11
In July 1975, Henry Barclay Todd became the owner of 23 Seymour Road, a three-storey detached Edwardian townhouse with off-street parking, which he bought for £33,000 using the name J.J. Ross. This imposing, substantial house was in Hampton Wick, a leafy suburban enclave on the south-western fringes of London that hugged the Thames on one side and bordered a royal deer park on the other. Mixing period architecture with commuter-belt housing, it was solidly Conservative voting and family orientated, a largely middle-class haven: it was the last place anybody would think to look for an LSD factory.
From the moment Kemp left for Wales, Todd knew that at some point the reserves of his LSD would run dry and he’d have to start manufacturing it himself. Deploying an array of aliases, Todd ordered lab equipment from Farley & Sons and the D. Bewhay Company, and chemical agents from Hopkins & Williams and British Drug Houses, Enfield Branch. To get hold of ergotamine tartrate, he set up a front company – Fine Organics Ltd. Through it, he ordered ergotamine tartrate from Dolder AG in Basel, which was then routed through Inter-Saint Philippe, a Paris-based firm that collected its clients’ mail and sent it wherever they wanted it to go. Todd would have them forward the packages of ergotamine tartrate to drop-off points in London to pick up at his convenience. At the same time, he stored a large amount of it – enough for thirty million tabs – in a safety-deposit box at the Kantonel Bank in Switzerland – the same branch that Kemp and Bott used – and lodged some of his funds in the Vontobel Bank, which also counted Ronald Stark as a customer.
With the infrastructure in place, Todd was ready to install his chemist. Born in 1947, Andy Munro was from a solidly lower-middle-class background – his father had been a policeman – and attended grammar school before doing chemistry at Cambridge, where he met Kemp and Solomon. Yet another brilliant student with a restless, enquiring mind, Munro went on to do a masters at the University of East Anglia. While there, he participated in the lengthy student sit-ins that paralysed college life for weeks on end; Munro’s role was to make sure the protestors did not run out of cannabis. In 1972, having successfully completed his course, Munro moved to London and lived at 4 Hanover Road, Kensal Rise, ten minutes’ walk from Ladbroke Grove.
Munro moved in the same radical circles as Kemp and Bott, and was especially close to a veteran anarchist who’d been part of King Mob, an artists’ collective that staged subversive spectacles. In the summer of 1968, King Mob gave out flyers inviting ‘the damned, the rich, the screwed, the despised, the thugs, the drop outs, the scared, the witches, the workers, the demons’ and ‘the old’ to a ‘Devil’s Party’ in ‘Notting Hell’ on 15 June, during which they intended to break into the private gardens in Powis Square that were for the exclusive use of wealthy residents. Wearing a gorilla costume, and with a pantomime horse at his side, Munro’s friend and mentor – along with his other King Mob comrades and a parade of excited kids – removed the wire-fencing round the gardens with bolt-cutters and poured in. The police came. King Mob were arrested and fined, but three months later the local council opened the gardens to the public.
Munro also hung out with the Microdot Gang and spent time observing Kemp at work in his makeshift labs. Though Kemp was careful not to reveal all his secrets to Munro, he did trust his judgement and asked Munro to check whether Todd was meddling with the strength of the microdots to increase his profits. Munro did as requested – thereby contributing to the falling out between Todd and Kemp – yet he was still uppermost in Todd’s mind when it came to recruiting a chemist. By then, Munro was based south of the river at 71a Webbs Road, close to Clapham Common, in a flat above a shop. While his skills as a chemist were not in doubt, Munro struggled to cope with the strenuous demands of manufacturing acid on a massive scale. Munro lacked Kemp’s stamina and powers of concentration, his ability to remain focused for long stretches of time. One of Todd’s associates thought Munro had an ‘encyclopaedic’ brain that was ‘full of fascinating ideas’, but had to concede that he was wilfully eccentric and disorganised, wandering round with ‘his head in the clouds’. Munro’s interest in Kemp’s approach to synthesising LSD sprang more from intellectual curiosity than any desire to be locked up in a small room immersed in noxious fumes for weeks on end. Nor did he experience the same thrill or sense of achievement; he would later claim that he was acting under duress and the £50,000 Todd paid him was insufficient compensation for being treated like a prisoner on a chain gang.
He was also extremely clumsy and accident-prone. Perhaps the most serious of several incidents occurred at the end of a long day in the lab. Lying down for a momentary rest, Munro shut his eyes and fell completely asleep. Waking in the middle of the night, he realised that he’d neglected to put his phial of acid in the fridge before taking his unscheduled nap. To make sure his forgetfulness hadn’t done any damage to his delicate creation, Munro decided to take its temperature with a thermometer. Still dozy and not fully alert, he shoved it into the phial so hard that it went right through, cracking the glass. 150,000 tabs worth of pure LSD poured out, soaking a small patch of carpet. Fearful of Todd’s reaction, Munro kept quiet about the spillage, hoping he wouldn’t notice the loss. He didn’t: the wasted acid was merely a drop in the ocean.
Tableting was the responsibility of Todd’s closest colleague, Brian Cuthbertson. Todd had turned to Cuthbertson back in 1971 when he was preparing to offload the LSD Solomon had received from Kemp’s production run in Stark’s Parisian lab. Cuthbertson was a middle-class grammar school boy, who’d gone to Reading University but dropped out in 1970 after failing his mathematics exams. Not long after, he arrived in London and was introduced to Todd. They instantly hit it off and Todd put him in charge of tableting, an arrangement that would continue throughout the Kemp years, right up to the split. At the same time, Cuthbertson communicated with key suppliers in the microdot distribution network. Like Todd, he was fond of fine living and disinterested in left-wing politics and hippy culture. For him, the acid enterprise was a business and his main source of income: he used his earnings to dabble in antiques and property development, renovating aging houses; in 1974 he purchased a dilapidated chateau in the Dordogne that overlooked a wooded valley.
Cuthbertson set up his tableting operation on the first floor of Seymour Road, while Munro cooked up the acid on the floor above in a series of attic rooms. In the evenings, Cuthbertson would unwind by playing Chopin on the piano. By the summer of 1976, hundreds of thousands of tabs were ready to go. For the UK, Cuthbertson churned out microdots, selling them to his distributors for around £170 per 1,000. For the international market, he tableted domes and pyramids. Some of the acid that went abroad was exported to Amsterdam and Australia by members of the UK supply chain. Otherwise, Todd relied on a long-established relationship he had with two Germans based in West Berlin. Sometimes he would go there – where an exchange would occur in an antiques shop – or they would visit him in London. This arrangement had begun in 1971 when one of the dealers who was helping Todd offload Solomon’s stash decided to drop out. Up to then, he’d been selling 2,000 tabs a week to the West Germans. Rather than lose that connection, Todd took over from the dealer, visited the West Germans on their home turf, came to terms with them and opened an account at a branch of the Berliner Bank.
Todd’s contacts – who were known simply as Carl and Gunther – had emerged from West Berlin’s anarchist scene, which was closely related to the city’s drug culture. By 1968, a number of anarchist communes had popped up across West Berlin and LSD – which was probably coming from Czechoslovakia – began to circulate among them. Over the next couple of years, the volume of LSD and hashish entering the city increased dramatically. During 1968, the West Berlin police carried out 140 drug-related arrests; in 1970, there were 858. This steep rise was replicated across the country, where the number of arrests leapt from 1,891 in 1968 to 16,000 in 1970. This increase in acid’s availability coincided with the publication of an LSD guidebook – Consciousness Expanding Drugs: A Call for Discussion (1969) – by a Berlin-based author who’d just returned from two years in London. It contained chapters on biochemical manipulation, the legalisation of marijuana, psychotherapy and psychedelics, and applied mysticism. More generally, the link between drugs and radical social change was explored in Love magazine. The first issue featured a lengthy interview with Timothy Leary and a bold statement of intent: ‘it is our obligation to break the antiquarian social and economic system … we have to force ourselves collectively to build a new world’. The next one ran articles about hashish, while a 1970 edition was devoted to LSD and offered ‘Tips for Trips’ to the novice user, advising them to ‘linger around the centre of a big city’ and ‘observe environmental oscillations, the traffic flow, the cars, traffic lights and the people standing in front of them’.
During the summer of 1969, some of West Berlin communards formed a loose-knit organisation called the Central Committee of the Roaming Hashish Rebels. Its main aim was to bring political activists and long-haired dope smokers together. Aside from consuming hash and encouraging others to follow their example, the Central Committee was in the business of selling it; one Hashish Rebel recalled how they knew ‘countless people we could sell shit to … you literally lived with and from dope’. At the same time, they tried to control the market and keep organised crime away from it ‘so that no dealer mafia could be created’. Given the significance of LSD to the Central Committee’s overall mission – they described taking acid as an ‘act of revolutionary disobedience’ – it made sense to apply the same policy to its supply and distribution.
Though it’s hard to pinpoint their sources of LSD, Orange Sunshine appeared in West Berlin during 1970, which must have come from either Nick Sand’s labs or from Kemp’s apprenticeship with Stark in Paris. At some point, a group of them went to London for a few months and, according to one Rebel, ‘looked at the whole English scene’. Though their visit slightly predates the beginning of Todd’s acid career, it may well have been when they forged the connections that made it possible for them to buy LSD from a London-based dealer. This laid the groundwork for the trade between Todd and Carl and Gunther, who were almost certainly linked to the Central Committee of Roaming Hashish Rebels, given how relatively small and incestuous the West Berlin anarcho-hippy drug scene was at the time.
Not long after their return, the Hashish Rebels began contemplating a change of tactics. From the moment protests against the Vietnam War got into their stride, the West German police had reacted with considerable ferocity. This intense level of state violence had convinced some on the hard Left that terrorism was the only viable response. From the Marxist camp came the Red Army Faction – whose most notorious cadre was the Baader-Meinhof Gang. In 1970, they took up arms, declared war on the system, and became public enemy number one. After a series of escapes, ambushes and shoot-outs most of them were rotting in jail, held in isolation and deprived of their rights. In this fevered atmosphere, the Hashish Rebels felt compelled to strike back with firebombs. With each arson attack, however, they became a bigger target for the police to aim at. On 4 December 1971, four of the Rebels were involved in a gun fight with the cops; one was killed, three escaped. Following this confrontation, the Central Committee of Roaming Hashish Rebels dissolved itself and reformed as the Second June Movement, named in honour of a student who was murdered by an undercover cop during a demonstration on that day in 1967.
On 2 February 1972, they exploded a bomb at the British Yacht Club in West Berlin, which killed an engineer. A few weeks after this, a Second June Movement member was shot dead by police. A wave of arrests followed. The Movement took time to regroup and rebuild. On 27 July 1973, they robbed a bank, making off with 200,000 DM. On 4 June 1974, they murdered an informer. Five months later, their attempted kidnapping of the President of the West Berlin Supreme Court went badly wrong and the judge wound up dead. Lessons learned, their next effort was more successful. On 27 February 1975, they took a conservative mayoral candidate hostage and demanded the release of six of their comrades. Within a week, the Second June Movement prisoners had been flown to safety in the Yemen and the kidnap victim had been set free.
To what extent Carl and Gunther were involved in the Second June Movement cannot be established with any accuracy. They did, however, continue their partnership with Todd throughout the Kemp years, receiving regular consignments of microdots. Then in June 1976, a tall West German – who was identified as having links to terrorist groups – came to see Todd in London, stayed a few hours and left. It’s not known what they discussed – or if the German was Carl or Gunther or a third party – but in all probability the main topic was the acid that was coming out of Todd’s Seymour Road lab. Once the deal was struck, all it would take was a few short cryptic phone calls and the LSD would be on its way from Hampton Wick to West Berlin.
On 8 March 1976, Detective Inspector Dick Lee held the first full meeting of the squad he’d assembled to smash the microdot network. Lee and his officers were based on the second floor of a former police driving school in Devizes, Wiltshire. Selected from eleven different forces, the majority were from the south, the south-west and Wales, representing Avon and Somerset, Hampshire, Thames Valley, Bournemouth, Wiltshire, and Dyfed Powys. All of them were drug squad detectives – either sergeants or constables. Out of fourteen, three were women. Lee was assigned a personal secretary and Sergeant Julie Taylor was initially in charge of administration. An executive officer looked after their specialist photographic equipment and radio transmitters. The unit was given six cars – two Ford Escorts, two Hillman Avengers, an Allegro and a Mini – each with two radios: one worked over long distances, the other car-to-car. The only thing their mission lacked was a name. After a brief discussion, they settled for Operation Julie.
About a week earlier, Lee had finally got his hands on the material the CDIU had been withholding from him. Reluctantly, and under pressure from above, the CDIU relented and Lee gained access to the Gerald Thomas interviews, his personal papers that were on him when arrested – including lists of names and addresses – and details of the CDIU’s somewhat half-hearted efforts to follow up on all this information. After its detectives had returned from seeing Thomas in Canada, it took another nine months before anything meaningful happened. In January 1975, the CDIU bugged Solomon’s UK phone and that April they raided his empty Maida Vale flat, measures that merely confirmed that he was out of the country. In the case of Kemp and Bott, the CDIU’s investigations added little to what Lee already knew. With only the Ladbroke Grove address to go on, the CDIU had no luck tracing their whereabouts until they got wind of the Range Rover crash. Kemp and Bott’s cottage phone was tapped, but neither of them indulged in shop talk. The electronic eavesdropping was abandoned and Kemp and Bott were left to their own devices. Nonetheless, the files did provide Lee with a vital clue. Thomas had briefly mentioned Paul Arnaboldi. The name rang a bell. A few weeks earlier, Lee had been informed by the Dyfed Powys Drug Squad that Kemp was making frequent visits to a manor house in Carno, which was owned by an American called Arnaboldi.
Joining the dots, Lee decided to arrange surveillance of the house just as Arnaboldi was taking up residence again and Kemp was embarking on the production run that been delayed because of the fatal accident. Buried in his basement lab – which he’d christened ‘The Yellow Submarine’ – Kemp worked forty-eight-hour shifts before being picked up by Bott in their Renault, ferried back to their cottage for twenty-four hours’ rest and then returned to the manor. At night, Arnaboldi sat at an upstairs window watching for any signs of trouble. During the day, he stood on the roof – from where he could see for miles around – and pretended to be fixing the tiles. Despite these precautions, neither he nor Kemp paid much attention to the shabby mobile works caravan – with a drop-down table, office chairs, a gas stove and a kettle – that parked up outside the main gates in early April and stayed there.
Crammed inside was a five-man team. Posing as surveyors hunting for a fresh seam of coal, they spent the next five weeks taking photos, acting busy, maintaining their cover with the locals and waiting for something to break the monotony. At the beginning of May, they observed Kemp and Bott transporting bits and pieces of what looked like lab equipment back to the cottage: they were cleaning up. On 7 May, Kemp was seen greeting Bott with a triumphal hug, overjoyed that he’d completed the biggest manufacturing operation of his career: Kemp had converted 7 kilos of ergotamine tartrate into 1,800 grams of LSD, enough for nine million microdots.
The next day, Arnaboldi concealed 450 grams of Kemp’s acid in his suitcases, loaded them into his car, locked up the house and drove away. At 4 p.m. on 10 May, he boarded a ferry at Southampton that was heading for Spain. With the coast apparently clear, Lee ordered a break-in. Having purchased some tools – hammers, screwdrivers, a drill and a flashlight – and protective clothing – Marigold rubber gloves and four black balaclavas – the detectives waited until 3 a.m. before entering the grounds. After throwing stones at various upstairs windows to check that nobody was home, two of them stayed on guard outside while the other two forced open the lounge window and crawled in. It took several hours of roaming the ghostly corridors and exploring the dust-laden crumbling rooms before they found the basement cellars, which were barred by a solid oak door fitted with a new padlock. Using the screwdriver, they removed it, went in, located the two rooms Kemp had used – now stripped bare and spotlessly clean – and gathered some microscopic samples from the drains and surfaces that indicated the presence of methanol, which was sometimes added into the mix during acid production. The next day, they broke in again and conducted a more thorough search. While inspecting an outside drain, they found the corpse of a dead mole that had been poisoned by pure LSD.
By 1974, the ever-elusive Ronald Stark had resurfaced in Italy. For official purposes, he favoured his fake British passport, issued in the name of William Terence Abbott. For day-to-day interactions with the locals, he alternated between several different incarnations: he was Maurizio Borghetti, or Carlo Rossi, or Giovan Batista Mita. Though he rented a small apartment in Florence, Stark spent the majority of his time in Rome, Milan and Bologna, where he stayed in grand hotels. He also had access to a country house in Tuscany. As usual, he mixed not only with the business and social elites but also with radical and revolutionary groups, effortlessly moving between the two.
At some point, he’d also acquired a partner and child, an American woman – Henrietta Ann Kaimer – and her little girl Leyla. Quite when and how Stark met Henrietta is a mystery, as is the exact nature of their relationship. There is no mention of her name by anybody from the Brotherhood, the Microdot Gang or Stark’s business enterprises. He did, however, furnish Henrietta with a fake British passport in the name of Pauline Margaret Booth, which he probably obtained in spring 1973, the same time he got his. And they did travel together using these identities, because their British passports carried stamps from the Netherlands and Sweden. Whatever Stark felt for Henrietta and Leyla, the arrangement between them served a practical purpose; it was a lot easier to pose as a normal, respectable citizen with them at his side. A couple and their offspring were much less likely to draw unwanted attention than a single man in his 30s.
Stark had been active in Italy since the autumn of 1969. Initially, he was distributing the acid brewed up for him by the Swedish alchemist Tord Svenson in their Paris lab. Then, in 1970, he opened a safety-deposit box in a bank in Rome. Inside it he put the handwritten formula for synthesising LSD that Nick Sand had sketched out for Kemp at the beginning of his apprenticeship. Though the Brotherhood commandeered half of what Kemp produced in Paris there was still plenty left for Stark, and it’s safe to assume he sold some of it in Italy. The same can be said for the vast amount of acid that came out of Stark’s Belgium lab between the summer of 1972 and autumn 1973: documents and letters concerning his on-campus facility landed in his safety-deposit box in Rome, along with other items relating to his activities during this period, suggesting that, at the very least, he was making regular trips to Italy’s capital city.
Once based in the country, it is unclear whether or not Stark ran an LSD lab. There are rumours that he was hoarding ergotamine tartrate in Lebanon. What he didn’t have was a chemist and, though no doubt he could have found somebody local to train up, there’s no evidence that he did. Instead, he focused on smuggling hashish. Since 1970, Stark had been trying to find a feasible way to manufacture dimethylheptyl, a mind-bending by-product of THC that was difficult and expensive to extract. His interest in it led him to investigate hashish oil, which he introduced to the Brotherhood. According to one of Stark’s circle – who was a former colleague of both Nick Sand and Owsley Stanley the Third – Stark was fascinated by ‘the more powerful THC derivatives’ and, by 1972, had decided ‘that the best raw material for making these derivatives was hash-oil’. Trading in large quantities of hashish ‘for fun and profit’ would allow him to continue his experiments.
Stark’s source of hashish was Lebanon and his supplier was Niaf Al-Masri, one of the country’s biggest exporters. Between 1972 and 1975, Stark – who spoke fluent Arabic – frequently stayed with the Al-Masri clan at their estate in Baalbek, a city on the north-eastern edge of the Bekaa Valley, which was the centre of hashish production in Lebanon. Running for 75 miles, the Bekaa Valley had the right climate and type of soil for cultivating cannabis and was predominately populated by Shia Muslims, whose livelihoods largely depended on the crop, which they grew for magnates like Al-Masri. By 1972, there were 965 square miles of cannabis fields in the territory under his control.
Al-Masri was typical of the major players in the Lebanese hashish trade, which had been dominated by big landowners and city merchants for over forty years. Their economic power translated into political power and many of them were members of the Lebanese parliament, the Chamber of Deputies. Al-Masri was the elected representative for his region and virtually untouchable. As a Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent concluded back in 1954, ‘certain of these large traffickers are so influential politically … that one might well state that the Lebanese government is in the narcotics business’. Sporadic attempts to crack down on the growers had a limited impact and were often met with armed resistance. A well-meaning attempt to encourage farmers to cultivate sunflowers instead of cannabis petered out after a few years due to lack of take-up: sunflowers simply weren’t as profitable.
Stark’s alliance with Al-Masri came about thanks to a Brotherhood connection. In the early 1970s, Lebanon accounted for 25% of the world’s hashish. At the time, it could be bought wholesale for as little as $15 a kilo: on the American market, the same amount would fetch $1,500. These kinds of margins caught the attention of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love (as well as the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, which had three agents in Beirut), and it’s estimated that the Brotherhood smuggled around 4,000 kilos of Lebanese hash into the US, quite possibly with Stark’s assistance.
In the summer of 1970, a Brotherhood associate arranged to pick up 1,500 pounds of hashish – worth about $3.5 million – from Al-Masri. The Brother’s plane, which had flown a circuitous route from Canada to an airstrip near Baalbek, was intercepted before take-off by Lebanese customs, who were driven away under a hail of machine-gun fire unleashed by the twenty-four armed men provided by Al-Masri. After this narrow escape, the plane was forced to land on Crete for refuelling and repairs, where it was met by Greek police. The smugglers were arrested and the hashish seized. As an international incident it was hard to ignore and in the Chamber of Deputies Al-Masri was accused of being behind the operation, charges he flatly denied even though there was evidence that his son had met the Americans in a Beirut hotel. With their Brother in a Greek jail, his friends asked for Stark’s help. His lawyer in Paris – the always reliable Sam Goekjian – duly obliged. Hefty bribes were paid to the appropriate individuals and in autumn 1971 the Brother was released. As a thank you, he introduced Stark to Al-Masri.
Aside from this extremely beneficial relationship, Stark claimed that he acted as a financial advisor to Musa Sadr, an Iranian-born Shia cleric who was the spiritual and political leader of his community, and had close ties to the Syrian regime. Based in the Bekaa Valley, Musa Sadr had a private army of around 1,000 men and, though not directly engaged in the hashish business, he did not interfere with it either, while his troops helped defend the valley from intruders. How much Stark contributed to his war-chest is impossible to say. But being on the right side of Sadr offered some further protection and allowed him to move in and out of the Bekaa Valley unmolested.
Otherwise, Stark’s natural habitat was the Casino du Liban in Beirut. The casino and hotel complex – which perched on a hill overlooking the Mediterranean – was granted a gambling licence in 1957 and opened its doors two years later. From then on, it welcomed a steady stream of celebrities and regional leaders – like the Shah of Iran and the King of Jordan – who were treated to top-class food and A-list entertainment. The Casino du Liban was also a favourite meeting place for diplomats, spies, hustlers and crime bosses, making it the perfect environment for someone like Stark. He boasted of brokering deals for the oil-rich sheiks and Saudi royalty who often stayed there.
Thanks to his influential allies, Stark was able to move as much hashish as he could manage for nearly three years. With two accomplices – and the blessing of the local mafia – Stark loaded Al-Masri’s hashish into stolen luxury cars and ferried them from Lebanon to Sicily. Alongside the cars, Stark used yachts and even planes to transport tons of hash into the country. Life was good and, in February 1975, he and Henrietta and Leyla were enjoying a comfortable stay in a palatial suite at the Hotel Baglioni, the oldest and most prestigious hotel in Bologna – with a main lobby and restaurants decorated with frescos and Renaissance paintings – unaware that the local police had recently discovered several stolen high-end cars in a garage and pulled in one of Stark’s smuggling partners, a professional car thief, for questioning. Further enquiries led them to the Hotel Baglioni and Stark’s room, where they found forged documents, Stark’s fake US passport, large sums of cash in numerous currencies, cocaine, morphine base and several kilos of hash.
Throughout, Stark and Henrietta stuck rigidly to their English personas, insisting they were who their passports said they were. But the cops were not convinced that the man they had arrested was in fact William Terence Abbott, so they sent a telex with his photo and details via Interpol to drug squads in London and Washington, who informed them that the man they had in custody was Ronald Stark, wanted fugitive and acid tycoon. Caught red-handed, facing a long spell in jail and the threat of extradition, Stark’s future looked grim. But he wasn’t ready to admit defeat. If there was a way to get himself out of this predicament, he was going to find it.