Acid might be a family affair, but Reid was no Fagin. He established trust funds for his heirs. He invested in gem mining. He was a capitalist, after all, and made personal responsibility a cornerstone of his home teaching, with a curriculum heavy on math. Until he sprang for a counting machine, Reid trusted his youngsters to tabulate the take. They banded stacks with strips decorated in crayon. Hearts. Flowers. Stars.
It was only after Al caught his seventeen-year-old son skimming that he bought the automated counter. Even then, the sheer volume could be taxing. The larger and better product that Leonard produced, the harder it was to discreetly sell all of it, and the more currency there was to be laundered.
Leonard didn’t know how Al managed to raise a family and run a million-dollar business, but he remained a big admirer. He, too, understood the demands of multitasking. He also appreciated that the time had come to give Petaluma Al a hand.
Todd Skinner was more than happy to oblige.
The swimming pool project presented dire risks beyond distribution and dirty money. Working closely with lysergics could prompt a condition Tim Scully once referred to as “Acid Makers’ Queasy”: a loopy lack of logic that kept chemists perpetually loaded and provoked careless accidents.
In August of 1998, Pickard suffered a serious chemical spill that nearly killed him, according to his partners. Reminiscent of the convulsions endured by Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement investigator Max Houser during the 1988 Mountain View bust, Leonard lay twitching alone on the floor of the Vuelta Herradura bungalow for two days, hallucinating nearer to the afterlife than he’d bargained for.
After a similar mishap with a broken flask once in Aspen, Pickard allegedly dodged injury by leaping into a hot tub. That time, he’d hired illegal immigrants to clean up. Lingering fumes in that lab house hastened his move to New Mexico.
Following the Santa Fe spill, Pickard was not so fortunate. He was laid up for days, his hands quaked, and his behavior changed.
“He became more reckless, if that was possible,” recalled John Halpern. “The secret agent thing got way out of hand. Grandiose one minute; paranoid the next.”
Savinelli noticed too. Pickard saw DEA everywhere. He hid video cameras in a potted plant and a wall hanging at the lab house. Stereo speakers secretly recorded conversations. His memory lapsed. Alfred came home from Native Scents once to find that Leonard had been there and left the gas on his kitchen stove. The house reeked. Had Savinelli lit a match, he would have been toast.
“Exposure to hundreds of doses has got to have an effect,” he said. “He was just not right. I would compare it to electroconvulsive therapy. It’s such a reset that part of his self or ego has dissolved to the point where he had to reconstitute himself.”
Skinner, too, recalled his accidents and their aftermath in trial testimony.
Pickard called their memories “myth” and defied them all, as well as the DEA, to prove he’d ever overdosed. “No corroboration of any lab was ever found, not a billionth of a gram,” he declared.3
Queasy or sober, Pickard did get production down pat, according to his partners. Despite his denials, all three maintained that Leonard cranked out quality crystals with regularity.
Still, business hit a wall in Santa Fe. There could be no expansion based solely on Petaluma Al’s distribution. Pickard looked to Halpern for help. For 10 percent of the profits, Halpern persuaded a childhood friend to join their enterprise.
Heir to a New York fashion design fortune,4 Stefan Wathne agreed to spread Leonard’s faux “Viagra” to London, Paris, Moscow, and beyond. He’d then arrange to send untaxed profits back to the US.
At first, Halpern told Wathne that Pickard inherited the capital to produce his Viagra knockoff. Later, he confessed the truth when he was certain Wathne “could tolerate accepting money from ill-gotten gains; that this would be illegal money.”
Wathne got into the game. Leonard nicknamed him “Ice” for his native Iceland. The Harvard-educated bon vivant developed a method for converting drug profits into Russian bonds then sending them back to the states. The mystery contribution of $140,000 to Mark Kleiman’s Drug Policy Analysis Program appeared to be a successful early example of Wathne’s laundering skills.
But it wasn’t long before “Ice” echoed Al Reid’s complaint about small bills. Wathne wasn’t about to mule a buttload of $20s through customs. His minimum transaction was $1 million. A month before Leonard’s acid spill, he met Wathne in New York with $750,000. Wathne grudgingly accepted the money but warned him that $1 million meant $1 million. Whenever Leonard tried fudging, Halpern let him know that “Ice” was pissed.
During one inelegant exchange, Leonard flew to LA, booked into the Beverly Hills Hotel, and delivered two grocery sacks of cash to Wathne’s boutique on Rodeo Drive. A puzzled female employee accepted the money on Wathne’s behalf. Leonard flew back to San Francisco nine days later after running up a $16,253.66 hotel bill, oblivious to his own profligacy or Wathne’s fury.
Skinner was the perfect buffer. Combining years of fraud with friendly decadence, he successfully bridged the gap between mad scientist and dilettante. After he’d agreed to add Skinner to his growing enterprise, Pickard’s extravagance worsened. Everyone flew first class and stayed at the finest hotels. During one acid exchange, Pickard roomed at San Francisco’s Pan Pacific, Skinner stayed at the nearby Hyatt, while Wathne checked in across the street at the high-end Campton Place (“Best rack of veal in the City!”).
The following day, Skinner rose early and cheerfully chauffeured Pickard to a storage locker north of the Golden Gate. There, he said, Pickard extracted $400,000. On their way back, Skinner deftly lifted $70,000 when Leonard wasn’t looking.
Back in the hotel, Pickard counted the cash before turning it over to Wathne. He frowned, then confronted Skinner: $50,000 was missing. Skinner
