9
In any business, the quality of your merchandise is irrelevant if you can’t get it to your customers. With drugs like heroin and cocaine – and to a lesser extent cannabis – producers relied on their existing ties to organised crime to get their goods to market. In the case of LSD, systems of distribution had to be created from scratch; the one assembled by Todd linked seller and consumer in unique and unprecedented ways, more of a college fraternity than a criminal enterprise. The starting point on the acid’s journey was Reading, 40 miles from London, where Todd’s two-man team tableted it all. Once their work was complete, they bought regular household products – cereal, teabags, dog biscuits, baby food – opened the packets, tins and jars they came in, removed the contents and filled them with small bags containing around 1,000 microdots each. These were then buried in obscure countryside locations – near a tree in the woods, by a hedgerow, in a field – where they could be safely retrieved by a trusted associate who would farm out the microdots to their connections. Some of these caches were intended for the owner of the Last Resort restaurant in Fulham, who supplied a contact in Amsterdam, who distributed the acid across Europe; the rest radiated out from Reading and across the south of the country.
Reading boasted a large student community that provided a pool of customers and ready-made dealers. From 1971, the town was also home to the National Jazz, Blues and Rock Festival, a fairly professional well-organised event where punters paid £5–6 to see major bands on a number of stages, while a free festival sprung up in its slipstream and colonised Windsor Great Park, a massive chunk of well-tended royal real estate 28 miles from Reading. The presence of these two events in the heartlands of Thames Valley, both taking place towards the end of August, sucked thousands into the area, all keen to have their own festival experience: and for many that meant taking LSD. Anticipating this surge in demand, Kemp and Todd coordinated their production schedule so that their microdots were ready to launch at the beginning of each festival season. As a result, the majority of the LSD consumed by the intrepid festival-goers was Kemp’s handiwork. Though his acid was readily available at the Reading Festival, the 1973 and 1974 Windsor free festivals were like trade conventions for the low-level links in the Microdot Gang’s supply chain; you could do business before them, during them and after them.
For Kemp, however, the free festivals were not just commercially important. They were also an opportunity for the various strands of the counter-culture to congregate, intermingle and achieve a deeper sense of shared purpose, and his acid would encourage that process. Kemp said he donated thousands of pounds to the organisers of free festivals and declared that it was ‘a marvellous moment of unity when so many heads gather together’. Many of the individuals and groups behind the events at Windsor were part of the Ladbroke Grove scene and brought their anarchic agenda with them, like the Albion Free State, which represented the 2,000–3,000 squatters who lived in the area and wanted to apply the right of common ownership to the whole country. Occupying a disused bingo hall close to Portobello Road, members of the Albion Free State were extremely active at Windsor ’74, the same year they issued their manifesto, which called for liberation from ‘dead-end jobs’; an end to the mass production of ‘non-essential consumer items’; the introduction of ‘neighbourhood and workers’ control of local factories, businesses, banks and supermarkets’; and the foundation of ‘permanent free festival sites, collectives and cities of life and love, maybe one every fifty miles or so’.
At Windsor ’74, their vision for a new England must have seemed within their grasp, as lines of battered cars and all manner of vans daubed in every colour of the rainbow clogged nearby roads; rows of makeshift tents, dwellings and authentic-looking tepees formed a hippy encampment; unruly hair, headbands and wristbands, patched-up denim and shaggy coats, topless women and face paint were everywhere to be seen; and all the while Kemp’s premium-grade LSD was circulating through the crowds, adding to the already otherworldly atmosphere. One festival veteran remembered that ‘there was a vast amount of acid at Windsor in 1974. Everyone was talking about it and it was obvious it was the focus of the festival’. For the dealers it was open season. Some charged 50p a microdot. Some were giving them away for free. Some advertised their wares by fixing signs on their tents – ‘I want to Destroy your Brain Cells’ – others pinned notices on trees – ‘Green acid – third tent on the left behind Stage B’.
Inevitably, Kemp’s mind-blowing LSD – a festival newsletter warned punters not to take more than one microdot – was too much for some to handle. The drug charity Release, which tended to the casualties, was overwhelmed by lost souls suffering from bad trips, freak-outs, accidental injuries and self-harm. There was also the risk of running into the ever-present Hells Angels, who preyed on the vulnerable and punished anyone who caused them offence. However, the main concern for the majority of festival-goers was the constant threat of arrest. The hostile attitude of many senior police officers to the festival scene was forcefully expressed by the chief constable of Hampshire. He thought these events were ‘evil’ because they allowed ‘drop-outs and anarchists’ to ‘influence … weaker characters’ and encouraged ‘amorality, perversion, drug addiction and contempt for all forms of law’.
To control and intimidate the crowds arriving for the perfectly legal Reading Festival, Thames Valley Police employed tactics that would have made your average dictatorship proud. At Reading Station plain-clothes officers met London trains and ushered any likely candidates into a side room full of cops. Drugs seized were sent to a forensic lab especially set up for the occasion. Magistrates’ courts stayed open to ten at night and council workers put in overtime to clear the paperwork; cells at the local stations were bursting at the seams and the overflow was transported in coaches to a nearby army barracks.
This heavy-handed approach was applied with even more vigour at the Windsor gatherings. In 1972 – when there was a small, less publicised event – the cops outnumbered punters four to one. In 1973, the festival had been granted permission by the Home Office, so the police maintained a relatively low profile. At Windsor ’74, however, the gloves were off. Over the first four days of the festival there were 280 drug-related arrests, then on the morning of 29 August, the decision was made to break up the festivities and send everyone packing. At 8 a.m., the police announced their intention to terminate proceedings. Three hours later, 800 officers – with truncheons at the ready – invaded the site: an undercover cop, who’d pitched his tent in the midst of the hippy tribes, recalled with some relish the moment ‘a great line-up of uniforms like Colonel Custer’s cavalry descended on the savages’ encampment’. Mayhem ensued – ‘there were tents and sleeping bags going up in the air and full tins of beans and vegetables being hurled at coppers’ – as the boys in blue kicked pregnant women, punched small children and generally put the boot in wherever possible; 220 people were arrested, many of whom were strip-searched at a local army base. When the dust settled, there were 255 allegations of police brutality.
The following year, neither the government nor the organisers wanted a repeat performance. A compromise was hammered out and the festival relocated to an abandoned air-base at Watchfield, half-way between Reading and Oxford. This may have seemed like neutral territory, but the 600 residents of the nearby village felt differently. They held a protest meeting and organised a petition; one journalist observed that ‘some of the villagers are frightened. Most of them are worried and anxious’. A few even cancelled their holidays because they didn’t want to leave their homes unattended. In the end, the nine-day event passed off reasonably peacefully. Red and green microdots were on the menu, Hawkwind were the headline act, and the police were less visible. Nevertheless, there were still teams of undercover officers patrolling the scene; seven officers masqueraded as hippies, while two carried cameras and sound equipment and pretended to be a freelance TV crew.
The next stop on the LSD trail was Oxford, 26 miles north-west of Reading. Like its historic rival Cambridge, the university drug scene there was up and running by the mid-1960s and demand for LSD remained constant from then on. If the students needed any further encouragement to move acid in and out of the various colleges, they got it from the university statutes, which effectively placed them outside the law. Infractions of the rules were dealt with internally and the police were only called in when absolutely necessary, much to the frustration of the Oxford Drug Squad.
At the same time, the non-student part of the town was large and diverse enough to offer room for expansion beyond the cloistered college grounds. The Victoria Arms – a pub by the river on the north-eastern fringe of Oxford – had psychedelic posters on the walls, a jukebox selection that featured Hendrix, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, and catered for the inhabitants of an area of town that was home to a dense concentration of hippies living in squats, communes and bedsits, many of them on Plantation Road: no. 20 was something of a drug storehouse. Around forty squatters lived three or four to a room without gas, heat or electricity and virtually no furniture except the odd mattress. In the bathroom upstairs, thousands of pounds worth of drugs of all kinds were hidden in a plinth under a raised bath.
From Oxford, the microdot expressway branched south-west towards the county of Wiltshire and its neighbour Somerset. The West Country was a particularly popular destination for followers of the Age of Aquarius, and much of this gravitational pull was down to the works of John Michell, an Old Etonian amateur polymath who studied archaeology, anthropology and philosophy, and was fascinated by UFOs. Having moved to 11 Powis Gardens in Ladbroke Grove in the mid-1960s and sampled LSD and other hallucinogens, Michell had a series of revelations about the true origins of human civilisation, which he believed began thousands of years ago when our species encountered a race of alien super-beings who passed onto us their knowledge and wisdom, out of which we gained agriculture, medicine and art.
Over the centuries, humanity had forgotten this critical phase in its evolution – until now. According to Michell, all ‘the signs’ pointed to ‘some form of encounter with an alien force’. As far as he was concerned, this transformative moment could not come soon enough. Given that ‘the earth is slowly dying of poison’ and humanity was incapable of reversing this process, Michell believed our survival depended on ‘the achievement of a new higher vision’. Luckily, this crisis coincided with ‘the increasingly wide interest in the use of drugs’, which was ‘opening the way to what may be an entirely new series of concepts’. This development was so ‘remarkably opportune’ that Michell found it hard to believe that it was ‘a matter of pure chance’ and suspected ‘the influence of an external force’.
In his first book – The Flying Saucer Vision (1967) – Michell conducted a global survey of pre-historic places of worship, identified them as contact points for our meetings with the aliens from outer space, and investigated how our memory of them was preserved through the images, symbols and stories of ancient mythology that depicted the extra-terrestrial visitors as gods who arrived in circular, disc-shaped objects; how burial mounds and giant earthworks were landing platforms for their spaceships; and how these awesome vehicles and their owners were represented by dragons and giant serpents in the myths and folk-tales of antiquity. Michell’s next publication – The View Over Atlantis (1969) – focused on the UK and was a big bestseller, going through three editions in the next four years and garnering a legion of fans. For those whose idea of Britain’s mystical past was largely informed by King Arthur and the works of Tolkien, Michell provided an apparently coherent explanation for the many legends and mysteries attached to it, grounded in the tangible physical reality of the country’s ancient monuments – ‘the old sites of sacrifice to the sky-gods’ – that viewed together formed a cosmic grid joined by a ‘vast number … of regular geometrical lines’ much like the ones used by ‘flying saucers’.
These ley lines radiated out from key centres of worship, of which Stonehenge was the most important. According to Michell, Stonehenge was ‘a holy city compiled by the philosophers of the ancient world’ and served as ‘an instrument’ for studying ‘the patterns of the universe’, as well as being a place to meet ‘with people of the divine race’. When the aliens stopped coming, the ‘occult’ rituals they performed at Stonehenge were kept alive by the druids, who possessed a range of powers similar to those that the shaman Don Juan passed onto Carlos Castaneda: the ‘ability to fly’; ‘to raise the dead’; ‘to travel in a state of invisibility’; and ‘to pass through the barrier of time’.
The summer solstice at Stonehenge had been drawing crowds since the end of the nineteenth century and their often-rowdy celebrations were a persistent cause of conflict with local villagers, the authorities and the druids – who’d been paying homage there since the late 1700s. The situation had got so serious that by 1966 the stones were surrounded by barbed-wire fences and guarded by military police. From 1970, however, bands of hippies began joining the druids and, having demonstrated that they intended to grant Stonehenge and its custodians the respect they deserved, they were able to forge a spirit of peaceful co-existence. In 1975, nearly 3,000 people showed up for a free festival where Hawkwind performed and one reveller remembered ‘Tolkien-esque wanderings through woods’ and seeing ‘hundreds of people, sitting cross-legged in meditation, as the sun came over the horizon’.
Meanwhile, 50 miles to the west, and linked to Stonehenge by a ley line, was Glastonbury Tor, with its ancient abbey rising up from its sacred roof, from where Michell claimed ‘men left earth to join the gods’. Located in the Vale of Avalon, the whole area around it was ‘laid out to a sacred plan’ that reproduced ‘exactly the same numbers and patterns as those that determined the form of Stonehenge’. Glastonbury’s unique place in Michell’s cosmic scheme was celebrated in 1971 at the legendary Glastonbury Fayre, which coincided with the summer solstice and was located at Worthy Farm, 110 acres of pastoral land, 7 miles from Glastonbury.
The impetus for holding a free festival there came from Revelation Enterprises, an events company whose office was at 307 Portobello Road (next door to Frendz magazine, which had promoted a ‘People’s Free Carnival’ in Ladbroke Grove), and was co-owned by the granddaughter of Winston Churchill. Her business partner was a devotee of Michell’s theories and told The Observer that he was utilising ‘pre-historic science’ and ‘spiritual engineering’ to help plan the festival. When it came to divining the right spot for the stage, he was looking to tap into ‘the planet’s life force’ and locate the ley line that ran through the site from Glastonbury Tor to Stonehenge. At the same time, the idea to make the stage the same shape as a pyramid came to the set designer in a dream; once on site, he called Michell for advice about how to construct it. According to the designer, Michell ‘said it should be based on the dimensions of Stonehenge’. Working from that model, and applying ‘sacred geometrics’, he ended up with a stage that was equivalent to ‘a hundredth part of the Great Pyramid’.
Between them, these two citadels of the space gods – Stonehenge and Glastonbury – accounted for the establishment of hippy communes and out-posts across Somerset and its neighbour Wiltshire, as well as attracting curious tourists and pilgrims seeking enlightenment. Consequently, there was a healthy demand for Kemp and Todd’s microdots, and the network had a distributor in the village of Frome who supplied a dealer based in the small market town of Chippenham, both around 30 miles from Glastonbury and Stonehenge. Todd’s man in Frome was an old acquaintance and operated from a flat above a shop on the high street. His contact was a builder from Chippenham who could be found in the back bar of the Bear Hotel selling hundreds of microdots a night. Their activities were made a lot easier by the fact that Wiltshire didn’t even have a drug squad. A Thames Valley undercover cop who’d been sent to scout out the area recalled how easy it was to get ‘any amount of pills, cannabis and acid’ in these ‘quiet country towns’, where the ‘dealing, smoking and tripping were all out in the open’.
The final destination on the microdot’s journey was Llanddewi Brefi, a small Welsh village with two pubs, a hall, a store, a police house and St David’s Church, named after the patron saint of Wales and allegedly built on the spot where he was said to have preached at some point during the sixth century. Llanddewi Brefi sat quietly in a region known as the Green Desert, a relatively unspoilt landscape that gave the impression that the past co-existed with the present. All around were traces of Celtic legends, woven into the fabric of hills and ancient stones, not merely relics but living and breathing entities, as if supernatural beings lived side by side with the human inhabitants, visible to those who looked hard enough.
The Microdot Gang’s contact in Llanddewi Brefi was known to everybody as Smiles. He passed through the village in 1971 before returning with his partner and her two kids in 1973 to buy a terraced cottage near the centre of the village that was called Y Glyn (The Hollow). Working class and ex-army, Smiles had lived in Birmingham, Manchester and London – his accent bore the imprint of all three cities – and he was perfectly at home in a world of pubs, clubs, after-hours poker games, betting shops and racetracks, where wages were blown on Friday and Saturday nights, you expected to rub shoulders with the criminal fraternity and nobody batted an eye if you bought and sold stolen goods or did some dealing on the side for a bit of extra cash. In March 1970, Smiles was convicted of conspiracy to steal and given a three-year conditional discharge. Two years later, he was fined £50 for possession of cannabis. Though he’d briefly been employed as a social worker in the late 1960s, by the time he moved to Llanddewi Brefi drugs were his sole source of income. But for Smiles, LSD was not merely about raking in the cash or having a bit of fun at the weekend; he’d had his own acid awakening. Years later, he remembered how LSD had opened his mind and helped him understand ‘that everything is ultimately connected’. Searching ‘for the divine spark within’, Smiles took up meditation, travelled to India, studied Buddhism and encouraged everybody in the village ‘to experience’ the same ‘one-ness’ that he had: ‘I turned the bread-man onto acid, the milkman onto acid, even the man who sold me the house’.
The residents of Llanddewi Brefi were unfazed by Smiles’ presence in their midst. He wasn’t the first LSD evangelist to fall for the village’s charms. Since the late 1960s that part of Wales held a magnetic attraction for those in the counter-culture looking for an alternative to hard-edged urbanised modernity. Part of the appeal was due to its remoteness and rugged beauty, separated from the border with England by a central rib of mountains, interspersed with deep valleys, and close to stunning coastline. Even more tempting was the fact that, due to the steady decline of the local rural population, there were dozens of empty farmhouses and acres of land available to buy or rent relatively cheaply. This was particularly appealing to those seeking a communal way of life. One colonist, who arrived in the area in 1973 with a dozen or so brethren, recalled that their ‘aim was to establish a self-sufficient rural community, run according to ecological/organic principles’. It was a daunting task, especially as the farm they’d purchased was ‘unbelievably run-down’ with ‘ramshackle buildings, soggy fields and a road that was impassable in winter’. In these sorts of conditions, many struggled to survive much longer than a year or two. An exception were the Tepee People. Assembled in 1975 at Stonehenge, they’d been drifting from festival to festival until they landed in a valley 10 miles from Llanddewi Brefi, erected their tepees and decided to stay, slowly buying up the land around them.
These hippy migrants were well served by a number of free festivals, the largest of which was Meigan Fayre, held in a field rented from a farmer, not far from Tepee Valley, and 700ft above sea level. The first event in 1973 was organised by a local commune and attended by 400 blissed-out revellers. In 1974, the site was flooded, but in late August 1975 thousands of people were treated to three days of hot weather. The site had taken a fortnight to get ready. There were two stages and a lighting rig, an observation tower, a sauna, a range of organic food tents and some stalls run by artisans and craftspeople. Every effort was made to respect the environment; the poster for the 1975 festival welcomed visitors with open arms – ‘we are here together to celebrate this wonderful summer in the spirit of love’ – but reminded them to dispose of their rubbish responsibly; keep any pets, especially dogs, under control; stay off private land; use the toilets provided; peel back turf before starting any fires and refrain from stealing wood to light them with. The organisers also put up a sanctuary tent for acid casualties to take refuge in, which proved a wise decision: on the first day, one punter remembered how most of the crowd ‘were incapable due to the huge consumption of psychedelics’, while another remarked that ‘it was the only event I ever went to where it seemed as if the lysergic state was the normal state’.
With so many hippy settlers and visitors passing through, there was no shortage of customers for what Smiles was selling. But he also funnelled some of his stock of LSD back into England, where it was picked up in Wiltshire, Somerset and Reading. This loop effect – reversing the westward trajectory of the acid – had been dreamt up by Todd as a way of confusing any police investigation, sending it in several directions at once and further obscuring the true origin of the microdots. Once he and Kemp split up, Todd saw no need to tamper with this carefully constructed network. It stayed in place, as did the personnel associated with it. As long as Todd could fill the gap left by Kemp, Smiles and his fellow microdot suppliers would continue to prosper.
On 3 November 1974, Detective Inspector Dick Lee, the middle-aged head of the Thames Valley Drug Squad, was sitting in his second-floor office at the police HQ in Kidlington, Oxfordshire, going over the information gathered by his undercover officers at that year’s Windsor Festival and the figures for arrests and drug seizures. Struck by the prevalence of LSD, he checked the files on Windsor 1973 and noticed the same trend. Put together, the evidence contradicted the national crime statistics, which calculated that there were roughly 20,000 hits of acid in circulation each year. But the festival data indicated that almost that amount had changed hands during Windsor ’74. Clearly, somebody somewhere was either manufacturing or importing LSD on a vast scale.
Before joining the drug squad, Lee – nicknamed ‘Leapy’ by his colleagues – had been working his way to retirement as a crown court officer in Reading. Married with three children, Lee was an old-school copper. He drank whiskey, wore waistcoats and smoked a pipe. He had zero experience of drugs but learnt fast and was liked and respected by his team. Though he considered LSD to be uniquely capable of pushing a ‘sad number of wasted individuals … to the fringes of society’ and leaving them stranded there, unable to return, it barely figured on his list of priorities, an attitude shared by the majority of his peers. Compared to the growth in heroin use and the continual spread of cannabis, acid was a minor problem, an esoteric oddity that had peaked during the Summer of Love before receding into the background. Yet the media kept reminding the authorities and the public that acid remained a menace by running a string of tragic stories. These tales of death and madness were given a fresh twist by the emergence of Kemp’s super-strong microdots. Dubbed the ‘pinhead killer’ by the press, the microdot was allegedly behind a new wave of horrific incidents: one senior drug squad officer told The Guardian that they were ‘the pusher’s latest weapon in the drug war’, not least because they were ‘so tiny’ and could be ‘disposed of at a moment’s notice’.
Confronted by the possibility that there was a microdot network doing business on his patch, Lee visited the CDIU on the fourth floor of Scotland Yard to see if they had any information about a major LSD organisation operating across the south of England. Given the CDIU’s remit was to monitor drug trafficking at a national level, it was the obvious place for Lee to go looking for answers. However, despite the fact that the CDIU had the Gerald Thomas file and two of its detectives had gone to Canada to grill him, they told Lee there was no evidence at all to support his hunch.
As a result, Lee was left to wait for some intelligence from his undercover officers that would confirm his suspicions. It eventually came from Martyn Pritchard, who was one of a new breed of ‘hippy’ cop. Since the mid-1960s, the police had struggled to get a handle on the hippy movement, so far removed from their experience as to be almost incomprehensible. Faced with such an unfamiliar phenomenon, a million miles away from their own hard-drinking culture, the police struggled to gain any meaningful traction. Informers were less easy to recruit. Undercover officers would wander into clubs and venues wearing white shirts with black suits, shoes and ties, and wondered why nobody wanted to talk to them. By the early 1970s, it was obvious that a more subtle approach was needed if the police were going to get anywhere with the citizens of the drug culture, and new undercover recruits like Pritchard were required to blend in with them, adopting their habits and lifestyles.
Born in 1947, Pritchard grew up in Reading, trained as an apprentice engineer, spent a year in Norway with an oil company, then joined the Thames Valley Police aged 21. In early 1972, after two years on the beat and nine months with CID, he volunteered for the Oxford Drug Squad, which consisted of five men and one woman. Once undercover, his chances of going undetected depended on his ability to tune into the same wavelength as his prey, an act of deception that was made easier by his interest in the same kinds of music – he used to play bass in a band – and party-loving nature. Like many other operatives who spent long periods undercover, he began to forget where the hippy ended and the cop began, and admitted that he got ‘the two characters muddled up’. Nevertheless, Pritchard had no doubts about where he stood on LSD: ‘I hate acid. You will find ninety per cent, if not more, of all drug squad coppers put it top of the hate list. They see the results of bad trips.’
Before hitting the Oxford scene, Pritchard learnt how to roll a joint and smoke it without inhaling, familiarised himself with the relevant slang and assumed the identity of an itinerant painter-decorator called Martin Poole. He grew his hair and added a moustache and chunky sideburns. He wore the hippy uniform, blessed with a touch of petula oil as ‘it gave off the scent of cannabis’. However, according to Pritchard, it was ‘not enough to just look like a hippie’. You had to have ‘dirt under your fingernails, holes in your socks and tatty old underwear’: a clean pair would be an instant give-away. In his pockets, he always carried ticket stubs from recent gigs and letters containing drug references. In his car, he kept packets of Rizla papers, a half-full tin of Old Holborn rolling tobacco, a guitar, some LPs and the mouthpiece of a hookah pipe. To complete the picture, he was given a criminal history, logged at the Criminal Records Office, which consisted of three previous convictions, the most recent for possession with intent to supply 500 tabs of acid.
Once he’d done a stint in Oxford, Pritchard moved onto Reading. One of his hunting grounds was the Star pub on the outskirts of town, where a major local dealer called the Count plied his trade. In the spring of 1975, Pritchard was trying to get the inside track on a gang who were smuggling Moroccan hashish into the country and offloading it in the Let-it-Be commune near Reading. Pritchard thought the Count was involved and arranged a meeting with one of his minions at the Star. After a few pints, the minion and Pritchard came to an arrangement. Pritchard would pay £6,000 for 20 pounds of hash that he’d collect once he’d made a down-payment of £2,000. Deal done, the Count’s minion then mentioned that he could throw in a thousand microdots for £150, if he wanted. Pritchard said he did, and went straight to his boss to give him the news. Lee was intrigued; did this mean the Count had access to the LSD network that he was trying to locate?
On Saturday 12 April, Lee waited for Pritchard in the Traveller’s Friend pub as other officers lurked in cars and flats close to the Count’s terraced house on Westfield Road. Pritchard showed up as agreed and was introduced to the Count. During a brief discussion, the Count told Pritchard he could get him up to 10,000 microdots a week. Having dropped the Count and his minion off at a nearby car park, Pritchard drove to the Traveller’s Friend and told Lee what had happened. Excited by what he heard, Lee authorised a bust. At 3 p.m., Pritchard returned to Westfield Road, picked up the Count and his minion, and headed towards the Reading suburbs and a semi-detached house where they were greeted by a tall blond Australian who led them into the kitchen, opened the fridge and pulled out 20 pounds of hashish and 1,008 microdots. Satisfied with the merchandise, Pritchard and his companions left to get the money. As they stepped out the front door, Pritchard lit a cigarette, signalling to the waiting coppers that drugs were inside the building. Within a matter of minutes it was all over. Pritchard’s car was stopped 200 yards down the road and all three of the occupants arrested. Officers swarmed into the house and took the Australian and his stash away with them.
Back at Reading police station, the Count and the Australian were held in custody to await a court hearing. The minion was cut loose and immediately put under surveillance, only to disappear twenty-four hours later, skipping town and going to ground in the Tepee Valley commune in Wales, not far from where Kemp and Bott were beginning their new life.