Cocaine has been in the headlines over last few days. It was also part of the story told in the TKPOTD for ten years ago today.

* * * * *

Brett Kimberlin got caught lying to a federal grand jury and wound up convicted of perjury. He was asked about his dealing LSD to a two guys named John Buckley and David Pacific. He claimed, based on the fact that the Indiana State Police had busted Buckley and Pacific for attempting to operate a lab to produce psilocybin, that they were making LSD.

During a July, 1972, sentencing hearing for a cocaine bust while he was a juvenile, Kimberlin was asked:

Q. Did you ever sell any LSD to David Pacific or Jenkins, John Jenkins?
A. No, I wouldn’t be selling it to Pacific or John Buckley because they are the ones that had the laboratory, they are the ones that made it all. If I was to do anything I would get it from them. That’s my answer.

He repeated that testimony in October before a grand jury. A second grand jury was convened, and it indicted Kimberlin for perjury. He was convicted.

Through the years, Kimberlin has claimed that Buckley and Pacific lied about him as part of a deal with the feds. When he was working with his biographer Mark Singer, Kimberlin claimed that Cody Shearer, one of the people who had helped him promote his tale about selling marijuana to Dan Quayle, had confronted Buckley and Pacific and that they had acknowledge lying. When Singer checked with Shearer, Shearer said that he had never discussed LSD or perjury with them.

Beginning at the bottom of p. 316 in Citizen K, Mark Singer writes:

Sifting through this heap of mendacity , I asked myself whether Kimberlin lies for sport or whether an assortment of small lies coalesced into a gang of tar babies that encircled him. When I first heard about Pacific and Buckley, they amounted to an interesting brick in my wall; their role in Kimberlin’s life never rose to a sinister level. Ultimately, they signified his willingness to stay wedded to a falsehood despite black-and-white evidence to the contrary. My metaphor metamorphosed. The Pacific-Buckley factoid—the news report of their arrest, along with Kimberlin’s claim of their perjury to frame him for same—was no longer a constructive brick but one of many blind turns in a labyrinth of misinformation.

Or to put it more simply: Brett Kimberlin tells lies, and he seems to do so even when he knows there is documentary evidence proving him a liar.

* * * * *

In the late ’70s, I was working in Indiana and courting the young lady who became Mrs. Hoge. She was finishing her degree in Audio Production at Indiana University and working in the music scene in Bloomington. As I’ve noted before, I have met a number of the people from Bloomington who knew Brett Kimberlin. What they’ve told me jives with Singer’s reporting.

BTW, used copies of Citizen K are available on Amazon.