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Across the Atlantic, one of Solomon’s old haunts was shutting down. Billy Hitchcock – owner of Millbrook, site of Leary’s acid holiday camp – had grown tired of his increasingly degenerate and aimless guests and the unrelenting pressure from the police: the mansion was regularly raided, visitors were routinely stopped and searched, and there were arbitrary arrests. In 1967, Hitchcock boarded up the main house and headed west. Once settled in Sausalito, Hitchcock tapped into the local acid scene, whose key figures had all visited Millbrook at one point or another and included Augustus Owsley Stanley the Third. Owsley was a hippy folk hero, the first person to synthesise high-quality acid outside of a laboratory, and his timing was perfect, making his breakthrough before the various anti-LSD laws came into effect. When they did, Owsley supplied what was needed in greater quantities than ever before.
From an elite Southern family – his grandfather was a senator and his father practised law in Washington – Owsley was a child prodigy who refused to listen to anybody and constantly clashed with authority, flunking out of a series of schools, the army and college before winding up at Berkeley and quitting his studies after two semesters. Keen to explore the meaning and nature of existence, Owsley soon tracked down some LSD, which had a profound effect on him. Ever curious, Owsley wondered how difficult it would be to cook some up. Using the bath tub in his cramped apartment and begging and borrowing the various ingredients he required from science students he knew, Owsley went to work, cranking out batch after batch, his product getting better all the time.
Despite being an erratic salesman (with an aristocrat’s disdain for money, Owsley gave away nearly half his LSD for free) his reputation grew and, in October 1965, he was invited to a party at a secluded ranch owned by Ken Kesey – author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962). Kesey got involved with LSD while attending a prestigious writing course at Stanford University. This all-American boy settled in an artists’ community near campus and signed up to be part of a series of trials, which were being funded by the CIA, on the effects of psychoactive drugs. Based at the local veterans hospital, volunteers were paid $75 a session.
For Kesey, LSD was the undisputed highlight. When the programme ended, Kesey took a job at the hospital as a psychiatric aide, often hallucinating his way through shifts. Out of these experiences came One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Owsley was less than impressed by Kesey; however, he bonded with some of the other guests at Kesey’s party who were members of the Oakland Hells Angels – the most feared and loathed biker gang in America. They’d met Kesey through Hunter S. Thompson, who was writing a book on their shocking exploits. Two Angels in particular – Terry the Tramp and Chocolate George Hendricks – were fascinated by LSD and when they learnt about Owsley’s achievements they offered to help him offload his product.
Glad to be rid of that responsibility, Owsley ramped up his output and started branding his acid with names like Blue Cheer, White Lightning and Pink Floyd, most of which landed on the streets of Haight-Ashbury, setting off a chain reaction that transformed this down-at-heel neighbourhood into the epicentre of hippydom and fertilised the Summer of Love. LSD ceased to be a fringe phenomenon – more talked about than taken – and entered the mainstream of American life. At the same time, Owsley was hired as a sound engineer by the Grateful Dead – the band that invented acid rock – after approaching them at a gig. Owsley travelled with the band, endlessly fussed over their amps and monitors, and dished out his acid wherever they went – including backstage at the legendary Monterey Pop Festival. It was during the band’s East Coast tour, spring 1967, that Owsley visited Millbrook and got pulled over by the cops. Though there was nothing illegal in his vehicle, the contents were seized, including the key to a safety-deposit box lodged in a Manhattan bank that was stuffed with between $100,000 and $200,000 of his LSD profits. Terrified that the law would discover his stash, Owsley begged Hitchcock to make his money disappear. Hitchcock removed the bundles of cash and went to the Bahamas – where he made regular trips on ‘business’ – and put it in an account at the Fiduciary Trust, an investment company run by an old friend of his.
Over the next six months, Owsley and his new apprentice – a Millbrook alumnus and borderline genius who’d built a computer when he was a teenager – managed a series of labs together in obscure locations, abandoning one for another if they sensed the cops were getting too close, and farming out their product to the Hells Angels. But time was running out. Owsley was a marked man; his antics had made him a celebrity. The more his fame grew, the more desperate the FBI and state police were to bring him down. After months of on–off surveillance and several near misses, they sprang into action on 21 December 1967: the lab was raided and Owsley taken into custody. Released on bail and facing a long prison sentence, Owsley cut his losses, reunited with the Grateful Dead, and went back on the road.
Owsley’s assistant slipped the net and contacted Hitchcock about bankrolling a new venture. Hitchcock weighed in with $12,000 and access to the Fiduciary Trust. Next, Hitchcock recruited Nick Sand, a young Brooklyn-born chemist who was capable of replicating Owsley’s magic formula. Sand had spent time at Millbrook and was an old-hand at DIY psychedelics; in his teens, he began brewing up intoxicants and selling them on to street dealers. While at college studying sociology and anthropology, he ran a manufacturing and wholesaling operation, shifting large quantities of his own mescaline and DMT – an incredibly intense and short-lived hallucinogenic – under the cover of a fake perfume company. When the local cops started sniffing round, Sand packed up his stuff and drove to San Francisco. Once Sand had been welcomed on board, Hitchcock took him to the Bahamas so he could make use of the same money laundering service as the others. Next, the team needed to arrange sales and distribution. For this, they contacted an organisation based in Orange County: the Brotherhood of Eternal Love.
Two years earlier, the Street Sweepers were a biker gang operating out of Anaheim and Long Beach, south of Los Angeles. Led by John Griggs, they raided supermarkets, sold cannabis and got into fights. At the time, Griggs was struggling to kick his heroin habit. Having heard stories about LSD’s healing properties, he decided to give it a try. One night, the gang broke into a Hollywood producer’s house and stole his LSD from right under his terrified nose. The gang mounted their machines, headed for the Arizona desert, stopped near Joshua Tree and dropped the acid. By the next morning they had renounced their biker existence. Instead they would dedicate themselves to psychedelic exploration.
For Griggs, the desire to attain a higher state of being – mediated by LSD – was genuine and sincere. He was also sufficiently charismatic to pull other members of the gang along with him and dynamic enough to lead his motley crew further than they’d ever imagined possible. But before Griggs embarked on his quest, he travelled east to sit at Leary’s feet, showing up at Millbrook in the summer of 1966. The two of them bonded instantly. Leary was fascinated by this working-class former high-school wrestling champion turned petty criminal – who’d suddenly seen the light – and gladly gave Griggs his blessing.
Having returned to California, the ex-biker and his clan decided to make their new beliefs official by forming their own religion. Setting up a legal acid church became a possibility after a 1962 test case involving Navajo Indians who’d been arrested because they used peyote during their sacred rituals. However, their appeal against the charges was successful; the judge ruled that peyote was essential to their religion and could be classed as a sacrament. Would this dispensation apply to LSD and cannabis? It was worth a try. The first to succeed were Dr John Aiken and wife who were seeking an ‘appreciation of Transcendental Reality’ aided by mescaline and peyote. In 1963, their Church of the Awakening based in New Mexico opened its door to fellow worshippers, and David Solomon was one of the first to attend their bizarre services.
Griggs and co. took advantage of these rulings and in October 1966 the Brotherhood of Eternal Love became an incorporated religion with legal status and tax breaks. In their founding statement, the Brotherhood vowed to uphold the ‘sacred right of each individual to commune with God in spirit and in truth as it is empirically revealed to him’. Their first ‘church’ was a large stone building in Modjeska Canyon that stood in the shadow of the towering Santiago Peak: the walls were covered with images of Christ, Buddha and a whole range of Hindu gods, and incense burned day and night. Outside, there was an orange grove and land where they cultivated vegetables. Every Wednesday, they gathered the ‘disciples’ together – there were around a hundred regulars and as many as 500 floating members, mostly working class, many of whom had criminal records.
To fund their movement, the Brotherhood wanted to expand their drug-dealing activities. Before this ambition could become a reality, however, the Brotherhood needed to find somewhere else to live. In late December 1966, their ‘church’ was destroyed by fire when some candles set the Christmas tree alight. The Brotherhood shrugged off this setback and moved south to Laguna Beach, home to an artist’s community and a thriving surfer scene – which would provide customers and new recruits. Griggs and his wife moved into a two-bedroom cottage in the canyons that ran inland from the sea and opened the Mystic Arts and Crafts Shop. In the front of their boutique they sold hippy merchandise; in the back they ran their marijuana business. At first, they smuggled grass in from Mexico by truck and boat. But then they discovered hashish (cannabis resin), which was practically unheard of in the US until bedraggled seekers of enlightenment carved out a route from Europe to Afghanistan – home of the finest hashish in the world – and small amounts of it started appearing in southern California.
Aside from loving the smoke, Griggs and co. were excited by the commercial possibilities. Two Brothers were sent to find the source. Travelling via the UK, they drove their beat-up van to Kabul where they hooked up with a local producer, made a bulk purchase and laid the groundwork for regular consignments – which were flown back to the US hidden in the panels of camper vans or in stereo equipment. Within months, they were shipping tons of it into the country to satisfy the huge demand they’d generated, creating a nationwide monopoly in the process. The Brotherhood had quickly morphed from local suppliers to global players – two of them were caught in the sleepy British fishing town of Tilbury moving Afghani hash.
As for LSD – the Brotherhood’s holy sacrament – they continued to score their supplies from Owsley’s Hells Angels connections up north and were actively looking to increase the size of their inventory. What they lacked was know-how, so when Hitchcock – who’d met Griggs at Millbrook – introduced Nick Sand to the Brotherhood, everything went smoothly. An agreement was made to flood the US with their LSD, and Hitchcock opened accounts for Sand and the Brotherhood at the Swiss branches of the Paravicini Bank and the Vontobel Bank, registered in the names of phony corporations, shell companies that consisted of nothing more than a postal address in Lichtenstein.
In an especially constructed and extremely well-hidden lab in Windsor, California, Sand refined and improved Owsley’s recipe: the result was Orange Sunshine, the most famous brand of LSD. Buoyed by their success – Sand had made enough acid for millions of doses – the consortium discussed opening another lab in Hawaii. However, Hitchcock was in no mood to celebrate. He was in the midst of a messy divorce. His financial affairs were being forensically examined by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). During the course of its agent’s investigations into the links between organised crime and the Bahamas, the IRS uncovered Hitchcock’s ties to a conglomerate called the Mary Carter Paint Factories (MCP), a shady company that had begun life as a humble paint manufacturer before being absorbed by the mafia; they used it to take control of a chunk of valuable real estate in the Bahamas that boasted several casinos.
In 1967, MCP began constructing a major hotel complex under the name Resorts International. A year earlier, the Fiduciary Trust – Hitchcock’s preferred acid cash laundry – had invested $612,000 in this new venture, while Hitchcock kicked in $5 million from his own funds. With the whole Resorts International project under scrutiny, Hitchcock did his best to conceal his involvement and shifted his colleagues’ assets out of the Fiduciary Trust and into the same Swiss bank that was looking after the Brotherhood. Nevertheless, Hitchcock knew it was only a matter of time before the IRS started delving into those accounts as well.
Given the trouble he was in, Ronald Stark was not the type of person Hitchcock wanted to be associated with. Stark had arrived in San Francisco having established himself as Europe’s foremost LSD dealer and was looking for a partner to help him break into the US market. Stark was born Ronald Shitsky in April 1938 and grew up on New York’s Depression-scarred streets. In 1953, when he was 15, his father died and his mother changed the family name from Shitsky to Stark. Whatever the nature of his relationship with his father, Stark was at a volatile and vulnerable age and his father’s death knocked the teenager’s world out of joint. Stark hung out with a bad crowd, flirted with trouble and, though he graduated high school, he failed to complete his studies in bio-chemistry at any of the three colleges he attended over a four-and-a-half-year period.
Nevertheless, Stark managed to secure an apparently innocuous civil service desk job, only to sabotage his chances of a stable career by submitting a fraudulent application for another government position. Stark was arrested and charged with a federal crime. He served some of his sentence at Lewisburg Penitentiary, a high security jail that held senior mob figures and their associates: one section of the prison was simply known as ‘the Mafia wing’. Stark was placed with non-violent white-collar criminals: expert con-men, smugglers, embezzlers and tax-dodgers who could teach him all the tricks of their trades. On release, he immediately headed for Europe; though the details are hazy, it appears that he was initially based in Paris – where he got into difficulties over the theft of a rare book – then moved to Italy – probably Rome or Milan – and returned to France in early 1968.
Quite when or how Stark entered the LSD trade is hard to know for sure. Assuming he began as an entry-level dealer – gaining knowledge of the market and his customer base before making the quantum leap into manufacturing – Stark’s supply of LSD probably came from Czechoslovakia. In 1954, the Communist regime in Prague began sponsoring an ambitious and long-running investigation into the therapeutic properties of LSD, based primarily at the Psychiatric Research Clinic and the Research Institute for Human Nutrition, where psychologists conducted thousands of sessions with hundreds of patients over the next twenty years. At first, the Czechs sourced their LSD from the Swiss firm Sandoz, but in 1961, after local chemists had managed to create good-quality acid, they went into production. From 1966, the state-owned company SPOFA began exporting millions of doses. When the laws regulating LSD in the UK, US and much of Europe were tightened, the Communist government – which was always looking for sources of foreign currency – allowed SPOFA to carry on manufacturing for the black market and customers like Stark.
Stark’s success as an acid entrepreneur suggests that he would have prospered whatever field of criminal activity he entered: Stark chose to sell LSD because he believed it was a weapon that could ‘facilitate the overthrow of both the capitalist West and the communist East by inducing altered states of consciousness in millions of people’. Stark was an anarchist, an engine of chaos out to destabilise the status quo and stir up an insurrection that would reduce the old order to ashes, clearing the way for a glorious new dawn. His character shared much with certain anarchists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; rogue individuals primed to attack the system – and all systems were as bad as each other: assassinating an Emperor here, a foreign dignitary there; planting bombs, robbing banks, stirring up trouble; living as fugitives in constant fear of arrest or exile.
Stark walked in their footsteps: he even resembled them with his stocky build, receding brown hair, intense, piercing blue eyes, Mexican bandit moustache and chunky sideburns. Like his nihilistic forebears, Stark was a man of action not words: theory was a dead end. However, there was one book that Stark could not live without: a sci-fi novel by Robert Heinlein, a libertarian who occupied the space where the extreme Right and extreme Left sometimes meet. Since his first story appeared in the legendary pulp magazine Astounding, Heinlein had churned out material of varying quality – from juvenilia to classics like Starship Troopers (1959) and Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) – which frequently tackled controversial themes and ideas. Stark was fascinated by Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966); he referred to it as his ‘revolutionary guidebook’.
Stark was not alone in finding inspiration in sci-fi. It was the defining genre of the hippy movement. It spoke directly to the acid culture. Offering an oblique critique of society, sci-fi dealt with philosophy and theology; imagined alien beings and strange worlds in even stranger galaxies; featured telepathy, telekinesis, teleportation, technological aberrations; and altered states of consciousness. The biggest sci-fi novel of the decade was Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965), which revolved around a spice with psychedelic properties. Herbert took mescaline in 1953 and found it exhilarating – ‘you have grasped the tail of the ultimate tiger’ – and terrifying – ‘you are a shaman, alone and forced to master your own madness’. The success of sci-fi was reinforced by comic books. At Marvel, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created Spiderman, The Incredible Hulk, the Fantastic Four and the X-Men among others. There were big movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes, and the USS Enterprise toured the universe on TV screens. Alleged UFO sightings and encounters with extra-terrestrials multiplied to such an extent that it was necessary to form the Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs of America.
Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is set in the twenty-first century and charts the course of a revolt against the Lunar Authority based on Earth that administers the colony and bleeds it dry. The leader of the insurrection is an aging professor, an anarchist whose vision of personal liberty – ‘I am free no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them, if I find them obnoxious, I break them’ – appealed directly to Stark. The professor’s clandestine rebel network was connected by a system of interlocking cells arranged in an open pyramid to ensure that ‘communications never break down because they run sideways as well as up and down’. Each of these cells had three members each equipped with false IDs, addresses and phone numbers. Only one of them would have contact with the adjoining cell, limiting the risk of betrayal or penetration by enemy agents. Stark adopted this approach, keeping numbers to a minimum and operating on a strictly need-to-know basis.
More significantly, Stark saw the professor’s vision play out during the student uprisings that rippled across Europe, first in Italy where students occupied Turin University for a month at the end of 1967. Their actions unleashed a wave of demonstrations, protests and further occupations at colleges across the country; tens of thousands took part and thousands were arrested during violent confrontations with heavy-handed police. Further confirmation that Heinlein’s professor knew what he was talking about came in Paris during the May 1968 uprisings, during which Stark added LSD to the revolutionary cocktail and took part in the protests around the Sorbonne University.
In 1958, France had 175,000 students; by 1968, there were 530,000 living in cramped sexually segregated dorms, attending overcrowded lectures, enduring a conservative, dated curriculum. Simmering discontent was channelled by a handful of left-wing activists who preferred Trotsky to Stalin; took inspiration from Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba, the Vietcong and various anti-colonial independence movements; and absorbed recent works by French philosophers who had performed an autopsy on consumer capitalism and revealed its barren soulless core. At Nantarre University, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who would become the face of the revolt, fronted a protest. The authorities overreacted. There were more protests. More overreaction. The police charged in. On 6 May, Cohn-Bendit reported to the disciplinary board at the Sorbonne while students gathered outside. The CRS – France’s riot squad – confronted them. There was fighting. The Latin Quarter was in flames. Paving stones were torn up to make barricades. The CRS ramped up the violence. The more beatings they dealt out, the more people took to the streets. On Tuesday 7 May, 25,000 demonstrators, who wanted the police to release all the students they’d arrested, converged on the city centre waving ‘the red flag of communism and the black flag of anarchism’ and marched ‘up the Champs Elysée to the Arc de Triomphe, singing The Internationale’.
Events were unfolding just as Heinlein’s professor predicted. In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, he argued that the most effective way to raise public support was to provoke the state to use disproportionate force against ‘peaceful’ demonstrations. In Paris, a poll of its citizens found that only 6 per cent thought police tactics were justified, while 71 per cent thought the students had been badly treated. Stark also saw the professor’s approach to propaganda adopted by the Parisian rebels. In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the professor orchestrated a guerrilla publicity campaign that covered every available public space with posters and graffiti as his foot-soldiers hit the streets and distributed handbills, pamphlets and one-page tracts. Similar tactics were employed by the students in Paris; art schools were creating 350 different poster designs every day and Stark would have seen walls covered with proverbs and slogans – ‘I am in the service of no-one’, ‘the people will serve themselves’, ‘the barricade blocks the street but opens the way’, ‘I am a Marxist of the Groucho faction’ – and various groups issued dozens of statements and manifestos and handed them out wherever people congregated. Thesis 12 of The Amnesty of The Blind Eye – a leaflet that gained wide circulation – reminded its readers that ‘revolution is neither a luxury nor an art. It is a necessity when every other means has failed’. Another method for mobilising the masses employed by both Heinlein’s professor and the students was agitprop: in Paris, the Revolutionary Committee for Cultural Agitation (CRAC) tried to ‘open a breach in the cultural system of the bourgeoisie’ by occupying theatres, art galleries and cinemas, and filling them with ‘the excluded, the poor and the oppressed’.
For a moment it seemed that the workers might join the students after a general strike on 13 May, but once they were granted pay hikes and better conditions their support fizzled. It also appeared that President De Gaulle might topple from his lofty perch, but he rallied to win handsomely in the June elections. This outcome echoed the downbeat ending of Moon: The Lunar Authority was overthrown only to be replaced by another oppressive system. But Stark was not as pessimistic as Heinlein. Revolution was still in the air and Stark was briefly in Milan when student demonstrations and massive trade union action rocked the Italian state. Back in Paris, he had business to attend to; Stark was going into LSD production for himself and rented several spaces in the Thirteenth Arrondissement to use as labs. This was a major step-up for Stark. In order to accumulate the organic materials, chemicals and specialised lab equipment needed to operate on an industrial scale, he created a legitimate front. Armed with an invented CV that claimed he’d studied at Harvard, the Rockefeller Institute, Bellevue Hospital and Cornell University (and having already set up one fake company – Calbiochem – that was registered in California), Stark bought into a series of firms – some active concerns, others just shells – in countries where due diligence and oversight were slack. Stark had a 40 per cent stake in Inter-Biochemical Ltd, based in Ghana, and holdings in various Nigerian companies.
Having laid the groundwork, Stark tracked down a chemist who had the ability to synthesis laboratory-grade LSD. Tord Svenson – who’d swapped the US for Paris to escape the consequences of a drug bust – was a charming Swedish giant with an easy-going nature and a passion for all things psychedelic. Tord rode motorbikes, lifted weights, kept up with the latest trends in psychology, sociology and politics, and was constantly testing his own boundaries. After graduating from the University of Massachusetts in 1959, Tord got a job with a chemical firm near Boston. In 1965, he joined the higher echelons of East Coast LSD society after being warmly embraced by the citizens of Millbrook. Hitchcock enjoyed his company, while a long-term member of the Millbrook scene and founder of the Neo-American Church (which preached that ‘everyone has the right to expand his consciousness’ using psychedelic drugs) fondly remembered that Tord, despite looking like ‘he’d stepped out of a movie about the Vikings’, was ‘sweet and childlike’.
In his spare time, Tord experimented in his basement with a variety of substances, including a powerful psychedelic that comes from the glands of the Australian Cane Toad. To produce it, Tord ran a weak electric current through a toad, causing it to secrete a toxic hallucinogenic compound that had to be heavily diluted before being safe to drink. On his first visit to Millbrook, Tord brought a vial of it with him. After an hour’s preparatory meditation, he consumed the potion while sitting by a lake. Four hours later, Tord came back to reality. Impressed, the leader of the Neo-American Church gave him an official title: ‘Keeper of the Divine Toad’. Tord’s 9–5 job prevented him from becoming a regular at Millbrook, but in early 1967 he was made redundant after the company he worked for was taken over by New England Nuclear. Tord’s previous boss had ignored pressure from the FBI to have him fired, but the new owners weren’t so charitable. Unemployed and at a loose end, Tord was invited to stay in the medieval style gatehouse that guarded the main entrance to the Millbrook estate. Once there, the casual debauchery and obscene wealth of his host troubled Tord’s conscience and his ‘Scandinavian, populist principles were constantly violated in front of his eyes’.
That autumn, however, Tord was arrested after his Boston home was raided by local police and federal agents who believed Tord was running a ‘psychedelic drug laboratory’. In the basement, they found small quantities of peyote and cannabis. Out on bail, Tord and his Millbrook buddies wondered if they could get the charges dropped on the basis that he was an honorary member of the Neo-American Church and these substances were an essential part of his religion. A lawyer was contacted who agreed to take the case, but wanted $25,000 up front. Though this fee would have barely scratched the surface of Hitchcock’s fortune, he refused to help because the payment wasn’t tax deductible. Left high and dry, Tord pleaded guilty. He was fined $200 and put on probation for three years. This onerous restriction on his freedom was too much to bear; Tord skipped town and headed for Paris. His reputation preceded him, and Stark was quick to take advantage. A deal was done and Tord went to work in Stark’s labs, where he conjured up several kilos of pure LSD, enough for millions of tabs of acid.
During his time in Europe, Stark frequently popped over to New York. With his profits well hidden in the same Swiss banks Billy Hitchcock used to launder his money, Stark was now a wealthy man and behaved accordingly. He drove fast cars, wore expensive clothes, ate at up-scale restaurants, owned a deluxe pad in a swanky building in Greenwich Village with a Picasso hanging on the wall, and indulged in casual sex. According to those who witnessed him in action, Stark slept mostly with women, but occasionally men as well, and participated in threesomes, foursomes and genuine orgies. To fend off questions about how he became rich overnight, Stark followed the bigger the lie principle. Either he was a not-too-distant relative of the Austrian branch of an uber-rich family who lived off his trust fund, or he was the son of a brilliant biochemist who’d inherited a fortune in patents from his father.
Using samples of Tord’s LSD to attract interest, Stark was looking for somebody to sell his European-made acid in the US. Several people pointed him in Hitchcock’s direction. Stark reached out to him through an intermediary and Hitchcock agreed to a meeting, reassured by Stark’s connection to his old friend Tord. Stark arrived in Sausalito, only to be disappointed by Hitchcock’s reaction to his plan. Beset by legal problems and the IRS, Hitchcock heard Stark out, politely declined his offer and told him to get in touch with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. By then, the Brotherhood had moved to Arizona, next to the San Jacinto Mountains, close to Palm Springs: one visitor remembered that ‘their haven lay in a spectacularly beautiful niche … There was a small lake, a rambling ranch house, corrals, a huge barn, tack houses, and cabins’. This move to such an idyllic location was partly practical; the Laguna Beach scene was spinning out of control with mobs of stoned youths fighting running battles with the police and each other, threatening to drag the Brotherhood down with them.
However, by shifting to this new environment, Griggs was also chasing a dream that had been awakened in him by Aldous Huxley’s final novel Island (1962), a detailed portrait of an ideal community based on a remote Pacific island that has a decentralised democratic system, an economy based on alternative technologies and sustainability, extended family networks, tantric sex and a hallucinogenic toadstool that produced a state of ‘luminous bliss’, which could ‘take you to heaven’ or ‘to hell’ or – if you were receptive enough – ‘beyond either of them’. Though Huxley’s utopia is eventually corrupted and despoiled, Griggs was fascinated by the promise it held and hoped to reconstruct the Brotherhood along similar lines; and the Arizona ranch would act as the starting point. A core of Brothers with their partners and children formed a tight circle around Griggs and together they began their journey towards true self-knowledge: one visitor fondly remembered nights in the desert soaring on acid while recreating Native American ceremonies around a campfire and scanning the sky for UFOs.
Before long, they were joined by good old Timothy Leary and family. With Millbrook under siege, Leary had shifted his attention to the West Coast, determined to stay at the head of the rapidly evolving LSD movement. Griggs had befriended Leary’s wayward eldest son and reconnected with his idol when Leary delivered some lectures at California State University Long Beach. But having Leary as a house guest meant that the Brotherhood came under increased scrutiny from the FBI – in addition to mounting harassment from local cops. Trouble followed Leary wherever he went and, over Christmas 1968, he was busted driving through Laguna Canyon with two roach ends in his ashtray. Leary was now facing twenty years behind bars, ten for the joint butts and another ten from the 1965 conviction that had finally caught up with him. The heat was on. Police helicopters buzzed overhead. The roads in and out of the ranch were under surveillance. Then tragedy struck in July 1969: a friend of Leary’s teenage daughter drowned on Brotherhood property. Traces of LSD were found in her system. A raid followed. Five Brothers were arrested on pot charges. Then Griggs took a dose of psilocybin, unaware that it had been cut with strychnine. He fell into a coma and died ten hours later at Idyllwild Hospital.
Nevertheless, when Ronald Stark – acting on the advice he’d been given by Hitchcock – appeared at the Brotherhood ranch, they welcomed him with open arms. Having won their confidence and entertained them with tall tales of his drug-dealing exploits – like smuggling dope from Japan concealed in electrical goods – Stark laid out his grand plan: he would manufacture LSD in Europe for them to sell in the US. Impressed by Stark’s business acumen, international profile and claim to speak ten languages, the Brotherhood instantly agreed to join forces with him. Stark enjoyed their hospitality for a few days then returned to Paris to set the wheels in motion.