It was three days before Christmas in downtown Montreal, when border agents stopped an elderly man with a biker mustache in a vast indoor mall. The man initially gave his name as Dennis Ross, but when the cops asked him about his tattoos, he acknowledged his real name was Johnny Boone, and his eight-year run was over. La Presse, Montreal’s French-language daily newspaper, called Boone “Le fugitif américain.”
When I learned of Boone's arrest, I was surprised most of all by the location of the bust. It was no secret to anyone who knew him: Johnny Boone didn't like crowds. They reminded him too much of his years in federal prison. But I wasn’t surprised that the U.S Marshals had kept looking for him. Boone, now 73, was widely considered to be the biggest outlaw marijuana grower in the history of the United States. For more than 25 years beginning in the 1970s, the Kentucky native had run a cultivation and smuggling network that, at its peak, included 30 farms and 70 workers stretched across 10 states. Boone, dubbed by law enforcement the “Godfather of Grass,” had been convicted twice before, serving a total of about 17 years in prison for his role in an enterprise widely known as the Cornbread Mafia. In May 2008, when a helicopter spotted him emerging from a central Kentucky barn wheeling a flatbed wagon with 2,000 seedlings in flowerpots, he knew that the police who were coming to arrest him would likely send him away for the rest of his life. So he ran.
But an amazing thing happened while Boone was hiding out: Weed became legal.
In the eight years since Johnny Boone became a fugitive, marijuana laws have changed dramatically in the United States. Twenty-nine states have now approved marijuana for medical use, and eight of those states have legalized marijuana for any reason at all, making Boone's skill set of growing highly potent cannabis at high volume a highly lucrative and legal profession, just not in the ZIP code where he happened to be tending his crop in 2008. Public support for legal marijuana is now at 60 percent, the highest level ever in 47 years of polling by Gallup. However, the federal government still considers marijuana to be as addictive as heroin with no medicinal value, despite the public’s clear belief to the contrary. Federal authorities, keenly aware of the legalization trend, have taken a hands-off approach during the Obama administration to the prosecution of marijuana cases in states that have passed medical marijuana laws. But a new administration is about to enter the White House, and Donald J. Trump’s choice as the nation’s top law enforcement officer has a very different, and much more conservative view on the subject of marijuana.
This makes Johnny Boone’s case far more intriguing than the average pot bust.
Once Boone is brought back to the United States, he most likely will be tried, convicted, and sentenced to the life term that he has avoided for almost a decade. He would be a prominent conviction for the likely-to-be-confirmed Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a signal that the Trump administration intends to ramp up the War on Drugs despite changing social mores. That is, unless something dramatic happens. Like a presidential pardon.
It’s a long shot say clemency experts, but President Obama has already pardoned three men from Boone’s part of Kentucky who were convicted of non-violent drug crimes. He could add Boone to a fast-growing list of those who have received presidential clemency. An online petition is already circulating asking Obama to pardon Boone in the remaining days of his term.
“I sure hope he gets a pardon,” said Jack Smith, Boone’s former attorney. Before starting a defense practice, Smith was a federal prosecutor, a two-time U.S. Attorney, and former counsel for the Church Committee on intelligence agency abuses. Smith knows Boone as well as anyone. “John Boone is a different sort of person. An open and honest man. I respect him and I like him. Johnny knows who he is and isn’t ashamed of it.”
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Johnny Boone graduated high school in 1961 and began life as a farmer with a little moonshining on the side. He decided at some point in the early 1970s to stop growing tobacco for $1.60 per pound when he could grow marijuana for $1,000. Boone first ran afoul of the feds in 1982, when he was caught smuggling 550 pounds of weed from Belize into a small Kentucky airport. By that point, Boone’s outdoor marijuana business had grown so brisk that it had become necessary to smuggle marijuana from South America, Central America and the Caribbean just to supplement his crop in the offseason.
Boone is from Washington County, Kentucky, right next door to Marion County, which has something of a marijuana-growing reputation. Marion County was the headquarters of the Cornbread Mafia, an organization that federal authorities claimed to be the largest domestic marijuana syndicate in American history. The men who ran it came from the same rural Catholic culture of Marion, Washington and Nelson counties, where the landscape is dotted with monasteries, convents and bourbon distilleries like Makers Mark and Jim Beam.
Boone served two years in prison on the Belize deal, and when he got out he ran headlong back into the Cornbread underworld, helping to build a domestic cultivation empire that would later stun federal law enforcement for its size and sophistication. After authorities caught Boone and 20 men in Minnesota with 90 tons, they discovered a sister farm in western Nebraska. But the Cornbread code of silence stymied the feds from understanding the true scope and scale of the network, and allowed many men to escape prosecution. The case against Boone as a kingpin withered because the feds had no witness willing to point the finger. So Boone served 15 years instead of a possible life sentence. He was released in 2002.
Over the past decade, public perception and state laws on marijuana have swung far from the draconian federal standard. Only six states have not passed laws that legalize some portion of the cannabis plant for medicinal purposes. And while the Obama administration failed to decriminalize marijuana as many had hoped, the president has made liberal use of his power to pardon, granting clemency to 1,324 Americans, mostly for drug charges. On a per capita basis, perhaps no place has received as much presidential forgiveness as Marion County in central Kentucky, where three men in a county with fewer than 20,000 residents have received clemency from Obama in the form of a pardon or sentence commutation.
The first was Les Berry. In 1987, Berry had little criminal experience before agreeing to work on Johnny Boone’s Minnesota marijuana farm. A U.S. Marine Corps veteran with an honorary discharge, Berry was calm in the face of the police raid and managed to procure a get-away car from a local used-car dealership and rescue six other Kentuckians huddled in the freezing Minnesota night. They made it as far as Wisconsin before getting caught. After his short prison sentence, Berry returned home to his wife and kept the same job at a barrel-making factory for the next 20 years. In 2011 he got a pardon from President Obama that restored his right to vote and to carry a firearm. Berry doesn’t talk to the media.
The second Marion County man to receive clemency from the president was Darrell Hayden, who has a profile more similar to Boone than a low-level worker like Berry. Hayden, a Vietnam veteran, was serving a life sentence without parole because of a three strikes mandatory-minimum sentence. He had been caught with 19,000 plants on a farm in Michigan. After more than 42,000 people signed an online petition organized by his niece, President Obama commuted his life sentence in March 2015.
Today, Hayden is a free man serving 10 years of probation with over 880 friends on Facebook. He wishes the same could happen for Boone, his long-time friend. “Anything’s possible,” Hayden said of possible clemency for Boone. “He’s a great man. You got to understand where’s he’s coming from. There’s very few men like him in this world.”
Just two days before Boone was apprehended in Canada, the White House announced clemency had been granted to 231 people, the most ever in one day. The group included a third man from Marion County, Aaron Glasscock, who was 22 at the time he was caught in a Florida-bound truck registered in his name with $900,000 hidden in a false gas tank—an errand he made for his father’s interstate drug trafficking ring. At the time of his arrest, he was two months shy of his pre-med degree. In 2000, he was sentenced to 30 years. His petition for early release at change.org was signed by 94,168 supporters. He will return home to Kentucky in April 2017. He couldn't be reached for comment.
If Johnny Boone is to become the fourth person from that part of Kentucky to get a break, Obama would have to radically accelerate a process that usually takes months, and to leap-frog over thousands of other applicants who filed their paperwork in the correct way. But, if the Obama administration wanted to make a clear and irrevocable statement about marijuana, granting a January pardon to Boone would be a good way to do it.
Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, thinks Boone's chances are slim but says that Boone’s punishment should take into account the “rapidly evolving” attitudes toward marijuana. “The consequences for his actions shouldn't be so completely bizarre. In a rational world, he wouldn’t be looking at any time in prison.”
A change.org petition to free and pardon Boone has been created since his capture in Canada. “He’s got a lot of people out here that love him, you can bet on that,” Darrell Hayden said.
The fact that a 73-year-old man is facing life in prison for a marijuana crime “points out the ludicrous nature of these laws,” said Mauer of the Sentencing Project. “It's hard to see what a life sentence at his age would help anybody in any way.”
“Anything is possible,” said Nkechi Taifa, advocacy director for criminal justice for the Open Society Institute, noting that the president can do as he pleases since the right to pardon is a power granted by the Constitution. “Extensive public exposure can make a great difference. People who are advocating for clemency for Boone should continue to do so,” she said.
The White House did not respond for a request for comment.
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If President Obama doesn't grant clemency to Johnny Boone before January 20, then Boone is in for a bumpy ride. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Kentucky won’t comment, but here’s what we know: the Obama DOJ wrote the Cole memo, which urges restraint in the prosecution of marijuana cases in states where relaxed laws have been passed, but Kentucky is not one of those states. Jeff Sessions, the likely new attorney general, can rip up that memo in an instant, and everything he has said about marijuana in the past indicates he’ll take a much more aggressive stance than his predecessors. Less than a year ago, Sessions said in a Senate hearing that "good people don't smoke marijuana." If he thinks people who smoke it aren't good people, what must he think of a guy who once grew it by the ton?
In all likelihood, Canada will deport Boone without even waiting for the U.S. to request extradition. His next hearing is set for January 13, when immigration officials may determine that Boone had been in Canada illegally and decide to deport him to the United States. If Boone doesn't fight his deportation, he could be in American custody within 48 hours, according to his attorney. A judge will likely rule that Boone should be kept in custody during his trial because he's a flight risk; and then in all likelihood he'll be found guilty and sentenced to prison for the rest of his natural life.
If the president doesn't act, there are a couple of other long-shot scenarios that could save Boone from a slow-motion death sentence. One of them is the precedent set by prosecutors in the Weldon Angelos case. In 2004, Angelos was sentenced by a federal judge in Utah to 55 years in prison for selling $350 worth of marijuana. After the Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal, Angelos filed a motion with the federal court in Utah to request a sentence reduction. His records remained sealed so exactly what happened next remains murky, but it appears that the prosecutor simply didn't argue against Angelos's motion, so the judge ordered his release.
Another outside chance could be a "Petite waiver," where the feds kick the charges down to a state court, so Boone could still be prosecuted for his crimes but without the risk of a life sentence. But that would require the Kentucky Attorney General to file parallel charges against Boone, which hasn't happened yet. Or, the president could pardon Boone for his first two felonies so that he can face his current charge as a first offense.
But then, maybe Johnny Boone's chances for clemency before January 20 are greater than they appear. As the president looks to secure his legacy with bold moves on Israel, Russia, off-shore drilling and national monuments, maybe a last-minute pardon of the biggest outlaw marijuana cultivator in American history makes perfect sense.
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On December 29, Boone appeared at an immigration hearing in Montreal via video-conference from the Rivière-des-Prairies prison, where he's being held. At the hearing, he politely refused to answer the immigration commissioner's questions by repeatedly saying "no ma’am," and his overall manner was “très poli et courtois,” according to La Presse, despite remaining “évasif” about how long he had been in Canada and where he had lived.
“I know myself I’m not a danger to anybody,” Boone said during his immigration hearing. “I do a lot of things to help people. I know that might not have much standing here. … But people need help and I try to help them.” When his hearing was over, Boone told court officials: “Have a nice day.”