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 was still a desert of dry counties in the 1980s and 1990s, and Richmond was the nearest oasis miles away. Morgan eventually opened Liquor World, a giant alcohol empire in Richmond where, he said, “we were making over a million a month.”
He married and had a daughter, Jordan. He divorced, married again and Sydney was born. He went to Ireland to watch horse racing, 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 would die,” he said. “The best of everything. I have spared no expense.”
On 200 acres of Kentucky pasture just outside Richmond, his 14,300 square foot vision became a reality. Nine bedrooms, three kitchens, a six-car garage, a steam room, a saltwater pool—the front door 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 revolt against attempts to overhaul health care and limit weapons, and that social collapse would soon follow. He envisioned “roving gangs” hunting for food and supplies in the aftermath. He bought riot gear, body armor and a small arsenal of firearms so that “if you had to enlist a gang of looters, you would have a chance to save your family.”
The cornerstone of his survival plan was what lay beneath: a shelter 26 feet underground, under a massive 39-inch ceiling. It contains 2,000 square feet of bedrooms and common space, along with a stocked food pantry, an air filtration system, and two escape tunnels, one of which is 100 feet (30 meters) long. The company that installed the shelter suggested that Mr. Morgan keep quiet about it because “if anything ever happened, there would be people trying to take the bunker.”
