So in 1982, he took out a loan to buy a liquor store in Richmond, a small town about half an hour southeast of Lexington. Southern Kentucky in the 1980s and 1990s was still a desert of dry counties, and Richmond was the closest oasis for miles. Eventually, Mr. Morgan opened Liquor World, a giant liquor store in Richmond where, he said, “we were doing over a million a month.”
Married and has a daughter, Jordan. Divorced, remarried, and Sidney was born. He went to Ireland to watch horse races, took the family to Paris, bought a boat. And in 2009, he started working on the house.
“My vision was that I was building a place where I was going to die,” he said. “Best of all. I spared no expense.”
On a 200-acre Kentucky meadow just outside of Richmond, his vision became a 14,300-square-foot reality. Nine bedrooms, three kitchens, a six-car garage, a steam room, a saltwater pool—the front entrance alone cost $75,000.
“My feeling was that we were going to have civil unrest because there was so much going on with Obama,” Mr. Morgan said. He believed that people would rise up against attempts to overhaul health care and restrict guns, and that societal collapse would soon follow. He envisioned “roving gangs” looking for food and necessities afterward. He bought riot gear, bulletproof vests and a small arsenal of firearms so “if you have to fight a gang of marauders, you’ll have a chance to save your family.”
The keystone of his survival plan was what lay beneath: a shelter 26 feet underground, under a 39-inch solid ceiling. It contains 2,000 square feet of sleeping and common space, along with a stocked food pantry, an air filtration system, and two escape tunnels, one of which is 100 feet long. The company that installed the shelter suggested Mr Morgan keep quiet about it because “if anything ever happened, there would be people trying to take over the bunker”.
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