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

continues today.

    While Johnny Boone served hard federal time for his marijuana crimes, he learned from his fellow prisoners of Sicilian descent that such a code of silence had a name in the Old Country-omertd. Moved by what his Sicilian friends told him about its philosophy and how it related to his life, Boone had OMERTA tattooed across his back in red and blue ink. Omerta as a concept arose in Sicily by necessity as the island was continually conquered by a series of outside forces through the centuries. For Johnny Boone, the same concept arose in his community from a different conquering force: Prohibition.
    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