Operation White Rabbit

could never have anything to do with any of that, and here’s one reason why,” said Pickard. “I grew up with stories from my uncle who was a soldier near the end of the war and among the first to enter the death camps. Fourteen-year-old girls he saw there on meat hooks. Even in his old age, this fine old warrior and huntsman would cry at the memories.”

Marquardt apparently grew up free of holocaust horror stories. He admired Adolph Hitler’s “ruthlessness of purpose,” and said as much to his parents and teachers. The end always justified the means. His adolescent heroes were a pair of nineteenth century Prussian chemists² who put science ahead of sentiment.

“They weren’t about being good human beings or bad human beings,” he said. “They were about being good chemists.”

Like Leonard, Marquardt was a wanderer. He took to roaming between prison stretches, landing in college towns much the way Pickard did. He snuck into labs at the universities of Oregon and Wisconsin to brew his newest mindbenders. Along the way, he lost his own taste for drugs. His contempt spiked for those who did indulge. He had zero pity for addicts and saw nothing wrong with feeding their habits.

“He got off on the power trip of being able to make drugs and what people would do to get them,” said his ex-wife, Peggy Dulaney. “Girls—well howdy, they’d do anything.”

The oddball Peg Dulaney married and nicknamed “Squeak” reeked of chemicals. He dressed in faded overalls and tripped over his own feet, but she found him endearing. They remained together fourteen years.

“He could be an arrogant son of a bitch with other people, and he always kept a .45 stuck in his britches, but with me he was real sweet,” she recalled. “He was real good to my daughter, paid for all her schooling. He loves animals. We had seventeen dogs at one time, and a bunch of cats too.”

During his longest stint outside of prison, he befriended his pursuers. Much like the mighty mouse who chased the cat in that long-forgotten sixties LSD film, Marquardt toyed with and talked to narcs more often than his fellow felons.

“He says that he solves chemical problems by envisioning himself as a nucleus within an atom and picturing what reactions might take place around him,” said John Duncan of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics. The Marquardt he came to know was a joker and rough-hewn mystic.

Marquardt saw himself as a pioneer hero lifted from legend. He described his life to the Tulsa World in 1978 as “the last American folk adventure: The light in the moon . . . narcotics agents chasing you all over the land. It’s a fantasy made real.”

The occasion of his newspaper interview, however, was his latest bust for cooking. This time, he’d set up a three-room lab in his Muskogee home to manufacture LSD, but with a twist.

“It was going to be the hallucinogen of the future,” he said. “It combined the best features of amphetamines, but acted more like LSD. The results were spectacular, beyond the realm of anything I ever experienced on LSD.”³

Once more, Marquardt did his time then vowed to go straight. He walked out of prison a changed man. He set up a used lab equipment warehouse outside of Wichita he called Prairielabs. It attracted scant attention until a traveling salesman called 911 in August of 1992, gasping for breath.

Joseph Martier⁴ stumped the ER physicians. The forty-two-year-old Pittsburgh solar heating salesman who called the EMTs to Prairielabs nearly died from fentanyl poisoning, which made no sense because nobody outside anesthesiology even knew what fentanyl was. A hundred times stronger than heroin, a speck the size of a salt crystal could provoke instant respiratory arrest. The DEA came to know fentanyl as “serial killer of the drug world.” Some junkies died so quickly the hypodermics were still stuck in their veins.

“They died before they could get high,” said a representative of the Philadelphia Health Department.

It took the DEA six months to link the dots which ran from Baltimore to Boston, Pittsburgh to Prairielabs. The final dot landed in George Marquardt’s home laboratory. As Leonard did during his 1988 arrest, Marquardt stood by during the raid and offered fair warning to the task force that swept past him in HazMat suits. Breathe the fumes or touch the dust at your peril; this shit could body slam a whale.

Fentanyl was George Marquardt’s Waterloo. While the Russian variety measured roughly eighty times stronger than China white, Marquardt’s was closer to four hundred times as potent. The DEA priced a kilogram at between $240,000 and $640,000. By comparison, heroin went for $100,000 to $200,000 a kilogram and cocaine, a mere $20,000 to $25,000.

In court, he did not deny he made it, but took no responsibility for the dozens who OD’ed. They knew the risks every time they stuck a needle in their arms. Marquardt had no pity. He fascinated Leonard Pickard.

With Mark Kleiman’s approval, and awareness of the Harvard Human Subjects Committee, Leonard located Marquardt in March of 1995. At fifty-one, he was beginning a thirty-year prison term in Oregon. Explaining in a letter that he wanted to more clearly understand fentanyl’s effects, Pickard flattered Marquardt as the expert that he was. He enclosed a research questionnaire.

Was fentanyl pleasant? Would its use spread? Was Marquardt familiar with an ultrapotent form of the drug strong enough to flatten an elephant? What precursors did he use? How might the chemicals be monitored on a global scale?

After folding Marquardt’s responses into his ongoing Russia project, and with Marquardt’s permission, Pickard forwarded his findings to the UN Drug Control Program in Vienna.

“The gem of his reply,” Pickard said later, was that the DEA hadn’t confiscated his lab after he was arrested. It was still out there, somewhere in Kansas—a fact Pickard salted away for future reference.

1. Dead center in the human brain, the pea-sized gland produces sleep-inducing melatonin, but also has an ancient reputation as a mysterious “third eye,” connecting the