The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History (5 page)

THE REVEREND WILLIAM DEROHAN-FORMER PROFESSOR AT THE SORBONNE in Paris, a Roman Catholic priest and an Irish drunk-drifted on horseback through the wilderness of Virginia and the territory that would become Tennessee in the twilight of the eighteenth century saying Mass to the frontier Catholics where he found them in ones and twos and drinking himself into a stupor in between.

He came northward from the south into the land that would become Kentucky in the autumn of 1790, when the white population numbered fewer than thirty thousand, until DeRohan's horse stopped short of the lip of a great tectonic escarpment, the ridge that would become known on maps as Muldraugh's Hill and locally as Scott's Ridge, where the land dropped five hundred feet nearly straight down and continued seemingly forever in both directions, giving DeRohan an unspoiled view of the entire Bluegrass basin laid out before him in the oranges and yellows of harvest time. The priest and his horse had found by accident the best vantage point to see the secret beauty of what would become known as Marion County.

"I remember as a kid, digging ginseng around there," retired State Police Detective Jacky Hunt said later. "And every weekend there was a fresh car run off Scott's Ridge up there. We always called it Horseshoe Bend because you got the Rolling Fork River shaped like a horseshoe looking out. People would steal a car and strip it and run it off there. Always all those cars down there ... I've taken a lot of people up there to Scott's Ridge, and they get up there and they're like, `I never knew this was here.' I've brought people from eastern Kentucky up there, and they're like, `Daggone! You got a mountain here, too."'

Fifty years before thieves used Scott's Ridge to dump stripped-out cars, Prohibition-era revenuers like Big Six Henderson looked out from the same vantage point and saw the white smoke of a dozen active moonshine stills; 140 years before that, in 1790, the Reverend DeRohan likely saw only one plume of smoke when he arrived, the only sign of civilization coming from Basil Hayden's bourbon still at Holy Cross, which had been distilling corn whisky for five years by then. After he descended through the trees and fog of the escarpment and forded the Rolling Fork as it horseshoed along the foot of the ridge, DeRohan crossed into territory just recently claimed by settlers of European descent but also by multiple native tribes who had been hunting and burying their dead in the region for centuries.

The Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768-signed by the Iroquois in presentday Rome, New York-ceded all of what is now West Virginia and Kentucky to the British, prompting a wave of immigration into the area as well as violent conflict between settlers and the Shawnee, Chickamauga Cherokee, Creek and Chickasaw, who used guerrilla tactics, including stealthy attacks upon settlements by canoe, plucking the lives from pioneers in the night. Bishop John Lancaster Spalding would later estimate that between 1783 and 1790, the confederacy of native tribes killed or captured at least fifteen hundred Catholic souls.

In 1785, five years before the Irish priest's arrival, Basil Hayden chose to establish his community on the banks of Pottinger Creek, a small waterway unnavigable by canoe. Few settlers in Kentucky at the time lived outside fortified encampments because attacks from natives came often and savagely. Hayden settled land about nine miles upstream from Pottinger Station, a fort built in 1781 between New Haven and the Trappist monks by Samuel Pottinger, a Revolutionary War veteran.

Hayden's band of fifty families immigrated together to the fertile center of Kentucky in a collective bargaining effort-the power of their numbers, they hoped, would force the church to send a priest to tend to them, but Archbishop Carroll of Baltimore, the only prelate in the New World, denied them. Then the Reverend DeRohan, the hopeless drunk, stumbled upon Holy Cross from the south.

When the archbishop learned that DeRohan was in Kentucky, he demanded that the Irish priest return to Baltimore, but DeRohan, insubordinate when he drank, refused. Instead, the Irish priest helped Hayden and his settlers build the first Catholic church west of the Appalachian Mountains out of rough-hewn logs.

Once Basil Hayden established a foothold at Holy Cross, more Catholics came, all seemingly possessing the same genetic predisposition toward bold action and risk-taking, a spirit of adventurism matched only by the community's devotion to the church. Fertilized in the fecund Kentucky bottomland, that devotion blossomed into abundant families of strong faith, who sent more than their share of sons and daughters into the clergy and cloistered religious life.

With the sudden abundance of frontier Catholics making a go of it deep in the uncharted darkness of Kentucky, Archbishop Carroll realized that his drunk priest in Kentucky needed help. At the same time, French and Belgian clergymen were fleeing to the New World by the boatload to escape the guillotine. Among them was a stern seminarian named Stephen Theodore Badin. Upon Badin's arrival in Baltimore, Archbishop Carroll promptly ordained him and sent the young priest to Kentucky.

It wouldn't go well.

For years Father Badin tried to impose his brand of Old World order upon the New World Catholics, with mixed results. Although Badin succeeded in founding the Sisters of Loretto, an order that continues today, he could never bend the people nor local church leadership to his will. In a letter to Archbishop Carroll, Badin speaks poorly of his whole flock, referring to one local patriarch, John Lancaster-a survivor of a storied Shawnee attack who was later sent to Frankfort by his peers as their representative and then their senator-as "the Kentucky Robespierre."

Badin's unpopularity extended to fellow clergymen as well, including Bishop Flaget, a Frenchman; the two agreed on very little. When Flaget decided to move the cathedral from rural Bardstown to the growing metropolis in Louisville, Badin would take no more. As soon as the bishop consecrated the ground for the new cathedral in Louisville, Badin circled the property chanting the Dies Irae, the Latin song of death, then left Kentucky for Europe. Among clergy even today, Badin is talked about as a stern authoritarian whose worldview, which teetered perilously close to Jansenism, made the Flemish cleric a borderline heretic.

Badin would later return to America but not to Kentucky. Instead, he traveled to northern Indiana, where he bought the land upon which the University of Notre Dame was founded. A dormitory there bears his name.

By the time Badin died, a small town bloomed about ten miles south of his convent in Loretto, built along a buffalo trace and a small river named the Jordan (pronounced locally as "JER-den"). They named the town Lebanon for the abundance of cedar trees. It was settled first by Presbyterians from Virginia, then the Catholics and some Methodists and Baptists sprinkled in to make things interesting. By 1840, Lebanon had three churches (Catholic, Methodist and Presbyterian), one coed school, six doctors, eight lawyers, three hotels, fourteen stores, a sawmill, fifteen mechanic shops and about 750 inhabitants in town and 11,032 in the county, including Benedict Spalding.

Benedict Spalding came to Kentucky as a boy in the last wave of Catholic emigration from Maryland. He became sheriff of Marion County at twenty-five, married at twenty-nine, and sold dry goods that he hauled from Louisville, selling $15,000 worth in his first year in the first store ever opened in Lebanon. From then on, Ben Spalding dedicated his life to building his town into something important and after years of public service earned the nickname Uncle Ben. Midway through his life, he accomplished his greatest goal: bringing the L&N Railroadnamed for its Louisville-to-Nashville line-to Lebanon. On the maiden voyage of the Lebanon spur of the L&N Railroad, the train hit a cow. But even nine hours behind schedule, a mob of people waited in trees and on rooftops to greet the train as it chugged into Lebanon, shouting, "Hurrah for the L&N and Uncle Ben!"

With the railroad, business in Lebanon boomed: Livestock could go as far as Chicago, and farmers from all over central Kentucky had to bring their goods to Lebanon to get them to market. The distilleries that had dotted the countryside grew bigger and closer to the railroad through the little communities of St. Mary's, Loretto, Dant Station and Chicago.

When the Civil War came to Kentucky, both sides battled over Lebanon's train depot, causing the Union to camp more than eight thousand men just outside of town. Although the war tore families apart-brothers against brothers and such-nothing stopped the distilling, and none of the Union officers ever went thirsty, nor did the dashing Kentuckian Confederate raider, John Hunt Morgan, who caused mayhem all along the western front of the war, including sacking the Lebanon depot and burning Lebanon-twice.

Morgan's raids caused panic in the Union leadership in Kentucky, particularly with General Boyle, who called for martial law in Lexington and implored Cincinnati to send artillery by special train. News of the commotion reached Washington.

"They are having a stampede in Kentucky," President Lincoln wrote to General Henry Halleck, then stationed in Mississippi. "Please look to it."

The day after Morgan left Lebanon, the Union retook the town. Among the Yankee occupiers was an Englishman lawyer named William H. Bradbury, who worked as a secretary for the Union generals of the 129th Illinois Infantry. Nursing an injured leg, Bradbury wrote to his wife from a private upstairs room in a Lebanon hotel in the summer of 1863:

Lebanon, Kentucky

August 16, 1863

My dearest wife,

lam writing this before breakfast at the hotel called the Campbell House in a bedroom in which are two beds. Last night was the first really cool night we have had & good sleeping was the consequence. My leg is still troublesome [...J

There is no restraint on the liquor saloons here. The quantity of whisky consumed (by officers chiefly) is enormous. The soldiers are encamped out of town about 5 miles distant where there is water. The number of shoulder straps staying at this & the other Hotel is very large. Colonels, Lieutenant Colonels, Majors, Capts, & Lieutenants swarm around, and the bar often is thronged from morning to night. Their officers ought to be with their commands & not loafing about town. [...J

I shall ride in a wagon or ambulance & my baggage will be carried-I must now conclude as there are papers to be made out.[..]

With best love to you & the children. I am your affect. husband.

WmHBradbury

Union-held Lebanon also provided refuge for the former slaves of central Kentucky. Slaves who escaped from their masters knew they would be safe there and could take the train north to freedom-the aboveground railroad, as it were.' President Lincoln ordered the railroad extended from Lebanon to Knoxville, and Congress appropriated funds to employ freed slaves working a thousand men per mile of track. Lebanon became the work camp, and the black population exploded in a shantytown built along the tracks on the backside of the depot, a neighborhood later to be known as Black Bottom, the neighborhood that would produce Club Cherry and other track-side entertainment that drew major Chitlin' Circuit musicians a hundred years later.

With the Civil War over, the train through Lebanon carried fewer soldiers and army supplies and began hauling what Uncle Ben had envisioned for it-Lebanon's imports and exports. In 1866, Lebanon shipped 16,105 bushels of grain, 2,081 hogsheads of tobacco, 202 barrels of flour, 1,067 carloads of stock, 158,087 pounds of government freight and 1,535,277 pounds of general freight to Louisville. Coming back from Louisville, Lebanon received 119 carloads of company freight, 457,853 pounds of government freight and 5,636,173 pounds of general merchandise. That year 17,435 people departed Lebanon as passengers on the train, and the exact same number returned.

While the federal government continued to keep soldiers stationed in Lebanon throughout Reconstruction, the town otherwise returned to its antebellum self St. Augustine School, founded by the Sisters of Loretto during the war, now began to grow while churches became houses of worship again instead of hospitals. The country merchants who had fled to town for protection from raiders during the war were able to return to the hills. Former slaves departed either on the train or with the army. In 1867, Lebanon had 2,905 residents: 1,967 white folks and 938 black folks. By 1870, the US Census counted 1,102 white and 823 black, or 1,925 totala loss of nearly one thousand people in three years, a postwar population realignment as the countryside became safe again.