Gerth: How Johnny Boone went from convicted drug trafficker to cultural icon

SPRINGFIELD, Ky. — The death last week of Johnny Boone brought to a close the tale of a childhood farming champion-turned-marijuana-grower-turned-cultural-icon who smoked joints the size of cigars and had a personality just as big.

His legend grew with stories about him in High Times and Maxim magazines and it only got bigger when he went on the lam for eight years after police found 2,400 marijuana plants at his farm in Washington County.

Boone, the head of one of the Central Kentucky marijuana-growing groups that came to be known as the “Cornbread Mafia,” was a modern-day Butch Cassidy who cultivated his outlaw image much the same way he cultivated some of the finest cannabis this country had ever seen.

Some people who commit crimes are thought of just as lawbreakers.

Others, like Boone, become cult heroes.

Heavyset and bearded, he played the role perfectly.

“He was never thought of as being a criminal,” said Joe Keith Bickett, a longtime friend who headed another “Cornbread Mafia” group based in nearby Raywick.

Cornbread Mafia leader was a local hero. Then he became an icon.

He was already a local hero and had some followers across the country when Jim Higdon began research for his book, “The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate’s Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History,” which was first published in 2012.

Part of what made Boone an icon was the sheer size of his crop when he was arrested in 1987 in Minnesota, Higdon said. Police estimated the haul to be 90 tons and led to Boone's second of three stints in a federal penitentiary.

It was the largest pot bust ever in the United States and, according Higdon’s book, police could only guess the amount of marijuana they found because no one had ever seen that much before.

But part of Boone’s mythology was because he was a true believer in marijuana, said Higdon.

Boone didn’t diversify into cocaine like many marijuana farmers at the time, Higdon said, and he saw himself as an anti-authoritarian figure, fighting against unfair laws, telling police and judges on numerous occasions that he was doing nothing more than trying to feed his family.

“He was dedicated to being a cannabis grower,” Higdon said.

And, the pot. Oh, that pot.

Boone was a student of the plant who worked tirelessly to improve the strain of weed he grew in Kentucky and elsewhere. At one point, tests showed his plants had more than twice the percentage of THC, the narcotic ingredient in marijuana, than the average plant in the United States, according to Higdon’s book.

But he had more than that going for him.

'Just a good old boy'

He grew up in Washington County — one of the three counties that formed the cradle of Catholicism in Kentucky — and where the government had put much of the population out of work with prohibition in 1920.

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The area was known for its production of bourbon, and along with bourbon came jobs not just in distilleries but on farms and in cooperages.

Folks who fought the heavy handed government were celebrated there.

In growing and selling marijuana, Boone was doing nothing more than the bootleggers of the past who distilled moonshine and sold it throughout the region during prohibition and in the years after it.

Elmer George, a lawyer in Lebanon, Kentucky, who represented numerous members of the Cornbread Mafia, said in four decades of practicing law, he never had a jury in Washington, Marion or Nelson counties sentence someone accused of growing pot to jail time.

“People here didn’t see anything wrong with it,” he said.

On top of that, Boone gave money to people who needed it and toys to children whose parents couldn’t afford it, people who knew him said.

Higdon said he was known to give pot to “people in sensitive positions” who were undergoing chemotherapy or needed the drug for some other purpose.

Bickett, who spent more than 20 years in prison and now works as a law clerk and paralegal for George, said he was “just a good old boy.”

There were lots of reason to like Johnny Boone.

And for the folks who occasionally smoked a joint or who still resented the revenuers of the past who put the stills and the cooperages in the region out of business, they had a common enemy.

“He didn’t like policemen, but around everyone else, he was Mr. Friendly, Mr. Goodguy. He was a hail fellow well met,” said Jack Smith, a former U.S. attorney for the Western District of Kentucky who later represented Boone for the better part of two decades.

In fact, his dislike of police was legendary, which may have helped bolster his fame.

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According to Higdon’s book, Boone once took his pickup truck to the home of a state trooper who was nosing around his business and pushed the trooper’s police cruiser through the door into his garage.

When he was arrested in Minnesota, he told police his name was “Charles Grass.”

The Godfather of Grass

Al Cross, who wrote a series of stories on Kentucky’s marijuana trade for The Courier Journal in 1981, said he worried about the reaction to the stories from some of the pot growers, but he never worried about Boone.

“He was a gentle soul. … Johnny Boone was the person I was least concerned about getting violent,” he said.

Bickett said stories of Boone and other members of the Cornbread Mafia doing things like stringing up fishhooks at eye-level and tying rattle snakes to trees in order to protect crops were made up and first appeared in a magazine article that nick-named Boone and other members of the group the “Godfathers of Grass.”

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The first edition of Higdon’s book said Boone kept dogs that had had their vocal cords removed so they could silently attack people who were stealing weed. In a later edition, he wrote that it wasn’t, in fact, true and apologized for the error.

“Johnny didn’t do anything like that,” Bickett said.

Boone's reputation grew in 2008 after he fled the country and kept the federal government at bay for eight years. He fled to Canada and was arrested near Montreal in 2017.

“I think the secret is, he was a fugitive and fugitives are known for mystery and daring and intrepidity and so on,” Cross said. “We had a television series all about a fugitive.”

Jack Smith thinks it might be even more simple than that.

“Johnny Boone wasn’t all bad and he wasn’t all good,” Smith said. “He was just a human being trying to make his own way and people liked him for it.”

Joseph Gerth can be reached at 502-582-4702 or by email at jgerth@courierjournal.com.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Johnny Boone's legacy: From Kentucky pot grower to fugitive and legend