It didn’t take long into the reporting process to encounter these facts: of the 70 men arrested in Cornbread-related busts, 69 were Catholics and zero agreed to cooperate with law enforcement in exchange for a lesser sentence. But what did our rural Catholic identity have to do with a giant marijuana cartel?
We were all part of the same Catholic parishes and ended up at the same Catholic wedding receptions. Now, having grown up in the middle of that three-county area (Lebanon, Kentucky in Marion County), I had some clue about this Cornbread deal, who some of the men were and what kinds of cars they drove. I thought I was writing a true-crime story, and at the start I didn’t know much more than the basics: between 19, 70 men from a three-county area in central Kentucky were arrested on 30 farms in 10 states with 200 tons of marijuana in what federal prosecutors said was the “biggest domestic marijuana in American history.” They called them “the Cornbread Mafia.” The supremacy of divine law over secular law was (I assumed) a concept reserved only for religious fundamentalists, so what was I doing with it in a story about large-scale marijuana growers? When I started working on the book that would become The Cornbread Mafia, I never thought that I would be telling a story of God’s law versus Man’s law.
Cornbread mafia tennessee code#
James Higdon on the authority of the Church and the largest homegrown marijuana syndicate in American history James Higdon, The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate’s Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History, Lyons Press, 2012, 400 pp., $16.95
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