‘Cornbread Mafia’ head Johnny Boone, who ran large marijuana-growing operation, has died
John Robert “Johnny” Boone, who once ran a multi-state marijuana-growing operation known as the Cornbread Mafia, has died at age 80.
Boone died Friday night, Joe Keith Bickett wrote in a Facebook post Saturday.
Boone, known to some as the “Godfather of Grass” and the “King of Pot,” was something of a legend.
A native of Washington County, Boone was raised by his grandfather and as a young man won 4-H competitions showing sheep and growing tobacco, according to a 2017 Courier-Journal profile.
As an adult, he became adept at a different kind of farming.
He grew pot in Belize for a time and served a stint in federal prison after a bust related to that, the Courier-Journal profile stated.
In 1987, he was caught growing pot in Minnesota and spent a decade in prison.
That bust of the self-named Cornbread Mafia involved 29 farms in nine states, including Kentucky, according to media reports. Scores of people were prosecuted.
An assistant U.S. attorney described the operation in a 1989 Herald-Leader article as “the largest domestic marijuana producing organization in the history of the United States.”
At the time, federal authorities were referring to the Cornbread Mafia as the Marion County Marijuana Cooperative and had formed a special task force to combat it. Between 1985 and 1989, they said they’d seized 182 tons of marijuana with a wholesale value of $364 million.
In the 1989 article, authorities described farms bought specifically for growing marijuana that were outfitted with alarm systems and booby-trapped fields protected by dogs.
And Boone, who by then had been sentenced to prison, was named as one of the co-op’s leaders.
In 2008, Kentucky State Police used aerial surveillance to discover 2,400 marijuana plants on the farm where Boone was living in Washington County.
Boone fled and spent nearly eight years on the run before he was found and arrested in Canada in 2016.
He pleaded guilty to a federal charge that he conspired to possess more than 1,000 marijuana plants with the intent to grow and distribute the weed, and in March 2018, he was sentenced to four years and nine months in prison.
Bickett, who served time after being convicted as part of the Cornbread Mafia and later wrote a series of books about it, went on to work with Boone to form a company that sells CBD, according to the News-Enterprise in Elizabethtown.
Boone was much-loved in his stomping grounds around Marion and Washington counties, and many took to social media to share remembrances of him on the Bickett and Boone Facebook page.
“He was a great friend to many of us,” Bickett wrote. “Always willing to help his friends and neighbors. Prayers and thoughts for all the Boone family. He will be greatly missed.”
James Higdon, who wrote “The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate’s Code Of Silence And The Biggest Marijuana Bust In American History,” said in a post on the social media platform X that Boone was “one of the greatest outlaw cannabis growers of all time. A true Kentucky legend.”
Arrangements for Boone were incomplete Saturday afternoon.
This story was originally published June 15, 2024 at 5:33 PM.
