“Nothing like this in jurisprudence has ever been seen before! DEA has refused to release even a single word for ten years, and is likely to continue to do so. But there’s the rub.”
As Billy explained his strategy, the government could choose to defy the court and hold on to the damning file, but they would have to release Leonard. Rork had bet that Skinner’s DEA relationship dated back so far and was so toxic that the agency could not afford to let the public see the sleazy way it operated. If Billy was correct, Pickard would walk out of prison a free man, time served.
A month later, the Ninth Circuit dashed his hopes. Skinner’s file would stay sealed. Leonard would remain Prisoner #82687–011.
On June 23, 2017, Dr. Michael Bauer got drunk, put a gun to his head, and squeezed off a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
“I saw him a month before,” said Alfred Savinelli. “We’d had a very normal relationship for the past three or four years. We’d go mushroom hunting. He came up for the weekend with the kids. Didn’t make sense.”
“Maybe something from the Pickard saga caught up with him, but I don’t think so,” said John Halpern. “I think he committed suicide.”
Both psychonauts knew Bauer from the earliest days of the swimming pool project, when he all but apprenticed himself to Leonard Pickard. Leonard, who encouraged him to become a physician, remained a father figure long after he went to prison. Indeed, Pickard may have taken the news hardest of all. For a year following Bauer’s death, Leonard began evening prayers with a paean to his fallen friend.
“There always will be an emptiness in me, and in many others, that Mike once occupied,” he said. “I wish I had known of the seriousness of his difficulties, but I only heard of his love for his wife and children.”
Mike’s mother is not so sure.
“Michael was most certainly a victim, as have been many young starry-eyed students whose parents send them to so-called prestige universities where they come in contact with these people who are protected by the university, and who do real harm,” said Linda Bauer.
Since her son’s death, she has turned her home office into a war room, convinced that there is far more to Mike’s passing than simple suicide. Her son became chief physician for the vast Kiowa Pueblo reservation in the years after Pickard’s imprisonment, but among other oddities, Bauer developed an obsession with Afghanistan that his mother lays to Leonard, along with Mike’s lifetime lust for psychedelics.
“It all started the day he met Leonard Pickard,” she said, comparing Leonard to the protagonist of TV’s Breaking Bad. “The Leonard story is equally twisted. It’s a picture with no edges.”
On the one hand, Leonard maintained prison estranged them (“I hadn’t seen Mike for twenty years. In the twelve years I’ve had email, he wrote me twenty or thirty times; perhaps five phone calls.”) On the other, Bauer remained close enough to invite Leonard’s son Duncan on rounds when he made house calls to remote cabins in the desert.
“He was the only doctor in Albuquerque who made house calls,” said his mother. She quickly adds that he was also apparently the only doctor in Albuquerque with ties to both Central Asia and the CIA. “They tried to recruit him when he was going to Boston College,” she said.
So completely did Bauer and classmate Kenichi Sakai fall under Leonard’s spell that both risked jail time over Operation White Rabbit. The DEA held Michael for four days in San Francisco in 2001, accusing both men of money laundering. Ironically, Bauer could have claimed the name Ivy Mike. He proudly stood by Leonard long after others squealed. Like Leonard, Mike led a secretive double life.
But if Mike was mixed up in foreign intrigue or the international drug trade, Leonard maintains he knew nothing about it. He is equally clueless about the mystery surrounding Bauer’s suicide and flinches at the suggestion he might somehow be responsible. Linda Bauer is looking for answers where none exist, he insisted. “We will grieve her pain.”
Though he wasn’t present, Pickard painted a vivid picture of Bauer’s memorial, “. . . packed with physicians and residents and those who loved him.
“At the very end, after all the speakers, a Roadman for the Native American Church suddenly appeared, unannounced, moving through the assembly to the dais. Victor had guided Mike through many all-night ceremonies. He began singing in Navajo a death song for Mike, with his long, earnest prayer filling the room. He sang of Mike’s vision to become a doctor, and how he was a great healer among his people, among the dispossessed and poor. Everyone’s heart was taken skyward. At the end, the prayer descended into silence, and the crowd quietly parted to let Victor pass. Mike would have loved it. Pretty good story, yes?”
No sooner did he lose a young friend than word came that Leonard had lost an old one.
Nick Sand suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of seventy-five. After he did his ten years following the Canadian bust, Sand retired to California, unrepentant.
“Nick and I were quite different. He was eager to discuss his exploits, and did so at conferences and to media,” said Leonard. “I, on the other hand, have always disavowed any experience or involvement with LSD, privately or publicly. I never mentioned the substance during my Cambridge years; my research was on fentanyl.
“Nicky admitted to being responsible for thirteen kilograms over his lifetime. The DEA accuses me of two hundred forty kilograms4 or one kilogram a month for twenty years. Of course, that can only be fanciful.”
He wrote Sand an elegy that was read several times at his memorial service.
“Just a personal thing, really,” said Leonard. “A feeling. I hope he heard it, dancing in
