Apperson promised he’d get a legit job. He worked for Apple for a time and eventually opened his own machine shop, but once a psychonaut, always a psychonaut. Clyde felt the same visceral challenge to master MDMA and mescaline in the lab as did Leonard. They remained in contact over the years.
With his typical overabundance of caution, Leonard referred to Apperson as “C”. He called upon “C’s” expertise only when he needed to move his lab. Skinner maintained that Clyde’s typical fee was $100,000 for set-up and $50,000 to break one down. Leonard flew him in from San Francisco and Apperson had the swimming pool project ready for transport in two days.
Though Savinelli had been the resident overseer in New Mexico, Apperson was not able to count on his help. He and Pickard were on the outs. Once in his debt, Alfred was now Leonard’s creditor. Native Scents had been picking up the ever-growing tab on Leonard’s chemicals. Pickard had gotten to the point where he wouldn’t even answer Alfred’s emails. He currently owed Savinelli $10,000.
As Leonard’s new bagman, Skinner arranged to pay Savinelli with $10,000 worth of DMT. The drug was a dingy brown and of dubious quality.
Skinner processed it himself in a kitchen coffee grinder at the home of one of Pickard’s strippers. He packed most of it in a brown bottle so that Alfred wouldn’t notice and told her she could keep the rest.
But Savinelli did notice. He had absolutely no confidence in Skinner. When Alfred’s son Robert developed a summertime crush on fellow high school senior Emily Ragan, Skinner made a show of swooping in and stealing the girl away. Never mind their twenty-year age difference. Skinner reveled in breaking Robert’s heart. His piss-poor excuse for DMT was just the latest insult he added to Savinelli’s injury.
Savinelli distanced himself from Skinner and the swimming pool project. Once he learned John Connor and Leonard Pickard were one and the same, more alarms went off. As Halpern’s friend, he warned him that he was consorting with conmen and clowns. He described Skinner as “the devil incarnate.”
He later groused, “John (Halpern) is a dupe and a fool, but he didn’t cause this all to happen.”
Alfred’s personal paranoia surged during the summer of ’99. He kept most of his psychedelics and cash hidden in a safe beneath the tile walkway to his garage, but he buried the hottest drugs out in the yard. His alpha ethyl tryptamine was tucked into a creek bank near his property line and a baggie of Czechoslovakian ET that he said Leonard had given him a year earlier was hidden in a culvert behind his house. After the Bronfman bust, he relocated a fifty-five-gallon drum of ayahuasca root that he’d kept in inventory at Native Scents.
He wanted nothing further to do with the swimming pool project.
Skinner said that he paid his very first visit to Leonard’s lab after Apperson had broken down the equipment. While Pickard prepared to leave for Europe on another FEDS mission, Skinner rented a room at the Santa Fe Hilton. He commuted daily to 110 Vuelta Herradura. In Savinelli’s absence, Skinner got the cleanup detail. Nausea, he said, greeted him at the front door.
David Haley warned that there’d been a lot of damage, but when Skinner did a walk-through, he felt like he was gagging his way through a war zone. Acid stains streaked the bathroom. He brought in one of his day laborers to scrub it clean.
Lupe Tenorio-Matias reported back that the tile was ruined. It would have to be replaced. Skinner gave him three Valium and promised $1,000 cash if he could fix the bathroom and bring the entire house back to some semblance of normal.
Skinner was working against the clock. Under the terms of Haley’s lease, they had to return the house to its owners by Sept. 10. Skinner summoned Gardner Springs employee Mike Hobbs from Tulsa to lend a hand. To hear Skinner tell it, the two men had to don latex gloves, swallow a handful of Valium, and pant past the worst of the fumes. While Tenorio-Matias cleaned, they loaded an eight-by-four trailer with Apperson’s boxed-up lab gear.
Before he left for London, Pickard made it clear that he was not convinced Kansas was the answer. According to Skinner, he preferred relocating to another residential neighborhood in Santa Fe, where the DEA was not likely to snoop. Skinner told him he’d found another home comparable to Vuelta Herradura nearby for $800. He did not say it was temporary.
Once Pickard was gone, Skinner and Hobbs moved the trailer again, this time to a Storage USA unit located in an industrial zone on the edge of town, not unlike the one in Mountain View where Leonard got busted in 1988.
There the equipment would remain for the next three months.
When Pickard returned from London on Oct. 21, Skinner was ebullient. With the Santa Fe emergency behind them, he planned a celebratory wing ding like no other.
He started by renting a secluded party house located on a ridge overlooking Bolinas Bay. The one-time hideaway of late Grateful Dead founder Jerry Garcia, San Souci offered spectacular views of the Pacific peeking through stands of redwood, cypress, and eucalyptus. In addition to black-bottom pool, sliding glass walls, and psychedelic lighting, the split level four-bedroom spread stood on an acre of sparsely populated Stinson Beach—the perfect venue for an army of psychonauts to trip the light fantastic long into the night.
Using Mike Hobbs as his alias, Skinner put down a deposit for a month’s stay. He invited several dozen of his closest pals to a Nov. 9 bash honoring rock star Sting, who was then in the Bay Area on a concert tour.
Sting’s debut inside Leonard’s inner circle occurred
