The San Francisco Examiner from San Francisco, California • 403

i i. only briefly. Some of the key figures in the ring had apparently escaped the net. And now Julie investigators believe the European ring was just part of a "much larger American operation." One of the names that popped up during the Julie investigation was "Backhus." Another was "Lee," and it turned out later that this was Lee Hassler. Between the arrests and the trials in Bristol a year later another name came up: David Lovelace, an alias for Francis Ragusa of Oakland.

There is still another name in the Operation Julie files: Vladimir Petroff, a U.S. citizen and a chemist. Petroff was arrested in San Diego in March 1973 with twelve others and charged with the manufacture and distribution of LSD. He was released on $50,000 bail and later skipped. Petroff is presently listed as a federal fugitive and believed by DEA agents to be out of the country.

Or dead. Julie detectives believe they saw Petroff in May 1976 in a house in Carno, England that they had under surveillance. At any rate Petroff has disappeared, like Jim Teegarden and Denis L. Kelly of San Francisco. That's three disappearances.

There's a fourth also connected with LSD. 1 1 ') 1 fV I I L- i v. Uawv tlx lit rederic. Messenger was named in a from Reno, Gary Frcdcrichs. It is not known what Ragusa's role was at the time.

It is known that in November 1976, DEA agent Jarrctt met Van dcr Wolff and shortly after that Van der Wolff started working for the DEA. In February 1977, Van der Wolff testified, he met Backhus, Watson and Gary Fred-crichs in Frankfurt. They arranged that Fred-crichs would fly to Reno and get a motel room and that Van dcr Wolff would follow one day later carrying one kilo of ET in a body belt. The ET would be delivered to Fredcrichs in Reno. Van der Wolff was to receive $5,000.

Van der Wolff testified that he flew to Chicago and was met by U.S. Customs investigator Bobby C. Holloway and other agents. Molloway confiscated the ET and replaced it with a harmless substance. Van der Wolff then flew on to Reno and met with Fredcrichs in the motel.

When the money changed hands, agents moved in and arrested Frederichs. He was subsequently charged with conspiracy to receive smuggled property, a violation of Customs laws, and convicted in federal court in Reno. Frederichs pleaded guilty and received three years suspended. He is presently on probation. Customs agent Holloway says: "We were able to make several connections beyond Fredcrichs.

And he adds that he can't name names because "the investigations are ongoing." He says that Customs was able to document twenty kilos of ET a year coming into the Bay Area via the Backhus ring. The DEA speculates that much of this ET went to Ragusa and that Ragusa had a connection with a secret laboratory that processed it into LSD for him. Oakland investigators, after Ragusa's murder, said he was a "top end" dealer and that he was too big to have anything to do with dealing LSD at the street level. Oakland police captain James Stewart said underworld sources told police that Ragusa routinely kept between $1 million and $2 million worth of ET in his home and more than $150,000 in cash to make drug buys. Oakland police described Reilly, who is charged with the Ragusa murders, as a smalltime drug courier who became suspicious of his friend when Ragusa began talking about some murders he had committed in the Miami area.

When the Ragusa murders were discovered, police found two automobiles near his home that were registered to persons said to be living at Reilly 's San Rafael address at 1111 West Street. Police inquiries into Ragusa's movements established that, under the alias of David Lovelace, a dealer of oriental carpets and books, he had traveled to England eight times in the twelve months before his death. There is speculation that the massive drug ring roundup by Britain's Operation Julie led to Ragusa's murder. Suspect Lawrence Reilly. "There is speculation that the massive roundup by Operation Julie led to Ragusa's murder" federal indictment in Los Angeles County in May, 1977.

He was charged, along with three others, with conspiracy to manufacture and distribute LSD. One of those named along with Messenger was Michael Lewis Green, a convicted income tax evader and a principal in the chemical firm, Biodyne Industries of Harbor City, near Los Angeles. Green, who had once allegedly employed Petroff as a chemist, was named in a second indictment in San Diego, April 7, 1978. This one was a charge of conspiracy to obstruct justice in connection with a plot to plant LSD in a San Diego chemical plant and an attempt to frame Messenger. Green, thirty-nine, and his wife, Judith, thirty-two, were convicted of the charges.

Messenger was not present at the trial. He had disappeared on February 16, 1978, three weeks before the San Diego indictment was handed down. During the Green trial in San Diego, an admitted LSD courier and tableter, Richard Shepard, who had turned informer and who was a prosecution witness, testified that in 1973 he had tableted LSD for Vladimir Petroff and that Green was the supplier of the ergo-tamine tartrate used by Petroff in the production of LSD. Shepard told the jury that Green purchased ET from an importer, Henley and Company in New York, through Biodyne Industries (which was licensed by the Federal Drug Administration), and sold it to people who had clandestine laboratories, including Petroff. In additional testimony, Shepard said that Messenger and a Peter Allard, another admitted LSD courier, were involved in a chemical company in San Diego.

He said he continued they formed a special squad of investigators under the command of Detective Inspector Richard Lee. The team was named after one of its woman members. Sergeant Julie Taylor. Operation Julie, comprised of twenty-eight undercover detectives, worked for thirteen months tracking down a vast international network of LSD smugglers, couriers, chemists, laboratories and financiers. Then, in a dramatic dawn raid on March 26, 1977, they rounded up 120 people in England, Wales and France.

The team unearthed more than six million doses of LSD worth some $200 million and Swiss bank accounts of nearly $2 million. The network stretched from the United Kingdom to France, Israel, the Netherlands, Australia, West Germany and the United States, particularly California. Seventeen people were brought to trial in Bristol, England and convicted. About a year after the massive raid those convicted began serving prison terms ranging from two to thirteen years. But ironically, the source of LSD dried up Ocotland Yard's Central Drugs Intelligence Unit (CDIU) became alarmed at the rise in LSD seizures in the mid-1970s.

The possibility of a ring existed. And in February of 1976 9 kroUwigMa9HWAn 10. 1979.