Acid, Greasers, Hippies and Violence: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love
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It's late 1967, the summer of love is in its twilight and America is deeply, deeply divided. On one side nuclear families, Christian traditionalists and a government infused with the Stars and Stripes Cold War zeal. On the other hippies, flower children, baby boomers, Vietnam draft dodgers, surfers and of course drug enthusiasts.

Among the hippies' many pastimes is tripping on lysergic acid diethylamide, LSD, which has been legal until just the previous year. So many people are getting baked on the stuff that politicians and cops are warning of a full-blown cultural crisis. Historian Arnold Toynbee describes hippie as a, quote, red warning light for the American way of life. For most hippies, the legal change doesn't really mean too much. They're going to buy and drop acid no matter the law.

But for a ragtag bunch of flower children living in a mansion in Laguna Beach, California, it changes everything. These are the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Dropouts, criminals, bikers and surfers who've coalesced into one of the country's biggest drug smuggling enterprises. From Mexican pot and Afghan hash to some of the most potent acid on the market.

High on Eastern religion, the Brotherhood's goal is nothing short of utopia. And they want to flood the country with so much weed and psychedelics that every single man and woman can, in the words of guru and Brotherhood friend Timothy Leary, turn on, tune in and drop out.

Their leader is a pal of Leary's, if not as famous. His name is John Griggs, a transplant to California from Oklahoma. Skinny, raw-boned and scruffy, with long cotton candy hair and a Hanna-Barbera grin. Griggs was a greaser and a street fighter until a couple of years before where he stuck up a Hollywood pool party, stole their acid and got so high it changed his entire life.

People call Tim Leary American's acid lover in chief and Griggs' guru. In truth, it's the other way around. Despite all this, by the end of 1967, most folks still don't know what the Brotherhood of Eternal Love even is. And few wonder where all these drugs are coming from. In Southern California, though, it's become a lodestar for the local hippie movement. And hundreds, if not thousands, have made a batik-shirted pilgrimage to the group's Laguna hideaway.

And while early entrants may have been seeking spiritual enlightenment soaked in blotter paper, a new breed is arriving. One of them is a surfer, musician and Jesus lookalike named Johnny Gale. He looks the part, for sure, but let's just say he probably hasn't read that Mahabharata from cover to cover. Gale's a crook, and Laguna and the Brotherhood are his chance to make some serious money in the new drug boom.

His utopia doesn't really care much for equality, nor Griggs and his cultish acolytes. This is about making bank. One day, Griggs and his right-hand man, Eddie Padilla, head to Gale's home and knock on the door. They want to sniff him out. I just wanted to say hi and see what you're all about, Padilla says when Gale answers. Gale doesn't waste a moment.

He whips out an Uzi submachine gun and points it in Padilla's face. This is what it's all about, he tells Padilla. I'm taking over. I'm running things. Padilla barely flinches. He's been throwing punches since he had fists to throw them with. And he's beaten up way more men for John Griggs than their peace-loving image would suggest. But as the pair head back from Gale's pad, they know something seismic has shifted in Laguna.

Gail might have the trappings of a psychedelic-loving brotherhood hippie, but he's a gangster, and a violent, uncontrollable one at that. Whatever innocence the group had is vanishing fast, and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love is quickly turning into the hippie mafia. Welcome to the Underworld Podcast.

Hey guys, and welcome to another episode of the show where we dig into a weird, usually grim, but always entertaining story from the world of organised crime. I'm your host Sean Williams in Te Whanganui-a-Tara or Wellington in New Zealand. Apologies to our many Maori listeners, I'm sure there's loads of you. And I'm joined as always by writer, documentarian and Sopranos expert witness Danny Gold in New York. How's it going over there? Is it 75 degrees and sunny like here?

Yeah, bro, I want to die. But that's a conversation for another day. Okay, well, that's got off to an optimistic start. It's just really cold. It's just really cold, man. It's really cold and I hate it. Why don't I live in Miami? Anyway, keep it moving. Yeah, I mean, I'm sunburned to shit at the moment. I went to the cricket yesterday. The sun didn't even come out and I've got sunburn. What the hell is going on?

but I guess it's a rite of passage for every Brit who comes here to look like a tomato every now and then. The merch, guys, it is up. We've got an online store. It's at underworldpod.com forward slash merch, so you can check that out. Each transaction goes directly into the pockets of a Moldovan taxi driver named Vasily, so that's great. Yeah, definitely buy the Don't Instagram Your Crimes t-shirt and give it to a local rapper you know, so maybe he'll stay out of jail and we can...

We can, you know, help some people out in that way. I definitely want to thank Chris at jhbuffalomeat.com who sent me a bunch of beef jerky. Guys, like we're not making enough off ads. So just send us free stuff and we'll just like, we'll whore ourselves out. You know, if you have, let me think, Sean, what do you, what do you need? Like any sort of like fancy meat or seafood delivery thing. Oh yeah. Um,

Yeah, fish, food, clothing, warmth, heat. Expensive denim, some leather, tattoo artists right now. Anything. Just a roof over my head, some heating, anything would be nice. And of our supply guys, definitely illegal things. I don't know if you want us to promote you, but do that as well. We're totally up for it.

That was a good start. Now, so this one is like super, super interesting. I'm sure, you know, I'm sure a lot of our listeners would have heard of this whole story with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. I mean, it's like, to me, it's one of the most fascinating stories in 60s America, right? You've got Tim Leary, there's Richard Alpert or Ram Dass, latterly. Poets, writers, musicians, Woodstock, Jimi Hendrix, Charles Manson, Prison Breaks, Altamont, The Weather Underground. I mean, this stuff, it's just bonkers.

If you're turning on and tuning into this show, chances are you're going to drop out if we rehash the same stuff. And that is not what we're about on the Underworld podcast. Yeah, honestly, it's kind of wild. Like I've always been fascinated by that time period too. I read this book 20 years ago. It's called Can't Find My Way Home. I think they eventually made a series about it for like one of the news channels. And it's like this history of America in the 20th century through drugs. And like every decade, the author goes through the different drug scenes from like

jazz and heroin in the 30s to the beats and marijuana in the 50s. I read it when I was like 22 and it got me really into like reading about this stuff where there was like drug traffickers or yeah, drugs and like Timothy Leary, you know, books and like back then and there was this guy Daniel Pinchbeck who, you know, before Rogan and that guy on Vegas, like he was into DMT and he had this book where he went to like

all these indigenous societies all over the globe and did their hallucinogens for like their rite of passage. I think he eventually went like off the deep end, you know, a little loopy, but, uh, it's, it's a great book. You know, all this stuff was out there already, but my big mistake was, you know, not making a podcast, interviewing all these weirdos back then. Cause I'd be getting more money than Rogan right now. You know, I read Terrence McKenna back in the day. I'm all about that. Like was all about that stuff. But, uh,

Yeah, man, think about how rich we would be if that had been our shtick in 2007. Yeah, I'd rather not, actually. This subject, yeah, like you say, it's just so, so insane how it sort of wends and moves with the time in America. And the more I've been researching this subject, it kind of becomes more clear that the backgrounds of the Brotherhood and its founder, John Griggs...

This is kind of the part of the story that gets passed over, right? Most people do think of Ram Dass or Leary when they think of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, but...

John Griggs, the guy I mentioned in the cold open, he is the real hippie messiah. Tim Leary is just a very naughty boy. So there's a Monty Python reference. Anyway, before I take it from the top, I want to shout out Nick Scowl. He's a journalist and author of Orange Sunshine, The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, and its quest to spread peace, love, and acid to the world. I don't know why you need subheads that big. Anyway, it's pretty much the authority on the brotherhood. Massively recommend it. A

Like, amazing read. Really great, like, punchy nonfiction writing. And it provides the backbone for a lot of this episode. And there's a movie of the same name based on Nick's book, and I've linked to that in the reading list too. But honestly, the book is way better. You should go out and buy it. Yeah, we really do help people sell these books. So, you know, go get that book. I think it's going to be worth your time. Yeah, it's awesome. So let's begin. Have you ever taken acid, Danny? No.

You know, I've dabbled in different types of hallucinogens of all kinds and had some bad experiences. So it kind of put me off trying acid. Actually, I haven't. Yeah, I've done it a couple of times. I was doing the same kind of silly stuff when I was younger. I took a boatload of mushrooms when I was a little bit more optimistic and not so full of...

hate for the world maybe I don't know let's just say the first time I took a little bit too much there was a festival in Budapest called Ziget some of you guys might know it it's eight days long and there's no campsite I mean it makes me shiver thinking of it now and I took way too much and I wound up rocking back and forth killer show because I thought they were actual murderers and they were out to get me so that was a real cool moment from my life

Anyway, the other time was better, but man, psychedelics are like serious stuff. You've really got to be careful with them. And as you're about to learn, right, the men and women of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, they 100% did not handle psychedelics with care. Now, LSD, and I'm going to butcher that scientific name again, disergic acid diethylamide,

It's created in 1938 by a chemist named Albert Hoffman in Basel, Switzerland. Jesus Christ, man. Like, what is it with Germans and class A's? And this guy makes acid while he's actually trying to beat breathing problems. Yeah, it's always something like we're trying to solve wrist pain. We accidentally invented this combination of heroin and meth. It's always like in the 40s.

Yeah, I mean, so he invents this thing in 1938, right? But it takes him until 1943 until he actually takes 250 micrograms of the stuff. And he realizes that, oh, wait a minute, this is hallucinogenic. And actually fans of psychedelics celebrate Hoffman's discovery and I guess self-discovery each year on April 19th, which is my sister's birthday. So shout out to her. I'll send you a bunch of acid in the post this year.

I had such drunk English-like clothes. I was so attracted to the show that I was captivated. I even had a good idea

Hoffman soon figures he's going to be too big to make his way home from the lab. And at the time, Basel, obviously, it's during the war and it's got restrictions on car use. So the pair, him and his assistant, they bike it home. And that's why modern followers call this day Bicycle Day.

And like I said in the cold open, in the States, LSD is actually legal until 1966, years after it's become famous with Hollywood actors, musicians, and other hippie beatnik scumbags. Sorry, that's the government line, isn't it? Anyway, Silver Fox, Cary Grant, he even credits Acid with giving him a quote, second youth in the twilight of his screen career. So see if you can pick up on that in like North by Northwest or whatever.

Anyway, the government bans it and it becomes a Schedule 1 drug. So that's the highest level you can be on. And it puts an end to countless medical researches and tests on how LSD can help people with psychiatric and mental health issues. And that stuff has really just wound back up today.

So by the end of the decade, when John Griggs is coming up in the world in more ways than one, acid is a well-known substance. It's definitely not groundbreaking to be taking the stuff, even if it's mostly confined, of course, to hippies and creatives and other anti-government freeloaders. Sorry, sorry, the government propaganda got me again. I appreciate this ironic line of jokes coming from a hippie punk like yourself. Ah, yeah, I'm nothing if not a hippie. And honestly, when it comes to acid in the 60s, I mean...

the amount of rabbit holes you can dive down to Hunter Thompson, Ken Kesey, MK Ultra. These are all shows in their own right. But I think Griggs' story though, it needs a bit of a deeper dive because it really runs counter to this flower power hippie narrative about the brotherhood. And it's super, super interesting. So,

John Merle Griggs is born in August 1943 in Texas, where we're not exactly sure, but his family moves first north to Oklahoma, and then in 1955 they take John to Anaheim, California, same year the Disney theme park opens. He's short and muscular, with a black rockabilly cut and a stutter, which he amplifies by amphetamine pills he pops heavily throughout his teenage years. So that's a little life lesson. Griggs might look diminutive, but...

He's powerful and he's skilled in a fight. And in high school, he gathers some pals on the wrestling team into a gang he calls the Blue Jackets. So usually he'll pick a big lad, he'll throw insults at him, and then he'll just step back and take a backseat while his friends step in and they rough the guy up. Sounds like a bit of a nerd, really. They practice their skills by kicking cigarettes out of each other's mouth, which is kind of cool. Is that cool? Yeah, 50s gangs were old, man. I bet they had like switchblade clones and everything.

Yeah, this is like full rumble fish. Anyway, Greg wins a wrestling scholarship to Brigham Young University, but he begins dating a brunette from school named Carol. Now, Carol's pals warn about him. They probably tell him that he spends his spare time kicking cigarettes out of his friend's mouth, that he's a troublemaker and so on. But she's smitten. It's love at first sight, as she describes it. And by 1961, when they're both just 17, Carol is pregnant and the couple heads to Vegas with their parents for a good old shotgun wedding.

And they move into a small home in Fountain Valley, which is just a few miles south of Anaheim. I mean, like most of this show is going to play out in that kind of sprawl around Southern California. But Griggs, obviously, is a tearaway. He smokes pot, he takes psychedelics all the time, and he gets into illegal racing around Anaheim, which is Orange County, south of LA, a kind of island of conservatism in SoCal's liberal ocean. The guy is like every character from Grease rolled into one. Yeah, I love him already.

He disappears into the mountains, though. I think he has a bit of an epiphany. He's trying to survive on whatever he traps, so that earns him the nickname Farmer John, but he's no farmer, right? He comes back to urban life, and he forms another gang. This time he calls them the Street Sweepers, and they go around drag racing, robbing stores, and beating people up for fun. And ordinarily, again, it's Griggs who's going to insult somebody, and then his friends are going to dish out a kicking. Yeah, I feel like...

The 50s and 60s were full of people who lived wild youth like this. And then by the 70s, they're all like the CEO of some import-export company or bank or something or like, I don't know, running Viacom in the 80s. It's just, I don't know what was going on, but they bounced back pretty quickly and put on those suits and made things happen. Yeah, actually, that's a good little sort of premonition for this show as well. I mean...

Here is Oklahoma's excellent This Land press. You should check it out. It's a really good magazine, guys. Anyway, quote, soon John left the Blue Jackets for the Street Sweepers, an infamous Anaheim, quote, car club, whose members waged drug-fueled drag races while wearing German army helmets. They'd throw water balloons or exit people on the street. Somehow, in all of this, John managed to get a job with Anaheim Parks and Recreation as a trash collector.

But he wasn't the kind of guy who separated work from play. He smoked enormous joints while driving around town on trash details, occasionally rolling down the window to yell, Hey, I love you at passing strangers. That sounds kind of nice. Rob,

Robert Ackley, a tall, lanky kid who's one of Griggs' confidants at the time, recalls, quote, there was no peace and love going on at that time. It was, don't look at me. What are you looking at? You want to fight. And Ackley continues, quote, we were Anaheim guys and Johnny was the boss. Johnny was the boss.

Johnny took over everything. People started calling him the farmer because he gathered everyone around him like Johnny Appleseed. So that's another, we're going to learn that some of these names, they have different origins down in this show. Anyway, he just grew followers. Everyone followed John. Just sounds like the kind of influencer guru we really need to grow the Instagram account. Am I right? Yeah. Developing a cult back then, it just seems so much more organic, you know?

You really had to have some pizzazz. There was no editing. There was no face tuning or any of that. You had to have it. No, but we do have that now. So guys, if you want to help us out, get in touch. Anyway, when he's not cracking heads, Griggs is working out in the oil fields of Yorba Linda. That's north of Anaheim, beside the sweeping valleys of Chino Hills State Park.

Around the same time, he's just dealing huge amounts of weed. He hooks up with a seasoned fighter and crook named Eddie Padilla, and they dominate Orange County's weed trade.

Through the mid-60s, Greg gets into harder drugs himself, and he actually winds up addicted to heroin, from which he contracts hepatitis. Him and Padilla decide they want in on the growing LSD trade, most of which is centred on chemists working out of rural California labs. Fortunately, they've gotten wind that a Hollywood producer who lives up in the hills has a big old jar of the stuff on his refrigerator, and they decide to go steal it, of course.

Soon after, Griggs, his second in command, Tommy Tunnel, is a real name, and a friend and heroin addict named Joe Buffalo, and these are just like crazy names, dress like old-timey gangsters in brimmed hats and overcoats, and they arm themselves with shotguns and pistols, and then they barge into a party the producers have him, stick him up, and demand the acid. And I mean, of course, the guy just gives them the lot.

So messed up is Griggs at this point that he accidentally gives back some of the stolen stash to his young son, Jerry, who apparently spends an entire night rocking back and forth in his rocking chair. Yeah, I mean, we've all been there, Jerry. Maybe not at the age of like six, but... More importantly, soon after the robbery, Griggs is convalescing in a hospital bed for the hepatitis and he's chatting to his friend, Chuck Mundell.

Mundell is a talented surfer who Griggs has known since high school. With Mundell's help, Griggs gets a hold of some of that stolen acid and he just scarfs down a load of it. And then he has what's known as an ego death. That is a trip that makes the user realize the futility of worldly concerns and the presence of a higher power in the universe. I mean, me and Danny don't really need drugs for that. But anyway, Mundell says, quote, something had happened to John in that hospital and I don't know what it was.

I mean, he's taking a load of acid, Chuck. Like, it's pretty obvious. The pair then trip together. Griggs describes seeing something he calls a, quote, colour wheel rotating in the air. Mundell is seeing the exact same thing and they think they're communicating psychically.

Some versions of this story actually claim that Griggs took this massive dose in the mountains above LA after the heist with his co-conspirators, and as dawn broke, each man downed his weapons and swore of violence. But Nick Scowl doesn't write about that. He writes about the hospital episode, and I'm inclined to go with him. That book is so well reported. Whatever the truth of that story, though, Griggs is immediately proselytizing acid as a holy sacrament, a way to see the depths of life and its creator.

Sounds like every advertising creative in Williamsburg in 2015 talking about ayahuasca. I feel like some long nights you might have had just creeping into this, Jonas.

Yeah, yeah. John Grigston, he is tripping with co-workers, friends, surfers. I mean, anybody's going to do it with him, right? He's completely hooked. And he deeply believes that LSD is the key to unlocking what British writer Aldous Huxley, who's a big, big influence on the group, had called the quote, doors of perception.

LSD, John Griggs believes, will create a utopian society on Earth. To him, acid literally is God. Now, being a psychedelic spiritual leader and head of a low-life Anaheim street gang might seem a bit contradictory, right? But Griggs quickly sees how he can leverage one cause for the other, and he seeks out folks who can help him turn the street sweepers into a completely different kind of mob.

People were just motivated back then, man, just real doers, you know? Yeah. I mean, he's also got like a toddler kid and a wife and like five different jobs. I mean, this is proper rise and grind. Yeah.

Just going for it. Yeah, yeah. Enter Travis Ashbrook at this point. He is a skinny surfer with long hair, is there any other kind of surfer, who cross boards and he deals pot on the side again, you know. He's an ace surfer, right, and a pretty dab hand at smuggling, roading it from Tijuana and Tecate into SoCal, grabbing kilos of the stuff and selling it on the streets of American cities, swept up in this whole hippie craze thing. Really?

Remember, this is a time when the border between Mexico and the US all but didn't exist in many spots, and Mexican cops are easily bought off if there's trouble. I think that's completely changed these days, right? Anyway, this is an easy buck. One time a dealer tells Ashbrook he's out of weed, and he offers him LSD instead. Ashbrook just shrugs his shoulders and he buys the stuff, and then he tries it.

Soon, Ashbrook is on John Griggs' radar, and after Ashbrook's wedding in 1965, his dealer passes on a message to go visit John. When Ashbrook does, John Griggs hands him a shoebox full of a pound of ready-to-roll Mexican weed. It's a nice wedding gift. And Griggs is a different kind of kingpin now.

He's had this psychedelic epiphany, he's desperate to spread the drugs all over the world and usher in this new peace-loving utopia. Eddie Padilla, who we mentioned earlier, he is also down to join. And on his 21st birthday, he drops a load of acid with Griggs and a coterie of friends at Mount Palomar, which is a 6,100-foot peak in northern San Diego County. As someone read from the psychedelic experience, Padilla passes out. When he wakes up, he's alone in a forest, surrounded by trees.

That's when I realised I was dead, he said. Then he takes a stroll and finds his buddies, who he assumes are dead too, and everyone's in heaven. This is Padilla's ego death. He ditches the heavy drugs he's been taking and he carries on selling pot. But an undercover cop comes over wanting some drugs, and at the same time an incense candle falls over and it burns up John Griggs' home. So he and Carol move into new pads near Silverado in the canyons out east of Anaheim.

Pretty soon, Padilla and Griggs set up in Tarquitz Canyon, on native land in Palm Springs, even further into the desert to the east of the city. They're still selling weed, of course, but mission number one is to get as many folks as they can to do acid. Says Padilla, quote,

Unsurprisingly, this move does bring tons of people on a pilgrimage to Tarquitz to get high with the gang.

And they do group trips on weekends, building a clique of disciples, and they call them disciples too, keeping up this whole religious image. Griggs and Padilla are dropping mega amounts of LSD, like five taps of pot,

pretty much every day. Carol's getting involved too. And I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that maybe little Jerry Griggs isn't getting the best child of all time, but maybe it's the best. And I don't want to piss off the psychedelics crowd. They're pretty zealous. Yeah. Oh, seriously, man. Like people, people go deep and they stay real deep. Yeah. It's not my cup of tea. Let's just say anyway, what happens next is a pretty hilarious collection of stories at the group's so-called church. Basically Griggs and Padilla, they're

they're fried and they're trying to get their old heavy drinking street fighter pals off booze and benzos and onto acid which doesn't always work out and mostly sounds like the plot line of an all day sunny series

But over time, the church gathers around 500 members and 100 regular attendees. And they do culty stuff like till the fields and paint murals of Eastern religious figures on the walls. They do group therapy sessions about how not to do naughty stuff like robbing and beating up people again. Almost two thirds of the church's members have a criminal record. And at this point, you might be wondering, what actually is this church? Does it have a name?

Well, Griggs and Padilla do call their followers, quote, disciples, but they don't actually call themselves anything until the summer of 1966, when everybody gets around, has a power while and throws out ideas. Griggs comes up with the Church of the Sleeping Angel, but it's Christian anarchism.

and also terrible. And it's eventually down to Chuck Mundell, the surfer and weed smuggler, to suggest the brotherhood of eternal love. Here's Padilla being very, very Padilla-like. Quote, It just went into my consciousness forever. What else could we be named? Because that is in fact what it is. What we've been, what we are today. I have an eternal love for everyone who is in that room today. I mean, a lot of these quotes, like, they just...

They're giving me all kinds of flashbacks to university dorms. But anyway, the guys have got their disciples, they've got their church, and they've got their name. And now they're going to go fishing for the biggest fish in the entire country, Timothy Leary. Leary is living in New York at the time. He's been fired from Harvard. He's kind of America's psychedelic aficionado in chief. Griggs drives across the country to Leary's home in New York, and instantly Leary becomes one of Griggs' followers.

Now it's important to note that most people think Leary led Griggs, and that absolutely is not true. Of course, Leary was the most famous proponent of LSD in America, and someone whose fame was about to go nuclear with his arrest, subsequent escape from prison.

That's such a wild story, right? That's like the Black Panthers in Morocco and all that. Yeah. Like, how is that not... I mean, maybe it is a movie. I don't know about it, but that would... I mean, what a crazy time. Yeah. I'm going for a couple of books right now because I'm going to do another show or maybe 10 about this stuff. But that is...

intense, it's wild. But it's Griggs who's actually the guru at this point. It's Griggs with the disciples and it's Griggs with the brotherhood, all of which Leary wants to further his ambitions to turn more Americans onto acid. In fact, at one point, Leary declares that John Griggs is, quote, the holiest man ever to live in this country.

In October 1966, Griggs and his disciples incorporate the Brotherhood as a non-profit, because of course, and they kickstart an organisation they say will, quote, "...bring the world a greater awareness of God through the teachings of Jesus Christ, Buddha, Ramakrishna Babaji..."

Paramahansa, Yogananda, Mahatma Gandhi, and all true prophets and apostles of God, and to spread the love and wisdom of these great teachers to all men, irrespective of race, color, or circumstances. And I'm going to give myself a pat on the back for saying all of those words on the first go. Now, yeah.

Now, doesn't that sound lovely and totally not culty or crimey at all, especially given it's only a fortnight after California is criminalized acid as a schedule one drug and the whole country is going to do the same soon after. So straight off of the bat, the Brotherhood is not only very weird, but it's also a criminal organization.

Anyway, no matter, because this is when Griggs goes from small-time suburban guru to national acid hero. He moves into a Laguna Beach condo and builds an LSD smuggling empire. Disciples even pass around rumours he's got magic powers, because of course they do. At the church near Silverado, members go full cult. They research medical care, how to deliver babies on site, building their own homes, you know that stuff. It's cult stuff.

The church burns down again. Come on, John, stop leaving those incense candles everywhere. And that forces everyone over to Laguna Beach. They put together plans for an art center and a surf store.

But now we're into 1967, the summer of love. Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, the Beatles are about to go mad and head out to Rishikesh. The world's getting on the Brotherhood's page, basically. Griggs, Padilla and the other founding brothers have this dream to build a church on an island, based on Aldous Huxley's novel, Island. And Griggs and Leary do these little magical mystery tours of California shows, festivals and creative events. Roll

rolling out Turkish rugs and asking crowds to imagine them as messengers of God. Why does 20th century man need LSD? Goes one of Leary's favourite lines. Quote, because it's the 20th century. Sounds like a Christmas cracker joke. Anyway, around this time, Griggs attempts to make good on his plan to take the Brotherhood to this island hideaway.

One of the guys knows the King of Tonga, which is an island nation in the Pacific between Hawaii and New Zealand. And Griggs picks out a small Tongan island on which he's going to install what he calls Mystic Arts World. I mean, this all sounds so corny, but I guess it was new and exciting at the time.

And sure, this all sounds extremely spiritual and deep, but it's all just basically a giant drug smuggling operation. I don't know, man. It sounds kind of rad. Like the whole island, you know, utopia thing. Like not the worst way to spend your early 20s. It's kind of an interesting fork in the road, right? Which John Griggs do you want to hang out with? Is it the tucked in denim white t-shirt greasers who do benzos and get pissed?

Or is it long hair, batik shirted John Griggs who's on acid all the time with his pals and Timothy Leary? I don't know. Both of them. Yeah, both.

The group at this point is still shipping huge quantities of weed across from the Mexican border and selling LSD, which of course now is illegal. And the way they smuggle the weed into the States is kind of hilarious. One guy drives, another just sits on the back seat pretending to be asleep, but actually just sits on a shitload of pot. They switch up to stashing stuff in station wagon panels and even boats on trailers. And of course they're paying Mexican cops left, right and center, but Sinaloa cartel, this very much is not.

The Brotherhood is dealing kilos of pot all over the country, as far away as Manhattan. Orange Sunshine, the book of Nick Scowl, it gets into some of the quantities involved and it's thousands and thousands of kilos going for a grand a pot. Some single trips are making the Brotherhood $100,000, which if you do the math is like around 900 grand today.

These guys are turning on and tuning in, but they are not dropping out. They're making bank. Just like moving stuff and getting it and selling it. Like just easy. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just sit on the weed and don't let the cops see you and just drive straight in. It's Charles Play.

The Brotherhood's next step is, like their religious leanings, to be found out east. But this is no yoga retreat, right? It's the so-called Hippie Trail, an overland route from Western Europe into Turkey and across Persia or Iran, through Central Asia into Afghanistan, India and Kathmandu, Nepal, which is the route's principal terminus. You've got opium from Kabul, of course, and high-grade mountain hash from Kandahar or Kathmandu, but pretty much nothing.

Then you drove or flew it back and smuggled it into the States. Remember, this is not an era of security scans at boarding gates. Most of the time you could just walk straight onto a plane with a ton of hash wrapped in your jacket with a markup price of like a thousand percent.

Anyway, the Brotherhood gets deep into this route. And in true Brotherhood style, they even stash marijuana in film reel cans because then you had a good excuse to tell people not to open them or you'd ruin the film. And another favorite is surfboards. Actually, the Brotherhood is deep into the spirituality of surfing and they call it, quote, Christ in the curl, which is actually pretty good. Yeah, I mean, everything I'm hearing, I'm liking, man.

Yeah, actually, the more when I'm reading it now, it does seem pretty cool. And we're going to go deep into the hippie trail for our upcoming doco episode on my trip to Nepal. So you guys can wait for some more crazy stuff on that. It really is like really crazy. But TLDR, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, is a serious drug gang at this point with guys all over the globe shipping stuff from Asia, Mexico and all over the US.

They basically become a hippie trail co-op, inducting more and more people into the brotherhood, encouraging them to get out on the trail and bring back primo hash from Nepal and Afghanistan.

driving down the street value and pricing out American competition. Economies of scale, baby. You've got to love a bit of hippie rise and grind. Honestly, I'm just like thoroughly shocked a group of hippies who are all drugged out could coordinate these logistics like, you know, across continents. It's just it's incredibly impressive. You know, they must have had like one 55 year old suburban dad accountant or like boss lady secretary who just handled everything like that.

Highly possible. I mean, doesn't it make it even more crazy that they're basically baked on acid 24-7 as well? It's just nuts. Yeah.

But at this point, the group actually builds that art center that I mentioned earlier. And here's a quote. Once Mystic Arts World arrived in Laguna, everything changed. Thousands of hippies who spent the summer of love in San Francisco fled its chaotic end and drove south to Laguna Beach, now the focal point of California's psychedelic scene.

Front page stories brought news of charges being filed against quote LSD peddlers, raids on quote stash houses, arrests of dope suspects and the tragic outcomes faced by unwitting victims of their wares, including a 17 year old Garden Grove girl. Garden Grove is the city south of Anaheim, by the way, evidently high on LSD. He was committed to a mental hospital after police found a quote wandering naked on Goff Street.

And this is a good time to mention that while the Summer of Love was a seismic event in Western history, and we remember it as a turning point for the culture, the music, drugs, protests, feminism, and so on, the backlash to it was epic. Way bigger than anything the right wing cooks up about trans rights or school books these days. Yeah, the wave crash back. Oh yeah. Yeah, I mean, this stuff literally prompted the war on drugs, global prohibition, civil wars around the world.

Wait, hold on. How did the hippie revolution, like I love to blame the hippies for everything, but how did they prompt like civil wars around the world? Actually, I mean, this kind of like tees up the Nepal episode really well because as we're going to get into in that show, actually the prohibition of weed in Nepal, like there is a direct link from that to this communist revolution and civil war. It's really, really interesting. So I think that's going to come out in a couple of weeks, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. That also, I mean, you know, the banning, the focus, that was the early 80s, right? The focus against weed in late 70s, early 80s. We talked about this in the Jamaica episode that they kind of really tried to eliminate weed from the island. So a lot of people there that had these networks selling it in the States, it was part of the reason they switched to trafficking cocaine.

Not the reason, but it played a role in it to a degree. Yeah, I mean, look at what happened in Afghanistan as well. Drug prohibition just went pretty much caused everything to tumble into the modern situation that we've got now.

At the US establishment at the time, it went absolutely hell for leather against hippie culture, which I'm going to go down deep into in that Nepal piece. But yeah, as I've mentioned, it caused a Maoist revolution there. But the right wing really kills hippies in equal measure. And I want to read some of a Time magazine piece. I just adore this piece from July 1967 called Simply the Hippies. Quote,

One sociologist calls them the Freudian proletariat. Another observer sees them as expats living on our shores, but beyond our society. For California's Bishop James Pike, they evoke the early Christians. There is something about the temper and quality of these people. A gentleness, a quietness, an interest. Something good,

to their deeply worried parents throughout the country, they seem more like dangerously deluded dropouts, candidates for a very sound spanking at a cram course in civics, if only they would return home to receive either.

I love this story. And a bit more, quote, in a sense, hippiedom is a transplanted lost horizon, a Shangri-La or a go-go, blending Asian resignation and American optimism in a world where no one grows old. Hippiedom is more than a choice of lifestyle, says Chuck Hollander, 27, drug expert for the National Student Association.

It's an apolitical systemicide. Jesus Christ. Calm down, Chuck. Settle down. He's a student leader, man. Come on. That doesn't sound very past the blunt. Anyway, people were terrified of this shit. And at the center of it all is the Brotherhood of Eternal Love and their storefront, this place called the Mystic Arts World in Laguna. And I mean, to be fair to the naysayers, they are a gigantic drug smuggling operation and a New Age cult.

Anyway, with the amount of press it's getting, it's no surprise that cops come after the Brotherhood. In the summer of 1967, cops raid a stash house finding LSD, POT and methadrine, which is an alternative form of meth, basically. I mean, the amount of stuff these guys are chugging back makes me actually bristle. Like, I'd definitely hop off the nearest tall building if I did it.

Later raids discover huge quantities of pot, acid, heroin, you name it. Brotherhood members are getting pulled over with hundreds of thousands of bucks worth of weed and other stuff just obviously sitting on their back seats because they don't give a shit. I mean, if the rule is not to get high off your own supply, these guys are going straight to drug dealer jail. No passing go.

Pretty soon, Laguna Canyon gets known as, quote, Dodge City, with the sheer amount of police activity and raids going down. I mean, the way I've read it, pretty much every other home in the area is a brotherhood trap house or a venue for an orgy or just some disgusting little smoking den. A lot of the brothers are also having sex with underage girls, according to a few old members, which is, yeah, that's less than ideal. Yeah, I mean, that's the whole dark side of the cult thing, right? They always...

they always got to take it a little too far. Can't just have their consensual orgies and smoke a little bit of weed. They just got to, got to go right for it. You know, it just always goes Nambla. It never doesn't go. Yeah. Yeah.

But anyway, this is around late 1967, the time of our cold open for the show. And this is when things begin to change, right? The Brotherhood Empire is getting really big, too big, really. And it's stretched thin. And rather than peaceniks and psychedelic lovers getting involved, hardened street thugs are heading to Laguna in search of a payday.

There's Johnny Gale, who I mentioned before, and there's another guy called Buddha Bob or Fat Bobby, I think he might be overweight. And he's not just into pot and acid or any of the other guys, they're selling harder stuff too, right? And they're getting locals hooked, and it's all getting pretty grubby in the canyon. Outside gangs start shooting up clap and trap houses, cops are barging around, and cracks are appearing in the brotherhood's interwoven relationships.

says early member Dion Wright to Nick Scowell, quote, In December 1967, cops shoot a Brotherhood member named Peter Amaranthus dead.

On Feb 20th the following year, 200 Brotherhood hippies fight cops armed with billy clubs and wherever there's a break in the action, they hold hands and chant Om together. I mean, you could barely make this stuff up.

And while the OG brothers, Griggs, Padilla and Co. are becoming more like grey beards of the movement, while crims like Gayle and Buddha Bob, they're snatching more power for themselves. I guess, ghost of the drug industry future? Yeah, I mean, this is an amazing story, but it's also just like so predictable at every level, you know? Yeah, totally. And then there is Neil Purcell.

By 1968, Purcell has been a Newport Beach cop for seven years, and he's spent most of that time trying to drive hippies out of town. He hates hippies. A lot. He arrests weed smokers on the beach, and he raids concerts. Such a buzzkill. By 1966, he's taken to doing undercover work for the Laguna Beach PD. Such is his determination to rid California of its shaggy-haired stoners.

What Purcell sees horrifies him. Open dealing, smoking in broad daylight. It's like drugs are legal in Laguna. What a thought. Purcell makes so many arrests, it gets folks talking all the way up in City Hall, and loads of them actually don't mind the hippies. They think it's good for business. It's good for some business, of course.

And all the while, Purcell's orbit is closing in on the mystic arts world and the Brotherhood. He even raids it one time. He confiscates artworks of naked women on the grounds they're, quote, indecent. I mean, weed, unwashed hair, tits. It's enough to make your blue blood boil.

My God, says Purcell of the Mystic. You could walk along the street and these guys were hawking their wares just like peanut salesmen at a ball game. I got acid. I got pot. I got hash. It was unbelievable. We made hundreds of arrests down there. He also heads into the canyon and he busts Brotherhood potlatches, pissing off Griggs and his boys even more.

Says one Brotherhood member, quote, Guy seems like a real narc. Yeah, he's, uh, I don't know. In the words of Peep Show, he's so not Rainbow Rhythms. Anyway,

Here's a slapstick episode. I doubt you would probably get much these days. Purcell heads into Dodge City, right? And he stops Brotherhood member Lyle Lincho German, or Herman, who's smoking a joint. Purcell and another officer jump out of the bushes. Lincho punches Purcell in the face. The other officer tries to tackle Lincho but misses, breaking his shoulder on a railroad tie. Then Lincho's pal, Patty Yerker, who everyone calls Fat Pat...

races out of her house with a frying pan Purcell wrestles Lincho to the ground Fat Pat bops Purcell with the pan Lincho escapes but he's wearing thick boots and he keeps falling over on the eucalyptus leaves on the ground Purcell maces him and throws him in a squad car later Lincho actually gets off his charge while Fat Pat pays 50 bucks for calling Purcell a quote motherfucker

By 1960, I mean, I just want to take a moment on that because it's just so Keystone Cops. Anyway, by 1968, so many Brotherhood members are heading out on the hippie trail to Asia that they actually have races to see who can get to, say, Kabul first. They're the most efficient and largest scale group bringing Afghan hash into America and the cops are beginning to figure them out.

Eddie Padilla is happy to get out on the front lines of this booming business and he still goes on trips to Mexico too with the surfer smuggler Chuck Mundell. Griggs though, he's getting on a bit. He's in his mid-twenties and he's nervous and he begins to take a back seat. Instead, he stays behind in Dodge City to quarterback what is by this point huge, gigantic industry. And he's

And he's still getting blotto on Isid of course and spouting all his guru-like dreams of ego death and spiritual salvation, hooking up with Leary and bolstering his soothsayer cred. But that year, something huge happens. Eddie Padilla is busted with a shit ton of marijuana in San Francisco and, staring down the barrel of a huge prison sentence, he agrees to become an informant on the Brotherhood. Now, some pretty gaping holes are appearing in the group's armor and it's gonna start heading downhill.

The island dream, remember Aldous Huxley's book, that looms larger as things get tougher. One of the brothers heads all the way out to Micronesia, that's a sprawling island chain north of Papua New Guinea and east of the Philippines, incredibly remote, to scope out property.

But Griggs is getting more into Timothy Leary, and he pays instead for a sprawling Palm Springs property on which he's going to drop out with the acid superstar. Despite the protestations of Leary's one-time confidant, Richard Alpert, who by this point is going by Ram Dass, of course, and he tells Griggs that Leary's more about getting high than any sort of deep meditative reason.

Das later says that, quote, I was disillusioned with a lot of people in the psychedelic scene. I think I felt that Tim couldn't make it to enlightenment. He was absolutely fooling himself. He wanted to bring psychedelics into the mainstream, and so did the Brotherhood. They were rebellious, and they wanted to use psychedelics to challenge the government, and that's always problematic. They had the tiger by the tail.

So here we are. It's 1968. Eddie Padilla is a police informant. The Brotherhood is a multinational hash smuggling gang. Its membership is swelling out of control. Neil Purcell, that cop, is sniffing literally around Mystic Arts World and Dodge City. And John Griggs, the Brotherhood's founding father, has chosen not to follow the dreams of his acolytes, but buy a farm with Tim Leary and get messed up on acid 24-7.

It's that schism, one insider tells Nick Scowl, author of Orange Sunshine, that "set off the conflict that destroyed the Brotherhood." In February 1968, Tim Leary announces he's dropping out of public life to become a "modern messiah." Actually, he's moving out west with his wife to join John Griggs. And his son, which I'll get into in another show. That gets mad. Both things can be true, I guess.

The hideaway ranch itself, which is near the hamlet of Idlewild, is spectacular. Right beside the Pacific Crest Trail, several houses, a barn, cattle, stables, vegetable gardens, and a reservoir. It's just a one-stop shop for the discerning, psychedelic adult drug kingpin. Again, I can't lie, man. It sounds pretty nice.

Yeah, it does actually, doesn't it? The more you hear, it's all right. Only married members are allowed to enter it too. Damn, that's us. Anyway, that cheeses off single brothers, of course, and they began referring to the ranch as a concentration camp. Creepy. They don't like it at all. Says Padilla, quote, it's one of the dumbest things we could possibly do.

Griggs and Leary are getting unbelievably high, that's not really a newsflash is it, and having so many messed up sittings that people start thinking they have a telepathic relationship. They don't live in the cottages or houses on site, instead they erect teepees and pretend to be Native American chiefs, ouch. They're useless with tools or any of this back to the land stuff that they profess, and of course they're vegetarians.

Briggs gets obsessed with turning single brotherhood members into couples even more, even though he himself is having an affair with a young woman on the ranch. Leary is huffing so much acid, he's pretty much in psychosis, and then things really fall apart. On December 26, 1968, Neil Purcell, the hippie-hating cop, is driving his patrol car through Laguna Canyon when he spots a black Plymouth stopped across the street and blocking it.

When he inspects further, he finds Tim Leary and his son Jack high as kites and having a row. Weed smoke billows out of the Plymouth's window, and Purcell takes the pair downtown. I'll let Orange Sunshine take it from here. Purcell recalls Jack Leary as the strangest individual he'd ever met, living proof that LSD was a dangerous threat to the youth of America. "'I hated drugs with a passion, and I still do,' he says."

After being dressed and placed in his jail cell, Jack commenced to take off all his clothes.

I recall he had no underwear on and he squatted down in the corner and started masturbating like crazy, Purcell recalls. Disgusted, Purcell turned to Tim Leary and began berating him. You think drugs are so great, he said. Look at your son there, in front of your wife. He's in there masturbating like hell. Sean, this reminds me of that story you told me that happened to you in the airport on the way back from Nepal. Anyway, moving on. I'm going to get through this story a bit quicker now. Okay.

From here it's going to take a lot of hearings, but Tim Leary is sentenced to 10 years for marijuana possession, kicking into gear another wild chapter in his and the Brotherhood's lives. Meanwhile, at the ranch, under the supervision of John Griggs, a new potent strain of LSD is developed, one that's going to have profound consequences for Griggs, the Brotherhood, Leary and America.

While staring at sunlight bouncing off a water tank at the ranch, Griggs coins the new drug's name, Orange Sunshine. And that is where we're going to leave this one, guys. We're going to come back for more Brotherhood of Eternal Love chaos soon. I mean, like we mentioned, there's Tim Leary, The Weather Underground, and that whole insane story. There's Orange Sunshine, this brand new LSD, and its own rampant spread across America, Charles Manson, the Black Panthers, and of course, the hippie mafia.

And there's also a fun little story about Jefferson Airplane and Richard Nixon. I think I'm going to do that as a bonus. Anyway, there we go.

Yeah, dude, that was really good. And you've gotten funnier, man. Just a lot of one-liners in there that I found myself laughing a lot. So I don't know what's going on in New Zealand, but it's really helping you out. But yeah, patreon.com slash underworldpodcast for bonuses and to throw some cash so we keep doing this. You can also sign up for those bonuses on iTunes with like one click. And the merch is up at underworldpod.com slash merch. So do that and buy that. And yeah, thanks for tuning in.

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