DIXIE MAFIA: GEORGIA Ep. 2 | “The Cobra”

Bentley led the Russell County Betterment Association, a civic organization that was determined to clean up Phoenix City. A bomb had been planted under the porch of Bentley's house. Bentley wasn't home when the bomb detonated, but his wife and son were. Bentley's son suffered mild injuries and his wife was unharmed. The house was badly damaged, but it obviously could have been much worse.

No arrests had been made, but it was easy to compile a list of the usual suspects, the local criminal kingpins who made fortunes from gambling, prostitution, and illegal liquor. Hugh Bentley was the first prominent person who had really stood up to them, and his Betterment Association was starting to convince people in Russell County that they didn't have to continue to live with the crime that had been so pervasive for decades. An attempt to kill Hugh Bentley meant he was making progress. Now, eight days after the bombing, Deputy Fuller and the other lawmen were indirectly targeting one of those criminal kingpins. The lawmen were on their way to the home of O.

E. Blakely. Blakely was a gambler and low-level criminal who dabbled in the sale of illegal liquor. The lawmen had received a tip that Blakely had stashed several gambling machines in his house that were owned by crime boss Clarence Head Revel. The machines were a way in, but many people thought Revel was also involved in the attack on Hugh Bentley.

Fuller's men stopped short of Blakely's house and walked up to the front porch. Fuller banged on the front door, and a confused Blakely opened it. The officers barged in and searched the house. In the basement, they found what they were looking for—two pristine horse-racing gambling machines and three slot machines. Blakely confirmed that all the machines belonged to Revel, and a few hours later, Revel was taken into custody without incident.

Revel didn't run or fight back. There was no need. He knew he would be out of jail on bond in a couple hours. He knew he wouldn't go to prison. At worst, he would pay a fine, which essentially acted as a bribe of local politicians.

The doors of his gambling clubs would stay open, and his bootlegging operations in Alabama and Georgia would keep humming. But that didn't mean things weren't changing. Hugh Bentley and his Betterment Association were making real progress in cleaning up Phoenix City, and soon, Bentley would find a new champion—a lawyer named Albert Patterson. Patterson had been a defense attorney for Revel and fellow crime, lord Hoyt Shepard, a couple years earlier, but Patterson had experienced a change of heart. For kingpins like Head Revel, Hoyt Shepard, and Jimmy Matthews—men who would be retroactively grouped together in the origin story of the so-called Dixie Mafia—the good old days of rampant crime in Phoenix City were coming to an end.

Unfortunately for the people of Phoenix City, they would have to endure a lot more damage before the cleanup finally happened.

I'm your host, Chris Wimmer. In 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 2, The Cobra.

In the fall of 1944, eight years before the bombing of Hugh Bentley's house, and ten years before the big cleanup of Phoenix City, Clarence Revel had ordered the murder of Johnny Frank Stringfellow. Johnny had been sitting in prison when federal agents approached him about going undercover in Revel's bootlegging operation, which had undergone a big expansion from Alabama to Georgia. The agents would release Johnny from prison and wipe his record clean if he would be an informant and testify against Revel at trial. Johnny agreed, and he did his work well. He learned valuable information that led to the arrests of Revel and his top two associates.

But before the case went to trial, Revel discovered the identity of the informant in his crew. Revel ordered two men, Wilson McVeigh and Dave Walden, to kill Stringfellow and bury his body in a Florida swamp. The two men carried out their instruction, and Revel himself supervised the burial of Johnny Frank Stringfellow in a swamp near the beach communities outside Jacksonville. And then, with the informant and presumptive star witness dead, the case against Revel and his associates collapsed. Revel was eventually indicted for the murder of Johnny Frank Stringfellow, and he hired a lawyer named Albert Patterson to fight extradition to Georgia.

Revel was based in Phoenix City, Alabama, but Stringfellow had been killed in Georgia. The state of Georgia wanted to prosecute Revel and send him to the electric chair if he was found guilty. But once again, the case against Clarence Revel, nicknamed Head Revel, fell apart. Revel, like the other kingpins in Phoenix City, seemed to walk between the raindrops.

When Head Revel was free and clear, he went back to running his clubs in Phoenix City and supervising his bootlegging network in the southeast and ramping up his burglary business. Throughout the second half of the 1940s and the early 1950s, Revel built a crew of safe crackers alongside his other businesses. The craftiest man in the crew was Johnny Benefield. Benefield had been in the safe cracking game for decades. The FBI had a file on him dating back to 1927..

Benefield had robbed banks all over Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Florida. He kept a barn in the country outside Phoenix City where he studied new lock technology and drilled on safes he had stolen. Under Revel's control, Benefield schooled other would-be robbers who worked for Revel. A general in the Alabama National Guard called Benefield the professor of safe cracking at Head Revel's College of Burglary. In January 1952, a bomb exploded at Hugh Bentley's house and Head Revel was arrested for an unrelated crime, which may have had a bit of a fishing expedition quality to it.

On the surface, the arrest of Head Revel for owning illegal gambling machines didn't seem to be connected to the bombing, but everyone knew the criminal kingpins of Phoenix City had the most to gain from Bentley's death. Or maybe they just wanted to scare the hell out of Bentley, to force him to stop his crusade. Head Revel was one of those kingpins, and maybe the local authorities thought they could bring Revel in on something small like illegal gambling machines, and then develop a case against him for the bombing, though in hindsight that seems unlikely. In a couple years, the people of Phoenix City and Russell County would hear painful details about the corruption of their sheriff's department. By 1953, the bombing was old news, and it was barely a speed bump for Head Revel.

But his burglary crew was scheduled to do a job in Georgia in October, and that was when his life and operation took a dramatic turn. It was all supposed to be so simple, but Revel would find himself at the center of more murder cases, and those would not be as easily dismissed as his other troubles.

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Revel gathered his crew at one of his Phoenix City clubs and tore into them to try to figure out how they lost the job. Luckily for all the men there, Revel took them at their word that they were not involved in undercutting his plan. The heist had been pulled by Henry Crawford, a robber from Georgia who had probably heard about the job from other thieves and safe-crackers in the business. Whoever told him about it almost assuredly thought Crawford wouldn't be dumb enough or brave enough to move against one of Head Revel's targets. Crawford threw together a ragtag team on short notice and beat Revel's men to the job.

Crawford's crew got away with nearly $100,000 but left behind a good deal of cash and jewelry. The job was shoddy, and local lawmen had good leads. There were also rumors that the Georgia Bureau of Investigation was working on the case, and the GBI was already closing in on suspects. Head Revel decided he wanted a cut of the money before the authorities got their hands on it, and he may have wanted to get his hands on Henry Crawford as well. And the only man who might have been as angry as Head Revel was James Bush, Revel's reported first lieutenant.

Bush was in his late 30s, balding and a little overweight. He had been part of Revel's crew for several years, and he had done time for crimes as mundane as running a moonshine still and as serious as assault with attempt to murder. Bush was known for being a practical joker. One of his most famous antics was to climb onto the roof of one of Revel's clubs in downtown Phoenix and use an air rifle to shoot drunken passersby in the backside. But in November 1953, when Bush was called to Revel's office, it wasn't for practical jokes and neither man was laughing.

Revel had given the Fitzgerald job to Bush, and now both men wanted the money they felt was rightfully theirs. No one knew exactly what Revel said to Bush during that meeting, but shortly afterward, Bush began calling Henry Crawford and making demands. Some reports said Bush wanted just $400, but considering the amount of money that everyone assumed Crawford stole from the hardware store, Bush likely demanded much more. Either way, Crawford refused.

Crawford called his local sheriff's department on the evening of November 14th and said there might be trouble. James Bush was on his way to Crawford's house, but Crawford hoped they could settle their differences peacefully. Despite his hope, he also enlisted a friend named Harold Griggs to be at his house. Griggs was originally from Columbus, Georgia, right across the river from Phoenix City, and he knew James Bush and Head Revel. Thirty to forty-five minutes after Crawford called the sheriff's office, a car pulled into his driveway.

James Bush and three other men were in the car. By 7.30 at night in November, it was dark, and it seemed like none of the men noticed a car down the road that held a deputy sheriff and a city police officer. In the car, Deputy Julian Freeman and Officer Edward Nix watched Bush walk up to the house. They didn't see a weapon, so they didn't take any action. Bush pulled open the screen door and knocked on the front door.

Someone opened the door, and Bush stepped inside. Right after the door closed behind him, the lawmen heard two loud gunshots, which were followed by several muffled shots. The lawmen hurried to Crawford's house as the three people who were in James Bush's car bailed out and ran away. Deputy Freeman and Officer Nix drew their weapons and rushed into the house. When they entered, they found Henry Crawford leaning against the wall in a daze.

Harold Griggs was just inside the front door holding a gun. He dropped the gun and raised his hands in the air. On the floor, lying face down in a pool of blood, was Head Revel's Lieutenant James Bush, who still clutched a .38-caliber revolver in his hand.

The scene at Henry Crawford's house was grim. Deputy Freeman and Officer Nix didn't need the coroner to tell them that James Bush was dead. Bush had been shot six times in the back of the head and the neck. The lawmen inspected the gun that Harold Griggs had dropped and found it to be empty. Griggs quickly confessed to the shooting, but swore it was self-defense.

He claimed Bush entered the home waving a gun and yelling that he was there for a cut of the heist money. The lawmen knew Bush hadn't been holding a gun when he walked into the house, but it was possible that he pulled it out right after he stepped through the door. And he certainly was holding a gun now, as he lay dead on the floor. But it was just as possible that a gun had been placed in his hand after he hit the ground and before the lawmen ran in. In addition, investigators at the scene discovered that the angle of the shots that killed Bush contradicted Griggs' version of the shooting.

Griggs had clearly been standing behind the door, lying in wait, when James Bush walked in. Then Griggs opened fire from ambush.

The investigators, the sheriff, and the solicitor general all agreed. the shooting was not self-defense.

Crawford and Griggs were going to trial for murder, and in the state of Georgia, that meant they would be on trial for their lives. The killing made the front page of the Columbus Journal newspaper, and the drama surrounding the crime ramped up when Crawford was also implicated in the hardware store burglary two weeks earlier.

Griggs and Crawford's defense team added to the sensational nature of the case when they reported that their clients would testify that James Bush had been given an order. Phoenix City crime boss Head Revel had ordered Bush to kill Henry Crawford. There was even speculation that Revel had been one of the men in the car at Crawford's house that night and had fled. when the shooting started. Revel denied everything.

He told the press and the police that, yes, he had run some moonshine in his day and he may have dabbled in some gambling, but he didn't know anything about safecracking and he certainly didn't know anything about the murder. Revel claimed. his name only came up because of the unfortunate business with Johnny Frank Stringfellow several years back. He had nothing to do with that murder, and he had nothing to do with this murder either. Forty years before the movie A Few Good Men, defense attorneys for Griggs and Crawford were in the same position as Tom Cruise's character.

If Head Revel gave an order to have Henry Crawford killed, they couldn't prove it ever happened. The jury didn't believe Griggs' self-defense story, and they returned guilty verdicts for Henry Crawford and Harold Griggs on the charge of first-degree murder. At sentencing, the two were spared trips to the electric chair and sentenced to life in prison. While Revel's name remained linked to the death of James Bush and the possible attempted murder of Henry Crawford, prosecutors didn't file charges against Revel. The case was too weak.

Head Revel once again escaped a murder case in Georgia. But like an overmatched boxer, he was about to absorb a one-two punch. No sooner was the case of James Bush closed than a much more scandalous and prominent case was opened. That was the one that finally brought sweeping change to Phoenix City, Alabama. It was so sinister, and it became such a spectacle, that Revel couldn't count on his connections or reputation to ensure he would escape charges.

Head Revel would have to disappear.

In the summer of 1954, attorney Albert Patterson was the Democratic nominee for state attorney general. By that point, he was working with Hugh Bentley and the Russell County Bannerman Association to clean up crime in Phoenix City, and his message was popular with voters. That made him a serious threat to the criminal establishment in Phoenix City, men like Hoyt Shepard, Jimmy Matthews, and Head Revel.

Patterson also threatened corrupt local lawmen, local politicians, and statewide politicians. Money from kingpins like Head Revel flowed everywhere. For those who are fans of one of the best TV shows in history, The Wire, there's a perfect quote that fits all these situations. Follow the drugs, you get, drug dealers. Follow the money, you don't know where it's gonna lead.

Revel, Shepard, Matthews, and others led the opposition to Patterson and the Crusaders for cleanup and justice. The kingpins gave money to people and groups who campaigned against Patterson. When that faltered, they used old-school ballot box tampering and voter intimidation.

Revel had been on the front line of the efforts to intimidate voters, including one election where a riot broke out and Hugh Bentley and his son were badly beaten. When Patterson won the Democratic primary for state attorney general in June of 1954 and was virtually guaranteed to become attorney general in November, the stakes rose. In the AG's office, Patterson would have the resources to crush men like Head Revel. And Patterson knew the stakes and the danger as well as anyone. He spoke openly about his fear of being assassinated before he could take the oath of office.

When people suggested he start carrying a gun for protection, Patterson scoffed. He knew that if the gangsters sent someone to kill him, he'd never see it coming, and he would never have a chance to defend himself. Patterson was right about his fear and premonition. On the evening of June 18, 1954, Albert Patterson was shot and killed outside his law office in Phoenix City. The murder of an elected official sent Phoenix City into a tailspin.

The governor of Alabama declared martial law and a curfew. He sent the National Guard to assist the investigation and to raid the gambling halls, brothels, and liquor distributors. One of the first clubs raided belonged to Head Revel. Dozens of gambling machines were seized and the doors were boarded up. The same thing happened to clubs all over town.

Simultaneously, hundreds of people were taken into custody. Some were brought in on charges of various illegal activities, and some were brought in for questioning in connection with the murder of Albert Patterson. Head Revel was one of the men who would fit into both categories, but he disappeared.

As the authorities ramped up their interrogations, they learned no one had seen Revel since the night of the murder. Two weeks after Albert Patterson was killed, a warrant was issued for Revel's arrest on charges related to his gambling operation, but his reputation kept him. a person of interest in the murder case. Recorded phone taps revealed Phoenix City gambling czar Hoyt Shepard on the phone discussing the murder of Johnny Frank Stringfellow. Though Revel wasn't named in the recordings, the press jumped on the story and filled their newspapers with a retelling of the gruesome details of Stringfellow's death and Revel's alleged involvement.

While law enforcement and the Alabama National Guard worked to clean up Phoenix City and find Albert Patterson's murderer, Head Revel remained on the run. Some rumors placed Revel as close as Florida or New Orleans, while others put him on a beach in a non-extradition treaty country in South America. Every few weeks, a headline declared that the dragnet was tightening on Revel or he was going to turn himself in, but nothing happened. Revel remained out of sight, even after Albert Patterson's case was considered closed. The official story was that a deputy sheriff, the county solicitor, and the sitting state attorney general, whom Patterson would have replaced, conspired to take down Patterson.

While the fallout continued in Alabama, Head Revel remained out of sight. Authorities seized much of his property and sold it at auction, which caused people to wonder how he had the money to stay on the run. The answer appeared to lie in a spree of robberies that happened in Georgia during that time.

The nearly overwhelming task of cleaning up Phoenix City was complete by the time Head Revel came out of hiding. Within a year of Albert Patterson's murder, the town that was once known as America's wickedest city had been awarded the status of All-American City by a national civic organization. A Hollywood film had been made about the city's proverbial rise from the ashes. It had only been two years, but Head Revel was a man whose time had passed. Revel faced 56 state and federal charges related to gambling machines, operating a lottery, possession of firearms, and tax evasion.

But all those charges amounted to just one 90-day jail sentence related to tax evasion. The other 55 charges earned him 30 months of probation. Afterward, Revel tried to open a pawn shop, but was refused the business license. Authorities assumed the pawn shop would be an easy way to fence stolen goods. So Revel went right back to safe-cracking and gambling.

He was active in his old stomping grounds in Georgia and avoided arrest for several years. Eventually, he was caught red-handed robbing a hardware store in Fort Valley, Georgia. A few years after that, he was indicted on more gambling charges. At 64, Revel's health was failing and an upcoming federal trial had to be postponed so he could have kidney surgery. He received a sentence of two years, but he still couldn't or wouldn't quit the criminal life.

After serving his time, Revel orchestrated a sports betting ring based in Columbus, Georgia, with Revel setting the point spreads on college football games. Revel, along with eight other men, including a former Georgia state senator, were indicted in 1974.. Revel was convicted and sent back to prison. He was in his mid-70s when he was released for the last time. A couple years later, in 1980, Hoyt Shepard, Revel's fellow gambling kingpin, died in Phoenix City.

The funeral was a who's who of underworld figures from the bad old days. Pallbearers included Head Revel and Jimmy Matthews, Shepard's longtime partner in crime. The honorary pallbearers included corrupt former lawmen, bribed politicians, and even Russell County Solicitor Arch Farrell, the man who was supposed to have prosecuted all those bosses, but was accused of being a co-conspirator in the assassination of Albert Patterson.

Head Revel outlived most of the questionable men he had known in his 71-year criminal career. He made it to 83 years old before passing away in a nursing home in 1988.. Revel was remembered on the front pages of newspapers across Georgia and eastern Alabama. The articles recounted his many and varied crimes and his reputation as the head of a so-called College of Burglary. They mentioned Revel's connection to the murder of Johnny Frank Stringfellow and how James Bush died, allegedly carrying out Revel's orders.

Most of the articles softened the rougher edges of Head Revel's story, but one article told the unfiltered truth. It included a comment from someone who knew Revel but wished to remain anonymous. The source summed up Revel simply and succinctly by saying,

Next time on Infamous America, the criminals and crime waves of North Georgia take center stage. The counties outside Atlanta are full of bootleggers and fast cars, a few of whom become the early legends of NASCAR. But in the 1960s, the crime becomes darker than the age-old act of making and running moonshine. Shocking crimes will have echoes of Phoenix City and worse. 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 B Barrel Media on Twitter.

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