XII.
ON OCT. 21, 1997, THE Oklahoma Highway Patrol caught Todd Skinner weaving through traffic. He was cited for driving under the influence, but Skinner was not so intoxicated that he could not pass himself off to the arresting officer as Gerard Terrence Finnegan. He had a driver’s license that said so.1
The ruse worked. Nobody checked. Finnegan/Skinner appeared on Dec. 22, paid fines with $1,140 in cash, and no further questions were asked.
The Oklahoma justice system could be faulted for so grievous an oversight, but seldom did it have to contend with so clever a miscreant. For a very long time, Todd Skinner seemed to lead a charmed existence. With his stepfather’s help, he continuously skated past the law. He never appeared to want for cash. His marriage might be on the rocks, but Todd looked as if he took even that calamity in stride.
He always found ways to keep an overactive libido satisfied. Beneath his pretense beat a BDSM heart. He dosed his children’s babysitter with blotter acid that summer. When she alerted the Pottawatomie Sheriff, her testimony got the same attention as Gerard Finnegan’s DUI. “Not credible,” said police.
During the first year that he split with Kelly, Skinner took up with seventeen-year-old Emily Ragan, a hyper-bright STEM student who lived in nearby Manhattan with her parents, both professors at Kansas State University. Diminutive, dark-haired, and sweet-natured, she was disturbingly comparable to Kelly. Skinner preferred suggestable dewy-eyed coeds, but was not averse to pricey hookers. In The Rose, Leonard wrote that he fantasized about being “smothered in girls.”
Todd liked playing roulette with a lady on his arm. He frequented Topeka’s topless Cabaret Club fishing for the latter, but gambled at Harrah’s Prairie Band Casino on the nearby Pottawatomie Indian Reservation. He visited Vegas often.
And despite his soon-to-be ex-wife’s sour indignation over his missile silo, the Skinner boondoggle turned out to be a bona fide hit. The Wamego outpost of Gardner Springs Inc. had been fully accepted by the locals. Several went on the payroll. Skinner hired off-duty cops for security. There were rumors at the Friendly Cooker café of meth labs and odd Satanic rituals down deep in the earth, but rarely any disturbances topside. Prairie stoicism prevailed. No harm, no foul.2
But 1998 would differ dramatically from 1997.
As the new year began, Katherine Magrini had a falling out with her son.
“One day he tells me to move out, at enormous cost,” she said.
She did not advertise her reasons, but Mrs. Magrini angrily ordered all Gardner Springs machinery, materiel, and employees pulled back to Tulsa. A business that once pulled in $2 million a year was losing ground in Wamego. The good times slowly ground to a halt.
Todd kept a game face. Both of his Porsches remained parked out front, conspicuous displays of his declining wealth. He planted a state-of-the-art windmill in the vegetable garden that he’d ordered as accompaniment to his missile base menagerie. He par-tied hard, especially on weekends, when all sorts of middle-aged flower children assembled in Wamego before descending into his subterranean sin den.
But the hard truth remained: Todd was nearly broke, and growing desperate.
Leonard wasn’t.
Ever the Samaritan, Pickard insisted on keeping the cost of a single 100 microgram hit down to a very affordable 29.7 cents—or so said Skinner. The economics of scale still made even a modest markup a gold mine. Profit margin per batch could approach $3 million.
The challenge was, and always had been, distribution. Unloading Santa Fe “Viagra” to paying customers could get dicey. Amsterdam contacts handled the European market well enough, but domestic sales were a whole different matter. Reliable traffickers were hard to find. If any shred of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love remained, neither Pickard nor Skinner knew where it was. Those few Brothers Leonard located through his Kennedy School research were either retired or buried so deep underground that they almost never surfaced.
Paranoia struck deep in the mid-1990s. No one was safe, not even Sasha Shulgin, who’d been operating in plain sight and without a license since 1993. Witness the cautionary tale of Bruce Michael Young. With a dramatic rise in income, dealers all too often succumbed to profligacy.
Ultimately, Pickard turned to an ex-Marine who’d been transforming acid into cash along the California coast for the better part of a decade. A jolly, unassuming retiree, Alec “Petaluma Al” Reid was a sometime art dealer with seven kids. He laughed from the belly, puttered like a grandpa, and philosophized with flair, combining the best parts of Wilford Brimley and Wavy Gravy. Everyone knew when Al came to town. He drove a big red Cadillac convertible with a hidden compartment suitable for a single kilogram of LSD.
Through a tried-and-true network of Grateful Dead loyal-ists, Reid had been spreading lysergic cheer for years in a region known to the DEA as the Acid Triangle. With a straight line from Monterey to Castro Valley forming its hypotenuse, the triangle came to a point at Bolinas Bay. It was within these boundaries that Reid peddled his elixir. In brown vials labeled “Wild Oats Vitamin C—100 grams,” a dose could be purchased through mail order or from salesmen strategically stationed outside rock concerts. He also shipped frequently to Amsterdam.
Following established protocols, Pickard periodically met Reid at the Buckeye Roadhouse in Sausalito or Lyons Restaurant in Petaluma. There, Skinner testified, he exchanged acid for cash. Al spurned small bills. Too bulky. He liked to print tiny hearts on $100s so he could track where the money went.
Once in early ’97, the Secret Service paid Reid a visit. Did Al know he’d been spending bad bills? Not many, but enough that the Treasury Department wanted to know where they came from. The agents gave him a crash course in what to look for and told Reid to stay vigilant.
Al wasn’t sure who was passing him phony money, but from
