Halpern might play their game, but he held the DEA in contempt.
“Karl Nichols is a shrimp dick who has a Napoleonic complex,” he snarled a decade after trial, when there was no more fear of reprisal. “One time, I was being interrogated by all these fuck wads: DEA, Kansas Bureau of Investigation, FBI. I go to the bathroom, come back—there’s dead silence in the room. Eight or nine people all looking at me at once. I’m like, ‘Yeah? What’s going on?’ One of them says, ‘We were talking about you while you were taking a leak. You’re the smartest guy in the room.’ I said, ‘Thank you.’
“But then he leans forward with a sneer and says, ‘Only thing is, there’s all of us, and just one of you.’
“See, that’s intimidation.”
As with Skinner, the DEA kept Halpern’s cooperation under wraps. His duplicity eventually leaked, often with Halpern’s unwitting help. At a spring psychonaut symposium six months after his first debrief, Halpern ran into Dave Nichols and Sasha Shulgin at the MIT Faculty Club in Cambridge.
“It was the oddest thing,” recalled Nichols. “John came to our table and starts waving his hands, shaking his head and says, ‘I didn’t tell ‘em anything they didn’t already know!’ We had no idea what he was talking about. Sometime later, we heard he’d been singing like a canary.”
Halpern excused his behavior as motivated by self-preservation. He blamed Leonard, then and now.
“He was a train wreck waiting to happen,” he said.
In January of 2001, Alfred Savinelli got an anonymous phone call directing him to a back booth at a Taos coffee shop a couple blocks from Native Scents. When he arrived, he found only a cup of coffee and a sealed envelope next to it with his name written on the front.
Inside were summaries of the DEA’s initial interview that Halpern, as well as a second interview with a redacted source that Alfred assumed to be Skinner. Alfred’s name was sprinkled liberally throughout both documents. An unsigned cover letter suggested he leave the country. Savinelli speculated that the not-so-subtle message had to have come to him circuitously from Leonard Pickard.
“Leonard, John, and Todd all decided either on their own or as a group: ‘Let’s make Alfred the scapegoat,’” said Savinelli. “I was the kingpin. That’s what the DEA thought. That’s what they all wanted the DEA to believe.”
Within the month, Alfred received a subpoena to testify before a San Francisco grand jury on Feb. 22, 2001. He was doubly panicked because his son had been living with Halpern while attending school in Cambridge. Alfred feared his boy would get caught up in the sting. To save himself and his family, Savinelli admitted to buying chemicals and glassware through his company, but only because Leonard told him he was using them for academic purposes. He wound up providing approximately four hours of testimony for the prosecution.
He believes it helped his case that half his legal bills were paid by pop stars Paul Simon and Sting. That he had strong connections with celebrity made him a far less likely target. His nexus for both singer/songwriters was yoga: he met Sting through Ganga White; Simon through Ashtanga yoga guru Danny Paradise. Like both pop star practitioners, Savinelli literally liked to tie his body into knots.
“They (Sting and Simon) stopped by to see me whenever they were in Taos,” said Alfred. The two performers also shared a passion for ayahuasca.
“I watched Paul do the funky chicken once right there on my kitchen floor,” he said. “He and I are exactly the same height.”
Simon and Savinelli swapped stories regularly before the Wamego bust. Alfred points to his name listed among the credits of “You’re the One,” Simon’s 1999 Grammy-nominated comeback following the failure of his Broadway debacle, “The Capeman.” Referring to the lyrics of many of Simon’s songs on “You’re the One,” Alfred proudly stage-whispered, “My mouth to his pen.”
He connected the two rock icons when Savinelli began attending Sting’s annual Rock for the Rainforest benefit concert each spring at Carnegie Hall. The year Simon was on the bill, Alfred shuttled back and forth between both singers’ Upper Westside living quarters.
“They live in the same building in New York City,” said Savinelli. “Paul’s up on the twelfth floor and Sting’s got an apartment downstairs.”
Their names appeared together once more in newspapers during the buildup to the Pickard/Apperson trial. Among the thousands of pages filed in the case, the eyes of reporters like Mark Portell went right to the line reading “Sting/Paul Simon.” When the media called their publicists, they got a standard “no comment,” but Savinelli said privately that their combined help staved off bankruptcy, the threat of which is another government tool in pressuring witnesses like himself.
“There’s no level to which they won’t stoop,” he said.
During the two years Pickard prepared for trial, he could never predict where help might come from. There was cautious encouragement from the Shulgins, Mark Kleiman, and colleagues at Stanford or Harvard, all of whom had much to lose if they raised their voices too loudly. But there was unexpected help too, including Skinner’s girlfriend Krystle Cole, her other paramour Ryan Overton, and Todd’s own father.
Overton visited Leavenworth once to let Leonard know that the DEA snared both Overton and Tanasis Kanculis1 in the same Skinner web that would eventually bear the name Operation White Rabbit. Overton said he’d like to take the stand on Pickard’s behalf, but he’d been warned to “get used to wearing khaki” if he testified for the defense. He didn’t.
A month before trial, Tulsa police opened an investigation of Gordon Henry Skinner on accusations of child molesting.2 It was not the elder Skinner’s first brush with the law, but it was the worst. He was ultimately exonerated, but the allegation came at a particularly bad time.
Whatever his own sins, Dr. Skinner (unlike Todd, Gordon Sr. was a licensed Doctor of Chiropractic) recognized his
