As charges mounted and appeals continued, the Learys managed to remain out on bail, but Dr. Tim’s defense strategy was the exact opposite of the now-silent Owsley.
“I cannot abide his lust for publicity,” said Bear. “He is a magnet for attention.”
Leary amplified his crusade, babbling to anyone with a press pass. He ratcheted up defiance with a run for California Governor in 1970:12 a mock campaign that ended with his long-delayed imprisonment for the Laguna Beach bust.
Leary and the Bear both went off to prison in 1970. Owsley kept his profile low; Leary mugged for the camera at every opportunity. America’s first two acid outlaws would continue muted protest for decades to come, but their dream of dosing humanity into mass epiphany ended with the clang of a jail cell door.
That left the Brotherhood and its Sunshine boys to carry on.
In the spring of 1969, federal agents arrested Tim Scully in California on a fugitive warrant based on the previous year’s Denver raid. He made bail, but faced fifty-six years. Over the next several months, Scully commuted to Colorado for court dates, paranoia his constant companion.
When Scully picked up a tablet machine in Chicago one day during the summer of 1970, he noticed a vaguely familiar profile passing him on the street. Couldn’t quite place it, but the face stayed with him. After he rented a truck to cart the machine back to the West Coast, he saw another vehicle parked nearby with another familiar face behind its wheel. The driver ducked, trying to look inconspicuous.
Scully wrinkled his brow. He wasn’t hallucinating.
“I’d always been able to lose them in the past, but not this time,” he recalled.
Scully wound up abandoning the incriminating machine in Pocatello, Idaho. His attorney later re-sold it to a candy company.
When he finally did return home, the paranoia didn’t dissipate. During a lab accident one day, he caught a whiff of acid fumes, later glanced out a kitchen window and saw ghostly feds lurking behind every bush.
“A clear message from my unconscious that it was time for me to quit,” he said.
Scully put the brakes on, but Nick Sand didn’t—nor would he. Ever.
Cozying up to Billy Hitchcock, Scully’s far more defiant junior partner learned to love the money associated with LSD as much as or more than he did the evangelism. Hitchcock was his man.
During an acid séance once at Millbrook, Leary had asked Billy what enlightenment meant to him. Hitchcock answered, “Being better able to predict the stock market.” Despite a hefty trust fund that yielded $15,000 a month, Hitchcock never gave up arbitrage. He loved the trading floor as much as he did Leary’s pharmaceuticals. Nick began to model himself after Hitchcock.
After evicting Leary and Alpert from Millbrook, Hitchcock relocated to Sausalito in ’68. There he brokered the first summit meeting between Brotherhood leaders and the Sunshine twins. He laundered Bear’s cash reserves13 and bankrolled Leary. According to the government, Hitchcock kept both Scully and Sand on $12,000 annual retainers—an allegation Scully disputed.
“Billy Hitchcock did not pay Nick or me to do any chemistry,” he said. He did loan Scully money, however, at three-to-one interest.
Hitchcock seemed to favor Nick over Scully. He helped Sand open an account at the Nassau branch of Fiduciary Trust14 under the alias Alan Bell. It was Nick, too, whom Hitchcock hooked up with a spooky expat named Ronald Hadley Stark15 who operated the Brotherhood’s Belgian LSD lab, far from the prying eyes of US authorities.
Nick returned from the Bahamas with big ideas. He closed the Windsor lab, pooled his money with David Mantell, and moved into the Cloverdale ranch where he rebooted the acid operation. In the fall of ’69, Nick started yet another company: Tekton Development, dedicated to the manufacture and/or acquisition of LSD labware.
As Scully’s fervor waned, Sand’s big ideas ballooned. The Belgian lab produced a pound of second-rate “brown” acid that needed purification, but Scully refused the task. Sand rented another lab house near Palm Springs and undertook the process on his own. He scoffed at Scully’s paranoia as both unfounded and irritating.
Except that it wasn’t.
After bagging Leary and the Bear, Nixon’s Justice Department ratcheted up its dragnet. A flood of frightening headlines fueled the emerging War on Drugs: mostly made-up accounts of teens leaping from fire escapes or wandering into freeway traffic. Government propaganda also spread unfounded rumors that LSD could warp the DNA of the unborn.
When the twenty-one-year-old daughter of right-wing TV personality Art Linkletter leapt to her death from a Hollywood high-rise in October of 1969, Linkletter used his celebrity to condemn LSD.16 He repeatedly testified that Diane Linkletter’s suicide happened while she was tripping, even though investigators found no supporting evidence.
Further alarmed by the notorious crimes Charles Manson’s family committed while allegedly under acid’s influence,17 Congress rushed to judgment. Determined to ban LSD just as they had banned booze during the Roaring Twenties, lawmakers made mere possession a federal crime. Thousands would go to jail, some for decades.
Scully’s fear was not imagined. Like Owsley, he got the govern-ment’s message. Nick Sand remained oblivious.
To his everlasting regret, Leonard Pickard never met Captain Al or Tim Leary. Same with Humphrey Osmond and Huxley, and the whole inaugural generation of psychonauts.
He began writing to Owsley, but not until decades after the elusive Bear really did leave the country. In 1996, Owsley settled permanently in the Australian outback with yet another new “old lady,” far from the prying eyes of The Man. He and Pickard struck up a correspondence in 2006 when Leonard asked his participation in a “Future Drugs” book project, but it withered once Pickard discovered the role model of his youth had devolved into an obsessive crank with scant interest in chemistry or medicine.
“He was emphatic about ‘cyclonic storms’ ravaging the hemispheres. Hence, his move to Australia,” said Pickard.
By then, Owsley had
