It was a new twist on the cat-and-mouse game we'd been playing for months, Mr. Rakes and I. I'd call and ask if I could meet him for an interview. He'd ask when. Then the stories would roll. "Can't. Going in for cataract surgery. Next month either - getting one of those brain scans. Don't come Friday - got a big snow coming."
When health and weather wore out, there was company, arthritis, holidays, a trip to Kentucky. And, always, business to attend to. "I'm working on a deal - real busy," he'd say. "I'll talk to you the first of the month."
"Mr. Rakes," I'd say, "You've been telling me that for months now. Really, I won't take up much of your time."
So when the curtain moved and there was a slight possibility that Hugh Rakes might come to his door, I stood and waited. What was a couple of minutes after so many months of phone calls and excuses?
He wears his flannel pajamas under a short-sleeved shirt and pinstripe pants. He has the milky complexion of someone who's unfamiliar with the sun. His eyebrows are bushy and long; he twirls them with his gnarled fingers when he gets excited. Which is most often when he's talking money. Dollars, and the intricate deals that produced them, seem to be Hugh Rakes' raison d'etre.
His fascination with money goes way back to the early part of the century, when he was a boy on Shooting Creek in neighboring Franklin County - known then, and now, as the moonshine capital of the world. Rakes says bootleg whiskey was the common currency of his youth.
Having better things to do than sit in a dusty schoolroom, Hugh Rakes quit school at the tender age of eight; by the time he was 15, Rakes was selling moonshine throughout southwest Virginia and West Virginia. One story has it that he forged his mother's name on a $1,000 bank note and bought 250 gallons of moonshine with the money. He loaded the whiskey on a wagon, guarded it with a Winchester rifle cradled in his arms, and sold it in Christiansburg, Virginia., for a cool $1,400.
The 1935 Franklin County moonshine conspiracy trial was notorious both for its duration - at 10 weeks, it lasted longer
than any federal criminal trial held in Virginia, even the famous Aaron Burr treason proceeding - and the prominence
of its defendants, including Robert E. Lee's grandnephew and a former member of the General Assembly. The charges centered around deputy payoffs by still operators so that Franklin County moonshine could be distributed freely up and down the East Coast in violation of federal tax laws.
It's common knowledge in Floyd County, Virginia., that Hugh Rakes, along with his cousin, Amos, was in the thick of the moonshine trade, travelling the late-night roads with the back of his car whiskey-loaded. Somehow Rakes avoided
indictment in the conspiracy trial. Thirty-four others didn't, those indictments resulting in nine prison terms, 13 probationary sentences and heavy fines.
The convictions didn't come without long deliberation - the jury stayed out three days, sequestered and under heavy guard. When Judge John Paul insisted a verdict be reached, jurors acquiesced.
Enter Hugh Rakes. In an apparent effort to convict Commonwealth Attorney Carter Lee and acquit several other defendants, Rakes and his brother Edd devised a plot to pay off jurors and entrap an attorney by planting a microphone in the latter's office. The scheme was ingenious and intricate, involving out-of-state relatives of jurors and late-night hotel meetings, and Hugh Rakes apparently masterminded the whole thing. He got two years and a $1,000 fine, given with a strong judicial warning: "Interfering with justice is a serious matter."
"It wasn't bad at all, that prison. They let me come and go as I pleased. I learned everything I needed to know about the dairy business working on the prison farm," Rakes says.
He put that knowledge to good use. Immediately upon his release, Hugh Rakes began buying up the best farms in central Virginia. In 1942 he masterminded the purchase of Court Manor, a 1,200-acre Shenandoah Valley horse-breeding estate.
Forthwith he turned it into a dairy farm, stunning Virginia's horse people. By the end of World War II, Rakes had acquired 14 dairy farms in Virginia and 10 in Wisconsin, and claims to have produced 15 percent of Virginia's milk during the war.
"My farms were beautiful - I had the prettiest barns in Virginia, and everybody knew it. My Leesburg barn had 400,000 bales of hay in it." He grips my arm tight, recalling the splendor of his stored wealth.
I ask him about the land that Dulles Airport bought from him. "Had an option on it, just an option. It was near some creek up there . . ." He pauses, taps his fingers with irritation on the arms of his rocker. "Can't recall the name . . ."
"Bull Run?" I suggest.
"Yeah, yeah. That's the one. I was walking the land with the airport men and I saw a pile of metal balls. Bent down to pick one up and heaved but couldn't move them. They were all glued together. Cannonballs." He laughs and grips my arm again. "You know, if I'd have been able to read and write better, they'd never have gotten me on that misdemeanor thing."
Calling the chain of events that landed Hugh Rakes in the federal penitentiary a second time a "misdemeanor thing" is like calling Michael Milken a petty thief. When the misapplication of funds case went to trial in Richmond in March, 1947, Rakes and several of his loyal backers were accused of multi-million-dollar embezzlement, resulting in the failure of the Farmers and Merchants State Bank, Fredericksburg's largest.
Along with Rakes and his wife, Lillian, eight others were charged with committing or aiding and abetting the embezzlement of bank funds, which Rakes apparently used to finance his dairy operations. William Reeves Gardner, the Fredericksburg bank vice-president, was indicted on the most counts, which essentially boiled down to his cashing large checks for Rakes without the funds to cover them - almost a half-million dollars' worth.
The trial lasted 53 days and pitted Virginia's best defense attorneys against a young U.S. Attorney, George Humrickhouse. Testifying as character witnesses for Rakes and his well-placed cronies were Governor William Tuck, State Justice Herbert B. Gregory, two circuit court judges, and Representative (later Governor) J. Lindsay Almond.
Delay tactics were tried: flu, an apparent heart attack, and the non-appearance of Rakes' attorney. When word reached the Court of Attorney J.B. Morgan's alleged asthma, Judge J. Waties Waring threatened to send a federal marshall to fetch him rather than declare the mistrial Rakes was certainly hoping for.
In the end, nine of the defendants were convicted, with the stiffest penalty going to Hugh Rakes: four years in the federal penitentiary. His far-flung dairy holdings were placed in receivership, and Hugh Rakes began serving his sentence on July 16, 1948.
"I didn't belong there any more than you did," Rakes insists. "Three years for a misdemeanor charge! Even the jail man told me when I drove up, 'Mr. Rakes, you don't belong here.' They gave me the run of the place; even let me go home for two months. I tried to get a pardon from Harry Truman, but it didn't work."
He leads me back to our chairs.
"Now let me tell you about timber. I've got an eye for timber. If I'd stayed in the timber business, I'd still be a
millionaire today." He launches into stories of thousand-acre tracts of land in Maryland and North Carolina, bought for almost nothing, creatively financed, with trees so big around you could build a whole house out of a couple of them.
"Curtis Turner and I would fly into those little mountain towns and he'd land that plane of his on the main street. We stayed down in Roper, North Carolina for a couple years working 3,000 acres of land - got it for $11.25 an acre. I cooked for the timber men - bacon and eggs, bacon and eggs, every damn morning bacon and eggs!" He smiles a dreamy smile; he's smelling the sharp, smoky scent of that bacon.
"Poor old Curtis - got himself killed in that plane. All tore up. We had good times down there before it happened. Him and that little Piper of his."
He talks on: about buying land adjoining the Great Dismal Swamp and selling it to Mormon farmers; selling cedar oil to the Japanese; inventing waxed milk cartons to replace glass bottles.
He doesn't mention his infamous bogus deals: how he almost succeeded in selling off a large part of Great Smoky Mountain National Park before federal investigators stopped the loan; how he convinced a Washington investor to loan him $100,000 to buy Natural Bridge.
allegedly deeded the stunning Georgian Revival home to them to protect it from seizure during one of his legal battles.) Two Floyd County businessmen bought it, with the agreement that Rakes would be able to live in the back three rooms until he died. Regardless of who holds the deed, Hugh Rakes still owns the place, and he's proud of its solid architectural elegance.
Around the back, Rakes' Dodge Dart sits parked in a carport, the driver's door gaping wide. "Gee, somebody left your car door open," I point out.
''Hunh. Hope the battery didn't wear down. I got to get down to the Post Office.''
"You still drive?" I ask incredulously.
"Got a half-license - I can drive during the day.'' He fits the key into the ignition and revs the engine.'' Get in," he says. "We'll drive down to the garage."
I look down the long brick driveway and see a half-finished, roofless building. Rakes is hunched over the steering wheel, the engine roaring. He's determined to make this football-field length drive to recharge the battery.
"I'll walk, thanks," I say.
"Get in," he says again. I do.
He accelerates, aiming the front end of the car up the driveway at the narrow doorway ahead, in which a stack of wood pallets sits squarely.
"Look out, Mr. Rakes. There's something in the way!" I cover my eyes.
"I see it," he says irritably, and the car glides neatly around the wood into the center of the concrete slab floor. "Going to be nice when I finish this place," he says. He throws the car into reverse and roars back down the driveway, his short out-and-back trip complete.
For a very brief time I know what it might have been like to be in one of Hugh Rakes' Cadillacs running moonshine or cruising the mountains for coal and timber. I look beyond his ancient face and the flannel pajamas and feel the intense confidence of the man who made and lost several fortunes, whose many falls from grace were simply opportunities to do it all over again.
(Joan Vannorsdall extends thanks to Lewis Burwell of Floyd for research assistance.)
Note: These archival articles are presented exactly as they appeared at the time of the issue in which they appeared. As such, all quotes, as well as references to temporal facts, artifacts and other items are contemporaneous to the date of original publication.