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

  When Prohibition ended in 1933, Marion County refused to end its outlaw ways, and moonshining continued unabated, especially during World War II, when the government rationed alcohol along with sugar, a key ingredient of moonshine. The illegal trafficking of sugar may sound like a joke, but it was indeed a crime during the war and for nearly a year after. It's a crime that will serve as the introduction for a character who will play a supporting role in this story: Hyleme George, the child of Lebanese immigrants and the future mayor of Lebanon, Kentucky.

  At 2:00 a.m. on November 6, 1946-after the Allied victory but before the end of rationing-Hyleme George deplaned a flight from Chicago carrying a suitcase. When he stepped onto the tarmac in the middle of a rainstorm, he was stopped by police and IRS agents, who knew him to be a former taxi driver with a record of gambling arrests. Inside George's suitcase, police found enough sugar ration stamps for 47,657 pounds of sugar-sugar allegedly destined to be made into moonshine. Given an average ratio of ten pounds of sugar to one gallon of moonshine, that's enough sugar to make 4,765 gallons of moonshine-plus three quarts.

  Soon after the bust, in which the Courier journal in Louisville referred to George as a "sugar stamp racketeer," George moved from Louisville to Lebanon, where his Lebanese family had already set down roots: Dr. Eli George, one of the county's few physicians, had established a medical practice on Main Street years earlier, and Philip George owned a wholesale liquor distributorship on Water Street, the back street behind Main.

  It didn't take long for Hyleme to go into business with his brother, Philip, as Hyleme felt comfortable in the liquor business, which was a growth industry in Marion County. After Prohibition, the Kentucky legislature deferred the issue of liquor legality to the counties, and each county voted itself "wet" or "dry."True to its nature, Marion proudly chose its fate as the last wet county to the Tennessee line, 108 miles away.

  After establishing his foothold in Lebanon, Hyleme George bought another business on Water Street, a juke joint called Club Cherry, a music venue and watering hole that catered to the town's black folk. By 1950, Club Cherry had become a seminal stop on the Chitlin' Circuit, that network of black nightclubs throughout the South that thrived during and in spite of segregation. In 1951, a skinny piano player named Little Richard rolled into Lebanon singing a song about a drag queen from Georgia named Miss Sonya and left Lebanon having changed the song title and chorus in honor of Club Cherry's manager, Lucille Edelen; in 1955, when a locomotive rolled by Club Cherry's door on its way to Chicago or Atlanta, Junior Parker played "Mystery Train" in a double bill with Bobby "Blue" Bland; that skinny black kid in the army jacket playing the guitar with his teeth at Club Cherry in 1963, that was Jimi Hendrix.

  Hyleme George hired Obie Slater to replace Lucille Edelen as Club Cherry's manager in the early 1950s; the Parker-Bland double bill had been Slater's first booking job. A year after he booked Hendrix, Slater booked a new Stax artist named Otis Redding for $300 for two nights of Redding singing "These Arms of Mine" and "Can't Turn You Loose."The second time Slater booked Redding, Redding's agent charged $600 for one show, which paid for a pre-Monterey Pop performance of Redding's "Respect" and his cover of"(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction,"with the horn section playing the Keith Richards guitar line.

  Then Hyleme George made a business decision that changed the history of Lebanon and Kentucky-and of rock 'n' roll. In 1964, he opened Club 68, a nightclub named for the highway that ran through Main Street, a highway that would carry hundreds of cars bringing thousands of people-mostly wide-eyed teenagers-to Lebanon every weekend from a hundred miles away or more, young white kids who were drawn by the black musicians who had been playing to black folks on Water Street for more than a decade by then. Club 68 united, for the first time in those parts, black musicians with white audiences, brought together by a Lebanese immigrant in Lebanon, Kentucky. This strange brew, combined with lax enforcement of underage drinking laws, quickly catapulted Lebanon into a primary nightlife destination for young people across Kentucky and beyond, prompting the Courier ,journal to refer to Lebanon during an investigation of its club scene as "the Ft. Lauderdale of central Kentucky."

  Of all the performers who passed through Hyleme's clubs, none of them-not even Jimi Hendrix-left a greater impression on audiences than Ike and Tina Turner, who played the Cherry and Club 68 between a dozen and twenty times, depending on whom one asks. The memories of these shows-from locals, out-of-town college boys and the gonzo disc jockeys from WAKY-AM, who could hardly believe what passed for normal in Lebanon-illuminate a page ripped from popular music history, with Hyleme George grilling steaks for the band as the bus arrived, Ike Turner firing his drummer for being ten minutes late and Tina shimmering on stage.

  At some point in 1977 after Ike and Tina's final appearance in Lebanon, local legend claims that Hyleme George received a phone call from Tina Turner. She had just broken up with Ike, and if Hyleme could send her $5,000, she knew that she could make it on her own. Decades later, when Tina Turner performed in Louisville's Freedom Hall during a world tour, Obie Slater managed to get backstage to see if Tina remembered him, but she disappointed him.

  "I think I might remember," she told Slater. "But I don't know."

  What we do know is that this relationship between Hyleme George and the Turners began in 1961, when the jukebox man loaded a single into the Club Cherry jukebox that caught Obie Slater's ear-Ike and Tina's second hit record, "It's Gonna Work Out Fine."

  Of course, Ike and Tina's relationship did not work out fine. Neither did the wild notion taken by many Marion County boys who drank and danced and fist-fought to this soundtrack that they could make a living by breaking the law, growing plants considered by the government to be a threat to society.

  In the belly of Club 68-listening to the likes of Ike and Tinathose who became the Cornbread 70 received their education in life skills, where laws weren't so much broken as simply ignored, the outside world and its consequences held at bay by a multigenerational code of silence and a soundtrack of rock 'n' roll and rhythm and blues, where otherwise good Catholic boys learned to run from the law. The 1971 yearbook from Marion County High School contains numerous photos of young men who would be included among the Cornbread 70. Take, for instance, Jimmy Bickett.

  Elected class clown in 1971, Jimmy Bickett spent his weekends in high school dealing cards at the endless game of seven-card stud run out of the Blue Room in the back of Club 68. When Hyleme George played, he always sat next to the dealer, and as soon as the other players were drunk or distracted, Hyleme would nudge Bickett under the table, and Bickett would rake the pot twice in the same hand. From watching the game played this way, Jimmy Bickett learned that even when he lost, Hyleme George found a way to win.

  By the time Bickett graduated high school in 1971, enough boys from Marion County-including Bobby Joe Shewmaker-had returned from Vietnam as men who brought news that in the big cities, people paid a fortune for the weed growing wild behind their grandfathers' barns, forgotten remnants of the hemp-growing effort during World War II. Due to their upbringing, the young Marion County men viewed the criminality of growing weed as an afterthought at best.

  "Oh yeah, it's illegal," Johnny Boone remembered being told. "So, don't get caught."

  Thus it began.

  Starting in 1971, a certain type of Marion County boy couldn't wait to graduate high school so he could grow himself a great big field of marijuana-and that's how the 1970s rolled into the 1980s, a phenomenon that did not go unnoticed by police and therefore generated a steady stream of headlines in the Lebanon Enterprise year by year, of which these are just a sample:

  November 22, 1979: WHO GREW THE POT CROP? POLICE HAVE NO SUSPECTS

  July 31, 1980: POLICE DISCOVER SEVEN ACRES OF MARIJUANA ON COUNTY FARM

  August 7, 1980: MARIJUANA IS FOUND IN CORN FIELD

  August 14, 1980: MORE THAN 45 ACRES OF "GRASS" ARE FOUND AND DESTROYED IN THE COUNTY

  September 15, 1982: KENTUCKY STATE
POLICE, SHERIFF HARVEST MORE POT

  September 22, 1982: POLICE FIND 1,000 POT PLANTS IN RAYWICK BARN

  July 9, 1986: POLICE FIND 60,000 MARIJUANA PLANTS

  August 6, 1986: POLICE OFFICERS CONTINUE WAR ON MARION COUNTY MARIJUANA

  An exhaustive list of marijuana-related headlines from the Lebanon Enterprise would go on for quite some time. Police were even stumbling onto it accidentally:

  December 6, 1979: POLICE FIND POT WHILE SEARCHING FOR [COP KILLER] GRAHAM

  September 22, 1982: HIGH SPEED CHASE RESULTS IN POT FIND

  The story behind these headlines is partly one of how economic hardships manifested themselves in a particular community. By the 1980s, the family farm was crumbling-not just one farm or another particular family but the whole notion of one family sustaining a living off one farm, the notion upon which many in Marion County and elsewhere in America had staked their livelihoods for generations. At the same time, the free market eroded Marion County's primary crop, burley tobacco, from both ends-usage among American adults started to decline as the tobacco companies began buying burley from international markets for pennies on the dollar for what it cost them at home, even though Kentucky farmers practically gave it away at $1.60 per pound.

  By 1985, the unemployment rate in Marion County reached 18 percent on its way to 20. While families found it harder to make a living on the farm, few viable alternatives existed for those who sought a way out. Many men from Marion County carpooled for more than an hour every morning to factory jobs in Louisville, working eight-hour assembly-line shifts at General Electric or Ford and carpooling home in time for supper.

  The factory jobs inside Marion County, found in a small garment factory, a sheet-metal lithography plant, the bourbon-barrel cooperage and the Maker's Mark distillery-although essential to the county's survival during the Reagan years-couldn't begin to employ all the able-bodied adults looking for work. Many of these out-of-work farmers chose to break the law rather than take a check from the federal government for doing nothing. And as the stakes rose, it only increased their resolve to continue:

  August 21, 1980: STATE POLICE SEEK INDICTMENTS IN FEDERAL COURT AGAINST THOSE WHO ALLEGEDLY CULTIVATED "GRASS"

  July 28, 1982: STIFFER POT LAWS HAVE NOT STOPPED LOCAL MARIJUANA GROWERS

  November 26, 1986: FBI SEIZES 37-ACRE FARM WHERE POLICE FIND DOPE

  These headlines from the 1980s signal the changing game of cat and mouse between law enforcement and pot farmers. Stiffer state laws didn't work? Send the pot farmers to federal court. Not tough enough? Take their property. For every new weapon the law used to curtail the Marion County marijuana growers, the growers improvised strategies to beat it. But the law never backed down, and a steady stream of Marion County residentsseventy of them between 1987 and 1989-paid a visit to the inside of the federal prison-industrial complex as guests of the American taxpayer:

  September 11, 1980 SIX ARE INDICTED BY FEDERAL GRAND JURY THEY'RE CHARGED WITH GROWING MARIJUANA

  August 11, 1982: SECOND MARION COUNTIAN IS CHARGED IN CONNECTION WITH INDIANA MARIJUANA BUST

  August 18, 1982: THREE MARION COUNTY MEN ARE ARRESTED ON MARIJUANA CHARGES

  November 12, 1986: NINE MEN BUSTED ON POT CHARGES IN WOODFORD COUNTY

  This march of headlines continued apace to Johnny Boone's bust in Minnesota in October 1987 and the arrests of Jimmy and Joe Keith Bickett in February 1989-the only ones of the seventy busted inside Marion County, which had been until then a virtual fortress of silence against outsiders.

  Police arrested Jimmy at a downtown motel across the street from Club 68 in the act of selling 125 pounds of pot to a pair of informants from Maine.' federal agents went to the Bickett family farm in Raywick, where they arrested Joe Keith, who lived in a two-hundred-year-old cabin that had been in the Bickett family for six generations.

  Bobby Joe Shewmaker would be arrested three months later. The press conference announcing the Cornbread Mafia and its connection to Marion County would be held in June 1989. The purpose of the press conference was for the federal government to tie a pretty bow on a case that it considered to be closed, but it was a story that was far from finished.

  The story of the Cornbread Mafia is much greater than the simple arrests of seventy people who grew 182 tons of pot; it's a story that could have come only from a rural Catholic culture that survived and adapted to the outside forces exerted upon it by Prohibition, Vietnam and Ronald Reagan.

  It's a story of exotic strains of a potent plant, of guard dogs without voice boxes, of guns and piles of ammunition left unfired, of buckets of emeralds used as currency in Belize, of lobsters and limousines and nuns in possession of stolen property.

  It's a story of bloody bodies in the back seats of cars, of passions unchecked by law and pickup trucks used as weapons but also a story of generosity, of brotherhood, of criminals carrying Christmas presents through the snow. It's the story of marijuana seeds smuggled from Afghanistan, cocaine smuggled from Colombia and European bull semen smuggled in through Canada. It's the story of a rogue DEA agent who sells exotic poison in the classified ads of Soldier of Fortune magazine, of kidnappings, helicopters, lions and bears and an infamous sex tape involving cocaine, a Doberman pinscher and a fugitive with a legendary endowment.

  It's a story of a culture that nurtured the ambitions of young adventurous men willing to take incredible risks with hard work and a story of the economy that made such risky work necessary-free spirits exercising their free will in the free market, the philosophical children ofJohn Stuart Mill, maximizing their liberty with the least possible harm to others while at work in Rousseau's natural state, which happens to be the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

  Although the Cornbread folks remained relatively nonviolent as far as nationwide criminal enterprises go, this book still has a body count of nearly a dozen violent deaths, which doesn't even include some spectacular ones, like the 1983 shooting of Vietnam veteran and marijuana big shot Don Nalley, who took a rifle bullet to the head as he stepped onto his front porch in the summertime, not long after his girlfriend and crew left his house to go swimming at Monks Pond on the property of the nearby Trappist monastery; the case remains unsolved.

  This is the story whose author becomes the first journalist subpoenaed under the Obama administration because its main subject, Johnny Boone, becomes a federal fugitive after getting caught growing the Colonel's twelfth secret herb one too many times.

  It's the story in which Johnny Boone says:

  "It had taken me seven years to get a variety so that it was whambam-get-it-done in Kentucky" and

  "Kentucky has been a wonderful place for producing marijuana and more so than maybe any other state as far as volume goes. Well, wonder why?" and

  "Pot breeding is really mentally enlightening."

  This is the story of the Cornbread Mafia.

  THE REVEREND WILLIAM DEROHAN-FORMER PROFESSOR AT THE SORBONNE in Paris, a Roman Catholic priest and an Irish drunk-drifted on horseback through the wilderness of Virginia and the territory that would become Tennessee in the twilight of the eighteenth century saying Mass to the frontier Catholics where he found them in ones and twos and drinking himself into a stupor in between.

  He came northward from the south into the land that would become Kentucky in the autumn of 1790, when the white population numbered fewer than thirty thousand, until DeRohan's horse stopped short of the lip of a great tectonic escarpment, the ridge that would become known on maps as Muldraugh's Hill and locally as Scott's Ridge, where the land dropped five hundred feet nearly straight down and continued seemingly forever in both directions, giving DeRohan an unspoiled view of the entire Bluegrass basin laid out before him in the oranges and yellows of harvest time. The priest and his horse had found by accident the best vantage point to see the secret beauty of what would become known as Marion County.

  "I remember as a kid, digging ginseng around there," retired State Police Detective Jacky Hunt said later. "And every weekend
there was a fresh car run off Scott's Ridge up there. We always called it Horseshoe Bend because you got the Rolling Fork River shaped like a horseshoe looking out. People would steal a car and strip it and run it off there. Always all those cars down there ... I've taken a lot of people up there to Scott's Ridge, and they get up there and they're like, `I never knew this was here.' I've brought people from eastern Kentucky up there, and they're like, `Daggone! You got a mountain here, too."'

  Fifty years before thieves used Scott's Ridge to dump stripped-out cars, Prohibition-era revenuers like Big Six Henderson looked out from the same vantage point and saw the white smoke of a dozen active moonshine stills; 140 years before that, in 1790, the Reverend DeRohan likely saw only one plume of smoke when he arrived, the only sign of civilization coming from Basil Hayden's bourbon still at Holy Cross, which had been distilling corn whisky for five years by then. After he descended through the trees and fog of the escarpment and forded the Rolling Fork as it horseshoed along the foot of the ridge, DeRohan crossed into territory just recently claimed by settlers of European descent but also by multiple native tribes who had been hunting and burying their dead in the region for centuries.

  The Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768-signed by the Iroquois in presentday Rome, New York-ceded all of what is now West Virginia and Kentucky to the British, prompting a wave of immigration into the area as well as violent conflict between settlers and the Shawnee, Chickamauga Cherokee, Creek and Chickasaw, who used guerrilla tactics, including stealthy attacks upon settlements by canoe, plucking the lives from pioneers in the night. Bishop John Lancaster Spalding would later estimate that between 1783 and 1790, the confederacy of native tribes killed or captured at least fifteen hundred Catholic souls.