Leonard was so loopy he didn’t even know how badly he’d been robbed.
“The women, the money, the recklessness. . . . All of that spun out of control after Pickard’s exposure to the chemical spill in Santa Fe,” recalled Halpern. “He changed. He started believing every bullshit lie Skinner told him.”
Skinner was as spontaneous as he was pathological. He could spin fabulous hooey into high-stakes ambrosia. At a point when government and academic funding for psychedelic experimentation hit an all-time low, Todd let it be known at psychonaut conferences, mushroom festivals, and other gatherings of the hallucinatory cognoscenti that he could secure grants for projects like Rick Strassman’s DMT study.
“Dave Nichols was out of money,” testified Skinner. “Everyone was out of money as far as that group was concerned. They needed money. Savinelli didn’t have enough and Strassman couldn’t get more. Money was scarce.”
Scarce for everyone except Leonard Pickard. Separating him from his cash became Skinner’s singular focus.
Somehow during the early days of their collaboration, Todd convinced Pickard that he was Warren Buffett’s sub rosa bagman and that he could persuade the billionaire to help Leonard stage an international drug trafficking conference at Harvard.
Nonsense, said Pickard. Warren Buffett indeed. What kind of fool did Skinner take him for? And yet, Leonard remained intrigued.
Over many months, Skinner embroidered his story with back-channel baloney: he was able to move Buffett’s money around because he seemed so unlikely! Dontcha see? A hulking doofus with a head for numbers and a buccaneer’s gift for crossing state lines. Who better to carry Warren’s water?
Pickard listened dubiously to Skinner boast about transferring $1 billion from Buffett’s Swiss accounts to a Caribbean bank in exchange for a $5 million commission. Skinner and Buffett were tight. Warren kept Todd on a $225,000 quarterly retainer. Todd had Mrs. Buffett’s private number on speed dial. He hitched rides on the Berkshire Hathaway jet whenever he liked.
When asked later how he could possibly have believed that a Neanderthal like Skinner hung out with a Fortune 500 billionaire, Pickard said, “I was hanging on because I really wanted to do this project.”
Slowly, Leonard came around to the prospect of a Buffett-backed drug summit. Skinner sweetened his hopes with the promise of persuading his good friends Sting and Paul Simon to furnish the soundtrack. Gathering together the crème de la crème of medicine, academia, and government in one place . . . it was all just too delicious.
And Leonard would get the credit!
He needed $440,000 to underwrite his unprecedented dream gathering of psychonauts, cops, neurobiologists, spies, and diplomats. It might be titled “The Cortical Revolution: upcoming epidemics from erotogenics, memory drugs, and addictive designer compounds.” He could almost taste the canapes and Chardonnay. Among the keynote speakers: Vladimir Putin and US Drug Czar Barry McCaffery.
Pickard put in $100,000 seed money from the swimming pool project, then hit a wall. No contributions. Scant interest. Nobody shared his vision.
Buffett sounded more and more like a godsend.
As 1998 commenced, Leonard’s academic career was at a standstill. Despite its early promise, FEDS had gone nowhere. Nonetheless, when he wasn’t cooking in Santa Fe, Pickard soldiered on. From Amsterdam to Acapulco, he attended conferences, patiently posting his banner for, “The Future Drug Study—Drug Design and Policy Implications.”
“Several researchers from Harvard’s McLean Hospital and Hopkins were reading it,” recalled Pickard. “Pinned to the cork board were cards from universities and industry, and one from the Chief Pharmacologist at DEA.”
He dreamed of legitimacy. Proud of his new role as Mark Kleiman’s deputy, he continued to bask in the Harvard mystique. His dodgy past behind him and his Kennedy School degree on the wall, he’d finally mastered the duality of Jekyll and Hyde. Were it not for the grandiose tangle Skinner wove for him, Pickard might have slid right into the twenty-first century as the wise, witty prognosticator that he so longed to be.
“If they had left me alone, I would have been a neurologist long ago,” he sighed.
Skinner had big ideas. As he later described his role from the witness stand, Todd skyrocketed overnight from Pickard’s junior executive to Chief Operating Officer:
I was involved in money laundering, I was involved in trying to locate places that the labs would be at. I was involved in making decisions of where money was to go for what we called “charitable operations.” I was also involved with communications decisions. I was involved with making decisions of security issues. Pickard referred to me as (the man in charge of ) “worldwide security for the Brotherhood of Eternal Love.” I was the document keeper, to the best of my knowledge. I looked and would make decisions that had to do with—Was this a good decision? Was this going to cause a problem? Constantly sifting through errors of seizure. . . .
Among Skinner’s first orders of business was lassoing Ivo Kaanen, an old Heidelberg college chum, into Pickard’s organization. Kaanen was to set up a lab on the Dutch-German border, where Leonard would furnish him with the Viagra recipe. The aim: quadruple European output. Wathne was tapped to handle the international sales increase.
Skinner testified that he organized domestic finances through an elaborate Vegas-style laundering system. Leonard loaded cash in storage lockers until Skinner could get to it. The easiest method was to hand wash Petaluma Al’s $100s through casinos, using smurfs: friends, relatives, or Gardner Springs employees who would “gamble” just beneath the $10,000 federal reporting threshold. They’d cash in their chips and—voila!—clean cash.
The problem was the sheer amount. Leonard had storage lockers all over the country. Turning untaxed cash into clean roulette winnings worked well enough if done in the thousands, he said, but not millions of dollars.
As the alleged brains of the outfit, Pickard left the dirty laundry to Skinner, with whom he
