13
As Lee pieced together a rough biography of the Microdot Gang and the true extent of its activities, its access to foreign markets and intricate financial arrangements, he kept encountering Stark and the Brotherhood. The more he learned, the more convinced he was that they were behind the success of the UK network. Yet the picture Lee had was partial and incomplete. He’d approached the Italian authorities about Stark, but they were reluctant to share any of the evidence they’d gathered. The other potential source of information was the DEA, who proved more accommodating. Lee was given the chance to benefit from its accumulated wisdom and in mid-September 1976 he landed at San Francisco airport, where he was greeted by his hosts, DEA agents who had previously worked on the Brotherhood of Eternal Love investigation. Aside from sharing numerous bottles of whiskey with him, the DEA agents gave Lee access to all the Brotherhood case files and told him about their current operation – code-named Centac X – aimed at a new LSD network that had risen from the ashes of the Brotherhood, drawing on the expertise of several of those who’d avoided capture. They’d busted two of its labs, seized 40 tons of chemicals and equipment, and believed that the gang were getting their LSD crystals from Europe and also dealing in guns.
After stop-overs in San Diego and Houston, Lee headed to Louisiana to track down the man whose information had set him on the trail of the Microdot Gang. Gerald Thomas was not expecting visitors. He’d gone out of his way to make his small apartment a refuge, tucked away in Baton Rouge – where he’d got a regular day job as a chemical engineer – trying to stay as invisible as possible, certain that his former comrades had put a price on his head because of his decision to co-operate with the Canadian authorities. Having served seven months of a fifteen-month sentence, Thomas was released on parole and deported to the US. So far, his past had not caught up with him, yet here was somebody knocking on his door. Breaking into a cold sweat, Thomas answered it and was relieved to find a middle-aged English detective on his doorstep and not a hitman.
Over the next forty-eight hours, Lee patiently probed and prodded Thomas as he told his story: his scientific background; falling under the influence of Huxley and Leary; visits to Millbrook and meeting Solomon and Arnaboldi; and being reunited with them in Majorca. At this point, Thomas lied about his whereabouts between leaving Majorca in 1969 and moving to London in 1972. Thomas claimed he spent the whole period in Baton Rouge, deliberately editing out the fact that he’d made regular trips to the UK; hung out at Solomon’s Grantchester cottage; been introduced to Stark; and was aware of the deal struck between Stark, Solomon and Kemp to produce acid in Paris. Otherwise, he mostly stuck to the truth, adding little to what he’d told the Canadians and the detectives from Scotland Yard.
Nevertheless, Thomas had given Lee some insight into the inner-workings of the gang and its origins, and he left Baton Rouge reasonably satisfied with what he’d learnt. Lee ended his trip at the DEA’s forensic laboratory in Washington, where he was shown examples of LSD that had been sent there for analysis, including some of Kemp’s handiwork, which had been found all across America – in New York, California, Kansas and Illinois – bearing images of pyramids, dragons and Santa Claus.
In deepest Wales, two of Lee’s surveillance team were positioned on top of the mountain overlooking Kemp and Bott’s home waiting for them to leave in their Renault and take one of the roads out of the valley. On their signal, several of their colleagues were poised to enter the cottage grounds and plant a tiny microphone – enclosed in a waterproof tube – in the guttering above the frame of a small window that Kemp and Bott would leave half-open and was ideally placed for picking up their conversations either upstairs or downstairs.
Lee had authorised this mission after a long and fruitless summer during which his team had endured a record-breaking heatwave. Conditions at the Bronwydd farmhouse had not been pleasant. The water in their well dried up and their crude outside toilet was besieged by swarms of flies and bluebottles. With drought setting in, water was also an issue for Kemp and Bott. To maintain their vegetable garden, Kemp had to get it from a river about a mile away, using a truck to cart it back to their thirsty crops. To avoid having to do this in the future, Kemp set about digging his own well, employing a divining rod to locate a decent source of water. Otherwise, they tended their goats and chickens and, aside from Tcharney and his partner, their only visitors were the odd stray hippy stopping to buy their goat’s milk.
This lack of any incriminating activity was praying on Lee’s nerves; hopefully a successfully placed bug would end the monotony and release his officers from purgatory. So when his watchers saw Kemp and Bott drive off in the direction of Aberystwyth, his men got the all-clear and – armed with a ladder – raced to the cottage to execute their plan, which involved running the cable through joints in the stonework leading up to the window. But on closer inspection, they saw that there was no way the cable would fit in the guttering. Determined not to leave empty-handed, one of them took advantage of an open bedroom window, climbed inside and did a sweep of the downstairs, copying down telephone numbers, names and addresses that he found in a diary by the phone.
All things considered, this was a decent result and compensated somewhat for the continued failure of the two hippy cops based near Llanddewi Brefi to attach themselves to Smiles. However, they were getting closer by gaining the confidence of two locals – called Happy and Blue – who did a bit of business with Smiles. Blue was the more significant of the two, and the undercover detectives managed to arrange a hashish deal with him having produced a large lump of it – borrowed from an evidence room – to prove that they were serious. Blue often discussed his relationship with Smiles, but the man himself continued to keep his distance, until one afternoon they spotted him walking beside the road outside Lampeter and offered him a lift. Smiles accepted, but as soon as he sat in the passenger seat he demanded to know if they were undercover cops. Too stunned to speak, one of them burst into nervous laughter and Smiles’ question remained unanswered for the rest of the journey.
As it was, progress was made in Smiles’ case thanks to Martyn Pritchard, who had returned to the West Country after a brief spell in west London researching the drug and party scene and gaining valuable intelligence. Based in Bath, Pritchard discovered that the Chippenham–Frome axis which he’d previously encountered was no longer operating, but in Hankerton, a small village in Wiltshire, a couple of dealers were flogging 1,000 microdots a week plus amphetamines and cannabis. After a few weeks carefully establishing his credentials, Pritchard engineered an invitation to their house at 29 Chapel Lane, an attractive cottage with a substantial garden, which contained a swimming pool, cannabis plants and a chapel. They chatted and smoked for a few hours and Pritchard convinced them to sell him 500 microdots for £160. Then, in an effort to make himself a fixture in their lives, he flirted shamelessly with the sister of one of the dealers – who lived there too – and offered to help renovate the chapel, in exchange for LSD.
On the basis of Pritchard’s regular reports, Lee felt it was worth asking the Home Office if he could tap the dealers’ phone. In the same way the British government officially denied the existence of its intelligence services, it also refused to admit it employed electronic surveillance, a fiction sustained by the fact that any material gathered by it was inadmissible in court. As a result, all requests for it had to be sanctioned by the Home Office first. Permission granted, Lee’s decision paid off handsomely: the two dealers from Hankerton spoke openly about their business and made the error of phoning Smiles to order 3,000 tabs of LSD. Smiles was furious they’d contacted him at all and even more annoyed that it was about such a trivial amount of acid. Rather than let them come and collect it, Smiles told them he’d mail it to a friend who’d deliver it by hand, and warned them to never call him again, under any circumstances.
Though this was an important development, it meant little if Lee couldn’t tie the West Country-to-Wales supply line to Todd in London, something that was proving difficult to do, despite the fact that Todd was under surveillance twenty-four hours a day with officers on foot, on bikes, and in cars and vans following his every move. It didn’t help that Todd spent the summer doing nothing except enjoy himself, eating at his favourite restaurants and shopping at his favourite stores while Lee’s watchers boiled in the heat: inside their van the temperature regularly hit 100 degrees centigrade. They installed electric fans, swallowed salt tablets and pints of water, and stripped down to the bare essentials. Unable to leave the confines of the van, in case they were spotted, they kept an eye on Todd through a small peephole. Finding a decent parking space was a constant headache. Yet so far, they had nothing to show for their efforts.
The obvious way to penetrate behind Todd’s respectable front would be to bug his phone. Though getting Home Office approval wouldn’t be a problem, all monitored calls were fed through a central switchboard at Scotland Yard, increasing the chances that Todd might get to hear about it through the grapevine. Faced with this dilemma, Lee compromised. He asked the Post Office to put a meter on Todd’s phone that recorded the exact time that calls were made or received, clocked their duration and registered the numbers involved. While this was a helpful innovation, Lee was not satisfied with the information it was providing him. He wanted more. Rather than risk exposure by following standard procedure, Lee turned once again to HM Customs & Excise.
Since 1946, HM Customs & Excise had the right to run phone taps and four of its officers occupied a cramped room in a nondescript office block in Chelsea – nicknamed ‘Tinkerbell’ – a former Department of the Environment building that had been redesigned and re-equipped by boffins from the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and housed operatives from MI5, MI6, Special Branch and Scotland Yard. By 1976, the HM Customs & Excise listeners had been absorbed into its Investigations Division and concentrated exclusively on drug trafficking. Less ponderous and slow-footed than the other agencies camped in the building, the dedicated staff of the Drugs A for Alpha team – as they were known – reacted in real time to intercepted conversations, giving Lee up-to-the-minute feedback on Todd’s telephone activities.
By October, the bug was in place and at 11 a.m. on 2 November it paid dividends. Todd called a hi-fi supplier about a piece of stereo equipment he’d sent for repair. While going over details of his order, Todd couldn’t remember which address he’d given them, Earl’s Court or Seymour Road. Once Lee heard that Todd had access to another dwelling, he dispatched a surveillance squad to Seymour Road and had the Post Office put a meter on the phone-line. With no reason, as yet, to believe otherwise, Lee assumed that the house in Hampton Wick was where Todd intended to tablet the acid that Kemp had made in Wales. The thought that they were working separately never occurred to him.
Despite the Operation Julie team’s failure to observe Kemp and Bott doing anything even vaguely criminal, they had succeeded in remaining undetected. As far as Kemp and Bott were concerned, it was safe to go ahead and begin tableting their LSD. During November 1976, they removed thirty moulds and some small perforated boards they’d kept hidden under their compost heap, and assembled a crude tableting machine in their kitchen. Working steadily they could produce 50,000 microdots every three hours. Within a few months, they’d accumulated nearly 400,000 microdots, which Kemp gave to Dr Mark Tcharney, his close neighbour and old Cambridge friend. Tcharney passed 200,000 of them to Solomon, who sold them to Sheni, the Israeli dealer from Amsterdam. In the process, Tcharney also made contact with Sheni and sent another 183,000 his way. At the same time, Tcharney and Kemp began considering the possibility of using Tcharney’s farmhouse as the site for a new lab.
Soon there was enough money in Kemp and Bott’s pockets to justify a trip to their Swiss bank. With £16,000 worth of Dutch currency in her suitcase and the key to their safety-deposit box, Bott arrived in Zurich on 8 February 1977. She checked into the Hotel Plaza and was soon interrupted by Swiss customs police who wanted to inspect her belongings – a random check, nothing personal. Bott held her nerve and told them that the cash belonged to her sister, a medical practitioner. The cops were satisfied with her explanation and left. Rattled by this unexpected intrusion, Bott phoned Kemp that evening. He reassured her that it was probably just a routine search; the main thing was they hadn’t found the key to their safety-deposit box. Around lunchtime the following day, Bott left the hotel, walked to the Kantonel Bank and put the Dutch guilders into the safety-deposit box. Mission complete, she returned to the UK via a deliberately circuitous route, boarding a Calais to Dover ferry two days later.
Another financial matter Kemp and Bott were anxious to resolve was the sale of the Carno manor house, which had been on the market since the summer. While it stood empty there was always the danger that the cops might come snooping round. Arnaboldi had flown over from Spain in October and he and Kemp had met with their estate agent. By mid-January, they had a buyer, who had taken possession of the manor house but not parted with any money for it. Arnaboldi returned to Wales to force the issue. The buyer refused to back down and they had a furious argument that ended when he threatened to call the police. On 12 March, Arnaboldi was back for another try. This time the buyer was more amenable and agreed to settle up within a few days, much to Kemp’s relief. He was looking to terminate his relationship with Arnaboldi because the American kept pestering him to tablet his share of the Carno acid as he lacked the means and the knowledge to do so. Kemp firmly refused and, after they’d finally shaken hands with the buyer, he hoped he’d never have to see Arnaboldi again.
During the last months of 1976, Todd was putting together the lab at Seymour Road so Munro and Cuthbertson could hit the ground running. Posing as Mr Blunt of the fake firm Inter-Organics Ltd, Todd ordered supplies of chemicals and lab equipment from the same firms and companies that he’d bought from before, and made a trip to Switzerland to stock up on ergotamine tartrate. He flew to Bordeaux, picked up a brand-new Volvo from Cuthbertson’s place in the Dordogne, and drove it to Basel and straight to his supplier of choice – Dolder AG. Todd got out of his Volvo and went in the main entrance. Moments later, he re-emerged with two employees and entered a nearby bar. After half an hour, they came out and returned to the office. Todd reappeared almost immediately carrying a bulky brown paper bag, which was packed with ergotamine tartrate. The following day, he boarded a ferry to Dover, having mailed the ergotamine tartrate to his preferred courier company in Paris, which would forward it to the UK for Todd to pick up at a later date.
As soon as Todd had fitted Seymour Road out with what Munro required, the chemist got cracking. With his part of the process complete – and supremely confident that once set in motion the network would run itself – Todd found time to play rugby for the London Scottish third team, until a leg injury sidelined him, and plan a mountaineering expedition to the National Park of Northern California, paying for a climbing friend to go there and survey the terrain for him. In the meantime, Cuthbertson returned from France and started tableting Munro’s acid the minute it was ready, mixing the liquid LSD with calcium lactate to help prepare it for his hungry tableting machine. In total, Munro and Cuthbertson got through 15 kilos of ergotamine tartrate, enough for twenty million tabs, and, once Cuthbertson had accumulated hundreds of thousands of them, he would bury them in a prearranged spot in the countryside near Reading.
A long-term colleague, who lived in the area, dug them up and then reburied them in hidey-holes in Berkshire and Hampshire, where they were collected by the owner of the Last Resort in Fulham, who forwarded them to a contact in Amsterdam for distribution across mainland Europe and Scandinavia. Cuthbertson’s contact gave the remaining microdots directly to Spenceley – who drove down to Reading to collect them in person. Between the end of November and 19 December, Spenceley met Smiles on three separate occasions in three different pubs: the Ram Inn, Lampeter; the Drover’s Arms, which was in a tiny hamlet of eight houses, 6 miles from Llanddewi Brefi; and the Black Lion, Lampeter. During their first rendezvous, Spenceley handed Smiles a plastic shopping bag that had 50,000 microdots concealed inside resealed tins of baby food. The next two times, Spenceley gave him 100,000. In return, Smiles paid Spenceley £170 per 1,000 microdots, then sold them on to dealers in London, Birmingham and Swindon for £200 per 1,000.
Thanks to the fact that Lee had already applied for and obtained taps on both Spenceley and Smiles’ phones, his officers were present to witness each of these handovers. Meanwhile, the undercover hippies – who’d since moved from their camper van to a terraced two-bed stone cottage close to the heart of Llanddewi Brefi – had finally bonded with Smiles after a confrontation in the New Inn. Smiles had once again pointed the finger and accused them of being cops, which prompted one of them to fly into a rage, pin Smiles up against a wall and threaten to cave his teeth in if he ever accused them of that again. Shocked and apologetic, Smiles dropped his defences and invited them to join his life of endless partying. Long nights together would begin with a tour of the area’s pubs and end with smoking sessions at Smiles’ house, which had a whole room dedicated to Hindu gods and a papier-mâché sculpture of Jimi Hendrix upstairs.
By now, the undercover detectives had ceased trying not to inhale. During a booze- and dope-fuelled card game, one of them was passed a chillum loaded with premium-grade hashish. A few puffs sent his head into a whirl and he began to hallucinate; according to him, sounds became distorted, his playing cards ‘appeared huge and out of proportion’ and ‘the Queen of Diamonds was smiling’ at him. Seeking sanctuary in the bathroom, he retched violently into the toilet bowl and watched in amazement as ‘a large dragon’s head’ rose out of it with ‘red eyes and fire spitting forth from its mouth’. The whole experience seemed to last for hours; but when he rejoined his companions they’d barely noticed he’d gone.
Throughout all this socialising, Smiles declined to discuss business with them, until one evening in January. After a few hours drinking in various pubs, they went back to Smiles’, where he offered them high-quality cocaine. Having snorted some lines, Smiles and company headed to a restaurant in Lampeter for a slap-up meal – his treat – while one of the hippy cops stayed behind to babysit Smiles’ daughter. During their high-spirited dinner, Smiles spoke openly about his plan to exchange LSD for cocaine. Meanwhile, back at Smiles’, the child-minding undercover cop was taking advantage of their absence; he searched the premises and found a bag full of cash and a cereal box stuffed with around 1,000 microdots. This was the moment they’d been waiting for and they quickly relayed the news to their boss. But Lee was disturbed by this turn of events. Worried they were getting in too deep, he was also concerned that Smiles’ potential cocaine supplier was an American with heavyweight mafia connections. His men were entering dangerous waters. The evidence against Smiles was already damning enough, so rather than continue to jeopardise his detectives’ safety – and sanity – Lee pulled them out of Llanddewi Brefi.
In London, the HM Customs & Excise Alpha squad kept Lee up to date with Todd’s calls to chemical firms and lab equipment companies. When he headed to Switzerland to obtain ergotamine tartrate, Lee’s men were right behind him. In Hampton Wick, the surveillance team at Seymour Road noticed the arrival of a tall man in a leather jacket whose car was registered to a certain Brian Cuthbertson. Lee ran background checks, assembled a picture of Cuthbertson’s long history with the Microdot Gang and even had French police search his house in the Dordogne, though nothing of consequence was found. Put together, these new developments suggested that Todd might be doing more at Seymour Road than simply tableting Kemp’s acid. This possibility became harder to ignore when Lee and his watchers in Hampton Wick managed to identify the scruffy young man who was frequently spending the night at Seymour Road.
One morning in December, four cars and ten officers were in position ready to tail their target as he left the house and made the five-minute walk to Hampton Wick station. Once inside, he purchased a one-way ticket to Clapham Common. A detective standing behind him in the queue noted the destination and radioed it through to the waiting cars that sped off at full pelt to try and reach Clapham Common before the train did. Lee and one other cop followed the man onto the platform, keeping a discreet distance. The train arrived after ten minutes and pulled into Clapham Common twenty minutes later. The target was the last passenger to get off and exit the station. The police cars, which had negotiated dense south London traffic to arrive with just seconds to spare, disgorged two officers – one who fell in behind their man, the other in front of him – who followed their quarry for half a mile until he reached his flat. As soon as Lee heard what the address was, he realised the person they’d been shadowing was none other than Andy Munro.
The addition of Munro to the equation appeared to confirm that Seymour Road was acting as an acid lab. Yet Lee stuck stubbornly to his theory that Kemp produced and Todd and his crew tableted and supplied: one network, not two. This misconception clouded his judgement and made him view each fresh discovery from that perspective, obscuring the truth and delaying the resolution of the investigation, putting almost intolerable demands on his task-force. At Bronwydd in Wales, morale was low. Winter was doing its worst. The snow was so thick they had to abandon their cars and get a Land Rover. The farmhouse was perpetually cold and damp. Water ran down the walls. Mould was forming. Freezing nights were spent crawling around the perimeter of Tcharney’s land, searching for signs that a new lab was being prepared. In London, the surveillance teams had taken up residence in a three-bedroom house in Hendon – borrowed from the RAF – where eighteen of them shared one small bathroom and kitchen. There weren’t enough beds to go around so one of them slept in a cupboard, another in an alcove under the stairs, and another in the linen cupboard on the landing. Though everybody was given a few days off at Christmas, most of the Operation Julie team were too exhausted to enjoy it.
By then, Lee’s superiors were running out of patience. They wanted action. At a meeting held on 2 February 1977, he was given thirty days to wrap up the operation and make the arrests. But even with the clock ticking, Lee was hesitant, unwilling to strike until the last possible moment. He let his officers follow Bott on her trip to Switzerland, and arranged for the local police to pay her a visit in her hotel room. In Carno, he persuaded the troublesome buyer to let things proceed smoothly and watched Arnaboldi and Kemp complete the sale of the manor house. In London, his detectives observed how Munro and Cuthbertson rarely left the house on Seymour Road anymore, and listened to recorded conversations about thousands of tabs of acid changing hands. But still Lee insisted on waiting, his indecision agonising for his officers, especially those stationed in Hampton Wick, who kept telling their boss that LSD was being manufactured right under their noses.
It was only when Lee was presented with incontrovertible proof that there were two LSD factories that he reluctantly admitted that he was wrong. On 17 March, scientists at a government lab informed him that there were two sorts of microdots in circulation: Kemp’s – which were extremely pure – and Munro’s – which were diluted. But having held off for so long, Lee was in danger of missing the boat altogether. Both Todd and Cuthbertson had booked holidays to the Bahamas and Todd had cancelled the milk deliveries at Seymour Road. On the afternoon of 23 March, the watchers in Hampton Wick tailed Todd – in his Volvo – and Cuthbertson – in a transit van – as they left Seymour Road and parted company, only to come together again on the M4 motorway outside London, and then take the A33 to Reading. On the outskirts of the town, they turned into an industrial estate and approached Smallmead, a municipal rubbish dump. Todd parked his Volvo and joined Cuthbertson in the van as he drove into the tip. Together they unloaded some black plastic bags, piled them in a heap and set fire to them. This drew the attention of the onsite bulldozer operator who sidled over and told them they couldn’t burn garbage there. Todd suggested he might like to use the bulldozer to bury it instead and slipped him £5. The council worker did as he was asked, and Todd and Cuthbertson left in their respective vehicles.
One of the cops – who’d followed them to the dump and witnessed what happened – approached the bulldozer driver and gave him £10 to dig the bags up again. Inside were traces of calcium lactate, tablet moulds, plastic floor covering, protective gloves and an assortment of microdots and domes. The next day, Munro loaded his car with more plastic bags, went to a refuse tip in nearby Kingston and left them there. The cops retrieved the bags, which were full of smashed-up lab equipment. Todd and his colleagues were cleaning house. Within twenty-four hours, there might be nothing left to find. It was time to bring the hammer down.