Leonard paid for it all under the name Todd Ragan. When he wasn’t using cash, he routinely stuck Skinner with the bills. Even so, Pickard chalked up $41,602.96 on his personal credit card accounts during 1999. He spent an additional $20,119.34 on money orders for Clyde Apperson. And still, Leonard never paid income taxes.
In between women, he did manage briefly to get down to business during the first week of December. Apperson and Hobbs drove the lab equipment from Santa Fe to Kansas. According to Skinner, Pickard joined him at the Atlas F silo in Carneiro, new home of the swimming pool project.
While Pickard and Apperson set up inside the Control Center, Skinner kept watch over the south Kansas flatlands for any suspicious vehicles. He loved Leonard’s magic, but lysergic chemistry was beyond his skill set, he said. Once he rekeyed the doors, his job was done.
Todd’s specialty wasn’t chemistry; it was disinfecting dollars. The compulsion he apparently shared with Leonard Pickard was multiple partners, if not indiscriminate sex.
Shortly before Christmas, Skinner met an eighteen-year-old pigtailed pole dancer from Burlington, Kansas (pop. 2,674). Krystle Cole performed nightly at the Club Orleans. Blonde, blue-eyed, tall (5’9”), thin (120 lbs.) with a butterfly tattooed on her left ankle, Krystle had her act down pat: small-town gal with swivel hips and alfalfa in her teeth. Skinner was instantly smitten.
At first, Krystle regarded her nerdy new admirer as less than unlikely.
“Do Amish men really go to strip clubs?” she wanted to know.
Once under his spell, Krystle’s homespun cynicism melted. Skinner later insisted that he wasn’t slumming; he was an investment banker interviewing her to become Emily Ragan’s assistant.
“Krystle was a great valet,” he told journalist Michael Mason. “She was very well organized.”
Skinner quickly proved to be Krystle’s new candy man; she, his willing guinea pig. She swallowed, smoked, and injected anything he prescribed, including hallucinatory suppositories. Krystle loved getting high. She was Vanna White to his Satanic Sajak. During the psychedelic Masses that Skinner regularly celebrated at the silo, Krystle tended his altar. She became as devoted to Todd as Natasha was to Leonard.
As both the year and the century wound to a close, neither Skinner nor Pickard seemed to notice that their lives might be spinning out of control. Having one babe for public consumption and another on the side seemed as routine as laundering Benjamins by the butt load. Like the proverbial frog in the proverbial pan of slowly boiling water, each soldiered on. Y2K was bound to be the best year yet.
1. In addition to developing New Age glassworks as CEO of the Earthstone and Growstone corporations, Ungerleider also produced the documentary Dying to Know: Timothy Leary and Ram Dass (2014).
2. Founded in 1968, the California non-profit propagated Ganga’s philosophy: “I got into yoga for spiritual, mystical reasons. I had no idea there was a physical practice. Some of my first teachers were hatha yogis. They told me if I wanted to see the world from a different point of view I should try standing on my head.”
3 “I never purchased, nor was gifted, nor received any controlled substance in any way from Skinner,” said White.
4. Fame did not dull his eccentricity. Moments before delivering his 1993 Nobel lecture, Mullis said he’d rather talk to the Swedes about AIDS than DNA. He refused to believe that HIV was the cause. In 1992, Mullis founded the Star Gene company to make and market jewelry that contained the amplified DNA of dead celebrities like Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley.
XV.
AS THE NEW CENTURY BEGAN, Skinner spent more and more time at Harrah’s Prairie Band Casino on the nearby Pottawatomie Indian reservation. He advertised himself as a billionaire, arrived in his Porsche, and always seemed to win.
On Jan. 8, 2000, Todd turned in an unusually large pile of chips. Challenged by an impudent cashier, he identified himself as a Treasury Department official. He flashed an Interpol badge, collected his payout, then went about his business.
But suspicions had been aroused. The following day, Pottawatomie Sheriff ’s deputies showed up at his missile silo and arrested Skinner for impersonating a federal officer. They kept him at the Sheriff ’s office until a Secret Service agent drove in from Kansas City. The agent accused Skinner of trying to plant a bomb.
“Do you track the President?” he demanded. “Do you follow the President? Do you go to areas where the President goes to? Are you interested in killing the President?”
Skinner sweated out the ordeal until four a.m. Once again, he got lucky. Just before dawn, the agent gave up and went home. Skinner faced federal charges, but as with Paul Hulebak’s death, he was released pending further investigation.
Todd decided that gambling in Kansas might be imprudent. In the first of many trips, he flew to Nevada on Feb. 25. Skinner returned again and again to the Strip over the next several months, extending his winning streak to the Paris, Mirage, Treasure Island, and Bellagio. Wherever he went, a Currency Transaction Report1 (CTR) seemed to follow. All told, he estimated he took home $750,000 in winnings—roughly the same in Dutch Guilders that had been wired from the Netherlands.
Once, he tried to swap a 1,000 Guilder note at Kaw Valley Bank in Wamego for a quick infusion of greenbacks, but the teller said she couldn’t exchange Dutch currency. The manager explained that the nearest bank authorized to do so was 100 miles away in Kansas City. Skinner sniffed at such rubes. He took his Guilders to Vegas.
While Skinner laundered, Leonard wandered.
To help his new partner make above-limit currency trades during his frequent travels, Skinner introduced Pickard to a boyhood chum. Bill Wynn had matured into a skilled provider of
