William Mellon Hitchcock: Bon Vivant Who Helped Bankroll the LSD Counterculture

PHOTO: Getty

The Mellon family has many made-men turtles on a fencepost connections to the American intelligence community, and Mellon family foundations have frequently been used as financial conduits for CIA and Crime Syndicate operations.

Patriarch Andrew Mellon (1855-1937) is noted for the tenants of “Mellonomics,” which is differentiated by anti-unionism, tax cuts for the rich, low wages, curtailing government regulation, low interest rates and stock speculation.

Millionaire banker Paul Mellon was the son of Andrew Mellon, U.S. President Hoover’s Treasury Secretary, and ambassador to Great Britain. Paul Mellon was OSS station chief in London and a liaison to British intelligence.

Richard Helms was a frequent weekend guest of the Mellon patriarchs in Pittsburgh, Penn., during his tenure as CIA director (1966-1973), according to Martin A. Lee and Bruce Schlain’s book “Acid Dreams” (1985).

Drug Wars trading card- Timothy Leary and Richard Helms-

William “Billy” Mellon Hitchcock (1928-1989) was heir to the Gulf Oil fortune and nephew of Pittsburgh financier Andrew Mellon. Accordingly, he lived a “carefree” life and played key roles with other usual suspects in New Underworld Order social and cultural debasement projects of the times.

From Lyndon LaRouche’s “Dope, Inc.” [ibid., pp. 242-246] we learn:

William Mellon Hitchcock was Timothy Leary’s “Godfather” and “the Daddy Warbucks of the Counterculture.” In the early 60s, Billy Mellon-Hitchock almost singlehandedly bankrolled mass-production and distribution of LSD (which, hardly by coincidence, was at the time the subject of testing by the CIA’s secret MK-ULTRA program) — financing this effort through known CIA fronts like Castle Bank in the Bahamas [founded by Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt’s onetime boss, Paul Helliwell, paymaster for the Bay of Pigs invasion], the Meyer Lansky syndicate’s bank of choice for its money-laundering. Its special clientele also included Miami mob ally Bebe Rebozo, President Richard M. Nixon, Nixon campaign contributor and Golden Triangle heroin druglord Robert Vesco, the CIA’s George Bush, and certain anti-Castro Cubans …

Robert Phoenix and Russ Winter Reveal the True Hidden History of Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll

Leary on left, Hitchcock right

Hitchcock turned over Millbrook — a 4,000-acre estate in Dutchess County, New York — to Timothy Leary’s International Federation for Internal Freedom. William was introduced to LSD and Leary through his sister, Peggy Hitchcock, who Leary introduced to LSD the year before and with whom he had a brief affair.

In his autobiography, Timothy Leary wrote:

Peggy Hitchcock was an international jet-setter, renowned as the colorful patroness of the livelier arts and confidante of jazz musicians, race car drivers, writers, movie stars. Stylish, with a wry sense of humor, Peggy was considered the most innovative and artistic of the Andrew Mellon family. Peggy was easily bored, intellectually ambitious, and looking for a project capable of absorbing her whirlwind energy. And that was us.

All manner of operatives would show up at Millbrock such as the boy pederast Allen Ginsberg.

Beatnik Allen Ginsberg’s Weaponized Debasement of Culture

Lee and Shlain described the scene at Millbrook:

There were large aquariums with unusual fish, while other animals, dogs, cats, goats, wandered freely through the house. People stayed up all night tripping and prancing around the estate. (A stash of liquid acid had spilled in Richard Alpert’s suitcase, soaking his underwear, when the psychedelic fraternity was traveling back from Zihuatanejo, so anyone could get high merely by sucking on his briefs.) Everyone was always either just coming down from a trip or planning to take one. Some dropped acid for 10 days straight, increasing the dosage and mixing in other drugs. Even the children and dogs were said to have taken LSD.

In 1968, Billy Hitchcock financed Tim Scully’s LSD lab. The product from the lab was distributed by The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, which was also arranged by Hitchcock. The Brotherhood was dubbed the “Hippie Mafia” by the police. They produced and distributed drugs in hopes of starting a “psychedelic revolution” in the United States.

Prior to the development of the Brotherhood, California LSD was distributed through the Hell’s Angels. Hitchcock laundered and invested money for the Angel’s in Switzerland- and lost much of it.

Hitchcock went to Sausilito, Calif., and underwrote two chemists, Nick Sands and Tim Scully, to expanded the operation to manufacture millions of hits of Orange Sunshine LSD.

The Brotherhood began to distribute the drug – often for free – and, by sheer cowinkydink, with funds raised from smuggling Afghan hashish, which they brought directly from Kabul and Kandahar. It was an audacious global smuggling operation, with drugs stashed in musical instruments, in a VW camper van and, in quintessentially Californian style, inside hollowed-out surfboards. Hitchcock seemed to have mysterious “connections” to facilitate such a global operation.

According to Michael Randall, a formative member of the Brotherhood, the plan was to drive down the price of LSD through mass production. In other words, to distribute “so much Orange Sunshine that it would become virtually free. We had a deep spiritual commitment to what we were doing,” Leary wrote.

Their activities came to an end on Aug. 5, 1972, when a drug raid was executed on the group. Police arrested dozens of Brotherhood members in California, Oregon and Maui. Curiously, little jail time was served by anyone in the group.

In early 1973, Billy Hitchcock was threatened with 24 years in prison for tax evasion if he didn’t help the government convict the prime movers of the LSD (and hashish) cartel. Billy, the financier and promoter, turned informant, provided evidence and testified against Tim Scully and Nick Sand. They were both indicted in April 1973. Scully served a couple years in prison, and Hitchcock walked scot-free.

Per The New York Slimes (good link) in 1974:

Hitchcock, then a 34‐year‐old multi-millionaire, told the jurors that for years he and the defendants were close friends. He described at length his involvement in the drug manufacturing scheme and said the four had spent a great deal of time together here and at his estate in Millbrook, N. Y.

In operating the business, according to the testimony, Mr. Hitchcock, the defendants and others traveled to London, Munich, Brussels, Zurich, the Bahamas and throughout the United States. They always returned, however, to Windsor, Calif., where their lab was secreted in the basement of a small wooden farmhouse.

Scully and Sands were the subject of the 2015 British documentary “The Sunshine Makers.” This appears to be difficult to locate online.

The Sunshine Makers Official Trailer 1 (2017) – Documentary

Winter Watch Takeaway

To our eyes, the open-source material on Hitchcock and his operations look rather scrubbed and memory holed.

Read and watch one of Winter Watch’s most important posts “In Plain View: Jaw-Dropping Video of LSD Promoters Holding 1979 Meeting.”

Hitchcock also had ties to Ronald Stark, the U.S. intelligence asset who has been linked to Charles Manson and some of the more radical theories surrounding the Process Church of Final Judgement.


Read “The Other Sons of Sam: Now, for the Rest of the Story”

Next, Hitchcock’s tentacles moved on to the Meyer Lansky-linked Resorts International; which, in 1970, evolved into a private intelligence operation known as “Intertel.” Hitchcock was the largest investor.

He was an associate of the notorious Bernie Cornfeld and Seymour “The Head” Lazare, directors of the Swiss-based Investors Overseas Services (IOS), a money laundry outfit for the Mafia, Third World dictators, and the CIA. When a financial shortage was perceived at IOS, their assets were transferred to Robert Vesco, whose network of corporations are alleged to have been a CIA front by William Spector, a former CIA operative.

The history of Resorts International has been brilliantly detailed in Jim Hougan’s book “Spooks.” This leads down many other rabbit holes but is beyond the scope of this intro to Hitchcock. More is here.

Resorts Intl. is in the middle of not only the Watergate affair but also a vast array of intelligence operations that include anti-Castro Cubans, Mafia bagmen, illegal campaign contributions, and money-laundering. The Nixon and Rebozo involvements with Resorts Intl. is only the tip of a very old and very dirty iceberg, and Hitchcock has managed to stay quietly in the shadows of the infamous politicos [source: “Sinister Forces —A Warm Gun: A Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft” by Peter Levenda].

More background on this network

12 Comments on William Mellon Hitchcock: Bon Vivant Who Helped Bankroll the LSD Counterculture

  1. Its too bad, LSD had / has so much potential as a mind expanding conduit. I had a life changing experience that opened my little mind to things i had never thought before. I still have friends that do it once a year to ‘reset’ their brain and spirit, they say it brings them to a peaceful state with themselves. Very interesting drug

  2. No ego, but when I referenced this author and his works, months ago on WW, no one seemed remotely moved. And then:

    “The history of Resorts International has been brilliantly detailed in Jim Hougan’s book “Spooks.” This leads down many other rabbit holes but is beyond the scope of this intro to Hitchcock. More is here.”

    Now there seems to be interest. Good to know, and I am glad for the attention to the text; however, I do wish more time was spent regarding the overall background of the source. Back when I posted, I simply made reference to the author’s background (in an effort to be transparent), but I left most of the background out,

    (Humbly) I would suggest that a discussion on the author and his other works (including his intelligence access) could be interesting.

    Best,
    SC

    • I am still shaking my head that there isn’t a major book out and a Netflix series on the shtick of Billy Mellon Hitchcock – a major hidden away New Underworld Order operative.

      • Yes, I do concur; however, the problem is there are so many “little” or “lesser known” players in the whole scope of the the shadow networks (for lack of better wording right now, not because I give someone or group aw-inspiring credit).

        WW does a heck of a job shinning a light on some of the least known corners of this whole network, which is highly compartmentalized. Heck, I think with the limited size and straight forward resources of WW, the site actually does a far better job than the bigger “truth-ish sites” (not you or this tie, them). Although I will not call out anyone, there is that fella who everyone thinks is the reincarnation of Mr. Bill Hicks. He seems to give out knowledge, while coloring inside the lines and having established spooks on his program (not to mention shilling for the Orange Potato, former President and “Ormolu King”). WW leaves that blowhard in the dust; however, even as good as this website is and even with the strong, smart, as well as varied support of its readers, the fact remains that we are talking about the largest, corporate, empire to exist on Earth (Amerika).

        Even if we gave you a staff of 100, and funded you with Monopoly playing money to the moon, there is an excellent chance that you could miss 1000 or more key players in the grand scheme of the national destruction project. What this site does extremely well is to alert folks to the game, let them know to look for the players, ask them to check diverse sources of information, and then trust when things seem good, but always verify. This is not me blowing smoke your way, but simply acknowledging why I come here.

        Honestly, about a month or two into being on this site, I could not for the life of me understand why you even do this work, Yet with time and a whole lot of patience from you, as well as Torchy, I got it to the extent that I can get it (not a slam at you, but an admission of my own limitations). To get up every day and be willing to do this work takes immense endurance and a lot of true bravery.

        Sure sometimes we try and push you to do more (I did above with my reference to Mr. Jim Hougan, an author I found only about 2-3 months before arriving at WW) and I think that is because we see how talented you are at bringing new knowledge our way. Yet, all of us know how hard you are working at this. Also, all of us appreciate what you are doing here (otherwise, why would we keep coming back).

        Sometimes I think when we see a drop off of a friend on here, it can be a result of realizing just how vast the whole picture is and equally how hard it may be for us to even wrap our heads around it all. Although you do not “black pill” us to death, we can get easily “black pilled” just by showing up for a series of days and reading how insidious this whole saga is. And honestly, I would opine that you, Torchy, Mr. Mueller and all of us have barely “scratched the surface” of the entire picture.

        We could even be given unfettered access into the Iron Mountain facility with all of us there, working together, for a year and we would barely be able to get much more of a total picture as we have right now (at least that is my humble opinion). We could write FOIAs until our fingers are blistered and still not get much further than we are right at this moment.

        Take just the legacy of the Corcoran family in DC and try to “drill down” their impact on the town (DC), the nation and the world. Just something as myopic as this topic could take us years to try and unravel. Yet, their work echos through DC, Wall Street, Europe, the Far East, the drug trade, the Congress, the art world, the Judicial Branch and especially “Executive Action”. And that is just one family.

        (Hate to go all Judge Napolitano on you, but…) What if Tommy “the Cork” Corcoran had a best friend that was a gangster that few people even knew existed? What if that gangster was the “Boss of DC”? What if that “Boss” ran an extortion racquet, rooted in the sex trade, and with the goods on Congressmen that no one has even heard of? What if those goods were on a one term Representative that was the deciding vote on a piece of legislation that was buried for decades, but formed the root for stare decisis regarding the Patriot Act? This one black hole could last us a decade to unravel, and that is but a scintilla of the entire picture.

        The bigger picture is easy for us because the powers that be often release the names or have lost control of the names to a point that it becomes common knowledge. Then when they try to spin the story, it becomes rather easy for us to take it apart. An example might be Secretary James Forrestal and / or Congressman Charles A. Lindbergh, Senior. Yet what of United States Senator Henrik Shipstead? How many of our friends are going to recognize this name or the party he originally won his seat with?

        Heck, everyone here is going to know Soros, and maybe even knows Rogers, but how many will know Victor Niederhoffer? He may seem like “small potatoes”, but just a look at the Wiki (which never lies = ) and we get:

        “In 1997, Niederhoffer Investments was not finding many opportunities for investments and, having returned much of its funds to customers such as George Soros, began investing the remaining 100 million dollars in areas where Niederhoffer later admitted that he did not have much expertise. Niederhoffer decided to buy Thai bank stocks, which had fallen heavily in the Asian financial crisis, his bet being that the Thai government would not allow these companies to go out of business. On October 27, 1997, losses resulting from this investment, combined with a 554-point (7.2%) single-day decline in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (the eighth largest point decline to date in index history), forced Niederhoffer Investments to close its doors. In a lawsuit that Niederhoffer later filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois against the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, where he traded options, he alleged that floor traders colluded to drive the market down that day to force him out of his positions. Traders at the time said Refco may have been responsible for as much as $35 million of Niederhoffer’s losses.”

        (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Niederhoffer#1997_losses)

        Now when we apply the similar thinking (small potatoes can equal huge shifts in the world) to our government and we realize that no matter how smart we are, we are still just “scratching the surface”, then the whole picture just becomes a blur in our brains. Add into this the “noise” of everyday life and even those of us who are “awake” can become rather “sleepy”.

        Basically, I think that you will continue to find very interesting people and subjects in the history of the American apparatus, and yet there will not be a whole lot of focus on these very interesting people in more major media, due to the whole story just being too big for most minds to even grasp.

        Still, I would like to see you keep plugging away. Many thanks for all of your hard work!

        Best,
        SC

        • See now, I dug a hole and fell down it.

          So I was freshening up my recollection of Senator Henrik Shipstead and came across the Roosevelt Corollary. Now I will not dig the hole deeper by interjecting the Drago Doctrine, but I will pose the following question:

          Aside from me, does anyone else think that the Corollary formed the precedent for the Iran Contra Affair (as if it was a love story; gotta love the spin)?

          Yes, I know I am fixated on this point in history, but you may wish to concur that it was fascinating and did form a “game changer” with regard to the American intelligence apparatus.

          Just a wonderin’.

          Best,
          SC

      • Below’s a link to a federal court document out of Pittsburgh that shows that on Feb. 21, 1973, Billy Hitchcock was indicted on 6 counts of tax evasion, and it lists his age as 33.

        https://digital.library.pitt.edu/islandora/object/pitt%3Aais9830.07.02.0254/pages

        Billy was married to a South American model, and when they divorced he screwed her on alimony so she went to the feds and told them: “My husband’s been financing the worldwide of LSD,” (which was absolutely true).

        The feds found the profits in Swiss bank account Billy hadn’t disclosed on his federal tax return, so they indicted him then flipped him. He subsequently testified against Nick Sand, Tim Scully and Lester Friedmen in the Sunshine trial. Nick & Tim were found guily but Lester got off, that time. (Lester, a Case Western Reserve University chemistry professor who broke bad, got caught in a meth conspiracy later.)

        Billy absolutely was the kingpin of the Sunshine operation, though. He knew Nick Sand from Millbrook (Nick was the resident psychedelic chemist there, but had not yet produced LSD.)

        After then-Dutchess County NY District Attorney G. Gordon Liddy busted Millbrook and broke up the psychedic commune headed by Leary, Leary headed out to Laguna Beach and hooked up with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love.

        Through BET, Leary met Tim Scully, who had apprenticed in LSD production under Owsley, who by then was then in prison/retired. Leary introduced Billy to Scully, and Billy introduced Sand & Scully, and Billy financed their lab in Windsor, and hooked them up with precursors through connections Billy had in Switzerland.

        Nick and Tim made acid there for as long as they could get precursors. Eventually they couldn’t get any more, because their Swiss precursor source got in trouble for some other shenanigans he was involved in.

        After the Sunshine was gone, the BET began sourcing their acid throgh Ron Stark, who had at least 2 labs in Europe.

        And then after Billy got jammed up on taxes (because the cheap SOB screwed his ex-wife on alimony), he flipped on Nick and Tim. The trial was weird because the feds NEVER got the lab — by the time of the Sunshine indictments, it no longer existed, as least in Windsor. Which meant that a hell of a lot of the prosecution hung on Billy Hitchcock’s testimony.

        (Fun fact: One member of the California psychedelic crowd who contrributed to Nick & Tim’s defense was Leonard Pickard. He sold a painting for $5,000 and gave it to the defense. Flash forward 25 years: Pickard was busted in 2000 in Wamego Kansas, driving a complete LSD lab away from the abandoned Atlas missle silo in which it had been stored)

        Nick got 10 years and Tim got 15 (under 1970s guidelines that were fairly lenient in terms of parole). Both appealed and were out on bond for awhile. After the appeal was denied, Tim ended up doing 5 years, during which he earned a PhD. After his release, he went on to become a software engineer.

        Nick, meanwhile, disappeared from his Sausalito houseboat the day the appeal was denied (in 1976) and went DEEP underground. Someone drove him to Seattle, where he caught a ferry to Vancouver Island, BC. He didn’t resurface until 1996, when he was busted in Port Coquitlam, BC, in a designer drug lab the Mounties said was the most elaborate they’d ever seen.

        (During his 20 years underground, under fake identities, Nick mined for gold in Canada, had a big-scale psychedelic mushroom grow op there, and he spent 5 years in Antelope, Oregon as a disciple of Rajneesh. By the time of the 1996 bust, Nick was summering in Canada, making LSD, DMT, MDMA, 2CB, 2CT7 and other exotic tryptamines and phenelthylamines, and wintering on a lime & mango plantation in Mexico.)

        It took Canadian authorities at least a month to realize they’d caught the elusive Nick Sand, who’d been on the lam for 20 years. Nick did some time in Canada then was returned to the US, and did 3 years prison on his 10-year sentence (because of the 1970s parole guidelines).

        (By the way, Nick was the son of Clarence Hiskey, a Manhattan Project metals chemist. The House UnAmerican Activities Committee fingered Hiskey as a Soviet spy in he 1950s. The feds never had srong enough evidence to indict him, but the stain ruined his career to the extent that Nick’s parents changed his and his sister’s surnames to their mother’s maiden name, Sand.)

        Some of the above material is from books on the 60s-70s acid trade; much of it is from personal conversations with Nick (now deceased) and Tim, who I believe still lives in Little River, Calif.

  3. Billy Hitchcock was not born in 1910. That would have made him ten years older than Leary. Look at the photos of the two together at Millbrook. Billy is much younger. Born around 1938 – 39. After he ratted on Scully and Sand in ’73 he seems to have disappeared. Can’t find anything on him since, which is odd for someone in that family.

      • Which tree exactly are you referring to? Can you link it?
        The Jan. 28 1974 NY Times article about the trial says he’s 34 years old, making his birth date around ’39 – ’40.
        Does it say when he died? Any idea from what? Apparently he stayed away from the overt swashbuckling after getting his slap on the wrist.

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