Phenakistocope by Joseph Plateau, 1841
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by American Dream » Sun Jan 04, 2015 12:10 pm
by IanEye » Sun Jan 04, 2015 12:27 pm
by American Dream » Sun Jan 04, 2015 1:28 pm
The Magic Jews
September 2, 2008
by Hamilton Morris
When I first walked into the apartment on Ridge Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, I didn’t see much because the lights were off. It was a long empty room with couches lining the walls. Empty cans and bottles everywhere. At four in the morning all that was left were the remnants of a party. Nothing unusual. A Hasidic Jew was passed out on his back, yarmulke resting on the cushion next to his head. His cell phone was wildly ringing digitized klezmer music from within his wool pants. He lay totally still. I walked toward him, wondering if he was alive. The phone cycled through four more rings before he swiped at his pocket, at which point I let out a sigh of relief.
I could hear muffled singing coming from behind a closed door down the hall. I stepped over the passed-out Hasid, making my way into the next room. Inside, it was completely dark. The air was warm with the smell of bodies. Ten, maybe fifteen, naked Jews were perched, chanting in flawless harmony with one another. They stopped briefly to greet me and then resumed. I watched them speechlessly for a moment before posing the question “What’s going on?” A voice in the dark made an incomprehensible remark about LSD, and everybody broke out in bouts of electrified laughter. And then the chanting began again. I only stayed for a few minutes, watching them in awe before I felt for the doorknob and got up to leave. Back in the other room, a Hasid I had not noticed before informed me that the party was over, the acid was gone, and I should come back the next day. I asked him when and how frequently this sort of thing happened. He responded: “Constantly.”
For many, religion is tedious work. A chore handed down from generation to generation, rewarding only by virtue of its being unpleasant. Few have had a genuine religious experience, something that warrants worship, reverence, time, and faith. I know I haven’t. In Jewish mysticism, God is partially defined by his lack of definition. He is infinite and unknowable, the eternal question mark. I had my first psychedelic experience smoking salvia in a friend’s station wagon when I was 16. I lay screaming with laughter, soaking myself with tears, snot, and drool. I knew that something significant had happened, something that would definitely fit under the “infinite and unknowable” heading. But to say that it was a religious experience would be wrong. It was better.
Two days after the party I received a phone call from one of the Jews. I expected it to be along the lines of another party invitation, but to my chagrin it was a request to attend the funeral of one of their friends. He had overdosed on cocaine the previous night. I got on the F to Parkville, Brooklyn, and then walked toward 39th Street nervously. Attending the funeral of a Hasidic Jew I had never met, without a yarmulke, wearing a purple leather puff-coat, made me generally uneasy. Outside the Shomrei Hadas Chapel, Hasids paced nervously while smoking cigarettes. I walked through the door and took a seat in the back, trying to remain unnoticed. At the front of the synagogue a wall of black-clad Jews blocked any view of what was going on. I listened to the Hebrew prayers drone on and found my social discomfort slowly melt into sadness. When the service ended I filed out to watch the pine box heaved into a Ford Excursion as mobs of family and friends cried and smoked and talked on cell phones. It was here that I met Aaron, one of the few in attendance who was without religiously sanctioned clothing. He began to explain things a bit.
The previous night one of his ex-Hasidic friends had been on a drug binge, taking massive doses of coke, ecstasy, and an assortment of benzos. He was fine, if extremely inebriated, when he retired to bed, falling asleep next to his girlfriend. The following morning she woke up next to a corpse. Aaron explained, “It’s a nonstop drug binge without drug education. These Hasids have all lived incredibly sheltered lives. You really can’t even imagine unless you’ve been there. When they stray from their families nobody has told them not to mix this with that, speed and ecstasy, alcohol and Xanax. It gets seriously dangerous.” “Who’s selling them this stuff?” I asked. “There are drug dealers who get a kick out of the whole thing like, ‘Let’s get the Hasids fucked up,’ you know? Which is fine, but they don’t realize that’s exactly what’s going to happen—they are going to get really, really fucked up.”
As he told me this I felt overcome by frustration. Maybe it was selfish, but the thought that all I would see of this renegade Hasid drug life was one tantalizing taste, that it was already over and everybody would be scared straight and the scene would disintegrate into obscurity before I got a chance to learn exactly what was going on, really disappointed me. “So I guess this is the end of it all?” I asked. Aaron paused and said, “No, no, no. Definitely not.” And on that note I was invited to a party the following night.
To take a moment and clarify my religious background: I am a Jew. I was bar-mitzvahed (at Masada no less) but I never went to Hebrew school. I never went to temple. I learned a CliffsNotes version of Hebrew and memorized my Torah portion from a recording on a MiniDisc. In short, I know nothing about Judaism. I am also not religious or “spiritual” in any way. I feel awkward even saying the word “prayer.” The Jews I met at Ridge Street come from Hasidic and Orthodox Brooklyn neighborhoods. Most speak Yiddish as their first language. Aside from a love of psychedelics and maybe some shared genetics from way back when, we have nothing in common. I was introduced to all of them by a friend of a friend of a friend. A psychedelic mushroom is called a magic mushroom, and by that logic these Jews could be called Magic Jews. So that’s how I started to think of them.
by American Dream » Thu Jan 08, 2015 12:38 pm
I can’t identify with any certainty the first international drug smuggler my mother – Julia Callan-Thompson – befriended, but one she met early on was Damien Epsilon, an Irishman who’d lived in Ibiza before moving to London in the early 1960s. In 1962 my mother approached Epsilon in Henekey’s pub in Portobello Road. She wanted to go to Spain and had been told he was driving there. Epsilon agreed to take my mother and her boyfriend Geoff Thompson to Ibiza if they shared the petrol costs. After spending a few weeks in Ibiza, Epsilon returned to London and my mother travelled on to Andorra alone. Thompson, who’d proved somewhat erratic about covering petrol costs, went back to London at the same time as Epsilon, but separately. When my mother returned to London, she socialised with Epsilon until he moved back to Ibiza in 1963. She returned to Ibiza many times in the mid-sixties to hang with Epsilon’s set, and this may well have constituted the first of a number of international drug smuggling sets with which she was acquainted.
In 1965 Epsilon had to flee the Balearic Islands because he was stopped on the Spanish border in a van filled with pot, which he’d driven overland from Istanbul. Seeing a customs officer prising open the panelling behind which drugs were concealed, Epsilon with his passport held aloft, wandered off pretending he was looking for an office at which to present his papers. He got up onto a hillside from where he could observe what was going on at the checkpoint. When he saw one of his companions being led away in handcuffs, he escaped into Spain. Recently Epsilon explained the situation that then unfolded as follows: “I knew I’d be wanted by the police from the moment of the bust. When I reached Barcelona, I dropped my friend’s passport at the American Embassy and with a note asking that they made representation to the Spanish authorities to the effect that I was totally responsible for the dope of which my companion was entirely innocent. I made it to Ibiza where I hid out in various houses for a month until I escaped the island (The) Police had searched for me in Formentera and were on the look out for me in Ibiza. It was the biggest bust ever in Spain at the time.”
After escaping Spain and the potential drug rap hanging over him there, Epsilon relocated to London, where by moving into the antique business he found himself working alongside one-shot novelist Bill Hopkins. My mother first met Hopkins in the early-sixties via her work as a hostess at Murray’s Cabaret Club. After the publication of his only book The Divine & The Decay, Hopkins was briefly considered one of the leading Angry Young Men; but by the time my mother met him he’d reinvented himself as a entrepreneur dealing in used goods. Hopkins introduced Epsilon to a girl he knew called Tina Lawson, who also happened to be Francis Morland’s babysitter. At this point in time Morland and his partner Keith Wilkinson knew nothing about drug scamming but they quickly became major players though the fortuitous combination of their money and Epsilon’s contacts after hooking up with the Irishman via Lawson.
Morland himself was an ex-public school smoothie, a former ski champion who belonged to the fast-set clustered around Princess Margaret, and would have inherited the Somerset Morland wool ‘fortune’ had the family business not gone belly-up in the seventies. In the sixties, he was a London art world insider with a teaching job in the sculpture department at St Martin’s College of Art. His mother, Dorothy Morland, had been director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Morland’s work in bronze of the early-sixties was well received. A Times critic covering the Sculptors of Today exhibition at the Bear Lane Gallery in Oxford praised him for ‘distinguished modelling coupled with imaginative insight’ (11 May 1962). The following year, alongside David Hockney, Joe Tilson, Peter Blake, Allen Jones and Derek Boshier, he appears in Gerald Laing’s photograph London Artists in Paris; this was taken during the Paris Biennale des Jeunes. 1963 was a key year for Morland, since he moved from working in bronze to using fibreglass finished in coats of cellulose paint.
When writing about Morland’s contribution to The New Generation 1966 at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in Studio International, P. Procktor said of this change of direction: “Comparing the new work with the old there can be few transformations of style more radical. The break is complete. These large entwining serpentine shapes relate to the work of other sculptors in this idiom, speak in a sculptural language which is familiar because it is to a certain extent a shared language. What interests me is not the grammatical principles of the language nor who invented them, one can safely assume that Morland did not, but what this language is used to say. Kiss, the only title of the four pieces in the exhibition which has a specific human connotation, provides a clue to all. The twisting and entwining shapes are metaphors of the body, headless, limbless, featureless, but miming the poses of relaxation or sexual intercourse like gigantic strings of macaroni…”
1966 was to prove another turning point in Morland’s life, since as we’ve noted it was then that he secured an introduction to Damien Epsilon. Morland was unable to pay for his extravagant life-style from the sale of his work, and was keen to find alternative sources of income. Once he gatecrashed the drug scamming game, he realised that one of the ways he might smuggle hash was to seal it inside his large fibre-glass sculptures, a hole which could be re-plugged was all that was required to get the dope in and out of his art works. Many years down the line this ploy was imitated by Howard Marks, who substituted Morland’s modernist constructions with the speaker systems used by rock bands. To Morland smuggling was a means of subsidising his real passions, fast living and making art. In the late sixties Morland’s work appeared in group shows such as New British Sculpture organised by the Arnolfini Gallery at outdoor locations in Bristol and the 1st Burleighfield Sculpture Exhibition at Burleighfield House, Loudwater, Bucks (both 1968). Morland’s one person show Recent Sculpture opened on 12 September 1969 at the Axiom Gallery, London W1. Under the headline ‘Hinged and Unhinged’, Guy Brett dismissed it as ‘decorative’ in a Times review of 19 September 1969.
Morland’s first bust occurred in October 1969, hot on the heels of his Axiom show. The art world reacted with horror, seeing taking drugs as one thing and smuggling them as quite another. Morland’s career as a professional sculptor came to an abrupt halt, and he was dropped by many of his professional friends. The charges against him took some time to wind their way to a conclusion in the courts but The Times dutifully covered this on 23 March 1971 under the heading ‘Diplomats In Drug Ring, Crown Says’. Morland failed to answer his bail so he wasn’t actually up before the beak. Others not present were a Mr Khaled and Fulton Dunbar, Third Secretary at the Liberian Embassy in Rome. Morland and Dunbar were said to have made statements admitting their guilt and that of others. Morland’s partner Keith Wilkinson pleaded not guilty and so was tried separately. It was claimed the gang smuggled £150,000 worth of cannabis into the UK, and had plans to ship a lot more around the world. In the dock was Robert Paul Palacios who used his catamaran to transport the drugs from Morocco to Cowes, on the Isle of Wight, from where he drove them to London in a Rolls-Royce car. Palacios who’d been hired to do the job by Morland was fined £4000. Morland’s wife Susan was said to be only on the fringe of the gang and was fined £500 for possession of cannabis and cannabis resin.
Morland began his first jail sentence for smuggling in America. After sailing his 47 foot ketch loaded with hash from Morocco to the US in July 1971 and being caught upon entry, he was jailed for eight years and fined $15,000. The Times tersely covered Morland’s second bust on 4 June 1972 under the headline ‘London Man Jailed in US Drug Case’. After doing time for his first two ‘crimes’, Morland was next nicked attempting to land cannabis worth £3.5 million in northern Scotland. When he was jailed for nine years and had assets of more than £232,000 confiscated, The Times of 25 June 1991 covered the case under the headline ‘Drug Smuggler – Francis Morland’: Unfortunately this 1989 bust was not his last, nor did the 1991 judgement result in his final stiff sentence.
Like Morland, Terry Taylor is another figure who has been treated as relatively minor within the history of swinging London and yet played a key role in London’s sixties drug culture. Described by Tony Gould as ‘unconventionally successful’ [1], Taylor was for a time chiefly of interest to cultural historians because characters in the Colin MacInnes novels Absolute Beginners and Mr Love and Justice had been based to a greater or lesser extent upon him. In 1956 MacInnes introduced Taylor to photographer Ida Kar and he became her lover for a few years. Karr’s husband Victor Musgrave, who ran Gallery One, was apparently very happy with the arrangement. Simultaneously Taylor worked as Kar’s photographic assistant and she encouraged him to paint. [2] After getting his first drug novel published in 1961, Taylor went to Tangier to work on a follow-up. While away he smoked a lot of weed and hung out with a variety of fellow psychedelic explorers including William Burroughs. I can at this point allow the American poet Johnny Dolphin to take up the story:
“One day a curved-nose, thatched-haired tall thin Englishman about thirty, coiled beside me and ordered a mint tea [...] After ordering the mint teas, Terry brought out his kief bag. He began deftly and with luminous attention to separate seed from the dried leaves. The seeds grew in size for me until they became as large as peas. He worked like a goldsmith. Then he laid out two pipes, wooden, curved, painted. I had gone on two peyote trips and for seven days had done a small amount of hashish, but never before had I seen anyone who knew what to do, exactly. I abandoned myself to a master… “ [3]
In his memoir Journey Around an Extraordinary Planet, Dolphin goes on to describe how he got heavily involved in a magic group formed by Terry Taylor and various Berbers which met to materialize thought forms:
“Each one would concentrate, projecting his inner scene. The one with the most power would make the scene that would take over the night in the Magic Room. That one would have made the greatest magic. I learned how to measure power. Terry, lean, deft and poised, prepared the kief from the dried plants, carefully selected from the Berber women’s stocks. Then he would pass out the majoom cookies [...] We sat backs to the wall in silence focusing on making the scene appear. In one I heard Walid, the mute, screaming, ‘Let me out! Let me out!’ His eyes burned like a man newly sentenced to life imprisonment. Terry and Hamid became one glance which became tensile, material, then alive, as their two I’s danced out upon that high wire that their live bodies lavished their energies upon creating and maintaining. Lita and Mark, two bright six year old Jewish kids from Shtetl immigrants, played pat-a-cake on the sidewalks of the Lower East Side. My head rolled off my right shoulder and sat on the floor, taking it all in while I watched myself become a contemplative head with no body to care for or react to. This scene had not been the one I projected nor did anyone else claim it. The great magic scenes came from an undiscoverable magician…” [4]
These scenes were destined to be repeated in London, albeit with a different group of ‘initiates’. Intimating a little of what was to come, Dolphin writes:
“Terry labored for the perfect pipe of kief and the perfect cookie of majoom. Terry labored to become the perfect observer. Terry got the unreliable cheap Chinese batteries that did enable us to hear what he said we must hear by candlelight, the Beatles, and Ginsberg doing Howl. Terry wanted to turn all London on and later helped start the process with street acid together with his tall, thin-nosed call-girl friend from Chelsea. Terry could talk about the fine points of sentence structure and the power of paragraphs. He had written a novel of which he had no copy available and had been in prison in England once on a drug count. “ [5]
In 1964 Taylor introduced my mother Julia Callan-Thompson to Detta Whybrow, the woman Dolphin describes as Taylor’s ‘call-girl friend’, and with others they formed a magic group in west London. Fuelled by grass alone the attempts of this coven to materialise thought forms appear to have borne some strange results but when they came to be powered by LSD their activities immediately took off into another stratosphere. At that time Detta Whybrow had a john who was a chemist and I’ve been told that through a combination of her charms and various weird rituals, this boffin was persuaded to make acid. There may be some mythologising going on here, while Detta does seem to have suggested to the john he manufacture acid for her friends to deal, the lure of easy money was probably enough to convince him it was a good idea. That said, when the cops raided the two acid laboratories set up by Victor James Kapur, they also recovered a huge stash of photographic negatives showing him having sex with Whybrow and various other women; agreeing to pose for these shots could have been the means by which Whybrow’s circle got the chemist to commit to manufacturing LSD for them. Terry Taylor informed me recently that at first he thought Detta had gone crazy when she told him she had a john who’d make acid for her. Street sources say the acid was extremely pure and potent; the English equivalent of the legendary Orange Sunshine.
In November 1967, after a series of police raids across north and west London aimed at smashing an LSD manufacturing and distribution operation, Detta Whybrow then aged 39 was one of ultimately nine individuals hauled up before the beak at Bow Street Magistrates’s Court over drug offences. Hauled in alongside Detta was her 29 year-old boyfriend of the time, John Sherwood Pendry. Their chemist Victor James Kapur, who was just a year younger than Detta, was given a nine-year stretch at the Criminal Court at the end of May 1968 for manufacturing LSD. Amazingly, Whybrow got off with two years probation. A 54 year-old antique dealer Harry Nathan of Chelsea copped the main blame for overseeing the distribution of the acid and was jailed for seven years; my view is that Nathan was a very minor player and Detta was the only individual who played a key role in the acid distribution to be arrested. A 31 year-old dispenser Mohammed Hassan Ally who assisted Kapur got 21 months. The authorities claimed the LSD involved had a black market value of a quarter of a million pounds. But prior to this bust taking place, another important drug connection opened up for the circles to which Detta and my mother belonged.
While travelling in the Middle East in 1967, Graham Plinston met Salim Hraoui [6] through a third party. Among other things Hraoui wholesaled hash and the two men decided they could do business. The Lebanese connection Plinston established in this casual fashion regularly couriered hash to London on his behalf via ordinary airline flights, arranging for the pot to be concealed in body harnesses strapped to those paid to act as drug mules. It was by such means that Plinston’s supply was smuggled until Hraoui introduced him to Mohammed Durrani in 1969. Durrani knew some Pakistani government officials who were prepared to exploit their diplomatic immunity to smuggle hash. By this means Durrani’s diplomats were able to get drugs into mainland Europe but not the UK. The biggest hurdle for dope smugglers was getting their gear into Europe; transporting it around the continent was viewed as considerably less risky. Nonetheless Plinston and Geoff Thompson were busted in Lorrach in 1970, as they ferried dope in a car from Switzerland across the West Germany border. This is the famous seizure that gave Howard Marks his break into the major league of the pot trade. After being sent by Mandy Plinston to sort things out in Germany and then reporting back to various Middle Eastern connections about what had and hadn’t been compromised, Marks took over portions of Plinston’s business while his friends Plinston and Thompson did time in jail. [7]
Bizarrely, John Pearson in his tomes on sixties British gangsters the Kray Twins writes about a man called Alan Bruce Cooper, [8] who it is claimed was working reluctantly and under threat of imprisonment for the American Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. Among other things, the American authorities are said to have known that Cooper had been manufacturing LSD and trafficking in this drug. Supposedly, it was decided that Cooper should entice Ronnie and Reggie Kray into committing crimes for which they could be convicted because the authorities in the USA were concerned about their connections to the American Mafia. Regardless of exactly what role various intelligence agencies did or did not have in controlling Cooper, he was a major player in the events that culminated in the conviction of the Kray twins for murder. In The Profession of Violence, Pearson provides the following details about a few of Cooper’s schemes:
“Cooper had the big ideas that Ronnie needed and seemed as thrilled as Ronnie by them all. They often talked about narcotics. Cooper had European contacts and clearly knew the market. This was the quickest, safest way for the twins to become millionaires. As a start Cooper suggested setting up a flat in Belgrave Square as a clearing house for wealthy addicts and their pushers. Cooper got as far as renting the flat when Ronnie said he wasn’t interested. Other rackets they discussed were large-scale gold smuggling, further currency deals, a take-over of an existing marijuana racket carried on through the diplomatic immunity of some Pakistani diplomats and the traffic in illegal Asian immigrants from Belgium. And each time it was Reggie’s caution that prevented Ronnie from becoming involved…” [9]
If this is to be believed, then it appears that American intelligence may have known in 1967 about the drug pipeline Plinston benefited from two years later. If what Pearson says on this score is reliable, it is possible that having failed to get the Krays to take over the pipeline the American authorities left it up and running for future use, and it is the same drug conduit that Plinston later stumbled upon. That said, despite the paranoia that permeates the drug subculture, I’m unaware of anyone from the circles around Plinston and Thompson who believes they were set up to be busted in Lörrach. It is nonetheless curious that on 18 July 1968 when Alan Bruce Cooper appeared as a Crown witness at Bow Street Magistrates Court against the Kray brothers, he should deny he’d given the police information about Victor James Kapur and Harry Nathan, claiming: “I discovered my father-in-law (Nathan) was a runner for the LSD Kapur was manufacturing when it came out in the papers.” Nathan was busted in his son-in-law’s car, and the police found Cooper at Nathan’s flat when they went to search it immediately after this arrest. [10]
Under oath on the same day of the Kray hearing, Cooper also denied that he’d planned to kidnap the Pope and hold him to ransom, and repeated his claims that he’d had a two year involvement with American intelligence, stating that the Krays’ lawyers could check this by applying to the European office of that service. This was reported in The Times of 19 July 1968. Top cop Leonard Read in his autobiography Nipper Read: The Man Who Nicked The Krays (MacDonald & Co, London 1991) provides a more complex take on Cooper’s relations with the British police than the one given at Bow Street Magistrates Court. Read does, however, assert that the evidence Cooper gave against the Krays was essentially true, and implies Harry Nathan was wrongly convicted as an LSD runner when he says in his book that it was Cooper – and not Cooper’s father-in-law – who was involved with Kapur’s drug factory. Read’s account appears to me reasonably consistent with the police file on the Kapur case, and what various street sources have to say on the subject. However, while Nathan may have been completely innocent, it seems to me more likely he was a minor player; but even if this was the case, his role in the drug running was very small in comparison to that of his son-in-law.
Cooper confirmed in court during the Kray trial that he’d made a living from gold smuggling, something to which Kapur was also connected. Two months before he was busted for manufacturing LSD, Kapur acted as a crown witness at Bow Street where he testified against former speedway champion Squire Francis ‘Split’ Waterman and three others who were charged with ‘attempted illegal export of gold, receiving gold bars, and possessing firearms and counterfeiting equipment’. This was reported in The Times of 23 September 1967. The case against Waterman ran in part that he’d been cutting and smelting gold from a bullion robbery in Clerkenwell, and that he’d enlisted Kapur’s aid in choosing and purchasing a furnace with which to do it. Likewise The Times of 19 July 1968 reported that in court testifying against the Krays, Cooper confirmed he was acquainted with Split Waterman who he knew to be both a gold smuggler and an arms dealer.
Under the headline ‘Four-Year Term For Split Waterman’, The Times of 20 March 1968 had already reported that the police believed Waterman to be a gun-runner as well as a gold smuggler. Reporting on the Kray trial on 20 July 1968, The Times records the claim that Waterman had fitted up an attaché case with a hypodermic syringe loaded with hydrogen cyanide, so that Cooper could furnish it to a third party who was to carry out an assassination for the Kray brothers. At the time this seemed an utterly fantastic escapade, but such methods of assassination were later taken up by eastern bloc security agencies. It is impossible for me to say exactly what Waterman, Cooper and Kapur, were doing; but it is reasonable to conclude that they were known to each other and collaborated on what were either criminal or intelligence enterprises, and possibly both. It is certainly strange that Alan Bruce Cooper, a man claiming to be a willing police informant as well as an American intelligence asset and former gold smuggler, may have had inside knowledge about what on the surface would appear to be two unrelated suppliers of drugs peddled by the group centred on Detta Whybrow, my mother and other individuals such as Mike Burton (who I am naming because I know he is dead, I have other names that I won’t include here). It is unclear to me where Whybrow and her circle were sourcing drugs immediately after the Kapur bust, but by the end of 1969 both the acid and the pot they were dealing was supplied by Graham Plinston and his associates.
Stewart Home
1. Tony Gould, Inside Outsider: The Life and Times of Colin MacInnes (London: Allison & Busby, 1993), p. 144.
2. Gould, Inside Outsider, p. 114.
3. Johnny Dolphin, Journey Around an Extraordinary Planet (Oracle, AZ: Synergetic Press, 1990), p. 3.
4. Dolphin, Journey Around an Extraordinary Planet, p. 5.
5. Dolphin, Journey Around an Extraordinary Planet, p. 6.
6. Salim Hraoui is called Lebanese Sam by Howard Marks in his autobiography Mr Nice (London: Vintage, 1998).
7. The history of the illicit drug trade of the sixties and seventies has to date been rather poorly served by English-language print sources. For example, while invoking Graham Plinston’s 1970 bust in Lörrach as a key event in the Howard Marks story, both David Leigh in his authorized biography High Time: The Life & Times of Howard Marks (London: Unwin, 1985), and Howard Marks in his autobiography Mr Nice (London: Vintage, 1998) omit to mention that rather than being alone, Plinston was arrested and subsequently jailed alongside Geoff Thompson.
In his autobiography, Howard Marks is two months out in his dating of the Lörrach bust. The fact that Marks and those drawing on his recollections get their facts wrong can be demonstrated easily enough by consulting press reports of the time. A Reuters news agency wire of 18 March 1970 led, for example, to coverage on page 5 of the London Times the following day headlined ‘Britons Held On Drugs Charge’. This report makes it clear that both Plinston and Geoff Thompson were in jail after the discovery of ‘about 105lbs of hashish in their car’, and that they had been arrested upon entering Germany ‘from Switzerland on February 26.’ The Times piece explicitly cites information contained within it as being provided by a British consulate spokesman in Stuttgart, and the authorities notified Thompson and Plinston’s families of the arrests before speaking to the press about them.
Therefore it is ridiculous of David Leigh to assert in his authorised Howard Marks biography High Times that in the spring of 1970 Mandy Plinston sent Marks to Frankfurt to investigate her dope smuggling partner’s disappearance. As should already be clear, Mandy Plinston knew of the bust before Howard Marks; as did my mother Julia Callan-Thompson, my mother’s boyfriend of the time Bruno de Galzain, Geoff Thompson’s partner of the time Jane Ripley, Charlie Radcliffe, Alex Trocchi and many others immersed in the London counterculture. The claim made by Leigh and some later writers to the effect that Howard Marks learnt of the bust by looking through German newspapers in Frankfurt, and then relayed this ‘discovery’ back to the UK, is utterly spurious. Its reiteration demonstrates the rather dubious status of a number of texts that claim to provide inside information on the dope trade.
8. John Pearson, The Profession of Violence: The Rise & Fall of the Kray Twins (London: Grafton Books, 1985); John Pearson, The Cult of Violence: The Untold Story of the Krays (London: Orion, 2001). Cooper is often referred to as The Yank rather than by his name in the ghostwritten gibberings of Kray camp followers. Those wanting to look further at the extensive if often wildly inaccurate literature about the Krays might start with Albert Donoghue and Martin Short, The Enforcer: Secrets of my life with the Krays (London: John Blake Publishing, 2001) or Reg Kray, Born Fighter (London: Arrow, 1991). However, Pearson’s Profession of Violence in its various revised editions from 1972 on remains the best work on the subject.
9. Pearson, The Profession of Violence, p. 281.
10. Barry Cox with John Shirley and Martin Short in The Fall of Scotland Yard (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977), address the corrupt nature of the London drug squad in a detailed if restrained fashion. While the bent coppery Cox addresses landed certain detectives in jail, considerably more serious allegations have been made elsewhere. It should be noted that Norman ‘Nobby’ Pilcher one of the bent cops who features prominently in The Fall of Scotland Yard played a key role in the Kapur bust.
by American Dream » Thu Jan 08, 2015 3:18 pm
“But the very same man who orders the death of journalists off the coast of costa rica as they are uncovering a story dealing with our government’s importation of cocaine and our government’s use of drug profits to fund the contras is the very same man who will stand on a studio set, airfield, white house garden or convention podium and talk in the fake moral code about the humane and glorious designs he has planned for the social fabric of america if elected president. And the same man who stands before you at the altar of the church with seven television cameras pointed at his face and talks about the sanctity of the fetus is the same man who kisses the hands of dictators in central america—dictators responsible for the pillaging of an entire country dissolving in poverty, as well as the murder of hundreds of thousands of people he perceives as disagreeing with his power structure….”
by American Dream » Fri Jan 09, 2015 10:55 am
Radical Traditionalism, Revolutionary Reactionism
Presently, the mystical current of racist ecology is slowly gaining traction among some circles of former anarchists. Most notable is Olympia, Washington, where two former Green Scare prisoners and ex-anarchists have turned to white nationalism, citing a desire for white-only spaces, a respect for neo-nazis, and a pronounced disdain for “the Mexicans”. Nathan “Exile” Block and Joyanna “Sadie” Zacher were heavily influential in the green anarchist tendency prior to and during their incarceration for late-night arson attacks against industries responsible for massive environmental degradation. Disconcertingly, these two influential former Earth Liberation Front militants were initiated into the world of political violence while running through the streets of downtown Seattle in the anti-WTO Black Bloc in 1999 [8]. Several other people associated with the green anarchist movement in Olympia have followed their reactionary trajectory.
The quasi-spiritual works of ego-fascist Julius Evola and the “esoteric hitlerism” of white supremacist author Miguel Serrano [9] have been heavily influential in this growing circle. A webpage [10] operated by Nathan Block appears as a cascading scroll of imagery adorned with swastikas, black suns, and Anglo-Saxon runes complimented by an assortment of quotations from obscure neofascist theorists. This cult-like formation has expressed a sincere admiration for would-be race war instigator Charles Manson [11], particularly his environmental decree “ATWA” which stands for “air trees water animals” or “all the way alive” (the latter was used as the title of a 2012 public statement from Zacher published in the Earth First Journal). A 2007 communique written by Block and Zacher makes several vague references to the need to continue the ecological struggle in the name of the white race (often hidden behind double meanings) before concluding with an allusion to Manson’s environmental decree.[A]nd let those of us who heed the calls so often ignored stand upright, with clear vision, whether illuminated by the great Sun or by a more obscure Light, which rides with the night terror with all creatures of the hidden hours: the clawed, the winged, the hoofed, and also with those beings referred to by the euphemisms of ‘the ancestors’, ‘the fair folk’, or indeed, the ‘elves’.
air trees water animals [12]
As with the Apoliteia tendency (explained below) and the Wandervogel movement, they claim an aversion to the political and a focus on individual and cultural pursuits such as touring in Neofolk bands and practicing Germanic pagan rituals.
Unfortunately, many green anarchists do not fully understand this resurgent white nationalism. Many assume that any apparent fascist sympathies must be purely aesthetic or symbolic. This willful ignorance will likely allow the trend to continue to grow, particularly in the white counter cultural enclaves of the Pacific North West.
Retreat from Politics
The current resurrection of fascism continues virtually unchecked due to the insistence of its authors and artists on their supposedly “apolitical” stance.
Apoliteia, as described in the early 20th century by the currently influential post-fascist author Julius Evola, is the rejection of compelled allegiance to the realm of traditional politics. For Evola, this did not mean that all political action is problematic, only that individuals should base this activity solely on their own personal interests.
Evola, promoting the concept of a hierarchy of races that placed blacks at the bottom and whites at the apex, also fixated on the mystical realm of race. He believed that race was manifested both in the body and in the soul, and that the ideal human being embodied the Aryan race both physically and spiritually [13].Our position, when we claim that race exists as much in the body as in the spirit, goes beyond these two points of view. Race is a profound force manifesting itself in the realm of the body (race of the body) as in the realm of the spirit (race of the interior, race of the sprit). In its full meaning the purity of race occurs when these two manifestations coincide [14].
Evola promoted a sort of egoist fascism; the individual was to seek to become an “aristocrat of the soul” and to embody the brutality and order of the Holy Roman Empire within their own individual essence.
Evola objected to many of the visions of the PNF (Italian National Fascist Party) because of their focus on material conditions and relative lack of attention to spiritual and racial considerations. Though never a member of the PNF, he was an associate of Benito Mussolini and his writings eventually influenced the racial perspectives of the PNF hierarchy.And if Fascist Italy, among the various Western nations is the one which first wished for a reaction against the degeneration of the materialist, democratic and capitalist civilisation…there are grounds for thinking,…that Italy will be on the front line among the forces which will guide the future world and will restore the supremacy of the white race [15].
Evola was a bizarre character. At the peak of WWII, he would walk the streets of the city during allied bombing raids in order to “ponder his destiny”. One one such stroll, he was maimed by a Soviet bomb and as a result spent the remainder of his life paralyzed from the waist down [16].
For Evola, as for many of todays’ esoteric racists, a retreat from the political realm is accompanied by a rise in the cultural and artistic worlds. Liberal social-democracy has dominated the globe and vanquished its opponents on a political level. Post-fascists advocate remaining in the cultural sphere until the moment that social-democracy begins to collapse as a result of its own decadence; this fall will be the moment to again emerge into the world as a material force.
Modern society is meaningless, directionless, decadent. A new way must emerge to once again give purpose to life. For many, this force will resurrect the spirits of the ancestors, a reincarnation that is starting to appear in the world of culture.
The New Force
Third-positionism is a political tendency that seeks to synthesize aspects of anarchism and communism with white nationalism or extreme ethnic traditionalism. This tendency has grown significantly in Europe over the past few years. In Italy, the neofascist squatters of Casa Pound are occupying buildings and organizing militant demonstrations against the proposed construction of a high-speed rail that would be heavily damaging to the local environment. In Russia, fascists have used the anarchist black bloc tactic to anonymously march through city centers.
Today, neofascism appears much more exciting and radical than did the far right organizations of decades past. The images of popular unrest in Ukraine during the winter months inspired people around the world. It was not long before it became clear that violent neo-nazi street movements were responsible for instigating much of the anti-government unrest.
While the most recent waves of resistance in America have been leftist and at times even revolutionary, modern history has made clear the entirely unpredictable nature of white-majority subcultures and movements. Much of the 60s generation that shut down America’s thoroughfares in opposition to the war in Southeast Asia grew into the right-wing formation that elected Ronald Reagan in 1980. The America of Golden Gate Park’s drug loving hippie acid freaks metastasized into the war on drugs within fifteen years, with many middle-aged former leftists leaving their convictions behind with their youth. For the most part, white America sat by and watched as military-style raids into black and brown communities fed the expansion of a draconian prison slave-society that expanded over 700% since 1970.
by Searcher08 » Fri Jan 09, 2015 12:54 pm
by American Dream » Sat Jan 10, 2015 1:41 am
Hippie Roots & The Perennial Subculture
By Gordon Kennedy & Kody Ryan
"Wandervogels Abschied" by Fidus, 1900
by American Dream » Sun Jan 11, 2015 4:39 pm
You’ve dropped acid with Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey and even Groucho Marx. Did you ever have a religious experience on LSD?
No, but my awe of nature was enhanced. Also, I was once tripping on acid at the Seaquarium in Miami, and a dolphin told me, “If God is evolution, then how do you know He’s finished?” A couple of years later, I told dolphin researcher John Lilly about that encounter. “No,” he said, ”how do you know you’re finished?”
--Paul Krassner On Harvey Milk, the Yippies, and Talking to Dolphins After Dropping Acid
by American Dream » Sun Jan 11, 2015 4:54 pm
by MacCruiskeen » Sun Jan 11, 2015 4:59 pm
by American Dream » Mon Jan 12, 2015 10:03 pm
by American Dream » Tue Jan 13, 2015 1:41 pm
Sobriety is its own kind of altered state of consciousness. For the addict, it is nothing less than a complete rearrangement of perception, both internal and external. A consciousness that beforehand was a fraying patchwork quilt of alcohol, THC, cocaine, LSD, and sundry delusions is unexpectedly pushed face-to-face with things as they really are. And those things are not very pretty. The kind of rationalization required to give up basic dignity in order to maintain being high and drunk is really a strip of gauze that lets just enough light through to allow you to get around without bumping into things, but not enough to really see any detail.
Removing the pall of daily addiction is like flash powder going off in your face. At first, it’s nearly as blinding. There are the spots of light that keep you squinting. But soon, as reality itself starts again to take shape, you get to see in perfectly illumined clarity the true state of your life.
Garbage is heaped in piles in the kitchen. The cupboards are empty and the refrigerator is filled with nothing but a once-used jar of mayonnaise and some old soy sauce packets. Then there is the lack of anything around of value; everything of worth has been either sold or stolen by someone else. An empty water bowl for cats that have long since disappeared sits dry in a corner. By the phone are the stacks of bills that seem so incongruous, as if they belonged to another dimension. There is nothing here to love, not really much to hate, but there is shame and a sicklysweet disgust at what stares back from the mirror.
There are other realities as well. Sleeping for the first time sober and waking up clean is a mystery of boundless grace. A cup of coffee in the basement of a church during a twelve-step meeting tastes like the nectar of the gods. A roast beef sandwich on rye with shredded lettuce, tomatoes, and pickles from the local deli is like eating something from Eden. The first time I saw the new buds of spring while clean, I finally understood what Aldous Huxley meant by the “is-ness” of things. Of course, not being afraid after a very long time—my whole life, in fact—made me only that much more afraid I would lose that gift.
by American Dream » Wed Jan 14, 2015 12:03 pm
by justdrew » Wed Jan 14, 2015 1:44 pm
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