by Joe Donnelly
“She knows he’s been going to see whores and coking out,” Padilla says. “We’re like, Oh, god.” Prostitutes and police are thick as thieves in places like Lima, Peru.
Still, there’s no reason to be paranoid. All I have to do is spend the night, pick up the coke, give it to a few people, and peel out in twenty-four hours, Padilla remembers thinking. Everything was set up ahead of time; the deal should be an in-and-out affair.
Though they had agreed to keep a low profile, Padilla, Brewer, and Thomason decide to go to the compound’s bar that night. It’s an upscale place, and they get all dressed up. Fastie is there. Things are tense, and Padilla knows better than to dance with Fastie’s girlfriend. But when she asks, something won’t let him say no. Maybe he just wants to rub Fastie’s face in it. Maybe he’s the guy who has to let everyone know he can have the girl. Whatever it is, when they get off the floor, Fastie isn’t amused.
“All of a sudden, in a jealous rage, he gets up, scrapes everyone’s drinks off the bar, and throws a drink on [his girlfriend],” Padilla says. “The bouncer, some Jamaican dude, kicks him out.”
Fastie returns to his room and tosses his girlfriend’s belongings out the window. She ends up spending the night in Padilla’s bungalow.
The next morning, the girlfriend leaves to retrieve her belongings. She never comes back. Fastie isn’t anywhere to be seen either.
If they’d been reading the signs, they might have waited until things settled down to pick up the coke. Instead, Padilla and Brewer stay on schedule and head to a nearby safe house for their load—twenty-five kilos of cocaine worth nearly 200,000 dollars—and return to the bungalow without a hitch. Things seem to be back on track.
“It’s so fresh, it’s still damp,” Padilla says. “So I’ve got it on these big, silver serving trays, sitting on a table. James is making a paper of coke [think to-go cup]. Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks is playing. Richard’s doing something…I don’t know what. And I’m writing down numbers. All of the sudden, the door opens. I look and all I see is a chrome-plated .32. Oh, shit. I just thought, wow, my life just ended.”
The Making of Eddie Padilla
Thirty-four years later, Eddie Padilla emerges from Burbank’s Bob Hope Airport into a balmy Los Angeles autumn night. He has a well-groomed goatee, a shiny, bald dome, and a nose that clearly hasn’t dodged every punch. Wearing a black jacket and tidy slacks, Padilla is muscular and sturdy at sixty-four. He walks like a slightly wounded panther and offers a knuckle-crushing handshake. “Hey, man, thanks for coming to get me,” he says with a lingering SoCal-hippie-surfer accent.
We grab a coffee. Padilla speaks softly, with an economy that could be taken for either circumspection or shyness. The circumspection would be mutual. I had been approached about Padilla through his literary agents; they’d been unsuccessfully shopping his memoir. Right away, I was skeptical. Padilla’s story was epic, harrowing, and hard to believe.
Aggravating my suspicions was the memoir’s aggrandizing tone. Plus, I’m not a fan of hippies and their justifications for what often seems like plain irresponsibility or selfishness. Still, I have to admit, if even half of his story is true, Eddie Padilla would be the real-life Zelig of America’s late twentieth-century drug history. And as is apparent from his first handshake, he has Clint Eastwood’s charisma to go with his tale.
I drop Padilla off at one of those high-gloss condo complexes in Woodland Hills that seem designed especially for mid-level rappers, porn stars, and athletes. His son, Eric, manages the place. Though Padilla lives a short flight away in Northern California, he has never been here before. Tonight marks the first time in nine years that he will see his son. For twenty years now, Padilla has been literally and figuratively working on reclaiming his narrative. Reuniting with his son is part of that effort. I may be too, and I’m not sure how I feel about it.
As we approach, Padilla falls silent, unsure of what to expect. Eric is waiting outside the lobby when we pull up. He looks like a younger, slightly smaller version of Padilla. They greet each other with wide smiles and nervous hugs. I leave them to it.
I pick Padilla up the next morning to go surfing. He’s in good spirits. The reunion with his son went well. Plus, he hasn’t been in the water for a while, and surfing is one of the few passions left from his earlier days.
Out at County Line, it’s a crystalline day with offshore winds and a decent swell kicking in. For Padilla, I’ve brought my spare board, a big, fancy log that would be cumbersome for most on a head-high day at County Line. Padilla inspects the long board like it’s a foreign object.
“I don’t know about this,” he says. “How about if I take your board and you use this one?” Worried about the danger I’d pose to others and myself, I refuse. “Okay, then,” he smiles, and we paddle out.
Padilla’s reservations disappear as soon as the first set rolls in. He digs for the set wave, a fat, beautifully shaped A-frame. He deftly drops in, stays high on the shoulder, slips into the pocket, and makes his way down the line, chewing up every ounce of the wave. It’s one of the best rides I see all day. But he’s not done. Padilla catches wave after wave, surfing with a fluidity and grace that puts most of us out here to shame.
Exhausted after a couple hours, I get out of the water. When Padilla finally comes in, he is grinning ear to ear. “Who’d have thought I’d have to go from Santa Cruz to Los Angeles to find some good waves?” he jokes.
Buoyed by the return to his natural habitat, Padilla lets his guard down and begins to tell me about his life, over lunch at an upscale chain restaurant in Santa Monica. Though Padilla is forty years her senior, the attractive waitress is definitely flirting with him. Whatever it is that makes women melt, Padilla has it. He’s magnetic and likeable.
As for his story, it could stand as a metaphor for the past few turbulent decades—the naïve idealism of flower power, the hedonism of the 1970s and ’80s, the psychosis and cynicism of the war on drugs, and the recovery culture of more recent times. It’s a story that’s hard to imagine beginning anywhere but in Southern California.
Edward James Padilla was born in 1944 in the same Compton house where his father, Joe Padilla, was raised. Joe, a dashing Navy guy of Hispanic, Native American, and African-American ancestry, married Helen Ruth McClesky, a Scots-Irish beauty from a rough clan of Texas ranch hands who moved to Southern California, near Turlock, during the Dust Bowl.
Both family trees have their troubled histories. Joe’s mother killed herself when Joe was twelve. The family broke apart after that, and Joe had to fend for himself through the Depression. “He had no idea what it was even like to have a mother,” Padilla says.
Helen’s father turned to moonshining and bootlegging in California. Padilla recalls how his grandfather liked to show off the hole in his leg. As the story goes, federal agents shot him during a car chase. Padilla raises his leg and imitates his grandfather’s crotchety voice: “That goddamn bullet went through this leg and into that one.”
When his grandfather finally ended up in prison, the family moved down to south Los Angeles where work could be found in the nearby shipyards. Padilla says his mother and father met in high school, “fell desperately in love,” and got married. This didn’t please the old man, who didn’t want his daughter mixing with “Mexicans and niggers.” Helen found both in one.
As the son of a mixed-race couple before such things were in vogue, Padilla got it from all sides. He wasn’t Mexican enough for the Mexicans, white enough for the whites, or black enough for the blacks. He was also a frail kid who spent nine months with polio in a children’s ward.
Padilla would get beaten up at school, and for consolation, his father would make him put on boxing gloves and head out to the garage for lessons with dad, a Golden Glove boxer and light heavyweight in the Navy. “If I turned my back, he’d kick me,” Padilla says about his father, who died in 2001. “He was trying to teach
me how to fight the world. My dad was a different kind of guy.”
The family moved to Anaheim when Padilla was twelve. There, he says, he became aware of the sort of prejudice that you can’t solve with fists, the sort that keeps a kid from getting a job at Disneyland like the rest of his friends.
“That’s when I started really getting ahold of the idea that, hey, I’m not being treated like everybody else. I’m sure I had a chip on my shoulder.”
Padilla got into a lot of fights, got kicked out of schools, and wound up in juvenile hall where he received an education in selling speed, downers, and pot.
By the time he was seventeen, Padilla was making enough as a dealer to afford his own apartment and car. But it wasn’t exactly the good life. He was doing a lot of speed, and one day he got arrested for what must have been an adolescent speed freak’s idea of seduction. “I started taking handfuls of speed, and I got so crazy. I mean, I got arrested for exposing myself to older women because just do that and we’ll have sex. That’s how psychotic I was.”
To make matters worse, he got in a fight with the arresting officer. The incident landed him thirteen months at Atascadero State Hospital in San Luis Obispo. He came out feeling like he needed some stability in his life, or at least an eighteen-year-old’s version of it. “I need to get married and settle down and be a pot dealer. I remember clearly thinking that. So, I married my friend, Eileen.”
Padilla and Eileen were eighteen when they married on August twenty-two, 1962. Marriage, though, didn’t solve certain problems—like how to get a job, which was now even tougher with a stint in a psych ward added to his résumé. “It would have been really cool if I could walk in somewhere and get a job that actually paid enough to pay rent and live, but from where I was coming from, I’d be lucky to get a job sweeping floors,” he says. “I tried everything. So it was easy to start selling pot.”
He turned out to be good at it.
Mountain High
Eddie Padilla turned twenty-one in 1965. Cultural historians wouldn’t declare the arrival of the Summer of Love for a couple of years, but for Padilla and a group of trailblazing friends, it was already in full swing.
He figures he was already the biggest pot dealer in Anaheim by this time. For a kid who grew up watching The Untouchables and dreaming of being a mobster, this might be considered an achievement. But something else was going on, too. The drugs he was selling were getting harder and his lifestyle coarser.
He started sleeping with several women from the apartment complex where he and his wife lived. He spent a lot of time in a notorious tough-guy bar called The Stables. “That’s where I started being comfortable,” Padilla says. “This is where I belonged. Social outcasts for sure.”
Eileen eventually had enough and took off for her mother’s. But it wasn’t just the philandering. Padilla also had an aura of escalating violence about him. “I had a gun. I felt like I was going down the road to shooting someone, just like hitting someone is a big step for some people. So that’s kind of insane. I was going to shoot someone just to get it over with. It doesn’t matter who, either.”
Then, early on the morning of his twenty-first birthday, one of his friends picked him up and drove him to the top of Mount Palomar. Joining them was John Griggs, a Laguna Beach pot dealer and the leader of a biker gang whose introduction to LSD had come when his gang raided a Hollywood producer’s party and took the acid. On the mountain with them were several others who would soon embark on one of the 1960s’ most influential and least understood counterculture experiments: the Brotherhood of Eternal Love.
They climbed to the mountaintop and dropped the acid. Padilla says he was changed immediately. “I was completely convinced that I’d died on that mountain,” he remembers. “It was crystal-clear air, perfect for taking acid. I came down a different person. It was what’s called an ego death. I saw the light. I can’t ever explain it.”
A birthday party was already set with a lot of his old friends for later that night. Back home, in the middle of the celebration Padilla says he looked around at the guests, some of the hardest-partying, toughest folks around, and realized he didn’t ever want to see those people again. He took the velvet painting of the devil off his wall and threw it in the dumpster. He dumped the bowls of reds and bennies laid out like chips and salsa down the toilet. He kept his pot.
“I went up the mountain with no morals or scruples, a very dangerous and violent person,” he says, “and came down with morals and scruples.”
From that day on, a core group of hustlers, dealers, bikers, and surfers, who at best could be said to have lived on the margins of polite society, started convening to take acid together.
“Every time we’d go and take LSD out in nature or out in the desert or up on the mountain, it would be just this incredible wonderful day,” Padilla says. They were transformed, he claims, from tough cases, many of them doing hard drugs, to people with love in their hearts.
Things moved fast back then. The Vietnam War was raging; revolution was in the air, and the group that first started tripping on mountaintops wanted to be a part of it. Under the guidance of John Griggs, by most accounts the spiritual leader of the Brotherhood, they decided they needed to spread their acid-fueled revelations. In the foothills of the Santa Ana Mountains, they took over a Modjeska Canyon house that used to be a church and started having meetings. Soon, they were talking about co-ops and organic living; they were worshipping nature and preaching the gospel of finding peace and love through LSD.
The Brotherhood of Eternal Love incorporated as a church in October 1966, ten days after California banned LSD. The Brothers petitioned the state for the legal use of pot, acid, psilocybin, and mescaline as their sacraments. They started a vegan restaurant and gave away free meals. They opened Mystic Arts World, which quickly became the unofficial headquarters for the counterculture movement crystallizing among the surfers and artists of Laguna Beach.
The Brotherhood proved both industrious and ambitious. Soon, they were developing laboratories to cook up a new, better brand of LSD and opening up unprecedented networks to smuggle tons of hash out of Afghanistan. They were also canny; they carved out the bellies of surfboards and loaded them with pot and hash. They made passport fraud an art form and became adept at clearing border weigh stations loaded down with surf gear and other disposable weight, which they’d dump on the other side so they could return with the same weight in pot stuffed into hollowed-out VW panel trucks. In their own way, they were the underground rock stars of the psychedelic revolution.
Soon, their skills and chutzpah attracted the attention of another psychedelic revolutionary. By 1967, Timothy Leary was living up in the canyons around Laguna Beach carrying on a symbiotic, some would say parasitic, relationship with Griggs. Leary called Griggs “the holiest man in America,” and more than anyone else, the Brothers implemented Leary’s message to turn on, tune in, drop out.
“The Brotherhood were the folks who actually put that command into action and tried to carry it out,” says Nick Schou, author of Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World. “Their home-grown acid, Orange Sunshine, was about three times more powerful than anything the hippies were using. They were responsible for distributing more acid than anyone in America. In the beginning, at least, they had the best of intentions.”
The group, Schou says, was heavily influenced by the utopian ideals of Aldous Huxley’s Island. “There was a definite plan to move to an island,” Padilla says. “We were going to grow pot on the island, and we were going to import it. We need a yacht, and we need to learn how to grow food and farm, and we need to learn how to deliver babies… We were just little kids from Anaheim. God, these were big thoughts, big thoughts.”
The End of Eternal Love
Around the time Leary was setting up camp in Laguna Beach, the island ideal took on a new urgenc
y for Padilla. No longer just a local dealer, he’d made serious connections in Mexico and was moving large quantities around the region. In one deal, Padilla drove to San Francisco in dense fog with five hundred pounds of Mexican weed. But something didn’t feel right. Padilla thought someone might have tipped off the cops. He was right: he was arrested the next day. It was the largest pot bust in San Francisco history to that point. In 1967, Padilla was sentenced to five to fifteen in San Quentin.
With his son Eric on the way, Padilla was granted a thirty-day stay of execution to get his affairs in order. “On the thirtieth day, I just left and went to Mexico, went to work for some syndicate guys,” he says. “I bailed.”
Padilla’s flight was also precipitated by a schism within the Brotherhood that some trace to its ultimate demise. Acting on Leary’s advice, Griggs took the profits from a marijuana deal, funds that some Brothers thought should go toward the eventual island purchase, and bought a four-hundred-acre ranch in Idyllwild near Palm Springs.
Padilla never cared much for Leary, nor for his influence over Griggs and the Brotherhood. “He was a glitter freak,” Padilla says. “A guy named Richard Alpert, who became Ram Das, told us, ‘You guys got a good thing going, don’t get mixed up with Leary.’”
Padilla saw the Idyllwild incident as a turning point for the Brotherhood.
“This is betrayal. This is incredibly stupid. You’re going to move the Brotherhood to a ranch in Idyllwild? To me, it was like becoming a target.”
The Brotherhood split over it. Many of those facing federal indictments or arrest warrants took off for Hawaii. Others moved up to the ranch with Griggs and Leary.
As the Brotherhood’s smuggling operations grew increasingly complex and international, revolution started looking increasingly like mercenary capitalism. Any chance the Brotherhood had to retain its cohesion and its gospel probably died in 1969 with John Griggs, who overdosed on psilocybin up at the Ranch. “That was John,” Padilla says, smiling, “take more than anybody else.”