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

by James Higdon

  Farmers caught on pretty quickly that this hemp crop made them feel a little funny. One boy, Al Brady, helped his family thresh its hemp seeds, and while walking home from the field one day, he told his friend that he felt dizzy.

  "I think being up on top of that separator all day made me drunk," he said.

  Advocates of industrial hemp often assert that hemp grown for fiber lacks enough tetrahydrocannabinol (commonly referred to as THC) to get a person "high," so why did the thresher make Al Brady feel drunk? Hemp, in common shorthand, refers to the male cannabis plant, whereas its female counterpart is called mar~uana. In a field grown for seed, both males and females would be present to ensure fertilization, and the females with their seeded flowers would be the ones run through the threshers to harvest the seeds. Although the flowers of the fertilized females would have dramatically lower THC levels than unfertilized flowers, there would still be enough present in a field's worth to perhaps cause the effect Brady described-not unlike a greenhorn tobacco farmhand contracting nicotine sickness by absorbing tobacco's active drug through his skin.

  So, Brady brought an old medicine bottle down to the barn one day and scooped up some hemp seeds before they went off to the government. That night he hid them for safekeeping in a barn behind his parents' home.

  Thirty-some years later in the 1970s, in the midst of the younger generation's cannabis bonanza, Brady went back to look for that medicine bottle of old seeds, thinking to himself how much money he could make from his heirloom hemp. He found it exactly where he left it, covered in cobwebs and three decades of barn dirt. Excited, he grabbed it, cleaned it off and opened it; but the seeds by then had turned to dust.

  As Al Brady's medicine bottle full of hemp seeds slowly decomposed in the family barn, the farming folks went on trying to make a living growing burley tobacco and teaching their children to follow along. In April 1957, the state 4-H office in Lexington announced its annual awards for its youth farming program, presenting the district tobacco championship to a thirteen-year-old boy from Washington County named Johnny Boone.

  Boone's family raised him on a Bloomfield Road farm that belonged to his mother's family. His father, the man who gave him the surname of Daniel Boone, gave Johnny little else besides the sorts of beatings that angry alcoholics administer to their children. A good day for Johnny and his siblings was when their father passed out before they came home from school; a bad day sent the Boone children diving under beds and out windows to escape their father's belt. Once, after their father had beaten their mother with a fishing pole, Johnny Boone, still a child, drove his mother to the doctor to remove the fishhook embedded in her cheek.

  So, Johnny Boone looked elsewhere for a father figure and found it in his maternal grandfather, Poss Walker, the owner of the family's large tracts of farmland. Walker guided bright young Boone's development as a farmer, helping his grandson at eleven years old to grow the 0.7 acres of tobacco that finished in seventh place in the district 4-H competition.

  In 1958, at fifteen years old, Johnny Boone won the state 4-H championship in sheep breeding, earning him a trip to Chicago for the National 4-H Congress. In 1960, Boone conquered Kentucky again, this time for his tobacco, giving him "the unique distinction of having attained two state 4-H championships," according to the Springfield Sun, his hometown newspaper. His winning tobacco project "was 2.6 acres which he irrigated, suckered carefully and saved all of the ground leaves."

  Johnny Boone graduated from high school in 1961 as a three-time football letterman in the top sixth of his class. "He plans to enter the University of Kentucky in the fall," the Sun reported. Life had other plans. Although smart and ambitious, Johnny Boone started a family and stayed on the farm to continue the traditions of his grandfather.

  A veteran of Prohibition, Poss Walker learned to supplement his family income with moonshining and bootlegging and whatever else seemed necessary to keep his farm afloat. These activities he included in the mentorship of his grandson, teaching young Boone skills for which the state 4-H board didn't award prizes. In addition to moonshining, Walker taught Boone how to grow more than one's allotted share of burley tobacco, a crop strictly monitored and regulated by the government. If agents from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) caught a farmer growing more than his share, his card at the tobacco warehouse would be marked red, and the excess tobacco would be confiscated. This "red-card tobacco" became an essential element to some farmers' meager incomes. The trick for Johnny Boone was to grow extra tobacco in secret patches tucked away in a corner of his grandfather's massive property. At harvest time, the managers of the tobacco warehouses, gentleman farmers who made their fortunes moonshining themselves, helped red-card tobacco growers elude the scrutiny of the federal agents.

  Married and forgoing college, Johnny Boone started farming and distilling on both sides of the law to raise his family. Although his home and property were in Washington County, Boone gravitated toward Marion County, where some people considered obeying certain laws to be optional, where the wets continually defeated the drys in the fight for the soul of the place.

  The fight flared red-hot one night in May 1958, when nitroglycerin blew sky high the partly constructed home of George Helm, the state Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) agent sent to look after Lebanon's notorious liquor merchants. The response from Frankfort, the state capital, came swiftly when thirty state troopers descended upon Lebanon at a time when the whole state force numbered only one hundred troopers. The state police succeeded in making only three arrests on misdemeanor charges: Hyleme George, owner of the Silver Dollar liquor store; his brother Philip of Phil's Dispensary, both on Water Street; and John Nelson, owner of the Corner Liquor Store on Main and Proctor Knott Avenue.

  Making matters worse, Kentucky's public safety commissioner, a thirty-year-old Harvard alumnus named Don Sturgill, inflamed the postbombing atmosphere by telling a major newspaper that Lebanon fostered "open and commonplace gambling, prostitution and illegal whisky sales."

  When challenged by representatives of Marion County, who drove to Frankfort to confront Sturgill about his allegations that Lebanon played host to prostitution, the Harvard grad dug himself in deeper.

  "When I said [prostitutes] were 'commonplace,' l simply meant they were available," he said. "And when you've got gambling and illegal whisky sales, you're almost bound to have prostitution.

  "I have evidence," Sturgill continued, "that twenty-seven persons living outside Marion County bought 4,300 cases of whisky in Lebanon between 1956 and 1957."

  When Commissioner Sturgill appeared in Lebanon a few weeks later-the press pool in tow-with the intention of arresting Hyleme George, Marion County turned the tables on him. The county judge refused to issue warrants and denied Sturgill's claim that it was a state matter by claiming local jurisdiction. So, Sturgill stepped out of the courthouse empty-handed, facing a crowd of angry locals and the assembled media. Stunned, Sturgill faltered, and Hyleme George took to the courthouse steps for an impromptu press conference.

  "Thirty patrolmen sent down here to arrest one liquor dealer for lending whisky to another one," Hyleme began, waving his cigar around for emphasis. "That's no charge. The charge is that they're hard losers. They're mad," Hyleme said, putting his arm around the man beside him, "because this man's brother was elected county clerk."

  That man's brother, Paul Clark, had defeated a twenty-year incumbent and state party patronage dispenser with the help of Hyleme George's new loyal voting bloc, Lebanon's black folks, whom George treated just like anyone else.

  "I don't think this is coming from the governor's office," George continued in remarks recorded by George Trotter, editor of the Enterprise. "He wouldn't tolerate it if he knew what was going on."

  The Harvard grad expressed surprise at the sore-loser allegation.

  "I'd be glad to take a lie-detector test to show that no politics were involved in this investigation here," Sturgill insisted over the jeers of the angry crowd.

&
nbsp; The spontaneous assembly, partial to George's point of view, heckled Sturgill on those courthouse steps, reminding him of his charges of prostitution.

  "Where are those girls?" the crowd shouted repeatedly. "Where are those girls!"

  A reporter didn't understand the dynamics of the situation, so the editor of the Lebanon Enterprise explained.

  "Gambling and liquor violations are a sin against the state," Trotter, the local newsman, said. "But prostitution is a sin against God. That's a serious charge," thereby articulating this Marion County notion that Man's Law and God's Law were not exactly the same.

  "And if he's a crook," Trotter added, regarding Hyleme George, "he's the nicest crook you ever saw."

  "For that time back when he was getting going, he was pretty powerful," Johnny Boone later said of Hyleme George, adding that George "loved to take chances . . . to gamble with circumstance, but he needed enough money to live on, had a big family to raise, so he wanted to make sure some of those gambles were for sure, too."

  That nice crook who liked to bet on sure things went on to help fend off a wet/dry referendum placed on the 1958 ballot by out-of-town Protestant moralists. With the dry vote defeated and the ABC officer's housebuilding plans on hold, Lebanon's nightlife turned the dial from 9 to 10, on its way to 11, from "wide open" to wider open.

  In 1964, George decided to build the business that would become the centerpiece of his legacy, Club 68, while he also decided to enter politics, which would become the other half of his legacy. He successfully ran for mayor of Lebanon in 1964, in part by charming voters when he chained two black bear cubs to the front of Club 68 to attract customers and voters. In one year he brought black music to a white audience at his club and gave black voters a seat at the table by relying on their vote in his mayoral run.

  For the opening night of Club 68 in 1964, Hyleme George's club manager, Obie Slater, booked blues legend Lloyd Price to sing his hits, "(You've Got) Personality," "Stagger Lee" and "Gonna Get Married," a dialog song between Price and his backup singers:

  The narrator of these Price lyrics could have been any of the bright young men who met their future wives in Club 68, relationships that often turned out surprisingly stable, given their tumultuous startsbonds that began as teenagers, dancing and drinking in Club 68 to first-class live music for years before they were old enough to vote, to serve in the military or to realize how good they had it. These teenagers who could buy beers by the dozen at Hyleme's bar were certain to vote for Hyleme when he ran for reelection, if they were old enough to vote by then.

  By the mid-1960s, Hyleme George had parlayed his "nicest crook" persona into a successful political career as the mayor of Lebanon with a knack for solving the community's problems in his own unique way.

  One such problem was the summer heat and humidity; Kentucky cooked in it. Being indoors without air-conditioning was practically unbearable, especially inside Mary Immaculate Hospital. In addition to fighting the pain of appendicitis or recovering from surgery or childbirth, patients lay in their hospital beds in the sweltering heat with windows open and fans running and flies landing on everything.

  The Dominican sisters ran Mary Immaculate with unmeasured devotion, working diligently to comfort their patients during the summer months-sponging cool water on their brows and giving them ice water with flexible straws, but the relief they offered was insufficient. Without air-conditioning, their patients' misery continued.

  So, during the scorcher of 1969, the nuns began raising money: A teen dance raised $71; a bake sale raised $700; a radio show raised another $225; tobacco farmers gave $2,200. By Christmas, the nuns had raised $5,592.58; estimated cost to air-condition the hospital: $100,000. It seemed hopeless, but the mayor of Lebanon knew of an alternative: Charlie Stiles in Raywick.

  Since the 1940s, even before Hyleme George moved to Lebanon, he had associated with Charlie Stiles and his brother Paul. Although the Stiles brothers were best known as moonshiners and bootleggers, they also knew how to get wholesale appliances at a steep discount. Like Hyleme George, the Stiles brothers play a major role in setting the stage for the Cornbread Mafia. Although Charlie Stiles would be dead before the first pot harvest, his influence upon the Cornbread boys is difficult to overstate. If the Cornbread were a real "mafia," which it wasn't, then Charlie Stiles would have been the godfather.

  Back in 1946, the Stiles brothers' commercial-sized moonshine still had been the likely destination of the 23.8 tons' worth of sugar ration stamps that federal agents caught Hyleme George toting on the Bowman Field tarmac in Louisville. Federal agents finally found that still in 1951, and the judge sentenced Paul and Charlie each to one year in federal prison, to be served alternately so that one could look after the family farm while the other went to prison.

  Upon their return to Raywick, with wartime rationing over, the Stiles brothers diversified their outlaw holdings. While continuing to moonshine, they also began hijacking trucks and fencing stolen goods, enterprises that would span two decades, utilizing younger Raywick talent like Joe Downs, who had recently returned to Marion County from service in the US Marine Corps in California. Downs became a truck driver for Charlie Stiles, and they targeted the General Electric Appliance Park in Louisville, where GE assembled every refrigerator, oven range and clothes washer sold in America-the Detroit of home appliances.

  Many in Marion County carpooled the hour to Louisville every morning for the good-paying union jobs at the GE plant, but the Charlie Stiles crew had no desire to work there when they could fleece GE by the truckload. Soon the cost of modernizing one's household in Marion County dropped dramatically as a flood of side-by-side refrigerators, freezers, washers and dryers in colors like turquoise, avocado and harvest gold washed into Lebanon's kitchens, garages and poker rooms. In this context, Hyleme George must have asked himself, "Why should the nuns pay retail to air-condition the hospital?"

  So, Hyleme George, the mayor of Lebanon, sent someone to ask Sister Mary Dominic Stine, the chief administrator of Mary Immaculate Hospital, if she would like fifty window-unit air conditioners for onetenth the retail price.

  "I never really saw Hyleme. I don't remember who it was," Sister Stine remembered years later. "It was some of Hyleme's relations, but I don't know who it was." She would know if it was Hyleme because, "I guess I knew him all my life."

  On June 26-"I was very busy that day"-Sister Mary Dominic Stine wrote check number 7443 payable to "cash" in the amount of $10,000, which the bank paid in $100 bills. Within a day, she had fifty windowunit air conditioners stacked in the hospital's ambulance garage. Simple as that.

  "Funny part of it is," Stine recalled, "I think everybody in Lebanon knew they were stolen but me. Sounded to me like a pretty good I wasn't around town much, you know...

  "`Is everything all right with them?' I asked.

  "`Oh yeah,' he said."

  A nurse saw the air conditioners and the individuals who unloaded them, and she promptly called the police. At the state police post, Detective Ralph Ross answered the phone and then drove to the hospital garage, where he found fifty GE air conditioners, 23,500 BTUs, still in their boxes, which retailed for $419.95 each.

  "If I had been in my right mind, I would have thought that there was something funny going on," Stine said. "I was in a hell of a mess."

  Ross called GE to send a representative down. It looked like they had a truckload of hot air conditioners on their hands, and the nuns at the hospital seemed to be in possession of stolen property, apparently sold to them by an associate of the mayor.

  "We had two of them put up, one in the emergency room and one on the second floor," Stine said. "When these big guys from GE came up and wanted to know who I had given the money to, I honestly couldn't remember his name. Good thing I couldn't. I was about the only one who didn't know anything."

  The commonwealth attorney filed charges against Hyleme George, Joe Downs and another Raywick man. The men hired as their defense attorney the brilliant and well
-connected Frank Haddad, a member of the same Lebanese immigrant clan that included the Georges and Shaheens.

  Detective Ralph Ross had unraveled the whole Marion County hot appliance pipeline, but now the commonwealth attorney faced Frank Haddad in a Louisville courtroom. It took the prosecutor more than a year to bring the case to court due to Haddad's endless pretrial maneuvering.

  "When I appeared before the grand jury, Frank Haddad told me, `Wear your habit, sister,' and I said, `What for?"' Stine remembered.

  The Dominican sisters had just shed their habits after Vatican II, and even before, Stine had worn a nurse's uniform and then clothing fit for a hospital administrator-never a habit. Yet, when she appeared in the Louisville courtroom, a black-and-white veil covered her head. In it, she felt like she misrepresented herself; it made her uncomfortable.

  "It was an awful thing to me, I tell you," she said. "I was so afraid.... My heart was in my mouth the whole time, you know. I don't remember a great deal because I didn't want to remember any of it."

  Yet, she testified effectively enough for Haddad to strike a deal with the prosecutor. In the end, Lebanon Mayor Hyleme George pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of receiving stolen property without felonious intent and paid a $2,000 fine. Joe Downs and the other Raywick man pleaded guilty and received one-year sentences, but neither of them served a single day in jail. Further, Frank Haddad convinced the court to refund the hospital its $10,000, "with half of my skin on it," Sister Stine later recalled.

  Joe Downs returned to Raywick and began to run several businesses, a small grocery store and a bar called the Fifth Wheel on the other side of the street, next door to the establishment owned by J. E. "Squire" Bickett, whose family will play a central role in the Cornbread story.