2. “Paul came into play because I read his brief paper on a synthetic mechanism that possibly could result in improvements in the routes to certain controlled and deleterious psychoactives, but also including LSD. This was the topic of a paper I wrote which relied upon synthetic difficulty or ease as major factors in future abuse scenarios.”
3. Pickard maintained that he does recount vignettes involving loved ones, but cloaked them in anonymity to spare them the mockery of knowing a felon.
4. Drug obsessed celebrities like Hunter S. Thompson and Jack Nicholson called Aspen home.
5. At a 1991 ceremony in Yosemite’s Ahwahnee Hotel, Kōbun married the Apple Computer founder to Laurene Powell.
6. After his election to the Afghan Presidency in 2001, Hamid Karzai promoted Dostum to Deputy Defense Minister. He became Vice-President in 2014.
7. As recounted in House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia by Craig Unger (Dutton, 2018), President Trump’s longtime associate Felix Sater also swapped Stingers:
His most notable early operation took place in 1998, when he went on the hunt for Singer antiaircraft missiles that the CIA had originally given to the mujahideen for use against the Soviets during their occupation of Afghanistan, but which were at risk of falling into the hands of radical jihadists.
Felix went to work. His attorney Robert Wolf called David Kendall, then President Bill Clinton’s lawyer, and told him that Sater had serial numbers for the Stinger missiles the Clinton Administration had sought. After President Clinton was informed, Wolf then spoke to CIA general counsel Robert S. McNamara Jr. and read out the serial numbers of the Stingers.
But the CIA was still skeptical. Next, Felix provided photographs of the missiles with their serial numbers and a copy of a daily newspaper to show the photo was contemporaneous. Meanwhile, Wolf began extended talks with two men in the CIA’s clandestine division about al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, and the Stinger missiles.
When President Clinton authorized the August 1998 bombing strike against al-Qaeda in retaliation for the terrorist bombings of the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, BuzzFeed reported, no fewer than ten current and former intelligence and law enforcement officials said Sater “supplemented US Intelligence by providing location coordinates for al-Qaeda camps that the US military ultimately bombed in Khost, Afghanistan.”
“Well, Felix got play for those Stingers,” said Pickard. “Sadly, Akbar did not.”
8. In his defense, Leonard testified the heroin shipment was designed to track how Afghan traffickers got the payload past US Customs, not as a basis for prisoner exchange.
X.
“SKINNER LOVED TO BE THE candy man,” recalled Alfred Savinelli. “He was a second-generation drug-pushing pedophile. He had nine lives and had already burned through seven of them by the time Leonard met him.”
Gordon Todd Skinner went by “Todd,” much the same way that Pickard used his middle name among family and friends. Todd and Leonard. Leonard and Todd.
When he introduced them, Savinelli had no inkling they would become the oddest of odd couples or that he—Savinelli—would be the unwitting matchmaker.
Leonard flunked out of Princeton the same year that Todd was born. Despite the twenty-year age difference, there were similarities. Both came from privilege, clashed early and often with the law, and were exceptionally tall. Todd stood six foot five and weighed in at 238 pounds. Leonard was three inches shorter and fifty pounds lighter.
Todd looked the part of a mad monk, tonsured and hunched as if newly released from the belfry at Notre Dame. He was prematurely bald and bearded whereas Leonard was clean-shaven and had a full head of long flowing silver. Todd was lethargic; Leonard, a marathon runner—the tortoise and the hare.
When first they met, Pickard sensed an ally in Skinner. He might be young, but seemed as dedicated a psychonaut as Sasha or Dave Nichols, or perhaps even Albert Hofmann himself. Skinner wanted to turn on the whole world. The two men registered instant simpatico in the sense that each intuited opportunity in the other. It took a year or two, but when Leonard’s opinion finally did begin to shift, it dropped slowly beneath contempt and kept descending all the way to hell.
“He’s a kind of preserved infant, but gargantuan, his face empty as a zero,” said Leonard with undisguised sarcasm. “We refer to him as ‘Bozo.’”
Skinner cared spit-little about the opinions of others. As with virtually everything about their relationship except their shared passion for psychedelics, Skinner and Pickard differed on the facts, including the date and circumstances of their fateful first encounter.
Skinner maintained under oath that he made Pickard’s acquaintance at a San Francisco shamanic botany conference in late October of 1996. He distinctly recalled Leonard wheeling a suitcase containing $700,000 in cash through a hotel lobby. When Leonard haltingly asked Todd to help him with his, uhm, “laundry,” Skinner heard the mumbling solicitation of a stuttering giraffe.
“You can’t ever tell what’s going on with his strategies,” said Skinner. “He’s usually double dealing on both sides.”
Pickard takes a moment to catch his breath. Double-dealing? And from the lips of the greatest double dealer since Benedict met Arnold? Leonard insists he didn’t actually meet Todd until February of 1998, during a session of the American Academy of Forensic Scientists . . . and the stuttering giraffe, by the way, was Skinner, not Pickard.
“He only appeared during that last year, really,” insisted Pickard. “He lurked at a few earlier conferences, but he had nothing to do with big LSD, even though forever after he claimed otherwise.”
Todd—not Leonard—was the aggressor, said Pickard. Right off the bat, Skinner sucked up with promises of drugs and money. He hooked Leonard with the Big Lie.
“Basically I just made up quite a story and told him that we could possibly get some money from (billionaire Warren) Buffett,” Skinner revealed later on the witness stand. “And I had quite a bit of fun with that one, but it really, in the end, upset him quite a bit.”
His curiosity piqued, Pickard gave Skinner his full
