6
Back in London, Kemp was looking to make use of the knowledge he’d gained in Paris and build an LSD network that followed the blueprint designed by Stark, Billy Hitchcock, Nick Sand and the Brotherhood. Solomon, though bruised from his encounters with Stark, had learnt from him as well and was thinking along the same lines as Kemp. Their partnership was back on, but this time the roles were reversed. Kemp was no longer Solomon’s pupil; now he was behind the wheel, with Solomon in the passenger seat. To lay their hands on the required amounts of the all-important ergotamine tartrate, Solomon invented a company called Inter-Dominion Associates, gave it a postal address in central London and wrote to various chemical traders under an assumed name. A major West German supplier – Dr Rentschler of Lampheim – agreed to his request and in June 1971 Solomon drove there, picked up a kilo of ergotamine tartrate and took it across the border into Switzerland, where he handed it over to Kemp.
Like their former associates, Kemp and Solomon took advantage of the Swiss banking system to protect their assets. Both of them signed up with the Swiss Bank Corporation, a syndicate of privately owned banks with branches across the country. Established in the nineteenth century, it slowly expanded the number of outlets it owned and managed to prosper during the Second World War thanks to its willingness to handle Nazi gold. By 1971, it had quadrupled in size with dozens of branches in Switzerland and a significant presence in the US. At the Swiss Bank Corporation’s Geneva branch, Kemp acquired safety-deposit box no. 4079 and stored all the ergotamine tartrate in it, while Solomon opened an account at the corporation’s Fribourg branch. In November 1971, Kemp and Bott got themselves a safety-deposit box at the Kantonel Bank – a state-owned conglomerate – where she kept the key to Kemp’s other treasure chest.
Having nailed down this end of the operation, Kemp was left to decide where best to install his acid labs. With Bott still in the Isle of Man completing her medical training, Kemp was in no hurry to settle down anywhere permanently. In May of that year, he was officially registered as living at an address in Bristol with a friend of Solomon, but he was also renting out a number of small flats in Ladbroke Grove, west London, on short leases, setting up temporary labs for quick production runs, then packing away all his kit and leaving it in storage, ready for the next location.
As Kemp’s first batches of LSD began to appear, all that was missing was somebody to deal with tableting and distribution. Solomon had just the man: an old acquaintance from Cambridge, Henry Barclay Todd, a solidly built, physically imposing man who’d given LSD to the geneticist Francis Crick and had a crush on Solomon’s daughter. Solomon had turned to Todd for assistance when he was trying to offload the bulk consignment of Kemp’s Paris-made LSD that was his share of the deal with Stark and the Brotherhood. Freaked out by having so much acid in his possession and thwarted in his attempts to conceal it in the grounds of Hilton Hall, Solomon ended up burying it in the gardens of his Grantchester cottage. This was only meant to be a temporary measure, however, as the thought of all that LSD resting on his property did little to ease his frayed nerves. Yet if it wasn’t going to sit there indefinitely, he had to find a route to market. Solomon was well aware that Todd had done a reasonable bit of dealing – hashish mainly – and seemed to know what he was doing. More importantly, Todd had a thick skin, survivor’s instinct and feral cunning that made him well suited for the task ahead. When Solomon approached him, Todd was at a loose end and happy to lend a hand. Their first move was to shift the acid a safe distance from the cottage. They rented the ground floor flat in the old vicarage of a sleepy Hertfordshire village under the name Robert Greenwood-High, and hid the LSD under the floorboards. The next step was to get it measured out into doses. Unable to obtain any degree of precision with basic kitchen scales, Solomon persuaded a student he knew to use the university science department’s weighing machine instead.
Once the acid had been measured out, they had to convert it into tablet form. At first Solomon did it by hand, inserting the LSD into capsules one at a time. Aside from being a painstakingly slow process, Solomon kept spilling the contents and triggering hallucinations that persisted for days on end. Todd intervened and they started adding calcium lactate, a white powder, to the acid after it was dissolved in a bowl of water, stirring the ingredients together with a glass rod to form a doughy paste that was much easier to get into the capsules. As time went on and the funds available to him increased, Todd was able to procure a factory-standard pharmaceutical industry tableting machine that dramatically increased productivity. The LSD paste was squeezed into a mould that compressed it into the shape of a flat tile, which was then placed on the base plate of the tableting machine and sliced into twenty equal strips by its nineteen parallel razor blades. After adjusting the angle of the operating lever, the action was repeated and repeated until each slab was subdivided into hundreds of tabs.
Though he was pleased with the results, Todd had no intention of wasting his time on this laborious job, so he hired a friend from Reading to manage the tableting, who then brought in several others to lighten the load. With his Reading associate, Todd also recruited a handful of dealers to help with distribution. From the start, he was extremely security conscious, insisting on strict rules of engagement similar to those employed by secret agents. One of Todd’s tableting team remembered him giving instructions about ‘hiding places, precautionary procedures, handovers, fall-back arrangements’ and ‘emergency signals’. There was to be no chatting on the phone except in code. If Todd needed to see any of them in person, they always met at the Maids of Honour Teashop opposite Kew Gardens, which according to him had ‘amazing cakes and scones’.
Once Solomon’s legacy had finally been dispersed, he and Todd had netted £50,000. In the process, Todd had developed a network capable of shifting as much acid as Kemp could make. He’d more than proved his worth, yet Kemp had reservations about involving Todd in the new operation because his commitment to the LSD trade was not driven by a desire for revolution. Todd did not share any of the ideological, philosophical or spiritual ideas that animated the counter-culture; he harboured no illusions about LSD leading humanity into the promised land and had zero interest in politics. To him, drugs were fun, and dealing them seemed an easy way to make money.
What Todd did share with his counterparts was the same sense of rootlessness and restlessness and a desire to reject the values and habits of their parents’ generation and throw off the dull monochrome world they’d inhabited for something more colourful and exciting. Todd’s hunger for travel and adventure may have been more urgent than others because of his experience of growing up in South East Asia. Though Todd was born in Dundee in 1945, his father was an RAF squadron leader stationed in Malaysia and Singapore during the last days of empire and Todd was out there until the mid-1950s when the family returned to Scotland. This dramatic change of environment – from jungle heat to slate grey skies – must have been a shock to Todd’s system, and left him with lingering memories of the different world he’d inhabited during his formative years.
Todd then attended Dundee Grammar School, where he was an able, if not exceptional, pupil and performed well on the rugby field. Cut loose at 18, he passed up the opportunity to go to university and worked as a hospital porter until he’d scraped together enough funds to escape to Paris and become a fashion photographer. Exactly what that amounted to is unclear; there is no surviving evidence to suggest he spent any time behind a camera. After two years sampling the city’s delights, Todd landed back in the UK with no plan and no prospects. Settling near Oxford – which by then had a thriving drug culture – Todd was arrested in November 1966 for theft and false pretences after he was caught using dodgy cheques. Todd was convicted and did over a year inside. After being released in February 1968, he somehow talked himself into a job at an accountancy firm, where he knuckled down for six months before hitting the road again. This time he headed for Prague to stay with friends.
At first glance, Todd’s choice of destination seems odd given the situation in Czechoslovakia at the time, only a matter of months after the Prague Spring, when the outburst of optimism and democratic energy that greeted a new administration determined to find an alternative to the restrictions of Stalinism and the excesses of capitalism was extinguished by the Soviet army. When the smoke cleared, its leaders were replaced by stooges hand-picked by Moscow who proceeded to purge any remnants of resistance and smother any murmurs of dissent. Yet the country did still have one major attraction for somebody like Todd: its state-sponsored LSD factories. Whether or not Todd returned to the UK in January 1969 with a suitcase laden with acid is impossible to say, but he did immediately drift towards Cambridge and into Solomon’s orbit. While doing some light dealing, Todd took on another regular job, this time as a systems analyst at a London firm. As before, the luxury of a steady salary lost its appeal fairly quickly and Todd made a definitive break from 9–5 wage labour when he and eight others were arrested in Cheltenham for possession of cannabis. Though they were all acquitted, the whole incident marked the point at which Todd committed to an outlaw existence, and soon after this he teamed up with Solomon.
Given how efficiently Todd took the reins from Solomon and steered their enterprise to a satisfactory conclusion, Kemp was impressed enough to put his doubts about Todd’s character to one side and bring him into the Microdot Gang. Nevertheless, Kemp remained wary of Todd and kept a close eye on him: Todd’s foreign travels and petty criminal mind-set, allied to his background and temperament, gave him the air of one of those refugees from the British class system who lurked on the fringes of spy novels. Useful but not to be trusted.
When Stark settled on Belgium as the next location for an acid lab he embarked on a project that surpassed anything he’d attempted before in terms of ambition and sophistication. Instead of occupying a disused factory space or dingy warehouse, Stark inserted his new venture into the heart of an extremely prestigious, high-profile experiment in urban planning and design. In 1968, one of Belgium’s oldest and most venerable universities became caught up in a wider dispute over national identity and language that pitted Flemish speakers against French speakers. The previously mixed University of Leuven split in two; the Flemish contingent stayed put while the French faculty decided to relaunch itself as the Louvaine-la-Neuve University, and drew up plans for a new campus that would include a railway station and a shopping mall. The aim was to realise a utopian vision of integrated living in a harmonious environment that featured futuristic concrete and glass structures arranged around open plazas and perfectly groomed lawns, linked by pedestrian pathways lined with symmetrically arranged trees; like something out of a sci-fi novel.
The university purchased a plot of farmland nearly 20 miles south-east of Brussels and work began in 1970. The first area completed was the Science Park. Built to encourage co-operation between industry and academia, it was a large zone where innovative tech companies could rent out premises. It was the perfect spot for Stark’s new enterprise; nobody would be paying much attention to what Stark was doing tucked away in the Science Park while the rest of the campus was still under construction. Stark took possession of a villa there in the spring of 1971 and christened it the Laboratoire Le Clocheton. To pull off this coup, Stark applied everything he knew about blurring the line between his legitimate businesses and his acid assembly lines, and exploited connections he’d been nurturing ever since he’d begun building a portfolio of companies – real and fake. Back when he was preparing the ground for his very first Paris lab – set up in 1968 – Stark created the Inter-Biochemical Company, a legit firm based in Ghana. During his stay there, Stark befriended an economic advisor at the US embassy in Accra. By the time Stark was moving into Belgium, the diplomat was based in London and did everything in his power to grease the wheels and ensure that his colleagues in Brussels lent Stark their support.
Another US expat seduced by Stark was the head of an electrical goods company, who had a son who was employed by a New York law firm, Surrey, Karasik and Morse. If Stark was going to push through the Belgian deal he needed proper representation and the East Coast lawyers recommended their man in Paris, Sam Goekjian, who, like the rest of them, was totally in the dark about Stark’s illegal activities. Aside from using Goekjian to launder LSD money by investing it in a Panamanian paper company, Stark got him to process all the contracts and paperwork relating to the Laboratoire Le Clocheton and make a $300,000 down-payment to cover the associated costs.
From the start, Stark ran the lab as a commercial concern, exporting small amounts of chemicals to Switzerland, and hired the necessary staff by advertising in a local trade magazine. They occupied Le Clocheton during normal working hours, but once they’d gone home Tord Svenson moved in. With the labs all to himself, the Swedish alchemist would work straight through the night, clocking off before the day shift arrived. To make sure that Tord could take full advantage of the facilities, Stark amassed an unprecedented 30 kilos of ergotamine tartrate via his string of existing businesses and contacts. Nevertheless, by the summer of 1972, and a year into production, stocks of it were running low and his supply lines were exhausted. So Stark turned to the same West German company that Solomon and Kemp had recently done business with.
This may have been no more than a coincidence, except for the fact that when Stark ordered the ergotamine tartrate he masqueraded as the English owner of an English outfit – the Amalgamated Pharmaceutical Company. This was registered at two London postal addresses: one in Holborn, which was identical to the one Solomon adopted when he dealt with the West German supplier; the other in Holland Park, just 500 yards away from one of the flats Kemp was renting. Though Kemp had previously declined an offer from Stark to work for him in Belgium, it seems that Stark had not completely lost touch with his former colleagues. Stark went on to buy 8 kilos of ergotamine tartrate from the West Germans, plenty to keep Tord busy until Laboratoire Le Clocheton was wound down later that year. Over the course of its existence, it had churned out a mind-boggling 20 kilos of LSD, enough for fifty million doses. It was the largest illegal acid operation ever mounted. It dwarfed the competition and put its predecessors in the shade: Stark had truly become the acid king.
On his regular trips to Switzerland, Solomon was reunited with his former sparring partner Dr Timothy Leary. Once the law caught up with the acid guru and he’d been dubbed America’s ‘most dangerous man’ by President Nixon, Leary was convicted on charges related to his two earlier drug arrests and in March 1970 he was sentenced to twenty years. After being shunted through the system, Leary wound up at California Men’s Colony, a minimum-security jail surrounded by wire fencing and home to mostly aging career criminals. Treated with kid gloves by the staff and generally respected by his fellow inmates, Leary took music classes every afternoon – the electric organ and the flute – had access to a typewriter, got sacks of fan mail and received visitors who slipped him LSD. Life was pretty congenial, but Leary thought it was his duty to escape, and the Brotherhood – who’d already contributed to his defence fund – thought it was their duty to free their high priest. Though the Brotherhood had plenty of experience forging passports and other forms of ID, their area of expertise was moving contraband, not people, especially not ones as famous as Leary. So they turned to a group with the necessary know-how: America’s most famous left-wing terrorists, the Weathermen.
In the late autumn of 1969, with the country ablaze, the war in Vietnam a bloody open wound and the state resorting to ever more ruthless repression, a core of around a dozen prominent radicals, with a history of student activism behind them, came to the conclusion that mass protest was redundant – a blunt weapon – and the movement they’d helped construct was incapable of delivering on its revolutionary promise. It was time to go underground, adopt guerrilla tactics and start planning a campaign of bomb and arson attacks. Given that most of the Weathermen were well-educated, solidly middle-class citizens and not urban warriors, the group embarked on a programme of reconditioning in an effort to dismantle learned behaviours and bourgeois attitudes, to harden their hearts and sacrifice their identities to the collective will. The group was all, the individual nothing. Egos were to be left outside the door. Everybody was encouraged to have sex with everybody else; long-term partnerships wilted in the heat generated by orchestrated free love. Looking back, one senior member concluded that this process had transformed them into ‘a classic cult’.
During these rituals, the Weathermen used LSD to break down the barriers between them. Acid was also employed during intense sessions of self-criticism as a way of weeding out weak candidates and exposing FBI undercover agents looking to infiltrate the group. The only FBI mole who ever managed to join the Weathermen remembered them subjecting him to a harrowing cross-examination, which he only survived because he concealed the LSD tab they’d given him in his hand rather than swallow it. Given the importance of acid to the group, it was essential to have a reliable source and the Weathermen relied on their connections to prominent members of the Brotherhood to keep them supplied with Nick Sand’s Orange Sunshine. This meant that when the Brotherhood contacted them about Leary – via a radical lawyer who knew both parties – they were guaranteed a sympathetic hearing.
By then, the Weathermen had become national celebrities thanks to a devastating accident: on 6 March 1970, the Greenwich Village townhouse that some of them were staying in was flattened when the stockpile of explosives in the basement spontaneously detonated, reducing the building to rubble and leaving three of them dead. Though the remnants of the New York chapter managed to pull off one spectacular attack that June – igniting a dozen sticks of dynamite in the New York City Police HQ and injuring seven people – most of the nationwide network evaporated. The founding members regrouped in San Francisco and were licking their wounds and pondering their next move when the Brotherhood – who were still supplying LSD to at least one of the group – offered them $25,000 to liberate Leary. The Weathermen took the job: not only would the cash come in useful, it was a chance to raise their profile and make the US government look stupid.
At around 9 p.m. on Saturday 12 September, Leary crept out onto the floodlit prison yard, scampered across it, scaled a telegraph pole, clasped the wires between his gloved hands and bare feet, and dragged himself along, pausing to rest his aching limbs and wait for what seemed like an eternity as a patrol car idled nearby. Finally over the outer fence, he dropped down, sprained his ankle and hobbled about a quarter of a mile to the highway, where he was picked up by two young women, who deposited him in the backseat of their car and handed him new identity papers, a change of clothing and some hair dye. About 150 miles south of San Luis Obispo, the car pulled in at a gas station and Leary was transferred to a camper van being driven by a veteran Bay Area communist, accompanied by a single mother and her 8-year-old son. Joined by several other vehicles, they proceeded in convoy to an apartment in San Jose, where Leary spent the night. Forty-eight hours later, following another change-over at a campsite near Sacramento, Leary finally arrived at his destination – a secluded farmhouse near Seattle – where he was greeted by senior Weathermen.
Together they issued a communiqué in which the Weathermen defended their actions on the basis that Leary ‘was held against his will and against the will of millions of kids in this country’ and the substances he promoted were ‘like the herbs and cactus and mushrooms of the American Indians’ and would ‘help us make a future world where it will be possible to live in peace’. Leary adopted a more aggressive tone as he accused the US government of being ‘an instrument of total lethal evil’ and warned that ‘the hour is late’ and the only option remaining was violent rebellion: ‘fight to live or you’ll die’.
A few days later, a heavily disguised Leary flew from Chicago airport via Spain to Algeria, which had already given sanctuary to a prominent Black Power activist. In typical fashion, Leary ignored the sensitivities of his hosts and potential allies; instead, he offended everyone with his demented behaviour. Handed his marching orders, Leary travelled incognito to Switzerland. Once across its border, he was whisked away by Michel Hauchard, a jet-setting playboy who’d been convicted of fraud, sold weapons to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and spent his winters skiing and his summers racing speedboats. Within hours of settling into his new luxury hide-out, Leary was arrested and spent a couple of months in prison before he was released into the care of Hauchard. Soon after, Leary was visited by two Brothers, who brought him a briefcase full of cash, two blocks of hashish and a container of pure LSD.
For the next eighteen months, Leary was untroubled by the Swiss authorities as he engaged in a never-ending social whirl, entertaining rock stars, film directors, writers and intellectuals, while consuming copious quantities of acid, peyote, coke, cannabis and even heroin. It was in this decadent environment that Solomon saw Leary for the first time since their Millbrook days. But his visit wasn’t entirely social. Solomon had been persuaded to help Leary get a UK publisher for the book he was trying to write about his imprisonment and escape. To help him finish the manuscript, Leary hired a 37-year-old English author and artist, a representative of the Beat generation, who’d done four years in a UK jail for drug offences; was interested in black magic; and sought out Leary in Algeria where they took LSD in the desert and tried to summon up demonic spirits.
While he and Leary laboured fitfully on the book, their host Michel Hauchard focused on finding a publisher, encouraged by the fact that he’d convinced Leary to give him the rights to his written works for the next twelve years and 50 per cent of his earnings from them. As Hauchard tried to land a deal in the US, it appears Solomon was asked to do the same in London, and he may well have smuggled portions of the text back from Switzerland to shop around town. How far Solomon got with his efforts to pitch the book is hard to say, but among his private papers was a bank statement dated September 1972 that belonged to Leary’s co-author, issued by a bank in Berne. Why this document came into his possession is a mystery, but the very fact he had it at all suggests that, whatever his exact role, Solomon was privy to the behind-the-scenes machinations and secretive negotiations that surrounded Leary’s manuscript. As it was, Hauchard managed to secure a $25,000 advance from Bantam Books, a mass market paperback imprint based in New York. Unfortunately for all concerned, Leary’s Confessions of a Hope Fiend (1973) failed to register on the bestseller lists despite a big print run and a lot of publicity.
By then, it was clear that the Swiss government, which was under unrelenting pressure from the Americans, was about to extradite him. Leary made for Afghanistan, but was seized at Kabul airport and carted back to the US. Leary was charged, taken to Folsom maximum-security prison and dumped in the cell next to Charles Manson. The infamous cult leader thought Leary was a genuine prophet and welcomed him with a gift of four books, one of which was Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan.
Claims that LSD played a crucial role in the Manson murders surfaced almost immediately. Once Manson and his gang were on trial, LSD featured so frequently in the courtroom that it might as well have been in the dock alongside the other defendants, charged as an accessory. Focusing on LSD was a key part of the prosecution’s strategy as it attempted to overcome the main obstacle to convicting Manson; he’d not harmed any of the victims and was nowhere near the scene when the slaughter took place. To tackle this, the prosecution tried to prove that Manson used LSD to gain complete control over his followers’ minds and turn them into robots programmed to carry out his orders; acid had wiped their brains clean and convinced them that Manson’s fantasy world was more real than the one outside their compound. This highly tenuous proposition went unchallenged by the defence because it was hoping to get the actual killers off the hook by following the same line of argument: they were not responsible for their actions because Manson had brainwashed them with LSD. In the end, the acid theory worked for the prosecution but failed the defence. The accused were all found guilty of the charges against them, while media coverage of the trial constantly emphasised the fact that LSD was an evil substance and a source of satanic power.
Leary spent six months in Folsom prison enjoying lengthy discussions with Manson about the nature of Good and Evil before being moved to another facility. In the spring of 1974, Leary was paid a visit by DEA agents who laid out his future for him. He was 53. He would grow old and probably die in jail. Leary may have aspired to be a famous guru and the leader of a global spiritual awakening, but he had no interest in becoming a martyr. He wrote a long and elaborate confession about his involvement with the Brotherhood and the drug culture in general. The DEA was delighted, largely due to the propaganda value of Leary’s admission of defeat. The story was leaked to the press and Leary’s betrayal of everything he’d stood for was greeted with dismay and anger by his old colleagues, fellow travellers and even his son. Nicknamed ‘Charlie Thrush’ by the DEA – because he sang like a bird – Leary was released on 21 April 1976 and entered the witness protection programme. Soon after, he was recognised by a member of the public and forced into the open. Free at last, Leary quickly discovered that nobody really gave a damn about what he had to say about anything anymore: he was, as Stark predicted, yesterday’s man.