The Brotherhood of Eternal Love
Stewart Tendler and David Mayhttp://www.druglibrary.net/schaffer/lsd/books/bel3.htmCHAPTER TEN In the months since taking over the Idylwild ranch the Brothers had developed a tradition, by the summer of 1968, of using LSD communally once a week, often under the leadership of Leary. A group of Brothers, Leary and Rosemary would climb up to the ridge above—the ranch buildings each week and into the cave set aside for the ceremony. The cave was quite large, fitted out with fur rugs on the floor and large cushions covered with Indian silk. Near the entrance a crude fireplace had been built, and light came from two hanging lamps.
At their best, the communal sessions were a tremendous experience. Sometimes, when the moon was full, the rugs would be hauled out of the cave and set round a square hearth nearby. The hearth, based on the ceremonial hearths used by Indians for peyote ceremonies, was surrounded by a large circle of fine sand and became the core of the session. As the others sat hushed, Leary would say a prayer enjoining the congregation to open their minds to the wonders to come. A small wicker basket circulated, filled with LSD, and each person took whatever size dose he wanted—the average was usually as much as 1,500 micrograms.
With the moon gleaming above, shining on the desert and Palm Springs in the distance, the session gathered pace. First an Indian peyote rattle would be passed round; as each person took hold of it they began to yell, shout, laugh, scream—their voices ringing out on the still air.
As the voices died on the night, the mood quietened to rhythmic chanting for a hour or so. Then a flute would accompany the voices, dancing alongside them. This was the cue for other instruments to pick up the beat until everyone was playing something—drums, guitars.
One July night in 1968, the rhythm and harmony never emerged. The LSD went round as usual. Griggs, Lynd, Randall, several other Brothers and the Learys each took their doses. Yet the effect was muted, and the session limped through the night with more troughs than peaks. It was a scattered, uninspiring experience which ended as the sun rose.
In the morning the Brothers held a post mortem with Leary. The weakness of the LSD made a mockery of the whole sacramental ceremony, and yet their LSD had come from San Francisco as usual. Leary told them it was important to get a good strong source. There might well be LSD on the streets in San Francisco, but no one knew how good it was. The Brothers asked if it was still possible to get the Sandoz LSD. No, said Leary. He really did not know where they could get any reasonable LSD. It was Griggs who suggested that the source could be Hitchcock and his friends. He and Randall went north.
A few weeks after they had arrived at Hitchcock's Sausalito home, Nick Sand drove along Highway 74, past the village of Mountain Centre, to the dirt road which led up to the padlocked gates of the ranch. When the Brothers moved in they changed the combination of the locks to I94-3, the year of Hofmann's discovery, but Sand—as a result of the visit to Sausalito—was expected. He was visiting ostensibly to look over the Brothers' arrangements, because he was planning improvements to the ranch at Cloverdale.
He liked what he saw. There was a main ranch house, a wooden building with four bedrooms, two large barns with living quarters attached, another little house and, further away, a one-bedroomed house where Leary stayed. The Brothers were in the process of buying themselves a dozen horses. Plans Were afoot for a sauna where people could retire with a large marijuana cigarette and just ooze and smoke. Land was being dug up for vegetables so that the ranch could be as near self-sufficient as possible.
But what struck Sand was the amount of space, the spare buildings and the isolation of the place on a plateau, with a good view for miles around. In the corral near the main house Sand put his proposition. The Brothers wanted LSD and he and his colleagues needed a production site. How about using the ranch as the base for a new laboratory?
Just as he had tempted the Angels with supplies of DMT, so Sand sweetened his proposal with a bag of blue capsules. The Brothers were invited to take handfuls of the capsules which Sand described as his latest product, 'Blue Levis'. Very good LSD, he assured them and he could make more if he had a good laboratory site.
The Brothers went into a huddle. The LSD was impressive—it was almost certainly the work of Scully, who had brought 100,000 doses from Denver before he lost his equipment. However, the idea of a laboratory on the ranch was not very appealing. The Brothers were content to deal, but nothing more. They wanted to get good LSD on to the streets; and if Sand could help them do that, they were prepared to distribute his product.
Sand left without getting his site; but he, Hitchcock and Scully had partially solved their problem. Once they could get a production run moving, they had a good, safe distribution route—and Scully for one could put aside his fears of corruption. The Brotherhood were building up a reputation across Southern California for square, fair dealing. No guns here. Griggs would not allow it. When two dealers skipped with $5,000 in Laguna, Griggs forbade the other Brothers to try and catch them.
If anyone still had any ethical doubts, Leary could vouch for the Brothers. Indeed, he even put his praise into print. The East Village Other in New York published 'Deal for Real, The Dealer as Robin Hood', in which Leary suggested it would be a moral exercise for all users of the psychedelics to do a little dealing 'to pay tribute to this most honourable profession... brotherhoods or groups of men'.
The sort of people he had in mind were the Brothers—described in the piece as 'a group of clear-eyed smiling beautiful dealers. They were young men in their twenties as all dealers have to be young. At that time their life situation was close to perfect. They were living together with their families in nature.'
Leary was so struck by them that in the summer of 1968 he moved on to the ranch, taking over the little one-bedroomed house and a plot of land by its side. The Brothers were his new patrons. Millbrook was dead, after a long, wasting illness. In May 1968, Billy Hitchcock and his family issued eviction orders for the various tenants through one of Hitchcock's companies.
When Millbrook was discussed shortly after the Learys arrived to take up residence at the ranch, Leary told Lynd that the faults of the estate were rooted in a debauched and uncontrolled lifestyle which constantly threw up problems. That may have been one of the reasons. The others were the constant attentions of the local police, the friction between different groups on the estate and the 'undesirables' who seemed to follow Leary home from his excursions to New York. By 1968 there were in fact three religious groups living in partial rivalry at Millbrook Leary's League, Art Kleps' Boo-Hoo church and an ashram. The League had the big house; the church had the gatehouse; and the ashram was set up in the carnage house. If that was not enough to create chaos, there were also the psychedelic pilgrims whose influx constantly annoyed neighbours. Posters were put up telling outsiders that no visitors were allowed in without permission, but that did nothing to mollify the police who began a campaign of steady harassment, ranging from arrests for crimes such as having a dirty car windscreen to raids on the estate for 'criminal facilitation'. Hitchcock sweetened the eviction notices by handing each of the three religious leaders a cheque. Leary quit Millbrook for the Brothers' ranch with a pay-off of $14,000.
No, Leary assured Lynd, the ranch would never have the same problems as Millbrook. The people on the ranch were all more or less of the same age, most were married couples, and the arrangement was far more stable than Millbrook had been. Besides, life on the ranch was fairly well organized.
The Brothers rose at six each morning for an hour of meditation to the sound of rock music or tapes of a Buddhist chant. Then the work of the day would start, with the wives taking care of the cooking (which was vegetarian) and the cleaning, while the men set about the chores of the ranch itself which included mending a large number of fences—since the horses they had bought turned out to be largely unbroken. The afternoon might be spent with a ball game or discussions with Leary who had officially amalgamated the League with the Brotherhood, symbolizing the bond with little medallions worn by the Brothers and bearing the Chinese Yin and Yang motif. Leary taught the Brothers the games theories he had once practised at Harvard, explaining his belief that human behaviour was. affected by rules, ritual and roles. Hours were spent mulling over ideas that had once made Leary such an acclaimed innovator. The commune's discussions ranged from Zen Buddhism to the current status of the psychedelic movement.
Someone in the Pentagon rashly tried to call up one of the younger Brothers for the war in Vietnam. The night before he was due to go to the induction centre, he was fed every kind of drug on the ranch. The next morning, still blasted out of his mind, the Brothers dressed him in the weirdest clothes they could find, bundled him into an old car and trundled off to the centre. After dropping him at the door, the car cruised back and forth outside. A few minutes later, he was hurled out in the road. The US Army had standards to maintain.
Leary was asked to endorse the plans for demonstrations and opposition to the war at the Democratic Party convention in Chicago. Groups like the Yippies (the Youth International Party) and the revolutionary Black Panthers wanted the psychedelic movement to be there. Leary conferred with the Brothers. Signs of trouble in Chicago were in the air. The Brothers wanted no part of violence, which seemed at odds with their concepts. The idea of people taking LSD and then taking part in what could—and did—become street battles was too much to accept.
When Chicago erupted in August 1968, the ripples never reached out to Idylwild where life seemed almost blessed. Leary was inspired to write a film script of the scene—a model of the society of the future, a dream world. Hollingshead, who joined Leary at the ranch, tells the story of the aftermath of a party the Brothers had been to in Los Angeles. At five or six in the morning, the Brothers were on their way back from a party in Hollywood. Dressed in beads and light robes, they were feeling thirsty when someone spotted an orange grove. The car pulled up and everyone began running around, climbing trees, laughing and throwing oranges to each other. No one worried about six or seven kilos of marijuana tucked away in the abandoned car. The morning air was loud with shouts of glee when a police prowl car pulled up.
On the face of it, a dangerous situation. The Brothers were clearly stealing oranges and it would take little more than a cursory search of the car to nail them with something more serious. Griggs came over to the man and explained things.
Nothing serious officer. Just a few guys who got thirsty on the road.
The police listened, nodded and told Griggs not to let it happen again.
Hollingshead said: 'They had fantastic luck. Griggs would take incredible risks like that. I compare them to Mr. Magoo, where Mr. Magoo is crossing the bridge which is falling down and he does not know this because he can't see it.' To the Brothers, the incident was no different from the time a patrol car went off the road outside San Diego chasing a marijuana load. As one put it: 'Those motherfuckers get zapped each time.' Like Owsley, they believed there was some sort of divine protection for their sacred role of moving drugs. The barns on the ranch were regularly packed with bales of marijuana neatly tied by a baling machine the Brothers found and renovated. Shortly after Leary moved in, the Brothers were off on what he called one of their 'spiritual journeys'.
In the summer of 1968 Lynd found himself heading eastwards towards Afghanistan. With a bank roll of $6,000 he bought a Volkswagen camper in West Germany, fitting it out for the long overland trek, on the advice of a Californian who made the trip to Europe to help him. The vehicle was loaded with extra stores, water cans, petrol tanks. The Volkswagen also had another modification: under the beds a hole had been cut to make a hidden compartment.
No one paid a great deal of attention to Lynd. The Baltic and Middle Eastern countries were beginning to grow accustomed to strange-looking Europeans and Americans heading east, many of them in battered campers like Lynd's. The roads to the east were not the smooth highways of the United States but sometimes rough roads climbing and twisting, ducking down and stretching across dusty scrub. Petrol stations were few, rest-rooms rare. The other traffic was comprised of huge juggernauts road-running between east and west, with consumer items going one way and farm produce the other. There were times when you needed a good air-conditioning system, which few European cars had, and times when the windscreen became clogged with dead insects. Stones bounced off the camper. Sheep ambled across the road. Californians are sometimes accused by other Americans of a certain insularity, an indifference to the rest of the world, sitting smugly in their Pacific paradise, yet here was Lynd quite prepared to go halfway round the world and into the unknown in search of hashish, hash.
Hash is the resin of the cannabis plant, dried and hardened into a dark lump, often considerably more potent than marijuana. As a product of the Middle East and Central Asia, it was rarely seen on the West Coast until the hippies began moving eastwards. By the mid1960s they were going east in search of the mystic experiences and sources so often woven into the theology of the psychedelic movement from the texts and teachings of Asia.
A Brotherhood expedition to buy stock in Iran, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan for the Mystic Arts World Store in the spring of 1968, found itself in the bazaars of Kandahar, Afghanistan. Hash was a mere $20 a kilo, compared with $2,000 a kilo in California, and the expedition brought back 50 kilos.
The hash was greeted with enthusiasm in Woodland Drive in Laguna, where a consortium system for drugs had developed between the Brothers. Some would provide finance and others organize purchases; then the stocks would be split up for distribution. Six of the central Brothers decided that Afghanistan was worth more than a chance encounter. Led by Griggs and Randall, the group decided they would provide the money while Lynd and several others would make the trip. It was to be the prototype of many others.
Lynd drove through the plains and hills of Turkey into the desert of Iran, towards Afghanistan and the beginning of the Himalayas: into a world of mud homes and thin leathery men who still kept sharp knives in their belts or cradled ageing fowling-pieces in their arms.
Lynd's goal in Kandahar, at the base of the Hindu Kush, was to find two brothers, the Tokhis. The first Brotherhood travellers had stumbled on them by chance when the manager of their hotel suggested they might be interested in doing business with them. One man was called Ayatollah and the other Nasrullah. Both were in their late twenties, but Ayatollah (which means 'Light of God') was the prime mover. He started his working life selling kebabs on the streets, saved up to buy a taxi and made enough to open a hotel. Nasrullah was homosexual, taken in by an Afghan dignitary in his teens and later becoming the proprietor of a rug shop.
The hotel and the rug shop were part of a much wider business empire. The Tokhis were also important figures in the sale of 'honey oil', hash.
One of the men who had been on the first trip was supposed to join Lynd in Kandahar to make the introduction, but Lynd decided not to wait. He walked through the dust and dirt of an Asian city to find the Tokhis.
He found Nasrullah's shop opposite the Tourist Hotel which -Ayatollah now owned in Shari Nar. Lynd paused. The shop was supposed to sell rugs, but this one sold clothes. Perhaps the Tokhis had changed their business.
Slowly and carefully he explained in English to the tall Afghani that he was in Afghanistan to buy hash, dope, uh... drugs. Hashish. He was from Laguna Beach, Laguna Beach in the United States.
Nasrullah was interested but cautious.
Perhaps the gentleman had friends he had met? He mentioned the name of one of the Brothers on the first trip.
Yes indeed. Lynd certainly did know him. Of course he knew him. He was about so tall, and he wore...
Nasrullah pulled out a pocket book and showed it to Lynd. The names of the Brothers on the first trip were written down. Nasrullah knew all about the Brotherhood. The others had explained it to him and said there would be more buyers. In the shade of the shop, the Afghani and the American began to talk business.
The next day, Lynd was introduced to Ayatollah, a thin-faced man with sunken cheeks, short hair and a thin moustache. A deal was struck for 250 lb of hash, which Lynd had no doubt would sell rapidly back home.
The American and the Afghanis seemed to be getting on famously. Lynd told them they were all brothers together, the Afghanis enthusiastically agreed. Lynd was a favoured customer, sweetening future deals by paying $20 per lb., $5 more than the Tokhis were asking.
Ayatollah took him to see the hash being made at his home and the friendship was sealed over a pipe or two of hash.
Lynd did not have enough cash to pay for the load—the Brother who was joining him would have the money—but the Tokhis were still happy to load up the Volkswagen in a quiet valley outside Kandahar. It was there that Lynd began to learn of the veniality of the Afghans.
The bed had been cut out and the hash was being put into the hidden storage space when an Afghani in uniform pulled up on a motorcycle. Nasrullah said the man was a police official and Lynd began to panic, but his host told him to keep calm. The official was told that the Volkswagen was under emergency repair, and seemed satisfied. Why don't you come up to my house afterwards, he suggested.
On the patio of the man's villa, Lynd found that the attitudes of the Afghani police were considerably more relaxed than those of their American counterparts. The official offered the party food and the pleasures of his hookah.
When the Volkswagen was loaded and the other Brother had arrived, the shipment was ready for its journey home. The plan was to drive the camper to Karachi and then ship it back to the United States, but the cash did not cover the sea journey. Racked with dysentery, Lynd decided to fly home, raise some more cash and telex it to Karachi. He arrived at Kabul airport wearing a coat Nasrullah had specially made for him. It contained a secret compartment hiding 6 lb of hash which would be sold to raise more cash for the main load.
Lynd, ticket in hand, was on his way to the aircraft when a customs official stopped him.
Lynd was led to an interview room where the drugs were quickly found. He was growing wise in the ways of Afghanistan. Nasrullah had undoubtedly tipped off the man, who was now expecting to be paid off to free him. Lynd gave him $175 and went off to his flight. He was just getting himself comfortable in the aircraft when the official popped in and returned his hash. Lynd stuck it in his belt, flying home to Los Angeles with the hash undetected.
Griggs drove Lynd south to Laguna and sold the hash in a matter of hours. The profit was sent off to Karachi and the Brothers waited for the camper to arrive.
They chose Wilmington, Los Angeles, as the port of entry, and took no chances. The Volkswagen, brought in under a fictitious name, sat for two days on the dock while Lynd kept watch in case customs agents were taking an undue interest. When the coast was clear, another Brother went on to the dock and took possession of the camper. He filled in the paperwork for the first stage of customs clearance, the tank was filled and the battery reconnected.
The Brother drove over to Lynd. The camper still had to be inspected. The customs inspection post was round a corner and out of sight. The Brothers looked at each other. What was to stop them driving out? Lynd hopped in and the camper headed for the last part of its journey.
When the load was eagerly weighed out so that each investor could take his share, Lynd discovered that the Tokhis had sold him 125 lb. instead of 250 lb.: Lynd had never weighed the hash. He had even paid over the odds.
The mood soured quickly. Lynd took 10 lb. of hash and decided to leave the others to squabble. No one knew what to do with the camper, so they tossed coins and Lynd took it with him. The others might feel shortchanged, but the load was still worth a great deal.
At the end of the day the shipment generated $400,000. The hash could well subsidize the LSD supplies. While the Brothers had been busy in Afghanistan, their new allies in San Francisco had not been idle either.
The guide who met Druce and his companion at San Francisco airport seemed businesslike, if a little casual in his dress. Sand, in jeans and sandals, typified the Englishman's idea of an American student. As they were driving away from the airport, Sand pulled in to give a hippie a lift, and the two began chatting happily about where to get the best grass (marijuana). Druce's travelling companion was totally mystified. Ron Craze had never taken a drug in his life and he had absolutely no idea what the Americans were discussing. He and Druce had come all this way to ask Hitchcock for funding to start their company, not to sit in a car with two men talking about God knows what.
Druce shared offices in London with another company whose owner held a half-interest in his business. Craze had come over from Exico, where Druce had once bought his LSD, to work for the man on legitimate chemicals business. Like Druce, who started in business at a humble level, Ron Craze was on the look-out for new business opportunities, and seized on the idea for a specialist firm which would sell feed to developing countries by a totally new method. The problem was finance. Druce came into the discussions, holding out the possibility that American contacts might just have the money needed. He could buy up the other interest in his firm, turn it over to what would become Alban Feeds and set up a new company which would deal in specialist chemicals. The two companies would be interrelated through holdings.
The contacts Druce had in mind were Scully and, through him, Hitchcock. Approached with the idea of Alban Feeds, the millionaire felt that a small investment could be an inducement to Druce to maintain the supply of base materials for LSD. Druce and Craze, who claims he was in the dark about the other side of Druce's contacts, were summoned to San Francisco, fares paid by Hitchcock, to discuss the. matter.
In the pleasant summer heat of San Francisco, the two Englishmen were whisked out of the city to Sausalito and Hitchcock's home. But after the prompting to fly over, there seemed no urgency to do business. Everything was low key, although people took great care when coming and going, as though they expected to be followed. Hitchcock himself was constantly on the telephone to New York, playing the market, checking on share movements. Druce was impressed by him, but otherwise bored. The two Englishmen were left to watch TV most of the day.
One evening, they were taken into San Francisco for a meal which ended with a visit to someone's friends who seemed to live in a bare house with boarded doors. After climbing through the window, Craze was introduced to a group of rock musicians. Back at the Hitchcock home, there was still no news of the $5,000 needed for Alban Feeds. However, Craze had finally realized that things were not quite what they seemed. Sand expatiated on the virtues of creating a better world with LSD. Craze listened politely as the chemist told him that any ordinary illness could be tackled and cured through the mind; Sand wanted to set up a clinic in Switzerland. Scully told the Englishman that if. LSD were put into water supplies, there would be no more war.
On the last night they got down to business. 'There were not more than five of us altogether,' said Druce. 'There was the usual thing about quality but that was their problem in production.' Druce realized Sand was the chemist. 'I got the impression they were fragmented. Guys with the money on one side and guys with the laboratory on the other.' As far as money was concerned, Druce 'had a rough idea they could earn five to six million dollars. I was not worried, providing it was done in the United States. It was a strictly business proposition.' The money would be forthcoming for Alban Feeds, while Druce would set about supplying raw materials.
He took home with him, according to Craze, a shopping list of chemicals written on the back of one of his catalogues. Druce was also commissioned to check comparative prices, and back in London began sending out requests to companies for their catalogues to pass on to the United States.
Soon after the San Francisco trip, Hitchcock, Sand and Scully arrived in London to finalize matters. Druce said he was told they wanted as much raw material as possible, every, three or four months. According to Scully, Druce was left with orders for 5 kilos of lysergic acid and 10-20 kilos of ergotamine tartrate. He was sent in the region of $100,000 for the orders, on top of the money for Alban Feeds and earlier payments.
The funding came direct from European bank accounts. The various trips from San Francisco had laid out a network of bank accounts for Hitchcock and the chemists. Late in July 1968, Hitchcock warned Sand that Fiduciary in the Bahamas was no longer a safe haven; there were rumours that the American authorities were taking an unhealthy interest in the company. Hitchcock recommended the Paravicini Bank in Switzerland.
Some years before, Hitchcock in his profession of broker had struck up a successful deal with the bank, and they would be happy to repay any debts. Both Sand's Alan Bell account and the remains of Owsley's Robin Goodfellow account were transferred to the Berne offices of Paravicini. Sand, no slouch himself in the world of Swiss banking with its secrecy and tight security controls, moved $114,000 from an account at another Swiss bank. Hitchcock was given power of attorney for Sand's account because it would be used for stock investment on which the millionaire would advise. Hitchcock's own account at Paravicini would provide finance for Druce.
The Swiss accounts had the obvious virtue of making it difficult for the American authorities to follow the business activities of Hitchcock and friends. While he was in Switzerland, he and Sand also arranged other ways of keeping Federal agents at arm's length. With the help of a Zurich bank official, the two men created a Liechtenstein corporation called Four Star Anstalt. Hitchcock later explained that the company was created because 'we were dealing with substances which were at best controversial. We were dealing with funds from unexplained sources and there was certainly no advantages on the other side of the ledger to any overt operations.'
The idea of Four Star Anstalt, funded through an account at the Vontobel Bank which Sand had used in the past, was to cope with the purchase of a site for the next laboratory to supply the Brotherhood. This time, if the laboratory was found, Hitchcock and friends would be well distanced from it. First of all, any investigator would have to get through the secrecy surrounding Swiss banks, then, if he succeeded, he would find himself up against the brick wall of the Liechtenstein company. Although a dot on the map of Europe, the country is the home of hundreds of thousands of companies, many of which are nothing more than paper creations run from the offices of local lawyers sworn to secrecy.
If the catastrophe of Owsley's fall and the discovery of the Denver site taught Hitchcock and the others anything, it taught them to put themselves as far away from federal agents as possible. They even thought of moving any future laboratory abroad. They first got the idea of the Bahamas while they were sorting out the original arrangements for the Fiduciary account. The island was conveniently close to the American mainland, yet at the same time outside United States' control. American investors came and went every day. Soon the scheme embraced not only a laboratory but a whole centre, like Leary's at Zihuatenejo. Scully, an enthusiast for Huxley's Island, was gripped by the idea and flew out to rendezvous with an official from Fiduciary who promised to help with any local problems.
The assistance amounted to an introduction to two men who, Scully was assured, would be of great help in his work. The problem was that the two reminded Scully very strongly of his first dramatic meeting with Joe Helpern in Chicago. However, whereas the subfusc giant turned out to be more machismo than Mafia, Scully's helpers were a little too realistic. Numbered among the American investors eager to put money into the Bahamas were members of the organized crime syndicates, and as the three explored the area around Nassau, Scully decided his travelling companions were Mafia musclemen. The two men told Scully they would take care of everything and the chemist decided he was probably included in the 'everything'. With visions of life chained to the bench of a Mafia laboratory, Scully preferred to take his chances on the American mainland.
Back home, Scully was nevertheless careful. The site he chose was a lonely house in Windsor, near Santa Rosa, using Sand's money. Scully's lawyer, a San Francisco tax expert called Peter Buchanan, would handle the details of the $41,000 purchase. To avoid the Internal Revenue Service, Buchanan agreed to hide the source of the money by changing it into bank cashiers' cheques or money orders, putting them through his firm's trust account and using that account to buy the house. It was a laborious task. Buchanan laundered $10,000 at 16 different New York banks, flying east in person. He did the same back on the West Coast, and in December a 'Mr James Orr' became the apparent owner of the house.
Hitchcock and Scully drove to a mushroom farm at Cupertino to recover stored laboratory equipment and chemicals Scully had laid in. When they arrived, the farmer's daughter warned Scully that some strange men had been hanging about in the neighbourhood—the BNDD (successors to BDAC) were on the trail again. They occasionally staked out in a chicken coop. The day Sand and Scully arrived, the coop was empty.
Scully and Sand agreed to split the raw material between them on the production run. Scully would go first, and Sand would follow. The New Yorker was none too bothered. He was planning a holiday in Mexico and some brushing-up on his techniques.
The bath-tub graduate had finally decided to go to school. He could be found part of the time in the laboratory of Professor Lester Friedman at Case Western Reserve University, Missouri. Sand had stumbled over him when he had tried to get STP made commercially. The firm he wrote to had suggested he approach Friedman, their consultant. The underground chemist and the overground chemist eventually met, and Sand began to pick his brains.
Lester Friedman was a tall, balding man in his forties. His specialist work, on chemistry connected to the sense of smell, had been translated into several languages, and he had something of an international reputation. A family man, sober and well-read, he did not fit easily into Sand's circle; but, like Sand, he had a passion for chemistry and considerable financial acumen. He will not talk now about those days, but perhaps his passion and his commercial sense got the better of him. Druce, who knew him quite well as a figure in chemical trading, says it was easy to forget he was an academic when they were doing business.
With the end of STP production, Sand began working at Case Western in the summer. He introduced Friedman to Hitchcock and, according to Hitchcock, the talk centred on compounds, simplification of processes and the improvements Friedman could make to the manufacture of LSD. Just as Druce had been given Alban Feeds, so Friedman received a research grant from Sand for his services. For the moment he stayed in the background, coaching Sand in December 1968.
With raw materials stored in one of Hitchcock's safety deposit boxes, Scully began work in January 1969, just as the New Year came in. The Brotherhood—their hash supplies secured—awaited delivery.
Ch 11Life on the ranch went on as usual, often in a haze of marijuana, since many of the Brothers would smoke up to thirty cigarettes a day. A brown dog called Nasrullah wandered around and the water towers were painted orange, after the new LSD. The original Brothers were the core of a gathering band still spreading wider and wider. The Mystic Arts World Store never seemed to make enough money to maintain itself, but there was plenty coming in from the various drug deals: 400-500-lb loads were now being hidden in Laguna.
New figures were emerging in the distribution networks. Just as Gale was making a name for himself with LSD, so 'Fat Bobby' Andrist was doing the same with hash, taking over the Afghanistan runs. A huge, Rabelaisian figure with hair down to his shoulders and a thick moustache which drooped over triple chins, Andrist was not above ostentatiously smoking large marijuana cigarettes and insulting passing police patrol cars.
With the experience he had gained from Afghanistan, Andrist also became a prime figure in the developing connection with Hawaii. The quality of the islands' marijuana, of which 'Maui wowee' was the most famous brand, made it a valuable import for the United States. Andrist set up a small canning workshop, sending tins of what were supposed to be local fruit, but were in reality marijuana, to California. A colleague opened an import/export business called 'Unbelievable Imports' and brought stereos from Japan which were shipped on to the United States, also stuffed with marijuana.
The interest in Hawaii was not however restricted to produce. Maui, one of the islands, became a new base for the Brothers. The second biggest of the 132 islands in the southernmost American state, its normal population of 50,000 live in a delightful climate. The hippies began settling themselves up on the coastal strip in the town of Lahaina—pronounced La-high-nah—which, after a chequered career as a whaling port and holiday retreat for the Hawaiian royal family, became a new Laguna, with legitimate businesses including a health and fruit-juice bar.
The Brothers also set up another commune on mainland America under the leadership of Lynd. Financed by sales of Orange Sunshine, he bought a parcel of land in Grant's Pass, a remote part of Oregon. The full purchase price was $20,000 and, to avoid arousing the suspicion of the police or tax officials, the deal was done in the name of Lynd's brother-in-law, Robert Ramsey.
For their money, Lynd and the Brothers got themselves a stretch of virgin land bordering on a forest. This commune, unlike the ranch, would be very basic and could also be a hide-out for fugitive Brothers. Just about everything had to be transported to the site, and Lynd set up tepees. He now dressed like a backwoods farmer. His long blond hair fell over the top of his denim overalls. The new image included a full beard.
Hawaii, Afghanistan, Oregon—the Brothers were steadily moving further afield. They could even be found in the sleepy English resort of Broadstairs looking out to the English Channel, enjoying the archetypal English summer holiday by the sea. At the height of the season, four of them rented a flat above a fish-and-chip restaurant on the sea front, to await vehicles arriving at the port of Tilbury before reshipping them to the United States.
Their landlady remembers 'they went on like saints. They all talked about brotherhood, love and religion all the time. They seemed to have hardly any money and ate little more than apples and cheese. They did not smoke or drink and they had no luxuries of any kind. Very humble people, they would listen to Krishna music. They said there was a man who ran the organization and he was very religious, just like a guru.' - BEL
Early in 1969, Leary announced his candidature for the governorship of California, challenging Ronald Reagan. Starting yet another merry dance with the media, Leary led them back to his mountain retreat, to the Brotherhood ranch. Considering what his highly public presence at Millbrook had done, it was not a bright move.
