4. Counting Sheep

It's 1976 and in the small village of Thandewi Brevi, undercover cop Stephen Bentley is sitting on the floor across the room from the person he's been watching for the last six months. Alston Hughes, better known as Smiles. Hughes is, unsurprisingly, smiling and Stephen is struck by a powerful feeling of brotherhood with this man. Maybe it's the effect of the meditation session they just had or the hash smoke hanging in the air. But Bentley wants to tell Smiles the truth that he's a police officer and that Smiles is in terrible danger. Bentley opens his mouth and... The moment passes. Wasn't the right thing to do, I still had a job to do, you know, Steve Jackson, Steve Bentley. There was still enough of Steve Bentley going on in my brain to go, no, you don't do that, so I didn't do it. Maybe Eric would have smacked me in the face as well. One remains undercover, for now. We'll come back to Smiles and Stephen later, but for now let's pick up where we left our LSD lovers, Richard and Christine. It's 1976 and the micro.gang in its various guises has been operating for about seven years now, supplying the world with a steady flow of LSD, fueling the counterculture, the free festival scene and the hippie movement. And most of this acid has been coming from Richard Kep, Christine Bott and their associates. After their terrible car crash, Richard and Christine decided to dismantle their lab in Karno. We smashed all the equipment into fragments and dropped it into the well. We had to rent a jackhammer to break down the wall in the cellar. Finally it was done. All traces of the lab had been erased. Richard and I took the final walk around the grounds before setting off back to a little cottage on the hillside 60 miles away. When we arrived, we embraced and did a little dance for joy in the garden. And so, dancing together in that garden, these two lovers decided to give up their life of crime and live happily ever after. OK, not quite. Richard has just finished a massive production run and has in his possession enough liquid LSD to make tens of millions of microdots. But first they have the small task of turning liquid acid into millions of microdot tablets and they've just smashed up their lab. So Richard makes his way to the garden set. He worked obsessively, drilling out electrical circuit boards to make molds for producing microdots. After weeks and hours of laborious work, he was ready to make his first tablets. He tried a dry run, mixing up a calcium carbonate paste with bright food dye. He pressed the firm paste across the surface of the boards. After the paste was dry, he used what we called the hedgehog, another board with small nails hammered into each hole, 1008 to a board, to push the dots out of the mold. For the next most important detail, the color scheme. He used pink, green and blue food coloring. Each board was emptied into a small plastic bag and the thousands of tiny dots were shaken into a corner and the bag was sealed. He ended up with a big jar of dual bright triangular packets. They looked so attractive and enticing. It was hard to believe all the years of effort. The literal blood, sweat and tears that had gone into producing them. With this point in the story, things were starting to slip. We'd been so exhausted from dismantling the lab and cleaning up the mansion that we'd broken our cardinal rule, which had produced an enormous amount of acid, enough for millions of trips. In former times, all acid and money were stashed in the ground many miles from where we happened to be living. For years, we had safe stashes in deep woodlands in eastern England. And although we had our fair share of scares and near misses, it had been a good system that worked well. We once again planned to dig a permanent stash. So they made their way into the Welsh Hills. But for once, the Welsh landscape was working against them. Rocky Welsh hillsides were not suitable. Finally, we gave up. We took the plastic toilet from our caravan and sealed in the multiple jars of acid. Richard then carefully lifted a dozen of the quarry tiles from the cottage floor and dug a hole. With the tiles cemented back in place, we felt a certain relief. At least we were certain that nobody else in the world knew where it was. Little did Richard and Christine know that the nearest cottage to theirs had been rented by the police and was now full of officers undertaking a 24-hour surveillance operation on them. Down the road in Thandewi Brevis, Stephen Bentley was coming to the end of his undercover stint, keeping tabs on smiles. Just as well, his liver couldn't take much more. By now, police had gathered enough evidence on the micro.gang to mount the biggest surveillance operation in history. And what they discovered was that most of the major players in this global industry were within a 20-mile radius of each other in mid Wales. With the acids dashed, Richard and Christine now threw themselves into the life they really wanted to live. And as the money flowed in, what did they choose to do with that life? You guessed it. Breed prize-winning goats. I decided to show Stella at the annual Averist with Agricultural Show and was delighted when she won her class. Patrick, the husband of one of my goat keeping friends, was a journalist with the local newspaper and he got the photographer to take a photo of me with Stella. Richard and I were amused when the picture appeared in the next week's issue of the paper. There I was in a white coat with a number pinned to my chest and Stella sporting a large rosette. A few weeks later, Patrick called to tell me that the photographer had been approached by the local police for a copy of that photograph. The noose was tightening around Richard and Christine. Dick Lee requested bugging devices and phone taps be given home office approval to bug their cottage. But this was rural Wales. They'd need a transmitter on top of the mountain and a mile of cable running over open land down the mountainside to the cottage garden wall. Richard and Christine spent a lot of time in the garden planting vegetables and tending to the goats, bees and chickens. So the police placed a secret microphone in their garden wall to listen into the conversations. And what they heard was completely unexpected. They discovered the Welshest explanation possible. A passing sheep had chewed through the cable which had begun to pick up transmissions from a sing-in competition. The police needed to get a wire inside the property. They decided to fit a mic to a window frame. The cabling could follow the stonework up to some guttering where the battery could be hidden with a transmitter. They just needed Richard and Christine to leave the cottage for long enough to give them the 15 minutes they needed. They decided to go to the local farmer's market 20 miles away to look at sheep. Watching Richard and Christine leave the cottage, the surveillance officers saw their chance. A ladder was placed against the back wall and the tiny hole drilled in to the window frame. Only the cabling wouldn't fit under the guttering. Meanwhile at the farmer's market, Richard was getting swept away with the excitement of it all. He was ready to shop till he dropped it. Richard liked the look of a pen of large Chevy-at-U lambs. "Yes," I said. "They do look nice but there's nine of them. How will we get them home? They'll never fit in the Renault. Don't worry about that," he said. And a few hours later a large group of Welsh farmers took a position to enjoy the sight of the two incomers trying to shove nine sheep into the back of a small green hatchback. "I swear they're taking bets," I muttered. "Come on, get on with it. Pass me another one," said Richard. Six went in easily but then the space was full. Once one sheep gets shoved another pops out the other side. "They're going to suffocate. No they won't. Come on and push and we'll get these last two in." Richard and Christine run around chasing sheep across the yard and returning them to the car. This time closing windows and locking doors. Meanwhile back at the cottage, having spent half an hour struggling with the cabling up a ladder, the police are ready to give up. Getting a bug into the house suddenly seemed like an impossible task. Then one of them noticed something. Richard had left the window open, or this was an opportunity too good to miss. The officers climbed in and searched through the whole cottage, taking notes of phone numbers and names written on paper. As they scrambled out of the house they decided on a whim to check the outhouse. There they found a bucket filled with food dye chemicals. When they reported their findings to the boss upstairs Dick Lee could hardly believe his luck. Now the police were ready to make their move. But it wasn't Richard and Christine's house that was raided. It was David Solomon's flat in London. The police didn't find anything, Solomon was much smarter than that. Well they found a bit of hash but Solomon wasn't arrested. But this worried Richard and Christine. Christine rang British Rail and booked a ticket from Neath to London. Police listening in knew she was on manoeuvres. In London she was seen paying for a flight to Zurich in cash. Quickly immediately called Swiss police for surveillance support. Zurich, Switzerland. Land of clocks and chocolates. But Christine has other things on her mind. Her flight lands and she makes her way to the hotel just off the Bahnhofstrasse. There she puts the key to her safe deposit box in her eyeshadow maker which she puts in her toiletry bag for safekeeping. The safety deposit box basically contained all the secrets of the micro dot gang. Christine planned to deposit the money Solomon had paid for the latest micro dots in the morning. So she calls Richard to tell him that she's arrived and all's fine but then. I finally stood up and opened the door. A burly man stood there. A woman was behind him. Yes. We're police officers, may we come in? He held out an identity card and I looked at it blankly. There must be some mistake. What do you want? We'd like to ask you a few questions. He stepped forward. May we come in? The officers enter Christine's room and take a look around. The female officer finds Christine's wand of cash and hands it to the male officer. That belongs to my brother-in-law. And why do you have it here? He's been in Oman where he was building a palace for the Sultan. I brought the money over to put in the bank for him. Building a palace for the Sultan sounds like a classic cover story, but was actually true. And which bank are you going to? The man asked. The spark answer. The police continued to search Christine's room for some time until they eventually gave up. They didn't find the safety deposit key. As they left, the man said to Christine, "It's not a good idea to keep you some of money like this in your room. There have been thefts. The hotel has a safe. You should keep it there." Christine was terrified. She called Richard. It didn't make sense. She didn't believe the police story. The police didn't believe her story. What were they after? The next morning, Christine went to the bank and retrieved her safety deposit box. They were receipts for a gotten in tartarates and handwritten instructions on how to make LSD. Christine took the papers into a toilet in the bank and set fire to them. As she left the bank to head to the airport, Christine felt she was being watched. Her stress was beginning to get to her. It was clear to me the police were onto us. There had been just too many warnings and coincidences. How had the police known I was in Zurich? If I just flew home now, would I be walking into a trap? At the airport, I scanned the departure board. There was a flight to London in half an hour and a flight to Amsterdam at the same time. Knowing that being unpredictable was probably her only way to cover her tracks, Christine flew to Amsterdam. Then, realising that might not be the most unpredictable destination for a drug dealer, she hired a car and drove to Utrecht. If I called Richard to join me, we could go somewhere and start a new life. Maybe New Zealand. We didn't have a lot of money yet. Maybe not enough. But money wasn't the thing that stopped her. What about the animals? The goats. Her beloved goat. The sheep, the chickens, the bees, the rural life she'd built. She couldn't turn her back on all that now. After years of living out of a suitcase, she'd put down roots. She'd learned about the land and put her bare hands in the soy hop. She'd become one with the place. So Christine went home. Meanwhile, Dick Lee was trying to coordinate the biggest raid ever planned in British policing history. Eight hundred officers, eleven police forces with simultaneous raids in England, Wales, France and Australia. They planned to make a hundred and twenty arrests, briefing centres were set up in Aberystwyth, Carmarven, London, Reading and Birmingham with devices, the HQ. At five a.m. Saturday, March the 26th, Dick Lee's team burst into eighty seven different properties across the UK. The police broke into Richard and Christine's idyllic cottage with a fourteen pound hammer. It's a bust. I said before I realised that I was awake or where I was and certainly before I knew what was happening. In the moments it took me to wake up, the bedroom door was flung open and the small room was full of excited men. Meanwhile, three miles away in Thandewi Brevy, Smiles was under a star-dotted skylight in a brandy and a hash-induced sleep. The next thing is there is a gun point at my head. On the rest, dragged me out of bed. I was naked. Dragged me downstairs into the living room, cuffed to myself and cuffed to a copper. As Smiles came to, he noticed the big lump of hash sitting on his mental piece. I was massively hungover. I really was. I was in a terrible bloody state. Anyway, I ate the hashish. So as the cannabis slowly digests in Smiles' belly, the police are demanding to know where he keeps all the acid. I was dragged around the house, all over the bloody place. I knew it. You think about what you've been doing and what you want to say and I just wouldn't have any interaction with them at all. That carried on for quite some time until the early afternoon, when they got a phone call. They'd been in Ginger Tony's place and they'd found a box of dog food and he didn't have a dog. So they opened it and the acid and money was in there, you know. So they said, open packets. Well, they'd been through the kitchen and everything that was open, they'd tipped out and put back again. But there was this sealed packet of alpen and they'd just taken it down and squeezed it like that. It seemed right and they'd put it back and I'd seen this happen. So they then decided to open this packet and they took the tweezers and rubber gloves and they said, "Are there any drugs in here?" I said, "There's absolutely no drugs in there whatsoever." And then they turned it upside down and this like 14 grand just went all over the floor. And then I got a few slaps. As for Stephen Bentley, he was sent on the London raids so he didn't have to arrest his friend, Smiles. And with the operation over, he cut his hair, trimmed his beard and put his suit back on. But it didn't seem to fit anymore. Having carried out his interviewing duties, Stephen was free to clock off and head home, but he couldn't leave yet. Down the corridor in a cell was someone he owed a good-bye to. I got to thinking about Smiles and I approached the subject with Dick Lee and I said, "Look, Governor, I really want to, you know, there's just something in me. I just want to go and talk to Smiles." And I was a bit apprehensive because I didn't know how he'd react. But anyway, Dick Lee gave me the guard and said, "Well, if that's what you want to do, fine." So I got the jailer on the cell door at Swindon police station and I walked in, saw Smiles sitting on the bench in the cell. He looked a little bit puzzled when he saw me because my appearance had changed a little bit. I still had the Zapata mustache, but my beard was trimmed, my hair had been trimmed so it wasn't quite as long. I still looked a little bit like a South American drug dealer. And then I saw the penny dropped. I saw his eyes light up and he stood up. I approached him and we just hugged and, you know, and I teared up a little and because, you know, I felt so close to the guy and I felt as if I deceived him and we just hugged and he just said something like, "No hard feelings, man." And, you know, it's all in the game. As ever with this story, there's a number of realities and the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Here Smiles is account of that final meeting. It came as no surprise to me when they appeared at my cell door in Swindon. No surprise whatsoever. He says that there was hugs. There wasn't hugs, believe you me, there was not hugs. What happened was the cell door opened, bloody great old King Uniformed custody sergeant with these two urbits on behind sort of peeking over his shoulder. And I said, "I told you you're bloody coppers." And they were shamed face, basically. And he gave me 20 players, nothing to light on with but. Back at the farmhouse after the police made their entrance, Richard was bustled downstairs while a female officer waited for Christine to get dressed. Then another officer came in, cautioned her and told her she would be taken away for questioning. "I have a freshly-kitted goat. She must be milked. And there's another goat, sheep and chickens. Surely whoever arranged this raid must be aware of that. We'll make arrangements," they said. So while a house full of police officers turned her home upside down and her life fell apart before her eyes, Christine stood squarely to the arresting officer and said, "I'm not leaving until I've milked Stella." Despite wielding all the power of the state, the officer could see there was something in Christine that was non-negotiable. So they followed Christine out to the paddock, and all the excited police officers waited patiently while Christine milked Stella for the last time. It was a beautiful morning. The sun was already shining over the ridge, and high above the valley a red kite spiralled. Now Richard came out, surrounded by four men. They all got into one of the cars. Petra, the lop-eared anglo-nubian, chewed some leaves from the recently-felled ashtray, while Stella jumped up on the wall and went into a ruminating trance whilst they milked her into a small stainless steel bucket. This is Acid Dream. Acid Dream was written by Tim Price and narrated by Risa Fance. Christine was Hannah Murray, and the contributors were Alston Hughes and Stephen Bentley. Original music was by Griff Reese and sound design by Peregrine Andrews. The researcher was Haley Mills, and the production coordinator was Caroline Barlow. The producer was James Robinson, and it was a BBC Studios production.