by Joe Donnelly
Not long after, Mystic Arts burned down under mysterious circumstances. It seemed to signal an end, though the Brotherhood would continue to leave its mark on the era. The group masterminded Timothy Leary’s escape from minimum-security Lompoc state prison following his arrest for possession of two kilos of hash and marijuana. Funded by the Brotherhood, the Weather Underground sprung Leary and spirited him and his wife off to Algeria with fake passports.
To facilitate his escape to Mexico, Padilla raised funds from various Brothers and other associates to gain entree with a Mexican pot syndicate run by a kingpin called Papa. His Mexican escapades—busting partners from jail and other adventures—could make their own movie.
One time he drove his truck to the hospital to visit his newborn son, Eric, who was sick with dysentery. On the way, he noticed a woman with a toddler by the side of the road. The kid was foaming at the mouth, the victim of a scorpion bite. Padilla says he threw the boy in the back of his truck and rushed him to the hospital. The doctors told him the kid would have died in another five minutes. They gave him an ambulance sticker for his efforts.
“I put it on my window,” he tells me. “I was driving thousands of pounds of marijuana around in that panel truck. When I’d come to an intersection there would be a cop directing traffic. He’d stop everybody—I’d have a thousand pounds of weed in the back, and he’d wave me through because of that ambulance sticker.”
In Mexico, Padilla ran a hacienda for Papa, overseeing the processing and distribution of the pot brought in by local farmers. For more than a year, he skimmed off the best bud and seeds. Meanwhile, he kept alive his dream of sailing to an island.
The dream came true when he and a few associates from the Brotherhood bought a seventy-foot yacht in St. Thomas called the Jafje. The Jafje met Padilla in the summer of 1970 in the busy port of Manzanillo. From there, it set sail for Maui. “It was five guys who had never sailed in their lives,” says Padilla. On board was a ton of the Mexican weed.
The trip should have taken less than two weeks. A month into it, one of the guys onboard, a smuggler with Brotherhood roots named Joe Angeline, noticed the stars weren’t right. “He said, ‘Eddie, Orion’s belt should be right over our heads.’ But Orion’s belt was way, way south of us. We could barely make it out.”
When confronted, the captain confessed he didn’t know where the hell they were, but had been afraid to tell them. “There’s a hoist that hoists you all the way up to the top of the main mast, and we hauled him up there and made him sit there for a day,” says Padilla. “That was funny.”
Eventually, they flagged down a freighter and learned they were more than a thousand miles off course, dangerously close to the Japanese current. The freighter gave them three hundred gallons of fuel and put them back on track to Maui. He’d made it to his island with a load of the finest Mexican marijuana.
“The seeds of that,” Padilla says, “became Maui Wowie.”
Spiritual Warrior
Maui Wowie? The holy grail of my pot-smoking youth, one of the most famous strains of marijuana in history?
When Padilla tells me he played a major role in its advent, my already-strained credulity nears the breaking point. I spend months looking into Padilla’s stories, tracking down survivors, digging up what corroborative evidence I can. And well, he basically checks out. But there are his stories and there is his narrative—how an acid trip on Mount Palomar transformed a twenty-one-year-old borderline sociopath into a man with a purpose, a messenger of peace and love. That one’s harder to swallow. While sitting over coffee at the dining room table in his son’s apartment, Padilla finally tells a couple stories that beg me to challenge him.
Back in the mid-sixties, he and John Griggs make a deal to purchase a few kilos of pot from a source in Pacoima. They drive out in a station wagon with eighteen grand to make the buy. But the sellers burn them and take off with their money in a black Cadillac. The next day, Padilla and spiritual leader Griggs go back armed with a .38 and a .32. Padilla goes into the apartment where the deal was supposed to go down and finds one of the men sleeping on the couch. The guy wakes up and makes for a Winchester rifle sitting near the sink. Padilla runs up behind him and sticks the barrel of his gun in the guy’s ear and says, “Dude, please don’t make me fucking shoot you.” Griggs and Padilla get their money back.
“So that stuff went on. I’ve been shot at. People have tried to kill me. I’ve had bullets whizzing by my ear,” he says. “But I’ve never had to shoot anybody.”
Padilla tells me of similar episodes in Maui where the locals, understandably, see the influx of the hippie mafia as encroachment on their turf. They set about intimidating the haoles from Laguna, often violently. One newcomer is shot in the head while he sleeps next to his son.
At his house on the Haleakala Crater one night, Padilla opens the door to let in his barking puppy only to find “a guy standing there with a pillow case over his head and holes cut out, and the guy behind him was taller and had a pager bag with the holes cut out.”
One of the men has a handgun. Padilla manages to slam the gunman’s hand in the door and chase off the invaders. “I’m going to kill both of you,” he yells after them. “I’m going to find out who you are and kill you.”
Padilla discovers the men work for a hood he knew back in Huntington Beach called Fast Eddie. Like a scene out of a gangster movie, Padilla and Fast Eddie have a showdown when Fast Eddie, in a car full of local muscle, tries to run Padilla and his passenger off the road. They all end up in Lahaina, where Fast Eddie’s henchmen beat up Padilla pretty good before the cops break up the brawl.
“Hey, bra, you no run. Good man,” Padilla recalls the Hawaiians saying to him. When Fast Eddie emerges from the chaos, Padilla points at him and tells the Hawaiians, “I want him. Let me have him. I worked him real good and that was that. People robbing and intimidating was over.”
I tell him it doesn’t seem like his life had changed very much since that day on Mount Palomar. “You know, don’t get the wrong idea,” he laughs. “I’m still who I am. We’re still kind of dangerous people. Just because we were hippies with long hair and preaching love and peace doesn’t mean we became wusses.”
“It doesn’t sound like you had a spiritual awakening to me,” I say.
“I was very spiritual,” he replies. “I thought I was making a life for myself.”
“As what?”
“A warrior. A spiritual warrior.”
“What was your spiritual warring doing? What were you fighting for?”
He falls silent. “I never thought about it before… Remember, I grew up in South Central. I already had an attitude from a young age. So by the time I got to Maui, it was like, here’s your job, dealing with these people. The warrior part was, like, we want to live in Hawaii. We’re not going to accept you guys running our lives. This is what we were trying to get away from. So my job as a self-motivated warrior was pretty clear, but it’s really difficult to explain.”
“So your job was protection?” I offer.
“I was never paid.”
It occurs to me that Padilla really wanted to live beyond rules, institutions, and hierarchy, like some romanticized ideal of a pirate. “So why,” I ask, “feel the need to color it with this patina of spirituality? Why not just call it what it was—living young and fast, making money, getting the girls, fucking off authority?”
“Uh, wow… I mean, you’re right; it was about all that. It was living fast and really enjoying the lifestyle to the max.”
“Why the need to justify it?”
“Well, it just seemed to me that was what was moving me.”
“It seems that way to you now?”
“Now, yeah now. But then, I felt more, and this sounds really self-righteous, that we were the people who should be in charge, not the ones who were beating people up and taking their stuff and shooting them.
So spiritual warrior, maybe it doesn’t look like that to anyone else, but it sure as hell looks like that to me now.” His voice is soft and intense. “I didn’t have a sign on my head that said spiritual warrior, but I definitely felt that’s what was going on… Nobody else was standing up to them. Nobody else would pick up a gun, but I sure as hell would.”
“You have a massive ego,” I suggest.
“Massive.”
“And that’s been your greatness and downfall all along?”
“Sure, yeah, I see that.”
I ask again, amid all the chaos, how his life had improved since his supposed awakening on Mount Palomar.
“My life was incredibly better. I was surfing, sailing, living life. All this other stuff was just, you know…I’m not in San Quentin,” he says. “That was the healthiest and clearest time of my life.”
Then, he met Diane Pinnix.
Pinnix was a tall, beautiful girl from Beach Haven, New Jersey, who came of age when Gidget sparked a national surf-culture craze. It’s not surprising that a headstrong girl from New Jersey would catch the bug, and she became one of the original East Coast surfer girls. Legend has it that when Pinnix decided she wanted to get away from New Jersey, she entered a beauty contest on a whim. First prize was a luggage set and a trip to Hawaii. Pinnix, then eighteen, won.
Pinnix’s mother, Lois, still lives in Beach Haven. When I call her, she has a simple explanation for her daughter’s flight to Hawaii and her subsequent plight. “It was the times, it was the times. She wanted to spread her wings. Drugs were a part of the thing, but I was very naïve. I was a young mother and in the dark.”
Padilla first ran into Pinnix when he went with a friend looking to score some coke from a local kingpin. Pinnix was the kingpin’s girlfriend. “I looked at Diane, and she looked at me, and the attraction was so strong,” Padilla recalls. “That was it.”
He started making a point of showing up wherever Pinnix was.
“We’re traveling in the same pack, and we started talking and flirting,” says Padilla. “It came to the point of ridiculousness…and my own friends were saying, ‘Why don’t you just fuck her and get it over with?’ But that wasn’t it, you know. I wanted her. It was an obsession. A massive ego trip, for sure, but at the same time there was an attraction unlike anything I’d ever experienced before.”
By all accounts, Diane Pinnix, a stunning surfer girl/gun moll, with a nice cutback and blond hair to her ass, was the sort of woman who could make a man do things he hadn’t bargained for.
“One day, we’re getting ready to paddle out, waxing our boards, and I say, ‘So, you want to be my old lady?’ And she says, ‘You have a wife and kids.’ And I say, ‘Okay.’ I was willing to let it go right there, and I start to paddle out, and she says, ‘But wait a minute.’ And that was it. It was all over. And that’s pretty much when I lost my mind.”
Pinnix was a committed party girl, and Padilla started doing coke and drinking excessively to keep up. After getting iced out of a big deal by a new crew on Maui who claimed Brotherhood status, Padilla decided to go out on his own. He made connections in Colombia and was on his way to becoming a coke smuggler.
“There was no more spiritual warrior,” he says. “This was a guy on his way to Hell. I had gone against everything that was precious to me. I left my wife and kids. I wasn’t living the spiritual life I was back when we had the church and it was the Brotherhood of Eternal Love.”
“Why did you do it?” I ask.
“Money. For Diane and me. I probably knew deep inside that if I didn’t have enough money and coke, that she wouldn’t stay with me…whether that’s true or not, I’ll never know. The bottom line is I became a coke addict, plain and simple.”
Paradise Lost
A few days before he’s supposed to arrive at Peru’s Gran Azul with Richard Brewer and James Thomason, Eddie Padilla is thousands of miles away on a beach in Tahiti. He sits and looks out at the ocean, contemplating how far things have degenerated, both for him and for the Brotherhood. He thinks about the messages of love, the utopian ideals, and the notion that they could change the world. All that is gone. What is left are the 1970s in all their nihilistic glory. The drugs, money, women, and warring, spiritual or otherwise, are taking their toll, and damn if he isn’t feeling beat already at just thirty.
In Tahiti, Padilla at last finds the island paradise that eluded him in Maui. And with Pinnix set up in style on the mainland, it’s a rare moment of peace in his increasingly out-of-control life. He wants more of that.
“It was incredible,” he says. “The best surfing and living, the best food on the planet. While I was in Tahiti, I really got sober, and all of the sudden, I was looking at what I’d been doing, and I didn’t want to go back.”
Smuggling coke isn’t about peace and love; it’s about money, greed, and power. He suddenly sees his life as a betrayal of his ideals, and he wants out. Feeling something like a premonition, Padilla decides that this next trip to Peru will be his last. Decades later, he remembers the conversation he had with a friend on that Tahitian beach. “She says to me, ‘What are you doing, how did you get into coke?’ And I just look at her and say, ‘I don’t even know, but I know right now that I don’t want to go back there.’”
He’s trapped, though. Too much money has already been invested in the deal. “I’m totally responsible, and there’s a whole bunch of people involved. But I’ll be back,’ I told her. That was the plan. ‘I’ll be back.’” He books a return flight to Tahiti. He never makes it.
Back at the Gran Azul, just hours before Padilla and his crew are scheduled to leave the country, quasi-military police agents storm the bungalow. One slams Padilla to the floor, another kicks Brewer in the stomach, and quickly Padilla, Brewer, and Thomason are all in cuffs.
“At least ten or twelve of them come in through the door, and they all have guns drawn. I didn’t have a chance,” says Padilla.
A man they will come to know as Sergeant Delgado takes a hollow-point bullet from his gun, starts tapping it against Thomason’s chest, and says, “Tell me everything.”
In some ways, Padilla is a victim of his own success. While he’s been hopping between Hawaii, Tahiti, Colombia, and Peru building his résumé as a coke-smuggling pirate, Richard Nixon has been marshaling his forces for the soon-to-be declared War on Drugs. It’s the beginning of the national hysteria that will see Nixon pronounce the fugitive Timothy Leary “the most dangerous man in America,” and today has more than 2.3 million Americans in prison, a vast majority of them for drug offenses.
Nixon’s strategy in the drug war is announced with his Reorganization Plan No. 2. It calls for the consolidation of the government’s various drug-fighting bureaucracies into the Drug Enforcement Agency. The DEA is formed, at least in part, to do something with Nixon’s boner for the Brotherhood’s members and associates, dubbed “the hippie mafia” in a 1972 Rolling Stone article. Congress holds months of hearings on the need for this new agency in the spring and summer of 1973. One is titled “Hashish Smuggling and Passport Fraud, The Brotherhood of Eternal Love.”
After the DEA starts putting too much heat on his Colombian connections, Padilla sets up shop in Peru. But the DEA’s budget shoots up from seventy-five to $141 million between 1973 and 1975, and Peru, the world’s largest cocaine-producing country at the time, quickly becomes a client state in the drug war. Some of that DEA money goes to fund and train the notorious Peruvian Investigative Police, or PIP (now called the Peruvian National Police). The PIP operates with near immunity and is expected to get results in the war on drugs.
Sergeant Delgado heads the force. A mean-spirited thug with dead, black eyes, he is one of the most powerful men in Peru. An Interpol agent known as Rubio is with Delgado.
Before the DEA put Peru in its crosshairs, Padilla would have been able to buy out of the arrest. Naturally, his first reaction is to offer
up the 58,000 dollars in cash he has with him. “Don’t worry,” he remembers Rubio telling him. “Don’t say anything about this and when we get to the police station, we’ll work something out.”
The three Americans are taken to the notorious PIP headquarters, known as the Pink Panther, a pink mansion that the police confiscated (they are rumored to have executed the owners). With no tradition of case building, Peruvian detective work at the time pretty much consists of coerced confessions and snitching.
The PIP is famously brutal. During the two weeks the guys are held at Pink Panther, Padilla says they’re surrounded by the sounds of women being raped and men being tortured.
The country’s shaky institutions are rife with corruption, and there is little to no history in Peruvian jurisprudence of due process or jury trials. Prisoners wait for years to have their cases heard before a three-judge tribunal, only to see their fates determined in a matter of minutes. Their arrest immediately throws Padilla, Brewer, and Thomason into this Kafkaesque quagmire.
In a 1982 Life magazine story that details the horrors of the Peruvian prison system and two men who tried to escape it, a survivor tells of his time in the Pink Panther. “My god, I was in tears after they went at me,” Robert B. Holland, a Special Forces Vietnam vet recounts. “I did a couple things in ’Nam I might go to Hell for. But Peru was a whole new day.”
When their escape attempt fails, the two primary subjects of the Life story commit suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills. In a final letter to his wife, one of the men, David Treacly, writes, “I have no confidence in either their concept of justice, their methods of interrogation and inconceivable brutality, or in the bumbling incompetence and indifference of our embassy… So I’m going out tonight… John not only accepts and understands, but has decided he wants to go with me… Given the circumstances, I cannot think of anyone I’d rather go with.”