Leonard was fifty-four. Melissa was five. In his memory, she wore saucer eyes, Mouse ears, and a grin of endless delight.
In The Rose of Paracelsus, Leonard wrote about an unnamed tot who serves tea to a stuffed toy angel and a crippled giraffe. She called the giraffe Gigi. In Leonard’s telling, the angel bows its head in perpetual prayer over Gigi’s broken limb. The scene is fiction, and yet it’s not.
“Melissa actually had a Gigi, and I always promised that I would fix her leg one day,” he said.
He never did.
The chief function of the Director of Cage Operations at the Paris Casino was to take note of suspicious activity. When a gaggle of Kansas yokels started raking in the dough during the month of May, Dave Ellis did just that.
He started by filing a SAR on Gunnar Guinan, an unlikely winner who cashed in chips by the thousands. Ellis followed up the SAR filing with a four-alarm memo to all Paris cashiers: Beware of Guinan, the suspected ringleader Gordon Todd Skinner, his mother, and all those with whom they associated. They might be “gaming agents,” the Vegas euphemism for high-end grifters.
Within a week, however, Ellis changed his tune. In the Director of Cage Operations journal, he wrote without explanation: “Heat’s off Skinner—Let him do what he wants—anything he wants.”
In his own personal journal, Pickard similarly ricocheted in his opinion about Skinner. A laptop file he labeled “Snowman” noted each mitzvah followed by every transgression. When caught stealing, Todd simply passed off each sleight of hand as a practical joke.
Take the Case of the Missing Mortgage. By the spring of 2000, Leonard’s love life had evolved into French bedroom farce. Natasha was jealous and pregnant; Trais was pregnant but benign. All that his first baby mama demanded was security for herself and her impending child. To that end, Leonard ordered Skinner to use $225,000 in Guilders to retire Trais’s mortgage.
It took a couple months, but Skinner transubstantiated the Guilders into $190,000 in clean casino cash. He blamed the $35,000 difference on descending Dutch exchange rates, a dubious explanation Pickard accepted without too much grousing. What happened next, however, was larceny.
Skinner forged Pickard a check for $190,000 then snuck into his hotel room and destroyed it. Next, he FedExed Pickard a real check for $190 and another to Trais for $130—three zeros short of the $130,000 she needed to pay off her mortgage.
It was all just an elaborate joke, said Todd. Trais and Pickard were not amused. No matter, Skinner said with a chuckle. The real checks would soon be in the mail. His quarterly retainer from Warren Buffett had just been late, creating a cash flow problem. Not to worry.
On June 16, Skinner pled guilty in federal court to impersonating a government agent. His sentencing was set for August.
Todd appeared rattled. It was the first time he’d faced real consequences for trampling the law since the eighties. Everyone around him seemed to take a deep breath and a step backward. Following the Trais mortgage fiasco, even gullible Leonard Pickard had grown chilly. Todd strung him along with the Buffett scam, but he was running out of excuses.
To top off his growing isolation, he’d lost track of Krystle Cole. During the weeks following his two auto accidents, Skinner’s new gal Friday disappeared. She strayed after a rave one night in Kansas City and never returned.
Skinner dispatched Gunnar Guinan to investigate. Guinan found her shacked up at an extended-stay hotel with a cellular phone salesman and part-time deejay named Ryan Overton.
Todd had an undeniable jealous streak. He enjoyed the occasional orgy and thought nothing of an anonymous poke now and again, but took umbrage at poachers. Clearly Overton had been Cole mining, but Krystle knew how to handle Todd. She offered up Overton as a guinea pig.
Todd dosed him with DMT and Alfred Savinelli’s MDMA. He shot him up with ALD-25, Vicodin, and Valium to see how he’d react. Overton spent the week tripping. He became Todd’s latest convert. Overton even offered to add his own brand of MDMA to Skinner’s pharmacy. Before month’s end, Overton was a full-fledged member of the congregation.
He was also a hidden liability. Besides running Generation Telecom and emceeing raves, Overton also sold MDMA he imported from Amsterdam through a Polish national who mailed it right under the noses of US Customs.
Tanasis “Socko” Kanculis was well known to the DEA. He smuggled MDMA out of the Netherlands by taping tablets inside magazines, sealing them in plastic, then mailing them past dope-sniffing dogs4 to customers in Kansas City.
A month before Krystle met Overton, Kanculis sent him just such a package, but to the wrong address. It contained three hundred pills. The addressee called police as well as Overton. When both showed up in the front yard at the same time, Overton denied knowing anything at all about the pills. Police had to turn him loose, but he was now on the DEA’s radar.
And so was everyone with whom he associated.
On a sunny afternoon in early July, Pickard cooled his heels in the foyer of a thirty-room mansion in the San Francisco suburb of Hillsborough. He twisted his fingers into a knot, meditated, hyper-ventilated, and adjusted his necktie. In a nearby conference room, Skinner conferred with Warren Buffett’s associates, who were reviewing Pickard’s grant application.
After what seemed to be forever, Skinner emerged with a smile. He had good news and bad. Buffett hadn’t been able to make the meeting, but he did approve the Future and Emerging Drugs Study conference! Confirmation would arrive shortly via FedEx. Skinner congratulated Pickard and gave him the tracking number. Buffett’s wife Susie would handle all the details. Skinner handed Pickard a slip of paper bearing Susie’s private number, but cautioned against
