The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History
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In 1945, Squire Bickett, a twenty-three-year-old tavern owner who had lost his leg in a motorcycle accident, married nineteen-year-old Coletta, a telephone operator. (He would later play tricks on people unaware of his false leg by stabbing himself in his wooden prosthetic with a buck knife.) Squire brought Coletta back to the Bickett family farm-more than five hundred acres of prime farmland, wooded knob land and river bottom just outside of Raywick's "city limits," originally settled by William and Jane Bickett in 1798 with a 1,800-acre Revolutionary War land grant.' in 1948, with four children in diapers, Squire Bickett moved his family to a downtown Raywick home with no electricity or running water to be close to the tavern opened by Squire's father at the end of Prohibition.
Over the years, Squire Bickett worked a wide array of jobs to feed his growing family: broom maker, grocery store owner, bulldozer operator, oil speculator and farmer. He also ran Squire's Tavern, later christened Bickett's Pool Hall when ownership passed to his sons. His nine children grew up on the farm and in the Raywick house, wearing homemade clothes and fed the food grown in the garden by their mother or hunted by their father.
Louis Earl Bickett, Squire's eldest son, sat at his father's bar as soon as he could drink and passed the time by picking fights with just about anyone who came in from outside Marion County. Squire's second son, Joe Keith, liked to work outdoors and had a sharp mind for business. Squire's third son, Charlie, named after family friend Charlie Stiles, helped his father around the saloon, working behind the bar as a teenager. Between serving drinks, Charlie worked the crowd like a budding politician. Jimmy Bickett, Squire's fourth son, sometimes woke up in the middle of the night and watched his mother fixing breakfast for Charlie Stiles after a long night of stealing something big enough to make him hungry. At other times, young Jimmy would crawl out his bedroom window onto the front porch roof to watch the men drink, fight, drag race and flip cars over to set them on fire.
That was Raywick, a place that suited men like Johnny Boone, who graduated from high school ten years before Jimmy Bickett. But because Boone hailed from neighboring Washington County, his entry into the Bickett family's tavern was not guaranteed; most outsiders had to fight Louis Earl Bickett first.
But not Johnny Boone.
"Johnny didn't have to fight," Charlie Bickett recalled later. "His reputation preceded him.... I mean, you take your kingpins or your big wheels, they all respected Johnny. He was well known and well liked, and he didn't go out of his way to hurt anybody."
The first time Charlie Bickett ever laid eyes on Johnny Boone, he saw the red-bearded farmer from Washington County passed out drunk on the floor of Squire's Tavern.
On the other side of Raywick, however, Father Thomas Caldwell could hardly sleep from the noise made by drunks fighting outside Squire's Tavern and cars racing up and down the road. Children and the elderly feared coming to Mass because drunks still roamed the street on Sunday mornings. Caldwell's predecessor, Father Brown, hadn't had a single good night's sleep in his nine years at Raywick, maintaining the long and tense relationship between Marion County's clergy and its people.
In January 1969, a fight broke out between thirty people on Raywick's main thoroughfare, paralyzing traffic for an hour. The next month, congregants from three Protestant churches met with the Catholics at St. Francis Xavier to discuss bringing law and order to their community; more than 125 concerned citizens attended. The county judge and the county attorney spoke, along with an ABC officer and Squire Bickett, the magistrate for that part of the county. At the meeting's conclusion, the assembly established a committee and charged it to study the situation and take action. Eight men were elected, including Squire Bickett and Charlie Stiles, with the goal of petitioning the sheriff for a deputy to serve the area.
"The people who attended this meeting," Father Caldwell told the Enterprise, "were enthused at the idea of getting something done to have law and order after living in terror of unrulies for so long."
Some time later a local teenager drove crazy through town in a pickup truck, cutting donuts in the St. Francis Xavier parking lot, squealing tires and hollering with the windows rolled down. Charlie Stiles, waking from bed, recognized the driver as J. C. Abell, a young man who had been courting Stiles's adopted daughter.
Acting on behalf of the committee to restore order to Raywick, Charlie Stiles took his shotgun out to his front porch. As the truck made another lap in the church parking lot, Stiles shot a hole through the driver's-side door, hitting Abell in the knee and giving him a limp for the rest of his life. The wound kept J. C. Abell quiet for a while but not forever. He will reappear in this story.
As Raywick's unelected leader, Charlie Stiles gave to his people many of the proceeds of his extralegal adventures. When winter would approach, he would stop at army surplus stores and stock up on boots and coats, take them to a storefront he kept in Raywick and give most of them away. He never locked the store at night. If someone needed something, Stiles just told that person to go take it. After a local marriage, he would take the newlywed couple inside and tell them to take what they needed. Mary Dee, Charlie's wife, tried to run the store when Charlie worked out of town, but he gave away any profit she could muster. So, she eventually made him close it down, but that didn't keep Charlie from giving back to his people, like employing Raywick youths in his more legitimate ventures.
The Bickett boys stripped tobacco on Charlie Stiles's farm every harvest season after they helped bring in their own family's tobacco. Like most farm boys, the Bicketts were often absent from school during these autumn days. Without hired help, farmers relied on their children as a source of labor; the family farm would be economically unsustainable otherwise. The strained tobacco market put even more stress on the children of farmers. Many parents couldn't afford farmhands any longer, so children became responsible for milking cows before and after school every day, setting tobacco in the spring, and stripping it in the autumn before hanging it in the barn to cure. Their classroom education came second.
Jimmy Bickett graduated from the first class of the newly consolidated Marion County High School in 1971; the year before, his brother Charlie had graduated from the last class at St. Charles High, the rural public high school for the Catholic part of the county. It's all the education they would ever need.
The day after Jimmy's graduation, Charlie Stiles put the fourth Bickett son on his work crew, tearing down the old barracks at Ft. Knox. He paid Jimmy the same as his other workers, two dollars a day, plus meals of bologna sandwiches and a bushel of apples.
"I heard a lot of Charlie Stiles stories growing up," retired State Police Detective Jacky Hunt said later. "I remember he was big on stolen bulldozers and all kinds of stuff...
"I grew up digging ginseng with my papaw, his name was Romey Hunt. Everybody knew him over there. He was a big card player; everybody played poker. What was that called at Club 68, the Blue Room? My granddaddy used to be a dealer at the Blue Room. Of course, that was before my time....
"When I was a little boy, my granddaddy would tell me all these stories. And he told me the story of Charlie Bickett-I mean, not Charlie Bickett, Charlie Stiles. Everybody liked Charlie, and he apparently was pretty personable.
"He told the story-I don't know what he was doing, out digging ginseng or something-but he was pulled over on the side of the road, and he was stuck. It was pouring down rain, and Charlie Stiles pulled up, and got out, got on his hands and knees, crawled underneath the truck, pulled a chain on it, and got him out. He got all muddy, but he got him out of the ditch. He always told that story about Charlie Stiles.
"Charlie had all this money, which he got from various ways, but you know, he took the time to pull him out of the ditch. So, you know, that's why a lot of people liked Charlie Stiles. I just remember hearing a lot of stories about that growing up."
Less than a month after Jimmy Bickett graduated from Marion County High School, the commissioner of the Kentucky State Police (KSP) called a meeting of the
Organized Crime Unit in Frankfort on Thursday, June 17, 1971, with the sole purpose of planning "an investigation into the activities of Charles G. Stiles of Raywick," according to a report filed by Detective Ralph Ross, an attendee, who had never forgotten the "hot air-conditioner incident" and always suspected that Charlie Stiles had somehow been behind it.
After the meeting, four detectives checked out two unmarked cruisers and drove to the Holiday Inn in Bardstown. That night Ross gave the other detectives a tour of Nelson County, passing My Old Kentucky Home State Park and the Heaven Hill distillery on their way out of Bardstown before plunging into the knobs on a narrow strip of asphalt toward Marion County. The unlit, shoulderless highway wove itself through the deeply wooded hills before crossing the flat farmland that surrounded Holy Cross at the Marion County line. At Holy Cross, the highway veered left toward Loretto, but Ross turned right onto an even narrower road that led toward Raywick and the unit's principal surveillance points: Charlie Stiles's house in downtown Raywick and Paul Stiles's farm a mile away at the foot of the escarpment. From there, Ross drove his crew the eleven miles from Raywick into Lebanon to show them Club 68 and the state police post just down the road.
For a whole weekend, this crew staked out Raywick in teams of two around the clock, wearing suits in unmarked sedans, never seeing anything illegal until Sunday night, when a 1953 blue Chevrolet ran two detectives off a narrow farm lane in St. Mary's called Frogtown Roadthe blue Chevy driving off, leaving the sedan in the ditch, its headlights illuminating wire fencing, green pastures, dark trees.
"This is a typical act of harassment used by Stiles," Ross typed in his report.
The next day, all four detectives watched the Stiles farm from two unmarked cruisers, pulled off the highway on Stiles property. All day the Stiles brothers set tobacco. When it started to rain, Charlie and Paul hopped into Charlie's white truck and drove toward the police. When he approached them, Stiles sideswiped both unmarked cruisers, leaving Ross and his men cussing in Stiles's driveway as they inspected their damaged sedans. Stiles, an amateur legal expert, knew that because the detectives had entered onto his property, they couldn't do anything about the damage.
"Stiles is aware of our presents [sic] in the area," Ross reported.
When the detectives exchanged one of the damaged cruisers at headquarters, their supervisor assigned them two uniformed troopers.
The next Thursday the detectives couldn't find Charlie Stiles anywhere, so Ralph Ross ordered the two uniformed troopers to stop every car that passed through Raywick as the four detectives watched to see if the two troopers could rouse their quarry. The uniformed troopers found a wide spot in the road, parked their cruiser there, and pulled over every driver in and out of town-the cruiser's bubblegum light painting Raywick blue.
A crowd gathered outside Squire's Tavern, the Fifth Wheel and the liquor store to cuss the police. When the cruiser pulled out to chase yet another car, someone took a sack of roofing nails-short and sharp with wide heads so they stand up on their ends-and spread them around the little turnoff spot that the troopers had been using. When the troopers returned to their parking spot, laughter had replaced the cussing coming from the loitering locals.
Then, at 11:00 p.m., a man walked out of the liquor store and spoke his mind.
"I'm going to go home and get my shotgun and kill all these damn State Police," he crowed.
The detectives stepped out of their cruisers and arrested him on the spot, prompting a mob of men from the pool hall and bars to pour into the street and press in against the detectives and their cruisers. As the horde pushed in on the police, one detective said some things that soon after got him reassigned. Another officer pulled a shotgun from his cruiser to disperse the crowd. With the state policemen outnumbered ten to one, Ross hopped into the cruiser that contained the arrested man and drove him to a holding cell in Lebanon. As the commotion died down, three tires from the marked cruiser, filled with roofing nails, hissed air.
The next Tuesday, Elmer George, Stiles's young attorney (and Hyleme's nephew), called the state police to ask if there were warrants out for his client, who, he claimed, was out of state. But Detective Ross spotted Charlie Stiles the same day at Ft. Knox, demolishing old barracks with a crew of Marion County boys.
"All surveillance in the area from this date on will be on foot," Ross reported and then took a two-week vacation, leaving two detectives to watch Stiles and his crew at Ft. Knox, running the plates on every vehicle and piece of heavy equipment that arrived, hoping that something would come up stolen. It never did.
Several times that summer, Johnny Boone watched Charlie Stiles bring his work crew home from Ft. Knox, towing wagons filled with lumber salvaged from the old barracks. He would see Jimmy Bickett and his buddies riding on the back of a wagon, on the top of a heap of paint-flecked lumber filled with rusty nails, arriving in Raywick at top speed at the end of a fiftymile journey through the twisted highway as if they were kids on a hayride.
For a whole month, the state police charged with watching Charlie Stiles could not find him. When they finally did, they shot him dead. Exactly how Charles Griffin Stiles came to his death remains disputed; many in Marion County do not believe the official version, as filed by Detective Ralph Ross:
On September 5, 1971, the Kentucky State Police's Charlie Stiles squad discovered a stolen van filled with appliances. The vehicle was hidden in a cornfield behind a barn at the end of a Spencer County farm road, some forty-five miles from Raywick. They staked it out.
Friday night, September 10, 9:00 p.m. A white Ford pickup truck pulled into the gravel road in front of the barn and stopped; the driver cut the lights, stopped the engine and stepped out. Ross reported that the following happened next:
Detective Campbell said, `Kentucky State Police, "and at this time the subject turned and started firing a gun, hitting Detective Campbell. The fire was returned, resulting in the death of a subject later identified as Charles G. Stiles, Raywick, Kentucky.
At 2:00 a.m., a captain from the state police called Raywick to tell Charlie Stiles's wife and brother that he was dead. Word spread quickly through Marion County that the state police had killed the Robin Hood of Raywick. To those hearing it, everything about it seemed wrong.
Charlie Stiles had fought the law since he was a boy and, until he lost, had always won. The feds caught him twice, in 1951 and 1961, but went easy on him in sentencing. Courts dismissed his other nineteen arrests, or he beat them in court, with charges ranging from moonshining (two counts) and possessing and selling untaxed liquor (one count) to writing bad checks (four counts), committing grand larceny (seven counts) and knowingly receiving stolen property (three counts).
There was also an assault-and-battery charge filed by the state trooper whom Charlie Stiles had dragged down the street in his truck for attempting to arrest him without a warrant (acquitted) and a charge of aiding and abetting the uttering of a forged instrument (dismissed). A charge of giving a false statement to the Department of Agriculture added the USDA to the list of agencies that crossed Stiles's path, a list that included the FBI, the US Marshals Service, the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax Division of the IRS (precursor to the ATF), the IRS itself, the police forces of Louisville, the Commonwealth of Kentucky, the state of Indiana and a number of sheriff departments.
In his brushes with the law, Stiles had honed a sharp legal mind. For any unforeseen occurrence in federal court, Stiles hired Frank Haddad; for any problems locally, Stiles had Elmer George, Haddad's protege. Joe Downs, another Haddad client, later recalled that when he called Haddad's office after hours, Charlie Stiles would often answer the phone.
Charlie Stiles spent time in federal prisons in Alabama and Indiana, yet the Kentucky State Police could never catch him, could never pin a charge on him that would stick. So, a team of four detectives shot him dead, officially in self-defense. The Courier-journal ran a short notice of his death the next week:
RAYWICK MAN SHOT, DIES OF WOUND
Those who knew Charlie Stiles had a problem with this version of events. "An exchange of gunfire?" Charlie Stiles never carried a gun, they said to themselves. He had even chastised one of his drivers, Warren "Sonny" Larue, a real gun lover, for carrying a gun.
"Getting caught with a gun," Stiles told him, "will get you five years for nothing."
The only pistol Stiles ever owned lay where he had left it-in the kitchen cabinet in his home in Raywick, according to his widow, Mary Dee. All his criminal activity-moonshining, bootlegging, cattle rustling and larceny-had been nonviolent; never an armed robbery in his thirtyplus-year career as an outlaw. Of the nineteen times police arrested him, never once did they catch him in possession of a firearm.
After the state police examined Charlie Stiles's body in Spencer County, they sent his body to Bosley's Funeral Home in Lebanon, where the undertaker sutured his eighteen bullet holes, embalmed his body and prepared him for burial. His funeral service filled and overfilled the funeral home chapel as farmers and workers waited outside, their hats in hands, solemnly murmuring among themselves about the life and death of Charlie Stiles, exchanging stories about what he did to make the state police so angryabout how he buried one stolen bulldozer with another stolen bulldozer, how he switched a stolen backhoe for a not-stolen backhoe and made the policemen look like fools. Everyone had a favorite Charlie Stiles story.
The laughter and conversation of the overflow crowd loosely assembled in the front yard of the funeral home died away when the pallbearers carried the coffin outside, giving the assembled farmers their first glimpse of Charlie Stiles dead. As the hearse pulled away, a string of cars and trucks with their headlights on folded behind in a tight procession out of Lebanon, an eleven-mile-long snake of farm trucks and family sedans filled with people who gave their whole Monday morning to honor his passing. As the hearse arrived at St. Francis Xavier Cemetery in Raywick, vehicles were still just entering the procession in Lebanon.