The New York Post tells the sensationalist story of one City Jet-Setter’s Bizarre LSD Trip:
A Harvard-educated Manhattan jet-setter has been pegged as the money-laundering mastermind behind a massive LSD drug ring run out of a Kansas missile silo, The Post has learned.Stefan Wathne, a 39-year-old scion of New York’s socially prominent Wathne apparel family, surrendered to federal agents Jan. 7 as he stepped off a plane at Newark Airport — after three years on the lam.
Wathne is accused in a 2005 federal indictment of laundering as much as $3 million through Russia between 1996 and 2000 for what authorities have described as the most prolific LSD operation in US history.
His arrest marks the latest chapter in a bizarre federal drug case that has unfolded over five years and featured a surreal cast of characters.
In addition to Wathne — an erstwhile financial planner and former American Ballet Theatre trustee — the case has included a prominent Harvard psychiatrist and a deputy director of a UCLA drug-study program.
In another strange twist, singers Sting and Paul Simon helped pay the legal bills for a witness in the case.
The drug ring was cracked in November 2002, when the US Drug Enforcement Agency descended on a decommissioned military silo outside Topeka, which had been converted to a lab capable of churning out massive amounts of LSD.