10/30/2026
They called him the kingpin, and he put it on his license plate.
Willie Dewitt Dawson ran his empire from Leighton, in Colbert County. Liquor first, then banks, then whatever paid. By the 1970s his black Lincoln Continental was the most recognized car in North Alabama. Family lore says the front plate read "kingpin."
He was a big man, dark-haired and heavy. His 1967 mugshot looks like a young James Gandolfini, and about as approachable.
He was born November 26, 1939, a middle child of William Hill Dawson. At sixteen he was caught siphoning gas from a car. He never finished school. Some accounts say third grade, others sixth. The classroom never stood a chance.
Dewitt built something else instead. A liquor empire came first. Then bank crews working small towns across Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and North Carolina. They wore ski masks and carried automatic weapons. They drove a stolen car to the job, dumped it near the bank, then melted into the bushes to wait for a second driver. Sometimes the guns and the money stayed buried in a thicket for a later pickup.
He did not hide. He posed. In January 1975, Attorney General Bill Baxley went on television and called Dewitt Dawson the worst outlaw in the state. Dewitt wore it like a medal. Strangers asked for his autograph on the street.
He hired W.R. Morris to write his life story. Morris had written the Buford Pusser book, and Dewitt joked that he wanted Burt Reynolds to play him in the movie. The book never came, and neither did the movie. But a pamphlet did. In 1975, "The Kingpin: Dewitt Dawson" hit the streets.
The taunts were the point. In late June 1975, about a month before his federal tax evasion trial, police stopped him on Highway 20. A fugitive named Melvin Art Burleson was in the backseat. Burleson had abandoned his own car, loaded with cases of wh***ey, by a store on Highway 43. Dawson was charged with aiding and abetting a felon. When IRS agents came to arrest him at home, the family story goes, they found a note taped to the front door. It read, "Internal Revenue Service: I gave at the office."
Prison was a joke to him. In October 1975, while serving federal time at Maxwell, Sheriff Gene Mitchell drove past Dawson's house and spotted him in the yard. Federal officials first denied he had been given a weekend pass. Two days later they admitted the mistake.
Former state agent Gene Mitchell understood the problem. "He was hard to catch at doing things because he had so many other people doing the crimes for him." Dewitt's reply was shorter. "I was no fool."
But the file kept growing. In 1977 he went to federal prison for the Vina bank robbery. He drew twelve years, and the appeals court upheld it.
He came home and went back to work. Then came April 24, 1985. The FBI swept through Colbert County, seizing property and cash in what they called one of the largest corruption cases in Alabama history.
On July 29, 1985, Dewitt stood up in court and pleaded guilty to nine charges, ranging from counterfeiting to running co***ne. Afterward he told the Times Daily, "I swear on a stack of Bibles that I didn't do some of the things they said I did this time."
He said Maxwell was not a bad place to do time, and he asked to serve his sentence there. They sent him. Behind bars he earned his GED, ran card games, and ate steak and shrimp while other inmates got slop.
By 1991 the mansion was gone. The paintings that once covered its walls now hung in a smaller house. Dewitt was 51, his jet black hair gone silver. "I'm broke, as far as having money, but I consider myself to be the happiest man around," he told the paper. "I've got more right now than I've ever had in my life." He said his life of crime was over.
Willie Dewitt Dawson died September 6, 1997. He was 58. They buried him at Old Bethel Cemetery.
North Alabama never saw another one like him.
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Photo colorized by AI.
