Skinner offered the FBI few details as to how a nineteen-year-old college dropout got involved in so far-fetched a scheme, but his story did check out. The case would take years to successfully prosecute, but Merit eventually fled to South Africa after he and five of his cronies were indicted in an elaborate penny stock fraud.
Meanwhile, Skinner enmeshed himself in a fraud of his own. Claiming once again that he was heir to his mother’s fortune, he opened an account with a Philadelphia brokerage house that specialized in foreign currency options. Skinner boasted to the Tulsa World that he sat on the Philadelphia Stock Exchange and operated a currency trading company called FINIX, but when his margins were called six months later, it turned out Skinner owed over $1.5 million.4
And he did all of this before celebrating his twenty-first birthday.
But Todd Skinner was just getting started. He moved easily between highbrow and lowlife. During the mid-eighties, he bounced between Tucson and Little Rock and Hot Springs, Arkansas, attending psychonaut conventions and hatching get rich quick schemes. In between, he snitched for the Department of Justice.
Todd befriended Boris Olarte, a Colombian cocaine dealer who’d bought a business from his mother.5 Olarte was subsequently busted, then consigned to the Tulsa County jail. Using his step-father’s connections, Skinner persuaded the DEA to put Olarte into the Federal Witness Protection Program as a first step toward turning him against the Medellín drug cartel.
His role in helping bring down the Colombians could not have happened at a better time for Skinner, who was simultaneously smuggling drugs himself. He got caught, first crossing the Mexican border with marijuana at Sells, Arizona, in November 1986, then peddling grass in Boston with a high school chum.
His drug dealing climaxed Jan. 26, 1989, with his arrest in the lobby of a Hyatt Hotel in Camden, New Jersey. Bail was set at $1 million. Charged with being a cannabis kingpin, Skinner was sentenced to three years’ probation. Jersey authorities were less forgiving than Tulsa police or the feds. Skinner spent his twenty-fifth birthday in jail before he reached out once again to his stepfather. Gary Magrini advised his boy to make a deal.
Skinner turned snitch and gave up his customers. While the New Jersey Narcotics Strike Force eavesdropped, he wore a wire during the sale of thirty pounds of weed to a trio of hapless Jersey pot dealers. Skinner would later testify against John Worthy, his wife Willie Mae, and sidekick Lamont Briscoe. The case ultimately turned out to be tainted6 for the government, but Skinner walked free, right into another sting.
He cooperated next with the government on a Jamaican drug case against the Morgan brothers of Montego Bay. Dennis, John, and Horace Morgan controlled a string of gas stations as well as a hotel, a car rental, and the Fairfield Plantation resort on the northwest coast of Jamaica. Though Fairfield could accommodate up to sixty tourists at a time, the Morgans limited occupancy to tamp down risks to their far more lucrative side business. According to the DEA, they had a lock on the hash, grass, and cocaine market.
Skinner’s assignment was to persuade John Morgan to meet him in the nearby Cayman Islands on the pretense that Todd had a boat to sell: a vessel suitable for smuggling bales of grass. In the Cayman capital of Georgetown, Skinner was told, local police could arrest Morgan, then send him to the US to face charges.
On Dec. 7, 1989, Todd flew to Grand Cayman accompanied by two Gloucester County detectives and a DEA representative from the Miami office. They set up the sting.
On Feb. 20, 1990, Skinner flew to Jamaica to woo Morgan. Using a string of aliases,7 he chartered a seventy-eight-foot oil tanker. All looked perfect until a hurricane intervened, wrecked the tanker, and ruined the ganja shipment.
But Skinner wasn’t done stinging in the Caribbean. He met a South Dakota Bible banger during one of his Jamaican visits. A former minister of the Des Moines-based Open Bible Standard Church, Everette LaVay McKinley set up the World Fidelity Bank on the island of Grenada, promising a 48 percent return on investment. Two hundred twelve church members gave the Reverend a total of $5.5 million to invest. They never saw it again.
Skinner testified about McKinley’s attempt to involve him in his scheme, and the court gave McKinley twenty-seven years.8 At his sentencing, McKinley invoked Proverbs 29:27, which warns against partnering with a thief:
The fear of man bringeth a snare, but whoso putteth his trust in the LORD is safe.
“Scripturally, I was wrong,” muttered McKinley, “but I won’t make that mistake again.”
In 1992, Todd said that he ruptured a disc in his back. He went on prescription pain meds: Soma, Carcipital, Percocet, Demerol, Flexeril, Parnate . . . and became addicted. He came to loathe opioids. By November of that year, he maintained that he’d kicked his habit, but a habit he vowed never to kick was psychedelics. He did not smoke or drink or snort speed or opiates, but never, ever did he turn down an opportunity to trip.
In answer to a prosecutor’s question about his recreational drug use, Todd carefully parsed his courtroom response, as if God were listening in: “I seem to have an idiosyncratic response to entheogens. That they are—have—(maybe that’s arrogant, so I’ve got to be careful) . . . they are very spiritual and sacramental things. I do not use these—I think you put it, ‘recreationally.’ And I take offense to that, unfortunately, because I do not take these things recreationally. These are sacraments to me.”
From PCP-A receptors to 5-fluoro-alpha-methyltryptamine, amanita
