Operation white rabbit, p.20
Operation White Rabbit, page 20
Clyde Apperson was a machinist from San Jose whom Leonard had known since the seventies. They’d worked together on the Mountain View warehouse lab where Leonard was busted in 1988. Sticking to his Ivy Mike oath, Leonard spilled nothing to investigators about his partner. When Linda Apperson read about Clyde’s close call in the newspaper, she supposedly forbade him to ever speak with Leonard again.
Apperson promised he’d get a legit job. He worked for Apple for a time and eventually opened his own machine shop, but once a psychonaut, always a psychonaut. Clyde felt the same visceral challenge to master MDMA and mescaline in the lab as did Leonard. They remained in contact over the years.
With his typical overabundance of caution, Leonard referred to Apperson as “C”. He called upon “C’s” expertise only when he needed to move his lab. Skinner maintained that Clyde’s typical fee was $100,000 for set-up and $50,000 to break one down. Leonard flew him in from San Francisco and Apperson had the swimming pool project ready for transport in two days.
Though Savinelli had been the resident overseer in New Mexico, Apperson was not able to count on his help. He and Pickard were on the outs. Once in his debt, Alfred was now Leonard’s creditor. Native Scents had been picking up the ever-growing tab on Leonard’s chemicals. Pickard had gotten to the point where he wouldn’t even answer Alfred’s emails. He currently owed Savinelli $10,000.
As Leonard’s new bagman, Skinner arranged to pay Savinelli with $10,000 worth of DMT. The drug was a dingy brown and of dubious quality.
Skinner processed it himself in a kitchen coffee grinder at the home of one of Pickard’s strippers. He packed most of it in a brown bottle so that Alfred wouldn’t notice and told her she could keep the rest.
But Savinelli did notice. He had absolutely no confidence in Skinner. When Alfred’s son Robert developed a summertime crush on fellow high school senior Emily Ragan, Skinner made a show of swooping in and stealing the girl away. Never mind their twenty-year age difference. Skinner reveled in breaking Robert’s heart. His piss-poor excuse for DMT was just the latest insult he added to Savinelli’s injury.
Savinelli distanced himself from Skinner and the swimming pool project. Once he learned John Connor and Leonard Pickard were one and the same, more alarms went off. As Halpern’s friend, he warned him that he was consorting with conmen and clowns. He described Skinner as “the devil incarnate.”
He later groused, “John (Halpern) is a dupe and a fool, but he didn’t cause this all to happen.”
Alfred’s personal paranoia surged during the summer of ’99. He kept most of his psychedelics and cash hidden in a safe beneath the tile walkway to his garage, but he buried the hottest drugs out in the yard. His alpha ethyl tryptamine was tucked into a creek bank near his property line and a baggie of Czechoslovakian ET that he said Leonard had given him a year earlier was hidden in a culvert behind his house. After the Bronfman bust, he relocated a fifty-five-gallon drum of ayahuasca root that he’d kept in inventory at Native Scents.
He wanted nothing further to do with the swimming pool project.
Skinner said that he paid his very first visit to Leonard’s lab after Apperson had broken down the equipment. While Pickard prepared to leave for Europe on another FEDS mission, Skinner rented a room at the Santa Fe Hilton. He commuted daily to 110 Vuelta Herradura. In Savinelli’s absence, Skinner got the cleanup detail. Nausea, he said, greeted him at the front door.
David Haley warned that there’d been a lot of damage, but when Skinner did a walk-through, he felt like he was gagging his way through a war zone. Acid stains streaked the bathroom. He brought in one of his day laborers to scrub it clean.
Lupe Tenorio-Matias reported back that the tile was ruined. It would have to be replaced. Skinner gave him three Valium and promised $1,000 cash if he could fix the bathroom and bring the entire house back to some semblance of normal.
Skinner was working against the clock. Under the terms of Haley’s lease, they had to return the house to its owners by Sept. 10. Skinner summoned Gardner Springs employee Mike Hobbs from Tulsa to lend a hand. To hear Skinner tell it, the two men had to don latex gloves, swallow a handful of Valium, and pant past the worst of the fumes. While Tenorio-Matias cleaned, they loaded an eight-by-four trailer with Apperson’s boxed-up lab gear.
Before he left for London, Pickard made it clear that he was not convinced Kansas was the answer. According to Skinner, he preferred relocating to another residential neighborhood in Santa Fe, where the DEA was not likely to snoop. Skinner told him he’d found another home comparable to Vuelta Herradura nearby for $800. He did not say it was temporary.
Once Pickard was gone, Skinner and Hobbs moved the trailer again, this time to a Storage USA unit located in an industrial zone on the edge of town, not unlike the one in Mountain View where Leonard got busted in 1988.
There the equipment would remain for the next three months.
When Pickard returned from London on Oct. 21, Skinner was ebullient. With the Santa Fe emergency behind them, he planned a celebratory wing ding like no other.
He started by renting a secluded party house located on a ridge overlooking Bolinas Bay. The one-time hideaway of late Grateful Dead founder Jerry Garcia, San Souci offered spectacular views of the Pacific peeking through stands of redwood, cypress, and eucalyptus. In addition to black-bottom pool, sliding glass walls, and psychedelic lighting, the split level four-bedroom spread stood on an acre of sparsely populated Stinson Beach—the perfect venue for an army of psychonauts to trip the light fantastic long into the night.
Using Mike Hobbs as his alias, Skinner put down a deposit for a month’s stay. He invited several dozen of his closest pals to a Nov. 9 bash honoring rock star Sting, who was then in the Bay Area on a concert tour.
Sting’s debut inside Leonard’s inner circle occurred a couple years earlier, when the British supernova landed in Southern California and purchased the Malibu beach house of “Dallas” TV star Larry Hagman. Sting adapted instantly to the New Age lifestyle, which included a growing fascination with psychonauts and such Esalen-approved disciplines as yoga.
He gravitated to Ganga White, widely regarded as the premier yoga master on the West Coast. White maintained his studio in the Santa Barbara foothills under the aegis of the White Lotus Foundation.2 Sting became a regular and eventually, a member of its advisory board.
Leonard approved. “I always thought Ganga was a fine teacher,” he said.
So did Skinner, who maintained that Ganga was a reliable customer for controlled substances.3 As a matter of fact, a grand jury scheduled White to spill what he knew on the subject the first week of January, and both Skinner and Pickard thought it might be a good idea to listen in. Like several other guests at the San Souci party, Ganga was unaware of the swimming pool project. They tried to wire him with a transmitter microphone disguised as a pen, but it was another James Bond scheme gone awry. They heard only garble.
Money, it seemed, had become the root of all evil. Before the party, Petaluma Al dropped by to see Pickard about bringing his account up to date. According to Skinner, Leonard separated Al’s $750,000 delivery into stacks of $100s and hid them at San Souci—money earmarked for the ET that Pickard had ordered during his recent London trip. Unfortunately, Skinner found the cache first.
After months of coddling Pickard, Skinner said he was getting sick of his cloak-and-dagger nonsense. Around the time of the San Souci gathering, Skinner recalled picking up the phone and hearing Pickard on the other end disguising his voice: “This is Carlos. I need a precursor out of Aldrich. A couple of kilograms of it or more.”
Translation: Leonard wanted Todd to order more supplies from Sigma-Aldrich Chemical Co. Why couldn’t he just say that? Everything with Pickard smacked of second-rate James Bond, said Skinner.
“A convenient, unverifiable tale,” countered Pickard. “Skinner could go on for hours like this, once he knew what you wanted to hear.”
During Leonard’s absence from San Souci, Skinner continued, he went on a scavenger hunt. He found a bunch of bills buried inside a tool box in the garage. They included Dutch Guilders and a pile of Canadian cash, as well as lots and lots of good old American greenbacks. Substituting $20s for $100s, Skinner topped each bundle with a Benjamin. He guessed that Pickard would not bother to count it all. Later, Skinner estimated he made off with between $200,000 and $300,000. He justified the theft as half the rent on San Souci, plus ongoing reimbursement for Pickard’s lavish travel expenses.
It was harder to justify renting a Porsche for $20,000. What of it? Skinner deserved a nice ride.
And Sting deserved the best sound system. To that end, Skinner hired the Sacramento audio engineer who installed his high-end stereo in the missile silo. Chris Malone was only too happy to oblige. Todd had recently ordered a pair of $80,000 speakers from him and usually paid in cash. San Souci was no exception.
“He carried around one of those silver bulletproof briefcases full of cash,” recalled Malone. “When me and the guy I brought with me to put in the system finished, he tipped me $2,000 then turned to my helper and handed him $1,000.”
Basking in Sting’s reflected celebrity, Todd recalled Leonard behaving particularly squirrelly during the party. Superstars, particularly scientific luminaries, seemed to reduce Leonard to a fawning groupie who already stood out from the crowd in his full-length black leather overcoat and cowboy boots.
Pickard steered the very comely Natasha Kruglova from klatch to klatch, introducing her as his latest protégé—a Russian doll with a medical mind. She was applying to Berkeley, and Leonard curried favor on her behalf among the assembled psychonaut royalty. He aimed to see her past all admission obstacles.
For her part, Natasha clung to him like Scarlett to Rhett. Meanwhile, Todd skulked nearby, young Emily Ragan hanging on his every word.
Beside Sting and his entourage, Skinner said that the guest list included Kary Mullis, who’d earned a Nobel since the days when he and Pickard had experimented with bathtub acid at Berkeley.
“Kary attributes his insight into PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) to his acid experiences,” said Pickard. “The DNA image won him the 1993 Nobel Prize4 in chemistry.”
He added, however, that Mullis was not on the guest list. In fact, he did not attend the party at all except in Skinner’s imagination.
In Todd’s version, Pickard nudged Mullis and asked him if he recalled that first time they’d synthesized a gram together.
“And Kary split,” muttered Skinner, “because Nobel laureates don’t want that kind of baggage on them.”
While the swimming pool brass partied in Bolinas, their minions were on the move in New Mexico.
Clyde Apperson flew in to Albuquerque on Nov. 5. Two days later, Mike Hobbs rented a truck in San Rafael under the name “Bill Martin.” He then began the cross-country drive to rendezvous with Skinner and Apperson in Santa Fe, making a stopover to visit Ganga White in Santa Barbara on the way.
Skinner had secured Tim Schwartz’s silo the way he sealed most deals: by supplying Schwartz with drugs and lying. He promised to remodel the former missile base and turn it into another Wamego fantasyland in exchange for free rent. Schwartz responded with a signed handwritten permission slip: “Todd Skinner has permission to do anything with my missile silo—he is the boss.”
Pickard headed for Carneiro too, according to Skinner, but followed a different itinerary. A week after the party, he flew commercial to Colorado, where he boarded a charter to Santa Fe. There he picked up Trais Kliphuis and flew on to Manhattan, where they spent the Thanksgiving weekend at a Fairfield Inn.
He also called Natasha twice on the sly, said Todd. Ignorant of his tryst with Trais, Natasha arranged to meet Leonard at Lake Tahoe from Dec. 28 through Jan. 2. They would follow their New Year’s holiday at Hyatt Incline Village with two more days at the San Francisco Hilton, then another week and a half at the Las Campanas luxury resort outside of Santa Fe.
Leonard paid for it all under the name Todd Ragan. When he wasn’t using cash, he routinely stuck Skinner with the bills. Even so, Pickard chalked up $41,602.96 on his personal credit card accounts during 1999. He spent an additional $20,119.34 on money orders for Clyde Apperson. And still, Leonard never paid income taxes.
In between women, he did manage briefly to get down to business during the first week of December. Apperson and Hobbs drove the lab equipment from Santa Fe to Kansas. According to Skinner, Pickard joined him at the Atlas F silo in Carneiro, new home of the swimming pool project.
While Pickard and Apperson set up inside the Control Center, Skinner kept watch over the south Kansas flatlands for any suspicious vehicles. He loved Leonard’s magic, but lysergic chemistry was beyond his skill set, he said. Once he rekeyed the doors, his job was done.
Todd’s specialty wasn’t chemistry; it was disinfecting dollars. The compulsion he apparently shared with Leonard Pickard was multiple partners, if not indiscriminate sex.
Shortly before Christmas, Skinner met an eighteen-year-old pigtailed pole dancer from Burlington, Kansas (pop. 2,674). Krystle Cole performed nightly at the Club Orleans. Blonde, blue-eyed, tall (5’9”), thin (120 lbs.) with a butterfly tattooed on her left ankle, Krystle had her act down pat: small-town gal with swivel hips and alfalfa in her teeth. Skinner was instantly smitten.
At first, Krystle regarded her nerdy new admirer as less than unlikely.
“Do Amish men really go to strip clubs?” she wanted to know.
Once under his spell, Krystle’s homespun cynicism melted. Skinner later insisted that he wasn’t slumming; he was an investment banker interviewing her to become Emily Ragan’s assistant.
“Krystle was a great valet,” he told journalist Michael Mason. “She was very well organized.”
Skinner quickly proved to be Krystle’s new candy man; she, his willing guinea pig. She swallowed, smoked, and injected anything he prescribed, including hallucinatory suppositories. Krystle loved getting high. She was Vanna White to his Satanic Sajak. During the psychedelic Masses that Skinner regularly celebrated at the silo, Krystle tended his altar. She became as devoted to Todd as Natasha was to Leonard.
As both the year and the century wound to a close, neither Skinner nor Pickard seemed to notice that their lives might be spinning out of control. Having one babe for public consumption and another on the side seemed as routine as laundering Benjamins by the butt load. Like the proverbial frog in the proverbial pan of slowly boiling water, each soldiered on. Y2K was bound to be the best year yet.
1. In addition to developing New Age glassworks as CEO of the Earthstone and Growstone corporations, Ungerleider also produced the documentary Dying to Know: Timothy Leary and Ram Dass (2014).
2. Founded in 1968, the California non-profit propagated Ganga’s philosophy: “I got into yoga for spiritual, mystical reasons. I had no idea there was a physical practice. Some of my first teachers were hatha yogis. They told me if I wanted to see the world from a different point of view I should try standing on my head.”
3 “I never purchased, nor was gifted, nor received any controlled substance in any way from Skinner,” said White.
4. Fame did not dull his eccentricity. Moments before delivering his 1993 Nobel lecture, Mullis said he’d rather talk to the Swedes about AIDS than DNA. He refused to believe that HIV was the cause. In 1992, Mullis founded the Star Gene company to make and market jewelry that contained the amplified DNA of dead celebrities like Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley.
XV.
AS THE NEW CENTURY BEGAN, Skinner spent more and more time at Harrah’s Prairie Band Casino on the nearby Pottawatomie Indian reservation. He advertised himself as a billionaire, arrived in his Porsche, and always seemed to win.
On Jan. 8, 2000, Todd turned in an unusually large pile of chips. Challenged by an impudent cashier, he identified himself as a Treasury Department official. He flashed an Interpol badge, collected his payout, then went about his business.
But suspicions had been aroused. The following day, Pottawatomie Sheriff ’s deputies showed up at his missile silo and arrested Skinner for impersonating a federal officer. They kept him at the Sheriff ’s office until a Secret Service agent drove in from Kansas City. The agent accused Skinner of trying to plant a bomb.
“Do you track the President?” he demanded. “Do you follow the President? Do you go to areas where the President goes to? Are you interested in killing the President?”
Skinner sweated out the ordeal until four a.m. Once again, he got lucky. Just before dawn, the agent gave up and went home. Skinner faced federal charges, but as with Paul Hulebak’s death, he was released pending further investigation.
Todd decided that gambling in Kansas might be imprudent. In the first of many trips, he flew to Nevada on Feb. 25. Skinner returned again and again to the Strip over the next several months, extending his winning streak to the Paris, Mirage, Treasure Island, and Bellagio. Wherever he went, a Currency Transaction Report1 (CTR) seemed to follow. All told, he estimated he took home $750,000 in winnings—roughly the same in Dutch Guilders that had been wired from the Netherlands.
Once, he tried to swap a 1,000 Guilder note at Kaw Valley Bank in Wamego for a quick infusion of greenbacks, but the teller said she couldn’t exchange Dutch currency. The manager explained that the nearest bank authorized to do so was 100 miles away in Kansas City. Skinner sniffed at such rubes. He took his Guilders to Vegas.
While Skinner laundered, Leonard wandered.
To help his new partner make above-limit currency trades during his frequent travels, Skinner introduced Pickard to a boyhood chum. Bill Wynn had matured into a skilled provider of all sorts of identification. He even had his own equipment. For laughs, Wynn made Leonard a driver’s license under the name of Oklahoma state representative Bruce Niemi. The real Niemi never knew that Pickard also carried a library card and ID from the Tulsa election board, all in Niemi’s name.
