Espectroscopia IR: Identificación de los Grupos Funcionales y Evaluación de sus Características Electrónicas

Leary's self-imposed exile in Switzerland was very pleasant after the traumas of life as a would-be revolutionary in Algeria. Old friends like David Solomon and Billy Hitchcock visited him. He drove a smart yellow Porsche; skied at Gstaad and St. Moritz, mixed with the beautiful people. Most of Leary's spare time went into preparing a book on his escape and subsequent travels in the underground called Diary of a Hope Fiend. Having split up with Rosemary, Leary was now escorted by Joanna Harcourt-Smith, the 26-year-old niece of a London publisher and a familiar face in smart European and American circles.

Yet despite the distance from Orange County, he began to feel the pressure from Operation BEL. There were demands for Leary's expulsion and the Swiss said he had to be out by the end of the year.

Leary was running out of money, but Joanna suggested that with the help of her friends they could reach Ceylon where a yacht would be put at their disposal. Leary headed east.

The couple arrived in Afghanistan on the girl's birthday, a few days after Sand was arrested in the United States. As the fugitive from justice strolled across Kabul's immigration hall, a member of the US Consul's office came forward and confiscated Leary's passport, already revoked by the State Department. For three days, Leary was kept under house arrest while Burke wheedled, bullied and harangued the Afghan authorities into deporting him forthwith.

“Burke,” cried the irrepressible Leary as the BNDD man joined him for the Pan-Am flight,

“you're famous.” Indeed Burke was, featured in a two-part article on the Brotherhood investigations by Rolling Stone magazine and a major witness before the Grand Jury in Orange County. Now the omniscient agent had been the instrument of Leary's downfall.

The BNDD man flew all the way to Los Angeles, not even turning a hair when Leary and Joanna tried to halt the flight transfer in London by claiming political asylum during the stop-over.

Once in Los Angeles, Burke formally arrested his man, handcuffed him and led Leary back to prison. The convoy of cars was followed by TV cameras; Leary, a flower tucked behind an ear, smiled broadly at reporters from a Volkswagen in the centre of the cavalcade. His girlfriend, ill with hepatitis, declared: “I am Timothy Leary's true love and I have come here to speak to President Nixon.”

Leary's arrest was not simply a propaganda coup for the investigators. It brought a substantial consequence in the shape of Dennis Martino, a former dealer, related to Leary through marriage. On the run from a Californian charge, Martino joined the Leary entourage in Switzerland. Two weeks after Leary was held in Kabul, Martino became a BNDD

informant. Burke debriefed him for three days. The agent felt that much of what he was told merely fleshed out details of the Brotherhood, but the detail was extensive; Martino

suggested places where the BNDD might look for Brotherhood fugitives.

Back in California, Martino had other uses. Kuehl found that Martino could infiltrate himself among the Brothers, such as Randall, out on bail. He pinpointed fugitives hiding south of San Francisco, which led to a raid on Easter Sunday, during which one man tried to gallop away on horseback across the mountains and another disappeared into brush so thick no one thought he could get away. He did, but the BNDD picked up five others.

As the trials and legal arguments rolled on in southern California—Brennan had now become a witness as well, and others were also talking—in San Francisco the joint IRS-BNDD

operation was still gathering momentum.

For months Hitchcock stayed out of reach of the investigators, who bided their time watching events in the east. Hitchcock was an increasingly worried, even desperate, man.

In Pittsburgh, the local IRS department was putting together a tax case against him, while in New York he faced divorce proceedings plus problems from the SEC on stock market malpractice. Buchanan had not kept his mouth shut. Scully would not allow himself to be hidden away. In March 1973, Hitchcock surrendered. Approaching the Federal Attorney's office in New York, he offered to talk in return for a deal, leniency on his charges.

A telephone call from the New York attorney's office and Hitchcock was on his way back to San Francisco for a debriefing with federal agents and an appearance before the Grand Jury.

Hitchcock told everything, naming Sand, Scully, Randall, Friedman, Druce, Owsley, Griggs and Stark—not to mention the various bank accounts, the search for raw materials and a mass of other detail. Hitchcock put the agents on to the trail of Rumsey as another potential witness, and in the middle of April gave his evidence to the Grand Jury.

On 26 April, the jury handed down indictments against Sand, Scully, Druce, Friedman and Randall.

Since his arrest on the Orange County indictment, Randall, facing both drug charges and a

$350,000 tax bill, had been fighting with skilful legal advice against the BNDD at every twist and turn. The BNDD pleaded with the courts that Randall's case, his background and his skill at avoiding capture required very high bail. But the courts reduced the initial figure of

$250,000 to $25,000. When he was re-arrested for passport offences which Elliot linked to the Belgian laboratory, Randall was given bail of $10,000 on that charge. As the Grand Jury in San Francisco prepared the last touches to the indictment, a court in Orange County was about to consider moving Randall's bail up to $250,000 again. It was too late. Randall was also a worried man. He had fled, jumping bail the day before the San Francisco court produced the indictment. Kuehl watched sadly as Randall's relatives cleared out the fugitive's belongings from his home.

At the very beginning of the investigations, Randall told Hitchcock that nothing could

happen if everyone kept quiet. He remained a fugitive and never saw the proof of his words in the San Francisco court, late in 1973, when the case against the LSD makers opened.

Stark was not there either, still missing. Druce could not be extradited from Britain on a conspiracy charge and refused to become a prosecution witness despite offers of immunity.

The thirty-nine day case turned into the Sand-Scully Conspiracy trial.

Hitchcock had actually persuaded Scully to give himself up, paid his legal fees and

apparently tried to talk him into a guilty plea. Scully however was prepared to pay his dues, as he had always said he would. They were going to be hefty.

At the beginning of the case, the court was told that it revolved round whether Scully was responsible for the psychedelic movement in California. Yet when Hitchcock began to give evidence, it was clear from his testimony that the millionaire had played a vital role in events over the years. But Hitchcock had done his deal. He pleaded guilty to two Federal cases on tax and credit regulations in New York, and was given a five-year suspended sentence, plus a $20,000 fine. Other tax liabilities were also settled. He had immunity in San Francisco.

So did others. George Wethern, the Hell's Angel dealer, was now living under a new name and occupation as a beneficiary of the Federal Witness Program and appeared, his mental faculties damaged by the variety of drugs he had taken over the years. Glen Lynd, another participant in the Program, also appeared. Rumsey was in court; so was Goekjian. Munson was discovered after a chance remark by Hitchcock, brought out from the East during the trial, and became a surprise witness.

Sand's defence decided to call Leary from prison. The great visionary, the psychedelic revolutionary who inspired the Brotherhood, spent a day talking to one of the prosecution lawyers before he was due to take the stand. Suddenly, he no longer wanted to appear. The Orange County Brotherhood charges against him were dropped shortly afterwards.

At the end of January 1974, the jury returned its verdict. Friedman was acquitted of the drugs charges. He later pleaded guilty to a perjury charge. Sand and Scully were each found guilty of the main charges. In the course of the trial, Owsley had often watched the

proceedings. Evidence began to accumulate against him, too, and the IRS attorney ordered agents to put together a case-they had three weeks to do it-which later led to a fine for the sometime master chemist.

His apprentices were not so lucky. Scully was given twenty years and Sand fifteen. Each was fined $10,000 and together faced a tax bill of over $250,000. Out on appeal, Sand, who had become very interested in medical work while in prison where he had been appointed head trustie, vanished like Stark and Randall before him.

Scully lost his appeal. His sentence, compared with those being handed out in Orange

County, was extremely harsh. Andrist pleaded guilty to passport offences and was given two years in federal prison which he served concurrently with a sentence on the Brotherhood conspiracy. Gale pleaded guilty to the conspiracy and was sentenced to one to ten years, but ended serving only a few months. Crittenden, the Porsche driver, received a short prison sentence, and other Brothers received equally light penalties. Judges were prepared to be very lenient, despite the claims of the prosecutors.

Nevertheless, overall members of Operation BEL and the investigators in San Francisco were jubilant.

Their epilogue on the case was written even before the last chapter was completed. The BNDD was being restructured to become a new weapon against drugs called the Drug Enforcement Agency, and Operation BEL was a useful argument to provide the DEA with the budget and facilities it would require.

Before the San Francisco trial had even started, John Bartels Jr., acting administrator to the emerging DEA, appeared at a Senate Sub-Committee on Internal Security. “In many ways,”

he told the senators, “the evolution of the drug trafficking activities of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love is a tragic illustration of the cynicism into which the youthful drug revolution of the mid-1960s has fallen.”

Between 1966 and 1971, the Brotherhood was virtually untouchable, but in the course of the investigation 750 members had been identified in a business the IRS estimated to be worth $200 million.

To date, the Brotherhood investigation had resulted, the senators were told, in the arrest of over 100 individuals including Dr. Timothy Leary. Four LSD factories were seized, along with over one million Orange Sunshine tablets and 3,500 grams of crystal, capable of producing 14 million dosages; six hashish oil laboratories; over thirty gallons of hashish oil and 6,000 lb of solid hashish … Other drugs and articles seized included 104 grams of peyote, 8 lb of amphetamine powder, 13.64 lb of cocaine, two marijuana canning operations, an Orange Sunshine pill press, seven vehicles, 546 acres of property in southern California and over

$1.8 million in cash, either seized or located in foreign banks. The Internal Revenue Service and the California Franchise Tax Board assessed the Brotherhood of Eternal Love

corporation for over $70 million in back taxes.

Doug Kuehl was still out on the streets following leads: “At the beginning of the case I said we were taking on the hippie dope dealers of southern California. Well, we won. We had never taken something out which did not appear again. The Brotherhood acid never came back.” Nor for that matter did the old Brotherhood. Kuehl now found many dealers had turned to cocaine and heroin.

But the story was not quite over. The remit for both the BNDD and the DEA which followed it centred on tracing leads affecting the United States. No one paid much attention to Stark's other interests beside California and Belgium. By what may or may not be a strange coincidence, as the investigations got under way in the United States, changes were taking place in the organization Stark had helped to foster in Britain.

In the spring of 1973, Stark, on the run from the BNDD and the IRS, passed through

London and obtained a false British passport—shortly after Hitchcock made his deal with the IRS. He left behind him in London an organization which would fill the gap created by the Brotherhood's downfall, producing up to 50 per cent of the LSD seized by the police throughout the world. Only the players had changed—not the game.