The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History (15 page)

In 1956, downtown Lebanon hummed with activity by the railroad tracks.Three years after Little Richard recorded "Lucille"in honor of Club Cherry's patroness and two years before the ABC agent's house would be blown into smithereens, the business on Water Street had grown into a bustling strip of entertainment. In addition to Club Cherry, there was Philip's Dispensary, Sunnyside Saloon, the Kit Kat Club, the Water Street Cafe and Farmers Restaurant-the sorts of places where one could get a beer or two on a Friday night.

On the cold, rainy and foggy Friday night of December 14, 1956, Garland Russell-twenty-three years old, six-foot-three, 190 pounds with dark black hair-strode into Farmers Restaurant. He was accompanied by Marvin Briscoe, twenty-two, an inch shorter and ten pounds thinner with dark, wavy hair; Frank Durham, twenty-four; and Ben Wright, son of the Marion County sheriff.

Russell and Briscoe were young toughs from neighboring Boyle County, where they had conducted a "reign of terror" for the past year and a half. The chief of police in Danville considered them "ruthless"; the Kentucky Fire Marshal's Office called them "pyromaniacs"; and the National Fire Underwriters Association agreed. Briscoe and Russell had once beaten a man with tobacco sticks until he almost died, said a witness who testified against them, and then set fire to his automobile. In a separate incident, when a husband and wife ran outside to see their car on fire, Russell blasted at them with a shotgun, blinding the wife in one eye.

At Farmers Restaurant, the proprietor served beers to Russell, Briscoe and their two companions from 10:30 until last call at midnight, when he sold them six beers for the road. All four men piled into a 1952 gray Ford pickup that didn't belong to any of them, and Russell drove off through the rain and fog in the direction of Danville.

Sometime before 2:00 a.m., they arrived at the Danville Tire Center, a truck stop near an all-night diner, where two International tractortrailers painted orange and silver with "Huber and Huber" written across their sides were parked beside each other.

Doris Smith, a waitress in the diner, had started her shift at 10:00 p.m. She was talking to the Huber and Huber drivers when she noticed a gray pickup pull in and park in a no-parking zone across the street. She lit a cigarette and watched it.

"The boys in that truck are checking on me," she said to the truck drivers. When she stubbed out her cigarette about five minutes later, a police patrol car pulled up next to the gray pickup in the no-parking zone. The officer talked to the driver, and the gray pickup drove away. The police car parked, and Officer Jimmy Ryan entered the diner.

"What were they trying to prove?" the waitress asked the policeman.

Officer Ryan shrugged, ordered a coffee and left. The two truck drivers paid up and followed the policeman out the door. A few minutes later, as the waitress took another customer's order, one of the truck drivers ran back inside.

"Can I use your telephone?" he said. "My truck's been stolen." It was 2:20 a.m.

Ben Wright, the Marion County sheriff's son, drove the gray Ford pickup, following Marvin Briscoe, who drove the orange-and-silver semi down the narrow, curvy Highway 84 toward Lebanon with their hijacked load of four pinsetters, shipped from Yonkers, New York, en route to a new bowling alley on Cannons Lane in Louisville. The theft ignited a car chase with Boyle County law enforcement and resulted in Briscoe and Russell ditching the orange-and-silver semi along with its bowling alley equipment by sending it off the top of Mitchellsburg Knob to crash in a heap below, as the two hijackers escaped on foot.

At 5:25 a.m., Boyle County Sheriff Deputy Howard Overstreet and Perryville Police Chief William Davis spotted two men lying in the highway, as if hit by a car: Garland Russell on his back and Marvin Briscoe on his side, concealing the .22 rifle that earlier in the evening had fatally wounded the radiator of Chief Davis's 1956 Pontiac patrol car. As Overstreet's car came to a stop, Marvin Briscoe rose to his knees with the rifle aimed at the windshield.

"They've got a gun!" Overstreet yelled and slid down to the floorboard.

Davis opened the passenger-side door and rolled onto the highway with Overstreet's pump-action shotgun. It was not yet daylight. Davis circled the car with the shotgun in his hands. Briscoe escaped into the ditch with Russell running a few yards behind him, still in the road. Davis called for Russell to stop, and when he didn't, Davis pumped the shotgun and fired.

The shot struck Russell and flipped him over an electric fence into a field. From a distance, Davis assumed he had killed Russell. Overstreet shined his flashlight on the motionless body and agreed: Garland Russell was dead.

Because Briscoe remained armed and at large, Davis and Overstreet decided they needed backup and went together to a nearby farmhouse to use the telephone. When they returned to the scene, Garland Russell had disappeared. Only a shoe, knocked off by the impact of the shotgun blast, remained.

Two hours later, after hitching rides with two different drivers, Briscoe carried Russell, wet and bloody, onto the doorstep of the house owned by A. J. Hourigan, where he lived with his young wife, Freda. Then Hourigan drove the twelve miles into Lebanon in his 1941 Plymouth with Garland Russell bleeding in the back seat.

At 8:15 a.m., the Plymouth arrived at the house of Dr. Eli George, Hyleme's straight-laced brother. The man who knocked at the door told Dr. George that his friend had been shot in a hunting accident. Dr. George told the man to take the patient to his downtown office, where the son of Lebanese immigrants had been practicing medicine for a decade by then. After he was in his office, Dr. George examined the twenty-seven gunshot wounds to Russell's right leg and made arrangements for his admittance to Mary Immaculate Hospital, thirteen years before the hot air-conditioner incident.

The next evening, just as the sun set on Sunday evening, the .22 rifle that Marvin Briscoe fired at police passed into the possession of a nineteen-year-old farm girl named Agnes Smothers. Meanwhile, the Kentucky State Police and the FBI assigned multiple agents to the case. Special Agent Raleigh Bristow and Detective Lieutenant Charles Young found Agnes Smothers at Freda Hourigan's home, where they asked her if she had brought a .22 rifle into her home and if she had told her mother that Garland Russell gave it to her.

The agents continued to question Smothers when the Marion County sheriff drove by and called Smothers over to his patrol car. Smothers opened the door and sat in the back seat as her two interrogators watched from a distance.

"What are they talking to you about?" the sheriff asked.

"Nothing much," she said.

"You keep your mouth shut and don't tell them anything."

"Yessir."

"Get a hold of that rifle and get rid of it where it can't be found," the sheriff said.

"Yessir."

After Sheriff Will Wright drove away, Agnes Smothers gave this statement to the Kentucky State Police and the FBI:

I am nineteen years old. I have not seen Marvin Briscoe in three or four weeks, and l have never seen Marvin Briscoe or Garland Russell with a re of any kind. Marvin Briscoe did not bring a re to my home, and I did not sell a re to Willie Lee Lanham. I know what my mother told the oficers, and it is a lie, and I told her it was a lie. I have read this statement, and it is true to the best of my knowledge. I am not going to sign anything.

Later that day FBI agent Bristow telephoned Sheriff Wright at the courthouse in Lebanon, asking if he had seen his son, Benjamin, whom the FBI and KSP considered to be a suspect. The sheriff said he would try to find his son for them. Immediately after Bristow spoke to Wright, Bristow's telephone rang. Robert Spragens, a Lebanon attorney, was on the line.

"I represent Benjamin Wright," Spragens said, "and I have advised him not to answer any questions pertaining to the theft of any truck."

Frank Durham, Benjamin Wright and Marvin Briscoe surrendered themselves to authorities on Monday, December 18, the day that Ben Wright and Agnes Smothers were hiding his rifle. Police took Garland Russell into custody at Mary Immaculate Hospital; Russell made a $7,000 cash bond three days after Christmas. By that time, all four young men faced federal felony charges.

On January 23, 1957, Garland Russell and Marvin Briscoe pleaded guilty and were sentenced to five years in federal prison; the next day Frank Durham and Ben Wright pleaded guilty as accomplices and were sentenced to three years.

On April 8, 1957, just a few months after Garland Russell pleaded guilty, Freda Hourigan, twenty-five, divorced her husband, the father of her four children. She then married Garland Russell in a jailhouse ceremony at the LaGrange Reformatory a year later on June 3, 1958. Russell reunited with Freda upon his release from prison on April 30, 1964, and moved into her Gravel Switch home with her children, as her exhusband, A. J. Hourigan, built himself a new house just down the road.

A little more than a month later, on June 16, Russell reunited with two friends he had known since high school, Charlie Irvin and J. W. VanArsdale, to celebrate his newfound freedom. Irvin was the youngest of the group at twenty-six, and Russell was the oldest at thirty-five. VanArsdale, twenty-nine, had been a freshman at Danville High School when Russell was a senior.

They hopped into VanArsdale's 1958 turquoise-and-white Chevrolet ragtop convertible and drove to the Riverside Cafe, along the Rolling Fork River near Bradfordsville in Marion County, where Irvin and VanArsdale drank a dozen beers and a half-dozen shots of whisky between them, but neither, it was later claimed, was "real drunk," as Russell stayed perfectly sober.

They left the bar well past midnight, and as the three young men drove around, according to VanArsdale's sworn testimony, Russell asked Irvin:

"Have you heard anything about my wife stepping out on me?"

"Yes," Irvin said. "I've seen your wife with Carl Ray in the Water Street Cafe."

"Would you tell that to her face?" Russell asked.

"I'd tell it in front of anybody," Irvin said, shrugging.

So, Russell told VanArsdale to drive to Gravel Switch, and VanArsdale started getting nervous. He didn't want to cause any trouble, but Russell assured him they were just going down there to talk. After stopping at a gas station to fill up, they drove to Russell's wife's house in Gravel Switch. Russell got out, went inside; the two others stayed in the car.

After a few minutes, Russell stuck his head out the door.

"You boys come on in," he hollered.

When they went in, VanArsdale sat by the door, and Irvin sat across from him. Russell sat facing them on a sofa, and his wife sat in front of him on a stool, facing VanArsdale and Irvin courtroom-style with Russell as the judge.

"Do you know this girl?" Russell asked Irvin.

"Yes, I told you," Irvin said.

"Is this the girl you've seen with Carl Ray?"

"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.