Gordon Todd Skinner (born July 13, 1964) is an American criminal who was involved in the world's largest LSD dealing operation in the late 1990s and 2000. He worked with chemist William Leonard Pickard and their mover, Clyde Apperson, to manufacture and distribute LSD in and from Aspen, Colorado; Sante Fe, New Mexico; and two former missile silos in Salina and Wamego, Kansas. Skinner grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In high school, he manufactured and dealt drugs like synthetic mescaline, despite his stepfather's employment by federal drug enforcement agencies—which had agents working in Skinner's house. In the 1980s, Skinner became an informant for such agencies. He once worked with the ONDCP on a sting operation that led to dealer José Abello Silva's arrest, which, in turn, led to the fall of the Colombian Medellín Cartel. Skinner, Pickard, and Apperson then made tens of millions of dollars off their LSD operation. Skinner then grew paranoid about an imaginary murder that Pickard had committed, and in 2000, informed the DEA of the operation. This gave him absolute immunity from prosecution. On November 6, 2000, the DEA raided the Wamego silo as part of their investigation Operation White Rabbit. The raid allegedly caused a 95% decline in worldwide LSD availability by 2004. Pickard and Apperson were sentenced to prison, while Skinner continued dealing drugs. In July 2003, he kidnapped and tortured his drug dealing apprentice, Brandon Green, in a hotel in Tulsa. Skinner was convicted, and given a sentence of life imprisonment plus 90 years.
Early life Gordon Todd Skinner, who was known by his friends as Todd, grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. His biological father was Gordon H. Skinner, a chiropractor. Skinner's mother was a businesswoman named Katherine Magrini, who ran a spring manufacturer, Gardner Springs Company and a candy company, Katherine's Spring Gourmet Chocolates. She divorced Gordon H. Skinner after she caught him molesting a child for the second time, and then married William Inholf for 18 months. Afterwards, she married Gary Lee Magrini, who was a special criminal agent with the Department of the Treasury (which performed drug investigations at the time), as well the Internal Revenue Service's (IRS) Criminal Enforcement Agency and the Northern District of Oklahoma's Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force.
Skinner went to Cascia Hall Preparatory School, a Catholic private school. He was good at math and chemistry, and in the latter, he had a great understanding of molecular structures. At age 15, Skinner started being obsessed with drugs. At 16, he started extracting psychedelic tryptamines from plants and gave them to his friends and classmates, studying their reactions. He often brought a tank of nitrous oxide to school, which he and his friends inhaled from. He also bought many books on drugs. Though federal agents (of the Customs and Border Protection, Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and IRS) frequently visited his home to meet with his stepfather, they either "didn't notice or didn't care" that Skinner was making drugs. His friend's father caught the two [Skinner and his friend] synthesizing DMT in Skinner's basement, and the father warned them that the practice was dangerous.
At age 19, Skinner acquired 10,000 peyote buttons from a Native American-owned church in Laredo, Texas, and stored them in the trunk of his car. He extracted alkaloid from them, to synthesize mescaline to sell to the Navajo Nation (who have a history of using mescaline synthesized from peyote). He wanted to sample it before selling, and got more into drug use after doing so. According to testimony Skinner later gave in court, he tried over 163 types of drugs in his life. Some of them were entheogens, which he took irregularly because they were "very spiritual" things to him. When he did, his method of ingesting them was "The Eucharist", a communion wafer tainted with lysergamide chemical compounds like ALD-52; extract from morning glory seeds; and ergot wine. He ingested the wafer with his friends in special ceremonies involving a sacrament, and Skinner's friends often referred to him as "the Buddha". After graduating high school in 1982, he studied at the Schiller International University in Germany, but failed his first semester. He then returned to Oklahoma and worked at Gardner Springs Company.
Government informant career In spring 1984, Skinner became a government informant by calling the Tulsa FBI field office. He told the agent who responded that he had made a deal with a con artist in Texas, Sam Merit; he told Merit he was the heir to Gardner Springs Company, and offered to loan Merit $300,000 to invest in a Caribbean charter airline and build a fake gold mine in Arizona. The FBI found Skinner's tip to be true, and Merit eventually fled to South Africa after he and five co-conspirators were indicted for a penny stock fraud.
José Abello Silva operation Skinner spent the mid-80s between Hot Springs and Little Rock, Arkansas, as well as Tucson, Arizona, while working as an informant for the U.S. Department of Justice. Skinner was arrested twice for selling marijuana, in an area of Mexico near the border town of Sells, Arizona, and in Boston. He had helped minimize the fallout of those arrests by contributing to the downfall of the Colombian Medellín drug cartel. He had befriended a Colombian cocaine dealer named Boris Olarte, who had purchased a business from Skinner's mother, a custom chocolate brand named Okie Power. After purchasing this, Olarte had been arrested and put in a Tulsa County jail. Skinner used Magrini's connections to convince the DEA to put Olarte in witness protection, and use him against the cartel. Olarte worked with the Office of National Drug Control Policy in a sting operation which led to the arrest of Olarte's supplier, José Abello Silva, a major Medellín dealer. Olarte's wife, Clara Lacle (who lived with Magrini), flew to Aruba with FBI agents to set up Silva. His arrest in 1989 led to the downfall of the cartel. Skinner used his time as an informant to gather intelligence on how the government investigates drugs.
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