14
At 8 p.m. on 25 March 1977, three sets of officers assembled at Seymour Road. One group entered through the French windows, another through a side entrance, while Lee and the others came in through the front door. The reaction to this sudden invasion was mixed. Munro was dazed and confused. Cuthbertson became agitated when his wife – who happened to be there – was also put in handcuffs, announcing her innocence to anyone who’d listen. Todd was calm and apparently unruffled.
Around ten hours later, just before dawn, officers in Wales crashed in on Kemp and Bott. According to one of the arresting officers, Kemp was ‘so sure that he would never be traced he thought we were busting him for having cannabis or something minor like that’ and asked whether he’d be back the next day to feed his animals. It was only when they crossed the Severn Bridge into England that Kemp grasped the gravity of the situation. A few miles up the road from Kemp and Bott, Tcharney was taken into custody. As were Smiles and Spenceley. In Reading, Todd’s key distributor was dragged out of bed. In Hankerton, the duo of dealers were led away, as was the owner of the Last Resort in London. In total, 180 officers raided 87 different addresses and made 120 arrests.
David Solomon, who’d been something of an afterthought during the final stages of Operation Julie, enjoyed another twenty-four hours of freedom before the net closed on him too. Early on Sunday morning, 27 March, Solomon received a call from Wales alerting him to the danger he was in, but he failed to react quickly enough and, two hours later, the police came knocking on his door. Arnaboldi was picked up in Majorca, held for a few days and released; Spain had no extradition treaty with the UK for drug offences. Nevertheless, Arnaboldi immediately quit Deya, flew to Zurich and then onto New York, where DEA agents intercepted him, searched him and found nothing incriminating. Arnaboldi travelled to Miami and disappeared out of sight. As for Sheni, the Israeli dealer, he was nowhere to be found.
The core group of prisoners were taken to Swindon police station where they underwent five days of interrogation. Within twenty-four hours, the Hankerton boys, Spenceley, Smiles and Munro had all admitted to being part of the LSD network going back a number of years. Solomon initially denied any involvement with Kemp but then quickly conceded defeat. Tcharney admitted to his role selling Kemp’s acid to both Solomon and the Israeli Sheni, and offered to take police to the spot on his land where there were 50,000 microdots. Cuthbertson had the same idea as Tcharney, except when he took officers to a clearing in a wood outside Reading to show them the location of a massive stash, he couldn’t remember where he’d buried it. A return visit was arranged, but Cuthbertson was still unable to find the right spot.
At which point Todd entered the picture. So far, he’d refused to discuss anything until he’d spoken with his lawyer, deflecting his interrogator’s questions and not giving an inch. But neither the cops nor Cuthbertson had given up hope of unearthing the LSD; so Lee asked Todd if he wouldn’t mind lending a hand. For all his defiance, Todd realised the hole he was in and was looking for ways to improve the odds in his favour. The next day, 31 March, Todd accompanied Cuthbertson and his escorts back to the woods. After conferring, Todd and Cuthbertson found what they were looking for; 12 inches below ground was a black plastic bag. Inside it were three plastic, cylindrical containers: inside them were 250,000 domes and microdots.
Following close on their heels was Todd’s distributor, the Reading-based Leaf Fielding. When he arrived at the University of Reading in 1966, Fielding had already rebelled against his boarding school education and become an anarchist. In the summer of 1967, he took acid and saw that ‘all creation is a shimmering dance of energy’. Like Solomon, Kemp and Bott, Fielding thought LSD could heal the world’s wounds; it was a ‘tool that could help us see a way back from the brink’. He dropped out, did random jobs and bummed round Europe, getting into a number of drug-related scrapes along the way. Back in Reading, and at a loose end, Fielding was approached by his friend Brian Cuthbertson, who got him to sell Solomon and Todd’s yellow LSD capsules. In 1971, Cuthbertson gave Fielding some of Kemp’s brand-new product, which he thought was ‘excellent’ and ‘the best’ he’d ever had. For the next two years, Fielding tableted the Microdot Gang’s acid. In 1975, Cuthbertson offered him the role of key distributor in Todd’s new network. By then, Fielding had opened Reading Wholefoods – initially as a stall before becoming a shop – and needed the money to keep it afloat. After his arrest, on the fourth day of interrogations, Fielding informed Pritchard about another stash in Caesar’s Wood, stuffed inside two packets of Winalot dog food. Inside each of them were fifty small plastic bags containing a total of over 100,000 microdots and domes.
Bott was also persuaded to give away the whereabouts of some of her hidden treasures – the brown bottles of LSD crystal and the tableting moulds concealed under the compost next to Kemp’s potato patch. During her interrogations, Bott was reserved, polite but unapologetic, as she tried to explain that making LSD ‘was my contribution to society’ because using acid ‘lifts the veil and one sees the truth’. Her faith in the rightness of her cause remained strong even when confronted by the cold reality of prison. From her cell in Bristol, she wrote to Kemp about how ‘all those we reached with our acid, lovingly produced, will feel united in support of truth and that vision we share of mankind living in harmony’. Kemp’s reply to her was similarly defiant: despite the fact that ‘the forces of repression are firmly in control’ he remained convinced that they had ‘started something no one can stop’.
Throughout his interrogations, Kemp had played it tough. Brooding and resentful, he conceded as little ground as possible. According to one of the cops shut in a room with him, Kemp was ‘the hardest man’ he’d ‘ever interviewed’. Kemp’s ‘mind was razor sharp and, although extremely egotistical about his acid manufacture, he constantly analysed the questions put to him and from this built a picture of what the police knew’. Kemp vehemently denied that he was mainly in it for the money and gave the same reasons for his actions as Bott, wishing he could ‘turn on’ the cops so they could see the light. The one time he lost control was when he expressed his feelings about Gerald Thomas, ‘the guy who’s put us all here’: Lee remembered Kemp calling Thomas a ‘bastard’ and a ‘slimy creep’, and muttering darkly that he was ‘a dead man’. When pressed by Lee, Kemp said arrangements had already been made to have Thomas killed – ‘it’s been seen to’ – though claimed he had no direct involvement with organising the planned hit.
Thomas’ betrayal wasn’t the only one to trouble Kemp. After several months in jail, and with plenty of time to ponder their plight, one of the Microdot Gang – whose identity has never been revealed – told their lawyer about the thirteen million microdots worth of LSD crystals under Kemp and Bott’s kitchen floor. To add insult to injury, word reached the police that Kemp had secreted £16,000 in the boot of his car, which friends had subsequently concealed under a stone by a river. However, when the cops located the money, there was only £11,000 left: somebody had stolen £5,000 from Kemp’s nest-egg.
During the weeks that followed the arrests, teams of forensic experts picked over Kemp and Bott’s cottage and 23 Seymour Road. By 3 April, the house in Hampton Wick had been stripped clean of dismantled lab equipment, empty chemical bottles and general rubbish. All that was left to remove was the carpet, whose fibres were still impregnated by the pure liquid LSD that Munro had tipped onto it. Three uniformed officers, who weren’t wearing protective masks or gloves, pulled up the carpet and sealed it in a large polythene sheet. As they did, they each absorbed a mighty dose. The results were instantaneous. Convulsed by hysterical laughter, they decided they’d better get some air and clear their heads, ending up at the Angler’s pub by Teddington Lock, where their pints of beer changed shape – one said his resembled the FA Cup – and every noise was unbearably magnified. Escaping out into the night, they sought the sanctuary of Seymour Road. The ‘pavements felt soft’ like ‘an expensive carpet’, ‘flowers and trees came to life’, and a pile of logs resembled a herd of deer. Back at the house, their buoyant mood turned ugly and, in a blind panic, they called a police surgeon who told them to go straight to Kingston Hospital. Once they’d recovered, their nightmare quickly became a funny story to be endlessly retold, and they were happy to share it with the press: The Liverpool Echo recounted their surreal escapades under the headline ‘Operation Julie and its lighter moments’. However, one of them felt compelled to visit Leaf Fielding in jail and tell him that the whole trip had been ‘a profound experience’ that had made him discover that ‘life was a deeper and more subtle business than he’d imagined’.
Despite the stunning amounts of acid already recovered, Lee was not satisfied and carried on with the investigation. Having put pressure on the prisoners and the Swiss authorities, Lee managed to gain access to their bank accounts and safety-deposit boxes. Aside from 1.2 kilos of ergotamine tartrate, Kemp and Bott had deutschmarks, share certificates and stocks and bonds with a total value of around £55,000. Solomon had accumulated least of all – he had £7,000 in his account. Todd had assets worth £307,000 in the Vontobel bank, at the same branch where Cuthbertson kept roughly £150,000 and a kilo of pure gold. Of special interest to Lee was the fact that Kemp, Bott, Solomon and Todd had signed up with these Swiss banks as early as 1971 when he suspected that they were still connected with Stark and the Brotherhood.
This aspect of the case continued to bother him. Kemp had written two versions of his acid career for Lee, and both skirted round the truth about his partnership with them. Kemp said he was contracted by Stark to work on THC, not LSD, and had no idea that the Brotherhood were involved until he arrived in Paris in 1970, where he watched its chemists in action and learnt enough to branch out on his own after returning to London. But thanks to the appearance of a new witness – a woman Lee referred to as ‘Nancy’ – he knew Kemp was lying to him. Nancy had been part of Solomon’s Grantchester scene in the late 1960s and had met Kemp, Gerald Thomas, Stark and Todd. She knew all about how the Microdot Gang had come together as a result of Solomon’s quest to tablet and sell his portion of the LSD Kemp had made in Paris for Stark and the Brotherhood. Unfortunately for Lee, the Director of Public Prosecutions decided not to use her testimony because it was tainted by her close association with the accused.
By autumn 1977, Lee had run out of rope. As far as his superiors were concerned there was nothing worthwhile to be gained by pursuing these new leads. Operation Julie was brought to a close and the team disbanded. Of the twenty-six members of the squad, almost a quarter resigned. One of those to quit the force was Martyn Pritchard, the hippy cop. Back in uniform and on traffic patrol, he was unable to adjust to such mundane duties after his adventures working undercover: ‘I could never go back to being a copper after those kinds of experiences.’ Taking advantage of the intense media interest in the case, Pritchard did a deal with The Daily Mirror newspaper and co-authored a no-holds barred account of his double-life with one of its journalists. Busted: The Sensational Life-Story of an Undercover Hippie Cop was published in 1978 by Mirror Books and the paper ran a series of feature-length pieces about it; one full-page spread featured a picture of Pritchard in hippy mode, leaning back in a chair, naked from the waist up, with long bedraggled hair and a neatly cropped moustache, staring into the camera as if he was posing for an album cover.
In his conclusion to the book, Pritchard expressed his belief that marijuana was a benign drug – ‘in my opinion, the guy with a little cannabis who goes home, listens to his stereo music and turns on with a joint, isn’t doing any harm’ – but stopped short of recommending decriminalisation. Though proud of what Julie had achieved, he acknowledged that ‘there must be quite a few people on the fringe of the distribution network that got away’ and the operation had been a ‘failure’ where ‘the money’ was concerned. His boss felt the same way. Like Pritchard, Lee could see no future for himself in the force. After being denied a promotion, he resigned in January 1978 – barely a week before the Microdot Gang trial began – and teamed up with a journalist from The Daily Express. The book they produced together – Operation Julie: How the Undercover Police Team Smashed the World’s Greatest Drug Ring – was an incredibly detailed and thorough account of the investigation, which covered every twist and turn, every advance and every false step, leaving the reader in no doubt that Lee thought it had ended prematurely, with much still unknown.
Lee’s misgivings, however, were not merely confined to procedural issues. He was suffering from a deeper malaise. True, he’d taken a vast quantity of drugs out of circulation, but he’d also locked up a group of phenomenally bright people who no doubt would have contributed to society if they hadn’t been seduced by LSD. And what about acid? Should it really be treated in the same way as heroin and cocaine? Or did it have a useful function to perform? Seeking answers, Lee spent an evening with the renowned psychiatrist R.D. Laing, long-term friend of Solomon and, for one day only, Stark’s analyst. Lee and a colleague were due to arrive at Laing’s London home at 7 p.m. They showed up three hours late, leaving ample time for Laing, his son and Steve Abrams – formerly of SOMA and Hilton Hall – to work themselves into a lather; Laing’s son remembered that ‘paranoia was the order of the day’.
This state of high anxiety was largely due to Laing’s recent encounter with the police. In the spring of 1976, they arrested him for possession of around one hundred single-dose bottles of Czech LSD. Much to Laing’s relief, the case was thrown out of court because the acid had been legitimately acquired back when he had a licence to use it for clinical purposes. Even so, the prospect of entertaining the lead detective from Operation Julie – who had considered interviewing Laing about his relationship with Solomon – gave them all the jitters.
Over the course of a night’s hard drinking, Lee and Laing debated the pros and cons of LSD. According to Laing’s son, ‘the intricacies of Operation Julie were laid out from Inspector Lee’s side’ while Laing described ‘the psychoanalytical theories behind the use of LSD’. When Lee asked Laing to explain the meaning of the word ‘ego’, Laing came up with twenty-nine different definitions. Unable to match the cop’s stamina and capacity to soak up alcohol, Laing puked at 4 a.m. By 6 a.m., he was lying flat on the floor. Despite this rather undignified end to their discussion, Laing’s son was left with the impression that ‘Operation Julie had somehow changed Lee’s perspective on the world’.
As far as David Solomon was concerned, the trial of the Microdot Gang was not only about their future, but also about the survival of the LSD counter-culture he’d been part of for over twenty years. Realising that public opinion would play a crucial part in the outcome, Solomon did his best to mobilise support. There was talk of a book about the case and efforts to organise a defence fund. On 29 April 1977, Solomon wrote to the editor of the Ladbroke Grove-based Homegrown, which billed itself as ‘Europe’s first dope magazine’. Solomon had met the editor to talk about making a contribution to its maiden issue just two weeks before he was arrested. In his letter, Solomon issued a plea for help. Given the immeasurable debt ‘famous pop artists and groups’ like Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles owed to LSD, it was ‘morally unthinkable’ for them not to rally round and make ‘sizeable contributions to help pay our immense legal bills and keep our families fed and housed’.
Though Solomon could count on Homegrown to do what it could, the groundswell of protest he’d hoped for did not materialise, and the former champions of LSD were nowhere to be seen. Instead, the tone of much of the public debate was dictated by a nakedly hostile press, both national and local. During the week that followed the arrests, The Daily Mirror came out all guns blazing. On 30 March, it claimed that £10 million worth of LSD had been recovered so far, while two days earlier it had reminded its readers about the terrible things acid was capable of: ‘LSD users have turned killer under the spell of a bad trip. Some thought they could fly and jumped from windows and roofs. Others have seen their friends as horrific monsters and killed them.’
The Microdot Gang trial began on 12 January 1978 at Bristol Crown Court and, as Solomon predicted, LSD joined the defendants in the dock. Kemp and Bott spoke passionately about its virtues and emphasised the importance to them of producing the finest acid possible: Bott said that Kemp ‘wanted his stuff to be not only good but the best’. This line of argument was bolstered by a witness from the drug charity Release, who agreed that the purity of Kemp’s microdots reduced the risk of bad trips. The head of the Drug Dependency Unit at University College London stated that it was absurd that LSD had the same Class A status as heroin and coke, given it was probably less harmful than alcohol or cigarettes.
But the aging judge – for whom the drug culture was an utter mystery that frightened and baffled him – would not even consider the possibility that LSD might have any positive effects, and his grave disposition and rigid attitudes dominated proceedings. The oppressive atmosphere in court was captured by a writer from the underground paper The International Times. Noting how the crown prosecutor ‘sometimes glances nervously at the dock as if expecting the prisoners to levitate’, his article compared proceedings to an ‘old witchcraft trial’ where defendants were accused of flying, ‘intercourse with the Devil’ and putting ‘spells on people’. Like them, the Microdot Gang were being persecuted for having ‘a different belief system’ and committing the crime of ‘heresy’.
Destroying Bott’s credibility was an important part of the prosecution’s strategy as she had chosen to plead not guilty – along with Cuthbertson and Spenceley. This was cause for concern. The case against her was weak. She was guilty of knowing what her life-partner was doing and supporting him throughout, yet her hands-on involvement was limited to driving him back and forth to his manor house lab. Had she shown regret or remorse, or put the blame squarely on Kemp’s shoulders, she might have received a more sympathetic hearing. As it was, Bott stood her ground and refused to play the victim. Even so, there was the fear that her unblemished record as a doctor, serving her community, would play in her favour. The prosecutor warned the jury that they had ‘to remember she is no ordinary doctor’ like the one ‘you go to consult when you’re ill’, but a ‘person with no moral scruples’.
The jury agreed and found her guilty, much to the press’s delight. The Belfast Telegraph ran with ‘Drugs Plot Doctor Found Guilty’. The Liverpool Echo – which referred to her as a ‘varsity girl’ – carried the headline ‘The Final Trip: Doctor Bott Guilty’. The Daily Mirror called her ‘Doctor Chick’, drew attention to the ‘£45,000 in cash and bonds’ in her Swiss safety-deposit box and featured a picture of her face next to photos of the Carno manor house and Seymour Road, alongside yet another article about ‘The Horrors of LSD’, which claimed that ‘takers have been known to … chew a hand to the bone believing it was an orange’ or ‘truss and prepare a baby for roasting, believing it was an oven ready chicken’.
Stewing in his cell in Horfield Prison, Kemp decided to fight back. He wrote a fifty-three-page statement that he intended to read out in court, until his lawyer persuaded him not to. Instead, he sent his manuscript to The Cambrian News and, as the trial reached its climax, the paper published an in-depth article – ‘Microdoctrine – The Beliefs Behind Kemp’s LSD’ – summarising his arguments and quoting them at length. The accusation that acid had made him a rich man had got under his skin and he addressed it head on: ‘I have no hidden stash of LSD money, I have no secret bank accounts, in any foreign country, no valuable assets, such as jewellery, coins or stamps. I own no property nor even a car’ – declining to mention that the majority of his assets were in Bott’s name. He conceded that some people did suffer an adverse reaction to LSD but claimed he’d never seen it happen to anyone he knew. He described the personal benefits of taking LSD – it ‘helps one realise that happiness is a state of mind’ and acts as ‘a signpost pointing a way to self-discovery’ – and emphasised the role it could play in raising awareness about the ecological crisis facing humanity and the ‘urgently necessary’ changes that had to be made ‘if we are to have any chance of solving the pressing problems of the modern world’.
The article came out on the same day as the defendants were sentenced. In his summing up on 8 March 1978, the judge reserved his harshest comments for Kemp, scolding him for wasting his ‘considerable talent’ on ‘a false ideal’. Todd had an easier ride as the judge could at least understand his motivation, which rested on the fact that dealing acid was ‘an easy way to make large sums of money’. As for Munro, the judge thought it was ‘a disaster’ that he had ‘allowed himself to become enmeshed in crime’. More generally, he regretted having to punish ‘people with excellent characters’ and ‘excellent qualifications’ with ‘severe sentences’ that would place them in the same penal category as murderers, armed robbers and rapists. But he did anyway. Kemp and Todd were given thirteen years; Cuthbertson got eleven; Solomon, Munro and Spenceley each received ten; Fielding and Smiles, eight apiece.
The press reacted with unrestrained glee. The Daily Mirror thought ‘the country should be celebrating’, not least because the Microdot Gang had been stopped from realising its ‘crazy ambition’ to ‘blow a million minds’ by dumping LSD into Birmingham’s water supply. Other papers concentrated on Kemp and Bott. The Daily Express published excerpts from their letters. The Coventry Evening Telegraph’s coverage focused on ‘The Lovers who Plied Drugs’, while The Liverpool Echo had several pages devoted to the ‘Two Lovers and their £1m Drugs Racket’ that described their student days together at Liverpool University, how they got sucked into taking drugs, and Kemp’s early failed attempt to make acid ‘in the basement of a Liverpool house’.
The next day, Bott stole the headlines. She was the last defendant to hear their fate. Any hopes of leniency were dashed when the judge declared that she only had herself to blame for the position she was in; Bott was ‘a clear-headed and very sensible woman’ who could have ‘kept out’ of ‘the conspiracy’ if she’d ‘wished to do so’. For her minimal participation in the Microdot Gang, the judge sentenced Bott to nine years in prison.
A few months after the trial ended, Homegrown magazine brought out its third edition. Alongside pieces about the Smokeybears – a legalise cannabis direct action group – UFOs and the US Army’s secret LSD experiments, the issue’s lead article – ‘The Acid Alchemist Affair’ – was all about the Microdot Gang. Accurate and well-balanced, it pointed out that the Julie investigation relied on the deployment of barely legal electronic surveillance, observed how the issue of police corruption had been conveniently ignored and asked whether a criminal court was the appropriate venue for passing judgement on LSD, a substance that ‘has its roots in the metaphysical, in the spiritual’ and ‘moves mysteriously in the caverns of the mind’. After all, if acid really was ‘the key to the Doors of Perception’ then it was a matter for philosophers and theologians, not lawyers and politicians.
Homegrown’s point of view was largely ignored as the popular press continued to get mileage out of the case. A battle had been won but the war on drugs was not over. There were alarmist articles about a new LSD threat coming from America, and in the autumn of 1978 there was a resurgence of interest in the case to coincide with the publication of Lee and Pritchard’s books. Lee’s Operation Julie was promoted by his sponsor – The Daily Express – and was widely reviewed. The Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror gave Pritchard’s Busted acres of space: one feature focused on the ‘elusive’, ‘greedy’ and ‘cunning’ Todd, who acted as the network’s ‘hidden brain’. Almost a year later – in September 1979 – the Microdot Gang were in the news again. Two of them – probably Todd and Cuthbertson – had asked to see officers from Operation Countryman, a major enquiry into corruption within the Metropolitan Police. Though the pair had nothing to say that directly related to the Countrymen investigation (and a police spokesman told the press that ‘there was no suggestion’ that any of the Julie team were corrupt), the prisoners did direct them to another hoard of buried LSD, the biggest so far: one million tabs in a large glass jar buried in a wood near Bedford.
For decades after this, the belief persisted that there were still hundreds of thousands of the gang’s microdots waiting patiently to be discovered. In the meantime, anybody who wanted to copy Kemp’s world-beating recipe for LSD could refer to the widely reported testimony given by a government forensic scientist during the trial. On the stand, the expert listed the ingredients Kemp used, explained how he went about synthesising them together to manufacture his unique acid and confirmed that ‘it was of a very high quality’.