little Richard, the Authorized Biography by Charles White, Richard says, "`Lucille' is after a female impersonator in my hometown. We used to call him Queen Sonya. I just took the rhythm from an old song of mine called `Directly from My Heart to You' slowed down, and I used to do that riff and go `Sonya!' and I made it into `Lucille."'

The fact that "Sonya" became "Lucille" at Club Cherry in Lebanon was confirmed in an interview with Bill Samuels Jr., former president of Maker's Mark distillery. Samuels hired Little Richard to play one of his lavish Derby parties and invited among his many guests Elmer George, who brought Obie Slater as his guest. During an intermission, Samuels witnessed Obie and Little Richard reminiscing about old times, where Little Richard confirmed the story that "Lucille" was named after Lucille Edelen, manager of Club Cherry.

In Tina Turner's authorized autobiography, I, Tina, written with the help of MTV newsman and Rolling Stone editor Kurt Loder, there is nothing to confirm or disprove the relationship between the Turners and Hyleme George at Club 68.

"It's Gonna Work Out Fine," released as a seven-inch single in 1961 by Sue Records, became Ike and Tina's second hit record.

Anecdotal references to the connection between the return of soldiers from the Vietnam War and the rise of the marijuana-growing industry were verified by reviewing a government report from 1974: The Vietnam Drug User Returns, commissioned by President Nixon, which concluded that only 41 percent of Vietnam soldiers had smoked pot before the war and that they were mostly from cities on the West Coast; over 90 percent of soldiers became exposed to drugs in Vietnam, and in nearly 75 percent of the units, pot smokers outnumbered nonsmokers. In addition to the 41 percent who smoked before the war, 28 percent of American soldiers began smoking pot in Vietnam, 11 percent within their first forty-eight hours in-country, making marijuana second only to alcohol as the US military's drug of choice; when other Vietnam veterans returned home elsewhere in America, most found that their old friends had discovered marijuana in the two years they had been away, and one in five found that more than half of his friends were getting high.

Before Vietnam, the nation's exposure to marijuana and other drugs was largely confined to major cities, but after Vietnam, drug patterns across geographical regions became indistinguishable. In short, Vietnam marijuanafied America and Marion County along with it.

The parade of pot-related headlines comes from the Lebanon Enterprise from 1979 to 1989.'Ihe quotations from Johnny Boone at the end of the chapter come from interviews I conducted with him in 2007 and 2008.

PART I

CHAPTER I

The history of the Catholic settlements comes from a variety of sources, including Humble Beginnings: A Bicentennial History of St. Charles Parish and Early Catholicity of Marion-Nelson- Washington Counties 1786-1986, by Joseph E. Mudd; An American Holy Land.•AHistory of the Archdiocese ofLouisville, by Reverend Clyde F. Crews; History ofSt. Charles Church and the Centenary of the Congregation, 1806-1906, by the Reverend J. J. Pike; History ofMarion County, Kentucky, Vol. 1, compiled by the Marion County Historical Society; Kentucky Moonshine, by David W. Maurer with the assistance of Quinn Pearl and the microfilm archive of local newspapers, including the Lebanon Enterprise and its antecedents.

'Ihe story of the Reverend DeRohan, the drunk Irish priest, comes from Humble Beginnings, Chapter 3, where Mudd states, "Somehow, this alcoholic priest had wandered down into Tennessee ..." and "Father DeRohan knew that he was his own worst enemy and did not attempt to blame anyone else for his problem." In his footnotes, Mudd cites "Mattingly, M. Ramona, THE CATHOLIC CHURCH ON THE KY. FRONTIER, p. 43" as his source on DeRohan.

My interview with Jacky Hunt, retired state police detective, was conducted in 2011 and continues throughout the text.

The date of the Treaty of Fort Stanwix was verified using a source from its period with lots of cultural insensitivity crammed into the title and subtitle, Red Men of the Ohio Valley: An Aboriginal History ..., by J. R. Dodge, published in 1860, from the Harvard College Library.

'ere is no shortage of sources for marking the foundation of Holy Cross by Basil Hayden in 1785, so for simplicity, I will cite the Reverend Crews's An American Holy Land, pages 36-39.

Bishop John Lancaster Spalding's estimate of "fifteen hundred Catholic souls" killed by the natives comes from Humble Beginnings, page 32, and Mudd cites as his footnote Spalding's biography of his uncle, The Life of the Most Reverend M. j Spalding, D. D., page 16.

The Reverend Badin's honor of being the "first priest ordained in America" can be found in numerous sources, including Bishops and Priests of the Diocese of Bardstown, by John A. Lyons, 1976, and An American Holy Land, page 44.

"'Ihe Kentucky Robespierre" comes from the Reverend Crews's An American Holy Land, page 40.

"By 1840 ."The facts listed here come from the "History of Lebanon," by Dr. J. F. McElroy, published in the Lebanon Enterprise in installments in 1910.

Kentucky is one of twenty-nine states with a town named Lebanon and one of thirtythree states with a town named Springfield.'Ihere are twenty-two states with both a Lebanon and a Springfield; of those twenty-two, Kentucky's Lebanon and Springfield are the nearest to each other at nine miles.'Ihe Lebanons and Springfields of New Hampshire and New Jersey tie for second-nearest at forty miles apart; and the Lebanon and Springfield in Colorado are farthest apart at 428 miles.

"Hurrah for ... Uncle Ben!" comes from an account written for the Enterprise by Mrs. Ellen C. Jenkins on July 14, 1914, and reprinted in the History of Marion County, Vol 1. The source for the paragraph on the prewar distilling years comes from History of Marion County, Vol. 1, pages 140-145.

"'They are having a stampede in Kentucky ..."'Ihis telegram from President Lincoln has been reproduced many places, including page 167 of Lincoln of Kentucky by Lowell Hayes Harrison and in "Raiding Strategy: As Applied by the Western Confederate Cavalry in the American Civil War" from the journal ofMilitary History, Vol. 63, Issues 1-2.

"'Ihe day after ... oath of allegiance." Information from this paragraph comes from Dr. McElroy's History ofLebanon.

The letter from Englishman William Bradbury comes from While Father Is Away: The Civil War Letters of William H. Bradbury, edited by Jennifer Bohrnstedt, University Press of Kentucky, 2002, page 112.

The statistics related to Lebanon's commercial activity immediately following the war come from Dr. McElroy's History of Lebanon. The census figures from 1870 and the list of bourbon brands produced before Prohibition come from the History of Marion County, Vol. 1.

The June 8, 1872, abstinence rally at St. Mary's comes from a contemporary press account. All the news related to the beginning of Prohibition comes straight from the Enterprise microfilm.

The fact that a crude steam still could produce three hundred to one thousand gallons of moonshine a day comes from Kentucky Moonshine, by David W. Maurer, University Press of Kentucky, 1974, page 69.

The connections between the heists of Marion County liquor and George Remus, the gangster from Cincinnati, become evident when one reads Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, by Daniel Okrent, pages 198-199.

The reporting on John Dillinger comes from a variety of sources, beginning with an interview with Eula Ray Kirkland, a local Gravel Switch historian.'Ihe date of Dillinger's parole from prison comes from FBI.gov.'Ihe quote "gambling and enjoying the gay night life of the city" comes from an account in the Lebanon Enterprise, as do all the headlines and details of the story, including the license plate number of the blue De Soto coupe.

The 2004 book john Dillinger: The Life and Death ofAmerica's First Celebrity Criminal, by Dary Matera, confirms much of the reporting in this book regarding Dillinger's Kentucky connections. Matera confirms the connection to Gravel Switch's Frank Whitehouse on page 72, ". . . Matt Leach and his [Indiana] state police detectives were in Kentucky connecting Dillinger to the Whitehouse brothers and scrutinizing the freshly repainted stolen DeSoto from Dillinger's White Cap days. Frank Whitehouse, nabbed for a subsequent stick-up, agreed to trade what he knew for the quick release of his brother George, who he claimed was clean. He told investigators about Dillinger's World's Fair trip, but little more ..."

On pages 374-375, in a footnote to explain why Dillinger's wallet was "overflowing with fifties" (p. 62), Matera details the Gravel Switch robbery, confirming that the indictment handed down in October named "Maurice Lanham, James Kirkland, and John Dillinger as those responsible for the holdup of the People's Bank of Gravel Switch on August 8 ..." But Matera says the getaway car was a "blue Dodge," not a DeSoto.

CHAPTER 2

I was given the 1877 edition of the History ofKentucky in 2006 by Suzie Smith, my gifted English teacher from Marion County High School.'Ihe statistics for each commodity by county were in an index in the back of this tome. Discussion of the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 can be found in Perspectives on Drug Use in the United States, by Bernard Segal, 1986, page 14. Discussion of hemp production in the Philippines by the American military dates back to at least the 1903 printing of Description of the Philippines: Official Handbook ..., compiled in the Bureau of Insular Affairs, War Department, Washington, D.C., including this passage on page 243:

"The productiveness of the volcanic soils is such that the Islands enjoy a practical monopoly of the world's hemp markets.'Ihe fine, pliant fiber common to the so-called Manila product defies competition and has no successful imitator."

In Linda K. Menton's Rise ofModern Japan, she writes on page 137, "On the same day of the Pearl Harbor attack, the Japanese attacked the Philippines."

Descriptions of hemp farming in Marion County come from several interviews, including with Joe Downs and Al Brady, who provided the quote, "I think ... made me drunk," as well as the story about saving the bottle of hemp seeds.

News ofJohnny Boone's young achievements in 4-H farming contests comes from an article in the April 2, 1961, edition of the Springfield Sun; stories about Boone's childhood come from interviews with him in 2007 and 2008.

The story of the 1958 bombing of the ABC agent's house and subsequent raid led by Public Safety Commissioner Don Sturgill comes from interviews of locals and press accounts in the and the Lebanon Enterprise, including all the quotes mentioned, including "If a crook. . ." and "But prostitution is a sin against God ..."'This last quote is the first example in print I found to articulate the distinction between God's Law and Man's Law, as understood by the residents of Marion County.

The fact that Lloyd Price opened the first show at Club 68 in 1964 comes from interviews with Obie Slater. Price's lyrics for "Gonna Get Married" (EMI Music Publishing) were found at LyricsMode.com.

Sources for the story of the "hot air-conditioner incident" include the Lebanon Enterprise, police files released through open records requests and interviews, including with Sr. Mary Dominic Stine, who passed away on September 19, 2008.'Ihe information from the paragraph about the nuns' fundraising for air conditioners comes from the Enterprise. Information from the early days of theft from the GE plant comes from interviews with Joe Downs.

"I never really saw Hyleme ..." comes from an interview with Sr. Mary Dominic Stine at the St. Catherine convent in Springfield, when she was in her nineties.

Details of the case, such as the check number written by Stine, come from an open records request to the Kentucky State Police.

Details about the Bickett family history come from interviews with several Bicketts, particularly Charlie.

"'Me people who attended this meeting..." comes from the Enterprise.

Stories about Charlie Stiles come from interviews from a variety of sources, including outlaws like Johnny Boone and Jimmy Bickett, and law-abiding citizens like retired state policeman Jacky Hunt.

The fact that a meeting occurred at the state police headquarters on June 17, 1971, concerning Charlie Stiles comes from Detective Ralph Ross's notes of the meeting, released through an open records request, and from Al Cross's unpublished reporting on the subject, which he supplied as a background source for this book.

Descriptions of the activities of the "Stiles detail" come from the police file released through the Stiles file kept by Al Cross and supplemented by an open-records (KORA) request, including quotes like "his is a typical ...," "Stiles is aware ..." and "I'm going to go home ..."

Plenty of speculation surrounds the actual events of the death of Charlie Stiles on September 5, 1971, but because none of it is provable at this point (Al Cross could not pin it down in the early 1980s, either), the story sticks to the official police report as its primary source. Charlie Stiles's "rap sheet" was included in his police file.

"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."

CHAPTER 5

Johnny Boone's connection to some sort of operation in Belize was, to me, one of the most fascinating angles to this story since I began reporting it in 2006, knowing that Boone was arrested after meeting a plane returning from Belize in 1982. However, prying information out of Boone about Belize was not easy.

"I can't tell you ..." is a quote that illustrates another example of the reporting for this book running up against the limits of nonfiction. Because secrets remain regarding who, exactly, was part of the Belize operation, Boone couldn't be as candid with me as he might have if just he and the others were caught.

"Now I may hate this water..." and other quotes in this section come from interviews with Johnny Boone.

The Bobby Joe Shewmaker section and all the quotes in it come from the transcripts of Shewmaker's 1985 trial on the smuggling charges dating back to 1979. I traveled to Savannah, Georgia, to review and photocopy those court records. Shewmaker did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this book, deciding instead to obey the unwritten code of silence. I made contact with the wife of "Little Fred" Sykes, son of "Big Fred," but when I tried to talk with "Little Fred," no one would answer or return my calls.'Ihe quotes from Big Fred's phone calls come from transcripts of those calls entered into evidence during the Shewmaker trial.

The second Belize section, dealing with the 1982 rendezvous at Bowman Field and subsequent bust at Rooster Run, comes from press accounts, interviews with Johnny Boone and former Louisville police Detective James Black and FOIA requests to the FBI. Black and his partner, Bud Farmer (now deceased), liaised with the FBI instead of the DEA because of the lingering distrust with the DEA following the Harold Brown years, causing trouble between the FBI field office in Louisville and HQin D.C., as revealed in the contentious airtel messages between the two offices, which came to light through this FOIA request. Additional information was gleaned from the state police report, obtained by a KORA request.

"If you let them get into Washington County ... and everything" comes from my 2007 interview with James Black.

"Y'all have been reading comic books ..." comes from my 2007 interview with Johnny Boone.

'Ihe story about Jimmy Bickett growing a crop in Mannsville comes from a 2008 interview with Jimmy Bickett.'Ihe story of Patrolman Price arresting Jimmy Bickett comes from interviews with Jimmy Bickett, police files via a KORA request and contemporary press accounts.

"'Ihe best I can do for you ..." comes from an interview with Jimmy Bickett, as do "I've got a good deal for you ..." and "Hey, I know that guy right there ..."

"I had to go to jail ..." comes from a 2007 Johnny Boone interview.

CHAPTER 6

News of the drought from 1983 comes from reporting in the Enterprise, the Farmer'sAlmanac and the National Weather Service.'Ihe story of Charlie Downs comes from the Enterprise and interviews with Joe Downs, Johnny Boone and Jimmy Higdon, the author's father.

The quotes from Elmer George, including "When Reagan...," come from the Enterprise. George declined several opportunities to be interviewed for this book.

The stories of the Raywick deaths of 1984-Billy Downs, Ronnie Ellis and so forth-come from the Enterprise and interviews with Charlie Bickett, Joe Downs and Johnny Boone.

"Not everybody's as slow ..." comes from an interview with Joe Downs, as does "If this check is cold ... dead."

"Why Marion County?" and the details associated with the failed "Tom Foolery's" sting operation come from Enterprise reporting and open records requests of the investigation from the Kentucky State Police.

PART II

CHAPTER 7

The early history of St. Mary's comes from many sources, including those listed for Chapter 1. Details on early St. Mary's history, from the Reverend William Byrne (1782-1833) to the arrival of the French Jesuits to the education of "Bishops Martin John Spalding and John Lancaster Spalding, Governors Proctor Knott and Edwin P. Morrow, and in more recent times, Cardinal Joseph Bernadin of Chicago," come from the Reverend Clyde Crews's An American Holy Land, page 97.

Crews states on page 96 that the Jesuits left St. Mary's for New York City because Bishop Flaget "would not endorse their financial appeals," perhaps because the bishop "feared competition" from the Jesuits.'Ihen Flaget's successor "withdr[ew] all the diocesan seminarians rather precipitately from the institution. When New York beckoned, the Jesuits were feeling decidedly unwelcome in Kentucky."

Information-gathering about Ken Keyes, founder of "Cornucopia" at St. Mary's, began with his Wikipedia page and included watching YouTube videos of Keyes's lectures on the "Science of Happiness" and reading his book, The Hundredth Monkey, which he wrote while in St. Mary's, and was confirmed by interviews with Mary Ann Ohsol, a Cornucopia workshop attendee who stayed in Lebanon after Keyes and his group departed for Oregon. Keyes died of kidney failure on December 20, 1995, in Coos Bay, Oregon, one month from his seventy-fifth birthday. His followers claim that Keyes's first book, The Handbook to Higher Consciousness, has a million copies in print in seven languages. Additional information about Keyes comes from interviews with J. Clifford Todd.

'Ihe story of Cliff Todd turning St. Mary's into the first private prison in America comes from interviews with Cliff Todd and Charlie Bickett.

I was unable to interview Johnny Boone about his interactions with Cliff Todd because I didn't interview Todd until 2011, and I lost communication with Boone upon his becoming a fugitive in 2008.

"Please be seated" and the Reagan press conference come from reporting by the New York Times and the Associated Press.

Cocaine's arrival in Marion County is told through interviews with Johnny Boone and Steve Lowery.'Ihe story of Johnny Boone T-boning J. C. Abell's Corvette comes from interviews with Lowery, Boone, Charlie Bickett and Jimmy Bickett. J. C. Abell declined an opportunity to be interviewed.

'Ihe story of the federal case built against Bobby Joe Shewmaker comes from the records of that court case, which I pored over in the federal courthouse in Savannah, Georgia. Shewmaker did not respond to letters sent to him in prison to request comment for this book. Information about Shewmaker's network of Missouri farms comes from an open records request to the Missouri State Police.

'Ihe story of the three boys who found $16,000 in a barn comes from the Lebanon Enterprise. Initially I thought about interviewing these boys, thinking they would be about my age, until I found out that two had already died, one by falling from the top of an industrial smokestack while working as a commercial chimney sweep. Sensing that story to be too large a distraction, I narrowed the focus of the story to just the boys and the cash.

The story of the sixty thousand plants found in July 1986 comes from the Enterprise. The DEAs claim that Kentucky marijuana was testing at levels higher than the national baseline comes from reporting in the Courier-Journal. 'Ihe fact that every undercover narcotics officer in Kentucky drove a Trans Am and drank Sterling beer comes from an interview with Mike Bandy, a former undercover narcotics detective for the Kentucky State Police.'Ihe story of the Mongols motorcycle gang rolling into Raywick comes from an interview with Jimmy Bickett.

'Ihe story of the explosion of the bar called Squire's Tavern and Bickett's Pool Hall comes from interviews with Charlie Bickett and Steve Lowery as well as other local memories.

"I want out ... You are in.!' comes from an interview with Johnny Boone.

The details regarding the November 6, 1986, bust at the barn in Woodford County come from the police file released through an open records request. Details regarding the April 1985 issue of Penthouse magazine come from an exhaustive search for the issue in many used book stores.

CHAPTER 8

Details surrounding Reagan's signing ceremony for his 1986 anticrime package come from reporting in the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Details about Johnny Boone planning to plant the Russian in Minnesota come from interviews with Johnny Boone. Details about the federal government's investigation into Shewmaker as a "substantial, significant grower, distributor and broker of multi-tons of marijuana in the Kentuckiana area ... the task force concept" come from an FOIA request to the DEA.

The story of Johnny Boone beating the charges in Nelson County because the witness was "afraid" of him comes from an interview with Jack Smith.

"Are you going out this year?" and the conversation Johnny Boone had with "a friend" come from a confidential source.

Details about the Minnesota operation before the bust come from interviews with Johnny Boone and Smith Fogle. 'Ihe story of the July 4 encounter with an Otter Tail County deputy on the lookout for a band of roving bank robbers comes from testimony from Minnesota officials in federal court and interviews with Johnny Boone.

"Which one? I'll cut it off!" comes from a story told by Jack Smith.

The story of Johnny Boone watching the Iran-Contra hearings on TV comes from interviews with Johnny Boone, including his watching the broadcast of West 57th Street, with the segment entitled "CIA Front Dealing Drugs."

"Our first story tonight" and the rest of the lead from that episode of West 57th Street come from the CBS News Archive.

"So, that's what they've been doing" comes from an interview with Johnny Boone.

The details about pulling the males from the Minnesota crop come from interviews with Johnny Boone.

The fact that September 23 was the autumn equinox for 1987 comes from the Farmer? Almanac.

"We had pictures of it ..." comes from interviews with Johnny Boone.

Details about Agent Phillip Wagner discovering Boone's pot crop come from Wagner's sworn testimony in federal court.

"It's just a truck ... It's a bust!" comes from an interview with Smith Fogle.'Ihe fact that the Minnesota crew was anticipating a fresh load of workers from Kentucky comes from a confidential source.

Details about Boone's failed escape attempt come from the testimony in federal court with deputies Thompson and Lockhart as well as interviews with Johnny Boone, including, "Charles Grass." Details about Mary Jo McDonald restraining the dogs so they didn't attack the raiding police officers come from Agent Phillip Wagner's testimony. I could not find Mary Jo McDonald to interview her.

Some details of the Minnesota bust, especially those concerning Les Berry, come from Bob Hill's reporting in the magazine from October 1989. Many of those details were confirmed by my own interviews with Smith Fogle.

"Very, very cold ... very cordial ... uncooperative as well" comes from the testimony of agent Phillip Wagner.

"Where are you going? ... over with" comes from the federal court testimony of Otter Tail County Sheriff's Lieutenant Ray Polensky.

Twila Schott's jury-rigging of the computer system to accept the APB of the car as "stolen" instead of "wanted" comes from Schott's and Wagner's testimony in federal court.

'Me actions and thoughts of Wisconsin State Patrol Trooper Arden A. Asp come from his sworn testimony in federal court as well as a phone interview conducted in 2007 as well as the testimony of his colleague, Trooper Michael Hookum.

"Wake up, boys ..." comes from Bob Hill's reporting and was confirmed by my own interviews with Smith Fogle.

Details about Trooper Asp's felony stop come from his testimony and phone interview.

Details about the interior of the Minnesota bust come from interviews with Phillip Wagner and others.

"If we could have saved the seed" comes from a 2007 interview with Johnny Boone.

"Men, we all share a secret..." comes from an interview with Johnny Boone.

'Ihe details about Marilyn Boone calling Jack Smith and Jack Smith leaping into action as Boone's defense attorney come from interviews with Jack Smith from 2007 to 2011.

"I would like the record to reflect ... do understand" comes from the official court transcript of the proceedings.

'Ihe letters written by Marilyn and Jean Boone come from their admission into the court records before the sentencing hearings.

It took eighteen months to get documents from the Drug Enforcement Administration through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. The DEA, along with the FBI, has a notoriously long waiting list for FOIA requests to begin with because every prisoner in the country has the right to his or her "file," in addition to all the other curious types. But in addition to the standard red tape, the DEA processors sent me into a bureaucratic limbo, where they denied my request for a fee exemption but never actually procured any of the requested documents. When I contacted the Department of Justice Office of Information Privacy, the ombudsman there took my request seriously, and I was bumped to the front of the line. Quotations coming from those documents include:

"[T]hese career violators...," "Initially ... upper echelon," "a special events operations (SEO) ... this cartel," "complicated and massive ... the assets," "vast background data ... ceased," "Concerned ... headquarters" and "assured him ... in Louisville."

Beginning with "For two weeks in 1988 ..."this section comes from interviews with Jack Smith and Johnny Boone, including "I'll be in ..."

The quotations from April 29, 1988, come from the transcripts of the sentencing hearing, which I requested via FOIA through the Executive Office of the US Attorney instead of traveling to St. Paul, Minnesota, to review them as I did when I went to Savannah, Georgia, to review the Shewmaker file.

Quotations from the Minnesota sentencing hearing transcripts include:

"Now we'll turn ... incarceration," "Frankly, I read his ... good guy," "OK, Jack? ... 'Thank you, Your Honor," and "Mr. Boone, do you want to say something?"-which all lead up to Johnny Boone's speech to the court, preserved in time by a court reporter, typed into a transcript during the appeals process, placed in a storage facility and then delivered to me by US mail after I filed an FOIA request. Boone's speech is:

"Yes, l would, Your Honor..." to "... any harm to anyone," and the judge says, "'Thank you."

'Ihe fact that sixteen of the seventeen arrested in Minnesota were granted voluntary surrender comes from internal DEA documents and was confirmed by Johnny Boone and others.'Ihe alphabetized list of Marion County-related marijuana busts comes from two FBI memos returned through FOIA requests, one from 1987 and one (a-m) from 1989, including, "'The evidence ... United States."

CHAPTER 9

Stories about Johnny Boone's rottweilers come from interviews with Boone, including, "Now, I'll tell you ..." Stories about Jimmy Bickett's lion come from Jimmy Bickett and others.

Details about the history of wild animals in Raywick come from the Lebanon Enterprise. Stories about Charlie Stiles buying Hyleme George's black bear come from interviews with Joe Downs, Mary Dee Stiles (Charlie's widow) and others.

"Good kitty ... nice kitty" comes from an anonymous source.

"Hey, your lion's ... tore all to pieces ... Come here, Chico" comes from Jimmy Bickett.

"I was probably seven or eight ... lions" comes from an interview with Paul Miles.

The story of the bust of Shewmaker's operation in Kansas comes from news reports from local newspapers, an open records request to the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, a telephone interview with the Topeka Zoo's chief zookeeper and an interview with Fred Elder.

"PRIORITY ... For the first time ... was the case" comes from FBI files released through an FOIA request.'Ihe dollar amount was redacted based on the FOIA exemption that allows keeping secret a fact that could endanger future operations.

The Jack Anderson column from October 3, 1988, fell into my hands thanks to a sharp-eyed librarian in Topeka, Kansas. I called her and several other librarians to ask them to search their local newspaper archives for the dates surrounding the busts in late September 1988. When I received a package in the mail from Topeka, it included a printout of the Anderson column with a Post-It note attached, saying, "Isn't this interesting?" Yes, it is.'Ihank you, Topeka librarian.

Details about the establishment of the Maine connection with Miller Hunt come from testimony from Hunt in the federal trial of Jimmy and Joe Keith Bickett, including "When you're dealing cocaine ... and everything" and "like anybody else would ... tell him."

Details about the task force raid on Jimmy Bickett's farm by DEA Agent Richard Badaracco, state police, game wardens and others in order to seize Bickett's lion in an attempt to connect it to Shewmaker's lions come from FOIA-requested task force documents, including, "a distributor ... a lion cub."

"Do you have ... Taylor County plates" comes from an interview with Jimmy Bickett.

Richard Badaracco did not respond to multiple attempts to interview him for this book despite the fact that he resides in Louisville.

'Ihe January 23 FBI memo including "to assist ... transmitting device" was released through an FOIA request.

The quotation, "contrary to the investigative methodology ... for narcotics matters," comes from an FBI memo from March 1982, when FBI HQwas chastising the FBI field office in Louisville for assisting in the bust of Johnny Boone meeting the plane from Belize.

Details of the actions of Miller Hunt and Michael Haskell in February 1989 come from their sworn testimony as witnesses for the government against Jimmy and Joe Keith Bickett.

Joe Keith Bickett and I exchanged numerous letters when I began reporting this book, but he refused to go on the record with me about anything except for the fateful day of his arrest. Quotations, including "partying," "what seemed like a month," "Tank's in the kitchen ... have a cold one then," come from Bickett's letter to me, written to me from the federal prison in Manchester, Kentucky, from which Joe Keith Bickett was recently released after serving twenty-two years.

All the quotes that occur during this day following the scene at Joe Keith's cabin come from sworn testimony in federal court.'Ihe weather report from February 13 comes from the National Weather Service archives.

The FBI field office's report of the bust of the Bickett brothers to FBI headquarters, "For the information of the bureau ... this cartel," comes from a memo released through an FOIA request.

"Then, I think in'89 ..." comes from an interview with Charlie Bickett.

The summary portrait of Grand Bend, Ontario, comes from telephone interviews conducted with the editor of the local newspaper and an eyewitness to Shewmaker's arrest. Details of his bust come from references in news reports and internal documents released through FOIA.

"Is this all for me?" comes from an anonymous source.

Details from the June 5, 1989, meeting of the task forces come from FOIA documents, including "as this term ... participants."

CHAPTER IO

"What's this press conference all about?" and other quotations throughout this section until "What's it have to do with me?" come from interviews with John Bramel.

Details from the press conference come from the coverage provided by the Associated Press, UPI and the Courier Journal. Quotations from the Courier journal include:

"What we are revealing today ...," "Each of these farms ...," "'Ihe organization ...," "'Ibis is the first ...," "'Ihe wholesale value ..." and "A major dent ... We intend to crush this organization."

"Wait a minute ...," "And wait..." and "Well, no" come from an interview with John Bramel, as do the details of his drive home.

"'Ihe DEA framed..." comes from an interview with Al Cross.

The arrival of the Action News vans is remembered by many people in Marion County. "Loretto, Kentucky ... nobody knows a thing" was remembered by an anonymous source.

"What makes you think ..." comes from an interview with John Bramel, as does "When are you gonna... arrested!"

Details about the coverage of the Cornbread Mafia in the Sydney Morning Herald come from interviews with Sandra Gwinn, including, "They didn't ... polenta."

"I wonder where ... that name" comes from an interview with Johnny Boone; "this term ... participants" comes from an FBI memo. "We were all sitting ... wild goose chase" comes from an interview with James "Jim Bean" Cecil.

CHAPTER

Information about the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, comes from interviews with Johnny Boone, Mr. Nice by Howard Marks and a pamphlet about the prison history sent to me by request from the public library in Terre Haute.'Ihere are very few sources about life inside Terre Haute penitentiary because, due to "Son of Sam"laws, no convicted felon can profit from the sale of a memoir, so first-person accounts from inside the prison are quite rare. For instance, Howard Marks's memoir, Mr. Nice, is not available for sale in America for that reason. I had to get my copy off eBay from a seller in the United Kingdom.

"Welcome to the gladiator arena" comes from an interview with Johnny Boone. Quotations from Howard Marks come from his memoir, Mr. Nice. Lists of types of prisoners inside of Terre Haute come from interviews with Johnny Boone and Mr. Nice.

'Ihe story of the friendship between Johnny Boone and Joe Testa, including "If you want it that bad ...," comes from interviews with Johnny Boone. Background information on Joseph Testa and his role in Brooklyn's "Murder Machine" as half of the so-called Gemini Twins, named after the Gemini Club in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where two hundred mob associates were allegedly murdered in the back room, comes from Murder Machine by Gene Mustain and Jerry Capeci.

'Ihe background on omertk comes from a number of sources, but a good one is an essay entitled "'Ihe Maffia [sic] and Omerta" by Richard Bagot in the February 1901 issue of the National Review, a conservative publication:

One of the most vigorous races, and one of the fairest spots in Europe, has lain for several centuries under the spell of a power as blighting in its influence on all social, moral, and economic development as it is mysterious both in its origin and in its action....

The struggle for self-defence [sic], the hatred and contempt for foreign rule, has produced in the Sicilian nature an unwritten code of honour [sic] which, although supremely egoistic in its origin, nevertheless can be, and very often is, the instigator of unselfish and even chivalrous deeds, and these, notwithstanding the savagery by which they are too often marred, compel an unwilling admiration.

It is this unwritten code of honour which constitutes the Sicilian Omerta ...

The story of a nineteen-year-old Marion County man who lied to police about being stabbed in the back comes from a short crime notice in the Courier Journal from late December 1981.

Boone's association with Howard Marks at Terre Haute comes from interviews with Johnny Boone, including "In there ... crazy."'Ihe background on Marks comes from his autobiography, Mr. Nice, which is not available on American bookshelves because of Son of Sam laws, including: "Terre Haute ... gymnasium" and "the hacks ... the prison."

The story of Boone refusing journalists' requests for interviews comes from interviews with Johnny Boone, as do details about UNICOR-made shivs, the cafeteria murder of Roosevelt Daniels and the blood sport made out of child molesters at Terre Haute. The story of Johnny Boone and Bobby Joe Shewmaker in Las Vegas comes from an interview with Johnny Boone, including, "a limousine, a big one ... else right now."

The story of Boone and Shewmaker talking through the windows at Terre Haute during Shewmaker's transfer through there comes from an interview with Johnny Boone, including, "Well ... to do."

The shift to the Bickett brothers' court case comes from reviewing motion filings and transcripts of their trial and subsequent hearings, including the window provided into the holding cells at the Bullitt Countyjail provided by the testimony of assistant jailer Danny Joe Maraman and inmate Robert Lamb, including, "'That's not..." and "You may..."

Courtroom quotes from the Bickett trial come from court transcripts, including "What I intend ... monitors" to "Yeah ... any horse."

As to allegations that the DEA altered the tape used to incriminate Joe Keith Bickett, DEA Agent Richard Badaracco declined repeated attempts to be interviewed for this book, so add this to the bin labeled "Things We'll Never Know."

Details about prison transfers to Manchester come from interviews with Johnny Boone. Quotations from the September 10, 1991, ruling of Joe Keith Bickett's appeals come from his court case file.

The story of the 1995 death of the Bicketts' sister, Patricia, and her husband comes from news reports and interviews with Charlie Bickett.

Stories of Johnny Boone and Jimmy Bickett in prison come from interviews with Boone and Bickett, including the tense weight-room showdown with Money and his crew and Jimmy Bickett trash-talking during bocce games. "Spaghetti-eatin' motherfuckers" and "Why do you call ... Is that all?" come from an interview with Jimmy Bickett.

Details about Charlie Bickett working at the prison and Cliff Todd bribing public officials and going to prison himself come from interviews with Bickett and Cliff Todd.

The details and narrative of the bust of Jeff Boone and his wife on the Boone farm come from the police report, released through a KORA open records request.

The fact that Jeff Boone escaped the Minnesota bust by hiding in a hay bale for three days comes from an anonymous source.

Judge George's ruling to throw out the search warrant was also included in the state police file returned through a KORA request, as remembered in an interview with Jacky Hunt.

Joe Keith Bickett mailed me a copy of the June 25, 2007, ruling on his final appeal, including "Upon review ... DENIED."

I attended the memorial service for Steve Lowery and witnessed Al Cross's eulogy.

CHAPTER 12

Details and statistics about Ham Days from 1981 and 1989 come from the Enterprise.

I got the tip that Bobby Joe Shewmaker's lions were at the Houston Zoo from the chief zookeeper at the Topeka Zoo. The notion that Chico ended up in a Spielberg movie comes from a half-forgotten memory of Jimmy Bickett.

The story of Jimmy Bickett and Charlie Bickett playing chicken in 2007 comes from an interview with Johnny Boone.

The scene between me and Boone in my apartment from February 12, 2008, is built from Obama's quotations, which I pulled from a transcript of the events. The quotations between Boone and me are from memory, including "There probably ... D.C." to ".. . second term."

Charlie Bickett's quotation that he knows it "sounds crazy" that he's going to vote for "that [n-word]" comes from my hearing it on more than one occasion.

"Orphans get killed" was said to me by my agent at the time, Richard Abate, then at Endeavor, now at 3Arts.

"Naw ... job" comes from memory.

I witnessed Charlie Bickett writing his bets with a Sharpie on the side of his refrigerator, and I regret not taking a photo of it. When I returned home in 2009 after living in New York City for a year, Bickett had replaced it.

Obama's election return numbers come from precinct-by-precinct reporting from the Lebanon Enterprise.

Details about the bust on Boone's farm in late May 2008 come from the reporting in the Springfield Sun, including over $5 million" to It started with ... at $340,000."

Due to the fact that the case remains open at the time of this book's deadline, no open records request was responded to, and the law enforcement officers involved in the case, including the DEA, the US Attorney's Office in Louisville and the US Marshals Service in Louisville and its headquarters in D.C., all declined comment.

The story about law enforcement almost catching Johnny Boone at his son's grave in St. Dominic Cemetery comes from an anonymous source.

My interview with Rick McCubbin, retired US marshal, took place in his new office in the Bardstown Police Department.

"I didn't ... don't care" comes from movie The Fugitive, 1993.

"Oh, I know ... in the trunk" comes from Paul Miles, an eyewitness in the car.

My interview with Charles "FedEx Chuck" Price took place in Lebanon while Price was making his rounds.

The quotations about the bearded man with the gun outside Boone's daughter's wedding come from the bearded man himself, but because he told me that story without knowing who I was or that I was writing a book, I decided to not include his name here.

Quotations from Justin Lenart, producer at America's Most Wanted, come from his posting on Vimeo. Despite repeated attempts, he would not speak to me about his work on the Boone segment, though he claimed to be "very proud" of it. Vimeo later removed Lenart's post after I complained that the AMW video violated my copyright by using photos of Johnny Boone without permission.

Quotations from my conversation with Rick McCubbin come from memory and were confirmed by my interview with him, including "Even if I knew ... an investigation."

Quotations from my conversation with the Brooklyn-based marshal, including "Hello?" to "... federal fugitive," come from memory.

The Joe Gerth story comes from the Courier-journal; my conversations with Jack Smith come from memory, including, "I got ..." to "... retained counsel," "I haven't witnessed ..." to "... feel that way" and "But, Jack ..." to "'That's right."

Quotations from my nephew Dawson come from memory.

I witnessed the exchange between Jack Smith and a US marshal posted at the metal detector.

Quotes from my conversation with AUSA John Kuhn are from memory; Kuhn would not speak to me about an open case.

Details about the evening of February 13-14,2009, when Deputy Jimmy Habib shot an innocent pregnant woman, come from documents filed with the US District Court.

I specifically asked the D.C. office of the US Marshals Service if there had been an internal investigation into Deputy Jimmy Habib shooting an innocent pregnant woman in the back and received no response.

In addition to Justin Lenart ofAMWnot responding to a request for comment, neither did AMW correspondent Angeline Hartmann. The transcript of Hartmann and Habib alleging that Johnny Boone was responsible for the suicides of Jeffrey Boone and Rosa Goff comes from watching the video on YouTube, posted by the Arizona-based production company contracted for the job before I had it removed for violating my copyright.

My interview with Jacky Hunt was conducted in his office at the Simpson County Sheriff's Department, where he now works. Details surrounding the events of the death of Rosa Goff come from the police report on file at the Washington County Sheriff's Office in Springfield.

Quotations from Johnny Boone regarding the US Marshals come from interviews I conducted with him before he became a fugitive, so readers can discard any notion that I am still in touch with him. Because I'm not.

This is to all my writing teachers, without whom this book would have been impossible: Suzie Smith and Lynn D. Farris from Marion County High School; Anne Shelby and John Maruskin at Governor's School for the Arts; George Ella Lyon, Tan Lin and Milton Reigelman at Centre College; Forrest Gander, C. D. Wright, Meredith Steinbach, Bob Arellano and the Peter Kaplan family at Brown University; Sandy Padwe, Sree Sreenivasan and Sam Freedman at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and my peers along the way. Thanks, y'all.

To my parents, Jane and Jimmy Higdon, I owe a great deal. They have put up with quite a bit as I assembled this book, and now they are likely to deal with its consequences. Sorry about that.

Additionally, I'd like to thank George Spragens, Cliff Todd and Curtice Taylor for their support during the reporting phase of this book.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JAMES HIGDON studied English and art at Centre College, writing at Brown University and journalism at Columbia University, where he graduated with honors in 2005. He has worked for the Courier journal in Louisville and the New York Times, contributed material to The Prairie Home Companion and researched the New York Police Department counterterrorism and intelligence divisions. He is currently an editor at PBS Frontline's Tehran Bureau. His reporting relationship with Johnny Boone landed him in the crosshairs of a federal manhunt, making him the first journalist subpoenaed under the Obama administration. He lives in Lebanon, Kentucky, and Brooklyn, New York.

Otis Redding (right) with Obie Slater (left), manager of the Club Cherry and the Club 68 in Lebanon, Kentucky. The photo was taken approximately in 1964 inside the Club Cherry, a regular stop on the Chitlin' Circuit and a primary cause for the Courier-Journal to label Lebanon as the "Ft. Lauderdale of central Kentucky." Note the "Ladies" sign above the restroom in the background; that's the men's room. PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF OBIE SLATER

Photo of Charlie Stiles, the top Marion County outlaw from the generation between Prohibition and marijuana. Stiles was killed by the Kentucky State Police in 1971; his death marks the unofficial beginning of the Cornbread Mafia. This photo comes from Stiles's KSP police file, which was saved by reporter Al Cross. AUTHOR'S COLLECTION

Unofficial wedding photo of Charlie Bickett (center, with revolver). The others in the front row are all Bickett brothers: Jimmy (far left); Louis Earl (left center); and Joe Keith (to the right of Charlie). Those in the back row-Steve Leake, wearing the hat on the right, and Keith Riney, in the center-do not appear as characters in this story, but Cooch Allen (back row left, holding the whisky bottle) was a contemporary of Charlie Stiles and father of Tank Allen, who was arrested with Joe Keith in February 1989. Johnny Boone and Elmer George were supposed to be in the photo, according to Charlie Bickett, but they were running late. PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF CHARLIE BICKETT

One of Charlie Bickett's creations, which he sold at Squire's Tavern in Raywick. It was the second year for the hat, as the CourierJournal reported in October 1981 that one could buy hats at Squire's Tavern that read: MARION COUNTY HOMEGROWN-THE BEST-1981. This 1982 edition of the hat was from the collection of Mike Bandy, former Kentucky state trooper, who participated in the arrests of Charlie's brothers, Jimmy and Joe Keith, in February 1989. PHOTOGRAPH © JAMES HIGDON

J. E. "Squire" Bickett, patriarch of the Bickett family, seen here speculating for oil. Bickett ran Squire's Tavern in Raywick, where he played practical jokes on patrons by stabbing himself in his artificial leg, which he lost in a motorcycle accident. PHOTOGRAPH BY STEVE LOWERY, AUTHOR'S COLLECTION

Beginning in 1980, the Kentucky State Police began cracking down on the large-scale pot growers of Marion County with the regular use of helicopters. In this shot, the helicopter pilot ascended and descended into a cornfield laced with marijuana plants to ensure the photographer for the Lebanon Enterprise got a good shot, according to Steve Lowery. PHOTOGRAPH BY STEVE LOWERY, AUTHOR'S COLLECTION

Two police officers walk the cornfield, identifying where the pot plants are hiding amid the rows of corn. PHOTOGRAPH BY STEVE LOWERY, AUTHOR'S COLLECTION

Merrill Mattingly, of the Marion County Sheriff Department, packs an arm-load of cut pot plants out of the cornfield behind him. PHOTOGRAPH BY STEVE LOWERY, AUTHOR'S COLLECTION

In the early busts conducted between 1980 and 1983, police were finding pot patches grown by the acre. In one weekend in 1980, police found fortyfive acres in Marion County alone. PHOTOGRAPH BY STEVE LOWERY, AUTHOR'S COLLECTION

The police employed state highway mowing crews to bush-hog entire cornfields where marijuana was found. PHOTOGRAPH BY STEVE LOWERY, AUTHOR'S COLLECTION

When police found pot patches hidden in the woods, officers had to chop the plants down by hand and carry them out to a burn site or load them onto a truck. PHOTOGRAPH BY STEVE LOWERY, AUTHOR'S COLLECTION

Once a pot field was discovered in Marion County, police would either burn it on-site or haul it off in trucks to a burn site for the television cameras. One grower compared watching the marijuana burn on TV to another unstoppable tragedy: It was like watching someone fall out a window." PHOTOGRAPHS BY STEVE LOWERY, AUTHOR'S COLLECTION

Harold Brown was the head DEA agent in Louisville from 1971 until he resigned in 1981 during an investigation into allegations that he participated in the sorts of large-scale drug trafficking operations that he should have been preventing. After police determined he sold poison to a teenager in Florida, Brown turned up dead from a gunshot wound to the head, an incident that was ruled a suicide. PUBLIC DOMAIN

When the cops spotted a marijuana farm from the air, the growers were frequently steps ahead of the police and often able to harvest some of a crop even after being spotted and just before the cops arrived on the scene. A truckload of pot could be worth $30,000. PHOTOGRAPH BY STEVE LOWERY, AUTHOR'S COLLECTION

Johnny Boone (front row, second from left) with his arm around Jimmy Bickett (front row, first on left) and other friends inside Manchester FCI. Joe Keith Bickett is standing in the center of the back row. The photo is damaged because it was saved by its owner for nearly a decade as one of his few possessions. PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF JOHNNY BOONE

In an undated photo, Jeffrey Boone visits his father, Johnny, in prison. PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF JOHNNY BOONE

Jimmy Bickett (right) in prison in April 2004 with his buddy, Leon Hershel Coffelt, from Tennessee, who was released from prison in 2011 after serving a thirty-year sentence for pot. PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF JIMMY BICKETT

To discourage visitors to his farm, Johnny Boone built these elaborate bone sculptures on his property, extending down the entirety of his mile-long driveway. It's more effective than a KEEP OUT sign and illustrates the methodical nature of Boone's creativity. PHOTOGRAPHS © JAMES HIGDON

In the 2000s, Johnny Boone was often spotted cruising around Marion and Washington Counties in his truck, whose dashboard was filled with feathers, bones and other examples of his interest in natural and Native American artifacts. Can you find the suction-cup tipped arrow? PHOTOGRAPH © JAMES HIGDON

This photo, taken by the author in 2007, landed the author in the crosshairs of a federal manhunt when Johnny Boone became a fugitive in 2008. Where was the photo taken? That's a good question. PHOTOGRAPH © JAMES HIGDON

This photo was taken on March 21, 2008, during the author's final visit with Johnny Boone before he became a fugitive. PHOTOGRAPH © JAMES HIGDON

* "Fifty thousand pounds? That's nothing," said one Marion County grower.

Table of Contents

Preface: Tina Tells Ike: "It's Gonna Work Out Fine" . .

I: A County Is Born: Catholic Migration, the Civil War, Prohibition and John Dillinger . .

The Hot Air-Conditioner Incident, the Lebanese Mayor of Lebanon and the Killing of Charlie Stiles

The Dark Side of Cornbread, Starring Garland Russell . . . . . . . . . .

"This Is Some Absolutely Dynamite Pot Here," the Police Said . . . . . . . . . .

CHAPTERS: Cornbread in the Tropics, the Cops Don't Trust the DEA and Jimmy Bickett Sees Johnny Boone

Growers versus the Drought of 1983, a Rash of Raywick Killings and a Drug Investigation Gone Wrong .

How the Jesuit College at St. Mary's Became the First Private Prison in America . . . . . .

Johnny Boone Becomes "Mr. Grass" . . . .

The DEA Wants to Know, "Where Did You Get This Lion?" . . . . . . . . . . .

Io: The "Cornbread" Press Conference . . . . .

I I: "Welcome to the Gladiator Arena" . . . . .

The US Marshals versus James Higdon . . . .

Notes and Sources . . . . . . . . . . . .

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Acknowledgments and About the Author . . . . . .

By 1980, the government estimated that Shewmaker sold forty thousand to fifty thousand pounds of hom