“Skinner wanted to host ayahuasca sessions like Alfred’s, and asked me to rent the Santa Fe house,” Leonard explained. “I did so, with his money. . . .”
In Pickard’s telling, simple, rational, and blameless explanations exist for every misstep, but Skinner got to the government first; his version prevailed.
Leonard was not a complete stranger to New Mexico. Back in Boston, he’d cemented his friendship with Dr. John Halpern, another frequent New Mexico visitor. Since their first nauseous meeting in Alfred Savinelli’s living room, Halpern and Pickard conferred often on psychedelic evangelism. While it wasn’t entirely clear to Halpern how a Harvard grad student could afford to bounce between Cambridge and Moscow and Santa Fe almost on a whim, all of Pickard’s many and varied associates had come to accept that Pickard had money—especially Halpern. Pickard’s $100,000 loans had become an annual routine. The source, maintained Leonard, was Todd Skinner.
David Haley became aware of just how much money Mr. Connor had when a FedEx box landed on his front porch several months after their first exchange. In furtherance of his agreement with Mr. Connor, Haley testified that he’d dutifully scoured the multiple listings for a likely writer’s hideaway, but the $20,000 inside the FedEx box accelerated the process.
“This money is for the work we’ll do together,” read the simple note that Haley found inside along with the cash.
Pickard wasn’t the only psychonaut who swore that he’d turned over a new leaf in the nineties. Todd Skinner filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy to wipe clean the debts he’d racked up over the previous ten years. His drug-running past behind him, he married a twenty-six-year-old Oklahoma State medical student on July 18, 1992, and vowed to settle down.
Skinner swept Kelly Sue Rothe off her feet, wooing her with wine, jewelry, and fibs. They honeymooned for four months along California’s Mendocino coastline before returning to Tulsa where Kelly settled in as a researcher at Lifton Laboratories while she finished her doctorate in osteopathy.
Her husband was absent much of the time, allegedly testifying in court cases and traveling on behalf of his mother’s business. Kelly bore him two children—a daughter quickly followed by a son.9 The new Mrs. Skinner was tolerant of his absence, if vaguely suspicious. Todd had been a philanderer before their wedding and she kept coming across signs that he might not have given up his dalliances.
“He wasn’t the money magnet he was proclaiming to be,” recalled Alfred Savinelli. “He had an old beat-up van and lived in an old single-family home, but Kelly made him look normal: two kids and wife. He ingratiated himself in ways that were interesting though, and got people to commit.”
In July of 1996, Todd Skinner bought a decommissioned USAF Atlas E missile silo at 16795 Say Road on the outskirts of Wamego, Kansas. Anachronisms of the Cold War, such missile silos still ring Topeka. Once SALT treaties and new technology made them obsolete, the Defense Department sold the silos to the highest bidders.
Skinner came up with $40,000 to put down on approximately twenty-eight acres. He created the Wamego Land Trust to act as owner of record and installed his junior high school science tutor, Graham Kendall, as trustee. On its face, the purchase looked legitimate. Representing his mother’s company, Skinner maintained that he planned to outfit the silo with the latest in Japanese robotics. With assembly-line efficiency and minimal labor costs, the new subterranean machine works would crank out industrial coils and other Gardner Springs gadgets.
But 115 feet beneath the bleak surface of the Kansas flatlands, Skinner also created lavish living quarters for himself and his closest campañeros: a surreal cavern featuring colorful Mexican artwork, a twelve-line phone system, a king-sized bed mounted on an oak pedestal with mirrored ceiling, humongous Italian marble hot tub, and a $100,000 sound system. He put in a mezzanine where he could survey his realm like the great and wonderful Oz. He also converted the fenced-in acreage above into a petting zoo: four llamas, a pair of Clydesdales, three miniature horses, and a tiny donkey. In all, Skinner’s remodeling and menagerie cost over $300,000.
Todd told Kelly the silo was for business and the menagerie was for their children, but Kelly kept hearing that Skinner’s underground Disney World was as much for head-tripping orgies as it was manufacturing custom springs. After months of his pathological excuses, she finally had had enough.
Kelly quit the marriage and spent the rest of the nineties fighting for custody.
Years later, after she’d remarried, become a doctor, and moved her family practice to upstate New York, Kelly heard from Leonard about Skinner’s duplicity. She was sympathetic, if cynical.
“Don’t worry,” she told him, “he’s done it to many people before you.”
About the same time that Pickard graduated from the Kennedy School, Mark Kleiman quit Harvard and moved west. In the summer of ’97, Kleiman invited Pickard to join him at UCLA’s Drug Policy Analysis Program as Kleiman’s deputy. He suggested Pickard might want to expand upon his theories about the growing opioid threat in Eastern Europe.
Kleiman had initial reservations about his star pupil. He found a disturbing reprimand in Pickard’s academic file. Leonard had once submitted a research paper written by another student—one step short of plagiarism, but still a violation of the academic honor code. Pickard sheepishly confessed his shortcut. He’d been extremely busy, you see, and, well . . .
Despite the black mark, Kleiman saw no further evidence of dishonesty. He hired him as his assistant.
Pickard didn’t exactly start out with a bang. He rarely kept office hours, travelled frequently,10 and finished little of the research assigned him—the same transgressions that got him into trouble at Harvard.
“That was making me nervous,” recalled Kleiman.
But Pickard’s knowledge of biochemistry was extensive and his Rolodex, formidable. His research veered toward synthetics, which Kleiman agreed were probably the next big threat. Pickard called
