DIXIE MAFIA: GEORGIA Ep. 1 | “Johnny Frank Has To Go”

It would be the eighth time in Major League Baseball history that two teams from the same metropolitan area played each other in the World Series. Five thousand miles to the east, in Europe, Allied forces were pushing toward Germany. The day before McVeigh and Walden waded into a Florida swamp, the American 82nd Airborne Division and the Guards Armored Division of British tanks liberated Nijmegen in Holland, and Allied forces won the Battle of San Marino in Italy. Unfortunately, those achievements were likely the furthest things from the minds of McVeigh and Walden. The crooks had driven seven hours from Fitzgerald, Georgia, on quiet back roads, to make their delivery to the Florida swamp.

That delivery was in the back seat of Wilson McVeigh's car, and the two men were, at that moment, digging a hole by the light of the moon. It was easy work. The ground was barely above sea level, and the entire southern coast had recently been pummeled by the first of three powerful hurricanes that would make landfall that autumn. While they dug a hole, the man who had ordered the delivery was on his way back to the spot. He was Clarence Revel, one of the most powerful criminals in Phoenix City, Alabama.

Phoenix City had a long history of crime, especially bootlegging and gambling, and it was hitting its peak. in the 1940s. The small city with a big crime problem sat along the banks of the Chattahoochee River that forms the border between Alabama and Georgia. Clarence Revel and his top associates had been expanding their bootlegging operation into Georgia, and that decision attracted the attention of federal treasury agents, who were responsible for stopping the sale of illegal liquor. To go after Revel's gang, the agents had sent an informant into Revel's operation.

The informant had done his work well. Clarence Revel and his associates were facing trials and serious prison time in federal institutions. That made it an easy choice to organize this trip to the Florida swamps, where lots of problems disappeared.

When Revel turned his car into the swamp, McVeigh and Walden stopped digging. They were blinded by the headlights of Revel's car, but they could see him pull something heavy out of the backseat and sling it over his shoulder. McVeigh and Walden assumed it was a sack of lime, a powder that was commonly poured on top of dead bodies before they were buried. It was used to keep the smell of the decaying corpses down, and at the time, many people thought it sped up the rate of decomposition. Revel was, in fact, carrying a sack of lime, but it was much bigger than what was needed to cover a single body.

As McVeigh and Walden stood in the hole, their paranoia went through the roof. They were high on morphine, but the drug that had been meant to calm their nerves had been backfiring on them all night. Now, they couldn't help but wonder if Clarence Revel was about to make three deliveries to the Florida swamp instead of just one.

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 1, Johnny Frank Has to Go.

In the summer of 1944, a few months before Wilson McVeigh and Dave Walden found themselves standing in a hole in a Florida swamp, Clarence Revel realized he had a big problem. He was one of the top criminal operators in Phoenix City, Alabama, but he wasn't quite on the level of Hoyt Shepard or Jimmy Matthews. Those two guys dominated the distribution and operation of rigged gambling machines in the Southeast, and they made a ton of money doing it. They used that money to buy local politicians, judges, and lawmen. And they, like many who came before them, helped make Little Phoenix City, on the banks of the Chattahoochee, one of the wickedest cities in America.

Vice and crime went back generations in Phoenix City, and by the mid-1940s, there seemed to be no end in sight. Federal agents and local lawmen had been trying for decades to stop the production, sale, and consumption of illegal alcohol in Phoenix City and the surrounding areas, and they had failed repeatedly. Raids on illegal whiskey operations happened all the time, but they did nothing to stop the flow of booze. And that was Clarence Revel's business, for the most part. Hoyt Shepard and Jimmy Matthews focused mostly on gambling, both selling their machines to other operators and running them in their own clubs.

They dabbled in bootlegging, like everyone, but they made most of their money from gambling. Clarence Revel was the opposite. He dabbled in gambling with games like the lottery scam known as The Bug, but he specialized in bootlegging.

Clarence Revel's nickname was Head, so most people called him Head Revel. If there's a good explanation for the nickname, it seems to be lost to history. Maybe he was always referred to as the head of the operation, and the reference became the nickname. Either way, he ran a club called The Bridge Grocery. If you wandered across the Dillingham Street Bridge from Columbus, Georgia, to Phoenix City, Alabama, and you were looking for a good time, the first things you would see were the neon lights of the Bridge Grocery.

And in the mid-1940s, with the American war effort surging, there was an estimated 90,000 soldiers living at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia, directly across the river from Phoenix City. Fort Benning, which is now called Fort Moore, had been the home of the School of Infantry Arms since 1920. And in the 24 years of its existence, an untold number of soldiers had slipped across the river to enjoy all the pleasures of Phoenix City. Those pleasures, as always, revolved around the big three, liquor, gambling, and prostitution. And while the federal government had always tried to crack down on all three, now it had new motivation.

Army commanders at Fort Benning were saying that Phoenix City, and other towns like it, were actively hurting the war effort. Commanders were losing young soldiers to sexually transmitted diseases and other calamities at an alarming rate, and it had to stop. Head Revell and the other operators in Phoenix City had used their money to secure protection from politicians and lawmen, but now they faced a new and intense pressure. And Revell, in particular, had started expanding his illegal liquor operation into Georgia. He was hitting even closer to home at Fort Benning.

And that summer of 1944, at the same time Allied forces were storming the beaches of Normandy, a new crackdown began on enemies on the home front. Famous General George S. Patton, who had been a commander at Fort Benning, had once threatened to roll a tank division over the bridge and flatten Phoenix City, if that was what it would take to stop the problem. In the summer of 1944, local and federal authorities understood Patton's sentiment, but they decided to take a more subtle approach. They sent undercover agents into the criminal organizations and found informants whom they could pay for information.

In Head Revell's organization, that paid informant was Johnny Frank Stringfellow.

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S. Army. His crimes had earned him a dishonorable discharge and a cell in a federal prison. While in prison, his name came up with law enforcement as a former associate of a man named Wilson McVeigh from Brunswick, Georgia. McVeigh, on occasion, had worked for Head Revel.

And that was how the connection was made. Stringfellow to McVeigh to Revel. At the time, Head Revel's business was in a perfect middle ground. It was big enough to make him wealthy and powerful on a local level, but small enough that he could buy his way out of trouble and avoid serious threats from federal agents. But with his expansion into Georgia and the intensified motivation to crack down on operators due to the war, Revel was now a higher priority than he had been before.

While Johnny Frank Stringfellow sat in prison, revenue agents approached him with a simple deal. If they released him, he would make contact with Wilson McVeigh. After winning McVeigh's trust, Stringfellow would try to get close to Head Revel and learn about his business operations in Georgia. If Stringfellow's information led to the arrest of Revel and his associates, Stringfellow's slate would be wiped clean. Johnny Frank Stringfellow took the deal.

After Stringfellow was released, he reached out to Wilson McVeigh, who worked in the shipyards of Brunswick, Georgia, for his day job. At night, McVeigh was a safecracker, often in the service of Head Revel. McVeigh worked both jobs with a guy named Dave Walden. The two of them were morphine addicts, and they targeted safes in pharmacies so they could score cash and drugs. at the same time.

McVeigh welcomed Stringfellow into the loose-knit crew, and over time, Stringfellow was able to get close to Head Revel. It appears as though about 99% of the plan worked perfectly. Accounts say Stringfellow was diligent and attentive. He apparently kept detailed notes of the comings and goings of Revel, his associates, and the thousands of gallons of bootleg liquor that Revel was moving through the state of Georgia. All that information helped the authorities arrest and indict Head Revel and his top two associates, Joe Allred and Godwin Davis, in the summer of 1944.

Through the legal process, Revel's attorneys learned that a key witness was able to get close to the ringleaders and would provide damaging testimony against them at their trials. The three bootleggers were set for trial in October 1944, and it was a simple request by the prosecution that produced unintended and tragic consequences.

Prosecutors told Stringfellow that he needed to collect and organize his notes and send them to the prosecution team. Stringfellow readied the notes and sent them off in a letter to the revenue agents who had worked with him on the undercover operation. It appears as though Stringfellow was walking through Phoenix City and he dropped the letter without realizing it. Whoever picked it up allegedly recognized Stringfellow's name on the return address and knew that he worked for Head Revel. Then the person saw that the letter was addressed to the U.S.

Treasury, the department of the federal government that was responsible for busting illegal liquor operations. That raised an obvious question. Head Revel was a known bootlegger. Johnny Frank Stringfellow was a known associate of Head Revel. Why would Stringfellow be sending a letter to the agency that was trying to bust Head Revel?

The letter found its way to Revel, and he decided immediately what needed to happen. Johnny Frank Stringfellow had to go.

Head Revel, Godwin Davis, and Joe Allred were not forced to sit in jail until their trials. Revel instructed his men to get word to Wilson McVeigh that Revel needed to speak to him. McVeigh traveled to Phoenix City and picked up his friend Dave Walden along the way. When McVeigh and Walden arrived, they headed for the Manhattan Club, a bar that was owned by Godwin Davis. There, the three ringleaders met with the two henchmen.

Joe Allred laid out the information. Stringfellow was a rat, and he had to be dealt with. The indicted men wanted McVeigh and Walden to kill Stringfellow. The ringleaders offered $1,000 for the job. As long as it happened in Georgia, far away from Phoenix City, it didn't matter how McVeigh and Walden did the killing.

But they wouldn't see a nickel of their money until they delivered the dead body of Johnny Frank Stringfellow to the swamps near Head Revel's vacation home in St. Augustine, Florida. Wilson McVeigh and Dave Walden hatched a plan. The two men invited Stringfellow to spend the weekend with them in Brunswick on the Georgia coast. If Stringfellow was suspicious of hanging out with two guys who worked for the men he helped put in jail, he didn't let it stop him.

Stringfellow accepted the invitation, but when he arrived, McVeigh and Walden said they changed the plan. Instead of hanging out in Brunswick, they would head for Walden's home in Fitzgerald, Georgia, roughly 100 miles west.

McVeigh and Walden promised the beer would be cold, the food would be plentiful, and to top it all off, they had a well-stocked cabinet of recently stolen morphine. Stringfellow went willingly. McVeigh and Walden figured the town of Fitzgerald was the perfect place for the murder. It was a small town in the hills of South Georgia and far away from Phoenix City, as Head Revel and company had requested. Additionally, if Stringfellow had shared his travel plans with anyone, he would have told them he was going to Brunswick.

When he went missing and people started looking for him, they would find a dead end. When the three men arrived in Fitzgerald, there was plenty of morphine, just as McVeigh had promised. Stringfellow asked for them to cook him up a hit, and that was when McVeigh and Walden set their plan into motion. McVeigh injected Stringfellow with what he and Walden believed was a lethal dose. Then McVeigh and Walden each took a hit, and they waited.

It wasn't long before Stringfellow went limp and collapsed. McVeigh decided they should wait a little longer to make sure. After an hour or so, they checked Stringfellow and felt confident he was dead. It was time to wrap up the body, load it into the back seat of a car, and head for Florida. But before they did, they each took another hit.

By the time they headed out on the road, they were as high as Georgia pines. The morphine should have made the seven-hour drive more relaxing, but it didn't. Paranoia set in, and they spiraled. McVeigh became convinced he could hear Stringfellow moaning in the back seat. So they stopped and delivered another lethal dose of morphine into Stringfellow's lifeless body.

Still paranoid and uncertain, they stopped again, and McVeigh pulled out a pistol from the glove box. He said he wanted to make sure that Stringfellow was dead on delivery, but McVeigh couldn't bring himself to shoot his friend. So Walden took the pistol, held it to Stringfellow's head, and pulled the trigger. It was the definition of overkill. Johnny Frank Stringfellow was dead.

He had not been moaning in the back seat. He had died with the first dose of morphine. And now he was dead three times over. And McVeigh and Walden still had work to do.

When McVeigh and Walden arrived in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, with Johnny Frank Stringfellow's thoroughly dead body in the back seat of their car, they were joined by Head Revel. Revel had driven up from his summer home in St. Augustine to make sure his delivery was happening. according to his plan. Revel and the killers drove separately to a secluded area to dig a shallow grave.

McVeigh and Walden started digging. while Revel announced he needed to go to town to buy some lime. He said the lime would speed up the decomposition and make the body unidentifiable. When he returned, Revel figured the grave was deep enough. McVeigh and Walden moved Stringfellow's body into the hole.

They were already paranoid because of their morphine usage, and now they were standing in a grave with a dead body, and Head Revel was standing above them. Revel reached into his pocket and told McVeigh and Walden that it was time for them to settle their business. Even through the haze of morphine, the two killers could easily imagine that they were loose ends who had just delivered themselves to their own graves. But instead of pulling out a gun to execute his accomplices, Revel pulled out a wad of cash. He told McVeigh and Walden they had done a good job, and he paid them the $1,000 he had promised.

As Head Revel and his associates had hoped, the case against them fell apart. Without the star informant, prosecutors couldn't move forward with their case. The letter with Stringfellow's notes was lost, and Stringfellow himself had disappeared. Head Revel never set foot in a courtroom. And after the collapse of the case, Revel continued to grow his criminal enterprises over the next four years without running afoul of the authorities.

Business at his clubs in Phoenix City boomed, and his multi-state liquor trade expanded. Revel also began to put together a team of expert safe-crackers who would become well-known in the Southeast over the next decade. Some of the jobs they pulled may have been front-page news, but between 1944 and 1948, the only time that the name Head Revel appeared in Georgian newspapers was when he advertised jobs for cocktail waitresses at his clubs. Revel's henchmen for the Stringfellow hit, Wilson McVeigh and Dave Walden, were not as successful or lucky. Both did several stints in prison for drug possession and burglary.

During one of those stints, they had a cellmate named Roy Williamson. Williamson was a thief and petty criminal from Tennessee who also operated in Georgia. As prisoners often do, McVeigh and Walden shared some of the stories of their crimes with Williamson. In March of 1948, Williamson found himself in the holding cell of Sheriff E.F. Howell in Columbus, Georgia, directly across the Chattahoochee River from Head Revel's stronghold of Phoenix City.

Williamson did not want to go back to prison, so he started talking about a deal.

Williamson offered to give the sheriff information about a man who had gone missing from Phoenix City four years earlier, a man named Johnny Frank Stringfellow. Sheriff Howell confirmed the disappearance with Phoenix City police, then listened to Williamson's story. Then the sheriff tracked down McVeigh and Walden in prison. When investigators questioned the prisoners about Stringfellow, they got more than they bargained for. McVeigh and Walden confessed to killing Stringfellow, but that wasn't the only murder they had committed back in 1944..

They had also murdered Dave Walden's wife, Patricia. The couple had only been married a week. when Patricia stumbled upon her husband's money, stash and paperwork that linked him to Head Revel's liquor operation. She questioned her new husband about the discovery, and she threatened to go to the police. With Wilson McVeigh's help, Walden killed his wife by strangling her and smashing her skull with a tire iron.

The men dumped the body in the Okefenokee Swamp, a blackwater wetland that straddled the Georgia-Florida state line. So in 1948, investigators had the nauseating task of unearthing two bodies from the Florida swamps.

It took the authorities several weeks to locate the body that was believed to be Patricia Walden's, and several more weeks to positively ID the badly decomposed corpse. Identifying Stringfellow's body was much easier. It turned out that Head Revel had used the wrong kind of lime. Instead of speeding up decomposition, as he had hoped, it actually slowed the process. The body was quickly identified by matching the teeth to Stringfellow's prison dental records.

McVeigh and Walden knew that a murder conviction in the state of Georgia could carry a death sentence. To avoid the electric chair, McVeigh and Walden cooperated with the authorities and gave the names of the men who had hired them to kill. Johnny Frank Stringfellow. Head Revel, Joe Allred, and Godwin Davis were indicted for murder and set to be extradited to Fitzgerald, Georgia, where Stringfellow had been killed. Revel denied any involvement, paid his $5,000 bond, and prepared to fight extradition.

He knew he was safe as long as he could remain in the criminal haven of Phoenix City, where he hadn't been charged with a crime for more than a decade. If it had only been charged as a bootlegging, he wouldn't have been so adamant. But this time, he was facing a murder rap with two witnesses who put him at the scene of the crime. Head Revel knew he had to lawyer up.

Revel hired an up-and-coming young lawyer named Albert Patterson. Patterson had defended Phoenix City gambling impresario Hoyt Shepard on a murder charge. two years earlier. Shepard was accused of gunning down another high-powered criminal, Fayette Leiburn, in a ballroom altercation. An eyewitness testified that she had seen the murder weapon in Hoyt Shepard's hand right before the shots were fired.

But somehow, Albert Patterson had gotten Shepard acquitted. Head. Revel had been in the audience at the Russell County Courthouse for several days of the trial, and he remembered Patterson. Now, Patterson worked to stop Revel's extradition. He argued that McVeigh and Walden had been threatened and coerced into naming Revel as an accomplice.

Patterson tried to further undermine their testimonies by claiming they had only incriminated Revel because authorities promised they would be spared the electric chair if they did. Finally, he questioned the trustworthiness of two convicted drug users. Patterson succeeded in getting Revel's extradition postponed several times, but after weeks of legal sparring, Patterson lost the fight. The judge ordered Revel to go to Georgia to face the music. In Georgia, Revel hoped Patterson could work the same kind of legal magic that he had worked at Shepard's trial.

As it turned out, Patterson didn't have to. The judge decided to postpone the presentation of Revel's murder case to a grand jury until the next session. It was currently October 1948, and the next grand jury session was in January 1949.. With nearly three months to wait, Head Revel was allowed to go home to Phoenix City to spend the holidays with his family. A year later, in January 1950, after Wilson McVeigh and Dave Walden had received life sentences for the murder of Patricia Walden, Head Revel was officially cleared of all charges related to the murder of Johnny Frank Stringfellow.

After six years, the case was finally done. Head Revel got back to work, or more accurately, he got back to crime. The next few years would be busy for Head Revel in Phoenix City, but also in Georgia. There would be more bootlegging, more safe-cracking, and more murder.

Next time on Infamous America, Head Revel grows his criminal empire in Phoenix City and continues to expand his safe-cracking ring in Georgia. For years, all goes well, but by the mid-1950s, Head Revel finds himself a suspect in a complicated murder plot and then possibly the most notorious crime of the era. That's next week on Infamous America.

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Additional research and writing by myself, with story editing by Jordana Houchens. Original music by Rob Vallier. 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 BBarrel Media on Twitter.

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