The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History (7 page)

Federal Agents Say That Plant Is Largest Yet Seized In Kentucky

Where else would the biggest still in Kentucky be located except Holy Cross? When ten "dry officers" arrived in the hamlet that Basil Hayden had built, they almost immediately found and destroyed two one-hundredgallon stills on Ollie Thomas's farm. After that January morning's driving rain slackened, they went to Tom Cambron's farmhouse, where they found the still that broke the state record. All the agents were veterans of Prohibition raids by 1922, but none had seen anything like this before.

"All it needed was a storekeeper and gauger," one agent told the Lexington Herald, "to make of the plant a regular distillery."

Cambron had built onto his farmhouse a thirty-three-feet-square room out of galvanized iron sheeting. Lining the wall were eight fermenters, each with a 500-gallon capacity. A 110-gallon copper still rested on a carefully constructed brick furnace; its copper arm was more than six feet long; and the worm, made from inch-and-one-quarter copper pipe, measured thirty-eight feet long and was coiled nine times. The whole thing was valued by the revenuers at $1,500 (or $20,227 in 2011 dollars). They emptied the fifty-gallon-barreled fresh whisky they found along with 3,600 gallons of distiller's beer and mash.

The still had been operating twenty-four hours a day, so when the revenuers sacked it in the predawn hours, they caught Jesse Cecil, a farmhand, working the third shift. Running nonstop, the still could make more than a barrel of moonshine per day, valued at $300 in 1922 or $4,045 in 2011. After destroying the Cambrons' livelihood and arresting their help, agents found 1,500 pounds of meal and mash hidden in an outhouse and four cows feeding on the fermented grain tossed out by distilleries, a popular barnyard feed commonly referred to as "slop."

Although the Cambrons had their still confiscated, the cows that had been feeding on the slop managed to escape the long arm of the law. Other animals weren't so lucky. Again, from the Enterprise:

CONFISCATED MULES AGAIN IN CUSTODY

Team Seized with Alleged Shiners, Taken From Negro Man, Brought Here.

FEDERAL OFFICERS TAKE TWELVE HOGS IN RAID

Porkers Were Found Feeding At A Big Still-Several Plants Are Destroyed.

The federal agents and those deputized by them to uphold the Volstead Act took their jobs seriously; they didn't think taking twelve pigs prisoner was funny at all and saw no humor in arresting the same team of mules twice. Just a few years into Prohibition, the seizure of livestock and the arrest of people as if they were livestock had become commonplace as the criminalization of an entire people's way of life became normalized.

Meanwhile, the distilleries that once provided honest livings to whole communities now sat empty, rotting where they stood, their walls covered by encroaching Kentucky flora and becoming nests for northern cardinals, eastern bluebirds and barn warehouses, however, were still racked with thousands of barrels of whisky. Its existence was not illegal, but its manufacture, transport or sale was. So, as long as the whisky behaved itself and stayed in its barrels in its warehouses, the federal government didn't seem to mind, deputizing locals as warehouse agents to guard Kentucky's aging whisky. Twelve men-one-quarter of the total number of agents in the state-were posted to the Marion County warehouses. With unemployment high, the warehouse agent jobs were sought by scores of hardworking men; the men were hired based on a strict criterion-their political party affiliation. In 1920, the Democrats controlled the statehouse in Frankfort, and so Democrats guarded the whisky in Marion County, smuggling the contents of the barrels past the federal revenuers one sip at a time.

When forced to choose between liquor and the law, the community came down on the side of liquor nearly every time and therefore on the side of outlaws and criminals, dramatically eroding the respect for the rule of law-including a scene in 1921 when a mob of seventy-five citizens in New Haven faced off against two government agents attempting to arrest a pair of moonshining brothers.

While many were engaged in replicating Kentucky's once-legal bourbon in moonshine stills across the region, others kept busy trying to steal from the warehouses of those shuttered distilleries what remained of the bonded whisky that had been barreled there before Prohibition's dawn. Every day the bourbon sat in those charred oak barrels, becoming more delicious by the minute, its value on the black market ticked upward. If each warehouse had become its own Ft. Knox depository, then George Remus-a Cincinnati defense attorney and first-class gangster-played the role of Goldfinger.

A federal agent would later testify that all of central Kentucky's seventy-five distilleries were robbed during Prohibition-many of them by men working for Remus. A former pharmacist, Remus read the Volstead Act carefully, especially the sections dealing with the exemptions for medical liquor, and discovered that pharmacies could legally buy and pay taxes on the stockpiles of bonded whisky currently aging in warehouses like the ones in Loretto and elsewhere in Marion County. So, Remus bought a pharmacy called the Kentucky Drug Company, located just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati in Covington, from which he purchased whisky from distilleries, which he also owned, one thousand cases at a time in order to distribute them to the medical whisky market. Gangsters working for Remus would then hijack these convoys and redirect their thousands of cases of Kentucky bourbon to the black markets of Chicago and the Northeast. Using this method, Remus achieved a staggering level of wealth, and Marion County was a direct source of his income.

In January 1921, a man who called himself C. L. Lynn arrived in Loretto with his wife and at least one other man in a motorcade of three vehicles at a time when the newspaper still referred to them as "machines"-a Ford sedan, a Cadillac and an REO speed wagon, which resembled "very much an ambulance," according to the Lebanon Enterprise. Mrs. Lynn stepped out of the Cadillac wearing diamonds and furs, while Mr. Lynn displayed a great amount of cash and paid some Loretto men to help him build a garage adjoining the warehouse for his REO truck. Lynn wasted no time in showing the revenue officials his permits to bottle the warehoused whisky for medical purposes.

The Lynns hired twelve locals to bottle the thirty-five barrels of whisky that remained in the Cummins warehouse, which filled 4,644 quart bottles that were packed into 387 cases over the course of six weeks. At night some in Loretto heard Lynn's truck leave its garage, only to see it back in the garage the next morning. When asked about this pattern several times, Lynn said he sent his truck out to aid a stranded motorist.

On February 10, 1921, the Lynns drove their Ford from Loretto to a gas station in Lebanon to fill up three five-gallon external tanks in preparation for their trip out of town. But before they got out of Loretto, their Ford got stuck in the muddy front yard of Len Thompson, the superintendent of the Cummins distillery. Thompson and his wife came out of the house to help the Lynns out of the muck. That night the Lynns disappeared, taking the REO and Ford with them but leaving the Cadillac behind. The feds inspected the Cummins distillery seven days later and discovered the whole place empty of people and liquor, estimating the value of the lost whisky at $50,000 (nearly $672,000 in 2011 dollars).

News of the heist spread, and a newspaper reporter in Louisville received a phone call from a man identifying himself as C. L. Lynn.

"Officials in more counties than one are involved. A man who paid for the law enforcement was with me on the deal but he double-crossed me," Lynn said. "They are sitting on what they believe to be whisky out there in Marion County tonight, but it's not whisky-it's colored water."

When the feds came to the Loretto distillery to investigate, Mrs. Thompson, the superintendent's wife, provided them with a clue. When she had helped the Lynns get their Ford out of the mud, she somehow ended up with Mrs. Lynn's gloves in her handbag. After the Lynns disappeared, Mrs. Thompson discovered stitched into one of the glove's inside hem the owner's real name: Edna Lawrence.

Edna was married to Robert Lawrence, one of America's most wanted automobile thieves, with eighteen indictments against him in Columbus, Ohio, alone-undoubtedly one of Remus's men. Revenue agents from all over the country met in Louisville to discuss the case, and on February 24, Elwood Hamilton, collector of internal revenue, suspended the Marion County distillery guards, including one Harold Bickett, for failure to guard the warehouse.

In late October 1922, more than a year and a half later, whisky bandits (likely Remus's men) paid a visit to the Burks Spring distillery, a ramshackle set of little wooden buildings that lacked the charming aura that Maker's Mark would give it in 1958. Despite being run-down, there was one attractive thing about Burks Spring-the contents of its warehouses.

The bandits paid off the warehouse guards and storekeeper-no need to get into a gunfight when a little money would do the trick. Besides, the bandits didn't need to do anything as unseemly as roll the barrels from the warehouse into trucks where any revenuer could see. Instead, they had a subtler plan-from the inside, someone bored holes in the whisky barrels and inserted a hose. From the outside, someone else siphoned the whisky out of the barrels and into kegs already packed into the back of a waiting car. It's a technique that Remus duplicated elsewhere, including a siphoning operation at the Jack Daniel's warehouses, which Remus also owned.

But maybe the siphoning method didn't go fast enough, or maybe the warehouse guards grew itchy-because the next month, November 1922, Remus's whisky robbers went whole hog and decided to take everything they could from Burks Spring. Eleven men drove into Loretto in a convoy of five cars and loaded them up with 450 gallons of aged whisky in barrels marked "Loretto" and forty-five gallons of unaged white dog, popularly called moonshine, from the Burks Spring distillery and headed off in a caravan toward Lexington. Led by a Packard loaded down with 210 gallons, followed by a Buick, two Ford touring cars and a Ford truck filled with guns and ammunition bringing up the rear, the load was worth $25,000 on the bootlegger's market, or nearly $336,000 in 2011 dollars.