The Acid King (2001)

L ate last year, a new prisoner arrived at the Shawnee County Jail in Topeka, Kansas — a polite beanstalk of a man from the San Francisco Bay Area who stood out among the petty criminals who make up the majority of Shawnee’s inmate population. He spoke in a rapid whisper, practiced yoga, meditated in his cell and read difficult books on mathematics and physics. Along with his prison blues, he wore sandals with socks. A princely mane of silver hair fell almost to his shoulders. The man’s name was William Leonard Pickard. A few days before, on November 7th, 2000, the 55-year-old Harvard graduate had been arrested not far from an abandoned Atlas E missile silo outside Topeka and charged with being one of the busiest manufacturers of LSD in the world, a chemist with the means to cook up acid by the kilo. If the government’s charges prove true, this would make him one of the high priests of acid manufacture, part of a clandestine fraternity that probably numbers no more than a dozen worldw ... Read full article.