Pickard needed no such advice. Since his initiation into the acid underworld during the late sixties, he knew to zip it.
Rork sympathized. He’d been in plenty of hot water as a kid. He grew up in foster homes, lived on the streets, never graduated from high school. He’d spent time in juvie, got his GED, graduated college, entered law school, and passed the bar in 1980. His memories of feeling helpless fueled his passion for justice. He’d taken on every sort of criminal case from littering to homicide, as long as he was fighting for an underdog.
“You don’t know what it’s like to be locked up for something you didn’t do,” he said. “I’ve never forgotten that.”
The court declared Pickard indigent and ordered the government to pay Billy’s fees. The week before Thanksgiving, he bought his client a pair of shoes to wear at his arraignment. Natasha sent Leonard his one formal blazer—a well-worn jacket from Moscow’s GUM department store. “Fitting, I thought,” said Leonard.
He pled innocent. Billy believed him. US District Judge Richard D. Rogers did not. While granting Apperson bail at $200,000, he ordered Pickard held without bond, not because he was a flight risk, but because he was a danger to the community. Unlike Apperson’s squeaky-clean record, Pickard’s arrest history dated back to high school. When busted, he was using a half dozen aliases. He had a phony British West Indies passport and an impressive array of false ID. No bail was deemed high enough.
Leonard’s sole consolation came during a weepy recess. Natasha handed him a bundle in a pink blanket. Guarded by marshals, he held his infant daughter, also named Natasha, for the first and last time.
“It was a glimpse of limitless joy,” he recalled. “Surrounded by the sacred, I whispered what love and comfort I could, and vowed to return to them. I could have held them, and hold them even now, forever.”
1. Lincoln Avenue, a.k.a. on road maps, “The Road to Oz.”
2. Alerted by Halpern, Wathne fled the US and did not return.
3. Russian for “cat.”
4. Leonard testified that General Dostum gave him the money for safekeeping.
XVIII.
IN THE WEEKS FOLLOWING THE Wamego bust, Karl Nichols was forced to reassess Todd Skinner. It started with the Operation White Rabbit debrief in the DEA’s Oakland office a week after Pickard’s arrest. There were handshakes and “Atta boys” all around before everyone settled down to business.
Senior DEA research chemist Tim McKibben kicked things off with the news that they’d confiscated enough ET in Wamego to make 826 million hits of LSD. While the agents whistled and joked about cornering the market, Skinner piped up that they didn’t know the half of it. Pickard hid even more ET in St. Louis.
Nichols demanded elaboration.
Skinner had been on hand the previous May when Pickard met with the mysterious ET man in the lobby of Chicago’s Ritz Carlton Hotel. He watched them cinch a deal for a lot more ET than the piddly little haul the DEA confiscated in Wamego. When Apperson trucked that original shipment from Chicago to Carneiro, Pickard ordered him to stop over in St. Louis and squirrel a lot of it away.
Whereabouts in St. Louis?
Skinner didn’t know, but he’d try to find out.
Three days before Christmas, Todd called Karl from his Tucson hideaway. Boy, was he embarrassed. He’d just learned that some of that missing ET had been hidden in Kansas, right under his nose. When he told Tom Haney,1 his lawyer advised him to call Nichols right away. He didn’t want his client violating his immunity agreement.
Skinner told Nichols that Gunnar Guinan would bring him the chemicals during the first week of January.
Most of January came and went.
After many heated phone calls, Skinner showed at Nichols’s Northern California office Jan. 22 with a trunk load of ET and a confession. He’d been hiding the stuff all along. He had no excuse. On advice of counsel, he threw himself on Karl’s mercy.
Nichols fumed, but he needed Skinner’s testimony. He let it ride.
Another month passed. Skinner had a further confession. This time Nichols flew to Kansas City. He met Todd and his lawyer in the lobby of the Airport Ramada Inn, where Karl locked eyes with his snitch. Skinner offered a small red case that contained two canisters of ET.2 He was abjectly apologetic. He’d forgotten to include them with the Jan. 22 shipment. He hoped to God he hadn’t messed up his immunity agreement.
Nichols lost all conviviality. There had better be no more screwups.
And there were not, at least as far as Nichols could tell. All ET appeared accounted for.
And yet both Nichols and Asst. US Attorney Greg Hough had to wonder if they’d made a mistake. They began harboring serious doubts about their star witness.
By December, the Acid King saga exploded onto the national stage. San Franciscans in particular honed in on the unfolding story filtering out of Wamego.
During its raid on Natasha Pickard’s apartment, the DEA confiscated a “To-Whom-It-May-Concern” letter from San Francisco District Attorney Terence Hallinan3 that took on added significance following the bust.
“When I was in private practice, I represented Leonard Pickard on some legal matters,” it read. “I always found him to be an honorable person who kept his word.”
A progressive with a long history of defending marijuana suspects, Hallinan refused comment to both the San Francisco Chronicle and Rolling Stone. Leonard, too, wouldn’t say how he knew the DA, though it appeared Hallinan may have played a role in negotiating Leonard past his 1976 MDMA arrest in San Mateo County. Hallinan was among the first, but would not be the last prominent
