8
When Kemp and Bott occupied 8 Westbourne Grove Terrace, the original plan was to install a lab there, but it quickly became clear that the premises weren’t suitable. So Kemp rented nearby flats on short leases instead. He looked for ground-floor apartments with covered drains that discharged straight into the mains, thereby preventing the noxious smells – which came from the lab’s chemical waste – leaking out and alerting the neighbours. Before moving in his equipment, Kemp would wait two weeks to make sure the site was secure and the other residents weren’t too nosey. Then he’d set up in the kitchen, leaving the window permanently open to release fumes and a fan on to keep the air circulating. Once the production run began – and it normally took Kemp around two months to complete one – either he or Bott were always on duty. Conditions were not ideal, and Kemp grew increasingly frustrated with cramped spaces and run-down fixtures and fittings; at one point, he rented an entire house in Liverpool and went to work there. Nevertheless, between 1972 and 1974, Kemp made enough LSD for at least seventy-five million doses.
By now, Todd had several machines to convert the acid into tablets and hired-help to operate them. To distinguish their merchandise from the other brands, Kemp and Todd perfected a unique tab: the microdot. With more sophisticated tableting equipment available to them, manufacturers were offering distinctive products, but Kemp and Todd had a monopoly on the microdot, which was much smaller and neater than the alternatives; no larger than a pinhead, you could conceal hundreds in a matchbox. To keep things interesting, Kemp introduced different colours, using a technique pioneered by the original alchemist, Owsley Stanley the Third, mixing food dye into the LSD before tableting. At the same time, Todd varied the shape and the design imprinted on the surface, which often featured pyramids or other psychedelic imagery. At the gang’s height, there were as many as sixty different types in circulation, and as their microdots spread across the globe, they became the gold standard for acid-heads everywhere. Overall, Todd’s distribution network accounted for between 80 and 90 per cent of the UK market. Though some of his dealers also exported their microdots to faraway places like Australia, the main route to the outside world was via contacts in Amsterdam and West Germany. As far as the US was concerned, what evidence there is suggests that surviving members of the Brotherhood were responsible for offloading the acid in America and probably in other territories as well. In total, the gang’s microdots were found in a hundred countries. Of the acid consumed around the world, 60–70 per cent came from Kemp’s labs.
Watching enviously from the sidelines was Solomon’s old compatriot Gerald Thomas, who’d been drifting ever since he quit Majorca, shifting minor amounts of cannabis into the US – with Solomon’s help – and bouncing from one short-term base to another. Given he was the one who originally introduced Kemp to Solomon, Thomas felt he deserved to be part of their LSD empire. Having settled in St John’s Wood, just a short walk from Solomon in Maida Vale, Thomas pestered his friend until he introduced him to Kemp and Bott in June 1972. Reluctantly they agreed to bring Thomas on board in a limited capacity, concerned that he was an accident waiting to happen. To get the ball rolling, Kemp gave Thomas some LSD to tablet and sell but Thomas got greedy, paid them £7,000 less than he should have for the amount he’d shifted, and was promptly sacked.
Irritated with Solomon for foisting Thomas on him, and growing tired of his antics, Kemp began to edge Solomon out of the gang. He got Todd to source ergotamine tartrate from a Swiss firm rather than rely on Solomon’s West German connection. Yet, as time went on, the financial arrangement between Kemp and Todd became a bone of contention. At the beginning, Todd agreed to pay Kemp £300 per 5,000 doses. This dropped to £200 as Kemp increased his output, and then down to £137 as Todd started offering his dealers discounts. Even with these reductions, Kemp was making around £50,000 a year, while Todd and the network were racking up between £300,000 and £1,500,000. What troubled Kemp was what Todd’s approach to business revealed about his character: a hustler only interested in the bottom line. Money was all that mattered to him.
Kemp and Bott were thoroughly anti-materialistic and disinterested in the accumulation of wealth for its own sake. He and Bott donated substantial sums to small radical groups and publications, and to the organisers of the various free festivals held every summer. According to Kemp, he’d also ‘loaned money’ to ‘friends’ who’d ‘run into debt’ without expecting any of it back. Their only major indulgence was their motor cars, which they took on occasional excursions to the continent. Unfortunately, they were terrible drivers and kept having accidents. In April 1971, Kemp bought a Daimler. Two months later, Bott wrecked it while on a trip to Scotland. The following May, Kemp paid £2,000 in cash for a red Range Rover. In August, he crashed it in Norway, and then again in London that October. But aside from the cost of running these ill-fated vehicles, no other aspect of their lifestyle was going to make much of a dent in their acid fortune.
Todd, on the other hand, ate through his profits fast. He lived at 29 Fitzgeorge Avenue in the ground-floor flat of a classic red-brick mansion block in Earl’s Court, a slightly more upmarket area than Ladbroke Grove. He had a common-law wife and child to support – about whom almost nothing is known. Aside from these basic expenses, Todd revelled in life’s luxuries; he liked fine dining – Harrods and the Savoy Grill – and tailored clothes. He collected rare stamps and speculated in stocks and shares. He also loved to travel and did so in style. No backpacking along the hippy trail or slumming it in downbeat hotels; only the best was good enough. From 1970 to the end of 1974, Todd visited France, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Greece, Malta, the US, India, Nepal, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Barbados and the Bahamas.
Not all these trips were vacations. Some catered for Todd’s one overriding passion: mountaineering. Todd caught the climbing bug when he was 13, and in the early 1970s he joined a new generation of mountaineers who were part of a rapid rise in the sport’s popularity: an article in the 1973 edition of the Alpine Journal stated that mountaineering was no longer a ‘minority’ pastime but one ‘suitable … for the masses’ (who were attracted to it by their need ‘to escape suburbia and find an antidote to twentieth-century city living’), and calculated that there were roughly 50,000 dedicated climbers and another 250,000 casual climbers in the UK alone. Todd fell into the former category and was especially fond of rock climbing – the sea cliffs of north Wales were a favourite spot – and in 1974 he went to Switzerland to scale the peaks with friends from the International Mountaineering School, an elite training camp high in the Alps. When they weren’t hanging off the sides of cliffs, Todd and his fellow climbers enjoyed what one of his contemporaries described as ‘a vibrant social scene’ with ‘wild partying’ and ‘drugs’.
With all these outgoings, Todd was always looking for ways to increase his turnover. Due to the unparalleled strength of Kemp’s LSD – government experts said it was the purest acid they’d ever seen – Todd would be able to dilute it and increase the number of microdots he produced without there being a noticeable drop in quality. Todd roped in a young chemist he and Kemp knew from their Cambridge days, and they set about reducing the potency of each consignment from the agreed 200 micrograms per dose to 100. Some sixth sense alerted Kemp to what was going on. He bought some of his own acid at a festival, tried it out and immediately noticed the difference. As Kemp’s overriding goal was to make LSD powerful enough to accelerate the fall of capitalism, any attempt to undermine that was the equivalent of a counter-revolutionary act. Furious, Kemp confronted Todd. Todd admitted he was short-changing Kemp and doubling his take. There was an almighty row, but Todd apologised in the end and promised it wouldn’t happen again. Kemp was not so easily placated. The next time he needed some ergotamine tartrate he bypassed Todd and went back to Solomon, who still had plenty left from his numerous trips to West Germany.
When he wasn’t running the odd errand for Kemp or plotting with Gerald Thomas, Solomon was labouring over his latest anthology. Like the previous two, it honed in on a hot topic that was the subject of widespread controversy and media attention: Solomon’s new project looked at sex and, befitting his credentials, its relationship to drugs. By tackling this subject, Solomon was giving himself every chance of reviving his flagging fortunes and rebooting his literary career. Self-help sex manuals and guides to the ultimate orgasm topped the bestseller charts, ate up column inches and were discussed on TV chat shows. Soho was packed with row upon row of triple X cinemas showing blue movies next to sex shops groaning with hardcore European imports. Low-core sex comedies jostled for space in the regular cinemas with soft-porn offerings dressed up as art, like Last Tango in Paris (1972) and Emmanuelle (1974). Glossy airbrushed Playboy centrefolds sat next to readers’ wives on the magazine racks.
Unlike his earlier efforts, this book was a collaboration with another editor, a fellow American expat, George Andrews. Given that his previous anthologies had done well, it’s not clear why Andrews was brought in – whether it was because Solomon requested help from a kindred spirit or because Panther had lost confidence in him and thought he needed the assistance. Those close to Solomon noted how he’d become less focused and more erratic, lacking drive and ambition. Solomon was knocking on 50. He’d been systematically taking LSD and other psychedelics for nearly twenty years and smoking cannabis on an almost daily basis for decades. It’s possible he was no longer capable of sustained periods of concentrated work.
As it was, Andrews was the perfect fit. The same generation as Solomon, he’d arrived in post-war New York and immersed himself in the counter-culture. During the 1950s, Andrews became a Beat poet and, like Solomon, was an early adopter of mescaline and LSD. Towards the end of the decade, Andrews migrated to Tangier, where William Burroughs was one of a coterie of expat writers and artists, and it was here that Andrews met Leary when he passed through town in the summer of 1961. This led to Leary including a poem by Andrews in the very first issue of his journal The Psychedelic Review, June 1963. The poem, entitled ‘Annihilating Illumination’, tries to capture the avalanche of sensations Andrews experienced during a hallucination:
I am alive with the living God
I throb unique among the infinite variations
and so what if all the evolution of consciousness only leads to the
knowledge
that I am a germ in the guts of a greater being
I am older than creation older than all beings
the stars revolve within me
I voyage through the inner space between my atoms
I take space ships to the different parts of my body
each organ becomes a constellation as I spread across the sky.
In 1965, Andrews made for London and straight for the World Psychedelic Centre (WPC), a bookshop and meeting place in Belgravia that had been opened by Leary’s emissary to the UK, who’d shown up in the capital armed with 5,000 doses worth of Czech LSD and several hundred copies of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The mutual connection to Leary meant that George Andrews was always welcome at the WPC and its owner invited him to speak at a workshop in consciousness expansion at the ICA on 14 February 1966, alongside Burroughs and R.D. Laing.
Seeking to make London his permanent home, Andrews rented a room in a ground-floor flat at 101 Cromwell Road, West Kensington, an address that was notorious on the London LSD circuit because a poet from New Zealand – nicknamed the Spider – had hidden 1,000 doses of acid there, with another 4,000 concealed a few streets away. The house also accommodated several members of Pink Floyd, who were at the vanguard of acid rock. In 1965, Roger Waters and Syd Barrett came down to London from Cambridge, where they’d both grown up. In his teens, Waters was the chairman of the local youth branch of CND, while Syd ‘the Beat’ Barrett loved Kerouac’s On the Road, smoked his first joint in 1962 and, three years later, took LSD by the banks of the Cam. Soon after moving to London, Waters and his girlfriend took the top-floor flat at 101 Cromwell Road and, when they moved out, Barrett moved in. By then, he was taking acid in his coffee every morning. In July 1967, he suffered a nervous breakdown and was diagnosed with schizophrenia.
In the midst of this chaos, Andrews managed to get a collection of eight poems published – Burning Joy (1966) – and finished compiling an anthology about India’s thousands-of-years-old cannabis culture, The Book of Grass: An Anthology of Indian Hemp (1967). Released by a small imprint, there was a French translation, a US edition, and then, in 1972, a reissue in paperback by Penguin Books. This wider exposure got the book some attention and good reviews and put Andrews at the front of the line for the job with Solomon. What clinched the deal, however, was their long history together; though it’s difficult to know exactly when and where they were first introduced, it could have been at any time during the previous twenty years.
To lure as many readers as possible, Panther launched Solomon and Andrews’ Drugs and Sexuality (1973) as a mass-market paperback with a marine-blue cover that featured a naked, bejewelled woman sprawling seductively on an exotic divan, lazily cradling a hookah pipe, with a large joint in an ashtray beside her. On the back cover, the blurb boasted that the book contained ‘an unsurpassed wealth of revelations, ecstasies, warnings and entertainment’: on the inside, it promised the reader that they were about to enjoy ‘one of those all too rare books capable of opening one’s mind’s eye on vistas of feeling and experience previously undreamed of’.
Unfortunately, Drugs and Sexuality did not live up to its billing. What followed was a dated, almost half-hearted, effort to throw together a bunch of texts, some of which barely mentioned sex or drugs. Organised chronologically, the text meandered across the centuries, beginning with erotic poetry and sacred texts from ancient Greece, Rome, China and India, then a procession of writers and thinkers – Boccaccio, Shakespeare, the Marquis de Sade and Baudelaire – mixed in with long extracts from obscure studies on aphrodisiacs, and several essays on yoga and tantric sex. More contemporary content included a short description of sex on amphetamines by Burroughs; a review of a survey of cannabis users and their generally positive attitude to sex; and a short story by Andrews, which first appeared in Frendz magazine, set in a café in Tangier, where nine people eat, smoke hashish, and have a simultaneous collective hallucination during which their bodies merge together in an act of sexual union that transforms them into ‘a naked hermaphroditic giant nine times larger than an ordinary human’.
The relationship between sex and LSD was explored in a reprint of Leary’s 1966 Playboy interview. In it, Leary explained how ‘sex under LSD becomes miraculously enhanced and intensified’ as ‘every cell in your body … is making love with every cell in her body’ and your senses reach fever pitch. Leary also claimed that LSD could ‘cure’ frigidity, impotence and homosexuality, because it unearthed childhood traumas, the root of all sexual dysfunction. Leary’s retrograde views – which reflected the reactionary attitudes of a society where homosexuality was illegal and considered by many to be a crime against nature – were repeated in another piece in the anthology, an essay entitled ‘Marital Problems’. Having analysed numerous first-person accounts about the impact of acid on intimate relationships, the authors concluded that LSD ought to be ‘regarded as a strong asset to marriage counsellors’. As far as treating cases of frigidity and impotence was concerned, acid seemed ‘to first define the problem, then dissolve it’. It also proved ‘successful in homosexual problems because it can reveal early traumas, which underlie the condition’. However, they were slightly more enlightened than Leary and happily accepted the fact that, after taking acid, some would ‘want to stay that way’, and believed that ‘a continuance of homosexuality’ should be viewed as a positive affirmation of self rather than ‘a relapse’.
It was ideas like these that made the book feel, even in 1973, seriously out of step with the times, as if Solomon and Andrews were still clinging to the attitudes of the era they’d felt most comfortable in. Perhaps unsurprisingly the book flopped; there were no reviews and sales remained flat. Though Andrews would edit another anthology for Panther – Drugs and Magic (1975) – and the publisher reissued Solomon’s cannabis book in a new paperback edition, the failure of Drugs and Sexuality brought his relationship with Panther to an end; for now, Solomon’s literary career was at a standstill.
The disappointing response to his anthology pushed Solomon closer to Gerald Thomas, who was still hoping to hit the big time. Convinced he could replicate Kemp’s LSD formula, Thomas was proposing they go into production for themselves. Equipment was bought and capital raised, largely through selling cannabis in the US, which Thomas smuggled in from India via Canada. Before flying off to complete the transfer of 15 pounds of hashish from a locker at Montreal airport to Boston, Thomas stored all his drug-manufacturing paraphernalia – including material for making cocaine – and most of his clothes and belongings in a warehouse at Blake’s Wharf by the London docks. On 3 June 1973, Thomas landed in Canada, picked up the dope, went to get his connecting flight, was stopped and searched by customs officials, and arrested. Out on bail, with nothing but a long cold Canadian winter to look forward to, Thomas began considering his narrowing options. About the only bargaining chip he possessed was his insider knowledge of the Microdot Gang’s operation and, though he had no particular loyalty to Kemp or Todd, selling them out would also mean betraying Solomon.
Yet his supposed friend didn’t seem interested in helping Thomas with his predicament. Thomas was very worried because among his luggage was a business card with the address of the warehouse in London where he’d stashed his stuff, and it’d only be a matter of time before the Canadian authorities informed their British counterparts. Desperate to limit the damage, Thomas repeatedly called Solomon and asked him to retrieve his possessions. Solomon reluctantly agreed, but instead of keeping them safe as Thomas requested, he simply burnt the lot. Incensed, Thomas demanded compensation. Solomon refused. Thomas threatened him. Solomon threatened him back. Angry, resentful and scared, Thomas spoke with his lawyer and arranged to sit down with the Canadians. In January 1974, Thomas told them everything he knew about the gang. Yet because Kemp and Todd had done their best to keep him at arm’s length, his grasp of the intricacies of their network was hazy. Crucially, he couldn’t remember Todd’s surname, and wasn’t sure if he was called ‘Harry’ or ‘Henry’ or another name beginning with ‘H’. However, he didn’t hesitate to put Solomon, Stark, Kemp and Bott squarely in the frame.
Rightly convinced that Thomas would crack under pressure, Solomon decided to cut his losses; without a book commission to distract him and with day-to-day life slipping through his fingers, he returned to New York. The others were relieved to see him go. Solomon’s cavalier approach to the drug trade and loose tongue had already made him a liability and, with Thomas behind bars, he’d become a significant security risk. Like Leary, Solomon had never adjusted to the new reality that came with the criminalisation of LSD. He simply couldn’t grasp the fact that they were the ‘bad guys’ and the culture they’d inspired had moved beyond its early 1960s optimism to a much darker place or that the majority of people remained fearful of what LSD was capable of.
For the others, Thomas’ incarceration was a problem, but not a disaster. Though Kemp and Bott now owned a caravan and were contemplating leaving London for somewhere more rural, they didn’t seem in any hurry to leave. A clear indication that they were planning to extend their stay was the fact that Bott – who’d been doing shifts at local surgeries – started working at Charing Cross Hospital on 1 April 1974. But at virtually the same time as Bott assumed her new role, two officers from Scotland Yard’s Central Drugs Intelligence Unit (CDIU) were spending a couple of days in Canada interrogating Thomas. Then on 24 April, Bott suddenly quit her job at Charing Cross. She and Kemp unhitched their caravan and hit the road: by that summer they were camped in north-west Wales.
It’s difficult to believe that these events were unconnected, and that it was merely a coincidence that Kemp and Bott high-tailed it out of London immediately after Thomas confessed to the CDIU detectives. The timing and manner of their hasty departure raises the possibility that they were warned that they were no longer invisible. The Metropolitan Police were certainly corrupt enough for this to be true. If this was the case, it seems more likely that Todd received the tip-off and passed it onto Kemp, rather than the other way round. Kemp was not the type to cultivate friends on the force. Todd, however, in his role as head of sales and distribution, was in prime position to reach out to the boys in blue and come to a mutually beneficial arrangement. And if Todd was indeed privy to the Thomas file, it meant he knew that even though his associates had been named, he’d escaped identification and therefore could afford to be more relaxed about the whole thing.
So while Kemp and Bott headed for the hills, Todd stayed put. He had plentiful reserves of Kemp’s LSD to draw on and a smoothly functioning, well-oiled supply chain that practically ran itself. There was no reason to stop now. Equally well, Kemp was not about to abandon his dreams of overturning the social order. The Microdot Gang may have split, but it was a long way from going out of business.
During 1973, Stark’s past caught up with him: specifically, his dealings with Billy Hitchcock and Nick Sand. Hitchcock was in the cross hairs of the IRS and the FBI for money laundering and tax evasion. The IRS had finally reconstructed the intricate nature of Hitchcock’s investments in Resorts International, the mafia-run casino-hotel complex in the Bahamas. Its agents also managed to prise open the accounts in Switzerland that Hitchcock held at the Paravicini Bank. Between these, his holdings in Resorts International and other funds secreted in the Bahamas, Hitchcock was facing a tax bill of $1 million. If this wasn’t bad enough, the IRS also found proof of the illegal trading in stocks and shares that Mr Paravicini, the president of the bank, had engaged in on behalf of Hitchcock and a former Lehman Brothers colleague. Mr Paravicini bought stocks and shares in major corporations like IBM and Polaroid – with a total value of $67 million – and deposited them in Hitchcock and his partners’ secret accounts, thereby violating stock market regulations and breaking a number of federal laws in the process.
As the investigators examined the books at Paravicini, they uncovered Hitchcock’s role as the acid banker and the fact that Stark, Sand and several other Brothers had accounts there as well. Though there were no immediate consequences for Stark, this discovery meant trouble for Sand, and the IRS began digging into his financial affairs. On his return from Europe – where he’d helped Stark and Kemp with their Paris lab – Sand had kept a low profile, aware that the BNDD had the Brotherhood in their sights. But Sand was not only on a mission to spread the psychedelic message, he was also an artist who could not stay away from his studio for too long. In April 1972, he moved to St Louis, Missouri, established a front company – Signet Research and Development – bought a building downtown and set up a major lab there, and put a smaller one in the basement of the house he was renting in the nearby suburb of Fenton. Sand’s main facility was the largest LSD production centre of his career and within six months he’d tableted 50,000 doses of Orange Sunshine and had the ingredients ready for another 14 million.
With everything progressing nicely, Sand and his girlfriend went on vacation at the end of the year. Unfortunately, they forgot to cancel the post. Before long, their mailbox was overflowing. Worried, the postman called the police. They came and noticed water seeping out from under the front door. Inside, a water pipe had frozen and burst. The cops entered the house, found cannabis in the bedroom, the drug lab in the basement and information about Signet Research and Development. Its downtown address was raided and the contents of Sand’s LSD factory were seized. On 19 January 1973, Sand and his partner returned from holiday and were arrested, but the charges were dropped on a technicality relating to the initial search. This lucky escape was only a temporary reprieve: Hitchcock had decided to do a deal with the government and was ready to tell the authorities everything he knew about the acid business. In exchange for Hitchcock’s co-operation, the IRS settled for a payment of $543,800 and his part in the Paravicini stocks and shares scam was quietly forgotten, leaving his Lehman Brothers colleague to carry the can, as the bank had closed its doors and Mr Paravicini was nowhere to be found.
Next came the LSD conspiracy case. On 26 April 1973, at a federal court in San Francisco, a grand jury indicted Hitchcock, Stark, Sand and four others for the manufacture, possession, distribution and sale of LSD. In the course of the proceedings, Stark got a special mention: ‘the Grand Jury specifically charges that … Ronald Hadley Stark managed and operated a laboratory under the name Laboratoire Le Clocheton … at Parc Scientifique De Louvain La Neuve … from approximately September, 1971, through August, 1972.’ These charges, plus the ongoing investigation by the BNDD, which had just become the DEA and was still after him for his involvement with the Brotherhood’s hash oil business, put Stark in a perilous position. For years he’d been hiding in plain sight. Flaunting his wealth. Jumping from continent to continent. Causing ripples wherever he went. That way of life was over. It was time to go underground.
Stark always had a fondness for aliases – he was Gordon Simpson in Switzerland and Jean Claude Van Der Leuwe in Belgium and Holland – but in 1972 he went a step further and acquired a new identity. In New York, he was issued a US passport under the name John Clarence Dillon, born on 4 September 1938, the same year as Stark. For further protection, he went to London in the spring of 1973 and got a UK passport with the name Terrence William Abbott, born on 4 December 1942. Furnished with these documents, Stark was temporarily beyond the reach of the FBI and the DEA.
As a result, Stark wasn’t in the dock when the LSD conspiracy trial started on 12 November 1973. He wasn’t present for the verdicts, or for the sentencing on 8 March 1974. Hitchcock, who’d been the prosecution’s star witness, was given a five-year suspended sentence and a $20,000 fine. Sand, on the other hand, got fifteen years. This harsh punishment was justified by the judge on the basis that ‘the psychedelic movement’ was responsible for ‘the degradation of mankind and society’, and if left unchecked would cause ‘anarchy in this country’.
Meanwhile, one of the men intent on creating ‘anarchy’ was still very much at large. Sometime that year, Stark resurfaced in Italy, ready to seize any new opportunities that might come his way. He was about to enter a treacherous world where drug dealers mingled with mobsters, political extremists, terrorists and spies, leaving a blood-stained trail behind them.
David Solomon in a relaxed mood
The 1966 US paperback edition of David Solomon’s LSD anthology
Timothy Leary preaches to his followers at the Human Be-In, San Francisco, 1967 (Shutterstock)
Billy Hitchcock outside the main house at Millbrook (Getty Images)
A rare photograph of the elusive Ronald Stark
Christine Bott and her prize-winning goat
Richard Kemp, the alchemist
Henry Barclay Todd caught on camera by the Julie team
Renowned psychiatrist R.D. Laing addresses a captive audience (Alamy)
A poster in support of the Angry Brigade members arrested for possession of explosives
Police break up the party at the Windsor Festival, 1974 (PA Images)
The PhD chemist Andy Munro who made acid for Henry Barclay Todd
Kemp and Bott’s farmhouse in Wales (Shutterstock)
The two faces of undercover cop Martyn Pritchard (Mirrorpix)
A tabloid article featuring photographs of the Carno manor house (top) and Todd’s house in Hampton Wick (centre) (Mirrorpix)
Laboratory equipment and moulds for tableting found at 23 Seymour Road, Hampton Wick
Detective Inspector Dick Lee and members of the Julie team pose next to some of the acid they seized (Gloucestershire Police Archives)
The Microdot Gang are accused by the press of plotting to poison Birmingham’s water supply (Mirrorpix)
Police attend the scene of the Aldo Moro kidnapping (Shutterstock)