"Hippie Mafia" Hash Smuggler Arrested

By Nick Schou 

Thirty-seven years ago, the biggest raid that had ever been staged in America's war on drugs took place when a task force of state, local and federal law enforcement agencies combined to take down a secretive group of hippie acid dealers and hashish smugglers known as the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. On August 5, 1972, cops in California, Oregon and Maui arrested dozens of people, sending an even larger group scattering around the world in pursuit of an underground life that in some cases lasted decades.

By then, the Brotherhood, better known among cops as the “Hippie Mafia,” had become America's biggest hash smuggling network, with a direct pipeline to Kandahar, Afghanistan. They were also the country's hardest-working distributors of LSD who even had their own trademark version of the mind-altering drug, Orange Sunshine. They operated their own storefront, Mystic Arts World, in Laguna Beach, where many members lived. After befriending ex-Harvard psychology professor Timothy Leary, they lured him to Laguna Canyon and later, to a mountain ranch in Idyllwild, California. Members, including the group's charismatic leader, John Griggs, slept in tipis and ate vegetables from their own garden – all with the aim of creating a self-sustaining utopia.

That dream ended in August 1969 – the same month that saw Woodstock, the Manson murders and the first moon landing – when Griggs died of an overdose of synthetic psilocybin. By then, Leary had been busted for marijuana possession, and not long after Griggs died, he went to prison. That's when the BEL pulled off one of the most spectacular stunts in American counterculture. They raised some cash and paid off the notorious anti-war radicals, the Weather Underground, to bust Leary out of prison and help him escape to Afghanistan, where he was finally arrested in 1973.

On Sept. 26, the last remaining member of the Brotherhood was captured after four decades on the run, when he returned to the United States using his own passport which he obtained using his real name. Brenice Lee Smith, who grew up in Anaheim and was one of the Brotherhood's founding members, was arrested by U.S. Customs agents at San Francisco International Airport just minutes after arriving from Hong Kong on the second leg of a trip that started a day earlier in Kathmandu, Nepal, where he'd lived since the late 1970s. He was immediately jailed on two 40-year-old charges of smuggling hash.

Along with many other Brotherhood members, Smith, better known as “Brennie” among family and friends, allegedly traveled to Kandahar, Afghanistan, in the late 1960s and smuggled hashish back to California inside Volkswagen buses, mobile homes and other vehicles. Smith was indicted for his role in the group but was among about a dozen members who managed to evade arrest in August 1972.

Previously, the most recent fugitive to be captured was Orange Sunshine chemist Nicholas Sand, who was arrested in British Columbia in 1996, still making LSD out of his underground laboratory. Sand spent several years in prison for manufacturing acid. Two years earlier, police arrested a friend of Smith’s named Russell Harrigan near Lake Tahoe, California, after they learned his real identity. However, an Orange County judge dismissed the charges against Harrigan because he’d lived a crime-free life while quietly raising a family.

Given that none of the other members of the Brotherhood who were arrested served any more than a few months behind bars as a result of the 1972 indictment – although many later went on to become even bigger smugglers – Smith has a strong case for having his own charges dismissed. According to Eddie Padilla, a founding Brotherhood member, and his wife, Lorey James, who happens to be Smith's niece, Smith spent much of his time in Nepal at a Buddhist monastery, where he became a devotee of Kalu Rinpoche and took the name Dorje. After Maoist rebels attacked his monastery, Smith moved to Kathmandu, where he married a Nepalese woman and fathered a daughter who is now 21 years old.

Padilla and James say Smith returned to the US to give himself up in the hopes of eventually paving the way to bring his family here. Unfortunately for Smith, who awaits a December 7 trial date, the prosecutor handling his case is Jim Hicks, who happens to be the son of Cecil Hicks, Orange County’s DA at the time of the original Brotherhood case and therefore the top law-enforcement official involved in the group’s prosecution. Smith's lawyer, Gerardo Gutierrez has already filed a motion for the case to be dismissed in the interest of justice. He believes the DA’s office is simply trying to punish Smith before convicting him of any crime. “I think this case is being prosecuted backward,” he says. “They want him to spend as much time behind bars as possible because that may be the only punishment he gets.”

Nick Schou is a staff writer at OC Weekly and the author of the upcoming book, Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World, which will be published in March 2010 by St. Martin's Press. Read more of Schou's Brotherhood coverage in the OC Weekly.