Todd wasn’t the only dealer hauled in. It was the final day of the annual Burning Man festival outside makeshift Black Rock City with over 30,000 die-hard psychonauts in residence. In a proudly pagan tradition dating back to 1986,1 seekers and shamans alike gathered annually in Nevada’s high desert to celebrate art, empathy, and the absurdity of human existence. With a bonfire visible from fifty miles away, they watched a forty-foot wooden effigy turn to ash while tripping, dancing, rocking, and rutting through the night. The Skinners correctly guessed it to be the perfect sales venue for their pharmaceuticals.
The theme in 2003 was “Beyond Belief,” reflected in the religion-mocking names of over five hundred congregations assembled around the Burning Man effigy: Tyrannosaurus Rex Jesus Temple, Church of Stop Shopping, Black Rock City Bike Repair & Divinity School, the Surely Temple, and the Black Rock City Wedding Chapel (“Fake weddings on demand; real ones require advance notice.”)
The atmosphere was relaxed. Everyone was high on something. But ecstasy entrepreneurs on Skinner’s scale were not tolerated. The Bureau of Land Management issued 177 citations that year and made ten arrests, but Todd’s was unique in that he was pretty certain he’d been set up by his new bride.
“Even though she was at Burning Man and left suddenly the day before my arrest and drugs were found in her purse,” Krystle did not get busted, Skinner groused.
Todd, on the other hand, was told that his arrest was the least of his troubles. While driving him to the Washoe County Jail in downtown Reno, a sympathetic deputy told him that the Tulsa DEA was in on the bust. The cops from Oklahoma promised that Skinner would never see the light of day again.
In jail, his notoriety preceded him. Another arrestee roughed up the star witness from the Acid King trial, but there was no time for whining or filing assault charges. Skinner was quickly arraigned, then bound over to Tulsa for trial on the kidnapping and torture of Brandon Green.
In a Slate article published on April Fool’s Day of 2004, psychonaut journalist Ryan Grim posed the headline question, “Who’s Got the Acid?” He answered it in the deck: “These days, almost nobody.” The reason, based on a DEA press release, was the Wamego bust.
In rare public praise for agents Karl Nichols and Roger Hanzlik, DEA Administrator Karen P. Tandy celebrated Leonard’s double life sentence on November 25, 2003, while soliciting DEA funding from a Congressional committee:
DEA dismantled the world’s leading LSD manufacturing organization headed by William Leonard Pickard. This was the single largest seizure of an operable LSD lab in DEA’s history. On November 6, 2000, DEA agents seized from an abandoned missile silo located near Wamego, Kansas, approximately 91 pounds of LSD, 215 pounds of lysergic acid (an LSD precursor chemical), 52 pounds of iso-LSD (an LSD manufacturing by-product), and 42 pounds of ergocristine. . . . Since that operation, reported LSD availability declined by 95 percent nationwide.
From his new home inside Lompoc federal prison, Leonard ground his molars. He dashed off an angry letter to Slate: almost none of Tandy’s self-congratulatory tribute was accurate.
“The idea that he was producing millions of doses that were getting into the market and he was a major supplier to the world was 100 percent bullshit,” said John Halpern.
LSD availability did decline briefly, but only because acid alche-mists around the world slowed production. As Leonard would later declare in The Rose of Paracelsus, each of the mysterious Six were capable of producing eight hundred grams a month—sixteen million doses, or roughly twice the lifetime output of Owsley Stanley.
“When Leonard got busted, they all stopped because they were afraid that Leonard was going to throw them under the bus,” said Halpern. “That’s why all the acid dried up for a year or two.”
Without success, Karl Nichols continued trying to locate the millions Pickard allegedly earned from making all of that LSD. Petaluma Al didn’t have it. Neither did the ET Man. The DEA tracked down Stefan Wathne to Moscow, but Russian extra-dition yielded only red tape and no drug money. The $3 million Wathne supposedly laundered never turned up and Wathne himself remained at large somewhere on the other side of the world.
“I think Nichols was absolutely certain that he was going to bring down this big organization but all he got was a chemist and a gofer,” said Chris Malone. “This may have looked like a big deal, but in fact a lot of it was crap. I think Karl was pissed.”
At Slate, Ryan Grim followed up on Leonard’s letter. He quizzed analysts both inside and outside the government, as well as Karl Nichols.
“We found LSD,” protested Nichols. “We found iso-LSD, we found all the equipment, the chemicals. Basically, we found everything.”
Grim concluded otherwise. One year after publishing his first article, he wrote a second one, headlined:
Hey, wait a minute . . .
The 91-Pound Acid Trip
The numbers touted by the government in its big LSD bust just don’t add up.
During Pickard’s sentencing, DEA forensic chemist Timothy McKibben admitted as much: “The actual amount of all the exhibits containing LSD was 198.9 grams.”
Working backward from each reported chemical quantity in the prosecution’s exhibits, Grim concluded that the ninety-one pounds of LSD contained less than seven ounces, and possibly none at all. When he quizzed Nichols’s boss, Grim got stonewalled:
The office of US Attorney Eric Melgren cooperated in the reporting of this story by allowing Agent Nichols to be interviewed. But when asked direct questions about the validity of Melgren’s 91-pound press release claim, the office demurred. It would neither defend the number nor abandon it. A Melgren spokesman stated, “We’ve given you all the information we can on this subject.”
John Halpern understood perfectly the government’s intransigence. It was about saving face, but it was also about money.
“Look, you’ve got to understand, only two people are in jail for a vast ‘conspiracy’ and the government
