The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History (8 page)

At midnight a revenuer roadblock stopped the convoy in Perryville, twenty miles away. When told to surrender, the whisky thieves opened fire. The gunfight lasted three hours-the most excitement Perryville had seen since the Civil War. During the shootout, revenue agents shot one of the bootleggers in the Buick, along with the tires of all the cars in the convoy. At the end of the gunfight, eight of the heavily armed men surrendered; the other three, at least one wounded badly, escaped. After processing these arrests, the federal agents went to Burks Spring and arrested the storekeeper, the gauger, the property custodian and two warehouse guards, charging that they were all complicit in the conspiracy. When the revenuers searched the warehouse, they discovered the leftovers of the siphoning operation-sixty-eight barrels empty in their ricks. At forty gallons a barrel, that's 2,720 gallons, worth over $323,000 in 1922 or $4.34 million in 2011. The next April government officials checking the distillery at Burks Spring found an additional 225 cases of whisky missing, every drop of bottled liquor in the house. The Enterprise reported:

MORE LORETTO LIQUOR TAKEN

The distillery nestled among the hills out a few miles from Loretto has been the scene ofseveral sensational robberies, and two or three persons accused of being implicated in the thefts are now under sentence to the federal prison in Atlanta. Others arrested in connection with the liquor raids on the plant are now under bond.

That the distillery has again been robbed will not come as a surprise to many. It has frequently been said that the robberies would continue until all of the whisky had either been removed or stolen. The barreled whisky is now being transferred to another storage center.

This decision to transfer what remained of Kentucky's whisky to centralized locations became widespread. Revenuers no longer wished to rely on local, politically appointed warehouse guards to act as a line of defense against those wishing to pollute the streets with the illegal sale of alcohol. In May 1933, the month John Dillinger moved to town amid the chatter following one of the most contentious Kentucky Derby finishes of all time, workers loaded train cars with what remained of Marion County's whisky-which would have been bottled and labeled as "Rolling Fork" and "Cumberland" if not for Prohibition. The Enterprise reported:

'TIS ALL GONE; NO MORE LEFT

Task of Transferring Whisky From Local Warehouses Is Completed.

Over A Month Required

The task of removing the whisky in the big iron-clad warehouses at the plant of the Mueller, Wathen & Kobert distillery was completed Monday, the last car load leaving that day for Louisville where much Kentucky liquor is being concentrated.

Shipments of the whisky was begun several weeks ago, and two or three car loads would be forwarded each day. The whisky was hauled from the warehouse to freight cars on a sidetrack at the plant, and few people knew that it was being transferred to another city. A Chicago firm of liquor dealers several months ago purchased all the whisky owned by Mueller, Wathen & Kobert, and that firm was not interested in the ownership of the liquor shipped. In the shipment were several thousand barrels.

The warehouses which have housed thousands of barrels of liquor during the years of their existence are now empty for the first time. The scenes of activity that once prevailed about them are gone. The sound of the cooper's hammer will not again be heard within their walls and a once prosperous industry in the community's midst is no more.

In Catholic communities like the ones in Marion County, where alcohol itself had never been considered sinful, the whole premise of Prohibition never made sense to begin with. How could the government say that whisky, beer or the blood of Christ was illegal? Seeing Prohibition as a law that attacked their way of life no differently from any of the decrees of authority figures who had persecuted them for centuries, the Catholics of Marion County rationalized a distinction that justified their lawbreaking-God's Law and Man's Law were not necessarily the same thing. Sure, there was plenty of overlap-both condemned murder, theft, prostitution-but in the eyes of Marion County Catholics, God's Law didn't condemn moonshining or bootlegging, and fifty years later, it wouldn't condemn growing marijuana, either.

Dry agents from the state and federal governments soon realized that in Marion County, arresting criminals was only half the job; getting charges to stick in court with a local jury was something else entirely.

In the last week of April 1926, a Marion County man accused of stealing bourbon at gunpoint appeared in Marion Circuit Court. The jury acquitted him, and in the next two days, juries would acquit a whole list of folks accused of a variety of crimes. A man charged with selling liquor: acquitted. A man charged with giving away liquor: acquitted. Three accused of disturbing a religious worship: acquitted. Six accused of possessing an illicit still: acquitted. Committing grand larceny: acquitted. Possessing an illicit still: acquitted. Manufacturing liquor: acquitted. Betting on a pool game: acquitted. Two men accused of possessing a still: $100 fines and sixty days in jail.

"Such a state of lawlessness exists in Marion County," the commonwealth attorney wrote in an effort to get these cases transferred to the federal courthouse in Louisville, "the jurors will be deterred from rendering an impartial verdict."

Consequently, liquor-related charges against Marion County men began to be tried in federal court instead of state court. The government wanted to get convictions and send these men to prison. The stiff federal sentence hoped for by prosecutors: one year.

From then on, a steady stream of men left Marion County for a year's stay in the federal prison in Atlanta. 'heir wives told their children that their fathers had gone off to be in the army or to see a sick aunt, and some were told the truth-the whole family of eight or ten kids (with three in diapers) all piled into one car for the two-day trip to Atlanta to see Daddy in prison. And still the moonshine kept flowing-the landscape of Marion County still dotted by the telltale signs of plumes of white smoke drifting up from behind wooded knobs or from inside a creek bottom.

The one-year sentence in federal court was for a moonshiner's first offense only; harsher penalties applied to repeat offenders, but no one from Marion County ever served a longer sentence for a second offense-although several did serve the one-year sentence several different times. In an age when bureaucrats still kept government records by hand, the Marion County moonshiner became skilled at convincing a judge that he wasn't the same man who had gone to prison the year before. No, that was his uncle; or he spelled his last name with two Ls, not one; or that was someone else entirely. So, even when the federal government put its foot down in Marion County, its residents found the spaces between the toes.

As the Depression and Prohibition continued, Marion County moonshiners sold their ware farther afield and spent time in other states' prisons, as did Frank Whitehouse of Gravel Switch, who found himself locked up in Indiana.

Whitehouse grew up in the eastern end of Marion County-the Protestant part-where modest wood-frame churches for the Methodists and Baptists stood where the larger brick Catholic chapels would be in the communities of Lebanon and westward. Even though they weren't Catholic in Gravel Switch, there were still plenty of men who moonlighted as moonshiners, like Whitehouse, who got himself arrested in Indiana trying to bootleg a load of Gravel Switch'shine. Convicted, Frank Whitehouse was sent to Indiana's state prison in Michigan City, where he met a fellow inmate named John Dillinger.

An Indiana judge had sentenced Dillinger to ten to twenty years for a botched robbery of an Indianapolis grocery store. Dillinger had confessed to his involvement in the heist, expecting leniency for his cooperation. The severity of his sentence shocked him in the courtroom and made him bitter in prison. He had big plans for when he got out, and maybe he shared those plans with Frank Whitehouse, the Kentucky moonshiner.

If you need a good place to hide out, Frank told Dillinger, you couldn't find a better place than Gravel Switch, where the road crossed the Rolling Fork River seventeen times with no bridges. People didn't go there unless they lived there-and even they couldn't get in or out when the river swelled up.

The state of Indiana paroled John Dillinger after eight and a half years on May 10, 1933, four days after Broker's Tip beat Head Play by a nose in one of the most controversial Kentucky Derby finishes of all time. After he was free, Dillinger made his way down to Kentucky and found Frank Whitehouse in Lebanon, almost a year to the day after Al Capone's train ride through Marion County en route to the federal prison in Atlanta.

While Dillinger waited for a place to stay in Gravel Switch, he holed up in an upstairs room on Main Street. Bored there, he borrowed a gun from someone in town to shoot at the pigeons that congregated on the courthouse, some have said. After Frank Whitehouse made arrangements, he took his guest back to Gravel Switch, where John Dillinger stayed for the whole summer of 1933, locals and Dillinger scholars agree.

Frank Whitehouse arranged for his friend to stay on the farm of an Arab peddler, George Shaheen, who had come to America at the turn of the century with a group of Lebanese Christians who settled together in Louisville. Several of these immigrant men employed themselves as pack peddlers across the countryside: carrying blankets, pots and pans, dry goods and animal feed to isolated country homes. George Shaheen supplied these peddlers and stationed himself at Gravel Switch because it was the farthest point that the railroad penetrated the wilderness.

Shaheen gave Dillinger a house on Hickory Corner in Gravel Switch, with nothing but farmland and knobs in every direction. Dillinger found the place nice and quiet, a place to rest between his time in the Indiana State Prison and the spree of bank robbing and jail breaking upon which he would soon embark. Shaheen gave him farm work to do, and Dillinger jumped right in, just for something to do to pass the time. On the backside of the farm, about a mile away, Dillinger parked a car in a barn that faced a back road in case any lawmen came for him from the front.

Dillinger hit four banks that summer: New Carlisle, Ohio, on June 10; Daleville, Indiana, on July 17; Montpelier, Indiana, on August 4; and Bluffton, Ohio, on August 14-all at least two hundred miles from Gravel Switch. These jobs paid for the guns that helped spring his gang from the Indiana State Prison later that year.

By the end of the summer, Dillinger had grown restless, and so were some of his new friends in Gravel Switch like Maurice "Tidbits" Lanham, twenty-three, and Jimmie Kirkland, a teenager. Because Dillinger decided to leave town, he and his buddies planned a parting gift for Gravel Switch-a daytime bank robbery.

On Tuesday morning, August 8, 1933, John Dillinger drove into Gravel Switch at 11:45 and parked diagonally across the intersection in a blue DeSoto coupe bearing Kentucky plates from McCracken County, license number 563-700. Kirkland and Lanham hopped out of the car and into the bank; one wore a straw hat and mechanics' overalls, and the other wore shabby clothes and a dark cap; neither had his face covered. Dillinger sat in the car and kept the engine running.