Todd Skinner remembered Halpern’s former “stack rat” as a Boston College history undergrad whom Pickard hired to help research the Russian and Afghani drug trade during Leonard’s final year at the Kennedy School. He also assigned Bauer to research Skinner.
“I think that he was sent to check me out extensively,” said Todd. “He hitched a ride from Taos to Tulsa, and then he ended up going to Wamego and became almost a permanent resident.
“Early on, I told Mike, ‘Get out of this thing,’” said Skinner.
“‘This is a giant LSD conspiracy and I don’t want you getting hurt.’ Halpern and Leonard said that I suffered from many psychoses and that I was totally nuts and that there was no such thing as this (conspiracy), and all the money that Leonard had came from an inheritance from his father and mother.”
As Operation White Rabbit unraveled, most of Skinner’s assertions proved false. The only sound advice he gave Mike Bauer was to “get out of this thing.”
1. Questioned under oath at the 2003 trial, Skinner denied knowing Kanculis:
Q—Do you know a Tanasis Kanculis? T-A-N-A-S-I-S K-A-N-C-U-L-I-S.
Skinner—No, I’ve never heard of that name before. That’s a strange name.
2. In 1992, Sandra L. Skinner—his wife subsequent to Katherine—had been granted an emergency protective order against him.
3. Among his creditors were Ganga White’s White Lotus Foundation ($80,000) and Skinner’s attorney Tom Haney ($280,000).
4. Created in 1982 at the peak of the War on Drugs, the OCDETF combines resources of eleven federal agencies, including the DEA, to take down major cartels. Employing approximately 2,500 agents, the task force spares no expense. Responsible for some 44,000 convictions and the seizure of over $3 billion in assets, the OCDETF has executed hundreds of successful efforts in its brief history. Operation White Rabbit was not among them.
XX.
WHEN THE CASE OF THE Wamego Acid King finally came to trial in January of 2003, Billy Rork offered up Skinner’s sustained malfeasance in defense of Leonard Pickard: the government’s star witness was a pathological liar, a repeat felon, and a murderer.
Sorry, said Judge Richard D. Rogers. The jury would hear nothing of the Hulebak case, since Skinner’s complicity amounted to “only allegations.” Rork didn’t even know about his appearances on behalf of the government at two previous federal trials, where Skinner asserted his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimi-nation (aliases, sources of income, etc.) fifty-three times.
Asst. US Attorney Hough forgot to tell the defense or the jury.
Skinner had blanket immunity, said Rogers. His misdeeds were irrelevant.
Appointed by President Gerald Ford in 1975, Judge Rogers was eighty-one, and long past the age of heavy legal lifting. He passed off most duties to two clerks, who had been with him nearly forty years.
“They’d hand him pieces of paper during trial and have him correct shit,” said Billy Rork. “I don’t think he had much of an attention span.”
Rogers concentrated on looking magisterial. In US v Pickard, he smelled a career capper.
A corn-fed standard bearer of prairie populism, Rogers grew up in Wamego. Before receiving his lifetime appointment, he distinguished himself first as Mayor of Manhattan then President of the Kansas State Senate. He took the “lifetime” part of his appointment seriously. Though long absent from the practice of law, on Nov. 25, 2016, he remained technically on the bench when he died at ninety-four.
Rogers was no progressive, but neither could he be labeled reactionary. In 1988, he demonstrated humanitarian backbone by ordering the early release of four hundred Kansas inmates because of prison overcrowding. He told the state legislature to build another prison or he’d release even more.
But Rogers had no tolerance for drugs. He and AUSA Greg Hough shared an epiphany in 1993 when a mild-mannered weed dealer went berserk in the Fred Carlson Federal Building.
Jack Gary McKnight, a thirty-seven-year-old railroad accounting clerk, blew up his car, then shot and killed a security guard before tripping a pipe bomb and imploding himself. Convicted of growing 100 marijuana plants, McKnight was “a very quiet, reserved person,” according to AUSA Hough.
Not on Aug. 5, 1993, however. Had he gotten off the elevator on the correct floor, McKnight might have taken out the entire US Attorney’s office, including Greg Hough. Instead, McKnight came out shooting on the top floor, where Judge Rogers had barricaded himself inside the law library. He and his clerks watched helplessly while McKnight’s car exploded out in the parking lot followed by the sound of McKnight turning himself to hamburger out in the hallway
With stiff upper lip, Rogers told the Manhattan Mercury, “None of us were terribly frightened, but we were tense and worried.”
Ten years later, Rogers and Hough shared a cynical view of drug dealers. Whether mild-mannered in appearance or not, pushers were diabolical, and had to be stopped.
The trial of William Leonard Pickard and Clyde W. Apperson began Monday, Jan. 13 and lasted fifty-six days, forty-two of them devoted to the testimony of twenty-nine witnesses and the introduction of over one thousand exhibits. It took two and a half days to select eight men and four women for the jury. It turned out to be the longest criminal trial in Kansas state history.
“At his advanced age, Judge Rogers relied heavily on his clerks for decisions on attorney motions, but he also ran a taut ship,” recalled Mark Portell, one of only two reporters1 who attended regularly.
“The federal courtroom was relatively small, with only three or four rows for gallery spectators,” he said. “I don’t recall any ‘shady characters’ among them.
“During my first day, I was reading a newspaper as jurors were brought in. A bailiff told me to put down the newspaper. In Judge Rogers’s court, it apparently didn’t matter if you were a participant or a spectator. You were expected to pay attention.”
The defendants arrived daily in
