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. That wasone view of the Brotherhood, something from the 1960s.The other, the 1970s view, could be seen in another holiday celebration, the convention onthe new repopulated ranch.About thirty people had gathered for what one guest, aEuropean who had never met the Brothers before, thought was a drug-world parody of themeetings of the great gangs during the Prohibition days.There were dealers from New York,the East, the Midwest and, of course, California.The righteousness he had heard of wasthere Randall gossiped about the Leary escape but the atmosphere was heavilycommercial as well.Many of the other people on the ranch struck the guest as street-wiserather than beatific and there was a strain of violence: discussion about setting up acontract to kill someone who was giving them trouble the Brothers, however, could notbring themselves to do it.Instead, they turned to business, the problems of LSD supplies,new hash routes, marijuana deals.87 Both the view of the Brotherhood at the ranch and the view in Laguna were legitimate, bothpart of a Brotherhood which by the early 1970s was a schizophrenic creature.TheBrotherhood had expanded like the ripples from a stone thrown into a pond, circles movingfurther and further out.The mythology of the Brotherhood and its freewheeling structureallowed anyone to claim membership or understand the vibes. There were those who justbelieved that the Brotherhood was a simple summation of their views, their loyalties.At thesame time, the Brotherhood had grown into a huge network of drug smugglers,manufacturers and suppliers.Partnerships would come together and split like amoebae.Butkey figures, the people with the connections and the experience, remained at the centre.Randall was the organizer of much of the LSD trading while Fat Bobby Andrist had risen tocontrol much of the hash movement.No one was eliminated to make way for new leadersand no one shot it out in Woodland Drive for possession of a garage-full of marijuana.If thiswas a mafia, it was one with a distinctly different ethos from the traditional idea oforganized crime.The more deals you got into, the more money they generated, which meant more deals andmore money, and again more deals.The dealing had an addictive, almost hypnotic effect, like playing an enormous and never-ending game of Monopoly.Many things were now acceptable.The Brothers may have baulked at a contract killing, but Andrist always carried a gun in theMiddle East.The Brothers had already moved into the world of secret bank accounts anddeposits with the help of Hitchcock.Why should they not? They now operated on the scaleof a conglomerate, a multinational.Some of the Brothers were moving into cocaine from South America via Costa Rica.It wasnot big business at any time, but it was there for those who wanted to take it up.TheBrothers did not discourage the infiltration of a non-psychedelic drug into their range.Thatwas one of the differences between the people at the ranch and the people at LagunaBeach, between the vibes, imagined or real, and the marketplace.There is no doubt the Brothers could enjoy the money that drugs provided.The Christmasmeeting dripped with money.Andrist brought back a Porsche sports car from West Germanyon one of his trips; he was too fat to drive it and had to get John Gale to chauffeur him.Yetthe same Andrist turned up in Laguna with a suitcase filled with $1 million from variousdeals and promised that one day he would bum such amounts.The Brothers were notcompletely rid of their original ideals, but they were often dwarfed by the size of theenterprise.The ambiguities of trying to establish a new lifestyle in the midst of the old wereshowing through.Their interests now stretched south through Mexico to South America, west to Hawaii andeast across the Atlantic to Europe and on to the Middle East and Asia
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