“Challenge in your mind what he says. Don’t just accept at face value what he says because the government’s not always right and the government doesn’t always do what it ought to do,” said Bennett. “I told you in my opening statement we were going to prove that Mr. Skinner and the truth are total strangers, and we did.”
Billy picked up where Bennett left off: “Would you buy a used car from Mr. Skinner?” Rork asked. “Mr. Pickard’s misfortune was meeting him in 1998, and later becoming financially dependent on him. If it doesn’t fit the government’s case, you ain’t gonna hear it, I guarantee it. It’s like the old Wendy’s commercial: Where’s the beef?
“Again, I can go on and on about dozens of pieces of evidence that don’t fit the government’s plan that you won’t hear about. You have Skinner’s version and you have Pickard’s version.
“I’m not going to ask you to vote guilty. I’m not going to ask you to vote not guilty. I’m going to ask you to vote as if it was your loved one or brother facing this charge. Hold Mr. Hough—anything he says—to the record. It’s not a contest. Did the government meet its burden of proof?”
In the Monday March 31 edition of the Kansas City Star, a headline summarized the marathon trial in the state capital as “One of a Kind.”
TOPEKA—The drug case unfolding in a federal courtroom here since January has a little of everything. Secretly taped conversations, false IDs, Las Vegas money laundering, a smuggler known only as Petaluma Al, testimony about Stinger missiles in Afghanistan and one of the biggest LSD laboratories ever captured in the United States.
“I’ve been doing this work for 42 years,” said Mark Bennett Jr., a Topeka lawyer who represents one of the defendants. “This case is one of a kind.”
Week after week, witness after witness, a judge and jury in US District Court in Topeka have listened to testimony about the shadowy world of international drug trafficking. After eleven weeks, the case went to the jury on Friday, and jurors are scheduled to return this morning to begin deliberations. . . .
In a little over five hours, the jury delivered guilty verdicts on all counts.
“We found the evidence was clear and convincing,” said jury foreman Scott Lowry. “It was a pretty easy verdict to come to.”
Six months later, Judge Rogers sentenced Pickard to life. Twice.
“Good thing the sentences were concurrent, rather than consecutive,” deadpanned Pickard.
A first-time offender, Apperson got thirty years. Leonard got two life sentences because he was a Buddhist, quipped his critics. The second one covered reincarnation.
Pointing to his lengthy rap sheet, Judge Rogers justified Pickard’s stiff sentence. Leonard immediately began planning his appeal, starting with a closer look at the elaborate DEA sting Mike Bauer identified as Operation White Rabbit.
“A Freedom of Information Act request followed,” he said, “and here we are in the 10th Circuit arguing away about it nineteen years later.”
In early 2004, Pickard and Apperson were flown to a squat old-style military prison in the central coast town of Lompoc, closer to their California roots.
“Clyde and I were in handcuffs linked to waist chains, and leg chains cuffed to our ankles,” Leonard recalled. “We could hardly move. The air and light of the West lifted our spirits, but upon landing at Vandenberg Air Force Base, we were confronted by rows of implacable US Marshals brandishing shotguns.
“Taking small steps, leg chains cutting into my ankles, I was in a single line of sullen, tattooed faces, funneled into a narrowing tunnel of great coils of razor wire on all sides. Heading into the crowded madness forever, I thought: ‘We’re in serious trouble.’”
1. The other was Steve Fry, court reporter for the Topeka Capital-Journal.
2. Halpern did not testify, but two days before the verdict, he submitted a grant application to the National Institute on Drug Abuse to study MDMA. NIDA approved the grant in September of 2004.
XXI.
SHORTLY AFTER EIGHT A.M. ON July 11, 2003, Texas City patrolman Neal Mora pulled his squad car off the Galveston highway, slowed to a crawl and squinted up ahead at a desiccated wraith standing by the side of the road.
“Help me,” it said. “Please.”
Draped in a filthy blanket, Brandon Andres Green’s hairless body was a roadmap of black and maroon, deep crimson scratches and hot pink bug bites. His eyes were as deep and dark as Auschwitz.
Brandon was an 18-year-old pizza delivery kid from Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. He’d been dumped five hundred miles from home, but not before days of torture, humiliation, and sodomy. Officer Mora got him to Mainland Medical Center, where ER doctors found a prolapsed rectum, mashed testicles, and hypodermic punctures adjacent to the festering wound along the side of his penis. His wrists and ankles were rubbed raw where he’d been hogtied. His skull, eyebrows, legs, and arms were razored slick.
After dressing his cuts, rashes, and scrapes, doctors admitted Green to intensive care and treated him for severe dehydration. He wasn’t expected to live. Detectives recorded his intake interview. Green’s recitation read like a Marquis de Sade fever dream.
His penis, testicles, back, arms, and legs had been injected with unknown substances. His groin was a swollen punching bag. His assailant sliced his phallus open with a razor blade, followed by a bleach bath. He hadn’t been fed or given water for nearly a week. He’d been trussed up with duct tape. And perhaps most hideous of all, his genitals had been wrapped with a cord, then yanked until Green heard himself snap like a rubber band.
Green’s sorry saga began three months earlier, when he hooked up at a south Tulsa rave with a stone-cold fox named Krystle Cole. He could not believe his luck. He’d been dating a Hooters waitress, but she had nothing on Krystle’s milky complexion, Rapunzel hair, and maraschino smile.
Over the following weeks, he and Krystle swapped boasts, bodily fluids, and MDMA. She introduced him
