Spirits of Just Men: Mountaineers, Liquor Bosses, and Lawmen in the Moonshine Capital of the World

4. Elder Goode

4 Elder Goode Primitive Baptists paid no preachers. Their preachers, like the members of the congregation, were farmers. —Sherwood Anderson, “I Build a House” reeling from the acquittal of Commonwealth Attorney Carter Lee, Col. Thomas Bailey, now working with coinvestigator C. S. Roth, received permission from the Treasury Department to continue his investigation. He headed into Salem and the rural counties surrounding Roanoke to talk with the jurors who had sat through the long weeks of the case and the closed-door deliberations. He met first with the jury foreman, E. H. Carlton, on Carlton’s farm in neighboring Montgomery County. The head juror was quick to speak his mind. Like Bailey, he, too, had been deeply disturbed by what he had seen and heard at the conspiracy trial and was willing to say so in writing. Carlton provided Bailey a sworn affidavit claiming that one of the jurors, Edgar T. Marshall, the son of a Maryland bootlegger himself, had not only resisted any reasoning in the jury room but refused anything less than the acquittal of Lee and the two others. According to Carlton, there was strong reason to believe Marshall had been bribed by a certain Mr. John Moore, of Moore’s Milling Company in Salem, Virginia, and perhaps several other parties , to hold out for Lee’s acquittal and to hang the jury if he had to. Carlton added, “I do not want the impression left that I was unwilling to convict the head of the conspiracy—Carter Lee. I made the statement to the jury that I thought Lee the guiltiest one of the bunch and the other jurors said the same thing.” He closed his statement, written with Bailey’s help, by recommending the government “make a thorough investigation of the cause of juror Marshall’s attitude, as I feel it resulted in a miscarriage of justice, and I have been subjected to much criticism by my friends on account of the jury’s failure to convict Carter Lee.”1 Ten other affidavits from the remaining jurors corroborated this statement by their foreman. Eleven men had voted to prosecute Lee and the others, and they agreed there had been a breach of justice and said so in writing. Bailey got others to sign papers as well, including some original conspirators who said they colluded with Carter Lee. elder goode 85 Knowing he had a good case, Bailey sent these statements to United States Attorney Sterling Hutcheson for his review. Though Prosecutor Hutcheson’s first report on the trial had failed to mention any sign of jury tampering, Bailey and Roth’s formidable collection of affidavits, both from the jurors and even those convicted in the first trial, were too much to ignore. Hutcheson agreed to take the case again to the grand jury in Harrisonburg. Bailey’s persistence had paid off—at least in part. On March 9, 1936, Hutcheson presented the papers to the grand jury and laid out the details of Bailey and Roth’s findings. Lee’s involvement was the centerpiece of the docket. Several of those convicted in the conspiracy swore statements that Lee had been involved in their dealings. He not only had run the conspiracy, they said, but had bought off the corrupt juror, too. Peg Hatcher said in his affidavit that Herman Shively told him that “Lee put up $1000 to help fix the jury in the Franklin County case.” Charles Guilliams’s signed statement said, “I heard Carter Lee say, in fact he said to me, that he had spent more than $8000 on the trial of the Franklin County case.”2 Others pointed in the same direction; Lee’s name was all over this case. It looked to Bailey as if he had his man this time. Figure 14. Primitive Baptist Elder James Goode Lane Hash (1881–1959), third from left, holding a Bible, was a farmer and civic leader in the Endicott, Virginia, community. Photograph courtesy of the Ora Hash family collection. 86 chapter 4 The grand jury heard the case formally on March 31, 1936, and concluded there was just cause for a trial. With additional evidence from dozens of other witnesses, the grand jury indicted twenty-four men, several of whom, including Roosevelt Smith, Edgar Beckett, Charlie Guilliams, and Claude Shively, had been on the original list of conspirators in the first trial. One of the three acquitted from the first...