The Covert War Against Rock

by Alex Constantine

  The death of Brian Jones has since been universally laughed off, attributed to drug use, when in fact he was completely off drugs, with the exception of ale and wine, for several weeks prior to his drowning. It is evident that he was drugged the evening of his murder, suggesting premeditation, planning. Eyewitnesses reported that he drank a couple of brandies before taking a swim. But Jones biographer Laura Jackson was shocked to discover in the biochemist’s analysis “far and away the most disturbing truth relating to Brian’s death”: Jones was “subjected to thin-layer chromotography, a technique designed minutely to separate and analyse the body’s components, and which failed to reveal the presence of any amphetamine, methedrine, morphine, methadone, or isoprenaline. What it did reveal, however, is far more alarming: two dense spots, one yellow-orange in color and one purple which were not able to be identified. Brian’s urine revealed an amphetamine-like—not amphetamine, and the distinction is important—substance 1720 mgs percent, nearly nine times the normal level.”

  The tell-tale signs of a cover-up by authorities are unmistakable. The bottle of brandy that Jones drank from was confiscated by PC Albert Evans “for analysis,” and was never seen again. No lab report on the wine appeared in court papers.27 Any probes into the drowning of Brian Jones were relegated to the Sussex Criminal Investigations Division (CID). The CID had the option of referring the case to the Director of Public Prosecutions—instead, the division chose to monopolize the investigation, in the end claiming there was “no evidence” to warrant prosecution, although at least one senior investigator protested this decision. East Sussex coroner David Wadman suggested falsely that the Home Office and police had thoroughly investigated the drowning. “I am bound to say that I think it is extremely unlikely that you’ll obtain any further information,” he insisted. But a Home Office spokesman subsequently rejected the claim that an investigation had been conducted at all, admitting flatly, “We do not have any information touching Mr. Jones’ death.”28

  A.E. Hotchner found that the death is still, some thirty years later, a sensitive subject in some quarters. While living in London, Electra May, his editorial assistant, scheduled an interview with Justin de Villeneuve, the mentor of Twiggy, the doe-eyed celebrity model of the 1960s. Two days before the de Villeneuve (his real name was Nigel Davies) interview, Hotchner took a train to Eastbourne to meet with the coroner, Mr. E.N. Grace, “who kindly provided me with all the police and medical reports relative to Brian’s death, and a transcript of the inquest. A few days later, Electra phoned de Villeneuve to confirm the interview for that day. There is no interview,’ de Villeneuve’s assistant said.” Electra asked why he had chosen to cancel. “Because Hotchner has been to see the coroner, hasn’t he? We didn’t know he was opening that can of worms. That’s why.” Hotchner’s secretary was unnerved by this response, he notes, since “she thought she was the only person who knew about my meeting with Coroner Grace.”29

  Who sent the lorries to the estate to cart off Brian’s possessions, the same sort of looting that followed the death of Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, and other star-crossed musicians? After the funeral at St. Mary’s Church, the workmen who killed Jones repaired directly to his mansion, girlfriends in tow. An estate worker said, “They drank, laughed and joked crudely and cavorted about. They even took their women to Brian’s bed. It really turned me over. I was out in the grounds and they hadn’t even bothered to close the curtains. You just couldn’t help but see them in there, in Brian’s bed. It was utterly appalling.” Jones’ belongings, with the exception of a couple of his most valued musical instruments, were systematically loaded into vans lined up in front of the house. Shortly thereafter, a bonfire was set in the garden. “A group of men were burning an enormous amount of stuff. I know, because I had a very nice little Bible and they’d flung that on, too,” said a gardener. “They were burning Brian’s things—his clothes, shirts and what have you. I don’t know on whose sayso, but they cleared no end of stuff out of his house and burned the lot.”30

  Jones was buried at Cheltenham Cemetary two days after the murder. In 1980, Rolling Stone staked an epitaph to the life of Lewis Brian Hopkin-Jones: “Jones played rhythm guitar for the group since its inception in 1962, but his contribution was more spiritual than musical. His flamboyant appearance and notorious lifestyle—which included fathering two illegitimate children by the time he was sixteen—set the tone for the band’s image.” Rock critic Greil Marcus likewise found the essence of the band in him: “What the Stones as a group sang about . . . Jones did.” 31

  But the account of his death left by police and the media industry is a fiction, because he was off drugs completely at the time. His death was not an accident caused by a life of abuse. He was murdered.

  NOTES

  1. “Random Notes,” Rolling Stone, no. 38, July 26, 1969, p. 4.

  2. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, “Student Bill Clinton ‘Spied’ on Americans abroad for CIA,” London Telegraph, June 3, 1996. Also see, Roger Morris in Partners in Power (1996). Among the first to publicly note the relationship of Clinton with the CIA was Gene Wheaton, formerly an NSC contractee and a Christic Institute investigator, in radio interviews following the first Clinton inaugural. On June 10 1996, the Telegraph reported, “in the late 1960s, Mr Clinton worked as a source for the Central Intelligence Agency. . . . He was certainly no dangerous radical. ‘No attack by his reactionary opponents would be more undeserved than the charge that young Bill Clinton was ‘radical,’ concludes [Roger] Morris. . . . The bearded, disheveled Rhodes scholar was recruited by the CIA while at Oxford—along with several other young Americans with political aspirations—to keep tabs on fellow students involved in protest activities against the Vietnam War. Morris says that the young Clinton indulged in some low-level spying in Norway in 1969, visiting the Oslo Peace Institute and submitting a CIA informant’s report on American peace activists who had taken refuge in Scandinavia to avoid the draft. ‘An officer in the CIA station in Stockholm confirmed that,’ said Morris. The Washington Establishment would like to dismiss this troubling book as the work of a fevered conspiracy theorist. But Morris is no lightweight. He worked at the White House in both the Johnson and Nixon administrations, resigning from the National Security Council in 1970 in protest over the US invasion of Cambodia. He went on to become an acclaimed biographer of Richard Nixon.”

  3. A.E. Hotchner, Blown Away: A No-Holds-Barred Portrait of the Rolling Stones and the Sixties Told by the Voices of the Generation, New York: Fireside, 1990, pp. 218–19.

  4. Mae Brussell, “Operation CHAOS,” unpublished ms.

  5. A.E. Hotchner, p. 232.

  6. Bill Wyman with Bill Coleman, Stone Alone, New York: Viking, 1990, pp. 404–5.

  7. Ibid.

  8. Hotchner, pp. 232–33.

  9. Wyman.

  11. Hotchner, p. 233.

  12. Hotchner, p. 234.

  13. See Bill Landis, Anger: The Unauthorized Biography of Kenneth Anger, New York: Harper Collins, 1995.

  14. Wyman, pp. 437–38.

  15. Pete Hamill, “Long Night’s Journey Into Day: A Conversation with John Lennon,” Rolling Stone, no. 188, June 5, 1975, p. 73. Lennon: “I went on the Dick Cavett show and said they were followin’ me. . . . [And] when they were followin’ me, they wanted me to see when they were followin’ me.”

  16. Landis, p. 167.

  17. Davin Seay, Mick Jagger: The Story Behind the Rolling Stone, New York: Birch Lane, 1993, p. 98.

  18. Hotchner, pp. 231–32.

  19. Brussell.

  20. Wyman.

  21. Hotchner, p. 296. Psychological pressure of this sort put Jones in a hyper-vigilant state, tactics common in mind control operations. The Manson Family attempted to bully and cajole Los Angeles studio musician Terry Melcher and Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys into forking over “travel expenses.” The shakedown of guitarist Gary Hinman ended in his murder by torture. Brian Jones was also murdered after an argument over money with Thorogood. Jones had been
stalked by the workmen for months. The psychological intimidations led, according to Jones’ friend Robert Hattrell, to “odd mental behavior, paranoiac, afraid there were people after him, out to get him.”

  22. Wyman, p. 428.

  23. Brussell.

  24. “Murder Claims Raise Doubt over Rolling Stone’s Death,” Independent, April 4, 1994, p. 2.

  25. Hotchner, pp. 297–99.

  26. Laura Jackson, Golden Stone: The Untold Life and Tragic Death of Brian Jones, New York: St. Martin’s, 1992, p. 217.

  27. R. Gary Patterson, Hellbounds on Their Trail Tales from the Rock ‘n’ Roll Graveyard, Nashville, Tennessee: Dowling Press, 1998, pp. 202–3.

  28. Jackson, pp. 225–26.

  29. Hotchner, p. 299.

  30. Jackson, pp. 224–25.

  31. Burk Uzzle, “Rock & Roll Heaven,” Rolling Stone, June 12, 1980, p. 45.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Portraits in Carnage: The End of the Rock Festivals

  I’M VERY PROUD TO BE CALLED A “PIG.” RONALD REAGAN

  Five months after the drowning death of Brian Jones a music festival held near San Francisco turned murderous, smothering Aquarius and its political anthems with a handful of apocalyptic screen images, “restless youth” seemingly devouring itself. The Rolling Stones were the centerpiece of the hellish fiasco at Altamont on December 6, 1969. The band would forevermore be tainted by the surreal violence of Gimme Shelter, the documentary film that chronicled the disaster, and so would the counterculture the Stones had done much to inspire.

  The festival was conceived in the first place to redeem the group’s flagging image. The press had laid into Jagger and crew, emphasizing their greed. “The stories of the Stones’ avarice spread,” journalist Robert Sam Anson reported, and critics pointed to Mick’s $250,000 townhouse, the collection of glittering Rolls Royces, “and [they] wondered how revolutionary ‘a man of wealth and taste’ could be. A token free appearance would still those critics. The concert, problems and all, was going to happen. For the Stones’ sake, it had to.”

  The group’s management set out to select a site for the event. They consulted Jan Wenner, the editor of Rolling Stone, who sent them to several professional concert promoters, and they in turn put them in touch with famed San Francisco attorney Melvin Belli, fixture of California’s well-heeled “conservative” power base.

  This was the first Big Mistake. Belli was summed up at his funeral in July, 1996 by Bishop William Swing, in a eulogy stitched with irony in the context of Operation CHAOS, at Grace Cathedral. Over the infamous attorney’s pale cadaver, the Bishop bid farewell to Belli.

  A man of law against the chaos of life,

  A man of chaos against the laws of life.1

  A cartoon that appeared after Belli’s death in the San Diego Union Tribune was an eloquent expression of his ethical standards. It depicted St. Peter on the telephone, reporting, “I’ve got a guy here claiming he was struck and injured by one of the Pearly Gates,” and there, smiling like an angel, stood a well-groomed soul identified by the nametag on his briefcase: “M. Belli.”2 The San Francisco Chronicle bid him farewell with a letter to the editor that appeared on the Op-Ed page: “Melvin Belli helped establish the principles of the plaintiff attorney: avarice, immunity to logic, self-aggrandizement and perfect contempt for the interests of society.”3

  He was not only an ambulance chaser par excellence. The legendary Melvin Belli was one of the CIA’s most trusted courtroom wonders until hypertension and cardiovascular disease claimed him on July 9, 1996. His client roster included Jack Ruby, Sirhan Sirhan, Martha Mitchell and Jim Bakker. His first high-profile client was Errol Flynn, who, according to thousands of FBI and military intelligence documents released under FOIA to biographer Charles Higham, was an avid admirer of Adolf Hitler, recruited by Dr. Hermann Friedrich Erben, an Abwher intelligence agent, to spy on the United States. The FBI, Higham discovered in the midst of poring through the many boxes of FOIA documents dropped on his doorstep, pestered Flynn and the studio employing him over his wartime association with a Nazi, “but there was little doubt that Will Hays and Colonel William Guthrie, a high-ranking Army officer on the studio payroll as Jack Warner’s troubleshoot in all matters connected with politics, were responsible for the cover-up. . . . Hays and Guthrie managed to smother the numerous inquiries that began seriously to threaten Errol’s career.”4 Melvin Belli, Flynn’s attorney, could also be counted on to button his lip, and he did repeatedly as a CIA-Mafia legal counsel in a number of assassination cover-ups.5

  It was Melvin Belli who chose the speedway at Altamont for the festival. “As a staging ground for a rock concert,” Anson concluded, “especially one expected to draw 300,000 people or more, Altamont could hardly have been worse. The raceway, which was on the brink of bankruptcy, was small, cramped, and difficult to reach. Its acres were littered with the rusting hulks of junked automobiles and thousands of shards of broken glass. In appearance, it had all the charm of a graveyard. Worst of all, though, the deal for its use had not been sealed until the final moment. Whereas Woodstock had taken months to prepare, Altamont had to be ready within twenty-four hours.”6

  The second Big Mistake of Altamont was the hiring of Ralph “Sonny” Barger and a contingent of Hell’s Angels to keep the peace.

  Barger, it has since been divulged, was an informant and hit man on the payroll of the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF). When Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver fled the country for Algeria, the ATF negotiated with Barger to “bring Cleaver home in a box.” He often made deals with law enforcement in exchange for dismissal of charges against fellow Angels. Barger was even hired by federal agents to kill immigrant farm labor activist Cesar Chavez, and may well have if Barger hadn’t first been arrested by police in the Bay area on a prior homicide charge.7

  The accusation arose in the death of Servio Winston Agero, a drug dealer. In a surprise courtroom maneuver, Sonny took the witness stand and confessed to his arrangement with local police and federal agents. Over a period of several years, he testified, he had brokered deals with Oakland authorities to give up the location of hidden cachés of automatic weapons, mortars and dynamite in exchange for the dismissal of all charges against members of his motorcycle gang. This was a deal he had brokered with Edward Hilliard, then a sergeant at the Oakland Police Department’s vice squad. Hilliard refused to comment when questioned by reporters. The defendant admitted for the record that he sold narcotics for a living, forged IDs, and slept with a pistol under his pillow. On seven occasions, though, Barger refused to respond to questioning and was fined $3,500 by Judge William J. Hayes for each demurral.

  Deputy prosecutor Donald Whyte asked the “spiritual” leader of the Hell’s Angels, an admitted federal operative, to name officers who asked him to “kill someone.” Barger squirmed and claimed that he could not recall, exactly, but attempted several phonetic variations of a possible name.8 Even in the courtroom, it seems, he was not about to risk retaliation by government contacts.

  But the deal was exposed anyway by ATF whistle-blower Larry Shears. The agent told his story to narcotics agents, and they gathered evidence on the murder plan before talking to the press. Shears announced that Barger had been contracted to kill Chavez, an assassination ordered by agribusiness magnates in the San Joaquin Valley. Chavez was only alive, Shears reported, because there had been delays. The first came when ATF agents insisted that certain files first be stolen from the farm union. The arson of union offices was attempted by hired hands, another delay. Confirmation of these allegations came three weeks later when union officials complained to reporters that there had been recent “arson attempts against [farm] union offices. Others have been riddled with bullet holes, and on at least two occasions attempts were made to steal records in the union offices.”

  The next glitch in the Chavez assassination, Shears said, came when the hit man, Sonny Barger, was arrested for the Agero murder. To support his statements, Shears waved a federal v
oucher at reporters signed by Senator Edward Kennedy, a payment of $ 10,000 to Shears for services rendered as an informant to narcotics agents and the IRS.9

  In March 1989, according to wire releases, Sonny Barger was convicted with four other Angels for conspiracy to violate federal firearms and explosives laws in a variety of plots to kill members of rival motorcycle clubs. Barger and Michael Vincent O’Farrell were sentenced in US District Court, Louisville, Kentucky, for their part in the transport of explosives with intent to kill. Barger and three others were slapped with additional counts for “dealing with a stolen government manual.” Barger was freed on parole three years later. The mystery of his early release was dispelled by the Tucson Weekly in 1996—it seems Barger had a political guardian: “You can talk about the biker tradition,” a law enforcement source explained, “the Harley, the patch that they’ve killed for, but in the end, what’s most important is money. Hell’s Angels is represented in 18 countries now. They’re probably the largest organized crime family that we export from the US. At the center of this global expansion is Oakland-based International President “Sonny” Barger, who’s had his hand on the throttle of Hells Angels’ money and mayhem machine since the late ’50s, despite occasional prison stints. When Barger was released from prison in 1992, an estimated 3,000 people attended his party. . . . Some influential people might get bought. I can’t tell you that Colorado Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell received any money. . . . I do know that he used his influence to try to get Sonny Barger out of prison.”10

  Barger’s booze-swaggling, two-wheeling entourage were paid killers. And since the carnage at Altamont, the Hell’s Angels have twice attempted to kill the Rolling Stones. In March, 1983, a witness calling himself “Butch,” his true identity protected by the federal witness program, testified before a Senate Judiciary Committee about plots to kill the Stones. “There’s always been a contract on the band,” he admitted under questioning. There were “two attempts to kill them that I know about. They will some day. They swear they will do it.” The vendetta, Butch said, originated with the killing at the Speedway concert, and was motivated by the failure of the Stones to back the Angel prosecuted for the killing. The first attempt to assassinate the entire band took place in the mid-’70s. “They sent a member with a gun and a silencer” to a hotel where the Stones were staying. The hit-man “staked out the hotel, but [the Stones] never showed up,” said the government informant. And in 1979, the Angels’ New York chapter “were going to put a bomb in the house and blow everybody up and kill everybody at the party.” But this conspiracy sank with a caché of plastic explosives, accidentally dropped overboard from a rubber raft. Killing the Stones, he testified, was an “obsession” with the bike gang.11