In Kansas, the prospect of belated Flower Power in the Flint Hills tantalized newshounds like Mark Portell.
“I’ve read a little bit about LSD,” said Portell. “I’ve never even thought about using the substance.”
Nonetheless, he’d never heard of anyone dying from it either. Like marijuana, LSD seemed one of those relics from the sixties that got people loaded with no lasting effect. It made for a helluva news story, though.
“Anytime something like this happens in a small town, it adds a little excitement,” he said. “The first night when they were going door to door and no one knew what it was about, I think it made people a little nervous. I’m sure a few pulled their rifles out of their gun safes and peeked out the window, but there was no panic or anything like that. People were just curious.”
Before the bust, Portell had heard that Todd Skinner operated a spring factory in the old silo. Great feature story, he thought. Portell called Gunnar Guinan. Gunnar never called back.
After the bust, everyone wanted to find Skinner. In March, Pottawatomie County prosecutor Barry Wilkerson talked a grand jury into charging Todd with the involuntary manslaughter of Paul Hulebak. The autopsy revealed “remote and recent needle injection sites of the upper body and lower extremities.” Skinner appeared to have shot Hulebak up like a pin cushion in a desperate attempt to counteract the opioids in his system.
Gunnar Guinan, who witnessed the entire grisly episode, later testified to Todd’s panic. His boss kept repeating over and over, “This is on me.”
The Pottawatomie County Sheriff had his indictment in hand, but when deputies showed up at the silo, they were told Todd left with no forwarding address. The DEA offered little help in tracking him down.
Six months after Pickard and Apperson were arrested, a Kansas City jury acquitted Mark McCloud of conspiring to distribute acid—a charge that could carry a life sentence.
“Thank God the people of Kansas City can tell the difference between art and LSD,” said the forty-seven-year-old Bay Area artist.
During a two-week trial, federal prosecutor Mike Oliver tried to link 33,000 sheets of blotter paper seized from McCloud’s three-story Victorian in San Francisco’s Mission District to acid distribution 2,000 miles away on the other side of the country. The DEA maintained that blotter acid confiscated during a 1999 bust in Kansas bore McCloud’s distinctive original designs.
“Mark McCloud was the head of an LSD conspiracy that gained a new generation to the cause of LSD,” declared Oliver. Despite losing, the Assistant US Attorney accused McCloud of conspiring with a fugitive acid dealer to sell psychedelics to schoolchildren.
Ten years earlier, the government failed to convict McCloud in Houston on the same charge. That the DEA would try again in Kansas came to him as no surprise. To McCloud, there was no state in the union more hostile to hippies, including Texas.
“They spent a million dollars trying to kill me,” he said.
When he read about Leonard Pickard and Clyde Apperson, he shuddered. Heir to an Argentine ranching fortune, McCloud could hire the best defense money could buy. All he could do was pity those who could not.
The same month McCloud was exonerated, the DEA honored Karl Nichols for the Wamego bust. As Leonard was being transferred from Shawnee County to Leavenworth, Billy Rork mumbled something about Karl’s citation. Leonard made a congratulatory note a priority in his new digs.
The legendary federal prison loomed like a medieval fortress over the east Kansas plains, but it was the modern Correctional Corporation of America4 pre-trial facility built beside it where Pickard would spend the next two years. The building was far from palatial, but more akin to a college dorm than the Shawnee County jail. At least he had a table where he could write.
Nichols ignored Pickard’s note, but added it to his growing file. Before Leonard had figured out that Todd was Cooperating Witness No. 1, he’d felt compelled to tell his side of the story. When Nichols wouldn’t respond in writing, Leonard finagled his personal cell phone number. Nichols answered in sotto voce, à la Sgt. Joe Friday.
“I immediately advised Pickard that I could not speak with him and that any communication would have to be made with the concurrence of the AUSA,” he recalled. “I stated that I was prevented from speaking with Pickard by the attorney/client privilege provision of the Sixth Amendment.”
Either Pickard admitted guilt, said Nichols, or he could not speak to him.
No deal, said Leonard. He would fight the charges, but felt duty-bound to alert the DEA to a possible fentanyl epidemic that looked like it might hit within the next ten years.
Nichols hung up.
Before Nichols had a chance to hang his award on the wall, Skinner threatened to nuke the DEA’s case. Todd failed a polygraph in April, admitted to squirreling away yet another can of LSD precursor, and confessed to hiding a pile of DMT labware. While the Hulebak homicide charges were pending, Karl had no choice but to suspend Skinner’s immunity agreement, including his $200,000 stipend.
Undaunted, Skinner kicked up his spending. He moved from Tucson to a $4,200-a-month penthouse on the thirty-second floor of Seattle’s Metropolitan Tower. He told Nichols a white supremacist threatened his mother after reading about the Pickard case. Katherine Magrini got a restraining order, but Todd had no such protection and was publicly branded a snitch in the newspaper.
During a brief return to Kansas, the Pottawatomie County Sheriff finally caught up with him. Todd was arrested on May 16, but convinced the court he was penniless. After he was released on his own recognizance, he hot-footed it back to Seattle.
In a series of hearings that summer, Tom Haney and the DEA argued for Todd’s acquittal. Karl Nichols’ partner Roger Hanzlik even took the stand, swearing that no one at the DEA knew about the Hulebak case until after the Wamego bust. By then, of course, Skinner had
