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Psychedelic Researcher Turns DEA Informant
(JEANE MacINTOSH, New York Post, February 18, 2008)
A Harvard-educated Manhattan jet-setter has been pegged as the money-laundering mastermind behind a massive LSD drug ring run out of a Kansas missile silo, The Post has learned. . . . Stefan Wathne, a 39-year-old scion of New York's socially prominent Wathne apparel family, surrendered to federal agents Jan. 7 as he stepped off a plane at Newark Airport - after three years on the lam. . . . Wathne is accused in a 2005 federal indictment of laundering as much as $3 million through Russia between 1996 and 2000 for what authorities have described as the most prolific LSD operation in US history. . . . His arrest marks the latest chapter in a bizarre federal drug case that has unfolded over five years and featured a surreal cast of characters. . . . In addition to Wathne - an erstwhile financial planner and former American Ballet Theatre trustee - the case has included a prominent Harvard psychiatrist and a deputy director of a UCLA drug-study program. . . . In another strange twist, singers Sting and Paul Simon helped pay the legal bills for a witness in the case. . . . The drug ring was cracked in November 2002, when the US Drug Enforcement Agency descended on a decommissioned military silo outside Topeka, which had been converted to a lab capable of churning out massive amounts of LSD. . . . The drug, formally known as lysergic acid diethylamid and originally used to study personality disorders, is the most potent hallucinogen known. The government banned it in 1966. . . . The feds arrested the Princeton- and Harvard-educated head of the operation, William Leonard Pickard, a noted chemist who at the time was deputy director of UCLA's Drug Policy Analysis program. . . . Pickard and an accomplice, California computer specialist Clyde Apperson, were charged with conspiracy and possession to distribute after agents seized enough raw material to produce 16 million doses of LSD, with an estimated street value of as much as $160 million. . . . The arrests put Wathne on the DEA's radar. . . . A Reykjavik-born Icelandic national whose family later put down roots here, Wathne was introduced to Pickard through Dr. John Halpern, a leading psychedelic researcher from Harvard's prestigious McLean Hospital. . . . Halpern, records show, was paid $319,000 by Pickard from 1996 to 1999 - the same years Wathne is charged with laundering money for Pickard. . . . Testimony at Pickard's drug trial suggested that Halpern was paid for the Wathne introduction. . . . Wathne's alleged role in the LSD ring was to take drug money, cycle it through Russia and then send it back to Pickard, partly in the form of a "donation" to his UCLA research program, according to testimony at Pickard's trial. . . . After the silo bust, Halpern made a deal with the feds and ratted out his friends. . . . He also rolled on a one-time New Mexico business partner, Alfred Savinelli, from whom Pickard had bought chemicals and glassware to make LSD.

FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ABOUT THIS STORY PLEASE SEE:

Halperngate

Halperngate Video

The Bad Shaman Meets the Wayward Doc

Halperngate II

posted by Lorenzo 4:46 PM