Tag: LSD

10/12/23

(Continuing the serialisation of Psychedelic Tricksters: A True Secret History of LSD by David Black – available from Amazon. Also on Kindle: HERE )

In August 1970, Tim Scully dropped out of active involvement in LSD manufacturing. His chemist partner, Nick Sand, on the hand, had no intention of giving up. But the dangers were mounting. In July 1971 Richard Nixon declared the ‘War on Drugs’ and got Capitol Hill to put up an initial $84m for ‘emergency measures’. The new Narcotics Traffickers Program (NTP) coordinated a joint strike force formed by agents of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD) and Inland Revenue Service (IRS) to select targets. Nick Sand, on the strength of intelligence reports and his arrest records was high on the target list.

IRS agents raided the offices of Sand’s lawyer, Peter Buchanan. Crucially, Buchanan was unable to provide them with a credible explanation of how Sand made his money. A search of of his law firm’s files revealed that Buchanan had deposited Sand’s money for the $155,000 purchase of his Cloverdale ranch. Buchanan had converted large sums into cashiers’ cheques which were deposited in a bank account for which he was a trustee (Scully compares this with a cat pooping on the kitchen floor and trying to hide it by scratching the lino). Buchanan had passed the titles of land purchases to Sand’s Liechtenstein front company, Four Star Anstalt. The paperwork for this company was held by the elusive Ronald Stark.

Like Tim Scully, financier Billy Hitchcock had withdrawn from the LSD business. But his past began to catch up with him when his former Swiss bankers sued him in a US court for non-payment of money he owed them. When the Swiss brought Hitchcock’s bank records into the country, the US authorities duly scrutinised various accounts and subaccounts at the Paravicini bank, including those of Nick Sand, Owsley Bear Stanley, and Hell’s Angel, Terry ‘the Tramp’ Tracey – all of them opened using aliases.

In late-1971, Tim Scully learned he was off the hook for charges stemming from the bust of his Denver lab. Because the police hadn’t obtained a search warrant the search was ruled to have been illegal. Scully, in fact, was now going straight, developing bio-feedback instruments which could measure the electrical activity of the brain, and identify brain wave patterns associated with the peak experiences of meditation. But, in May 1972 Peter Buchanan telephoned Scully to say he had talked to the Feds in return for immunity from prosecution. The ‘good news’ was he had recommended to federal agents that they should also offer immunity to Scully and Hitchcock in order to convict Sand and Stark. When Scully told Billy Hitchcock what Buchanan had done, they both agreed not to take up Buchanan’s suggestion. Hitchcock consulted Brotherhood of Eternal Love leader, Michael Randall, who advised him, ‘Just keep quiet and everything will be fine’. Hitchcock warned Scully to stay off the radar, in case he too was subpoenaed. They both left the United States for several months to dodge possible grand jury subpoenas which would’ve left them with a choice of testifying to the grand jury or going to jail for contempt.

In June 1972, Buchanan was subpoenaed to appear as a witness before the federal Grand Jury sitting in San Francisco. As it happened, on the witness stand Buchanan did his best not to say anything too incriminating about his clients. But the prosecution drew enough information out of him for the IRS to begin investigations of Scully, Randall, Friedman and Stark.

In May 1972, a top-secret ‘war council’ was held by the BNDD and various police drug squads at a hotel in San Francisco to launch ‘Operation BEL’. It was determined that the Brotherhood of Eternal Love was a 200-strong ‘loosely-knit organisation with a core group’, and that it was responsible for an estimated 50 per cent of all LSD and marijuana sales in the US. There was a parallel investigation of the Brotherhood in Orange County, where the public prosecutor convened a meeting of the various state agencies.

According to Tendler and May’s book, The Brotherhood: From Flower Power to Hippie Mafia, a report that came out the San Francisco meeting included a chart detailing the Brotherhood’s organisational structure: it showed one arm of the organisation to be Robert Andrist’s team of twenty or so who brought in grass from Mexico and hash from Afghanistan, to be passed on to their distributors in the US. The ‘LSD arm’ stemming from Michael Randall and Nick Sand had twenty main distributors in California, Hawaii and Oregon. Brotherhood members were described as ‘mystics’ who studied the ‘religious’ philosophy of Timothy Leary. Billy Hitchcock was placed alongside Leary at the top of the organisational pyramid.

The ‘chart’ – which, strangely enough, has never been reproduced anywhere and may never have existed – served to conjure up the spectre of an organisational hybrid consisting of a dangerous cult led by Leary, the ‘spiritual’ guru, plus a mafia-style setup, in which the finances were controlled by Billy Hitchcock. Leary however, had no involvement in the Brotherhood’s decision to become the distributors of Scully and Sand’s LSD; and in no way participated in their marijuana and hash smuggling business. As for Hitchcock, he had never had any financial relationship with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, if the Brotherhood is to be defined as the organisation founded by John Griggs, with its cadre of marijuana smugglers and distributors of LSD, etc. The gist of the elusive chart did however make it into the media: the New York Times referred to ‘Timothy Leary’s sex and drug sect, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love’.

In August 1972, an Orange County grand jury gave the green light for a series of raids in which fifty-three people were arrested at dozens of houses in California, Hawaii and Oregon. Those arrested included leading players such as John Gale and Glenn Lynd. Two and half tons of hash, thirty gallons of hash oil, and 15 million LSD tablets were seized. The Orange County District Attorney’s Office jubilantly announced that the Brotherhood of Eternal Love had been broken as an organisation and confidently predicted that Leary would soon be extradited to complement the round-up.

The raids were followed up with the release of a wanted poster featuring the mugshots of twenty-six alleged Brotherhood members, including Robert Ackerly, Hayatullah Tokri and Nick Sand. At this point the BNDD turned Brotherhood member, Glenn Lynd, who became their star witness when the Orange County grand jury sat again in November 1972. Lynd laid out the whole history of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love: from its pre-history in Anaheim to the Mystic Arts World Store, Lynd’s own travels in Afghanistan, the purchase of the Idyllwild ranch, incriminating conversations with Leary, and the arrangements with Sand and Scully for distributing Orange Sunshine LSD.

While Lynd was testifying to the grand jury, one ‘Leland Jordan’, alias Nick Sand, and Judy Shaughnessy were cooking LSD in a state-of-the-art lab in downtown St. Louis and at a smaller lab in their rented house in Fenton, Missouri. At the end of 1972, Nick and Judy went on vacation, but as they had forgotten to put a stop order on mail delivery, their mailbox overflowed. The mailman called the police when he noticed the overflowing mailbox and water leaking out from under the front door (Sand had also forgotten to put oil in their heater before going away; so as it ran out of fuel a pipe froze and broke). The police entered the premises found drugs in the upstairs bedroom and came across the laboratory in the basement. When Nick and Judy returned to Fenton they were arrested. Police claimed they had seized materials which were enough to make 14 million doses of LSD. They also found the address of the lab in St. Louis. Inconveniently for Tim Scully, the St. Louis police found an old flow-chart in his handwriting for making LSD. But fortunately for Scully, as well as for Sand and Shaughnessy, the police charges for the St. Louis bust didn’t stick, because the court later determined that the search, carried out without a warrant, was legally invalid.

In March 1972, an IRS agent interviewed Sam Goekjian at his Paris law firm regarding Stark’s ownership of a Panamanian paper company called La Hormega, which held the titles to Nick Sand’s Cloverdale ranch. In the summer of 1972 Goekjian was subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury in San Francisco. Before testifying, Goekjian attempted to contact Ron Stark repeatedly but was unable to trace his whereabouts. Chemist Lester Friedman was also subpoenaed. On October 13, 1972, he appeared before the San Francisco grand jury and testified extensively about ‘Doctor Stark’. He did not mention his own involvement with Stark’s laboratory at Le Clocheton, Belgium, but agents of the taskforce found documents at the Paris law firm relating to Ron Stark’s operation and Friedman’s role as a shareholder. When the lab was searched, its clandestine functions as an LSD factory had been dismantled, and there was no sign of Stark.

On February 21, 1973, a federal grand jury in Pittsburgh indicted Billy Hitchcock on charges of income tax evasion and Regulation T violations. Hitchcock finally cracked and struck a plea bargain. He agreed to testify before the federal grand jury in San Francisco as an ‘unindicted co-conspirator’ and name his fellow conspirators. In return he would write the IRS a cheque for $543,800 and walk with a five-year suspended sentence.

In April, 1973, Hitchcock gave grand jury testimony in which he admitted more or less everything about his role in LSD finances; and incriminated Tim Scully. Hitchcock’s testimony also gave the government enough leverage to force his assistant, Charlie Rumsey, to plea bargain. On 26 Apri 1973 an indictment returned ‘The US v. Nick Sand, Tim Scully, Lester Friedman, David Mantell, Michael Randall, Michael Druce and Ronald Stark’. Only Sand, Scully and Lester Friedman were ‘available’ to appear in court. Druce couldn’t be extradited from the United Kingdom, as the existing extradition treaty didn’t cover conspiracy charges (he turned down an offer to appear as a ‘non-indicted co-conspirator’). Mantell, Randall and Stark were nowhere to be found. Billy Hitchcock offered Scully a loan of $10,000 for legal fees with the recommendation that he apply for the same ‘unindicted co-conspirator‘ status. Scully took the money but declined to snitch.

The situation for both Sand and Scully was desperate. Presiding Judge Conti had made his feelings clear in pre-trial proceedings when he mentioned casually that he wished he had access to the death penalty in the case. The government had overwhelming evidence that the defendants had been making psychedelic drugs. Scully testified, untruthfully, that he had been making ALD-52 (1-acetyl-LSD), which the government had not yet specified as an illicit substance, rather than LSD-25. But the prosecution, basing their argument on the available scientific literature, were able to show that the synthesis of ALD-52 required LSD as an ingredient.

Also the government had come into possession of financial records which showed that very large sums of money had been used to make purchases of raw materials for making LSD. As it would have been clear to the jury that Hitchcock himself had been a major player in the conspiracy, the defence argued that Hitchcock was the mastermind of it all and tried to explain away all the money as all being his (not that this would have bothered Hitchcock greatly, as he had been granted immunity, and was in no further legal jeopardy).

Nick Sand’s lawyer, Michael Kennedy, tried to call Timothy Leary as a defence witness but Leary, who was negotiating a deal with the FBI to get out of prison, declined to appear. Scully naively tried to explain his idealistic reasons for making psychedelics; but that did not work either. In January 1974 the jury returned guilty verdicts on the conspiracy charges. Judge Conti, saying he regarded idealists as the ‘most dangerous people of all’, passed sentences higher than anyone in the Brotherhood of Eternal Love ever got. Scully got a sentence of 20 years and Sand 15 years. Lester Friedman was acquitted of conspiracy to make drugs, but later pleaded guilty to perjury.

Scully says now,

‘With 20/20 hindsight I regret having taken the witness stand. Lying on the witness stand is never a good idea. If you’re guilty it’s best to sit mute.’

He adds, regarding ensuing accounts of the trial in various books:

‘I was stuck with the fibs that I’d told for many, many years because I didn’t want to admit to having perjured myself. The result is that the historical record got very confused. I feel bad about that too.’

Sand and Scully were both incarcerated at McNeil Island high-security prison. Sand, true to form, had LSD smuggled in, courtesy of Judy, and organised tripping sessions with fellow inmates. Scully stayed straight and got a job in the prison library where he studied constitutional law in preparation for his appeal. In August 1974, after their bail-bonds were reduced, Sand and Scully were released pending their appeals. But, on September 13, 1976 the Ninth Circuit Court denied the appeals . Scully, now dependent on the legal services of the federal public defender, appealed this decision to the US Supreme Court. He submitted a petition for writ of certiorari: to have a judicial review by a higher court of Judge Conti’s proceedings. This petition was denied on February 22, 1977 and Judge Conti ordered him to turn himself in at McNeil Island by March 15, 1977. Scully complied.

Nick Sand hadn’t bothered with an appeal to the Supreme Court. As soon as he heard that the Ninth Circuit Court had denied the appeals he decided to abscond. With his ex-girlfriend, Nancy Pinney, driving the getaway car, Sand took off. The DEA, figuring he would do just that, tailed the couple but lost them. Sand bought a load of fishing tackle to look like a tourist and crossed into Canada, where he was joined by his partner, Judy Shaughnessy.

When Scully was on appeal bond in 1974, he had enrolled in an external degree program from the Humanistic Psychology Institute. This was for designing and building a computerized physiological monitoring system and gathering experimental data for research. During this respite, Scully also did volunteer work. One of his clients was a young handicapped woman for whom he designed a nonvocal communication system. When he was re-incarcerated on March 15, 1977, he was able to develop the system for her by having parts sent into the prison so he could assemble her computer and program it. Scully continued to do volunteer work from prison, and worked as an assistant to the prison psychologist. He was awarded a Ph.D a few months before he was paroled on February 11, 1980 and released to a halfway house.

Scully came out of prison in debt: an unpaid $10,000 fine, a substantial amount owed to the IRS, and tuition fees owed to the Humanistic Psychology Institute. Having to work to pay the debts, the amount of volunteer work he could do was limited but he continued to work through an organisation called Computers for the Physically Handicapped to develop microcomputer-based communication aids. From 1987-2005 he worked as a consultant and software/hardware designer for the Autodesk corporation. Currently, among other projects, he is researching and writing about the history of underground LSD manufacturing,

Most of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love fugitives who featured on Operation BEL’s wanted poster in 1972 were eventually caught. None of them had to serve very long prison terms; and most of them went back into dealing or smuggling drugs afterwards. The short sentences they got were indicative of the difference between the Orange County grand jury case and the federal grand jury case in San Francisco. Almost everyone indicted by the Orange County grand jury eventually was able to get the most of the charges thrown out because the evidence that been gathered was too fragmentary and too flimsy, while the federal grand jury in San Francisco worked under the direction of very professional prosecutors who gathered enough information to make their charges stick.

In 1977 Nick Sand, now using the false ID, ‘Ted Parody’, was converted to the ideas of the Indian mystic, Shree Rajneesh. Sand and Shaughnessy grew and sold magic mushrooms which made them enough money to travel to meet Rajneesh at his ashram near Pune, India. They bought a house there and Sand produced vegetables for the ashram in a large hydroponic garden. He also constructed an LSD lab at his house, having located a source of ergotamine tartrate in India. Sand helped Rajneesh get a passport to leave India and establish a Rajneeshee community near Antelope, Oregon. Posing as a Canadian, Sand moved there and remained until the ashram disbanded in late 1985 in the wake of a series of serious crimes by Rajneeshee’s followers, including a mass food poisoning attack with salmonella bacteria and an aborted plot to murder U.S. Attorney Charles H. Turner.

Sand returned to Canada, settling in Aldergrove, British Columbia and grew marijuana indoors using hydroponics. Trying his hand at a straight job for a change, Sand invested in gold mining machinery. But in the late 1980s his partners, the Smith brothers, who falsely accused him of arson. The resulting investigation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police revealed that Ted Parody’s ID was false. Released on bail, Sand fled to Mexico and Central America, eventually returning to Canada using another false ID.

In September, 1996 he was arrested while making DMT, MDMA, and LSD at a lab near Vancouver The RCMP soon worked out that they had arrested the notorious Nick Sand, who had been a fugitive from US justice for 15 years. In February 1998, Sand was given a nine year sentence which the Canadian authorities agreed to let run concurrently with his US sentence. His lawyer made a deal with the US authorities for him to be repatriated to California in return for credit for time served in Canada. But Judge Conti, who was specifically brought out of retirement to pass judgement on Sand, handed him an additional consecutive five-year term for jumping bail.

On 22 December 2000, Sand was released from prison after winning an appeal that overturned his conviction for bail-jumping back in 1976 on the grounds that he was never given a specific date to report to the court. In 2009 Sand told a National Geographic television interviewer that during his career he had made 140 million doses of LSD. Sand talked about writing a memoir but never got round to it. He died on 24 April 2017.

(NEXT UP: A serialised chapter on Tim Leary’s 1970 prison escape and his travels as a fugitive)

10/12/23

Continuing the serialisation of Psychedelic Tricksters: A True Secret History of LSD by David Black (Amazon. Also on Kindle: HERE)

Business Matters

In late June 1968, agents of the Bureau of Drug Abuse Control (BDAC) busted Tim Scully’s second Denver lab. The BDAC failed, however, to nab Scully himself, or his new partner, Nick Sand. The two LSD chemists were determined to continue production, but needed to obtain the necessary chemical ingredients. To this end they Invited British commodity traders Michael Druce and Ronald Craze to come to California as guests of Billy Hitchcock at his house in Sausalito. Craze, according to his memoirs, wanted investment money for a livestock feeds company. The idea was that the new business – called ‘Alban Feeds’ – would sell Sand and Scully the chemicals they needed and then invest the sales money in livestock feeds production. As Alban Feeds wouldn’t actually be supplying LSD, the arrangement – to supply ‘specialist chemicals’ – was believed to be legally above board.

Nick Sand met the two Englishmen at the airport in San Francisco and showed them the ‘scene’. Michael Druce, for all his front as a straight businessman, was familiar with the ways of the Millbrook fraternity. He even occasionally indulged in psychedelic drugs. In contrast, Ronald Craze was thoroughly unfamiliar with the scene and found the psychedelic fraternity to be utterly bizarre. When Timothy Leary offered him a joint at a party, Craze had no idea what it was, and embarrassed himself by opening his cigarette packet and saying ‘Oh, have one of mine!’

Sand did the negotiating with Druce and Craze during their visit. Having made a packet from STP it was Sand who provided the money. Hitchcock invested in Alban Feeds acting as Sand’s nominee. A third of the money Druce and Craze received from Sand was for investment in Alban Feeds – in the form of a convertible debenture – while the other two thirds was a down payment on a shipment of ergotamine tartrate and lysergic acid. On returning to England, Druce and Craze persuaded an animal feeds expert, Michael Faulkner-Jones, to come onboard with the new company. Albans Feeds opened a new office in Dunstable, Bedfordshire, and produced an impressive-looking catalogue of animal feeds products.

Druze and Craze were paid for their services via the Americans’ new banking facilities. Billy Hitchcock had enjoyed a successful run as broker in American stocks for the Fiduciary Bank and Trust Company. But after the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) scrutinised his dealings and imposed a consent decree to restrict them, Hitchcock made a new arrangement with the Paravicini Bank in Switzerland. This latter arrangement provided an extra arm’s length for the purchase of laboratory facilities; because any attempt by US Federal agents to track the cash-flow of their targets would come up against the Swiss banking fraternity’s uncompromising defence of ‘confidentiality’.

Hitchcock convinced both Owsley and Sand to transfer the money they had stashed off-shore in the Bahamas to the Paravicini bank so he could profitably play the stock market – with both his money and theirs. On August 30 1968, $32,000 was transferred from the Paravicini bank to a London bank for Alban Feeds. Then Hitchcock had $100,000 of Sand’s money transferred from the Paravicini bank to another Swiss bank, the Vontobel. In early September, Sand passed the $100,000 on to Druce’s bank in London as payment for the lysergic acid.

Avenging Angels

Nick Sand, having successfully sold his stash of White Lightning LSD during the 1967 Summer of Love, had gone on later that year to make STP at his new D&H Custom Research laboratory. This was distributed by the Hell’s Angels. Sand, effectively putting one over on the Angels, mislabelled his STP – which wasn’t a well-known psychedelic brand – as LSD. Sand, however, soon found out that doing business with them was far from risk-free. When a delivery to the Hell’s Angels of 12,000 doses of STP was found to have been spoiled by moisture in storage, Angels’ leader Terry ‘The Tramp’ Tracey and his assistant, George Wethern, drove the seventy-five miles from San Francisco to Nick Sand’s Cloverdale ranch. They shot at the locks on the gate, went in and terrorised everyone staying there, including women and children, until Sand arrived to replace the spoiled STP.

Sand’s relations with the Hell’s Angels went from bad to worse. When a rival dealer began undercutting the Angels in sales of STP, Wethern beat him up until he revealed that Sand had supplied him at a cheaper price than he was giving the Angels. Wethern also learned that Sand had been diverting the lithium aluminum hydride the Angels had stolen for him to make DMT into his STP production. Wethern and a team of henchman took Sand to a cemetery and pistol-whipped him.

George Wethern was a dangerous thug in more ways than one. On a ranch he later bought in Mendocino County there were some abandoned water wells which the Hell’s Angels used to dump the bodies of people they had murdered. Later, in 1973, Wethern became a government informer and he eventually testified as a government witness against Nick Sand. Tim Scully had never harboured illusions that taking LSD would make the Oakland Hell’s Angels less violent, hedonistic and money-grabbing than they were. He had never been happy about Bear’s dealings with them, knowing that they also distributed heroin and methedrine. One of the reasons Scully wanted to give LSD away for free was because distributors like the Hell’s Angels were putting LSD into the same distribution channels as hard drugs and thus exposing young acid freaks to the risk of getting addicted and falling into their clutches.

John Griggs and Tim Leary

Now working independently of Bear Stanley, Scully turned to Billy Hitchcock for advice on finding an alternative distribution channel. Billy suggested Scully ask the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. In 1966, in California, John Griggs, leader of a hoodlum gang from Anaheim, read a newspaper article about a Dr Timothy Leary, who was supplying Harvard professors, movie stars and writers with a new legal ‘wonder drug’ called LSD. Griggs felt resentful. He figured why should plebs like himself have to risk imprisonment scoring weed and heroin when the elite were getting much higher with impunity, on something that was unavailable in the dope underground? When Griggs heard that a local Hollywood film producer was hosting LSD parties, he organised an armed raid on his house. Griggs and two accomplices – Tommy Tunnell and Joe Buffalo – donned ski masks, barged into a party that was in full swing, brandished their weapons and demanded acid. The film producer, relieved that the gang didn’t want anything in the house except LSD, shouted ‘Have a good trip guys!’ as they roared off on their motorcycles into the night with a stash of his LSD. Soon, Griggs and his friends were dancing on the beach, shouting ‘This is it! Thank you God!’, and throwing their guns into the sea.

Days later, Griggs had a near-death experience when he was hospitalised with hepatitis he had contracted through his heroin addiction. He immediately gave up heroin and put his epiphany down to the ‘ego-death’ experience he’d had with LSD. Griggs ordered Leary’s publications on how to program LSD trips and began to hold weekly group sessions, usually in the mountains or on the beach. Soon they drew in hundreds of local surfers and bikers, who adopted the group’s motto: ‘Stay High and Love God’. After Griggs read Leary’s book, Start Your Own Religion, he travelled east to meet the author at the Millbrook retreat. Griggs impressed Leary as a proselytiser. ‘He had this charisma, energy, that sparkle in his eye’, Leary recalled. In Brotherhood member Travis Ashbrook’s assessment of Leary’s relationship to Griggs,

‘A lot of people thought John was a acolyte of Timothy Leary, but Tim told me that he considered John to be his guru. But it’s true that Timothy was inspiring us in an important way. He was college professor, someone in our parents’ generation, and he was telling us we were doing the right thing when he said “tune in, turn on and drop out.” There is a lot of self-doubt when you are doing something as far out as what we were doing, and Tim came along to tell us not to doubt it anymore’.

Days after the anti-LSD legislation in California in October 1966, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love registered as a tax-exempt religious church, dedicated to upholding the ‘sacred right of each individual to commune with God in spirit and in truth as it is empirically revealed to him’, and bringing to the world ‘a greater awareness of God through the teachings of Jesus Christ, Buddha, Ramakrishna, Babaji, Paramahansa Yogananda, Mahatma Ghandi, and all true prophets…’ The paperwork for incorporating the group as a legally registered non-profit organisation was filed by Glenn Lynd, as he was the only member who didn’t have a criminal record.

The Brotherhood set up a store-front in Laguna Beach, named Mystic Arts World, adorned with paintings by Dion Wright, the group’s artist-in-residence. The venture did good business, selling records, books, clothes and drugs paraphernalia to the local head community. Behind the business front of Mystic Arts World, the Brotherhood was developing a well-organised drug smuggling and distribution business. The Brotherhood ran marijuana across the Mexican border and bought Owsley-made LSD from the Hells Angels in San Francisco. On a trip to Afghanistan in search of hash, Travis Ashbrook and Ron Bevan met with Nazrullah Tokhi in Kandahar. Nazrullah and his two brothers Hayatullah and Amanullah, helped establish the Brotherhood as the biggest hash-smuggling operation in North America; with tons of hash concealed in cars and mobile homes blending in with the migration of young long-haired travellers along the Hippie Trail. Ultimately, the dealing was intended to finance the move to a secluded place, far from the maddening crowd and the Feds, where the Brotherhood’s life-style dreams could be realised.

One inspiration was Aldous Huxley’s utopian novel, Island. The community on Huxley’s imagined Polynesian island blends certain elements of western science and eastern Buddhism to develop a technology that works with nature rather than against it. Tantric sex – the ‘yoga of love’ – is taught and practiced. The family unit is extended by communal child-rearing. For some, this utopian dream actually seemed like a practical option – if the alternative was long-term incarceration at San Quintin. Brother Edward Padilla recalled,

‘The idea of moving to an island was as serious as a heart attack. We were going to buy a yacht, a big boat and sail there. We were talking about how to deliver babies, how to plant seeds, what to grow’.

Brother Jack Harrington had even flown to Micronesia to check out an island he had heard about. But in spring 1968, John Griggs, on his own initiative, made a down payment on a 300-acre piece of land in the mountains above Palm Springs. Though it was not on an island, it was secluded. Nicholas Schou’s book, Orange Sunshine, gives the impression that Griggs’ move was seen by disgruntled comrades as something of a betrayal of the group’s ideals. Tim Scully disagrees:

‘I’m not convinced that all the Brotherhood shared the same dream of an island. My impression is that the Brotherhood was a large enough group that there were subgroups with different dreams. Each of those groups may have thought their dream was everyone’s dream but that was an illusion. At the time when the LSD subsystem led by John Griggs bought the Brotherhood ranch, another subgroup decided to move to Oregon and a third group moved to Hawaii. Each group followed their own dream. My point is that it was more complicated than the people that Nick Schou interviewed made it sound.’

Although Bear Stanley had a low opinion of the Brotherhood, Tim Scully begged to differ; having met John Griggs at Billy Hitchcock’s house in Sausalito, he had been very impressed by him. To Scully, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love (at least in their determination to disseminate LSD as a social good) had a philosophy which was genuinely spiritual and non-violent. Being idealists didn’t stop the Brotherhood from building up one of the most successful drug-smuggling operations in the world. In the summer of 1968, John Griggs and Michael Randall of the Brotherhood visited Hitchcock in Sausalito. The Brotherhood, says Scully, ‘were having trouble getting as much as they wanted to distribute, so when I came and said, “I’d like you to distribute the LSD I make,” they were very happy’.

A New Dawn

Tim Scully’s collaboration with Nick Sand led in November 1968 to the establishment of an LSD lab in Windsor, near Santa Rosa, California. In this new partnership Scully insisted that both Sand and he would sell everything they made at Windsor through the Brotherhood, and not the Hell’s Angels. STP production was dropped; Scully was having moral scruples about putting it on the streets. In 1967 the negative effects of STP became apparent when people suffering extreme panic attacks were admitted to the Haight-Ashbury Medical Clinic and the San Francisco General Hospital. The Haight-Ashbury Clinic was quick to warn the local freak community that overdosing STP could cause psychosis and an ‘acute chronic and toxic reaction’ lasting for up to 24 hours. Scully says,

‘Owsley Stanley talked me into making some STP. I don’t feel good about having done that; STP turned out not to be a good psychedelic’. He adds that STP ‘lacked heart. It did not lead to experiences of oneness the way that LSD often did. And quite a few people had terrifying experiences until they learned how to correctly use the drug’.

Scully’s priorities were to get money for the legal fees of his two lab assistants who had been busted in Denver lab, and to buy more raw materials. His ultimate ambition was still to make 200 kilos of acid – enough for several hundred million good doses – and give it away to help change consciousness on a global scale. As he says now, ‘That latter fantasy did not happen’. Sand brought on board Professor Lester Friedman, of Case Western University, Missouri, to train him in advanced production techniques in return for a lucrative ‘research grant’ plus a stake in the front companies being set up in Europe for procurement of materials.

In the fiscal paradise of the Bahamas, Billy Hitchcock had a private account at the Castle Bank and Trust. This laundromat for Mafia narcotics trafficking had been co-founded by Edward Halliwell, a CIA asset whose air transport company had flown heroin to bankroll covert operations in the Golden Triangle and Indo-China. Hitchcock also made arrangements at Resorts International, another Bahamas-based conduit for Mafia money, and at the Fiduciary Trust Company, an offshoot of Investors Overseas Services (IOS). Headquartered in Geneva, IOS was headed by the notorious and crooked financier,Bernie Cornfeld (user of the slogan ‘Do you sincerely want to be rich?’).

Hitchcock, who spent some time in London, may have learned some of the dark arts of finance from Cornfeld himself. As an investment advisor, Hitchcock certainly learned about the attraction overseas trusts had for wealthy people trying to dodge taxes without breaking the law. As Alan Block and Sean Griffin put it in the Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice:

‘He (the taxpayer) puts money in a Bahama central trust. Why in the Bahamas? There is no income tax or estate tax in the Bahamas. Why in a trust? A trust is like a corporation, a separate legal entity. This separate entity is a non-resident alien, and a non-resident alien can sell an asset in the United States with no tax. How delightful! Now, if that non-resident alien ties in with a distributing company in the Netherlands Antilles, which can earn interest in the United States without a tax under any circumstances, he has put together a perfect set-up. He takes losses and deductions in the United States and he takes gains and profits abroad, under a tax treaty’.

Sand and Scully’s San Francisco lawyer, Peter Buchanan, handled the details of purchasing property for the laboratory established in Windsor, in November 1968. Buchanan attempted to hide the source of the money by buying cashier’s checks with cash and depositing them at New York banks in his law firm’s trust account. As a means of covering up real estate purchase and avoiding taxes, this, as we shall see, proved to be ineffective.

How Orange Sunshine conquered America.

By May 1969, at their laboratory in Windsor, California, Nick Sand; his pregnant partner, Jill Henry; Tim Scully; and David Mantell had produced over a kilogram of LSD, enough for more than 4 million 300 μg doses. Sand took charge of the tableting, churning out tiny pills dyed in orange, which were to become known as Orange Sunshine.

Tim Scully, having just obtained his pilot’s license, was having a piece of navigation equipment fitted onto his plane at Napa County Airport, California. On May 26, 1969, he strolled into the hangar only to be greeted by the Feds: ‘Tim Scully? You’re under arrest!’ He was taken to the Federal Building in San Francisco where investigators quizzed him on incriminating evidence found in his second Denver laboratory, which had been raided in his absence the previous year. Scully refused to answer his interrogators questions without the presence of his lawyer and was released on bail.

Sand, on learning of Scully’s arrest, was worried that the Feds might have found a paper trail leading to his lab in Windsor. So not wanting to take any chances, Sand closed it and moved his equipment out. His next move, in the fall of 1969, was to set up the Tekton Development Company in San Francisco to obtain lab equipment.

The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, led by John Griggs at the ranch at Idyllwild, was now distributing the Orange Sunshine. When the Brotherhood first moved into Idyllwild, in spring 1968, it had toolsheds, tractors, a windmill for drawing water from the well, diesel generators and a corral full of cattle. Dion Wright, a frequent visitor, noticed that what had once been a fully functioning ranch had strangely become a primitive camp: most of the inhabitants were living in teepees and since they didn’t eat meat the cattle had been given away to local ranchers. Glenn Lynd, as quoted in Nicholas Schou’s book, Orange Sunshine, says he expressed concerns about group-marriage arrangements inspired by Aldous Huxley’s novel Island, which he claimed Griggs appeared to be enforcing in the name of free love. Lynd’s account however, may have been coloured by his later status as a government informer, i.e. it may have been a bit of self-justification for snitching. Tim Scully is adamant that Lynd’s claim that the people living on the Brotherhood Ranch practiced free love is ‘utterly untrue’. He says:

‘At that time it was very common for most of us in the Psychedelic scene to practice free love and it was relatively unusual that the people living on the Brotherhood Ranch practiced monogamy. But they did so. Carol Griggs was a strong force in insisting for monogamy on the ranch’.

On 4 August 1969 the Idyllwid community was shattered by the sudden death of John Griggs from a drug overdose. According to Lee and Shlain’s account, in Acid Dreams, Griggs’ demise in a teepee at Idyllwild was due to an overdose of PCP (Phencyclidine: also known as ‘Angel Dust’). During the 1967 ‘Summer of Love’ in San Francisco, large amounts of PCP had been touted as synthetic cannabis (tetra-hydro-cannibinol – THC) amongst the Haight Ashbury hippies. PCP, which had been tested on soldiers at Edgewood Arsenal, was stockpiled by the CIA as a ‘non-lethal incapacitant’ even though agents reported that high doses could ‘lead to convulsions and death’.

In Timothy Leary’s version, in Flashbacks, the fatal dose was a synthetic concoction of psilocybin Griggs had bought from an underground chemist in Los Angeles. Leary claimed that laboratory tests had revealed the pills contained strychnine and that during this period there were many reports of psychedelics laced with poisons circulating in the counter-culture. According to Leary, rumours spread ‘about federal drug enforcement agents circulating tainted drugs, but there was no proof’.* According to Dion Wright,

‘The role of the intelligence community is unclear, but they were undoubtedly some kind of factor. Certainly the density of agents from various levels of government was more than anyone perceived at that time. I have come down on the side of a government assassination that worked’.

The authors of Acid Dreams seem to imply that Griggs’ death was suspicious. They write:

‘In the aftermath of Grigg’s death there was shakeup in the Brotherhood hierarchy. A different breed took over, and their approach to dealing was more competitive and cutthroat than before’.

According to Tendler and May’s account in their book, The Brotherhood, Griggs died because he simply miscalculated a dose of psilocybin mushroom pills. Tim Scully, who obtained Griggs’ death certificate and talked with the people who were with him when he died, says that is precisely what happened:

‘He died after aspirating vomit on the way to the hospital lying down in the back of a pickup truck where his friends didn’t know enough first aid to keep his airway open after he took a very large dose of synthetic psilocybin which came from Switzerland and which was pure. A contributing factor to John’s death was his propensity to be macho about taking extremely large doses of drugs, something many of the Brotherhood guys did. You can get away with that with LSD since very large doses are still not physically toxic but that habit becomes very dangerous when applied to other drugs such as psilocybin.’

After John Griggs’ death Michael Randall took over the Brotherhood’s LSD distribution system and married Griggs’ widow. The Brotherhood carried on.

The authors of Acid Dreams claim that by the summer of 1969 the Brotherhood was ‘stymied by lack of raw materials’ for LSD production, and ‘It was at this point that a mysterious figure named Ronald Hadley Stark appeared on the scene’.

Ronald Stark was operating a secret laboratory in Paris, with the British scientist, Richard Kemp, as his chief chemist. Towards the the end of 1969, Stark decided to expand his operation to the US, through the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. To this end he reached out to Billy Hitchcock via his envoy, Tord Svenson. By this time. however, Hitchcock’s luck playing the stock markets was running out and he was facing an IRS investigation of his tax affairs. He decided to drop out of involvement with the LSD underground and move back east. So when Svenson, in early 1970, contacted Billy Hitchcock to do some LSD business, Hitchcock deferred and directed him westwards to contact Nick Sand and Tim Scully.

In Lee and Shlain’s book Acid Dreams, the account of Ronald Stark’s first meeting with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love goes as follows.

In August 1969, Ronald Hadley Stark drove across San Jacinto Mountains of California and descended on the bungalow and teepees at the Brotherhood of Eternal Love’s Idyllwild ranch with an offer they couldn’t refuse. Stark was carrying a bottle containing a kilo of pure LSD made at a laboratory in Europe. Stark talked about his expertise in scams: smuggling drugs in consignments of Japanese equipment, utilising business fronts in West Africa, and moving money through a maze of shell companies set up by his lawyers in various continents. However, he explained, he also had a mission: to use LSD in order to facilitate the overthrow of the political systems of both the capitalist West and communist East by inducing altered states of consciousness in millions of people. Stark also hinted that he was well-connected in the world of covert politics.

This narrative would make a great scene in a psychedelic 20th century western directed by Quentin Tarantino. But it is largely a myth. The claim in Acid Dreams that by the summer of 1969 the Brotherhood was ‘stymied by lack of raw materials’ for LSD production, and that at this point Stark appeared is dismissed by Tim Scully. He points out that in the summer of 1969 the Brotherhood was busy selling vast quantities of Orange Sunshine and was not short of anything.

According to Acid Dreams, ‘Stark spoke ten languages fluently, including French, German, Italian, Arabic and Chinese’. Scully disputes this:

‘Everybody I know who knew him says that’s not true. He spoke English, French, German, Italian, and apparently some Arabic. He did not speak Spanish and tried to use his Italian unsuccessfully to substitute for it’.

Most importantly, Ron Stark didn’t suddenly appear on the California scene ‘coincidently’ following the demise of John Griggs in summer 1969. Stark first appeared in California in spring 1970. At Billy Hitchcock’s suggestion, Stark reached out to Tim Scully and Nick Sand, first by sending as an envoy his colleague, Tord Svenson. Tim Scully initially met Ron Stark in March or April 1970 and shortly thereafter introduced him to Nick Sand at the Cloverdale ranch. Scully recalls:

‘Ron Stark did not deliver a kilo of LSD to the Brotherhood. When he came to California to meet me, after a preliminary visit by his chemist, Tord Svenson, he convinced me to introduce him to Nick Sand and he brought that LSD along as his calling card. By the way, it wasn’t in a bottle, it was in a plastic bag. Nick remembered it as being a pound while I remembered it as being a kilo. He claimed to have European laboratories that could produce an unlimited amount of LSD and all he lacked was American distribution. I was thrilled to hear that because by then some of the gumption had leaked out of my enthusiasm for saving the world by making LSD. I still believed that it would be a positive force but I was becoming less and less convinced that simply spreading LSD to the four winds would save the world while at the same time I was free on appeal bond from the bust of my second Denver lab and facing a possible total of 56 years in Colorado state prison. Over a period of days Ron managed to convince us to introduce him to the Brotherhood and we took him down to the Brotherhood Ranch in Southern California.’

Ronald Stark takes over the Brotherhood of Eternal Love

Michael Druce and Ronald Craze’s company,Alban Feeds, had been paid handsomely in advance by Nick Sand to supply lysergic acid and ergotamine tartrate for LSD production. In 1970, however, the supply stopped, much to Sand’s unease. Accompanied by Donald Munson, he took a plane to London and went to see Druce, who could only excuses about the company’s cash-flow problems. Although Alban Feeds registered a profit of £128,000 in the first year of trading, it was heavily indebted to the National Westminster Bank due to overextended investments. But the most important excuse Druce kept to himself: he had been visited by a detective sergeant from Scotland Yard, who informed him that raw materials found in an illegal LSD lab in Denver had been traced back to his company  (the lab had actually been Tim Scully’s, raided back in June 1968). Druce was warned against supplying any more chemicals that might be used for making LSD in the US. Though Sand and Munson were kept in the dark about this, they sensed that Druce and Craze weren’t inclined to either deliver the chemicals or return the money that had been advanced.

They knew, however, that Craze had stashed ergotamine tartrate in a safe deposit box in Hamburg. The stockpile was a strategic asset of Alban Feeds: its market value was likely to increase over time; and served as collateral for loans from the bank. Ronald Stark hatched a plan to expropriate it. Lester Friedman, who acted as the go-between for Sand’s raw materials purchases, told Druce and Craze that a German firm in Switzerland called Inland Alkaloids wanted to make a bulk purchase of ergotamine tartrate. Craze didn’t suspect that Inland Alkaloids was in fact nothing more than a front company with a Swiss postal box number, whose directors were actually Friedman and Ronald Stark’s assistant, Simon Walton. Craze sent documents for the sale, expecting payment in return, but heard nothing. Craze thought he had ensured that the chemicals could not be collected without proper authorization, but his instructions had not been specific enough. Simon Walton walked into the firm’s offices, presented documents for the order, and walked out with the 9 kilos of ergotamine tartrate.

Craze also wrote letters to Sand, Friedman and Hitchcock, telling them that their scam had ruined his business and he wasn’t prepared to let the matter drop. Craze was soon visited in London by Nick Sand and Lester Friedman. Sand suggested to Craze that he wasn’t as innocent as he made out, as he had taken money from Billy Hitchcock for consignments that hadn’t been delivered. Craze pleaded innocence, saying that the only money he had received was to set up an animal feed business and that it was legitimate loan, legally endorsed. He had ousted Druce as a partner because he was convinced Druce had been swindling the company’s money and had been complicit in the scam. According to Craze’s memoirs:

‘Nick said that he was sorry for me but that there was nothing he could do to help me. Perhaps I should put it down to bad judgement and bad company and forget the whole thing as he couldn’t see how I was going to get anywhere. I told him that wasn’t an option. I had lost everything and my only way of surviving was to track down who was behind Inland Alkaloids, and if I couldn’t do it myself I would have to go to the police… if they knew anything at all or could find out anything I begged them to get in touch with me as time was of the essence.’

Craze’s threat to involve the police was not taken lightly. Next, Craze got an invite from a ‘Professor Ronald Stark’ to meet him at the Army and Navy Club, a plush gentleman’s club on Pall Mall, at 3 o’clock the following afternoon. When Craze arrived Stark told him he had been requested to meet Craze by ‘some friends’ who had been disturbed by letters Craze had written to them.:

‘He asked me politely if I could explain what happened. So I told him the whole story of Inland Alkaloids, Mike Druce’s treachery, the destruction of our business and possible bankruptcy. He listened patiently and when I finished he shook his head saying it was a most distressing business. He said that he wasn’t without influence and with my permission perhaps he could talk to the bank. Then, Craze recalled, Stark came to the point: He still needed supplies, we no longer delivered. In my heart I knew that I would never catch up with the people behind Inland Alkaloids, and it might be dangerous involving the police… He had read me correctly. I was to learn five years later that he had been sent over to see if I should be eliminated, and to arrange for a contract on me, but he had reported back that I was small fry, and as long as the organisation took preventative measures, I would probably cause them no more trouble.’

Craze’s claim that Stark had been considering having him ‘eliminated’ probably came from the police’s later investigation (‘Operation Julie’). But there is no record of anyone in the Brotherhood of Eternal Love or its LSD sub-system ever carrying out retribution by means of death threats or actual assassination (notwithstanding an FBI statement back in 1962 that ‘Stark is reported to possess a sidearm and his mental condition is reported to be questionable. Therefore care should be exercised in contacts with him’).

In any case, Craze’s self-image as a ‘legit’ entrepreneur dedicated to supplying farmers in under-developed countries with animals feeds, blissfully unaware of any illegality, never convinced Nick Sand; or Tim Scully, who says,

‘Craze was very disingenuous in claiming that all of that money was intended as an investment in Alban Feeds. The amount that was invested in Alban Feeds was essentially a tip or a bribe for Druce and Craze… I believe that Druce and Craze already knew that they were going to have trouble selling us more ergot alkaloids at the time when they accepted a large order from Nick.’

Over the years Stark had built up a network of very useful contacts for moving money and materials around the world through front companies. During his stay in Ghana in 1967, Stark as representative of the Interbiochemical company, had befriended an economic adviser at the American Embassy in Accra, named Charles Adams. They had resumed their friendship later in Belgium. Stark also befriended Ned Coffin, the principal of a company which sold heavy electrical equipment to West African countries. Coffin helped Stark obtain ergotamine tartrate through a state-owned pharmaceutical company. Stark persuaded Coffin’s son who worked at a New York law firm to handle his business affairs. The firm’s partner in Paris, Sam Goekjian, drew up papers for a laboratory Stark had set up at Le Clocheton, near Louvain-le-Neuve University, Belgium.

Leading Brotherhood of Eternal Love organiser, Michael Randall, travelled to Belgium under an assumed name and stayed in the town with his family. It seemed like a perfect cover: university staff thought Stark was a genuine scientist; and that the lab was making legitimate chemicals for export to Switzerland. Randall’s order for LSD was shipped to New York,concealed in Stark’s Jaguar.

Nick Sand later said he saw none of the ergotamine tartrate consignment he had helped to extort from Druce and Craze; it almost certainly went to Stark’s labs in France and Belgium, although Stark had assured the Brotherhood it was safely stashed in Tangiers. Tim Scully says, ‘Ron Stark and Nick Sand competed for The Brotherhood of Eternal Love’s favors and Ron Stark eventually won’.

Back in California in, Tim Scully was trying to get the acid Stark brought over from Europe tableted:

‘The LSD that Ron brought was not very pure, having been precipitated by freezing rather than crystallized by gently cooling. It also had not been through preparative column chromatography — an important purification step. Ron wanted us to tablet the LSD so that the Brotherhood could distribute it. Nick was willing to do so but he wanted 50 per cent of the profits. I was somewhat reluctant but Ron managed to employ his skill as a con artist to convince me that it would be better for me to do the tableting than for Nick to do it. Ron offered to pay for all of the expenses involved and I soon found myself ordering a tablet machine from Joe Helpern in Chicago and organizing a crew to help me set up a tableting facility in Oregon. Sadly, when I went to pick up the tablet machine from Joe, it came with a free bonus of carloads of federal agents who followed me. Making a long story short, I eventually detected the surveillance when I turned off the interstate freeway at Pocatello, Idaho. I was unsuccessful at eluding them and eventually ended up parking the truck with the machine in it and flying back to California. I contacted my lawyer and arranged to have the machine sold for a legitimate purpose; he found a candy company that wanted to buy it.’

‘I had already started purifying Ron’s LSD at the tableting facility in Oregon which was waiting for the machine that would now never arrive. I started to finish up that task, but a lab accident got me overdosed on LSD without a tolerance and I started hallucinating federal agents in the trees around the lab. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I packed things up and handed the LSD over to the Brotherhood and told them I was sorry but I couldn’t do the work any longer. The risks had grown too high while my sense of the benefits had dropped too low and the balance tipped solidly against further involvement in the LSD underground. Nick ended up finishing the purification and tableting of Ron Stark’s acid by the way. And of course he collected his fee.’