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

by James Higdon

  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.

  Inside the bank, Kirkland and Lanham pulled revolvers on four male bank employees and a customer.

  "Stick em up!" they said, waving pistols.

&
nbsp; While Kirkland held the men at bay with his pistol, Lanham leaped over the counter, handed a flour sack to Edward Isaacs and ordered him to fill it with cash. After Isaacs complied, Lanham led all the bank workers into the vault and closed it behind them, then leaped back over the counter, taking the change of a $5 bill from the customer.

  Outside, Kirkland and Lanham hopped into the DeSoto coupe, which they had stolen from Bardstown specifically for the job, and Dillinger sped away with $1,235.55 in cash, which would be worth $21,453.14 in 2011. They headed for the Danville Pike, leaving it when they turned off toward Penick and passed a mail carrier, nearly blowing him off the road. After they split up the loot, Tidbits Lanham took his share and went home, but Jimmie Kirkland accompanied Dillinger out of town.

  As soon as the Gravel Switch bankers extricated themselves from their own vault, they told the switchboard operator to alert surrounding communities. But by the time police were looking out for a blue DeSoto coupe, Dillinger and his Gravel Switch gang had already ditched the car in a Raywick cornfield on the other side of the county. Investigators would find it weeks later with the radiator cap off, indicating it had overheated after being driven incredibly hard.

  The next day, Wednesday, about noon, Sheriff G. C. Spalding arrested Maurice "Tidbits" Lanham at a pool parlor in Lebanon. Lanham "emphatically denied the charges placed against him," despite the fact that the banker and his son identified him as one of the robbers. Police had arrested Lanham the previous year for "stealing gasoline from the machine of Ernest Gaillard while it was parked near the High School," and he was currently under indictment in Washington County for hijacking. The judge set his bond for $8,000, which he could not pay, and so they shipped him to the Louisville jail, where agents from the Department of Justice wanted to question him.

  While police cornered Lanham in Lebanon, Jimmie Kirkland and John Dillinger arrived in Chicago, checked into a nice hotel and started spending their loot on new clothes-"gambling and enjoying the gay night life of the city," according to an account in the Enterprise. Kirkland's share of the take was $460; when the police arrested him nine days later on August 17,1933, only thirty-five cents remained in his new suit's pocket. According to the last-minute bulletin that ran in the Enterprise.

  According to report received here early last night, Jimmie Kirkland and John Dillinger, alias Clarence Crews, alias Chord Martin, wanted in connection with the hold-up of the People's Bank at Gravel Switch, were taken into custody at East Chicago, Indiana, by authorities there. The men were said to have been taken to Indianapolis, where they are awaiting the arrival of officers from this county to return them here.

  However, when Marion County Sheriff G. C. Spalding and his deputy Pete Glasscock returned from Indianapolis, they had only Jimmie Kirkland with them because "Dillinger has been returned to the Michigan City, Indiana, penitentiary from which he had been released on parole," according to the October 6, 1933, edition of the Lebanon Enterprise.

  When the grand jury indicted Lanham, Kirkland and Dillinger for the robbery, it also returned indictments against Marion County residents for an assortment of crimes, including storehouse breaking, child desertion, carrying a concealed weapon, shooting with the intent to kill, malicious shooting with the intent to kill, malicious assault, malicious cutting with intent to kill, arson and chicken theft.

  The Marion County jury, loath to sentence anyone for any crime, sent both Tidbits Lanham and Jimmie Kirkland to state prison for eight years. John Dillinger, however, remained elusive, as the Lebanon Enterprise kept track of his notoriety:

  PAIR TAKEN TO PENITENTIARY

  Lanham, Kirkland, Sentenced For Bank Robbery, Begin Eight-year Terms.

  Dillinger Is Liberated

  While Lanham was standing trial last Thursday evening for his part in the bank banditry, John Dillinger, also indicted on the same charge, was liberated from the jail at Lima, Ohio, by six gunmen who shot and killed Sher f Jesse L. Sarber. Dillinger was never returned here on the Gravel Switch bank robbery indictment but was confined to the Lima, Ohio, bastile [sic] following his arrest some time ago in East Chicago, Ind. He had been wanted in Ohio as well as several other States for bank robbery and a number of other criminal acts.

  Both Lanham and Kirkland in their testimony in this city denied that Dillinger was their confederate in the Gravel Switch hold-up when $1,235.55 was taken.

  Meanwhile, as the readers of the Lebanon Enterprise followed the weekly installments of the John Dillinger story, another historic narrative came to a close. On September 8, 1933, the Enterprise reported that the General Assembly in the state capital of Frankfort passed a bill by a vote of eighty-one to ten to "repeal ... the Eighteenth Amendment to the federal Constitution," also known as Prohibition.' he editor of the newspaper made clear that "national repeal is not sufficient" to allow Kentucky's own distilleries to resume operation, pointing out that an amendment to the state constitution would also have to be passed.

  Nevertheless, construction and repairs to old distilleries in the area started up, first in neighboring Bardstown, then in Lebanon, as reported by this Enterprise headline:

  DISTILLERY IS TO BE REBUILT

  J. A. Wathen And St. Louis Men Buy Site Near Town For New Plant

  Work To Start Soon

  "The sale," the story tells its readers on November 3, 1933, "includes about five acres of land, all lying north of the stream, Jordan [with] a thirty-foot right-of-way from the Campbellsville Pike," the approximate site of the original Wathen Distillery, built in 1875, where "the famous `Rolling Fork' and `Cumberland' brands of whisky were made."The property had been dormant since a fire of mysterious origin had destroyed many of the buildings in 1931.

  On Monday, November 27, 1933, Kentucky became the thirty-third state to ratify the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment.

  "For the first time in the history of the State, duly-elected delegates have assembled for the purpose of ratifying an amendment to the Constitution of the United States," Governor Laffoon declared while expressing the hope that repeal of Prohibition would not lead to the return of "open saloons."

  The governor apparently had not traveled much to Marion County, where "open saloons" had never departed. Just two days before the governor's speech on the subject, a thirty-five-year-old Raywick farmer named Felix Mattingly shot and killed Marion Bell, forty-four, whose body was found "on the Main Street of Raywick near the Earl Bickett Pool Parlor shortly before 10:00 o'clock Saturday night by a group who rushed from the pool room and a dance that was in progress to see what had happened after they had heard the shot." At his trial in April, Mattingly would claim self-defense, and a jury would deliberate for fifteen minutes before acquitting him.

  Slowly Marion County began returning to its brand of normal. By May 18, 1934, the Wathen Distillery began production in a new facility with a capacity of 740 bushels per day and a payroll of $2,000 per week. By midyear, something of a final act of Prohibition occurred with the death of John Dillinger. As reported by the Lebanon Enterprise on July 27:

  BANDIT CAREER IS CONCLUDED

  Last Rites For John Dillinger Slain Super-Criminal, Held Wednesday.

  Tip-Off Denied By Girl

  FARMERS ALL ACROSS KENTUCKY GREW TONS AND TONS OF HEMP IN THE nineteenth century but not in Marion County. According to an 1877 edition of The History of Kentucky, Marion County annually produced 81,800 pounds of tobacco, 2,207 tons of hay, 413,760 bushels of corn, 88,690 bushels of wheat, 1,041 bushels of barley-but zero pounds of hemp on 193,074 acres of land valued at $9.89 per acre. Neighboring Washington County reaped 2,100 pounds of hemp in 1876, a fraction of the statewide market for a product destined to become rope, paper and cloth in products used at home and at sea. Fayette County, the capital of thoroughbred horse country surrounding Lexington, produced 4.3 million pounds of hemp along with its 5,879 horses that same year. Hemp farmers in the counties that surround Fayette grew another five million pounds.

  In 1937, four years after repealing Prohibi
tion, the federal government criminalized hemp and its sister plant, marijuana. Yet, even while outlawing it, the government still consumed a great deal of hemp, needing its fiber for the miles of rope used by the Navy, which grew its hemp on plantations in the Philippines, an American territory, until Japan attacked in December 1941. In the days just after Pearl Harbor, America lost its sole supplier of hemp when it lost the Philippines. So, at the dawn of the war, the Navy was taxed not only with rebuilding its Pacific fleet but also with resupplying that fleet with rope made from the fiber that Congress had outlawed four years before.

  While women grew victory gardens and Boy Scouts collected tires and tin, farmers across America raised hemp for the war effort at the request of the federal government. Farms across the Midwest and South grew mountains of the tall green plants and then packed them off by the truckloads to warehouses. From there, hemp was shipped by rail to processing plants where it was turned into the rope necessary for the Allied naval victories in the Pacific and European fronts. Of the nine states that grew hemp for the war, the government asked only Kentucky for its seed, which it then planted in tropical places with longer growing seasons, like Brazil and Hawaii. In 1942, the US government asked Marion County to produce enough seed for five hundred thousand acres of hemp, roughly enough for 453,750 football fields.

  Though they had never seen hemp grown before, young Marion County men not drafted into the war worked the fields, tending acres of hemp that towered over their heads with trunks as thick as bamboo. When they harvested it in the autumn, they ran the hemp stalks through a thresher, which separated the seeds from their husks. Because the government wanted only the seeds, the farmers burned everything else, sending big white clouds of hemp smoke wafting up from the barn lots-the tranquility of the quiet landscape interrupted only by the chugga-chuggachugga of the diesel-powered threshers.