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

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    "I never really saw Hyleme. I don't remember who it was," Sister Stine remembered years later. "It was some of Hyleme's relations, but I don't know who it was." She would know if it was Hyleme because, "I guess I knew him all my life."
    On June 26-"I was very busy that day"-Sister Mary Dominic Stine wrote check number 7443 payable to "cash" in the amount of $10,000, which the bank paid in $100 bills. Within a day, she had fifty windowunit air conditioners stacked in the hospital's ambulance garage. Simple as that.

    "Funny part of it is," Stine recalled, "I think everybody in Lebanon knew they were stolen but me. Sounded to me like a pretty good I wasn't around town much, you know...
    "`Is everything all right with them?' I asked.
    "`Oh yeah,' he said."
    A nurse saw the air conditioners and the individuals who unloaded them, and she promptly called the police. At the state police post, Detective Ralph Ross answered the phone and then drove to the hospital garage, where he found fifty GE air conditioners, 23,500 BTUs, still in their boxes, which retailed for $419.95 each.
    "If I had been in my right mind, I would have thought that there was something funny going on," Stine said. "I was in a hell of a mess."
    Ross called GE to send a representative down. It looked like they had a truckload of hot air conditioners on their hands, and the nuns at the hospital seemed to be in possession of stolen property, apparently sold to them by an associate of the mayor.
    "We had two of them put up, one in the emergency room and one on the second floor," Stine said. "When these big guys from GE came up and wanted to know who I had given the money to, I honestly couldn't remember his name. Good thing I couldn't. I was about the only one who didn't know anything."
    The commonwealth attorney filed charges against Hyleme George, Joe Downs and another Raywick man. The men hired as their defense attorney the brilliant and well-connected Frank Haddad, a member of the same Lebanese immigrant clan that included the Georges and Shaheens.
    Detective Ralph Ross had unraveled the whole Marion County hot appliance pipeline, but now the commonwealth attorney faced Frank Haddad in a Louisville courtroom. It took the prosecutor more than a year to bring the case to court due to Haddad's endless pretrial maneuvering.
    "When I appeared before the grand jury, Frank Haddad told me, `Wear your habit, sister,' and I said, `What for?"' Stine remembered.
    The Dominican sisters had just shed their habits after Vatican II, and even before, Stine had worn a nurse's uniform and then clothing fit for a hospital administrator-never a habit. Yet, when she appeared in the Louisville courtroom, a black-and-white veil covered her head. In it, she felt like she misrepresented herself; it made her uncomfortable.

    "It was an awful thing to me, I tell you," she said. "I was so afraid.... My heart was in my mouth the whole time, you know. I don't remember a great deal because I didn't want to remember any of it."
    Yet, she testified effectively enough for Haddad to strike a deal with the prosecutor. In the end, Lebanon Mayor Hyleme George pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of receiving stolen property without felonious intent and paid a $2,000 fine. Joe Downs and the other Raywick man pleaded guilty and received one-year sentences, but neither of them served a single day in jail. Further, Frank Haddad convinced the court to refund the hospital its $10,000, "with half of my skin on it," Sister Stine later recalled.
    Joe Downs returned to Raywick and began to run several businesses, a small grocery store and a bar called the Fifth Wheel on the other side of the street, next door to the establishment owned by J. E. "Squire" Bickett, whose family will play a central role in the Cornbread story.
    In 1945, Squire Bickett, a twenty-three-year-old tavern owner who had lost his leg in a motorcycle accident, married nineteen-year-old Coletta, a telephone operator. (He would later