Infamous America - DIXIE MAFIA: GEORGIA Ep. 3 | “Bootleggers and Thieves”

Episode Date: July 10, 2024

Albert Patterson’s assassination brings the Phenix City syndicate crumbling down, but up the road in North Georgia crime is starting to explode. Fast new cars, dirt roads, and moonshine give birth to Nascar while the Dixie Mafia gives birth to a bloodsport. A shocking triple homicide helps spark a need for change, and in Jackson County north of Atlanta, the crusade for justice pits prosecutor Floyd Hoard against bootlegging kingpin Cliff Park. Join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join   Apple users join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes, bingeable seasons and bonus episodes. Click the Black Barrel+ banner on Apple to get started with a 3-day free trial.   On YouTube, subscribe to INFAMOUS+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: hit “Join” on the Legends YouTube homepage.   For more details, visit our website www.blackbarrelmedia.com and check out our social media pages. We’re @OldWestPodcast on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Interstate 85 runs from Montgomery, Alabama to Petersburg, Virginia, just south of Richmond. It passes through Atlanta, Georgia, Charlotte, Greensboro, and Durham, North Carolina, and Greenville, South Carolina, the hometown of legendary Chicago White Sox baseball player, Shoeless Joe Jackson. It was little more than a dirt track during Shoeless Joe's heyday, but by the 1960s, it was a pipeline for drugs, illegal whiskey, stolen beer, stolen cars, and stolen money. In Georgia, about an hour outside Atlanta, the highway runs past the small town of Pendergrass. Pendergrass would become infamous in the 1960s

as the hometown of Andrew Clifford Park. Formerly, he was called A.C. Park. Informally, he went by Cliff Park. His nickname, for good reason, was the old man. By the 1960s, when it all came to a head, he was in his 70s, and he was the godfather of bootlegging in the county's northeast of Atlanta. 15 minutes up Interstate 85 is the small town of Commerce, Georgia. It was the headquarters of Ambry DeWitt Allen, who was usually called A.D. Allen.

Alan dabbled in bootlegging and illegal gambling, but his primary business was car theft. He and many of his family members ran a car theft ring that plagued the region for years. When the ring ran into trouble, he would show that he had no problem with armed robbery to make money. And at that time, just like in Phoenix City a decade earlier, Park and Allen would face a crusading lawyer who wanted to clean up the area. Floyd Horde was from Fayetteville, south of Atlanta, but he married into one of the leading families of Jackson County, which dropped him into the backyard of Cliff Park and A.D. Allen. Horde started as a defense attorney in Jackson County, and he watched crime in the area grow worse and worse, and not just in Jackson County, but in all the counties northeast of Atlanta. Bootlegging, the production and sale of illegal alcohol, had been going on forever.

In the south, as in many parts of the country, it wasn't just a hobby or a way to make extra money, it was an art form. Drivers loaded cars with moonshine whiskey and tore through the back roads at the roads at breakneck speeds. In nearby Atlanta, Georgia, home of the University of Georgia, there were scandals involving illegal liquor, gambling, and prostitution that went all the way up to the mayor's office. All the counties along Interstate 85 were victims of a car theft ring that was moving stolen automobiles up and down the east coast. And in the 1960s, when Floyd Horde decided to lead the crusade against crime, his two top categories of targets were a car theft,

thieves and bootleggers. The car thieves would ignite a new fervor for the crusade with a brazen act of unplanned but vicious violence, and the bootleggers struck the most infamous blow. In an echo of Phoenix City in the 1950s, it would lead to their downfall. But the people of Jackson County would have to suffer a serious tragedy before they experienced a little triumph. From Black Barrel Media, this is Infamous America. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer, and this season we're going back to the story of the Dixie Mafia. Georgia is ground zero for stories of bootlegging, car theft, bank robbery, and murder. This is episode three, bootleggers and thieves.

In 1932, Henry Ford, the ruthless scion of the Ford Motor Company, inadvertently gave criminals nationwide their most valuable gift, a car with a lightweight V8 engine at an affordable price. It was the birth of the legendary flat, The Ford V8s became wildly popular overnight, though Ford wasn't the first company to mass produce a car with a V8 engine. That honor belongs to Cadillac, which introduced the mass-produced V8 in 1914. But automobiles underwent gigantic changes in the 18 years between 1914 and 1932.

And the Ford Flathead V8 revolutionized the auto industry. When John Dillinger was released from prison in 1933 and began his epic crime spree, he prized cars with V8 engines above all others. They were faster and more powerful than police cars, which was why they were also prized above all others for bootleggers across the country. And there was an additional value in the flathead V8. It could be modified with relatively little effort to add even more power and speed. In short order, moonshiners all over America were putting their modified V8s through grueling tests on punishing dirt roads. Drivers packed the cars with heavy loads of whiskey and gave them a pounding to see if they

could hold up to the rigors of outracing revenue agents. The results were fantastic. Four years after the debut of the Ford Flathead V8, drivers met in Daytona, Florida for the first organized stock car race, and many of those drivers were current or former bootleggers. They were usually called whiskey trippers in the business, and that race was the unofficial beginning of NASCAR. In 1939, three years after that first race in Daytona, a moonshine driver from Georgia named Roy Hall won his first three unofficial championships. As good as Hall was, many believed a fellow whiskey driver from Georgia named Carl Lloyd C. was the best in the business. Lightning Lloyd, as he was called, won three races in three different states in

15 days. 20 years later, Carl Lloyd C. would have a family connection to the battle between criminal Kingpin Cliff Park and crusading attorney Floyd Horde. By the time NASCAR was officially organized in 1948, Park was well on his way to becoming one of the most powerful and feared men in Jackson County, Georgia. Jackson County straddles Interstate 85, about an hour outside Atlanta, and about 30 minutes outside Athens. Park's hometown of Pendergrass was a hamlet of just 230 people in the early 1900s, and it wasn't much bigger when 27-year-old Cliff Park went to Europe in 1919 to fight in the waning days of World War I.

When he came home, the temperance movement, which had been building for years, finally succeeded in convincing Congress to pass a nationwide law that banned the production, sale and consumption of alcohol. Folks in North Georgia and all over America had been making their own moonshine spirits since the days before American history could be called American history. Nobody stops just because alcohol was now illegal nationwide.

In fact, there was more money to be made from the production and sale of liquor now that it was illegal. The money was all tax-free profit. And when the Ford Flathead V8 engine came online the year before alcohol, became legal again, it allowed drivers to roar over the back roads like never before, from Florida to Virginia, from the hills of Tennessee to the coast of Carolina. And with all that money,

it was easy to bribe virtually anyone to keep the industry flowing. Only the most righteous were crazy enough to believe that a law would actually stop people from drinking alcohol. And since people were going to drink anyway, it was pretty easy for lawmen, judges, lawyers, and politicians to accept money to look the other way. Cliff Park started small in his little corner of northeast Georgia, and he built his operation slowly and steadily through the 1920s and 30s, and especially in the economic boom years after World War II, just like the Kingpins in Phoenix City, Alabama. But in Phoenix City, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, crime was out of control, and when a local

lawyer and soon-to-be state attorney general Albert Patterson was assassinated in 1954, the crackdown on crime happened instantly. At about that same time, crime was dramatically escalating in Jackson County, Georgia, and all over the state. Bootleggers, car thieves, and illegal gambling operators were running rampant. Cliff Park, who was arguably the bootlegging king of the region, would take center stage in the 1960s. But in the second half of the 19th century, but in the second half of the 1950s, it was car thief A.D. Allen, who brought all the major players together in one interwoven web of crime and punishment. Charlie Drake was a 66-year-old merchant who ran a general store with his wife right next to their home in the town of Jefferson, Georgia, the county seat of Jackson

County. On the night of June 19, 1956, Charlie was in the living room of their house while his wife was in the kitchen. An intruder burst into the house with a gun. The assailant shot and killed Charlie and knocked Charlie's wife unconscious. And there began a classic small-town murder mystery story. A week later, Jackson County Sheriff John Brooks arrested a house painter named James Foster and charged him with the murder of Charlie Drake. A judge appointed two attorneys to represent Foster in what would turn out to be a fight for his life. One of those attorneys was 29-year-old Floyd Horde.

Horde grew up in Fayetteville, south of Atlanta. He played football for a year at the University of Georgia, and then spent a year and a half in the Navy. He returned to school, earned a law degree, and passed the bar. He married a girl from Jefferson, Georgia, moved to her hometown, and joined her father's law firm. Through the tragic murder of Charlie Drake and the defense of James Foster, local lawyer Floyd Horde began a crusade against crime like Hugh Bentley had done in Phoenix City, Alabama. of Alabama. Charlie Drake's wife had only been able to provide a vague description of her husband's killer. The intruder was about five feet eight inches tall, weighed about 160 pounds, and wore old clothing. It could fit lots of men in Jackson County and in Georgia and in the entire country, which included

James Foster. There was virtually no evidence against Foster, but after Charlie's wife delivered emotional, heart-wrenching testimony at trial, the jury found Foster guilty of murder, and the judge sentenced him to death in the electric chair. Foster went to prison, but Floyd Horde and his co-counsel always believed Foster was innocent. For two years, James Foster sat on death row waiting for his execution date. Then a surprising sequence of events began. Fifty miles away, in a county jail near Atlanta, a prisoner called his lawyer and requested a meeting. He had information to share.

He said he had done time with a man who talked repeatedly about killing someone in the town of Jefferson. The lawyer set the wheels in motion and Georgia officials eventually tracked the talkative inmate to a different prison. His name was Charles Rothschild. He was a former city policeman and deputy sheriff in Illinois and a safecracker and possible murderer down south. When questioned, Rothschild admitted to killing Charlie Drake. And then he told a tale of crime. in corruption in Jackson County. Rothschild explained that he had been told that Charlie Drake kept at least $5,000 in his house.

On the surface, the break-in was supposed to be a robbery. And maybe that was the truth. Maybe Rothschild was only there to rob Charlie Drake and the situation got out of hand. But there was an additional layer to the story. One year earlier, Charlie Drake had led a grand jury that was trying to clean up Jackson County and run bootleggers out of the area. The man who told Rothschild that Charlie Drake kept lots of money in his house was A.D. Allen,

a notorious bootlegger, gambler, and thief in the region. Alan was already in prison on a five-year stint because of his illegal liquor operation, and on top of that, he was also the ringleader of an organization of car thieves. So, whether the murder of Charlie Drake was a robbery gone wrong or a robbery that Allen hoped would go wrong, or a straight-up murder for hire,

the investigation into the crime opened back up. Defense attorney Floyd Horde and his co-counsel won a new trial for James Foster. The second time around, Foster was acquitted, exonerated, and released from prison. Charles Rothschild and A.D. Allen were tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison. Though Allen's murder conviction was eventually overturned by the the Georgia Supreme Court. It was now 1958, and Floyd Horde's name was all over the newspapers for his work on the James Foster case.

Shortly thereafter, the pillars of the old-time system of law and order in Jackson County started falling one by one. The year after the James Foster saga ended, another saga in Jackson County began. The judge who presided over the case was accused of manipulating grand juries, cutting backroom deals with lawyers and prisoners in exchange for favorable rulings, and defrauding Jackson County of hundreds or maybe thousands of dollars, among other things. In 1961, three years after the James Foster case, the judge was disbarred and removed from office. The same investigation that uncovered many of the allegations against the judge also uncovered allegations against the sheriff and the

Solicitor General. Sheriff John Brooks and Solicitor General Alfred Quillian allegedly defrauded the county of $8,000, which is the equivalent of more than $85,000 today. Similar to Phoenix City, Alabama, there were allegations of criminal activity throughout the local government in Jackson County, the judge of the district who was now gone, the Solicitor General who ran prosecutions in the district, the city attorney in Jefferson, who was known to be soft-down bootleggers, a county commissioner, and the sheriff of Jackson County, all were accused of various low-level crimes. The sheriff and the solicitor general,

who is more often called the district attorney today, kept their jobs for the moment. But in 1964, three years after the judge was disbarred, crime in the region northeast of Atlanta took a shocking leap forward. It started in Gwinnett County, and it traveled up Interstate 85 to Jackson County. Vincent Williams and Wade Truett owned an auto body garage in the small town of Hartsville, South Carolina, an hour outside Columbia. They specialized in rebuilding damaged cars and selling them for profit.

And Truitt, for sure, trafficked bootleg liquor, probably up and down the Interstate 85 corridor that ran right through Jackson County. Early in 1964, Williams and Truett bought a maroon Oldsmobile that had been damaged on the left side and the rear of the vehicle. After they inspected it, they realized they wouldn't make any money if they had to buy all the parts they needed to repair the car. The solution was to steal a similar Oldsmobile and strip it for parts. Sometime, likely on April 16, 1964, Williams and Truitt, along with their friend Alex Evans, made the four-hour drive to Atlanta in a Chevy. They found an Oldsmobile they liked, they stole it, and started caravanning back to South Carolina.

They were driving up Interstate 85, the well-used highway for the Ring of Car Thieves that was prominent on the East Coast at the time. Williams, Truett, and Evans may or may not have been part of that larger network of car thieves, but the network was so prominent on the East Coast that it's probably a safe bet they ran in the same circles. On that night, April 16th, moving into the wee hours of April 17th, the trio were about 15 miles northeast of Atlanta when they pulled off the highway, likely at Beaver Ruin Road in the community of Norcross, Georgia.

At the time, Norcross was a small town of about 8,000 people that was separate from Atlanta. Now it's part of the eighth largest metropolitan area in America. In 1964, Beaver Ruin Road would have been a heavily wooded and sparsely populated area. The thieves would have followed Beaver Ruin Road to a dirt track called Arkway. The road dead ends at a creek, and the thieves parked their cars in the woods to do some work. Venson Williams started changing the ignition switch on the stolen car. Alex Evans sifted through the Oldsmobile's glove compartment, and Wade Truitt started changing its license.

plates. In the early morning hours of April 17th, while the thieves worked on the car, a resident of Arkway called the Gwinnett County Police Department to report suspicious activity in the woods. Three officers responded to the call, which turned out to be their last. According to the version of the story from the Gwinnett County government, earlier that night, police officer Marvin Gravitt started feeling sick. He was 52 years old, and most people called him by his middle name, Jesse. Officer Jerry Everett, age 28, and Officer Ralph Davis, age 49, picked up Jesse Gravett at about 1 o'clock in the morning and offered to drive him home.

Shortly after that, on their way to Gravitt's house, they received a radio dispatch about the suspicious activity in the woods on Arkway. The officers turned on the flashing red light on their car and diverted from their course. They drove down the dirt road of Arkway and spotted the Chevy and the Oldsmobile. The officers surprised the thieves in the middle of their work and the situation turned chaotic. Wade Truitt, one of the thieves from South Carolina,

jumped into the Chevy and sped away from the scene. Officers Jesse Gravitt and Ralph Davis chased Pruitt while Officer Jerry Everett stayed in the woods to keep an eye on the other two thieves. Gravitt and Davis quickly caught Truitt and forced him to drive back to the location of the Stolen Oldsmobile. When they arrived, they found a very different scene from the one they had left a few minutes earlier. Officer Jerry Everett was sitting in the driver's seat of the Stolen Oldsmobile,

except at the time, none of the officers knew it was stolen. Car thief Alex Evans was sitting next to Officer Everett in the passenger seat. As it happened, Alex Evans had once been the chief deputy of the Gwinnett County Sheriff's Department, so he knew all three officers. The guess is that Officer Everett trusted Alex Evans because Evans used to be a deputy sheriff. But now, the other two officers returned with Wade Truett and the situation changed.

Officer Everett and car thief Alex Evans stepped out of the Oldsmobile. Evans drew a pistol, pointed it at the three officers, and told Wade Truitt to take their guns. When the officers were disarmed, Truit cuffed each officer with his own handcuffs. Now that the officers were hostages, the thieves discussed their options.

Vincent Williams reportedly said he hated everyone in uniform. Truitt suggested they handcuffed the officers to a tree and leave them in the woods while the thieves made their escape. And maybe he believed that that was what was going to happen when Alex Evans and Vincent Williams pushed the officers into the back seat of the stolen Oldsmobile. Evans and Williams drove the car deeper into the woods, while Truitt moved the police car so that it was mostly hidden from view. Then Truitt jumped in the Chevy and followed the path of the Oldsmobile into the woods.

As he was pulling up, he heard pops that he thought were firecrackers. When he stopped and got out, he saw the three officers lying on the ground with Evans and Williams standing above them. Evans and Williams had shot the officers with their own guns, but one wasn't dead. According to the story, Wade Truitt shot and killed the officer who was moaning in pain. With the officers dead, the thieves set the stolen Oldsmobile on fire and escaped in the Chevy. A few hours later, at about 8.30 a.m., a babysitter arrived at the home of the family on Arkway who had reported the suspicious activity the previous night. The babysitter noticed the abandoned police car that had been stashed in the woods.

She told the homeowner who called the police again. Units responded and soon discovered the awful scene of three dead officers in the woods who had been executed with their own weapons. Vincent Williams, Alex Evans, and Wade Truett became suspects fairly early in the investigation, but there was so little physical evidence at the crime scene that the case languished for a year. Eventually, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the Georgia State Patrol, with assistance from the FBI, developed leads that allowed them to arrest the three suspects. Truitt took an immunity deal and testified against Williams and Evans.

Williams went to prison for 25 years before he was paroled, and Evans never got out. The murders of the Gwinnett County officers happened about 25 miles down the road from Jackson County, where Cliff Park was the top bootlegger, and A.D. Allen's associates ran the car theft ring while he was in prison. By all accounts, the murders were spontaneous reactions to a situation that took a terrible turn. But the killings were symptoms of the wider problems of car theft and bootlegging in the region northeast of Atlanta. If three low-level criminals were willing to kill three police officers because of a simple stolen car, a car that the officers didn't even know was stolen at the time, what else were the criminals capable of?

Where would it end? Where would it end was the question that Floyd Horde wanted to answer that same year of 1964. The officers were killed in April. Five months later in September, Floyd Horde became Solicitor General and made it his mission to stop bootleggers and thieves. As Solicitor General, Floyd Horde supervised a judicial district that comprised Banks County, Barrow County, and Jackson County. To do his work across a wide area, he relied on detectives from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation,

and not just because of the three-county expanse. Two months after Horde took office, Jackson County Sheriff John Brooks lost his job. The GBI had broken A.D. Allen's car theft operation in Jackson County, which resulted in a truckload of indictments. Allen had already served time for bootlegging, and then he was convicted in the murder of Charlie Drake, but he was able to convince the Georgia Supreme Court to overturn his conviction, and he went straight back to his auto theft operation. He had a car lot in the town of commerce that was the headquarters of his operation.

GBI agents, in conjunction with Georgia's newly formed state auto theft squad, raided the lot, and gathered evidence that led to more than 20 indictments, including those of Allen, his brother, his son, and Jackson County Sheriff John Brooks. Brooks was forced to resign, and he faced five years in prison for his involvement in the car theft ring. In addition, he just happened to live on a property right next to Jackson County bootlegging Kingpin, Cliff Park. The Kingpin and the sheriff were neighbors, and it was widely rumored that the sheriff was an occasional business partner in the Kingpin's moonshine operation. After that, Solicitor General Floyd Horde went straight to the GBI when it was time to rock and roll. Right after he took office in September 1964, Horde and the GBI went back to the town of commerce

and seized gallons of illegal whiskey and four slot machines. Over the next four months, Horde continued to raid illegal liquor and gambling operations. His raids confiscated dozens of black market gambling machines and more than 150 gallons of moonshine whiskey. Right after the four months of raids ended, a violent tragedy shook the town of Jefferson that was at least as bad as the murder of Charlie Drake nine years earlier. In February, 1965, 27-year-old Donald Marlowe was found dead in his car. He was the son of the owners of the most popular cafe in town. And as the Atlanta Journal Constitution newspaper put it, he was shotgun to death. Two brothers were found guilty.

of the murder and sentenced to life in prison. As the shock of Donald Marlowe's murder started to wear off in the summer of 1965, Floyd Horde and the GBI ramped up two years' worth of raids on local bootleggers. The lawmen still busted car thieves, including three during a dramatic car chase, even after A.D. Allen's ring was broken, but Floyd Horde did the most damage to Allen's fellow criminal kingpin, Cliff Park. Those were bright days for law and in order in Jackson County, but they would be followed by the darkest. Next time on infamous America, Solicitor General Floyd Horde targets multiple bootlegging locations

that are owned by Cliff Park. Sheriff L.G. Perry replaces Sheriff John Brooks, but the new boss is the same as the old boss. And despite the escalating crime wave in Northeast Georgia and other violent events throughout the South, the entire state is stunned by a brazen attack in August 1967. That's next week on Infamous America. Members of our Black Barrel Plus program don't have to wait week to week for new episodes. They receive the entire season to binge all at once with no commercials, and they also receive exclusive bonus episodes. Sign up now through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com. Memberships are just $5 per month.

Original research and writing by Jamie Lyko. Additional research, and writing by myself with story editing by Jordana Houchins. Original music by Rob Valier. I'm your host and producer, Chris Wimmer. Find us at our website, blackbarrelmedia.com, or on our social media channels. We're Black Barrel Media on Facebook and Instagram and B-Barrell Media on Twitter. And you can stream all of our episodes on YouTube. Just search for Infamous America podcast.

Thanks for listening.