He was going to have to quit the psychedelic tourism he’d enjoyed since finishing med school. No more peyote by moonlight with Navajo elders. No more DMT pit stops inside the subconscious. He had to earn a living, pay off student loans and secure tenure. No more tripping. He would have to see patients, conduct rounds, and collect a salary like any other shrink.
Funny thing, said Pickard. He’d recently inherited a million bucks. He had even more cash squirreled away from “the old days”—a reference Halpern reckoned later to be code for untaxed profits Pickard earned before his 1988 acid bust.
“I’ve never met anybody in my life who would have hundreds of thousands of dollars just laying about,” said Halpern. “Never in a safe; just—it’s in a shoebox, you know?”
It did not occur to Halpern that Pickard might still be manufacturing the stuff. No way a Harvard Kennedy School grad student needed to break the law. Regardless, Pickard’s offer of a loan sounded good to Halpern.
Years would pass before his ayahuasca terror resurfaced as Kafkaesque nightmare.
Leonard began spending more and more time in New Mexico, but kept up his ongoing research into Russian heroin. He split his schedule between Taos and Cambridge with a pit stop now and again in Eastern Europe. As his newest confidant, Halpern gained insight into the latest scoop on designer drugs. Drugs like fentanyl.
It was fentanyl, in fact, that led Pickard to the strange case of George Eric Marquardt—a cautionary tale he shared during one of his New Mexico sojourns with both Halpern and Alfred Savinelli.
A brilliant self-taught chemist, George Marquardt was arrested in 1993 as he was moving his lab from Boston to Wichita. During his subsequent trial, prosecutors connected Marquardt’s synthetic heroin to some 250 deaths up and down the Eastern Seaboard.
In pleading guilty, Marquardt described his occupation as “drug manufacturing.”
“Of what kind?” asked US District Judge Patrick Kelly.
“Clandestine,” answered the forty-seven-year-old shambling lump who stood before the bench.
“Sir?”
“Clandestine,” repeated Marquardt. He stroked his ZZ Top chin whiskers, shifted weight from one scuffed work boot to the other, and continued: “I don’t know that I’ve had an occupation outside of being a career drug manufacturer.”
Pickard was familiar with his legend. A Washington state narcotics agent once declared, “this guy can make dope out of the dirt in your pockets.” Even while doing one-to-ten in an Indiana reformatory for car theft back in the seventies, Marquardt brewed up enough speed and hallucinogens to keep his cell block buzzed through much of his sentence. He never got caught cooking.
Like Owsley and Scully and Leonard himself, Marquardt began as prodigy. His initial brushes with the law were ironic, even quaint. In 1966, Marquardt passed himself off as a youthful exec with the Atomic Energy Commission. He was lecturing comely young physics students at an all-girl Catholic college in Milwaukee when the FBI arrested him. In reality, he was a twenty-year-old Waukesha High School dropout then on probation for stealing an oscilloscope from the University of Wisconsin.
“Things in his lectures did not ring true,” said Sister Emelius, chair of the Alverno College chemistry department.
Pickard found empathetic points of recognition all over Marquardt’s record. Marquardt never fit in at school, not because he was inept or lazy, but because he was obsessed with chemistry. Waukesha High expelled him a month ahead of graduation. He refused to study English or history. Even math made him cringe.
Like Pickard, Marquardt aced statewide and even national science competitions. At six, he was dismantling and rebuilding TV sets. When other kids played Little League, Marquardt was developing his own method for dating fossils with carbon-14. He was not so nerdy that he was immune to puberty. A high-tech surveillance system inside the girls’ locker room turned out to be a Marquardt project. He had an early, prurient interest in the connection between sex and psychedelics.
His romance with LSD began at age twelve after he watched a junior high public health film. Dosed with acid, a mouse began chasing a cat through the movie. Marquardt was mesmerized. He cooked his first batch before his fourteenth birthday.
Classmate Clifford Goerke remembered a strange, angry kid who bucked authority and threw tantrums at the slightest provocation. Marquardt distanced himself from his God-fearing parents, retreating to his basement laboratory. When his father grumbled about all the electricity he was using, Marquardt rigged a cable to a nearby transmission line, bypassing meters.
He regarded his teachers as imbeciles. In a final effort to broaden his education, his high school counselor let him take college-level chemistry at nearby Carroll University. He found the professor as useless as his high school instructors and dropped out anyway.
Over the next couple of years, Marquardt lied his way into research positions at Marquette and Northwestern universities, as well as the Argonne Research Laboratory in Chicago, where Leonard had once interned.
While posing as a biochemist at the University of Wisconsin, Marquardt made off with $2,476 in lab equipment, including a radiology device he sold to a used labware broker in Chicago. The device wound up at the University of Illinois where a comparison of serial numbers led school officials back to Marquardt. He was arrested while honeymooning in Los Angeles and back in jail before his first child was born.
Pickard never copped to it, but the case history of George Marquardt hit very close to home. The biggest difference seemed to be that Marquardt got caught more often and paid a far heavier price. By the time Leonard took an interest, Marquardt had spent half his adult life behind bars.
There was one more significant distinction, according to Leonard. Before he ever set foot inside his first jail, George Marquardt showed the makings of a budding Nazi.
“I
