Operation Julie - The World's Greatest LSD Bust — The World's Greatest Lsd Bust

Disgrifiad Cymraeg / Welsh Description

Cyfrol am un o rwydweithiau cyffuriau mwya'r byd a oedd ar waith yng nghanolbarth Cymru yng nghanol y 70au. Mewn labordy anial ar bwys Tregaron cynhyrchwyd gwerth miliynnau o bunnau o LSD pur - labordy a arweiniodd at un o'r achosion troseddol mwyaf diddorol a chwedlonol erioed. Adargraffiad; cyhoeddwyd gyntaf yn Awst 2010.

Disgrifiad Saesneg / English Description

The history of one of the world's biggest drugs networks that was active in mid-Wales in the mid-1970s. In a rural laboratory near Tregaron pure LSD valued at millions of pounds was produced and seized; this lead to an interesting and notorious criminal case. Reprint; first published in August 2010.

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Adolygiad y Cyhoeddwr / Publisher Review

LSD ac Operation Julie yn rhoi Llanddewibrefi ar y map – eto fyth Rhwng gwyrthiau Dewi Sant ac ymddangosiadau ar y rhaglen Little Britain, daeth Llanddewibrefi i gryn enwogrwydd ar hyd y blynyddoedd, ond i lawer rhyfeddod mwya’r lle oedd iddo ddod yn un o ganolfannau cyffuriau enwoca’r byd yn yr 1970au. Ac mewn llyfr newydd gan Lyn Ebenezer fe ddatgelir pwy oedd yn cymryd pa gyffuriau yn yr ardal a sut y llwyddodd yr heddlu i chwalu rhwydwaith cyffuriau mwya’r byd gydag ‘Operation Julie’ yn 1977. Mae’r awdur, a oedd yn newyddiadurwr gyda’r Cymro ar y pryd, yn datgelu sut y tyfodd Llanddewibrefi i fod yn ganolfan i sêr y byd pop yn Lloegr, yn cynnwys y Rolling Stones, Jimmy Hendrix ac Eric Clapton, a oedd yn dod i aros gyda’r chwedlonol David Litvinoff yn Llanddewibrefi yn niwedd y 60au. Yn ôl yr awdur “Mae hi bron yn sicr fod Bob Dylan wedi aros gyda Litvinoff am chwe wythnos yn ystod haf 1969 ar ôl iddo fod yn yr Ŵyl bop yn Ynys Wyth, ac mi wnaeth Keith Richards o’r Rolling Stones gyfaddef ei fod yn ymweld â’r lle a’i fod wedi defnyddio pob cyffur anghyfreithlon oedd yn bod, ac ambell un nad oedd yn bod!” Ond mae’r llyfr Saesneg Operation Julie yn delio’n bennaf gyda chyrch enwog yr heddlu a ddaeth i roi stop ar y rhwydwaith cyffuriau anferth lle cynhyrchwyd gwerth miliynnau o LSD pur yng nghefn gwlad Cymru. Ym mis Mawrth 1977 fe arestiodd yr heddlu ddegau o bobl a ffeindio chwe miliwn tab o LSD – y stash mwya o gyffuriau anghyfreithlon erioed. Roedd 800 o heddlu yn rhan o’r ymgyrch. Arestiwyd 120 o bobl i gyd, a daethpwyd o hyd i dabledi LSD gwerth £100 miliwn! Dyma’r achos mwyaf o’i fath erioed, a ddaeth a Llanddewibrefi, Tregaron a Carno i enwogrwydd drwy’r byd.

Adolygiad y Cyhoeddwr / Publisher Review

In March 1977 the largest LSD bust in history cracked a drugs ring based near Tregaron. Six million tabs of LSD were recovered by the police and 120 people were arrested throughout the UK and France. Stashes of LSD worth £100 million were also unearthed and £800,000 in money was discovered hidden in Swiss bank accounts. Eventually 17 defendants were jailed for a total of 130 years in the wake of the investigation code named Operation Julie. The history of this astonoshing drugs raid is written by Welsh author, Lyn Ebenezer. A journalist at the time of the case itself Lyn includes new information never released before based on interviews with many of the men involved. *********************************** LSD and Operation Julie put Llanddewi Brefi on the Map Llanddewi Brefi is renowned for the miracles of St David and has been portrayed infamously on the Little Britain television series. But it also has another claim to fame. Rather surprisingly, this small village in west Wales was the centre of the world LSD drug trade in the 1970s. In a new book by Lyn Ebenezer, he discloses who was making and taking the drug in the area and how the police’s so-called ‘Operation Julie’ managed to bust the largest drug ring in the world in 1977. The author, who was a journalist on the Welsh newspaper Y Cymro at the time, tells how Llanddewi Brefi became a desired destination for pop-stars such as the Rolling Stones, Jimmy Hendrix and Eric Clapton. They’d been invited to the village by local resident David Litvinoff in the 1960s. The author recalls, “It is pretty certain that Bob Dylan stayed at Litvinoff’s house for six weeks during the summer of 1969, just after he’d been at the Isle of Wight pop festival. Keith Richards from the Rolling Stones admitted that he’d been to Llanddewi Brefi too and that whilst staying there he’d used every illegal drug in existence and some which weren’t in existence!” However, the Operation Julie book deals mainly with the famous police raid which brought to a juddering halt the enormous drug network, which had produced pure LSD worth millions of pounds in rural Wales. In March 1977, the police arrested dozens of people and found six million tabs of LSD – the largest stash of illegal drugs ever found. More than 800 police officers took part in the operation and 120 people were arrested in total. LSD tabs with a street-value of £100 million were discovered. This was the largest police case of its kind and brought Llanddewi Brefi, Tregaron and Carno to world attention overnight. Operation Julie includes a great deal of new information never published before and records recent interviews conducted with some of those who were involved. And as a local journalist in situ at the time, Lyn Ebenezer gives his own first-hand account and his insight into the affair. In his introduction to the book, he recollects: “Those arrested were said to have been responsible for 90 per cent of the LSD produced in Britain and 60 per cent worldwide. That is the official line. It will become evident, however, that truth and fiction are still inextricably mixed over 30 years later. But the facts, incredible as they are, seem to outweigh the fiction. Here I include both… The story of Operation Julie is, if you believe the official spin, the story of an ideal that went wrong, greed and audacious enterprise on one side and of diligent, selfless and determined police work on the other. But it is also a story of political infighting and lasting bitterness. Stories abound of undiscovered stashes of LSD and hidden fortunes. There are tales of tip-offs by disgruntled police officers and even a royal connection. There remain many unanswered questions. There are, for instance, accusations that statistics were deliberately massaged in order to strengthen the case for a national drugs squad. And if chemist Richard Kemp had produced LSD worth £2.5 million during his seven years of production, as was alleged, why was it that only £11,000 of his money was ever discovered? Were the dangers of LSD exaggerated? Much was made of Kemp’s ability to produce the purest LSD in history. Surely, if it was the purest, was it not also the safest? After all, the dangers of LSD lie in its impurities. In fact, despite lurid newspaper accounts of the dangers of acid, no evidence whatever was produced to prove that Kemp’s LSD caused any deaths. There are accusations that some officers, the operation’s commander Dick Lee in particular, leaked doctored information to the press, especially to the red tops, as a means of strengthening the case for the formation of a national drugs squad. Papers like the Daily Mirror and the Daily Express in particular, following the sentencing, were laughably sensational. It is no coincidence that the only two books immediately published on Operation Julie appeared with the cooperation of those very newspapers. Dick Lee’s book Operation Julie (W H Allen, 1978) was co-written by Colin Pratt of the Express while Busted by Martyn Pritchard and Ed Laxton (1978), riddled with police and underworld parlance, was published by Mirror Books. Was it a coincidence that the journalist who first alerted me to the swoop was a Daily Express reporter? I have included a chapter on a fascinating character who appeared in Llanddewi Brefi seemingly out of nowhere at the end of the sixties. David Litvinoff was not directly involved with the Julie story, but was very much a part of the drugs scene. He attracted many pop stars including the Stones, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix and possibly Bob Dylan to his house. Albeit unaware of the fact, he was the harbinger of the influx of free spirits to the area. My motive in writing this book is not to be judgemental. Largely it is, rather, a story of how a quiet area of mid Wales was changed completely by incomers that embraced a different culture and way of life. Yet many of those involved in the LSD conspiracy were accepted by the local community. Had they not been embraced – or at least tolerated – their illegal venture would never have lasted so long. It is still difficult to find anyone in the Tregaron and Llanddewi Brefi area that will condemn them. In fact, they are regarded as likeable rouges, much like the area’s own Robin Hood, the sixteenth-century robber and folk-hero Twm Shôn Cati. So, even though this book follows the main events of Operation Julie, it is a revised overview. It is also the story of rural communities that were changed completely, and remain completely changed. LSD may not have changed the world, as its proponents had hoped it would, but it did, albeit inadvertently, change forever a rural way of life.”