Psychedelic Tricksters 3: Timothy Leary and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love
Utopias and Fiscal Paradises
The third part of the serialisation of Chapter Six of Psychedelic Tricksters: A True Secret History of LSD (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.
(Next Up (continuing the chapter): How Orange Sunshine conquered America.)