this week I read:
Operation White Rabbit - Dennis McDougal
A very readable story of the DEA takedown of the William Leonard Pickard / Gordon Todd Skinner LSD manufacturing ring. I say DEA, but it was only possible because Todd Skinner ratted out the others to gain immunity for his crimes that were catching up to him - impersonating a Secret Service agent when laundering money at a casino, the impending murder charges for his failed IV experiments on an IT contractor who was setting up some computers at one of his two underground bases, and some other shady business.
This book does a reasonable job of sketching an outline of the clandestine psychedelic chemist scene of the late 90s, but frustratingly there remain details that are not filled in. I would have liked to have read more about the supplier of ET ( ergotamine tartrate, essential precursor for LSD synthesis ), who allegedly had face-off style surgery to completely change his appearance, the alleged plot by Pickard to assassinate the ET supplier's right hand man, Pickard's involvement with the CIA in a plot to recover stinger missiles stolen by the Afghan military in exchange for the release of a major heroin importer, a plot which involved importing tonnes of smack into the US and then arresting the hapless mule, etc.,
The CIA involvement gets glossed over in favour of emphasising Skinner's various dealings with the DEA which he seemed to think were a get out of jail free card, but this backfired on him once his teenage bride, the goth stripper Kystle Cole, the DMT enema girl ("it burns!" ) and her teenage boyfriend, Brad, go the DEA and Skinner finds out, lures them to a hotel room and then tortures Brad for a week or so with the help of Krystle:
He remembered Krystle looming over him in a white robe, conducting some sort of seance.
"While I was being tortured, she would chant prayers over my body, offering my soul up as a sacrifice to Satan", he said.
[...]
But Todd dreamed up the cruelty coup d'etat. It began by wrapping a telephone cord around his scrotum, then using it to lever the full weight of his unconscious body off the bed. His fury unslaked, Todd next wrapped the cord around Green's penis. Bracing his foot on the boy's stomach, Skinner jerked the cord again until he heard the cartilage snap, crackle, then pop.
This whole torture episode takes up about one paragraph in Krystle Cole's self-serving memoir,
Lysergic, which I also read this week: "Todd was mean to me as well!" Which may explain how she walked away scot free from Burning Man the day before Todd was caught with 400 thousand MDMA pills. Everyone in this scene seems to have snitched on everyone else.
Lysergic is a bit of a mess, consisting of a short memoir of Krystle's time with Todd Skinner, where she paints herself as an innocent stripper, naive and unaware that the underground missile silo is also being used as a lab supplying "90% of the world's LSD" ( according to the DEA, who are no strangers to exaggeration). The rest of the book is padded out by Todd's whining letters sent to her from his prison cell, where he moans about his benzo withdrawal, the size of the pencils he is forced to write with, the cost of postage, and how dare Brad complain that Todd snapped his penis, along with long boring passages where he tries to show off how intelligent he is by describing his equations for playing the markets ( translates to "buy low, sell high" ), Prynne style organic chemistry lessons ( bonding lattices, etc., ), and obvious coded messages for where his stashes are secreted. Excuse me, Todd doesn't have "stashes", he has "libraries" ( a suitcase full of drugs to you and me ).
Both these books have an interesting subplot involving the owner of a high end audio retailer trying to recover the $120, 000 - $200, 000 stereo system that was installed in one of the missile silos, and which Todd then failed to pay for. Disturbingly, when Krystle mentions what they played on the stereo it was Enigma and Deep Forest. It's almost like drugs can rot your brain.
I'm currently reading
Operation: Trip to Oz by Guy J. Hargreaves, a mess of a book which attempts to describe the same story from the DEA perspective. However, it does contain some glowing descriptions of his agent heroes such as:
the legendary Frank White, who when asked during a trial why he'd shot a notorious Florida drug-dealer nine times, responded: "Nine? Because I ran out of bullets." Frank White became known as the "Dirty Harry" of DEA as he reportedly placed a total of over 30 rounds into the bodies of drug traffickers during his DEA career.
The one good thing about the
Operation: Trip to Oz is that it is free on amazon kindle, although I downloaded an ePub version from another site.
