Bring Me the Head of Timothy Leary

By the time Tim Leary fell for Joanna Harcourt-Smith, he'd been on the run for two years and the lords of karma had already begun to turn his fugitive doings back on him in hard ways.

His wife, Rosemary, had left with another man over a year before. She was a fugitive, too, and had grown tired of it, sick with their marriage, out of rhythm with the all-is-perfect cosmic-prankster style they had been chasing since she helped him break jail that night in San Luis Obispo. They fled first to Algeria, but the Black Panthers ran them out only four months after they got there. Eldridge Cleaver said they used too many drugs and weren't serious enough about the big struggle, which didn't have anything to do with tripping naked among the sand dunes and goat herds of the Sahara.

They crept around North Africa, Asia and Europe and holed up finally, tenuously, in Switzerland, where they were almost welcome as long as they kept moving from canton to canton, from rented house to rented house. And Tim was bored at 50, into heroin--snorting it--and cocaine and lots of acid, as always. Whatever chalet they were in was full of the desperate circus that found them everywhere now: wired friends, dopers, revolutionaries, other fugitives, power peddlers, smugglers, informers, burned-out cases, some relatives, star fuckers, journalists, some babies, musicians, other women.

Rosemary's spirit was low when a friend of hers, John Schewell, arrived in October 1971 for a visit. He came with Dennis Martino and April White, two young friends of Tim's from the Laguna Beach Brotherhood of Eternal Love days. The Brotherhood was a ragtag bunch of young hashish smugglers. They bought the hash in Afghanistan in 100-pound bundles and then shipped it into Canada and the U. S. While Tim had lived in Laguna Beach, he had been something of their spiritual father. Dennis had been a courier for the operation and April was his girl.

Schewell had never met Tim, but he was in love with Rosemary. He'd helped her with the fund raising and legal scrambling during the six months Tim had spent in prison, and the night they arrived at the house, everybody took acid to celebrate. Except Rosemary: She was moody and blue and didn't take any.

The next day, Tim went into the hospital for ear surgery, and while he was gone, Schewell and Rosemary talked and held each other and made love. By the time Tim got back, the shift of passions was complete. The day he went home, they took acid again and Tim finally looked at the two of them and asked Schewell if he and Rosemary had been getting it on. Schewell told him yes. Then Tim looked at Rosemary, and when she said yes, he told them, "I think the two of you should go away together...right now." Rosemary, crying, packed one suitcase, kissed April and Dennis and went. It was the end of seven years together for Tim and Rosemary, through high times, arrest, trial, conviction, jail, escape and flight. And after this day, he would almost never mention her name again. When they'd gone, Tim walked down the hill and came back with a bottle of wine, a newspaper and another woman: Emily, the first of many.

Tim was never without a girl or girls from then on. They came and they went, but only after he had watched them, talked to them, made love to them and read his poetry to them. He was always looking to see if this was the one, his perfect one. For of all the things Tim Leary was--intellectual, psychologist, prince of the chemical Sixties--he was most of all girl crazy. He always had been. He was a man who believed that the highest you could get on this planet, straight or stoned, was to rock your loins in the loins of a beautiful woman who adored you, who could share your madness and even your sanity, who could play your games, call your bluff, chase your blues, undo you. With that you could play table-stakes poker with Alexander the Great. Without it you were begging.

He was still insanely handsome. He had sandy hair turning whitish, blue eyes, a strong jaw, straight teeth and that Irish smile that had weathered all the storms of his life and still came out like the sun.

The living situation around him was communal. Everybody slept in the living room and slid freely among one another as lovers. Tim (continued on page 96) Timothy Leary (continued from page 89) was up early every morning; he read the newspaper every day, and sometimes when the intensity of the house was low, he would go to his typewriter and work.

He didn't have a passport in Switzerland, but he had money, which is like a passport for a man on the run. He'd written a book, Confessions of a Hope Fiend, with his friend and house guest Brian Barritt, a British novelist. Hope Fiend, was supposed to be an account of his time in jail and the escape, but the two of them turned it into fiction and fantasy. Tim sold the 16th version to Bantam Books and he had borrowed from friends against the first part of an expected quarter-million-dollar advance. He was spending like a fugitive: making flashy memories against a time when they might again be the most of what he had for passing the days.

He bought a yellow Porsche and with Pink Floyd humming up into the earphones from the tape deck, he drove it like the roads had no turning. He bought a home recording studio, amplifiers, a synthesizer and mixers, and everybody in the house played with them. There were fancy dinners, ski trips and a casino evening when he tipped the doorman $200 to let him in wearing tennis shoes. There was money that he gave to friends who showed up broke, money for dope, money for bribes and money he never saw that got skimmed by lawyers and agents who had influence with the Swiss government.

Michel Hauchard, a wealthy, shady character, was his archangel. At the end of Hope Fiend, Tim describes him this way: "A man emerged from booth eight and approached us. He was tall as a giant, silver-white hair swept into a leonine mane, face radiant with regal benevolence. He spoke to us in rapid Parisian French. It was Goldfinger, welcoming us to new life in Switzerland, land of freedom."

Hauchard lived in Lausanne and had strong enough and crooked enough lines into the Swiss council and other official agencies to keep Tim in the country and out of jail. But the price was high: Tim signed a contract with Goldfinger giving Hauchard total rights to everything he wrote for the next 15 years in exchange for money and favors that, in December of 1972, included an introduction to his sometime mistress, Joanna.

•

The house was in Immensee now; four bedrooms, built like a ship, with nautical bunks and fine woodwork. It was rented in Dennis' name. Tim's time in Switzerland was running out. Hauchard had warned him that his influence wouldn't keep him safely in the country past the end of the year and the government was making official noises that he had until New Year's Day to find another place to hide from extradition to the U. S. But if Tim was worried, he didn't show it. He was living for the moment and had been since he broke jail.

He was in Bern the day Joanna called to meet him and when Tim pulled the Porsche into the driveway that night, Joanna's rented orange Volkswagen was right behind.

They came in together, smiling: Joanna, a slender body in jean coveralls and a pink sweater with a sunburst on it. There were introductions, some welcome-home chatter and then everybody sat in the living room by the fire listening to music, drinking wine, eating oranges.

Joanna told them she was Hauchard's mistress and not much more. She said that she'd always wanted to meet Tim, that she admired his work and that, really, she felt they'd met before. Tim flirted with her across the room. After a while, she reached into her pocket, pulled out two hits of windowpane acid and ate one. Then she said, "Whoever eats this other will follow me." Tim jumped up, grabbed the other, put it in his mouth and swallowed. No one else had any.

They stayed up all night, speaking French, making love and laughing, and in the morning, when the others awoke, Tim announced that he and Joanna had made a perfect genetic connection, achieved the ultimate helical embrace, that they had known each other in another life, that this was the perfect love he had waited for and that she was his mystical sister, sora mystica.

Over the next two weeks, things changed in a way they never had with Tim's other women. Everybody still slept in the living room, but more and more Tim and Joanna were becoming separate, whispering, moving their mattress to a corner. They took long baths in the big tub, made love all day, took long walks, tripped, talked about the poems Tim was writing.

She warned him again that he wasn't going to be safe in Switzerland much longer and then suggested that they take a trip together, to St.-Moritz--a ski fling. When they told the others they were going, they called it a honeymoon and said not to worry, that everything was perfect.

Tim liked to ski: He liked the metaphor of it. His theory of momentum was that if you get going fast enough in this life, you can't slow down, and then it doesn't matter if you get off the track. Sometimes, with a head full of acid, he would throw away his poles and take the hill in a straight schuss. Joanna skied well enough to keep up. After a week, they called April and Dennis to say that they missed them, that everything was high and fine and that they were leaving Christmas Day for Vienna to make a film. Dennis, April and Tim's daughter, Susan, who had just arrived from India, made plans to join them. In early January, they did.

When they arrived, they found things happy but not quite perfect. Tim and Joanna were staying at the Bristol Hotel, making an anti-heroin documentary. It was in exchange for a passport promised by the Austrian chancellor, Bruno Kreisky. But Joanna had picked up hepatitis before she met Tim and the symptoms were just beginning to show. She began to look and feel worse and worse and the doctors told her that she should check into a hospital immediately. She said she was happy in the hotel room with Tim and refused to go.

Susan had arrived from India with a bottle of water from the sacred River Ganges, which was said to have healing powers. One night, Tim put Joanna into a bath, poured the water over her and then got in himself. But it didn't work. She was yellow now and weak and the doctors told her that if she didn't get treatment, she would die.

Joanna began to believe that the hepatitis was being used by one government or another to trap them, so they decided to run. She suggested Ceylon, said she'd been a movie star there as a child and that she knew the place. She wanted to stop in Beirut on the way to celebrate her birthday, January 13, then go on to Afghanistan. She'd never been there, she said, but she'd heard the hash was good and if she was going to die, she wanted to be high.

Dennis knew Afghanistan well. He had been there a dozen times to fill Citroëns and campers with hash to be shipped back to the States. He had friends and contacts there and spoke a little of the language, and they agreed that he should go along as guide and helpmate.

The money was almost gone and the three plane tickets took most of what was left. They told April and Susan to go to Amsterdam with most of the luggage and wait for word to join them. Tim was expecting money from Hauchard and he promised to send for them as soon as he got it. April was upset. Tim told her there just wasn't enough money to fly them all. As it was, they were going to have to jump their hotel bill.

The night before they left, everybody took acid in the hotel room. As Joanna began tripping, her strength seemed to return; she got out of bed, she looked better, seemed happy and excited about the trip. Tim took five hits of windowpane, waved his new passport and called it freedom

Tim, Joanna and Dennis took an Ariana flight to Beirut, where they played for three days. Then they flew (continued on page 104) Timothy Leary (continued on page 96) on to Afghanistan--a country that has no extradition agreements with the U. S. and where, they told themselves, they would be safe. Tim believed that he could go anywhere but home on his new passport.

When they arrived at the airport in Kabul, Tim and Joanna sat in the lounge while Dennis took their passports to the visa window. A nervous little man with a mustache watched them and a moment later began calling out "Timothy Leary...Timothy Leary." Tim identified himself and the man went over. He asked for their passports. Tim signaled Dennis to bring them and when he did, the man took them. He said he was from the American embassy and that their papers had been revoked. He told them to wait and left.

They waited. The airport cleared. Then an Afghan customs man walked over and asked to see their passports. They told him an American official had taken them. The Afghan looked surprised, said there were no American officials there and that if they didn't have passports, they would be taken into custody. Tim and Dennis argued, told the man in English and a little Afghan that Joanna was very sick and needed a hospital.

The Afghans put them into a car and took them first to a small police station, where there was more arguing and where they tried to separate the three. They clung to one another as if it were all they had left. Finally, they were put into another car, taken to a third-class hotel with a mud floor and one small oil heater and left under guard.

Tim insisted that they weren't really in trouble, that it was all a mistake, that they would be out soon. The Afghans brought them nan--the local bread--and water, but Dennis said if they ate it, they would get dysentery. They went hungry. Dennis was released the next day and checked into the Intercontinental Hotel. He called April to tell her that they needed money and help desperately.

Dennis took food from the hotel for Tim and Joanna and reported on the progress of efforts to get help. By then the three of them were beginning to suspect that Tim was going to be returned to the States. Then, three days after they were put into the hotel, an Afghan car picked them up and delivered them to the airport, where a Pan Am 747 waited on the runway. They were told that since they had no money and no passports, they were being deported to Beirut first, then to London. Then they knew for sure. Dennis was taken into a small customs room at the airport, then the car delivered Tim and Joanna to the door of the big jet. The two of them said later they knew who was going to be on the plane, that they'd read about him in Rolling Stone. His name was Burke and he was the head of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs in Kabul. When they walked into the first-class cabin, he greeted them happily. He told Tim that his passport was being held and that he had been issued an identity card meanwhile. Tim's card had his passport picture on it and said he was born in Massachusetts, U.S.A., on October 22, 1920, that his occupation was philosopher, that he was six feet tall and that his eyes and hair were gray. Across the top of the card was typed, Direct Return to United States Only.

On the flight to London, Joanna told all the passengers who would listen that they were being kidnaped. At the London airport, while they waited for the polar hop to Los Angeles, Tim laughed and smiled and told reporters that he was going to get a lawyer.

Then they were put on another Pan Am flight, direct to L.A., and when they were over Montana, a couple of hours or so from landing, Tim took out pen and paper and wrote this note: "The right to speak for me I hereby lovingly give to Joanna Harcourt-Smith, who is my love, my voice, my wisdom, my words, my output to the world for our love, etc., etc., etc. Timothy Leary. January 18, 1973, Montana, U.S.A."

It was raining hard when the plane taxied to a stop in Los Angeles. Immediately, ten Federal officers stormed aboard. They found Tim and Joanna in the upstairs lounge. One of the officers read the charges against Tim: escape from the Men's Correctional Colony in San Luis Obispo, California, September 13, 1970...19 counts of smuggling and conspiracy to smuggle in connection with the activities of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love ... and back-tax charges, $76,000,000, also out of the Brotherhood indictments.

Then an agent told him, "You're under arrest."

"What's your name?" Tim asked him. But the game had run out.

"Stand up," the agent said. "You know the procedure."

They cuffed his hands behind him and put a light rain jacket over his shoulders. Fifty Los Angeles police with riot guns and helmets lined the way to a Vw bus that was waiting to drive him to Parker Center. Tim smiled for the newsmen on the way. The agents smiled, too; his bail had already been set at $5,000,000. They were going to lose the key this time.

Joanna was released. She had never been arrested. Dennis was still in Afghanistan. No one knew what had happened to him. It was the Government's game now. One adventure had ended, another was beginning.

•

Joanna was a stranger in Los Angeles, but it wasn't going to be a problem for her. Tim had given her a list of names--old friends, movement people, media contacts--and the note he'd given her was going to be better than a passport for travel in the underground. One of the first people she called was Art Kunkin, then editor of the Los Angeles Free Press, and he set up a press conference.

Joanna began it by reading her love-note credentials with a slight French accent. Her eyes were the color of mustard by now. She said she and Tim had been kidnaped and then gave a short version of what had happened in Kabul. She finished the story by saying that she knew everything was going to be all right. One of the reporters asked her how she knew that. "I know that because I know that Timothy Leary is a free man...he's stronger than ever. He's happy." And then she said, as if it followed, "We were in Vienna by invitation of the chancellor, making an anti-addiction film. We're against hard drugs."

Someone asked her why the change of image for Tim. "It's not a sudden change of image," she told them as if it were true, "it's just two years later and there's perfect love. Timothy Leary never was for hard drugs."

Then she said she intended to stay in the United States "as long as it takes. Maybe it will take weeks, maybe months. I just intend to use every minute of my time and my life."

"Where's Rosemary?" they asked her.

"I don't know," she said.

•

April and Dennis arrived in the United States a week later. April had wired Dennis money from Amsterdam to pay the Kabul hotel bill, then he joined her and the two of them flew to Los Angeles, where he was busted going through Customs for passport and probation violations. They took him to the Hall of Justice, kept him there several days and then let him go. Dennis told everyone that his probation officer had interceded for him.

After legal tugs of war between Orange and Los Angeles counties, between Federal and state prosecutors, Tim was shipped to San Luis Obispo and put in solitary confinement to wait for his trial on escape charges. Joanna took a house in nearby Cayucos, where she began raising money and helping Los Angeles attorney Bruce Margolin prepare the defense. She visited Tim once a week, the maximum she was allowed, and the two of them continued to sing their song of perfect love for anyone who would listen. She was convinced that Tim would be free very soon and in mid-March, when a jury of 11 women and one man was seated in the heavily guarded courtroom, she told everyone that Tim would seduce them into returning a not-guilty verdict.

The trial was important to the prosecutors not only because they wanted (continued on page 204) Timothy Leary (continued from page 104) the cocky acid prince back behind bars but also because both he and the Weathermen claimed they had broken him out. The Weathermen, a radical political group of bombers led by Bernardine Dohrn, had sent letters to newspapers and TV stations just after the bust-out claiming that they had "the honor and pleasure of helping Dr. Timothy Leary escape from the POW camp at San Luis Obispo, California." None of them had been arrested.

Tim sent out letters of his own after the escape, from Algeria, and in them he let down his peace-and-love prattle and picked up the revolutionary rhetoric of his wheelmen. "Resist actively," he wrote back, "sabotage, jam the computer--hijack planes--trash every lethal machine in the land...shoot to live...blow your mind and blow up the controlling systems of the genocidal culture." Then he called the police pigs and warned them that he was "armed and should be considered dangerous to anyone who threatens my life or freedom."

The trial lasted over two weeks. When Tim took the stand, he swore that he was tripping when he escaped and that no one had helped him. He said he shinnied along a cable, jumped a 12-foot Cyclone fence and hitchhiked to a supermarket, where he bought a pair of khakis and a fishing hat. That was it, he told them; no Weathermen, just a lucky run.

When they asked him his occupation, he said he was a philosopher and a neurologician and that he'd coined that last word. He also said he was a time traveler from beyond the 20th Century and he was being persecuted for his ideas. But, he said, he was used to it: In other lives, he'd been Socrates and several witches burned at the stake.

The nub of Margolin's defense was that Tim was in a state of involuntary LSD flashback when he ran away. Tim confirmed that by saying most of the time he was not Dr. Timothy Leary. When he was driving a Chevrolet, he said, a fragment of his nervous system was a Chevrolet. Then he turned to the jury and explained in long detail his system of neurologies, a pseudoscientific and philosophical theory that sees man crawling up through seven levels of consciousness to reach his ultimate evolution, which waits somewhere in outer space. Then he told them, "I escape from everything...we've got to escape from this planet, from ourselves, or we will be destroyed."

In his final argument, Margolin called Tim an eagle beating his wings against a cage. The jury retired, talked about it for an hour and a half and then pronounced him guilty. Judge Richard Harris added five years to the ten he was serving when he escaped, and this time, instead of a country-club assignment, they sent Tim off to do hard time at Folsom.

Joanna broke down at the verdict and for the first time since she'd arrived in the country, she avoided newsmen. Then she and her secretary, Betsy Klein, and Dennis packed her things and moved her to an apartment in San Francisco, where she began a devastating nine-month run through the Bay Area underground that was going to leave everyone who had contact with her sorry about it.

•

Tim began his time in Folsom still talking like Socrates. He made a video tape that was supposed to be shown on TV but never was. In it, he said that millions of people all over the world thought he was the greatest philosopher of the 20th Century. He said that he'd taken LSD over 500 times but that he thought he'd misled a lot of kids and other people about acid. "I don't want anyone to listen to this broadcast and get any other idea than I'm telling you, stay away from LSD. In the first place, 99 percent of what's called LSD isn't LSD and 99 percent of the things said about LSD are totally lies or fabrications." At the end of the interview, he talked about the comet Kohoutek, which was then being promised as the greatest astronomical phenomenon of the century. He said it was a sign from a higher intelligence in deep space that we were visitors on the planet Earth and we weren't going to be here very long. He said he and Joanna had renamed the comet Starseed and that it was a symbol of unity and hope. It turned out to be a comet nobody saw.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, Joanna had changed her name legally from Harcourt-Smith to Leary and opened the Starseed Information Center to collect money and coordinate benefits for the Leary defense fund.

The benefits, mostly in San Francisco and Los Angeles, were always well attended, but they never made much money for the cause. Rock-'n'-roll bands played and gurus spoke of kidnaping and repression, but whatever money was made Joanna squandered--on cocaine and long-distance phone calls to her mother in Spain, on boots from I. Magnin and on jewelry from Cartier's. Finally, her style was too much for Baba Ram Dass, the man who had been Richard Alpert years earlier and was an old Leary friend. He refused to give Joanna $800 from one of the shows and told her in hard terms that the money was going to Margolin, who hadn't seen a penny for his work, and that she was sabotaging all their efforts to help Tim. Then Allen Ginsberg, the poet, another old Leary friend, went with Joanna to visit him at Folsom. He told Tim, in her presence, that Joanna was blowing precious money and turning off a lot of otherwise sympathetic people. Tim looked at her and she said, "Oh, you know; he just hates women." It was a reference to Ginsberg's homosexuality and Tim took it as explanation enough from his girl. He told Ginsberg that Joanna was one of the smartest women on the planet and that whatever she did was Ok with him. And when "Neurologic" was published as a small blue pamphlet, the by-line read, "Transmitted by Joanna and Timothy Leary."

Joanna continued her romp among the people she thought could keep her going and maybe spring Tim. There were no hippie hangers-on around the apartment or the Starseed office. Joanna didn't like them, called them losers and spent most of her time with rich men, dope dealers, politicos of stature and lawyers who had at one time or another represented Tim or, like Bill Choulos, were even then in the process of filing briefs and appeals in an attempt to free him. April and Dennis were closest to her now. April was acting as secretary and Dennis continued as helpmate, drug errand boy and would-be lover.

In November, Tim was transferred to the medium-security prison at Vacaville, about 60 miles northeast of San Francisco. He'd been there before--not as a prisoner but as a psychologist who had designed the personality inventory he took as they checked him in. Joanna visited him often and sometimes, taped in a yellow notebook, she took him acid. They hugged and cooed in the visitors' room. Tim would take the notebook and write ideas, people to see, projects to start, things for Joanna to follow up.

His spirits were good: He was working on a book called Terra II, which spun out his plan for a multibillion-dollar "sperm ship" that was going to take him and 500 of the most evolved people on earth out through the "Van Allen Belt Womb" into intergalactic space in search of the parental intelligence that had become his obsession since he had gone to prison. He said the problems of the journey were mostly behavioral, not technical. New patterns of interaction would have to be worked out for the huge crew of Terra II to replace the petty ways people treated one another on this planet, new forms that would transcend the silly, obsessive fear games people play with one another.

In December 1973, one of the oldest games of all reared up out of secrecy and changed everything. In pretrial discovery proceedings in a drug case, lawyer Michael Kennedy found Dennis named as the free-lance narc who had set his client up for the bust.

Then in January, Dennis signed a statement for Tim's then-current lawyers, Choulos and Kent Russell of the Melvin Belli firm, elaborating some of the details of his cooperation with the Federal narcs:

I, Dennis Martino, am 27 years old and I am currently living in San Francisco, California. At or about Thanksgiving time 1973, I first approached Dr. Leary's attorneys at the request of Joanna Leary. I communicated with them the details of my undercover activities, which are summarized below....During Dr. Leary's exile from the United States, I lived with him in Algeria, Switzerland, Austria and Afghanistan, thereby gaining his complete confidence.

On or about January 16, 1973, I was arrested in Afghanistan contemporaneously with Dr. Leary's abduction. Although I was not officially charged, I was told by James Senner of the American embassy that I could only leave Afghanistan by contacting Mr. Burke in the Justice Department of the embassy. Mr. Burke indicated that I would be permitted to return to the United States if I consented to become an informant for the BNDD [DEA].

I consented to this arrangement and was assigned a contact agent in Los Angeles. However, upon my arrival, I was again arrested at the Los Angeles airport, jailed in special custody in the informant block of the Hall of Justice and then approached three days later by my contact. This individual indicated that I could secure my release from custody and have all passport charges dropped if I would consent to assist as an undercover informer. Part of my assignment was to gain the confidence of the Leary defense team and to let my BNDD superiors "know what's going on with that [escape] trial."...

I periodically reported for debriefings to narcotics officers during the pendency of the escape trial. On at least some occasions, members of the Orange County district attorney's office were present when I discussed what I had heard at the San Luis Obispo home being rented by Dr. Leary's defense team.

Furthermore, during the trial, I was asked to place a phone call to Joanna Leary and to discuss the trial with her. The phone call was recorded without Mrs. Leary's consent and was placed from the offices of the Orange County district attorney. After completing the conversation, I asked my superiors whether there were many other tapes relating to Leary and I was informed that "there's a library."

When he was through, Dennis swore it was all true and signed it.

When Tim and Joanna found out and confronted Dennis, he pleaded his case the way every rat in history has pleaded it: They think I have been spying on you, my friends, but really, I have been peeping on them. I have studied their ways and know that the only chance to beat them is to pretend to join them.

Joanna believed him, saw a new kind of survival wisdom in what he said. She had nearly run her game out, anyway. She was close to broke and had, one by one, alienated the people who could have helped her raise more money. Most of the lawyers had long since deserted her for lack of payment and Tim was no closer to freedom than on the rainy day they brought him back. Now Dennis, her confidant and almost lover, a longtime inner-circle tripper, a 5'3" hustler with a silver tongue and bright eyes, was telling her that what looked like treachery was really a plan.

Tim had been under pressure from the prosecutors to talk since they picked him up. He had specific information on the Brotherhood and the Weathermen that they wanted, but, more than that, he had pieces they were missing--little pieces that probably no other person could have. The symbolic weight of breaking him, turning him into a fink, into someone who would trade other bodies for his own, was not lost on the other side. You hold the keys to your cell in your own pocket, they told him. Talk and you walk.

He had refused whatever vague offers of special treatment or even freedom they had made to him by the end of 1973. But now, in the first month of the new year, with his perfect love discouraged and desperate and his best friend a rat, he was close to going over.

In January, he was subpoenaed to testify for the defense in the trial of Nick Sand, an acid chemist for the Brotherhood. All charges against Tim in connection with Brotherhood activities had been dropped by now for lack of evidence and the Sand defense counted on him as a helpful witness. He'd agreed that he could help and he was shipped to a holding cell in the San Francisco Hall of Justice to wait to be called. Joanna visited him there and put him through the kind of ordeal the Government never could have. At one point, she began to cry. "They tell me you can free yourself," she said and then went berserk. She began hitting herself in the head with the telephone receiver and yelling that if he was the greatest scientist of the 20th Century, he would stop her bleeding, end their separation. Very soon after that, Tim sent word to the Sand defense that what he might say on the stand would not be beneficial to their case. He was sent back to Vacaville without testifying.

When he got there, he sent a telegram to the Federal narcs in Southern California, saying that he wanted to help them with their "drug-education program."

In the four months that followed, the Feds considered the game. There was going to be much internal scrambling in the Justice Department over how the case should be handled and by whom. While Tim waited for word, he began a series of encounter-type interviews with a prison psychologist named Wesley Hiler. He rambled on about neurologics and space travel, teleportation and time in prison. He put down his old friends, Ginsberg and Ram Dass, he talked about love. Now and then, he dropped a melancholic phrase or train of thought that betrayed his real fear--that he was going to end his days behind bars. Between state and Federal charges--two roaches in Laguna Beach and an ounce of grass smuggled across the Texas border from Mexico and his escape--he stood to be in jail until he was 71 years old.

•

Meanwhile, Dennis, Joanna and April were busy playing both ends against the middle. Dennis continued to report to the men he called his superiors, while Joanna cast about for money in the hope that something bold would spring Tim as it had once before.

In March, the three of them moved to a cabin on the side of Mount Tamalpais and Joanna learned that her uncle, Stanislaw Ulam, a distinguished nuclear scientist and one of the fathers of the H-bomb, was a candidate for the prestigious Enrico Fermi Award. When Joanna learned that a cash prize went with the award, she visited Ulam and made a series of phone calls that built finally to vague threats on his wife if he didn't give her $25,000 to help free Tim. Ulam stalled and the plan died, but only because a kinkier plot involving more money had begun to congeal.

Joanna had met a rich and mysterious man named Walter. He was involved in drug deals, false papers and gunrunning and he introduced her to a mild-mannered Buddhist, one of the Bay Area's largest acid chemists. His name was Frank. Joanna convinced him that she knew people at the Sandoz laboratory in Switzerland, where LSD had been developed. She said she knew Hoffman, the original acid chemist, and that she had a girlfriend in San Francisco whose uncle worked at the Swiss lab and could get quantities of ergotamine tartrate, a central component of LSD and one of the most difficult to get. Frank told her that if the quality and the source were what she said, he wanted five kilos. They agreed on $60,000 and arranged a meeting at the Hyatt Regency. They met in the bar and Joanna told him that the Swiss chemist's niece, a girl named April, was waiting in a room at the Holiday Inn near Chinatown with the ingredient.

In fact, they had taken four rooms at the hotel: April was in the first, where they would take Frank with his briefcase full of money. Next door, a girl was waiting to hold the elevator at the right moment. There were two other rooms, several floors up. The suitcase Frank was buying was in one. Across the hall, a fourth confederate waited behind a door with a peephole to signal Frank's arrival at that room to the others downstairs. Dennis waited out front in April's car with the motor running.

Joanna arrived with Frank, took him to April's room and introduced them. Then she broke out some French champagne and though the young Buddhist protested that he never drank, she and April convinced him that there was celebrating to do. After a few glasses, he was having a little trouble forming his words. April asked to see the money. He opened the briefcase and April and Joanna counted the packets of $100 bills: 30 of them, 20 new hundreds in each and an extra bill on top, in case he'd miscounted. They laughed and hugged him, gave him the key to the upstairs room and then, with their eyes full of the promise of sex, they told him to come back after he'd picked it up.

The plan had been for them to wait for a phone call from upstairs to say that Frank was in the room before they made their run. But he left his coat and that panicked them. They gave him a minute and made their dash. The elevator was waiting and they were still stuffing money into their purses as they scrambled on. Downstairs, they went through the lobby on a dead run, piled into the car and Dennis drove them straight to a house in Berkeley.

Upstairs, Frank found an aluminum suitcase with a combination lock on it. Joanna had forgotten to give him the combination. But while the three of them were together, they had talked about Aleister Crowley and the magic number 777. He tried it as a guess. It worked and for his trouble and his money, he found the typescript of "Neurologic," along with some prayer paraphernalia and holy bells from the East. Joanna would say later that they hadn't really ripped him off, that the manuscript alone was priceless.

Tim knew about the plan as it evolved and he loved it. When he got word that it had come off perfectly, he asked Joanna to send him $60 for himself and $60 for a friend. He was still waiting for official acceptance of his offer to fink and, meanwhile, money meant options. His spirits rose.

Joanna immediately scored a quarter ounce of coke in Berkeley. She and Dennis and April drove back to San Francisco and took a lavish room at the Hyatt Regency. The next day, Joanna called the Starseed answering service to see if Frank had called. And in his voice she heard this: "You're free as the wind; fly like a bird. How could I have done such an honored thing?"

They were elated: They had ripped off a man on whom they had a bunch of damaging information. They were safe.

For two weeks, they snorted and shopped for cameras and jewelry, stereos and clothes. Every night, they ate out.

The three of them were getting their coke from a San Francisco dealer named Charley DeWald and they were using close to five grams a day. It was costing them almost $2500 a month.

Joanna needed a public explanation for her sudden windfall, so she called her mother, Maryita, who lived in Marbella, Spain, and who Joanna had always claimed was wealthy. She and Dennis picked Maryita up at the airport in a rented Rolls-Royce and took her to the new house that they had rented, this one on Mount Tamalpais also, with natural-wood decks, a huge tub, rented furniture and a spectacular view. Mother stayed a month.

During that time, Joanna took the Rolls to Vacaville for visits and she and Tim plotted and schemed and waited for word from the Feds. But even with the money, there was a dead-end feeling to their plans. Joanna and Dennis were growing close in ways that were finally going to leave both Tim and April out. Still, there was to be one last bizarre fantasy that all of them chased before Tim took the last part of his fall.

At the end of March, a mountain man, big, grubby and carrying a gun in his pack, showed up at the Starseed office and said he was from a family of people who wanted Tim out of jail and were willing to die to accomplish it. Joanna and April took him to Enrico's, where he hypnotized Joanna and asked if she was willing to die to free Tim. She said she was. Then she and April took him to the house. Over the days he stayed, eating with his fingers and refusing to bathe, they planned an escape that Tim would love and that they truly believed would work.

April had been clipping flying-saucer reports out of the newspapers for Tim. She believed that she had seen one herself years earlier in Laguna Beach, and with the spirit of Terra II still in their heads, they decided that if they could get two helicopters, and pilots good enough to fly them, they could spring Tim. Some midnight, the mountain man and his group were going to plant explosives around the prison and on signal set them off as a diversion. Then over the gentle hills that surround Vacaville would swoop one of the copters, with huge mirrors on the bottom and weird lights all over it to make it look like a UFO. While the guards fled in preternatural fear, it would hover, land on the tennis courts, Tim would jump aboard and fly away. The second copter was to be painted with Air Force insignia and was to buzz the prison as if it had come from nearby Travis Air Force Base to give chase. Joanna said she wanted to be naked in the UFO copter, so that she and Tim could make love as soon as he jumped on. The mountain man argued that whoever was in the UFO copter had to be able to use a gun. Joanna insisted, said she'd go naked except for a machine gun. Dennis was to ride shotgun in the other copter and April was to wait some miles away with a Porsche in which Tim and Joanna would race to the ocean, where a boat would pick them up and run them out of U. S. territorial limits.

Joanna had between $25,000 and $30,000 left, and since the San Luis Obispo escape had cost only $25,000, she believed it was enough. But finally they couldn't stand the mountain man; he began to scare them. The plan collapsed of its own absurdity.

•

April was cooking and cleaning and running errands and by the middle of April, things in the house had become worse than awkward. Dennis and Joanna were drawing away from April, and though she was angry and sad, she was taking care of herself. Every few nights, she would walk to the bottom of the hill, where their coke contact would pick her up in his Jaguar, and the two of them would drive to the beach and make out. On those evenings, when she got home, Dennis and Joanna would grill her and shout at her. Though they didn't want her around, they were afraid of how much she knew and might tell if they threw her out.

Dennis and Joanna made two trips to Los Angeles around the third week in April to talk to his drug-agent bosses about the logistics of full cooperation from Tim and what he might expect in return. When they came back from the second trip and visited Tim, he took his yellow notebook and divided it into three parts: Love, Life and Freedom. They went back to the house that night with the Freedom portion filled with about 15 names. They were people Tim was willing to trade for himself: his wife, Rosemary, some Weathermen, some lawyers who had handled his cases, political activists who had come too close and said too much to him or to Joanna.

Of all the names on the list, the most important to the Feds was Rosemary's. She had been hiding where she couldn't be found since she and Tim had split up and she was the only one who could give firsthand testimony as to who arranged the connection and passed the money to the Weathermen for Tim's San Luis Obispo escape. The prosecutors believed, and Tim had told them, that it was a prominent San Francisco lawyer, active in the National Lawyers Guild and for years a fighter in unpopular and radical causes. But Tim had been in jail when the escape was arranged and only Rosemary could finger him for sure. And time was running out: In September of 1975, the statute of limitations would be up and no one involved in the escape, except Tim, could ever be tried for it.

Very close to the time Tim made his list, a friend of April's named Donna, also a close friend of Rosemary's, called the house. It was possible that she knew where Rosemary was. Joanna and Dennis told April that she had to meet with her and get the address. The two of them had lunch in Sausalito and when April told Donna what Dennis wanted, the two of them decided to make up an address in Florida. April took it home with her and the next day Dennis and Joanna flew to Miami, where they were met by Federal agents. Together they raided the ghost address.

April picked them up at the San Francisco airport the next day. Joanna called her a cocksucking bitch and then Dennis slugged her in the stomach and threw her into the back seat. When they got home, April pleaded that her friend had made up the address, that she had no way of knowing. Dennis and Joanna apologized, called her "our little girl" and even invited her to bed with them. She refused.

The next morning, Donna called and Dennis answered the phone. He asked her why she had lied to them. She said that she and April had done it together. And that was it. After a screaming scene, and threats of death if she talked, April left with a few of her things in a cab to stay with Charley DeWald in San Francisco.

•

By May 25, all decisions had been made. Tim took the code name Charles Thrush and in great secrecy was moved from Vacaville to Chino, where he could be processed out of the state-prison system and into the hands of Federal authorities who had assigned the notorious witch-hunter of radicals, Guy Goodwin, to shepherd Tim's grand-jury testimony. Goodwin was the man behind the Berrigan indictments and most of the other important Government cases against the radical peace movement. None of the dozen or so highly publicized cases he ran resulted in conviction, but that was never their first purpose. It was more important to Goodwin and his team to gather dossiers on the left and then harass them until they either cooperated or were forced into long costly trials. His bosses in the Justice Department were Robert C. Mardian and Henry Peterson.

Tim refused to see or communicate directly with his friends, but he was sending cryptic messages to everybody: "Nobody should have any secrets anymore....I'll be out of sight for a while....I won't hurt anybody...the only people who haven't ripped me off are the Feds...."

According to rumors leaked by the Government, Tim was to be flown from Sandstone Prison in Minnesota to Chicago, where he would testify before the Goodwin grand jury. For some reason, he never testified, although the Government continued to leave the impression that he had. In fact, his trip to Sandstone, where he was kept in special custody and wore a black bag over his head when moved in sight of the general prison population, may have been punishment for an abortive escape attempt that he and Joanna had planned and almost gone through with in June.

There were many rumors by then that Tim was singing, but no one was sure what he was saying or to whom--or even where he was. Neither the California prison authority nor the Feds would say anything. Tim was in contact with only Dennis and Joanna on the outside and they had pretty well dropped from sight. Almost no one knew for sure where the two of them were, including April, who had spent the weeks with Charley in San Francisco, planning her revenge.

On the evening of June seventh, she and Charley and mysterious Walter drove to the Mount Tamalpais house with the intention of holding Dennis and Joanna at gunpoint while they ransacked the house. No one was home, so robbery turned to burglary: a fur coat Joanna had bought, a stereo, some jewels, sleeping bags and, most important, 15 or so tape recordings, most of which Dennis had made over the course of their bizarre doings. The tapes included telephone calls to and from the house, plans, names of people, details of the cooperation Tim had begun, blackmail and drug deals. The Hiler tapes were there, too, along with the yellow notebook and Joanna's address books. The next day, they phoned Dennis to say that he could have the recordings and address books back for $20,000.

They arranged a meeting at the Towne-house Hotel in San Francisco a few days later. When April met Joanna in the lobby and asked for the money, an army of Federal agents and San Francisco cops closed in on her. Charley was upstairs in a room with the suitcase that held all but four of the most damaging tapes; and a few minutes after they pinched April and sat her in a patrol car, they dragged him through the parking lot, hands cuffed behind him, yelling "Mum's the word." The police took them downtown, booked them both for attempted extortion and April for possession of heroin, cocaine, marijuana and a deadly weapon. She had a little butane torch in her purse. When the San Francisco cops were through with them, they were driven across the bay and booked for burglary in Marin County, where they both eventually pleaded guilty. The four tapes April had held back were never found.

•

At the end of August, the Government admitted to The New York Times, through a Justice Department spokesman, that Leary was cooperating with Federal authorities in the hope of making a deal. They also said he was in Chicago testifying before a grand jury about the Weathermen. They claimed that Leary was filling in a lot of gaps for them and that the reason for the heavy secrecy and security was that they had information that his life was in danger. They never said who might want to kill him, but it was a theme they were going to hang on to in order to manage the story, leak it on their own terms and in their own time. Over the months that followed, they would change the story as to whose custody he was in, they would deny that they had him and then take the denial back.

On September fifth, the first really ugly result of the Thrush testimony hit. George Chula, an Orange County lawyer who had represented Tim in his original marijuana bust, and who had helped him for no money at other times, was himself busted in Orange County. First reports said that the indictment was the result of Leary's testimony the day before in front of an Orange County grand jury in which he had accused Chula of smuggling hashish to him while he was awaiting arraignment for his escape trial. The testimony itself was still secret, however, and no one really knew what Tim had said, or Joanna--reports said she had testified, too.

With Chula's arrest, the paranoia that had been building among Tim's old friends and associates and among the people who had known and run with Joanna reached a breaking point and two weeks later, a committee called People Investigating Leary's Lies (PILL) held a press conference in San Francisco.

Ken Kelley, a San Francisco journalist/activist, called the whole thing "the death of the Sixties." He was most responsible for putting the group together and whether or not it was the death of those years, it was certainly a flashback. There were over 100 journalists and longhairs, people with sitars and babies, arrogant and pushy television crews and up front a table full of faces from a time when Leary's name fit in the same breath with the Beatles and peace and love. Jerry Rubin was there, in a velvet coat and bow tie and one gold earring. He hadn't been in front of the cameras in three years and said he was sorry to be there now. Kelley sat next to him, then Ram Dass, Ginsberg and on the end, Jack Leary, Tim's 25-year-old son.

Kelley said PILL was lashed together to dispel the rumors and to condemn the pressure brought by the Government on prisoners to convince them to fink on their friends. He compared it to the McCarthy era and the Rosenberg affair. He called Guy Goodwin a "swinster" and said he himself had been before one of his grand juries in the Midwest a few years before. He said it was like being in the court of the Queen of Hearts: no lawyer, no appeal, no right to refuse self-incrimination. Before he introduced Rubin, he said that although "the fantasies of an acid-addled mythomaniac like Leary are easily impeached in a court of law...no one who has had any contact with Leary over the years should be surprised if an FBI agent comes knocking at the door."

Then Rubin read the facts as they knew them up to that time. It was a loose chronology and they didn't know much for sure. Chula had been indicted on the basis of Tim's and Joanna's testimony. Tim had been completely out of touch for months and there were rumors that he had made a video tape in which he named names and pointed the finger at old friends. Rubin said one theory was that Tim's spirit had been killed but that a phantom Tim lived on, cooperating with his executioners. But most prisoners don't break, he said, and he knew from personal experience that Tim never had a firm grasp on where truth ended and fantasy began. He finished with this: "He is trying to give his jail cell to someone else....I feel sick for the death of Tim Leary's soul."

Ginsberg began by chanting Om for a couple of minutes. He'd written what he called "Om Ah Hum: 44 temporary questions on Dr. Leary." They ran a mood range from serious to bitchy, worried to funny: "Trust. (Should we stop trusting our friends like in a hotel room in Moscow?)...Are all my serious prefaces to his books and imperious antithought-control declarations reduced to rubbish? ... Doesn't he recently hear of voices from outer space, does he want to leave earth like a used-up eggshell?...Are not the police, especially the drug police, corrupt and scandal-ridden, Watergate persons like Liddy and Mardian connected with his long persecution? ... Is Joanna Harcourt-Smith, his one contact spokes-agent, a sex spy, agent provocateuse, double-agent CIA hysteric, jealous tigress, or what? ... What was Joanna's role in isolating him from decade-old supporters, using up crucial legal-defense money? ... Does Leary see himself as spiritual President like Nixon, and is he trying to clean the karma blackboard by creating a hippie Watergate? Will he be pardoned by the next guru?..."

Ram Dass rambled and hedged and held out that Tim had always been more of a rascal than a scoundrel and that he wanted to reserve judgment. But if he and Ginsberg were holding out, Jack, Tim's son, wasn't.

Everyone in the room sat pretty much stunned as he took the mike and said, "I know that there's a lot of people who have always supported my father and still do and don't believe that he could ever do anything wrong. I hope this blind devotion, which I don't think he ever deserved, doesn't make people believe that he hasn't become one of the police. Most public figures have two lives--one public and one private. Timothy certainly did. ... As incredible as it might seem for many people to realize that Timothy has become a Government informer, his action comes as no surprise to me. I know Timothy Leary lies when he thinks it will benefit him. He finds lies easier to control than the truth .... Timothy has shown that he would inform on anybody he can to get out of jail, and it would not surprise me if he would testify about my sister and myself if he could. He had already implicated my sister in his escape. Knowing this, I have avoided him in prison .... As for his new girlfriend, Joanna Harcourt-Smith, we know few actual facts concerning her status. Some people are convinced she has been a police agent all along. My immediate reaction to her was that she is crazy."

•

Crazy, maybe; mean, for sure. When the grand-jury testimony against Chula was revealed, it was Joanna's that had done the heavy damage, not Tim's--although he had talked, too. But it was Dragon Lady, Joanna D'Amecourt of Washington, D.C., Joanna Tambacopoulos of Athens, Joanna Harcourt-Smith, now Leary, who had set up the Orange County lawyer. Tim knew about it and if some of his old friends at the press conference were trying to believe that he was just playing cosmic prankster again, it was only because they had not yet seen the words of testimony.

In Superior Court in the State of California, in and for the County of Orange, the People of the State of California Vs. George Chula, September 4, 1974.

Joanna sat in front of 19 grand jurors and answered the questions an assistant D.A. asked her.

Approximately June 16 of this year, did you have a phone call with Mr. Chula?

Yes. I did ... I called him ... told him that I was coming to Orange County from San Francisco on Monday and that I would very much like to meet with him.

At the time you made this call, were you working in conjunction with investigators from the district attorney's office?

Yes, I was.

And other officers from the Drug Enforcement Agency?

Yes, I was

After the phone call, did you have occasion to meet with Mr. Chula?

Yes, I told him I was checking into the Saddleback Inn and he told me he was going to call around eight o'clock .... We got in touch and 30 minutes later he showed up in my room .... I told him that Timothy was at Terminal Island and that was the reason I was now in Southern California .... Then the telephone rang and it was the investigator.

What investigator are you talking about?

I think it was Dick Stewart.

All right, this is a person who is employed by the DEA?

Yes, sir.

And he called while Mr. Chula was in the room?

Yes.

Where was he calling from?

He called from the next room.

So there were investigators in the room immediately adjoining your own?

Yes.

What next happened?

[Chula] pulled out a piece of paper from his pocket and he approached the night stand and he said, "Would you like some cocaine, girl?" So I said quite loudly, "Oh, cocania----"

Cocania? What is that?

That is cocaine in Spanish, you know, I was just, I was very amazed, I didn't ask him for anything....Then I said he was a generous man and he said, "Let's make some lines."... Then he asked, "Do you have something sharp so I can cut it?" ... So I gave him a photograph ... of Timothy and myself that we had taken in the afternoon at Terminal Island....He takes the photograph and starts tapping on the white substance ... tap, tap, tap, you know what I mean...He made three very quite thick lines....And then he gets up and says, "Let's do this in style," and pulls out a hundred-dollar bill .... Then he says, "Put it in your nose and take it." ... So I pretend to aspirate a little bit and I left him the rest and then I told him I would like to keep some for later ... and I asked him at that point, "Do you know how to fold a cocaine paper? because I don't." ... So he made it into this flat piece of paper and then he said, "Keep it in a safe place," and I said, "Well, I will put it in my passport, because if something happens to me, that is the last thing they will take," and he said, "No, that is not a safe place," so then I put it in a brown-suede purse----

I would show you a clear-plastic envelope with a white piece of paper bearing several initials on it and ask you if you could recognize----

Yes, that appears to be the piece of paper.

Did you place those initials on it here?

Yes, those are definitely my initials .... So then we leave the room and go to his car, which is a black Fiat .... And as soon as we start driving ... he pulled out a blue Kleenex and said, "Let's have a joint." ... Then I said, "Where did you get this?" because I knew he had been to Mexico, and he said, "Oh, it is Mexican, of course," and I said, "Did you bring it in with you?" and he said, "Yes," and I said, "It must be quite easy for lawyers to smuggle dope." and he said, "Not so easy as that."

I think you are at the point where you are about to arrive at the restaurant.

We sat down in a booth and he introduced me to the owner ... and then I got up and went to the phone and I called the Saddleback Inn and let the police representatives know at what location we were ... I went back .... Then I got up again and went to the ladies' room and I met with officer Carol Nease and I gave her the cocaine in the little paper that I just identified ...

•

Four days later, Joanna repeated the setup, at the Newporter Inn, again with Orange County and Federal narcs in the next room. Only this time, she gave Chula a Newporter postcard to cut up the coke.

She testified that on July second she met with him again and this time asked him to get her a half ounce of cocaine and gave him $700 of police money to make the buy. Just before he was to deliver the powder, he got an anonymous phone call saying that four police cars had been following the man in the black Fiat and that he was going to be arrested that night. Chula drove to Joanna's motel and asked flat out if she had anything to do with the setup. She said he was just paranoid because he was snorting so much coke and when she told the grand jury about it, she added, "I took this opportunity to tell him that it was very bad to take this much cocaine, or any cocaine, because it just makes you see life in a crazy way." When they asked her why she was testifying, she said:

Because the first year I spent in this country, I met a lot of people who were part of the drug culture....I found 99.9 percent of them to be dishonest, lying people.

Are you interested in helping Mr. Leary?

Sure, but if I didn't like the people I was working with, I wouldn't do it.

You are talking about the police agencies you are working with?

Yes.

During Tim's testimony, he told the jurors that he was a psychologist and a philosopher, but he left out the stuff about Socrates this time. He said he was testifying voluntarily and that on January 30, 1973, just after he had been brought back to America, Chula had given him a chunk of hashish in the hallway of the Orange County courthouse and that he had eaten it. He said Chula did the same thing the next day in the visitors' room at the jail. When they asked him, he said that he liked Chula and bore him no animosity. "I have moral judgments," he told them, "but no emotions. I feel a certain responsibility for ending what I think is a cover-up ... and I feel that lawyers ... I call them two-ply lawyers ... with their left hands are very friendly and in some cases profit by and encourage and sponsor activities which are illegal and then, on the other hand, they defend the people with whom they have been collaborating and cooperating." Then he gave them the nut of his rationalization for becoming Charles Thrush: "I think that we are at a time now in this country when everybody has to tell the truth ... If Watergate hadn't happened, I probably wouldn't be here today ... I feel no shame or guilt for the things I have done in the past....I think the truth should be open for everyone to see."

Even the grand jury didn't believe they could sell that coming from Tim Leary. They indicted Chula for possession of the marijuana and cocaine Joanna had told them about.

•

Through the fall of 1974, the game continued on its crooked, hidden way: The Feds said nothing, Tim kept his dead-man's silence, Joanna and Dennis lay low.

Ginsberg became convinced that Tim was being held incommunicado against his will and that his testimony was the product of some horrible brain beating, part of the Government's grand plot to bust and harass the most daring thinkers in the society. He wrote to Tim, asking for a note that he was ok and acting freely; he wrote to Senators and Representatives; he badgered the DEA and the FBI for word; and when none of that came to anything, he prepared to file a writ in an attempt to force the Feds to produce Tim in open court.

At the end of December, Tim did send a letter, but it was to the lawyer Bill Choulos, not to Ginsberg. In it he said he was fine and happy and that he was satisfied with the evolution of his legal situation and that he wished Choulos and everybody else who thought they were helping him would just let it be, leave him alone.

In January of 1975, Chula was found guilty on a reduced charge of marijuana possession and was sentenced to 45 days in the Orange County Jail. At the same time, rumors and a hoax telephone call placed Tim in a safe house near Sacramento and predicted that his parole was imminent.

Then, in late January, Tim was subpoenaed to testify at a California personnel-board hearing that was to decide the official fate of Wesley Hiler, the psychologist who had made the tape recordings with Tim at Vacaville the spring before. Hiler had been fired for showing transcripts of the tapes to a magazine editor and he was appealing the action on the grounds that his original agreement with Tim had included the possibility of publication. The state said that Hiler had violated Tim's privacy. Joanna and April were subpoenaed, too.

Late on the night of January 26, Tim was delivered from Folsom, where he had been in special custody--probably in a house on the prison grounds--to Vacaville, through the back gate. In the morning, he was led by a small army of Federal agents into the closed hearing, well dressed and tan, according to Hiler and his attorney. He testified honestly, they said. But it didn't do Hiler any good: His firing was upheld. Tim sank back into custody.

Joanna lied when it was her turn, they said. She had been in Europe with Dennis and the two of them had returned so that she could appear. They stayed a few weeks and then flew back, to Joanna's mother's house in Marbella. Before they left, Dennis told friends and a reporter that he and Joanna were the perfect love duet now and that Tim was out of it and a fool.

Three weeks after the hearing, the authorities began to show their gratitude in the way Leary had hoped for. On February 28, the California state-prison system officially discharged him, after 31 months, into the hands of Federal marshals. He still had ten years of a Federal sentence for marijuana possession hanging over him and a minimum of 18 months to serve on it before he could walk. By Federal law, the only one who could reduce or pardon those months was Gerald Ford, and since that was unlikely, the best his jailers could do was to start him serving his time as soon as possible. The Justice Department said he was in an undisclosed Federal penal institution, the DEA said he was in custody of Federal marshals, rumor said that he was in Los Angeles for a while. In March, an old Leary friend, Jaakov Kohn, had a visit from FBI agents who asked him if he would like to take a call from Tim. Kohn said yes and Tim phoned to say that he wished his friends would cooperate with the FBI, that Ginsberg was being a Jewish mother in his efforts to help and that he was just trying to rip off the first interview, and, again, that the Feds were nice people and were treating him well.

No one has heard another word from him.

Two weeks after Leary's call to Kohn urging cooperation and honesty, Dennis Martino was found by a Spanish maid, dead in a cheap Malaga hotel room, where his body had lain for several days. He was 29.

First reports said it was an overdose of alcohol and Valium. Then a Spanish autopsy said it was gastritis and peritonitis: a ruptured appendix. The underground scoffed at both and held it up as rat's karma: what happens to informers when the Government is finished with them. Joanna hid at her mother's, refused to look at the body and said nothing publicly. Dennis was flown back and buried in Southern California.

•

Whether it was suicide or murder is hard to know. For a reporter who has chased the story for nine months, all things are possible and nothing is for sure. Except maybe this: The game goes on and Dennis died of the game. Which may be better than being its ruined prisoner, somewhere in an undisclosed Federal penal institution.