Nick Sand followed a different path. He posted, then jumped, his $50,000 bail.
“Nicky learned that he would be gathered up early to preclude flight,” said Pickard. “They came into the houseboat in Sausalito two weeks before he was to surrender. Alas, he and his wife had already departed. Imagine that.”
Pickard visited the houseboat shortly after the couple vanished.
“Just an empty one room, drifting afloat in the water,” he recalled. “Mattress on the floor, Gods-eye on the wall . . . all the spirits had fled. I turned and left with a certain sadness, and happiness.”
The only thing Sand left behind of any value was a canary-yellow Mercedes that his attorney drove for years thereafter. Kennedy called it his “Yellow Submarine.”
Despite their clumsy debut, DEA agents could claim victory on several fronts in the War on Drugs. Before Watergate ushered President Nixon from office, Timothy Leary settled in at Folsom State Prison in a cell right next to Charles Manson. He was transferred to a federal facility, but served only two years before his 1976 parole, prompting many to suspect Tim was a DEA snitch—a charge that tarred him for the rest of his life.
Ram Dass and Allen Ginsberg turned on him. His son Jack told reporters “he’d inform on anybody if he could get out of jail.”
He did indeed inform on friends, including his own lawyers and ex-wife Rosemary. When he walked out of prison, Leary walked into the Witness Protection Program.
Augustus Owsley Stanley III served two years behind bars, swearing he’d never cook another batch of acid. Indeed, upon his release, he resumed his side career as chief acoustics engineer for the Grateful Dead and remained as far backstage as possible. He perfected the band’s legendary wall of sound, but publicly eschewed LSD.
The remaining members of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love either overdosed, did their time7, or went so deep underground that the DEA never found them.
Back inside McNeil Island, Tim Scully bore down on his computer/biofeedback research. Credited with a breakthrough in quadriplegic cyber communication that unlocked crippled voices, Scully achieved success after success. The Washington State Junior Chamber of Commerce honored him as its 1978 man of the year. Headlines underscored his feats. “He’s a Genius!” read one; “Scully’s Brilliant Past,” read another.
His nemesis, Judge Samuel Conti, was reluctantly persuaded to halve Scully’s sentence, but insisted he serve all ten years.
“Before you start considering rehabilitation and probation, which so many bleeding hearts advocate today, you have to punish the offender,” he said. “What happens to the victims of this very brilliant individual . . . those thousands and thousands of pills ingested by humanity?”
Over the judge’s objections, Scully was released early to a San Francisco halfway house in August of 1979. He returned to Mendocino where he continued his career as a computer engineer. He wrote and lectured on software, parapsychology and a range of other New Age topics, but never LSD.
Sometime later, Leonard Pickard stopped in for a visit. Eager to discuss the Brotherhood’s glory days, he pressed and prodded.
“He wanted to compare and contrast methods of making acid,” said Scully. “All I could do is be friendly and offer him a cup of tea.”
The September day in ’76 when he abandoned his name, his Mercedes, and his Sausalito houseboat, Nick Sand disguised himself as a vacationing angler intent on catching the last Canadian salmon of the season. A girlfriend drove him to the British Columbian border where he entered under the alias Ted Parody (Theodore Edward Parody III), and settled in the rural hamlet of Lumby (pop. 1,731). Judy joined him in November. They took up the cultivation of psilocybe mushrooms as a cash crop.
A veteran of subterfuge, Sand spent a few days each year in a Vancouver office building researching the names and birth dates of dead infants who’d expired around the time of Nick’s own birthday. He made copies of birth certificates and kept them tucked away. Ted Parody was an apt, if tongue-in-cheek alias, but he had several faux IDs in reserve just in case anyone got nosy and he needed to switch up in a hurry.
On a grocery resupply trip to Vancouver in the spring of 1978, a friend recommended a book by the Indian mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.8 Nick read it and then another and another. Rajneesh meditated with the best of them, but he had no time for the poor and downtrodden. Here was a hedonist with a taste for the good life—right up Nick’s alley.
He and Judy agreed: they had to make a pilgrimage to the Bhagwan’s ashram in the Indian city of Pune. It took the better part of a year, but they saved enough from mushroom sales for airline tickets for themselves and Nick’s infant daughter, Sorrel.
Once they established themselves at the ashram, Nick traded in the name Ted Parody for Pravasi. He and Judy endeared themselves to Rajneesh and his “sannyasins”9 (followers) by creating a hydroponic garden, supplying the cult with fresh produce.
The Pravasi/Sand family did well enough with vegetable sales to purchase a two-story home fifteen minutes away from the ashram. Nick and Judy lived on the ground floor and built an LSD lab on the second. Once he located a reliable source of ergotamine tartrate, Nick was back in business. For the next two years, he and Judy satisfied the acid needs not just of Rajneesh but much of the Middle East.
In 1981, the Pravasi/Sand family returned to the US, accompanied by Rajneesh himself. The guru aimed to bring his affluent teachings to the West Coast. He began by buying a 125-square-mile ranch near Antelope, Oregon, about 120 miles southeast of Portland. He paid $6 million for the
