Episode 1: Showtime

On June 15, 1989, John Bramel got an unexpected phone call. It was the US Attorney’s Office in Louisville, Kentucky, inviting him to a press conference the next day. This press conference was going to be massive, they said, and they really wanted him, the managing editor of the Lebanon Enterprise, to be there. At this press conference, John Bramel heard the term “Cornbread Mafia” for the first time. To outsiders, this story was sensational. Who on earth were these Cornbread Mafia guys? And how did they coordinate a giant network of marijuana farms all in secret? But John Bramel wasn’t an outsider. He was from the place where the Cornbread Mafia planted its seeds: Marion County, Kentucky. So he had a different set of questions. Questions where the answer depended on who you asked.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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This is a story about Marion County, Kentucky, a place with farming, moonshine, and pride in its bloodline. It’s a place that laid the foundation for a network of marijuana-growing outlaws called the Cornbread Mafia. Into this world walked a man named Johnny Boone, who set out to grow and harvest one of the greatest outdoor marijuana crops in modern times. But his timing was all wrong, and soon Marion County found itself at the national center of the War on Drugs. In their effort to take Johnny Boone and his syndicate down, law enforcement officials arrested 70 people...all from this pocket of Kentucky. It was the biggest marijuana bust in American history, and no one ever said a word. On Cornbread Mafia, we’re going to Marion County and finding out how a turning point in federal drug policy reshaped the story of a local community and had consequences that lasted for generations.