The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History (11 page)

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.

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.