The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History (3 page)

PROHIBITION OFFICERS AT WORK IN COUNTY

Five Stills Are Destroyed In This And Adjoining Counties-Two Men Are Arrested

STILL CAPTURED NEAR LORETTO

Shots Exchanged By Officers And 'Shiners But No One Seriously Hurt

MANY DRAW FINES IN COURT FOR VIOLATING LIQUOR LAWS

FOUR HELD OVER TO FEDERAL GRAND JURY

Prohibition Officers Destroy Nine Stills On Their Recent Raid In This Territory

MANY INDICTED BY GRAND JURY

Nearly Half Of The Ninety-Six Found Charged With Liquor Law Violations

TWO LARGE BOOZE FACTORIES ARE DESTROYED BY OFFICERS

OFFICERS MAKE MANY ARRESTS

Large 125-Gallon Copper Still Found On Raid In The Chicago Section

OFFICERS TAKE EIGHT MEN ON RECENT RAID

One Man Is Shot And Sixteen Stills Seized And Destroyed

TEN "STILLS" ARE DESTROYED

Successful Raid Made By Federal Officers

Through these sorts of widespread shenanigans, Marion County gained a reputation among major crime fighters and criminals alike as a mecca for illegal booze. Al Capone, according to local legend, visited the moonshine factories in Marion County during his better-documented trips to Louisville, and Capone certainly passed through Marion County in May 1932, when the government shipped him by train to the federal prison in Atlanta following his conviction in Chicago, a route that could have passed only along the railroad tracks through Marion County.

On the night of May 5, 1932-two days before Burgoo King would win the fifty-eighth running of the Kentucky Derby-Eliot Ness transferred Al Capone into the custody of the US Marshals Service at Dearborn Street Station in Chicago, where they boarded an eight-car train, the Dixie Flier, which left Chicago at 11:30 p.m.

In the middle of the night, the moonshiners of Marion County lined up along the tracks with their sons to give one last salute to the man who had helped keep their families fed. At some late hour that night, the Dixie Flier rushed through Loretto at eighty miles an hour along Marion County's class 3 track, which ran along the foot of the Muldraugh's Hill escarpment, the train chugging along the scarp's foot through St. Francis, Loretto and St. Mary's, where the Marion County whisky men tipped their mason jars in salute as it passed. Then the men took their sleepy sons home as the train made its way through the night to Atlanta via Corbin.

A year later, the year that would be Prohibition's last, John Dillinger came to Marion County after his parole from Indiana State Prison in May, enticed by a fellow inmate who told him that a person could hide out in Marion County as long as he wanted. In the summer of 1933, Dillinger used his Marion County hideout as a base of operations to rob at least four banks in Indiana and Ohio, while he also plotted the prison break for his gang still locked up in Indiana. On his way out of Kentucky for the last time, Dillinger robbed the Gravel Switch bank in eastern Marion County with the help of a few local boys on August 11, 1933.

Marion County provided safe haven for a man like Dillinger because its people kept their mouths shut. After enough occasions of armed lawmen raiding family farmhouses, the children of those lawbreakers realized that silence was the only weapon they had to protect their fathers and grandfathers from the revenuers intent on taking them away in handcuffs; this understanding grew into an unofficial code of silence that would be passed down for generations and continues today.

While Johnny Boone served hard federal time for his marijuana crimes, he learned from his fellow prisoners of Sicilian descent that such a code of silence had a name in the Old Country-omertd. Moved by what his Sicilian friends told him about its philosophy and how it related to his life, Boone had OMERTA tattooed across his back in red and blue ink. Omerta as a concept arose in Sicily by necessity as the island was continually conquered by a series of outside forces through the centuries. For Johnny Boone, the same concept arose in his community from a different conquering force: Prohibition.

When Prohibition ended in 1933, Marion County refused to end its outlaw ways, and moonshining continued unabated, especially during World War II, when the government rationed alcohol along with sugar, a key ingredient of moonshine. The illegal trafficking of sugar may sound like a joke, but it was indeed a crime during the war and for nearly a year after. It's a crime that will serve as the introduction for a character who will play a supporting role in this story: Hyleme George, the child of Lebanese immigrants and the future mayor of Lebanon, Kentucky.

At 2:00 a.m. on November 6, 1946-after the Allied victory but before the end of rationing-Hyleme George deplaned a flight from Chicago carrying a suitcase. When he stepped onto the tarmac in the middle of a rainstorm, he was stopped by police and IRS agents, who knew him to be a former taxi driver with a record of gambling arrests. Inside George's suitcase, police found enough sugar ration stamps for 47,657 pounds of sugar-sugar allegedly destined to be made into moonshine. Given an average ratio of ten pounds of sugar to one gallon of moonshine, that's enough sugar to make 4,765 gallons of moonshine-plus three quarts.

Soon after the bust, in which the Courier journal in Louisville referred to George as a "sugar stamp racketeer," George moved from Louisville to Lebanon, where his Lebanese family had already set down roots: Dr. Eli George, one of the county's few physicians, had established a medical practice on Main Street years earlier, and Philip George owned a wholesale liquor distributorship on Water Street, the back street behind Main.

It didn't take long for Hyleme to go into business with his brother, Philip, as Hyleme felt comfortable in the liquor business, which was a growth industry in Marion County. After Prohibition, the Kentucky legislature deferred the issue of liquor legality to the counties, and each county voted itself "wet" or "dry."True to its nature, Marion proudly chose its fate as the last wet county to the Tennessee line, 108 miles away.

After establishing his foothold in Lebanon, Hyleme George bought another business on Water Street, a juke joint called Club Cherry, a music venue and watering hole that catered to the town's black folk. By 1950, Club Cherry had become a seminal stop on the Chitlin' Circuit, that network of black nightclubs throughout the South that thrived during and in spite of segregation. In 1951, a skinny piano player named Little Richard rolled into Lebanon singing a song about a drag queen from Georgia named Miss Sonya and left Lebanon having changed the song title and chorus in honor of Club Cherry's manager, Lucille Edelen; in 1955, when a locomotive rolled by Club Cherry's door on its way to Chicago or Atlanta, Junior Parker played "Mystery Train" in a double bill with Bobby "Blue" Bland; that skinny black kid in the army jacket playing the guitar with his teeth at Club Cherry in 1963, that was Jimi Hendrix.