Leonard left for London the following day for a chemical weapons conference, but he was so high on the Buffett deal he could have flown without the plane. How could he have known that he’d just been the victim of an elaborate hoax?
A couple weeks passed. Leonard returned from London. Skinner called him from Mendocino where he’d rented a summer getaway. Alas, there were problems.
Warren Buffett’s rival, fellow billionaire Henry Kravas, learned that Skinner transferred $1 billion out of Buffett’s secret Swiss account. Buffett had to distance himself from Skinner before Kravas blew the whistle. For the moment, that meant there would be no grant.
Leonard doubled over, gut punched.
Skinner brightened. Not to worry! He found a Tulsa-based Christian charity that agreed to pick up where Buffett left off. As proof, he had a $300,000 cashier’s check from the J.E. and L.E. Mabee Foundation. The check was forged, of course, but looked convincing. As he later explained in court, Skinner observed the highest standards when it came to fraud:
“One way was to do it completely automated, which made a lesser-quality check,” he said. “The better-quality check was to do it through multiple steps to where you would use a Selectric III typewriter that had a special font. And then we would actually stamp the numbers up on the top that would say ‘official check’ or ‘cashier’s check,’ and those numbers would coincide with Federal Reserve numbers.”
Leonard accepted the check, but not the explanation. Skinner had run his con into the ground. His mark was finally on to him. He belatedly began studying Buffett’s biographies.
“When I asked Skinner the name of Buffett’s most recent wife after Susie, he didn’t know,” said Leonard. “When I asked about Buffett’s home in Omaha, where Skinner allegedly visited, he was unable to describe it, or to identify Buffett’s old favorite car, or his history in trading or his daily habits. I added these discrepancies to ‘Snowman,’ along with the list of the many lies so far.”
Each time Pickard heard from him for the rest of the summer, Skinner sounded a little more desperate, his excuses a little less convincing. If it weren’t for Pickard’s enduring dream of a Kennedy School FEDS conference, he would have stopped taking his calls all together. His final “Snowman” entry was “GET RID OF THIS GUY!”
“He was unpredictable and kind of crazy,” Pickard recalled. “From mid-July until October we had no contact. His life was unraveling. Then he called me.”
Skinner wasn’t alone when he phoned in late October. Sitting right beside him was a DEA agent named Karl Nichols.
1. The Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 requires financial institutions including casinos to report any transaction over $10,000 to the federal government.
2. Bank employees who believe a Currency Transaction Report involves fraud or other criminal activity can check a box and turn the CTR into a SAR.
3. Todd testified he trusted Leonard to help his children if he died, but Pickard said Skinner just wanted to incriminate him. He evened the score by quit claiming the deed to a Skinner creditor in 2003.
4. To get around this problem, Krystle and Todd once discussed stealing two drug dogs from a cop who lived across the street from Krystle’s parents in Kansas.
XVI.
AMONG HIS PEERS, KARL NICHOLS was known as a Boy Scout. He liked to believe that he played by the rules, though a just end occasionally warranted all necessary means. He stood on the front lines of the War on Drugs and took great pride in nailing dope dealers.
Born the same year as Todd Skinner and John Halpern, Nichols hired into the DEA as a forensic chemist, then methodically worked his way up to Special Agent. He trained in the DEA’s Richmond lab for four years before joining the California LSD task force in 1992, just in time for the climax of Operation Looking Glass.
Nicknamed Operation Dead End by Grateful Dead fans, who accused the DEA of targeting concertgoers, Operation Looking Glass resulted in nearly 3,000 arrests between 19931 and 1994. Some Deadheads went away for twenty years or more. The standing joke at the agency’s San Francisco headquarters was:
Q—What do you call a Deadhead in a three-piece suit?
A—The defendant.
And yet, despite the success of Looking Glass, nobody was laughing. The Department of Justice hadn’t shut down a single LSD lab since 1991. The drug kept coming from somewhere, but where?
The question obsessed Nichols as much as it did the old timers. The halcyon era of Owsley, Scully, and Sand was over. The acid underground had frozen solid. Nobody talked. Infiltration was a pipe dream. The DEA might not have learned the secret meaning of Ivy Mike, but its agents knew they were aiming at a silent, moving target, and consistently missed.
Operation White Rabbit almost didn’t happen. Had it not been for Todd Skinner’s desperate persistence to rat him out, Pickard might have continued unhindered, and no one would have been the wiser.
But by the summer of 2000, Skinner’s long, slow slide into perfidy had become a toboggan. One trouble cascaded into the next:
• Ryan Overton entangled him in his MDMA import scheme, which the DEA was rumored to be scrutinizing. Under a nationwide party drug crackdown known as Operation Flashback, ecstasy dealers were prime targets.
• The Pottawatomie County Coroner officially declared Paul Hulebak’s death suspicious. Too many needle tracks, too many conflicting stories. Sheriff ’s detectives named Skinner a person of interest.
• Spurred by multiple reports of suspicious activity, the Kansas Attorney General subpoenaed the Wamego silo’s phone records dating back to 1997.
• Skinner’s time was up at the Carneiro missile base. Tim Schwartz’s heirs ordered him to move, but the silo was a swamp. The ventilation system had flooded, scattering flasks and drug debris everywhere.
Skinner tried to remain rational. He handled one thing at a time, beginning with the Carneiro eviction. He called Apperson, but “C” was in the hospital with an ear infection. Pickard was still in London,
