10
Kemp and Bott’s hasty departure from London to Wales in the late spring of 1974 left them temporarily homeless and subsisting in a caravan until they found a suitable property to buy. The place they chose was a square, two-storey dark-stone cottage with a slate roof called Penlleinau (Headlands) that rested on the upper slopes of the Blaencaron Valley. The cottage came with two acres of land, some of it meadow, and backed onto a narrow track that led into the mountains. It was 6 miles from Llanddewi Brefi, a mile or so from the market town of Tregaron and roughly 19 miles from the coastal town of Aberystwyth. Inside the cottage, conditions were basic: there was no central heating, the furnishing was rudimentary, the plain walls were coated with white cement paint and the toilet was outside. The only change Kemp and Bott made to this sparse interior was to install a Victorian spiral staircase they’d bought in London.
Kemp and Bott had chosen to adopt a self-sufficient lifestyle – based on organic farming techniques – that was particularly prevalent among other migrants from the capital who’d been arriving in ever-greater numbers since 1972. Though most of them lacked any agricultural training, they were determined to succeed. One of those who did spoke for many when he summed up what drove so many young people to go back to the land: ‘like so many of our generation, we were swept up with the dream to find a relevance to our lives away from the rat race … a dream to get back to basics … and produce our own food … away from the endless materialism of town life’. A couple from London who moved to the area in 1975 remembered they ‘were desperate to move out of the city and grow vegetables’, while another wanted to be where the ‘air was clean and pure and the land relatively cheap’. For Kemp and Bott it was a question of leading by example: the more people who took this course of action, the more pressure there’d be for others to follow – as Kemp put it, ‘I’d have everyone out in two-acre plots like ours, being self-sufficient’.
The shift that Kemp and Bott made from the radical Left towards the Green movement was not a hard one to make. There was no need to abandon their commitment to revolutionary change. Ecological politics dovetailed neatly with their pre-existing ideals, which were anti-capitalist and anti-materialist and in favour of the decentralisation of power, local communal and collective organisations, and autonomous self-government. This new form of society was almost identical to the one championed by the Greens, who argued that a profound transformation was necessary to tackle the threat to the planet posed by rampant industrialisation, urbanisation, intensive monocrop agriculture, sky-rocketing fuel consumption, depletion of natural resources and raw materials, environmental destruction, species extinction, pollution and over population.
At a time of rising awareness about the damage being done to the eco-system and the dire consequences of pursuing unlimited growth, there was a chorus of voices sounding the alarm and calling for immediate action. One of those predicting imminent disaster was G.R. Taylor, the author of The Doomsday Book (1970), who claimed that unless we fundamentally altered course, humanity would soon be condemned to an existence ‘which would be scarcely worth living’; we might be able to ‘detoxify the soil’, ‘clean the air enough to breathe’ and ‘purify at least some of the water’, but much of the planet would be uninhabitable, forcing us to crowd together ‘like battery hens’ in underground tunnels. Similar prophesies of apocalyptic doom were made by the small pool of activists behind The Ecologist magazine, some of whom would go on to form Friends of the Earth. In A Blueprint for Survival (1972), they plainly stated that ‘the industrial life with its ethos of expansion … is not sustainable’ and ‘its termination within the lifetime of someone born today is inevitable’. The total collapse of the current economic system would come about either ‘against our will, in a succession of famines, epidemics, social crises and wars’ or ‘because we want it to’. The only effective way out of our self-inflicted predicament was to make small communities ‘the basic unit of society’ and ensure that each one was ‘as self-regulating as possible’.
Their vision of a scaled-down and mutually harmonious social structure was conveyed to a wide audience by two friends and colleagues, E.F. Schumacher and John Seymour. Schumacher concentrated on moral issues, Seymour on more practical ones. Over the course of a long and distinguished career – including twenty years as the National Coal Board’s Chief Economic Advisor – Schumacher tried to make large organisations function better, only to realise their inherent limitations: soulless, inflexible, wasteful monoliths resistant to reform and adaptation. Out of these experiences came his hugely influential Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (1973), a penetrating analysis of the forces driving us to destruction and of the alternatives that might halt our headlong rush to oblivion.
Schumacher declared that ‘the task of our generation’ was ‘one of metaphysical reconstruction’ and proposed that we reorientate our mode of being away from the purely functional and reprioritise spirituality and creativity. For him, the cardinal error of our age was allowing narrow economic thinking to dominate decisions about how to live as ‘it takes the sacredness out of life, because there can be nothing sacred in something that has a price’. Worse still, it produces a society that is driven by our basest instincts: ‘the modern economy is propelled by a frenzy of greed and indulges in an orgy of envy’. Though wealth may ‘rise rapidly’ as ‘measured by statisticians’, most people were ‘oppressed by increasing frustration, alienation’ and ‘insecurity’. This woefully misguided approach had to be replaced by one built on ‘the traditional wisdom of mankind’. Emphasising the ethical foundations underpinning the major world religions – which were supported by virtues such as ‘love’ and ‘temperance’ – Schumacher advocated ‘the development of a lifestyle which accords material things their proper, legitimate place, which is secondary, not primary’.
To achieve this goal, Schumacher wanted us to abandon gargantuan factories, stop the onward march of mechanisation and assembly-line manufacturing, and restore the dignity of labour – the intimate connection between workers and what they made – by adopting ‘technology with a human face’. The end result would be a society composed of a mass of producers rather than one governed by mass production. This stripped-down approach would also apply to agriculture, encouraging a society of growers where as many as possible had access to enough land to feed themselves. For those choosing the same path as Kemp and Bott, Schumacher’s words lit the way. One aspiring organic farmer – who called Schumacher ‘a huge inspiration’ and his book a ‘seminal’ work – set up the Mid-Wales Soil Association, which counted Kemp and Bott as members. Other newcomers to the area who felt the same way about Schumacher grouped together to establish the Centre for Alternative Technology and began to experiment with ways to implement his theories.
Of equal importance to these intrepid hippy migrants was John Seymour’s series of books on self-sufficiency; they provided some of the basic knowledge required to put Schumacher’s ideas into practice. Seymour had spent eleven years in Africa as a young man, observing how small tribal communities sustained themselves by carefully controlling the resources available to them. Eager to apply what he learnt, he took up organic farming. In 1964 – after a period in Sussex – he relocated to Wales and occupied some land on the edge of a mountain close to the Meigan Fayre festival site. In the opening pages of his bestselling The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency (1976), Seymour reassures his readers that ‘self-sufficiency is not “going back” to some idealised past in which people grubbed for their food with primitive instruments and burned each other for witchcraft. It is going forward to a new and better sort of life.’ Seymour recommended using ‘a carefully worked out balance between animals and plants, so that each fed the other: the plants feeding the animals directly, the animals feeding the soil with their manure and the land feeding the plants’. On their patch of land, Kemp and Bott established a large vegetable garden, kept half a dozen chickens and two goats. Kemp took charge of growing the food and applied Seymour’s ground plan, which involved separate areas for different types of crop – potatoes, peas and beans, cabbages, and root vegetables – to be rotated every four years.
Compost to nourish the soil would come from the goats, who were Bott’s responsibility. According to Seymour, goats are ‘the perfect dairy animal’ for ‘the self-supporting smallholder’. They’re very efficient at ‘converting roughage into milk’ that is ‘as good’ as cow’s milk and doesn’t cause allergic reactions. Equally well, goat’s milk makes ‘magnificent cheese because its fat globules are much smaller’. Goats also helped manage the land by chomping their way through thickets, brambles, weeds, bushes and piles of fallen leaves. But for all the advantages of having goats, they still needed a lot of work. In the early stages, Bott would have had to make sure that her kids got 1.1 litres of milk per day for two months, while to feed a doe during winter required 2 pounds of good hay a day, 1–2 pounds of roots and succulents, and 1–2 pounds of grain. As they were sensitive to cold and rain, Bott would have needed to provide them with shelter and had to ensure the outbuilding they were housed in was kept dry, airy and draught proof. Their habit of stripping bark from trees had to be contained and they had to be kept away from Kemp’s vegetables. Following Seymour’s instructions, she erected fences consisting of three electric wires strung from poles.
Bott took her goats – Stella and Petra – very seriously, intent on raising the best animals she could in what were ideal surroundings, close to heather- and gorse-covered mountainside. To underline her commitment, Bott joined the British Goat Society, which benefited greatly from people like her: according to its official history, the 1970s were ‘a period when self-sufficiency and the need for unpolluted foods became the rage’ and the British Goat Society had to ‘adjust to new situations’ as ‘membership increased rapidly’ due to ‘increased public awareness’. Among this fresh herd of goat enthusiasts, Bott distinguished herself by winning first prize at the annual Aberystwyth Agricultural Show in July 1975. Her moment of triumph was captured in a photograph that appeared in The Cambrian News and showed her standing next to Petra wearing a white knee-length smock with jeans poking out underneath, her hair back in a bun, squinting and smiling shyly at the camera.
Though Kemp did not breed any first-rate animals, he did make first-rate LSD, perhaps the best ever. Since childhood Kemp had been convinced that he was special, carrying a sense of his own superior intellect, which seemed justified given his academic success. Having applied his exceptional gifts to acid, the end results were proof of his genius. Once his ego had experienced that degree of gratification, it was almost impossible for him to go on indefinitely without yearning to feel that thrill again; he admitted that he got ‘a great feeling’ from ‘turning people on’. Other than satisfying Kemp’s psychological and emotional needs, there was another key reason why he and Bott decided to carry on manufacturing LSD; they believed it could help the Green movement capture people’s imaginations. Not only could acid reorder your whole view of reality and your relationship to it in a matter of hours, a good trip often led to an almost cellular awareness of the essential unity of all organisms as the distinctions between living entities dissolved and you merged with your surroundings. According to Bott, ‘you feel as one with the world. You begin to appreciate everything surrounding you. The trees, the stones, everything becomes beautiful. It really helps you see the truth.’ Kemp thought LSD could ‘catalyse’ change by making people understand that ‘happiness’ did not come from ‘buying things’ or accumulating possessions; once this happened ‘the problems resulting from consumerism would be to a large extent solved’.
Soon after quitting London, Kemp was reunited with Solomon’s old comrade Paul Arnaboldi. Solomon had befriended Arnaboldi at Millbrook, hung out with him in Majorca, and involved him in Kemp’s very first attempts to make LSD. Always elusive, with his Spanish island retreat acting as a safe haven and his boat ready to sail him away from trouble, Arnaboldi’s movements are impossible to reconstruct with any accuracy. One indication of the extent of his smuggling activities occurred during May 1974, just before he partnered with Kemp: the yacht he was on, which had dropped anchor in the Malaysian port of Penang, was searched by the Australian authorities who were convinced drugs were on board. Though the boat was clean, the whole experience may well have prompted Arnaboldi to embark on a new business venture thousands of miles away. He and Kemp weren’t close and had little in common – Arnaboldi had sworn off LSD after an especially harrowing trip – but the alchemist knew that Arnaboldi was a professional who could be relied upon not to make waves. Essentially a marriage of convenience, it was an arrangement that Kemp hoped would enable him to put together his biggest LSD production run yet.
Over the course of early summer 1974, Kemp and Arnaboldi toured mid-Wales looking for a suitable site and found one on the outskirts of the village of Carno – about half an hour away from Kemp and Bott’s cottage. Plas Llysyn was a grand but dilapidated early eighteenth-century manor house with thirty rooms and substantial grounds, surrounded by high walls and accessible via a long driveway. Crucially, it had a large basement, ideal for Kemp’s lab. Arnaboldi bought it outright for around £25,000. Kemp contributed £8,000; Arnaboldi covered the rest by selling a stack of shares. To silence any local gossip about the strange American who’d moved into Plas Llysyn, Arnaboldi spread the word that he’d purchased the manor for his mother in Florida and would only be staying there temporarily while working on a biography of John F. Kennedy.
With Arnaboldi coming and going, Kemp spent much of the latter part of the year refurbishing and renovating the basement, focusing on two rooms in its maze of cellars. Starting from scratch, he put in a new concrete floor, replastered the walls and washed them with lime. A hole was made in the ceiling to create better ventilation, and in January 1975, Arnaboldi came and installed a new drainage system. Having put the basic infrastructure in place, Kemp began fitting out his lab and sourcing the chemical agents he needed. Some of the equipment he’d accumulated in London – and kept in a rented garage in Bristol – was removed from storage, the rest he ordered from a bunch of legitimate firms such as Baird and Tatlock in Chadwell Heath, Ferris in Bristol, Mersey Chemicals in Liverpool, and Orme Scientific in Manchester. According to Kemp, he’d ‘buy a little here and a little there’, working through his ‘big shopping list … in bits and pieces’. When he placed his orders, he invariably ‘bought a complete set of spare parts with it and extra parts of vulnerable pieces’ as he preferred to have ‘two of everything so that any breakage wouldn’t cause delay’. But what Kemp couldn’t get in the UK was ergotamine tartrate. For that, he turned to his former colleague, David Solomon.
Determined to dodge any nasty fall-out from Gerald Thomas’ arrest, David Solomon had returned to New York, nearly a decade after he last set foot in the US. Despite having been absent for so long, Solomon was still able to get another book deal, and with George Andrews once again acting as co-editor, he put together an anthology about the coca leaf and its synthetic derivative cocaine – The Coca Leaf and Cocaine Papers (1975) – for yet another heavyweight publisher, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. As the title suggests, the book was as much about the coca plant as it was about cocaine: almost two-thirds of the text is given over to densely academic studies of the biological properties of the plant and its role in indigenous Peruvian culture, where it was used for its medicinal properties, as a stimulant to moderate the strain of a hard day’s labour and as an intoxicant to enhance religious ritual. Dominating this part of the anthology is a 150-page extract – entitled ‘The Divine Plant of the Incas’ – taken from an early twentieth-century history of coca written by an American pharmacologist.
This emphasis was deliberate as the aim of the anthology was to rehabilitate and promote the coca leaf, and explain its value as a plant – ‘the various alkaloids present in coca leaf … are both harmless and life-enhancing if taken orally and in moderation’ – while clearly distinguishing it from cocaine, which had done nothing but damage its image and criminalise its users. In their introduction, Solomon and Andrews acknowledged the benefits of cocaine (‘it temporarily makes the user feel stronger and happier’ and has ‘almost magical energizing qualities’), but took pains to stress the downsides of over-use, such as depression, paranoia and loss of libido. They also point out that habitually ‘slamming concentrated cocaine rapidly into the bloodstream by snorting it into the delicate mucous membranes lining the nasal passages’ could ‘burn a hole right through the nose’.
This negative view of cocaine is evident in the handful of selections about it that appear in the book’s final section: a long article by a journalist based on his experiences shadowing a Harlem dealer; a 1971 piece from Rolling Stone that charts the appearance of coke on the LA music scene, locates references to it in songs by various bands and describes how it became fashionable among the East and West Coast elites; and part of the Consumers Union Report on Licit and Illicit Drugs (1972), which underlined the dangers of cocaine and warned that it was entering the country through Miami in ever-increasing quantities. These last few extracts pointed to the future, suggesting the direction cocaine was going in, yet neither Solomon nor Andrews were that interested in exploring its upward trajectory. To them it was a passing phase. Given what came next, this could be seen as a bad error of judgement and meant their book was almost immediately out of date. This was not entirely their fault. In 1975 – when The Coca Leaf and Cocaine Papers was published – almost nobody could have foreseen the unholy alliance of forces that combined to fuel the cocaine boom that exploded across the US over the next decade as the white powder and its more lethal cousin crack cocaine tore through society from Main Street to Wall Street, from the suburbs to the inner cities.
Ultimately, the book’s failure to win a large audience – it was the only one of Solomon’s anthologies not to appear in paperback – was down to the overwhelming amount of scholarly material about the coca leaf. Solomon’s career as an editor suffered a fatal blow. Another income stream had dried up. This disappointing outcome, combined with the expense of trying to maintain a trans-Atlantic existence, meant that when Kemp requested his assistance with another LSD operation, he was in no position to refuse. In total, Solomon was able to lay his hands on 9 kilos of ergotamine tartrate. Three of them were left over from when Kemp and Todd were working together, the rest came from the same West German company Solomon had previously ordered from, via the fake firm he’d set up with a London address. As before, Solomon collected the ergotamine tartrate personally, then transported it to Switzerland where it was lodged in Kemp and Bott’s safety-deposit boxes.
Having assembled all the elements, Kemp was ready to proceed when disaster struck. While he and Bott were making the short journey from their cottage to the manor, he skidded on a wet slippery road, lost control of their Range Rover and collided with a Mini Estate being driven by the Reverend Eurwyn Hughes, who had his pregnant wife next to him in the passenger seat. He was badly injured; she was killed instantly. Charged with causing death by dangerous driving, Kemp appeared at Welshpool Magistrates’ Court a few months later. He was fined and had his licence suspended for a year. This lenient sentence must have come as some relief to Kemp and Bott and was symptomatic of a justice system that treated murder by motor vehicle less seriously than possession of a few ounces of weed. Yet the judgement was clear; it was Kemp’s fault. He was responsible, and he and Bott couldn’t simply write it off as just another accident like all the others they’d been involved in, beginning with his motorbike crash eleven years earlier. This was different. They’d taken two lives – a mother and her unborn child – and by any estimation it was spectacularly bad karma, especially as they considered themselves to be on the side of the angels. As a result, the emotional impact was considerable. According to a reliable source, they were ‘extremely distressed by the accident and mourned the death of the woman for some time’.
As well as being the cause of sleepless nights and existential doubts, the crash had also been a major breach of security. The case had earned Kemp unwanted publicity – there was coverage in the local press – and a criminal record. He and Arnaboldi decided to err on the side of caution. They sealed the lab, closed up the manor and agreed to wait nine months before opening them up again. With everything on hold, Arnaboldi slipped back to Majorca and Kemp went back to tending his vegetables.
On the day before Kemp’s Range Rover careered into the reverend’s car, Detective Inspector Dick ‘Leapy’ Lee was on the phone to the head of the Dyfed Powys Drug Squad. After the recent Reading bust that netted the Count and his microdot supplier, Lee’s men had been given the slip by the Count’s minion; out on bail, he’d skipped Reading and taken refuge in the Tepee Valley commune. Concerned by the sheer volume of acid being traded and consumed on his turf, the Dyfed Powys commander was eager to give Lee a hand. Then Lee got word from an informer that the microdots originally offered to Pritchard by the Count’s minion had come from the small village of Llanddewi Brefi and a house known as Y Glyn, which is where Smiles lived. Eager to act on this tip, Lee asked his counterpart in Dyfed Powys to organise a raid.
What happened next would not have been out of place in an Ealing comedy. On Wednesday 16 April 1975, a bevy of drug squad officers – including two from Thames Valley – and the constable in charge of Llanddewi Brefi, set off from Aberystwyth, a thirty-minute drive from Smiles’ cottage. In the meantime, one of the constable’s men called the police house in the village with a routine question for him. On hearing that his superior was en route to Y Glyn, he called the constable’s wife and asked her to intercept him and give him the message. Figuring it was urgent, she walked down the road to Smiles’ house and knocked on the door. Smiles answered, and she enquired whether her husband was there. Surprised by her question, Smiles said he wasn’t and agreed to tell him to contact her as soon as he arrived. As Smiles watched her go, he rapidly put two and two together. Unable to believe his good fortune, he removed all the drugs from hidden compartments in the house and buried them in a nearby quarry. When the raiding party arrived, it searched the premises from top to bottom but found nothing.
Despite this fiasco, Lee’s men did not leave Wales empty-handed. The following day, the Count’s minion was caught by Dyfed Powys police after a high-speed car chase. By then, Lee had managed to extract Kemp and Bott’s names from two Scotland Yard detectives who’d shown up at Lee’s office to discourage him from collaborating with the Dyfed Powys Drug Squad, claiming it would compromise their own acid investigation. Ignoring their wishes, Lee dropped Kemp’s name to his helpful Welsh colleague. It rang a bell. The Dyfed Powys officer had heard about the fatal car accident. He sent two of his men to check over Kemp’s Range Rover, which had been seized and was sitting in a police compound in Aberystwyth. They went over every inch of the vehicle and found some torn scraps of paper. Put together, they bore the words ‘hydrazine hydrate’ – one of the chemicals used to synthesise LSD.
Between the end of April and the end of July, Lee made three attempts to get the head of the CDIU to authorise a joint operation involving a number of different forces. Each time he was turned down. The result was the same when Lee went to his own boss and pleaded for the resources to cripple the network’s activities in the Thames Valley. At this point, Lee could have decided to forget the whole thing, but his resolve was stiffened when he heard about the death of a teenager in Preston from asphyxia, brought on by a massive panic attack, triggered by one of Kemp’s microdots, which had been bought at the Star pub in Reading from the Count’s minion.
Determined to keep those responsible in his sights, Lee was happy to oblige the Wiltshire police when they asked for help with their out-of-control drug problem, and sent them Pritchard and another undercover officer. During November 1975, Pritchard and his colleague familiarised themselves with the local scene. By Christmas, they had got a fix on the builder from Chippenham, whose supplier in Frome was part of Todd’s microdot distribution chain, and on Friday 11 January 1976 they found him in a convivial mood in his favourite pub, chatting with two young French guys who had a large block of good-quality hashish they were hoping to sell to a nearby commune consisting of about a dozen members who called themselves the Wombles. As it happened, they were having a party that night. Pritchard, his partner, the builder and the French duo showed up and had a good time, during which Pritchard persuaded the builder to meet him in the morning at the Bear Hotel to discuss business.
At their 11 a.m. rendezvous, the builder explained that his contact in Frome was extremely cautious and any arrangement he and Pritchard made was strictly provisional. That said, he offered Pritchard a starting price of £300 for 1,000 microdots with the promise of up to 80,000 a week if all went well. But as the builder predicted, things moved very slowly. When Pritchard was finally introduced to the man from Frome he immediately realised he’d be a tough nut to crack; Pritchard thought he was ‘heavy’, probably ‘a Londoner’ and ‘very shrewd’. Pritchard’s first impression proved correct. The supplier had three previous convictions relating to cannabis and acid. Aware that he was tangling with a big fish, Pritchard redoubled his efforts to gain his target’s confidence, arranging to run into him whenever possible. The moment of truth came when Pritchard was invited back to the supplier’s flat. As he sat with him and his girlfriend, Pritchard was told to roll a joint. Knowing full well that this was a trap designed to ensnare and expose any inexperienced undercover cop who hadn’t perfected his technique yet, Pritchard rose to the challenge. Instead of the standard three Rizla papers, he used five: ‘I had one paper long-ways, joined three going across, then another long-ways on the end. A five-skin.’ Impressed and reassured, the man from Frome intimated that he was ready to trade and invited Pritchard to a party that weekend. Though ‘the party was a knock-out’, everything went wrong at 3 a.m. when a new arrival recognised him: Pritchard remembered that he ‘looked straight at me’ and kept looking. Pritchard had been made. A few days later, the supplier called off the deal.
While Pritchard was hitting a dead end, Lee was making headway with the stubbornly secretive CDIU. Lee had approached them hoping they’d stop the Wiltshire police from interfering with Pritchard’s investigation – they wanted a quick result and were pressing for arrests – and found himself in a room with one of the CDIU detectives who’d interviewed Gerald Thomas in Canada. Reluctantly, and without going into details, he confirmed that Kemp and Bott were involved in acid trafficking, along with an American called David Solomon and an unidentified Englishman known as ‘Henry’.
By now, Lee’s persistence had made it impossible for senior figures within the police – and at the Home Office – to ignore his demands any longer. Lee was given a chance to state his case on the 12 February 1976 at a conference in Swindon, attended by representatives of five provincial forces, Scotland Yard, the CDIU and the Home Office. Having heard what Lee had to say, they agreed that there was clearly a big LSD operation out there and that the only way of tackling it was by forming a joint task-force. Unfortunately, nobody present had the power to put one together. Five days later, however, at a secret four-hour meeting held in Brecon, the Chief Constable of Dyfed Powys – who also happened to be Chairman of the Association of Chief Police Officers – the Chief Constable of North Wales, the CDIU officer who’d questioned Thomas and a Home Office mandarin decided to give Lee what he needed to bring down the Microdot Gang.