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

by James Higdon

  "Yes, at the Water Street Cafe."

  "Let's go outside," Russell told Irvin, without saying anything to his wife.

  VanArsdale stepped outside first, walked about fifteen feet and looked back. Irvin came out next, then Russell. In the summer darkness, Russell told Irvin:

  "I'm going to whip you for telling lies on my wife."

  VanArsdale turned around, walked up to them and tried to break up the fight.

  "You whip him," he told Russell, "and you've got me to whip, too."

  So, Russell pulled a .22-caliber pistol out of his pocket and shot VanArsdale, who dropped to the ground with a bullet in his stomach. Russell stood above him with a smile on his face and shot VanArsdale a second time in the same spot without saying a word.

  Russell then turned his attention back to Irvin, who worried less about his own safety than about the gut-shot and bleeding VanArsdale.

  "He's going to die," Irvin pleaded.

  Finally Russell relented and grabbed VanArsdale by the feet while Irvin held him under the arms, and they carried him to the back seat of the turquoise-and-white convertible. But they didn't leave right away. Russell and Irvin continued to argue as VanArsdale drifted in and out of consciousness, slumped longways in the back seat of his own car, bleeding all over its white vinyl interior.

  When VanArsdale came to, the car was in motion. Irvin sat in the back seat with him, and Freda sat in the front next to Garland Russell, who was behind the wheel. Russell stopped the car and ordered Irvin to get out. The two men stood close enough to the car for VanArsdale to hear them argue, their feet scuffling.

  "Garland, please don't kill me," VanArsdale heard Irvin say.

  Russell didn't say a word.

  Irvin must have convinced Russell of something because Russell let him get into the back seat again with VanArsdale. Russell started the car as his wife tried to talk to him.

  Just as Irvin relaxed, Russell turned around, reached into the back of the car and wrapped his hands around Irvin's throat. Irvin hollered and jumped up. VanArsdale turned his head to look up from the floorboard to watch it all unfold. Irvin kicked the front seat with both legs to get free from Russell's grip, so Russell pulled Irvin by the throat across the seat and held his thumbs against Irvin's windpipe until his legs stopped twitching. After Irvin's body went slack, Russell left the body draped across the white vinyl passenger-seat headrest.

  When they started driving again, VanArsdale asked Russell from the back seat what he and Charlie had done wrong. Russell didn't answer, but he stopped the car again and grabbed a rifle from the frontseat floorboard.

  "Don't shoot me again," VanArsdale pleaded, and as if he had convinced Russell to spare his life, Russell put the gun away and started the car again.

  "What's the matter with Charlie?" VanArsdale asked, referring to Irvin.

  "You know," Russell said. "He's dead."

  Then Russell stopped the car a third time and took a shotgun from the front seat. VanArsdale knew that this time Russell meant to kill him.

  "Can I pray?" he asked Russell.

  "Go ahead."

  Russell walked outside and pointed the 20-gauge shotgun barrel over the back door of the convertible. VanArsdale looked right up the barrel into Russell's calm face.

  "Did you know about Betty?" Russell asked him, referring to his first wife.

  VanArsdale had no idea what Russell meant. Russell coolly squeezed the trigger, hitting VanArsdale in the left arm and left side of his torso with a point-blank blast of buckshot. VanArsdale fell into the floorboard on his face, clutching his arm. He felt blood running through his fingers; he passed out. Russell drove the car back to Freda's house, and they went inside.

  Alone outside, VanArsdale regained consciousness around 4:00 a.m. on Wednesday, June 17. Irvin's body was slumped over the passenger seat. Climbing over the front seat, smearing blood all over the car's white interior, VanArsdale grabbed the steering wheel and drove off, hoping to get to Danville with Irvin's body riding shotgun. He drove fast and started getting dizzy, so he thought he should stop at the next house he passed.

  Hubert Wren, forty-five, awoke when a car pulled into his yard blowing its horn. His mother, Dora, thought it was George Ed Tucker coming up to go fox hunting. When Wren went to the door and opened it, he saw a man he had never met before walking toward him and bleeding badly, holding his left arm with his right. Wren backed up and let VanArsdale walk into the front door, where Wren got a good look at him.

  "What in the world is the matter with you?" Wren asked.

  "Garland Russell shot me. Can you help me?"

  Wren grabbed him by the good shoulder. He didn't know VanArsdale, but he knew Garland Russell. When he heard that name, he felt the blood drain from his body.

  "Listen, buddy," Wren told him. "You will have to go. You can't stay here."

  Wren gave VanArsdale a shove in his good shoulder, and VanArsdale turned and went out the screen door. A pair of headlights was approaching from Danville Highway, so VanArsdale started running. He ran until his body gave out; lying where he fell, he put his hand over his mouth to keep his breathing quiet and passed out again.

  As soon as VanArsdale disappeared, Garland Russell pulled into the Wrens'yard driving A. J. Hourigan's 1941 Plymouth (the one that Russell had bled in the back seat of en route to the hospital seven and a half years before). Russell kicked in Wren's door carrying a shotgun.

  "Where did he go?" Russell asked Wren.

  "He's outside."

  Russell dropped a shotgun shell on the floor and then bent over to pick it up. To Wren, Russell appeared "sober" and "calm as a leaf." Russell went outside, jumped over some steps and walked around the back of the house looking for VanArsdale. After about five minutes, Russell drove away in the '41 Plymouth.

  Garland Russell drove back to Freda's house in the Plymouth and told her they would have to go. They climbed into A. J. Hourigan's 1947 black three-quarter-ton flatbed truck with Garland behind the wheel. A half-hour after Garland had left the Wrens' house, Hubert Wren saw the three-quarter-ton flatbed truck drive down Danville Highway toward Riley. Then, fifteen minutes later, he saw the same truck returning toward Gravel Switch. Meanwhile, Wren thought for sure the boy who had come to the door was dead in the woods.

  The next thing VanArsdale knew, it was daylight. He saw sky; he could barely move. It was summer, but he was cold. He pulled himself up by a small tree and looked around. He saw a house and a smokehouse and started walking toward them without realizing it was the same place he had run away from just a few hours before. He came up on the back porch and beat on the Wrens' kitchen door.

  "I've been shot. Help me," he hollered, but the Wrens didn't answer.

  Inside the house, Hubert Wren's mother and his two handicapped sisters were crying.

  "Hubert, just be still," his mother said, "and maybe the boy will go to sleep."

  "All right, to satisfy you, I will be still," he said, according to his statement to the police later.

  But Hubert Wren couldn't go back to sleep. VanArsdale kept "making kin outside." So, Wren went to the house of his father, Lucien Wren.

  "Something's got to be done, Daddy," he told him.

  Lucien Wren then went to the house of Wallace Smothers to call the sheriff, Ham Blandford. Hubert went back to his house. Before the sheriff arrived, his father and Smothers showed up.

  "Where is this boy that got shot?" Smothers asked Hubert.

  "Around there by the kitchen door."

  Hubert's father and Smothers went around back. Smothers looked at Hubert.

  "There's nobody here," Smothers said.

  "He was here about two minutes ago."

  Smothers scanned the landscape; there was nothing nearby except the Wrens'smokehouse, where VanArsdale woke up hearing voices.

  "Mercy me!" he screamed. "Can you help me?"

  Wallace Smothers opened the smokehouse door and looked down at VanArsdale huddled on the floor. Then he asked VanArsdale who
he was and what had happened.

  "Garland Russell shot me-killed Charlie-he's crazy-"

  Shortly after, just as the sun rose, Marion County Sheriff Ham Blandford arrived, followed by an ambulance that rushed VanArsdale to Mary Immaculate Hospital in Lebanon, which would remain un-airconditioned for another five years.

  Kentucky State Police Detective Billy Lloyd saw the ambulance blaze back toward Lebanon on his way to the smokehouse scene. A minute later Lloyd stepped out of his cruiser and onto the Wrens' property, where the sheriff and his deputies were just beginning to inspect VanArsdale's turquoise-on-white Chevy convertible.

  What they found confused them.

  From the state of Charlie Irvin's body, still draped facedown over the white vinyl front seat, a deputy speculated that he had been run over by a truck, and because of the significant amount of blood and bits of arm muscle that VanArsdale had spread around the front seat, back seat and floorboards, the sheriff thought there might be a third victim somewhere. When they eliminated the possibility of a third victim, they then assumed that both VanArsdale and Irvin had been shot.

  The county coroner arrived and determined that, no, Irvin hadn't been shot at all, only strangled. All the blood and guts belonged only to VanArsdale, and somehow he was still alive.

  Russell and his wife made their getaway in Freda's ex-husband's three-quarter-ton flatbed truck. Meanwhile, Sheriff Blandford obtained a search warrant for Freda's house, still legally owned by A. J. Hourigan. Blandford and State Police Detective Billy Lloyd found the Remington 20-gauge shotgun that had shot VanArsdale in the bedroom and a .22-caliber Remington pistol, loaded with six hollow-point rounds, tucked under the cushions of Freda's living room sofa. Then they searched all the barns and outbuildings on the property, including A. J.'s unfinished home, where they found the'41 Plymouth.

  Sunday, June 21. Four days after the killing, eighteen miles from Gravel Switch on the other side of Marion County, Tommy Mattingly worked behind the counter at Mattingly's Grocery in St. Mary's while listening to the radio: The Cincinnati Reds split a doubleheader with the Los Angeles Dodgers; Jim Bunning pitched the first regular-season perfect game since Charlie Robertson in 1922; and three civil rights workers disappeared in Mississippi.

  At 9:30 p.m., just before Mattingly locked up, Freda entered. She looked haggard; her legs were scratched. She asked for a razor and blades, but Mattingly didn't have any. She bought a box of Kotex tampons, two cans of orange juice, three packs of Viceroy cigarettes, five penny matchboxes, six Milky Way bars, two boxes of shampoo, one bottle of Head & Shoulders and a large cake.

  When she left, Mattingly called the sheriff, suspecting she was one of the fugitives wanted in connection with the killing on the other side of the county. Within an hour, a state trooper arrived at the grocery with a photograph of Freda. Mattingly looked at the photograph and said he couldn't be sure it was the same person. He was certain about one thing: She hadn't bathed in days.

  At 12:30 a.m., two Lebanon police officers saw a woman on the railroad tracks. It could have been Freda, but she disappeared before they could get close enough to be certain.

  Word went out over the police channels that "Freda Hourigan" might be walking along the tracks to avoid detection. Two state troopers staked out the railroad five miles east of Lebanon, while another team searched the tracks on the other side of Gravel Switch until sunrise at 5:20. At 6:00 a.m., another search team formed by an L&N Railroad employee and an ABC agent found remnants of a trackside picnic about a mile west of Lebanon. Finding nothing else, they eventually called the search off after walking fifty miles of track between New Haven and Junction City across three counties.

  On Monday morning, a state police detective drove to the Veterans Hospital in Lexington to interview J. W. VanArsdale in room 32 on the fourth floor. VanArsdale told the detective that after he had been shot the first time and was lying on the floorboard of the convertible in a semiconscious state, he heard Charlie Irvin screaming and believed that Garland Russell had choked him to death with a chain.

  "What county did this occur in?" the detective asked. "Marion or Boyle?"

  "Marion. On Freda Russell's farm on the Fork," meaning the Rolling Fork River. By calling Freda by Garland's surname, VanArsdale was the first to recognize the jailhouse matrimony that started all this trouble.' police were still searching for Freda Hourigan.

  As the detective interviewed VanArsdale, Mr. and Mrs. Garland Russell were still on the run, trying to get into Washington County by hiking across farmland. Four nights before, when all this had started, Freda had been wearing high-heeled shoes. By the end, she was barefoot, her legs cut on barbed wire. She was getting sick, and Russell had to carry her. As they came across a herd of Black Angus cattle, they spotted a tenant farmer working the next field. Russell asked the man where they could find a telephone.

  "Go to the house," he replied.

  Once the two suspicious drifters were out of sight, the tenant alerted the property owner, who called the police from the milk parlor. Garland and Freda walked another mile before the state police arrested them by a wooded clearing about four hundred yards off Danville Highway. When the police booked them, Garland had $33 in bills in his wallet, a tape measure and a set of keys in his pockets, and he wore a felt hat and a twenty-three-jewel Bulova watch. Freda, five-foot-six and 125 pounds, had a $5 bill in her purse.

  A story started circulating through the Lebanon rumor mill that an Angus bull had chased the Russells out of hiding into the arms of the police, but sitting in a cell in the Marion County jail, Garland Russell quickly discounted that story.

  "I don't know where it got started," he told a local reporter, "but I certainly did not get run out by a bull." He told the reporter that his wife was sick, so "I had to get her out and get her to a doctor."

  Two and a half months later, in September 1964, judge George Bertram moved Garland Russell's trial to Taylor County, seeking a more impartial jury.

  When VanArsdale testified against Russell, he had part of his intestines in a bag on the outside of his body and had just recovered from an abdominal cyst caused by his gunshot wounds. He testified to a packed courthouse, answering all the detailed questions from the night that Russell shot him and killed his friend. As he testified, VanArsdale looked at Russell only once, when a lawyer asked how much he thought Russell weighed.

  In December, the Taylor County jury failed to reach a verdict on the three-count indictment: shooting with intent to kill, habitual criminal and murder. To avoid a second trial, Russell pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter, and Judge Bertram sentenced him to ten years in the LaGrange Reformatory, from which he had been released just eight months before.

  While in prison for this, his third time, Garland Russell met Joe Mike Mouser, a Raywick-born outlaw doing time for various offenses: grand larceny, attempted bribery of a state policeman, cattle rustling-the usual.' he two men got along, and Mouser invited Russell back to Raywick when he finished serving his time. When the state paroled Russell in 1972, he headed straight for Raywick and bought the house once owned by Charlie Stiles.

  Though people would not soon forget Charlie Stiles or the impact he had upon their lives, the two-story white frame house in downtown Raywick that had been the hub of Raywick life during the Stiles era had begun to deteriorate. Charlie and Mary Dee Stiles not only had lived in that house for nearly twenty years but also had raised about a dozen foster children there, kids collected from families who couldn't care for them on their own. And it was the house where the black bear that Charlie had acquired from Hyleme George lived until someone got it so drunk that it tore up the house and Mary Dee made Charlie get rid of it. After Charlie's death, Mary Dee moved into a smaller, one-story brick ranch house just around the corner, and the house that had been her home with Charlie Stiles began to crumble from neglect-as if Russell's mere presence accelerated the fall of the house of Stiles, the once-handsome white facade quickly morphing into that of a paint-flecked hau
nted house.

  When the Stiles home had crumbled beyond Russell's standard of living, he paid his insurance bill, turned on the gas and blasted the house's facade across the street into the parking lot next to Bickett's Pool Hall. If he hadn't said it before, he said it then: Garland Russell had arrived in Raywick.

  Garland Russell soon established himself among the Raywick crew considered to be the first generation of Kentucky marijuana growers, men who were much younger than he but who already had a few growing seasons' experience. How many young men engaged in the illegal cultivation of Marion County cannabis around 1972 would be impossible to calculate, but they likely numbered in the dozens, and they included Johnny Boone, the Bickett brothers, and a number of Vietnam veterans like Bobby Joe Shewmaker, Meece Williamson, who would kill Paul Stiles's son inside the Fifth Wheel in the early 1990s, and Don Nalley, whose career would end abruptly in 1983 when a high-caliber bullet ripped through him in his New Haven driveway.

  Johnny Boone never served in Vietnam, but Bobby Joe Shewmaker told him about a few of his experiences there:

  "He said he was downriver where he could see. He said there was a bunch of guys up there whose lieutenant was killed just then," Boone recalled later. "He said a bunch of what they called `gooks,' which meant they figured they were fighting for the North Vietnam.' They was wearing Vietnamese clothes. I guess it's hard to tell ...

  "The river wasn't very deep, but they were wide where they had eroded over the centuries, they come across there. And when it didn't look like no more were going to come out of the jungle ... they just opened up, guns clacking, clacking.

  "He said you could see them fall off them water buffalo, killed every one of them, shot a couple buffalo, too. He said, whatever went down in the water you could see it floating down the river ...

  "He said taking prisoners there was about a joke because nobody enforced it. Nobody instrumented any transfer or anything. Recon lieutenant and captain would come out there if you captured five men, you call it in on the radio and recon would come out there and question them, might beat the shit out of them, try to get them to talk or something. When they were done with them, recon left.