Older, wiser, and convinced that he was far more cautious, Pickard liked to believe that he stayed beneath the radar. No bling. No flashy clothes. No big bank deposits or fast cars or sudden and inexplicable displays of wealth. Crediting Skinner’s generosity, he lived well and traveled extensively, but always in the service of higher academic purpose.
As is often the case with guilt-plagued captains of industry, Pickard wanted to give back. His master plan called for renewed respectability for and eventual legalization of psychedelics. It didn’t occur to him that philanthropy might be as obvious a road map to unlaundered cash as smurfing.
When John Halpern, Sasha Shulgin, and others needed their studies funded, Pickard FedExed an anonymous gift of $97,700 in stock certificates6 to Heffter Institute board member George Greer with instructions on how to disburse the money.
Heffter turned Shulgin down. He was “too hot,” said Greer. The Institute delivered similar bad news to UC San Francisco research chemist Peyton Jacob and a Russian research team developing designer drugs in St. Petersburg. Only Halpern got his funding.
Pickard had better luck without the Institute acting as middle man. He gave $30,000 in cash to Bob Jesse,7 a San Francisco software pioneer who’d quit the vice-presidency of Oracle in order to become a full-time psychonaut. Like Microsoft’s Bob Wallace, Jesse willingly sacrificed entrée into the Steve Jobs/Bill Gates/Paul Allen pantheon8 of Silicon Valley billionaires in order to concentrate on the connection between God and chemicals.
“None of these people were in it for the money except for Skinner,” recalled Halpern. “I guess that should have been the big tip off.”
Skinner was unapologetic about profiting from acid. He always came away from each transaction a little richer. He was equally derisive of Pickard, whom he privately regarded as a fiscal imbecile and an arrogant fop. Todd saw himself forever bailing Leonard’s sorry ass out of one catastrophe after another. Pickard saw it the other way around. Theirs was a rocky symbiosis.
1. From the witness stand six years later, Skinner described the equipment he and high school chum William Wynn used to create phony ID: “A Genesis MP multiple processor computer made by Daystar for parallel processing. A Newgen disublimation printer, a Ryna type L scanner, high res and simple equipment for cutting and trimming and physically cutting things down. And a heat lamination device to laminate over the graphics work.”
2. Pickard later established that the Kansas Attorney General subpoenaed Skinner’s phone records in July of 1997, suspecting narcotics activity at the silo. Nothing came of it.
3. In The Rose of Paracelsus, he quoted the chemist Indigo’s similar experience with acid overdose: “I saw the constant creation of the most perfect world imaginable by the mind of God, the luminous air of delicious gases like the perfumes of lovers and goddesses, the rich earths made of gems, the fecund ground of being. I saw the union of all dualities, the crystallized souls of heaven, the galaxies of consciousness, and all life as mythic and sublime.”
While Halpern, Savinelli and Skinner were stoned on “pharmahuasca,” Leonard told them the Indigo story. He concluded that was how all three assumed he overdosed, and not the unidentified underground chemist he would one day conjure in the romance of The Rose.
4. The thirty-one-year-old jetsetter’s mother and two aunts (known as the Triplets for their consistently matching outfits) operated high-end boutiques in Beverly Hills and Manhattan and sold their designer goods through Ralph Lauren, I Magnin, and Bergdorf Goodman, among other luxury retailers. Wathne was also a trustee of the American Ballet Theater, the American Russian Youth Orchestra, and founder of the Moscow Institute for Social and Political Studies.
5. Skinner also used aliases to identify associates: Alfred Savinelli—Pseudo Indian.
Ganga White—The Pretzel.
Deborah Harlow—The Cobra.
Sasha Shulgin—The Elder.
Dennis McKenna—The Scientist.
Jeffrey Bronfman—Poor Fuck.
6. Greer returned the AT&T, Southern Bell, and Lucent Technologies shares. Heffter attorney Jerry Patchen later denied receiving the money, maintaining that the Institute carefully complied with all federal laws and had no connection to Pickard. Skinner ordered the shares sold in February 1999.
7. Around the same time, Jesse launched his own nonprofit Council on Spiritual Practices.
8. Among many other Silicon Valley pioneers, Gates, Jobs, and Allen admitted tripping on acid before sparking the PC revolution.
XIII.
LEONARD’S BRAIN TRUST—HALPERN, SAVINELLI, AND Skinner—met infrequently, but when they did, the huddle resembled a coven of hippie Sopranos.
Over breakfast one morning in Taos, Leonard began by demanding that Halpern get the Social Security numbers of his oddball friends for future use in smurfing and/or phony passport production. Then he started in on the guy who got busted in Oregon.
Skinner handed Pickard a newspaper story about Bruce Michael Young’s arrest. Young needed a muzzle, he remembered Pickard telling him at the time. The fear was that he’d blow the deep cover of a longtime and absolutely essential cog in Leonard’s acid enterprise. While Bruce Young had made most of his money through cannabis, he used much of that capital to buy acid precursors from the same underground wholesaler who supplied Leonard. Scuttlebutt had it that Young or one of his partners might even be talking to an Oregon grand jury about the so-called ET (ergota-mine tartrate1) Man.
So deep was the ET Man’s cover that he’d allegedly had plastic surgery done in Canada to disguise his true identity. He’d been operating beneath the radar for over twenty years. When he wasn’t in Oregon, the mysterious ET Man lived in Italy.
DEA files indicated that a James Edward Miller (a.k.a. Klaus Kurt Mueller) held Irish, British, and Macao passports, yet hated to fly. He also had several drivers’ licenses, but never ventured out on the road when visiting the US. Allegedly a fifty-ish Mafioso, he was graying at the temples and married a Eugene schoolteacher who—like Bruce Michael Young—had been called
