Operation White Rabbit Read online

  Also by Dennis McDougal

  Nonfiction

  Angel of Darkness

  Fatal Subtraction: How Hollywood Really Does Business

  In the Best of Families: The Anatomy of a True Tragedy

  Mother’s Day

  The Last Mogul: Lew Wasserman, MCA, and the Hidden History of Hollywood

  Yosemite Murders

  Privileged Son: Otis Chandler and the Rise and Fall of the L.A. Times Dynasty

  Blood Cold: Fame, Sex, and Murder in Hollywood

  Five Easy Decades: How Jack Nicholson Became the Biggest Movie Star in Modern Times

  Dylan: The Biography

  Fiction

  The Candlestickmaker

  Hemingway’s Suitcase

  Copyright © 2020 by Dennis McDougal

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 306 West 37th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  Skyhorse Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected].

  Skyhorse® and Skyhorse Publishing® are registered trademarks of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

  Visit our website at www.skyhorsepublishing.com.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Brian Peterson

  Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-4537-7

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-4538-4

  Printed in the United States of America

  For each and every gentle soul misplaced inside a jail.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Part Two

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Part Three

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Epilogue

  Postscript

  Bibliography

  Plates

  Prologue

  Wamego, Kansas—Nov. 6, 2000

  WILLIAM LEONARD PICKARD TENSED LIKE a gazelle, all senses alert. He sniffed the air, scanning his surroundings for movement, but remained stock still. Breathe in. Breathe out. Give the adrenaline time to dissipate.

  Satisfied that the moment was false alarm, he relaxed, then returned to the task at hand.

  On the eve of Election Day at the turn of the twenty-first century, the courtly, silver-haired chemist and his bearded sidekick, Clyde Apperson, loaded boxes containing aluminum canisters and an array of laboratory glassware into the rear of a Ryder truck outside a retired Atlas Missile silo on the edge of Wamego, Kansas. The pair worked with haste and care. The labware was delicate. The canisters looked as harmless as Pringles potato chip cans, but the powder inside could provoke convulsions, delusions—even death. There was no room for false moves.

  When they finished loading the truck, Pickard silently directed Apperson to climb behind the wheel and then did the same with his rented Buick LeSabre. Like a wizard trailed by his inelegant apprentice, Pickard angled his silver sedan past the chain link surrounding the former missile base while Apperson followed close behind. They each had a walkie-talkie so they could keep in touch as they prepared to head west on US 24.

  Apperson was new to paranoia, but pulling up stakes on a moment’s notice was routine to Pickard. For the better part of a decade, staying on the move had been as big a part of his complicated lifestyle as schmoozing with Afghan warlords, hobnob-bing with Russian diplomats, or investigating money laundering on the Caribbean resort island of St. Maarten. When he wasn’t globetrotting on behalf of the State Department or pushing paper as an academic at UCLA, Pickard synthesized psychedelic sacraments on the fly, lysergic acid diethylamide chief among them.

  Leonard Pickard saw himself as heir to Dr. Timothy Leary, even while he slowly morphed into the Walter White of LSD—but with one crucial difference, Pickard would argue: whereas the protagonist of TV’s Breaking Bad made crystal meth, which ruins lives and kills thousands, Pickard maintained that LSD never killed anyone.

  Possessing it is illegal, however, and carting around ingredients and lab equipment tends to raise questions. A veteran of many a previous bust, Pickard had grown wary to the point of neurosis: an ounce of prevention was worth a ton of police confrontation. Pickard preferred the serenity of anonymity.

  As night fell over the fresh layer of snow that blanketed the Flint Hills, Wamego lit up like a beacon. The farm town that advertises itself as “home of L. Frank Baum’s fictional Land of Oz” afforded the only light for a hundred square miles. Once they’d driven beyond its halo, Pickard and Apperson were shrouded in darkness. They stayed well within the speed limit.

  Pickard saw the flashing lights before he heard the sirens. He slowed, took a deep breath and waited for squad cars to blow past on their way to some accident on the Interstate.

  Panic not. Obey all traffic laws. Draw no attention. Hide in plain sight.

  Only this time, the cops didn’t fly by. Pickard began to perspire when a black-and-white crept up behind, its high-pitched yelp directing the LeSabre to pull over. Instead, Pickard switched instantly from calm to catastrophic. He whipped the walk-ie-talkie to his lips: “This is it,” he barked. “This is what we talked about.”

  He gunned his engine. Apperson followed his lead. The chase was on.

  It ended soon enough. Within a few hundred yards, the Kansas Highway Patrol overtook and forced both vehicles to the shoulder. Apperson made a half-hearted attempt to bolt before falling to his knees in surrender.

  Pickard had different ideas. He left the Buick idling and lit out across an open field. Weapons drawn, the highway patrolmen hollered, “Halt!” They followed in hot pursuit that cooled to lukewarm then frostbitten in minutes.

  A veteran marathon runner, Pickard could be seen in silhouette against the horizon. He ran a broken-field pattern well ahead of harriers half his age and did a fast fade into the night.

  “I actually waded down streams to elude the bloodhound scents,” Pickard recalled months later. “It took a while for those Nikes to dry out. And a full moon to top it all.”

  Inside the Buick, Pickard left behind a paperback describing how to vanish from public view and establish a new identity. Police also found two pamphlets titled “Escape From Controlled Custody” and “How to Survive Federal Prison Camp.” In the trunk were several more instructional brochures: how to obtain an international drivers’ license; how to file for a concealed-weapons permit in Florida; strategies for surviving a police interrogation; and how to hide contraband in public places. Were there any further doubt that they had the right suspect, the cops also located a Department of Justice handbook on controlled substances in the back seat and a catalogue of surveillance equipment in the glove compartment.

  Fortified half a
n hour later by a small army of DEA agents, the Kansas Highway Patrol joined Wamego police and a squadron of Pottawatomie County Sheriff ’s deputies in a full-on flashlight dragnet, crisscrossing the cornfields. Helicopters with infrared scanners and packs of bloodhounds aided in the search. When that failed, a house-to-house canvas of the rural hinterlands surrounding Wamego lasted through the night.

  The following morning, a farmer named Billy Taylor rang the sheriff ’s office. A stranger claiming car trouble was holed up in Taylor’s barn out on Military Road, four miles west of Wamego.

  Taylor had found the man snoozing in the cab of his old pickup at daybreak. If it weren’t for his dirty sneakers and grubby clothes, Taylor might have bought his story. The fellow seemed more like a professor than a hobo. He was cool as a cucumber when he asked Taylor to drive him to nearby Manhattan. Taylor gave him a nod, but added that he needed to put oil in his rig first. Then he called the sheriff.

  With neither lights nor sirens blazing this time, a squad car eased onto Taylor’s property. Taylor had engaged the stranger in small talk until he caught sight of the deputies. Pickard saw them at the same time.

  Once again, Pickard ran off through the fields, but this time, the deputies stayed in their squad car and kept pace right behind, bumping over irrigation ditches and shorn stumps of cornstalk. After a thousand yards, Pickard collapsed, breathless.

  “You’ve got me,” he told them.

  Tucson Federal Penitentiary—July 8, 2018

  Inside the antiseptic glare of a fluorescent-flooded visiting room the size of an NBA arena, contact is limited to a hug or handshake upon greeting and departure. Khaki-clad inmates sit in one set of chairs and visitors in street clothes on another. They face each other. No touching. The place looks benign, if sterile, but make no mistake: there is violence here.

  William Leonard Pickard leans across a four-foot gap that separates him from his visitor.

  “While the guards were distracted, inmates circled ’round,” Pickard confides. He keeps his voice low, his pale blue eyes tilted down. “One inmate steps in, stabs him eighty times.” His eyelids flutter. His normally low timbre hitches a notch at “eighty.”

  “Eighty times?” asks his incredulous visitor.

  “Eight,” says Pickard, pantomiming the jackhammer action of a shiv against his own narrow torso. He blinks twice then glances away, leaving the visitor in doubt as to whether he’s heard correctly.

  “Eight?” the visitor repeats.

  Pickard leaves the question hanging, neither confirming nor denying.

  “It was David Mitchell!” he hisses. “The guy who kidnapped Elizabeth Smart?” Pickard sits back in horrific triumph. “Blood everywhere.”

  Pickard looks askance at two correctional officers kibitzing nearby. Bored at having to spend another Sunday afternoon chaperoning, the guards will clock out once visiting hours end and prisoners return to their Spartan quarters.

  Pickard has been in residence almost a dozen years. He has lost count of the attacks he has witnessed. David Mitchell is just the most recent. Several were far more grisly. His point: don’t let the benign trappings of visiting day fool you. Federal prison is a damned dangerous place.

  Tucson isn’t the nation’s worst. The penitentiary at Florence, Colorado, 800 miles north of here is a Level 5 and houses such criminal elites as Unabomber Ted Kaczynski,1 World Trade Center mastermind Zacarias Moussaoui, and Silk Road internet wunder-kind Ross Ulbricht. Florence is far safer than Tucson. The difference is that everyone is locked down all the time—the equivalent of solitary confinement, 24/7. Not much room for either violence or intimacy.

  Pickard’s home base is also locked down frequently. It has had its own set of notables: celebrity felons as varied as ex-Black Panther

  H. Rap Brown, Utah polygamist Warren Jeffs, Boston mobster James “Whitey” Bulger Jr. and, of course, Brian David Mitchell, the sixty-four-year-old street-preaching pedophile who kidnapped fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Smart in 2002 and kept her indentured as a sex slave for nearly a year.

  According to Pickard, Mitchell is the latest of Tucson’s 1,500 high-risk inmates to fall victim to gang violence and guard indifference.2

  So was wheelchair-bound Bulger, though the scuttlebutt around the yard was that Whitey had been caught colluding with a prison employee who sold his autograph on eBay. Bulger was summarily shipped out as punishment.

  “He was disinclined to walk the yard, but had been seen in the library,” recalled Pickard. “An inmate approached me one day with a note from Whitey, saying he was aware of my case and wanted to talk about his experience with LSD in 1957 at the Atlanta Penitentiary.”

  In those days, the federal government occasionally sought drug research volunteers among soldiers and prison inmates, noted Pickard. Whitey claimed to be among them.

  “Generally, inmates volunteering for drug researchers were not told of the substance’s identity,” said Pickard. It didn’t necessarily have to be LSD. Could have been mescaline or psilocybin or any of a dozen other psychedelics. “I told him to visit me in the library, but he never made it.”

  Instead, in 2018, Bulger was transferred to Hazleton Penitentiary in West Virginia where he was bludgeoned to death with a sock load of padlocks. He was eighty-nine.

  “So, death can occur at any time, for any reason, even over some personal illusion or another,” said Pickard. “Other than knives, ‘locks and socks’ are the preferred method. I’ve seen more attacks than I can count.

  “Within the last six months, a schizophrenic inmate who thought people were always talking about him crept up behind another who was peacefully watching TV. After the first stunning blow, the next ten or so (full arm swings) were delivered on the unconscious victim. He’s never been seen again, but the assailant returned to general population after a month or so in the hole.”

  Any exaggeration on Pickard’s part about instant unprovoked terror can be forgiven. Tucson remains a somber place where gossip runs rampant. Whether eight or eighty, a blow to the skull or stab to the gut is never acceptable, even among the world’s most notorious, many of whom wound up here for committing their own ghastly murders.

  Arguably, William Leonard Pickard should never have been among them. A quick-witted chemist and con man with a passion for the good life, a talent for spinning the truth, and a dubious gift for mixing business, diplomacy, and neurochemistry—but a bloodthirsty criminal capable of gutting a fellow human being? Not in a million years.

  Nonetheless, he has learned to adapt. With two life sentences, Leonard, as he prefers to be addressed, ranks high in the Tucson pecking order—an éminence grise among capos and rapists. At seventy-four, he’s one of the oldest inmates. Most agree he is unlikely to ever walk free.

  He helps his peers with their appeals when he isn’t busy himself. He meditates, exercises, does some yoga. The rest of the time he plunges into reams of correspondence, reads voraciously, and revises his self-published 654-page fantasy/memoir, The Rose of Paracelsus.

  His latest publishing project involves an inch-thick primer on fentanyl which argues that Leonard correctly predicted the current opioid crisis over twenty years ago, while he was still a research fellow at Harvard University. His attorney recently sent bound copies of his “Fentanyl Proposal” to all 535 members of Congress in support of his bid for freedom. He also asked Kim Kardashian to work the same clemency magic on President Trump that she did for convicted drug dealer Alice Marie Johnson3.

  To date, his appeals have failed, but Leonard is resilient. His network of friends and admirers on the outside has only mushroomed since his 2003 conviction as the world’s biggest and best supplier of lysergic acid diethylamide-25.

  “Just was thinking this week that, even in captivity, I’ve come to know so many more than when free,” he said. “I say a nightly prayer for all the kind people.”

  None would know his shadier side if Pickard had his way. He stifles the negatives while maximizing pretensions. The “about th
e author” paragraph at the close of The Rose of Paracelsus tells all that he cares to share about himself:

  William Leonard Pickard is a graduate of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, with degrees in chemistry and public policy. He was formerly a research associate in neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, a Fellow of the Interfaculty Initiative on Drugs and Addictions at Harvard, and Deputy Director of the Drug Policy Analysis Program at UCLA. His interests include Victorian-Edwardian literature, deincarceration technologies, the neuropolicy of cognitive enhancement, and the future of novel drugs.

  He is, of course, so very much more.

  Leonard Pickard is a rail-thin stretch of a man who resembles a beardless Gandalf in a khaki jumpsuit and size-twelve bath clogs. He might be mistaken for an underfed Zen monk, which, in fact, is precisely what he is. He accepted his vows in a Taos ashram nearly thirty years ago. Over the ensuing years, his frosty shock of hair has come to match his translucent complexion. Against all odds, laugh lines crinkle the sockets surrounding his eyes.

  “I treat this place as a monastery, except that the other monks shout all day and are often violent,” he quips. Even at this late date, there is no hard edge to his voice.

  But Zen or no Zen, Leonard yearns for all that he has lost, beginning with family. He has at least three children by three different mothers, two of whom he never sees. Only one son and one of the mothers ever visit.

  However eager he might be to leave this desolate concrete and steel oasis in the Arizona desert, at Pickard’s core is ironic stoicism. A practicing Buddhist and vegan, he lays himself down to sleep each night with a Baptist prayer of gratitude that he learned at his Unitarian father’s knee. His mantras are few but binding. The best strategy for survival is to blend in, make few waves, and stay busy. Were it not for the natural human compulsion to scheme, his would be a purely ascetic existence, stripped of pretense, powered by compassion.

  And yet, hope does spring eternal. Pickard remains fit, vital, and ambitious—bent but not broken. He no longer fancies himself the lady killer he once was, though it seems he’ll never get past his instinct for seduction. Taking acquaintances into his confidence comes so easily that he falls back into the routine like an aging do-dah man.