Operation white rabbit, p.19
Operation White Rabbit, page 19
When coffers ran low, he always gravitated back to his writer’s retreat on Vuelta Herradura, whipped up a little Viagra, then went off again . . . all according to Todd.
Leonard flew to Boston for a week in July, then back to Kansas City and a meeting with Skinner at the Manhattan (KS) Holiday Inn. All four brethren in the swimming pool project—Skinner, Pickard, Halpern and Savinelli—convened in Telluride the following month for the annual Mushroom Festival.
Had Leonard ever filed an income tax return (he never did),3 the festival would have fallen under Schedule C as a business expense. Sponsored by the free-form Telluride Institute, the weekend event promised “all things mycological, from the newest advancements in mushroom science to our famous mushroom cookoff.” Skinner and Savinelli had been attending the annual event since its inception in 1984. During the festival, psychonauts owned the city. Leonard felt right at home. By Skinner’s reckoning, it was also a great place to swap psilocybe cubensis and pick up hippie chicks.
Psychonauts flooded the Netherlands that season as well. From Sept. 26 through Oct. 20, Pickard and Halpern flew to Amsterdam for an ethnobotany conference.
“They were spooks and academics at the same time, thinking they were smarter than everyone else,” said Savinelli.
Another obvious business expense, the conference was the perfect venue for drumming up support for Leonard’s Harvard drug policy dream. He and Halpern put up posters at the Amstel Hotel Maatschaapij, inviting inquiry and creating their own psychonaut database—a future resource for FEDS.
Still, interest was only lukewarm. On Oct. 16, Skinner wired them both enough money to get back home.
As Leonard’s bursar-in-chief, Todd purported to know his every move. Before the year wound to a close, Leonard was back in Santa Fe with the swimming pool project. While dropping in and out of his writer’s retreat, he’d let the place go. Even in the high desert where lush lawns and rose gardens simply didn’t exist, the exterior of 110 Vuelta Herradura had become unsightly. Walkways were shabby; shuttered windows, forbidding. Indoors, the place reeked. Nonetheless, David Haley convinced its absentee landlords to accept a lease extension for another year.
As 1998 ended, Leonard was off again. This time, he flew from San Francisco to Frankfurt, allegedly with a false-bottom attaché case his only luggage. He returned to San Francisco twenty-four hours later and spent New Year’s Eve at the Palace Hotel. When he checked out a week later, he settled his $10,640.09 bill with cash. Next stop: the Kansas City Ritz Carlton. He bivouacked with Skinner at his missile silo, then headed back to Santa Fe.
“Skinner played a dangerous game,” said Savinelli. “He’d intentionally overdose people with opiates, then play the life-saving doctor by giving them Narcan.”
On April 28, 1999, Todd was down in his silo, chatting up Leonard in a transcontinental phone call. From the corner of his eye, he noticed a forty-one-year-old computer engineer that he’d hired the day before. Paul Hulebak drove up from Tulsa for a couple days work on Skinner’s IT system.
“Skinner was on the phone to me at the time describing his latest drug episode,” recalled Pickard. “He stopped midsentence.”
Skinner watched Hulebak wobble then slump over his keyboard. What came next, Leonard assumed to be typical Todd histrionics.
“I’ve got a problem,” he told Pickard in a panicky voice. “Call you back.”
But he never did. After he hung up, Todd was preoccupied. Hulebak had gamely taken a couple of the drugs Skinner offered earlier. Now he lay face up, glassy-eyed and unresponsive on the silo floor. He slapped his face, yelled at him to get up, and checked his pupils with a flashlight.
Skinner later told Pottawatomie County Sheriff ’s detectives that Hulebak seized from an overdose of self-administered methadone and hydromorphone. How he’d acquired the cocktail was anyone’s guess. Todd said he immediately took Hulebak to the ER.
Todd did no such thing. He first tried shooting Hulebak up with Benadryl and his own homespun remedies he called “antigens.” When the engineer seemed to be breathing better, Todd ordered three of his employees—Hobbs, Guinan, and Kendall Graham—to help haul Hulebak to a hospital thirty miles away. He reasoned that suspicion surrounding drug use at his missile silo wouldn’t be a factor outside the city limits.
But Skinner changed his mind upon arrival. Hulebak was breathing so well, he did a U-turn and came back to Wamego. There, Skinner and his crew stood vigil, monitoring Hulebak’s recovery.
Only when he stopped breathing, nearly eight hours after the initial seizure, did Todd haul Hulebak to Wamego Hospital, a five-minute drive from the silo.
He was DOA.
“Todd Skinner is evil,” said Hulebak’s sister Kirstin Reynolds. “He considers himself very smart, but I can tell you from speaking with him numerous times that he’s used to dealing with stupid people.”
The Pottawatomie County Sheriff ’s detectives weren’t stupid, but they also knew they didn’t have enough to charge Todd. They turned Hulebak’s body over to the Shawnee County Coroner for autopsy.4 Skinner drove back to his missile silo, which he’d instructed employees to sanitize: no needles, opiates, psychedelics, etc.
Hulebak was not Todd’s first guinea pig. Over time, he became so sophisticated at estimating dosages, potency, and antidotes that he literally thought of himself as a physician bringing zombies back from the dead. His father practiced medicine after a fashion at his chiropractic clinic. Why shouldn’t Skinner follow in his footsteps? He even set up IV stations down in the silo for weekend recreational use.
As with Hulebak, Skinner similarly shot up John Halpern’s assistant. A young Boston College undergrad who’d apprenticed himself first to Halpern and then Pickard, Mike Bauer fell beneath the thrall of Leonard’s lysergic romance and became a junior member of the swimming pool project.
“Mike was John Halpern’s ‘stack rat,’” said Savinelli. “Pickard hired him to research volatile governments like Afghanistan in reference to their drug trade.”
Bauer inevitably met Skinner. Todd took a shine to the lad. He invited him to visit the silo. During his first trip to Wamego, Bauer let Skinner talk him into an IV drip.
“Skinner liked touting the psychedelic aspects of opiate use,” said Halpern.
Only later did he learn he was being overdosed on fentanyl. When Bauer convulsed and began to fade, Skinner brought him back with Naloxone, the generic version of Narcan. Unlike Hulebak, Bauer revived.
“Mike learned his lesson, though,” insisted Savinelli. “He never trusted the son of a bitch again.”
Others were neither so lucky nor so chastened. Bauer’s resuscitation only encouraged Skinner. Elmer Gantry paled beside him. In white lab coat with stethoscope looped round his neck, Skinner proudly put the “con” back into conversion. He presented himself as the psychotropic Kildare.
“More like Mengele,” muttered Halpern.
Pickard liked the ladies as much as Skinner, though it might be argued that he was slightly more selective. Leonard counted among his scientific role models Kary Mullis and Richard Feynman—both shameless voyeurs when they weren’t pursuing Nobel prizes.
“I loved his book, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman,”5 said Pickard.
In a chapter titled, “Topless Bars and Other Ways to Have Fun,” the Nobel laureate recalled leering as a nearby couple’s foot massage advanced toward casual sex one afternoon during the 1980s. Feynman lounged beside them in the spa at Esalen:
He starts to rub her big toe. “I think I feel it,” he says. “I feel a kind of dent—is that the pituitary?”
I blurt out, “You’re a helluva long way from the pituitary, man!”
They looked at me, horrified . . . and said, “It’s reflexology!”
I quickly closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating.
Pickard smiled at the passage. Most men were dogs, truth be told. Feynman the physicist and Pickard the chemist needed pleasuring as much as the next guy. And from Leonard’s point of view, there was no aphrodisiac quite so affecting as the illusion of sexual control.
Halpern recalled him once telling Harlow, “You know honey, we should hire surrogates around the world, and they can carry your egg and my sperm and we can have little Leonards and Debbies all over!”
Pickard allegedly told Skinner that he wanted to have many children by many different women.
One of his favored San Francisco haunts was the notorious Mitchell Brothers’ O’Farrell Theatre,6 where he met Martina Schenevar (stage name Selin), Deanna Luce (Marisa), Athena Raphael, and Sita Kaylin (Natasha). Their pet name for Leonard was “Fancy Pants.” He wined and dined them during their off hours. Martina once accompanied him on an expedition to Bangkok.
According to Skinner, Pickard checked into the five-star Auberge du Soleil in Napa Valley one April weekend for a ménage with Luce and Schenavar. The lovefest ended in a pitched battle. Hotel management had to kick all of them out.
“Skinner has a rich fantasy life, dwelling inside his own hallucinations,” said Leonard.
Whenever he stayed in Santa Fe, Pickard unwound at gallery openings and at a favorite topless lounge in Albuquerque. He gravitated to one dancer/artist in particular.
An environmental trainee employed by the air quality department of the state of New Mexico, Trais Kliphuis (pronounced Trace Clip-house) had recently staged a one-woman show in Santa Fe she called “Flesh Off the Easel.” Leonard had struck up conversations with half-naked women before, but this one was different.
“I’m not a very literal person,” she said. “I’m more interested in the sublime and the mysterious, and in seeing what comes through me rather than having a concept or an image.”
Thirty-something, intriguingly multifaceted yet fiercely independent, Trais clearly was no bimbo. By the time he wooed Kliphuis, Leonard and Deb were already on the rocks. Motherhood suited her, but abandonment did not. They hadn’t exactly split, but Leonard’s lysergic wanderings had taken their toll.
“Deborah liked to snoop though my notes, clothes, car, everywhere, even while I bathed,” complained Pickard.
Trais, on the other hand, had as free a spirit as Leonard’s. During their on-again, off-again year together, Leonard proposed marriage more than once. Tapping into Skinner’s wealth, he plied her with gifts and offered to retire the $135,000 mortgage on her new house in Santa Fe. They flew twice to Amsterdam and London on his dime, as well as the resort island of St. Maarten in the Dutch West Indies. Later, when she was asked to identify him from the witness stand, Trais pointed at Leonard and sighed, “He’s that beautiful man over there.”
Trais was no Blanche Dubois. She grew up on Long Island, studied chemical engineering at Tufts, and worked variously as cancer researcher, physicist’s assistant, and senior WIPP7 technician, while frequently opting for art over science.
“I always enjoyed her stories of dropping thousands of feet below the surface of the New Mexico desert into the vast salt mine storage facility for nuclear waste from Los Alamos,” said Pickard. “Railroad tracks like a honeycomb, geologic eons passing on the way down: ancient oceans from 250 million years ago.”
Trais might support herself as a scientist, but she made her name as an artist.
“Paint inspires me,” she told the Santa Fe New Mexican. “I just love playing with it and seeing what comes through that I’ve never done before. . . .”
Her reluctance to answer Leonard’s marriage proposals might be traced to similar pleas that she got from Todd Skinner, who promised diamonds, sapphires, and a visit to Bora Bora aboard his G5 jet. That he had no jet or any hope of showering her with gems eventually became apparent, but would not have persuaded her in any event. Trais was an artist first, paramour second.
Leonard didn’t wait for her to change her mind. Call it mid-life crisis or momentary self-awareness, but at fifty-four, Pickard was suddenly in the market for a wife. He fell next for a Ukrainian premed student whom he’d first encountered in St. Petersburg.
Natasha Kruglova was six years younger than Trais and ten years younger than Deborah Harlow. As Leonard grew older, his taste in women clearly trended younger. He began dating an emigre literally half his age.
“Relative youth is not what I was seeking,” he said.
Kruglova came to the US to study medicine, but couldn’t afford university tuition. She started out working the front desk at San Francisco’s Pan Pacific Hotel. She’d brought her father with her from Russia. They set up informal housekeeping in a one-bed-room rent-controlled apartment that fronted directly on California Street.
“Mattress on the floor, Korean grocery on one side and a coin laundromat on the other,” said Pickard.
Soon, Leonard began staying over whenever he happened to be in San Francisco, which was often. Natalya8 accepted Leonard’s cloak and dagger ways as if they were second nature because they were. She’d grown up in the USSR in a family grounded in intrigue. A retired trauma surgeon from Odessa, her father, Grigory Vorobee, had been assigned to Cuba during the 1962 missile crisis. When Pickard introduced her at receptions or cocktail parties as Selene or Martina or Natasha Vorobee, she went right along with the pointless ruse.
“I introduced Natasha as she was,” he said. “People were fortunate, and delighted, to meet a woman of her quality and bright spirit.”
Todd took notice, inventing the perception of the Vorobees as KGB. Following his pattern of lusting after all Pickard’s women, Skinner schemed after Natalya just as he had Trais. He offered her jewels and jet rides. Like Trais, Natalya wouldn’t give Skinner the time of day.
1. In addition to LSD, the chemical is also the basic ingredient for several migraine headache medications.
2. Llave got caught at the border Feb. 22, 1997, with thirteen tablets and was fined $500.
3. Pickard put $33,915.09 on credit cards in 1998.
4. Weeks before his death, Hulebak had been assisting the DEA in its investigation of a Tulsa pill-mill doctor.
5 “The title derived from the Dean’s wife at afternoon tea among the mathematicians at the Graduate College at Princeton,” said Pickard. “She asked him if he wanted cream or lemon and Feynman said, ‘Both.’”
6. San Francisco porn pioneers, Jim and Artie Mitchell opened the O’Farrell in 1969, evolving from topless to bottomless to full frontal over the next twenty years. Leonard befriended several of the dancers, inviting one them along on a two-week “research” trip to Bangkok in February 1999.
7. Located twenty-six miles southeast of Carlsbad, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant is the nation’s only deep (2,150 feet underground in an ancient salt formation) geologic long-lived radioactive waste repository.
8. Natasha and Natochka were nicknames.
XIV.
ON MAY 21, 1999, US Customs traced thirty gallons of Brazilian ayahuasca tea to the Santa Fe home of Seagram’s liquor heir Jeffrey Bronfman. No arrests were made, but the DEA seized the tea. In his role as president of the North American União do Vegetal Church, Bronfman demanded its return. He sued the Department of Justice, setting the stage for an eventual showdown before the US Supreme Court.
Though newspapers completely missed the raid, Pickard circuitously got wind.
Skinner told Pickard he’d recently given Santa Fe entrepreneur Andrew Ungerleider1 three grams of swimming pool Viagra, but according to Todd, the most recent batch had major volatility problems. One vial actually exploded. They didn’t need any more accidents.
Skinner said that when he showed up at Ungerleider’s door to retrieve the Viagra, his wife Gay showed him in. She didn’t have the Viagra, but she did have a delicious rumor. It seemed that her brother worked for the New Mexico Attorney General and the scuttlebutt was that the DEA had just raided Jeffrey Bronfman’s place.
When Skinner relayed the rumor to Pickard, he imagined agents crawling all over Santa Fe. It didn’t help that the lease on the Vuelta Herradura house was coming up for renewal. In anticipation, the landlords were already demanding a routine property inspection, David Haley told Pickard. His panic hiked another notch. He ordered Haley to keep inspectors out at all costs.
How? asked Haley. It was their property.
Pickard thought a minute. How about dressing in drag and passing himself off as John Connor’s sick mother? Haley could cough and wheeze like Anthony Perkins in Psycho. Literally bar the door.
Skinner was more sanguine. Perhaps the Bronfman bust was just a sign that the time had come to move on. Had it not been for the Hulebak case, he would have suggested transporting the swimming pool project to his missile silo. Unfortunately, the Pottawatomie District Attorney had Skinner in his sites as a person of interest. It seemed only a matter of time before Todd graduated to full-fledged murder suspect. The Wamego silo had to remain squeaky clean. Relocating there was not an option.
But there was more than one silo in Kansas. In fact, Skinner acquired his from a Wichita broker who happened to own one.
Tim Schwartz and partner Ed Peden made a business of buying and selling decommissioned silos. They called them “20th Century Castles.” Schwartz invested in a castle of his own near Wichita.
“It was an actual silo,” said Pickard. “A vertical cylinder surrounded by military fencing with an eighty-foot disc that blew off when the missile launched.”
An Atlas F missile silo sunk into the earth in 1960 at a cost of $3 million, the former Air Force installation consisted of 15,000 square feet buried beneath the prairie next to the tiny settlement of Carneiro, Kansas. The vertical launch tube was separated by tunnel from its control center—a perfect venue for the swimming pool project, far from the prying eyes, ears, and noses of the DEA. Unlike Skinner’s Wamego circus, the Carneiro site was a virtual morgue. It attracted zero attention from surrounding farmers.
During the summer of 1999, Skinner claimed that Pickard gave him $650,000 and told him to find another lab location, preferably in Santa Fe. Skinner pocketed the cash and began lobbying for Carneiro. While Skinner secretly negotiated with Schwartz, Pickard called on a trusty sidekick to begin breaking down the Santa Fe lab.
