So in 1982, he took out a mortgage to purchase a liquor retailer in Richmond, a small metropolis a few half-hour southeast of Lexington. Southern Kentucky within the Eighties and Nineties was nonetheless a desert of dry counties, and Richmond was the closest oasis for miles. Mr. Morgan finally opened Liquor World, a large alcohol emporium in Richmond, the place, he mentioned, “we have been doing over 1,000,000 a month.”
He married and had a daughter, Jordan. He divorced, married once more, and Sydney was born. He went to Eire to look at horse races, took the household to Paris, purchased a ship. And in 2009, he started working on the home.
“My imaginative and prescient was that I used to be constructing a spot I used to be going to die in,” he mentioned. “The best every thing. I spared no expense.”
On 200 acres of Kentucky meadow simply exterior of Richmond, his imaginative and prescient turned a 14,300-square-foot actuality. 9 bedrooms, three kitchens, a six-car storage, a steam room, a saltwater pool — the entrance entryway alone price $75,000.
“My emotions have been that we have been going to have civil unrest as a result of there was a lot happening with Obama,” Mr. Morgan mentioned. He believed that folks have been going to stand up in opposition to the makes an attempt to overtake well being care and limit weapons, and that societal collapse would quickly observe. He envisioned “roving bands of gangs” trying to find meals and requirements within the aftermath. He purchased riot gear, bulletproof vests and a small arsenal of firearms, in order that “if you happen to needed to interact a band of marauders, you’ll have an opportunity to save lots of your loved ones.”
The keystone of his survival plan was what lay beneath: a shelter 26 ft underground, beneath a 39-inch stable ceiling. It incorporates 2,000 sq. ft of bedrooms and customary house together with a stocked meals pantry, an air filtration system and two escape tunnels, certainly one of them 100 ft lengthy. The corporate that put in the shelter advised that Mr. Morgan preserve quiet about it, as a result of “if something ever occurred, there’d be those who attempt to take the bunker.”
