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

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