The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History (9 page)

Inside the bank, Kirkland and Lanham pulled revolvers on four male bank employees and a customer.

"Stick em up!" they said, waving pistols.

While Kirkland held the men at bay with his pistol, Lanham leaped over the counter, handed a flour sack to Edward Isaacs and ordered him to fill it with cash. After Isaacs complied, Lanham led all the bank workers into the vault and closed it behind them, then leaped back over the counter, taking the change of a $5 bill from the customer.

Outside, Kirkland and Lanham hopped into the DeSoto coupe, which they had stolen from Bardstown specifically for the job, and Dillinger sped away with $1,235.55 in cash, which would be worth $21,453.14 in 2011. They headed for the Danville Pike, leaving it when they turned off toward Penick and passed a mail carrier, nearly blowing him off the road. After they split up the loot, Tidbits Lanham took his share and went home, but Jimmie Kirkland accompanied Dillinger out of town.

As soon as the Gravel Switch bankers extricated themselves from their own vault, they told the switchboard operator to alert surrounding communities. But by the time police were looking out for a blue DeSoto coupe, Dillinger and his Gravel Switch gang had already ditched the car in a Raywick cornfield on the other side of the county. Investigators would find it weeks later with the radiator cap off, indicating it had overheated after being driven incredibly hard.

The next day, Wednesday, about noon, Sheriff G. C. Spalding arrested Maurice "Tidbits" Lanham at a pool parlor in Lebanon. Lanham "emphatically denied the charges placed against him," despite the fact that the banker and his son identified him as one of the robbers. Police had arrested Lanham the previous year for "stealing gasoline from the machine of Ernest Gaillard while it was parked near the High School," and he was currently under indictment in Washington County for hijacking. The judge set his bond for $8,000, which he could not pay, and so they shipped him to the Louisville jail, where agents from the Department of Justice wanted to question him.

While police cornered Lanham in Lebanon, Jimmie Kirkland and John Dillinger arrived in Chicago, checked into a nice hotel and started spending their loot on new clothes-"gambling and enjoying the gay night life of the city," according to an account in the Enterprise. Kirkland's share of the take was $460; when the police arrested him nine days later on August 17,1933, only thirty-five cents remained in his new suit's pocket. According to the last-minute bulletin that ran in the Enterprise.

According to report received here early last night, Jimmie Kirkland and John Dillinger, alias Clarence Crews, alias Chord Martin, wanted in connection with the hold-up of the People's Bank at Gravel Switch, were taken into custody at East Chicago, Indiana, by authorities there. The men were said to have been taken to Indianapolis, where they are awaiting the arrival of officers from this county to return them here.

However, when Marion County Sheriff G. C. Spalding and his deputy Pete Glasscock returned from Indianapolis, they had only Jimmie Kirkland with them because "Dillinger has been returned to the Michigan City, Indiana, penitentiary from which he had been released on parole," according to the October 6, 1933, edition of the Lebanon Enterprise.

When the grand jury indicted Lanham, Kirkland and Dillinger for the robbery, it also returned indictments against Marion County residents for an assortment of crimes, including storehouse breaking, child desertion, carrying a concealed weapon, shooting with the intent to kill, malicious shooting with the intent to kill, malicious assault, malicious cutting with intent to kill, arson and chicken theft.

The Marion County jury, loath to sentence anyone for any crime, sent both Tidbits Lanham and Jimmie Kirkland to state prison for eight years. John Dillinger, however, remained elusive, as the Lebanon Enterprise kept track of his notoriety:

PAIR TAKEN TO PENITENTIARY

Lanham, Kirkland, Sentenced For Bank Robbery, Begin Eight-year Terms.

Dillinger Is Liberated

While Lanham was standing trial last Thursday evening for his part in the bank banditry, John Dillinger, also indicted on the same charge, was liberated from the jail at Lima, Ohio, by six gunmen who shot and killed Sher f Jesse L. Sarber. Dillinger was never returned here on the Gravel Switch bank robbery indictment but was confined to the Lima, Ohio, bastile [sic] following his arrest some time ago in East Chicago, Ind. He had been wanted in Ohio as well as several other States for bank robbery and a number of other criminal acts.

Both Lanham and Kirkland in their testimony in this city denied that Dillinger was their confederate in the Gravel Switch hold-up when $1,235.55 was taken.

Meanwhile, as the readers of the Lebanon Enterprise followed the weekly installments of the John Dillinger story, another historic narrative came to a close. On September 8, 1933, the Enterprise reported that the General Assembly in the state capital of Frankfort passed a bill by a vote of eighty-one to ten to "repeal ... the Eighteenth Amendment to the federal Constitution," also known as Prohibition.' he editor of the newspaper made clear that "national repeal is not sufficient" to allow Kentucky's own distilleries to resume operation, pointing out that an amendment to the state constitution would also have to be passed.

Nevertheless, construction and repairs to old distilleries in the area started up, first in neighboring Bardstown, then in Lebanon, as reported by this Enterprise headline:

DISTILLERY IS TO BE REBUILT

J. A. Wathen And St. Louis Men Buy Site Near Town For New Plant

Work To Start Soon

"The sale," the story tells its readers on November 3, 1933, "includes about five acres of land, all lying north of the stream, Jordan [with] a thirty-foot right-of-way from the Campbellsville Pike," the approximate site of the original Wathen Distillery, built in 1875, where "the famous `Rolling Fork' and `Cumberland' brands of whisky were made."The property had been dormant since a fire of mysterious origin had destroyed many of the buildings in 1931.

On Monday, November 27, 1933, Kentucky became the thirty-third state to ratify the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment.

"For the first time in the history of the State, duly-elected delegates have assembled for the purpose of ratifying an amendment to the Constitution of the United States," Governor Laffoon declared while expressing the hope that repeal of Prohibition would not lead to the return of "open saloons."

The governor apparently had not traveled much to Marion County, where "open saloons" had never departed. Just two days before the governor's speech on the subject, a thirty-five-year-old Raywick farmer named Felix Mattingly shot and killed Marion Bell, forty-four, whose body was found "on the Main Street of Raywick near the Earl Bickett Pool Parlor shortly before 10:00 o'clock Saturday night by a group who rushed from the pool room and a dance that was in progress to see what had happened after they had heard the shot." At his trial in April, Mattingly would claim self-defense, and a jury would deliberate for fifteen minutes before acquitting him.

Slowly Marion County began returning to its brand of normal. By May 18, 1934, the Wathen Distillery began production in a new facility with a capacity of 740 bushels per day and a payroll of $2,000 per week. By midyear, something of a final act of Prohibition occurred with the death of John Dillinger. As reported by the Lebanon Enterprise on July 27:

BANDIT CAREER IS CONCLUDED

Last Rites For John Dillinger Slain Super-Criminal, Held Wednesday.

Tip-Off Denied By Girl