On August 5, 1972, the task force1 indicted twenty-nine members of the Brotherhood, including Nick Sand. Scully was named an unindicted co-conspirator. In coordinated raids across the state, as well as in Hawaii and Oregon, sixteen were arrested. Police confiscated one-and-a-half million tabs of LSD, thirty gallons of hashish oil, and two-and-a-half tons of hash. Sand and Scully were not among those arrested.
Four months later, the total number of indictments expanded to forty-six. The Sunshine boys remained in the wind, but Operation BEL was well underway, and closing in fast.
Leonard Pickard read each dispatch, digested each rumor, mapped out each strategy that the renegade chemists had at their disposal. When Brotherhood of Eternal Love “wanted” posters went up in post offices across the land, Pickard memorized the name and face of every outlaw.
“I saw the actual DEA2 flyer, with about eighty3 photos,” he recalled. “San Francisco, ’73. That would be quite the collector’s item these days.”
The twenty-eight-year-old Berkeley lab manager mined newspaper articles as if they were treasure maps. He savored the details: Nick Sand’s smokable DMT; Ronald Stark’s Belgian hash oil distillery; the murky Czech origins of lysergic essentials like ergota-mine tartrate. The personalities were never enough; Leonard lusted after the alchemy.
Since he first arrived in California, Pickard had tracked every phase of the government’s cat-and-mouse game, beginning with the Bear, segueing to Tim Leary, and now, the Brotherhood itself. The chase became an obsession—a primer on how to keep on cooking while dodging narcs.
“Please keep in mind that I am not putting down Owsley, Nick, or Tim,” he said. “Quite the opposite. As I began to study carefully these systems, I was honored to know them.”
But only vicariously. Meeting his heroes in the flesh would come later, and would be a one-sided triumph, like that of a fan securing celebrity selfies.
Pickard had been following the Brotherhood’s exploits long before the organization bankrolled Tim Leary’s notorious 1972 escape from a California prison camp. Leonard devoured every episode of the fugitive professor’s globetrotting misadventures:
• How the Weather Underground spirited Leary and wife Rosemary out of the country on false passports, securing them asylum in Algeria;
• How they were literally held prisoner by Eldridge Cleaver, the self-exiled Black Panthers’ Minister of Defense;
• How they escaped to Switzerland, where the Learys split up;
• How Tim was once again imprisoned, this time by a Swiss arms dealer who wanted to force him to write his memoirs from jail;
• How Tim again escaped, hooked up with jet-setting girlfriend Joanna Harcourt-Smith, fled to Austria, then flew on to Afghanistan;
• And how his turncoat son-in-law finally tricked him into the custody of a CIA agent, who returned Leary to the US, and to prison.
Nick Sand’s odyssey was neither so dramatic nor far-reaching as Leary’s, but just as fraught with missteps. While the Learys navigated Algeria and Switzerland, Nick and Judy Shaughnessy left their new Missouri home for a long vacation.
In their absence, their mailbox spilled over with unopened mail, leading their postal carrier to alert police. The cops found water leaking from beneath the front door: a water line had burst. When they entered to stop the leak, officers discovered a lab in the basement and what appeared to be opium in an upstairs bedroom.
On January 19, 1973, Nick and Judy returned home to arrest warrants and possession charges.
That same day on the other side of the country, Leary landed at LAX in irons. His CIA handler handed him over to California authorities to serve out a ten-year sentence for marijuana possession.
And the following day, Richard Nixon began his second term as President, announcing dramatic progress in his ongoing War on Drugs.4 The Nixon Administration was making good on its vow to wipe Leary’s LSD legacy off the map.
On July 1, 1973, the federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs officially merged with the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement to create the new Drug Enforcement Administration. The agency’s first mandate: obliterate the Brotherhood of Eternal Love.
When the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on the Brotherhood in October of 1973, tales of the so-called “hippie mafia” brought out Pickard’s antiauthoritarian thrill junkie. Each day’s news produced another chapter: the clandestine labs, the exotic drug smuggling, the hiding in plain sight. The Man had a new acronym: DEA. Nick Sand and Tim Scully stood out as heroes and martyrs.
By then, Scully and Billy Hitchcock had returned to the US. No longer in the Sunshine business at all, Scully went legitimate with Aquarius Electronics, an acoustic and biofeedback specialty firm. Nonetheless, he and Sand were both indicted. Nick was held without bail in a St. Louis jail, but Scully turned himself in and was granted freedom pending trial. Of the three original Orange Sunshine creators, only Billy snitched.
As a trust fund heir and stock market speculator, Hitchcock was correctly singled out as the weak link. With steady pressure from prosecutors, he turned on the Brotherhood, naming names and delivering damning testimony in exchange for immunity. He encouraged Scully to do the same, and when Tim declined, Hitchcock loaned Scully $10,000 to hire an attorney.
When the trial of Scully and Sand5 began in San Francisco’s US District Court on November 12, 1973, Billy Hitchcock was the prosecution’s star witness. Judy Shaugnessy stood outside the door, handing out buttons to all who entered. They read, “We’re all in this together.”
Inside, Leonard Pickard offered long-stemmed roses to the defendants’ supporters.
“I later learned the prosecution thought I was some musician celebrity,” he said. “Perhaps it was the dark blue velvet jacket, or the necklace of stars and moons.”
He secured an introduction to Judy Shaugnessy and they sat through the entire trial together, making notes, trading comments, and taking names.
“I watched Billy testify, from his first word to his last,” said Pickard. “He was responsible for bringing down the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. As the fundamental co-conspirator, he
