Hi, everybody.

Hi, everybody.

It's been, welcome to an all-new great moments in weed history. My guest this week, and I want to get right into this one because it's a real barn burner of a saga, is Jim Higden, author of the book, Cornbread Mafia, a homegrown syndicates code of silence, and the biggest

marijuana bust in American history. That's right. Roll up and buckle up, my friends, because it's

time for a classic great moments in weed history tale about outlaw growers and smugglers, in this case,

from the seemingly unlikely location of rural, central Kentucky, which is also where my guest was

born and raised, and so he's literally been following this wild story since he was an eighth grader in the 1980s, because that's

when the parents of his classmates and friends at school all started getting busted.

Jim would later attend the Columbia University School of Journalism and work as a reporter at the New York

Times, but he never stopped chasing the epic

tale of the cornbread mafia, a bunch of grizzled Kentucky backcountry farmers turned weed

outlaws who came to define his hometown. Yes, he kept reporting this story even after the central character became a federal

fugitive living one step ahead of the law.

Let me quickly read from the book's description.

By 1989, the task force assigned to take down Johnny Boone had arrested 69 men and one woman from busts on 29 farms in 10 different states

and seized 200 tons of pot. Of the 70 individuals arrested, zero talked. How it all went down as a tale

of mafia-style storylines emanating from the bluegrass state and populated by

Vietnam veterans and weed-loving characters caught up in Tarantino-level violence and heartbreaking altruism.

Now, that's a fucking weed story.

You might recognize the name Johnny Boone from that time he was profiled on America's

Most Wanted, though you've got to take anything you hear on that highly sensationalized syndicated

television show with a huge grain of salt, especially the part about smuggling weed inside of cows.

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