Simply outlawing them, however, was not the answer—an opinion shared by both professor and convict. Human beings, especially the young and stupid, seek their drug of choice, law or no law.
As one of the Six warned Leonard in The Rose,
But our fear is that—in the absence of the sacrament—toxic alternatives will proliferate, with addiction and loss of lives. Opiates, stimulants, bizarre lethal hallucinogens will enter the void. Governments would be wise to permit a certain availability of classical psychedelics, lest chemical horrors abound.
1. The slide opening at a cell door where guards can handcuff the inmate or hand him a tray of food.
2. Bardo: (in Tibetan Buddhism) a state of existence between death and rebirth, varying in length according to a person’s conduct in life and manner of, or age at, death. (Merriam Webster)
3. Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies
XXIV.
ON JULY 31, 2008, BILLY Rork served Greg Hough with a 117-page brief accusing the government of hiding evidence. Todd Skinner, not Leonard Pickard, was the Wamego Acid King, and they knew it all along.
“I don’t mind trial by ambush,” said Rork. “You get used to it. But the records on Skinner? Twenty-three different instances since the mid-eighties where he’d been working with DEA, and they gave us one case!”
The US Attorney’s office balked. Hough hedged that “any cooperation by, or investigation of, Skinner by unrelated agencies were unknown.” He blamed the DEA for his ignorance of Skinner’s long, tawdry record as a government informant, accused murderer and unrepentant drug thug. Caught amid denials, the government conceded it “was unaware of these matters,” but added the excuse that “each of the alleged matters involved agencies not involved in this investigation.”
“This is the worst case I’ve ever seen in my life of withheld evidence, of altered evidence, of witness tampering, and I think we’ve just touched the beginning,” Rork fumed.
After the Brandon Green case, Skinner himself accused Karl Nichols of “prepping witnesses.” He and his partner made the evidence fit the crime.
“You see, I can’t give a witness money or I’d be charged with bribery,” said Rork, “but the government can pay them, put them up in nice hotels and give them something more valuable than money: their freedom.”
Alfred Savinelli was Exhibit A. Before Karl Nichols began bullying him, Savinelli agreed to testify that Skinner, not Pickard, made and sold LSD among other drugs in both Santa Fe and Wamego.
“They scared Savinelli to death,” said Rork. “He held out for about a year, a year and a half, then at some point he gave in.”
After the DEA threatened to jail his wife and son, Savinelli switched sides and testified for the prosecution.
“Fact is, the prosecutor was sold a bill of goods and even in the face of defeat, wouldn’t admit it, and even went so far as to alter exhibits and evidence to support their case! Why did they do it? They wanted to make this case out to be what they thought it was, and it wasn’t. Pickard was never given a fair shot. Never.”
Every year that Leonard spent behind bars, another piece of Hough’s case fell apart, but the dirty pool didn’t end with the government. The lawyer who steered Skinner into the arms of Hough and the DEA approached Billy once with an offer to reveal the government’s fatal flaw.
“He wanted $20,000,” Rork scoffed. “How thoughtful of him to offer assistance!”
Billy never charged Leonard a dime. Appeal after appeal, he remained on the case. He explained his charity as compulsion as much as it was compassion.
“The facts cry out for help. They just scream repeatedly. If you read the transcript, you would not believe what went on. All Leonard ever asked from the very beginning was, ‘Billy, can you help me get the truth to the jury?’ I told him I’d do everything I could.”
The year following the filing of his appeal, Leonard discovered the existence of a second Operation White Rabbit.
Headquartered in Kansas City, Operation White Rabbit-East commenced on Oct. 23, 2001, almost a year after the day that Todd Skinner gave Karl Nichols and Roger Hanzlik their first tour of his missile silo. It ended Nov. 25, 2003, the day Leonard Pickard got life in prison.
The original Operation White Rabbit based in San Francisco began May 17, 2001, and continued through 2008. What it turned up was never revealed. For years, the DEA stubbornly refused to acknowledge that either operation even existed. Neither Nichols or the DEA’s San Francisco office responded to the author’s written requests for information on White Rabbit or Pickard’s prosecution. Were it not for Mike Bauer’s curiosity and Karl Nichols’ vanity, all might have remained under wraps.
“Strange the government pretended these didn’t exist,” said Pickard. “They could have simply been honest.”
Both he and Billy Rork figured the Justice Department wasn’t forthcoming because nobody wanted to explain where the money went. One Operation White Rabbit yielded a DEA bonanza under the well-funded Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force program, but two Operation White Rabbits?
“One can only imagine,” said Leonard.
The problem for Karl Nichols and Roger Hanzlik was that their golden goose laid an egg—just not the right kind. They’d been conned by a con man and were too humiliated to set things right.
“The guy didn’t have any money and the government never found any assets,” said Billy.
The only dividend the DEA ever got from its investment was a 212-page slide presentation Karl Nichols cooked up as a training aid to instruct agents on how to bust an LSD trafficking organization. There is no evidence that his seminars ever resulted in a single arrest.
When Leonard went inside, marijuana was illegal. Though it remained a Schedule One drug fifteen years later, all but seventeen states (including Kansas) had legalized pot possession.1 Recently, Oakland2 and Denver approved possession of psilocybe mushrooms. Grow kits could be purchased over the Internet.
Though still illegal, LSD microdosing had been rampant in Silicon Valley for the better
