multi-million controversial U6TERRÂNEÂM 'YGHONÂUT: DREADFUL SAGA OF GORDON TODD SKINNER THE STRANGE AMD BY MICHAEL HASON, CHRIS SANDEL, AND LEE ROY CHAPMAN GORDON TODD SKINNER IN JOSEPH HARP CORRECTIONAL CENTER. PHOTO BY SHANE BROWN e stood naked by the roadside with a blanket draped Oklahoma, a world and a life away from his Tulsa prep school. His hair is mostly gray now, the crown of his around his hips, feebly reaching out for the head smooth as a cremini's cap. H Skinner's mother, aTulsa business woman named Katherine Magrini, married Garj' Lee Magrini. Skinner's stepfather was glimmering cars as they passed in the morning light. a special criminal agent ^¥ith the U.S. Treasury Department, wrhich, at tíie time, handled sosies of drug investigations. He was almost too hideous to look at: Purple and black Federal agents visited the Magrini home regularly. From an early age. Skinner learned that he could dabble in the world of tracks streaked across his frail limbs, and his hollow drugs right under the government's nose. Either nobody cared, or nobody noticed. eyes peered out from a pale, gray head shaved bald, Skinner tried stronger drugs on his friends, studying them like insects. He was known to bring a tank of nitrous oxide to eyebrows and all. Brandon Andres Green was not from school so he and his pals could inhale in the bathroom between classes. One weekend, according to a classmate. Skinner hell, not exactly. He was from Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. experimented on another student, dosing him heavily wdth something he'd conjured. The teen was later found in front of a full-length mirror, naked and talking to his reñecüon. He tried Over the coiirse of the past six days. Green had been tied up Tulsa rave offering Ecstasy to Green's friends. Green eyed her to negotiate a cocaine deal with an oak tree. in a Tulsa hotel room, where his mind •was loaded with powerful baggy pants, her form under a fitted t-shirt. He asked her to "I was just a scientist saying,'Tr)' this out.'And unfortunately, psychoactives and his body ravaged. He wus then driven 500 meet him in the hall, to see if he could buy 50 puls. He was a they were all just guinea pigs in line," Skinner recalls. "Some of miles south and abandoned im a Texas field at night. Green had dealer too, he explained. She patted Green down, probing him them thought it was great, and some of them don't talk to me crawled through the darkness, the occasional moan of a distant with questions. He thought her paranoia was cute. Cole said to this day over it." car his only guide. Ever)' few feet, he collapsed from exhaustion. she'd call him soon to negotiate a deal, and she did, around By morning, he reached the road. He grasped at fistfuls of air, noon the next day. hoping that someone might notice him. It was 8:11 a.m. when Patrolman Neal Mora of the Texas eligion and psychedelics enjoy a marriage over millermia. City Police Department passed. He wasn't qxiite sure what he ROne of the most evocative myths pertains to Soma, or saw. He turned around, pulled over to the shoulder, then stepped WAIT 30 M I M U T E S 3 E r 0 R E Chandra, the havoc-creating moon lord of plants in Vedic out of his patrol car and approached the man cautiously. Brahmanism. "Let Indra drink, O Soma, of thy juice for "Help me, please," Green gasped. |o P E N I M G THE ENVELOPE. vñsdom," the Rig Veda proclaims. The ethnomycologist The emergency techs showed up and loaded Green gingerly COLE SAID. INSIDE WERE R. Gordon Wasson equated Soma vñth the psychedelic into the ambulance. They ran a few^ tests on his vitals. He had mushroom Amanita muscaria, the same mushroom that about 45 minutes left to live. DIRECTIONS TO A NEARBY appears in Siberian folklore and ancient Central American Green was no innocent, not back then. He was making pottery. The use of mushrooms, fungi, and other plant-related a few hundred dollars a week selling weed and Ecstasy in TACO ELL hallucinogens permeate indigenous spiritual traditions, but Tulsa when he met the wrong girl, who introduced him to the it w^asn't until 1938 that a Svsdss scientist, Albert Hofmann, wrong guy. He couldn't have known that he opened the gate tried synthesizing ergotamine (an extract of ergot fungi) and to an underworld populated with federal agents, clandestine They met at a Burger King near the University of Tulsa. wound up with lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD. Reports chemistry, and mystical orders. A world in which one man, Cole handed Green an envelope, then asked him for his car keys. quickly spread about its mind-altering effects. Even the U.S. Gordon Todd Skinner, felt at home. Green waited inside while Cole searched his car. Wait 30 minutes government was curious. before opening the envelope. Cole said. Inside were directions to Dr. Frank Olson, a biological w^arfare specialist, stayed at / X // a nearby Taco Bell, where Green found a note addressed to him the Hotel Statler in New York City. Unbeknownst to him, the hidden in the ladies' room. Green saw a tail, bearded man in the Central Intelligence Agency dosed him with enough LSD to t was AprU of 2003 when Green—18 at the time, still parking lot, a guy he noticed at the rave the night before. The seriously impair his mental state. On Saturday, November 28, Igrinding out his final semester of high school—first laid eyes notes led Green to a pay phone in a sandvidch shop, then a call led 1953, Olson's trip ended when he was pushed from, thrownn out, on Krystle Cole. She was the cute blonde in pigtails at a South to the nearby Peace of Mind bookstore, where he found a final or jumped out of the glass wfindow of his room and plummeted message hidden in a specific book that instructed him to meet 10 fioors down. The Frederick Ne-ws-Post said Olson was Cole in the parking lot of a health food store. depressed and complained of ulcers. Today, we know his death The game took hours, ending vwth Cole inviting Green was the result of a covert CIA project known as MK-ULTRA, into her car. It was time to meet her chemist friend. Green which dosed unvñtting men, women, and children wdth LSD saw the balding, bearded man—the same from the rave and for scientific research.The program was declassified in 2001, but from the Taco Bell parking lot—parked nearby. The man said nobody knows how many died as a result of the experimentation. he knew how to cook all sorts of drugs, and that he'd been Olson's family settled with the U.S. government for $750,000. involved in serious deals since he was a teenager; that he'd been all over the world, met with insiders, and even served a little time. And now he was looking for some help. Would Green be interested in some real work, a gig that involved a küo of LSD SKINNER LEARNED THAT in Amsterdam? Cole made the introduction: Brandon, meet Gordon Todd Skinner. HE OOULD DABBLE IN Around Skinner, Green felt intoxicated. At the time. THE WORLD OF DRUGS Green was a senior at Victory Christian School—a pretty boy, I slight of build wdth long, golden hair and blue eyes. He was RIGHT UNDER THE naïve and easily entertained, the kind of guy who would get fruited to the gills at raves. Skinner was everything Green was GOVERNMENT'S NOSE. not: big, strong, hyper-inteUigent, worldly, and otherworldly. EITHER NOBODY OARED. Green needed to get a legitimate job to distract the authorities, they told him. He would need to abandon the party scene for OR MOSODY NOTICED., a discrete, seemingly ordinary life. If everything went well, and Green proved himself to be a talented understudy, then they could talk about the transaction in Amsterdam. It could bring in millions. Green was excited, and terrified. Skinner and The CIA's drug exj>erimentation projects took root post- Cole were grooming Green to be a better drug dealer. Just the WWII. Initially they focused on discovering new techniques for week before he bought a fake Mazzio's Piz2^ uniform to fool mind control, torture, and brainwashing. Similar CIA projects his parents into thinking he had an after-school job. Now two grew in scope and ambition during the 1950s, and included accomplished drug traffickers clamored to mentor him. He subjects like future counterculture figures such as Ken Kesey, Todd Skinner never heard of Gordon Todd Skinner or Krystle Cole before. Robert Hunter, and Ted Kaczynski. In his book The Electric "Tfou realize you're in too deep to back out now," Skinner Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe documented the transition of told Green. LSD into American mainstream culture. By the late 1960s, GORDON TODD SKINNER'S SENIOR CLASS LSD •was on the tips of myriad tongues, with about 20,000 PHOTO, 1982 CASCIA HALL YEARBOOK. being introduced to the drug annually. In 1966, a gang of sophisticated, elusive peacenik drug uring his high school years in the early 1980s, Gordon smugglers called "The Brotherhood of Eternal Love" became DTodd Skinner ofren showed up to Casda HaU Preparatory a prolific supplier of LSD stateside and to soldiers fighting School in his blue blazer, with the school crest proudly the Vietnam War.