SPRINGFIELD, Ky. - With authorities closing in to appropriate 2,400 marijuana plants on John Robert Boone's farm two days ago, the legendary Kentucky outlaw vanished like a blow of smoke. The prolific grower has been dodging the law ever since, his folk-hero status growing with every sale of a "Run, Johnny, Run" T-shirt and snap on his Facebook fan page.
Tracking down the fugitive who resembles a tattooed Santa Claus has proven as strong as "stressful to get a haunt" for the federal authorities canvassing tightlipped residents among the small farms in a rural area southeast of Louisville. Boone, who's trying to avert the life time he would get if convicted a third sentence of growing pot, has lot of sympathizers in an arena where many farmers down on their circumstances have planted marijuana.
"That's all he's always done, raising pot," said longtime friend Larry Hawkins, who owns a bar and restaurant called Hawk's Place. "He never hurt nobody."
As Hawkins puts it, there are two kinds of growers: "You've got the caught and the uncaught." And, at least for now, the 67-year-old Boone is a bit of both.
He spent more than a 10 in federal prison after being convicted in the later 1980s of taking office in what federal prosecutors called the "largest domestic marijuana syndicate in American history," a thread of 29 farms in Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Nebraska, Missouri, Kansas and Wisconsin.
The group became known as the "Cornbread Mafia" and Boone was labeled by prosecutors as their leader, earning him the nicknames "King of Pot" and "Godfather of Grass." Eventually, 70 Kentuckians were accused of growing 182 tons of marijuana.
Boone's looks are a variety of grandfatherly and sinister: Around the sentence of the 2008 raid on his property 60 miles se of Louisville, Boone sported white hair on his balding head and a shaggy white beard. Yet across his game are large, tattooed letters spelling "Omerta," the infamous Sicilian word that describes the underworld code of silence.
While federal authorities don't name him as violent, his criminal record dates back to the sixties and also includes charges of wanton endangerment and illegal firearm possession.
Deputy U.S. Marshal James Habib and Boone's friends visit him an innovator - separating male from female plants on a big scale to increase strength and experimenting with seeds from about the world in different climates.
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