Was Brotherhood Member Brenice Lee Smith a Felonious Monk?
After three decades in Nepal, a fugitive in a hippie-era hash-smuggling case returns to OC in handcuffs
He spent decades on the run, but the last member of the so-called “Hippie Mafia” to evade the long arm of the law, has finally been captured and is now in custody at the Orange County Jail, having pleaded not guilty to 40-year-old charges of hash smuggling and LSD peddling.
Brenice
Lee Smith, who grew up in
Anaheim, was one of the founding members of the
Laguna Beach-based Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a group of hash-smuggling hippies who befriended
Timothy Leary and sought to turn on the entire world through their trademark acid, Orange Sunshine (see “
Lords of Acid,” July 8, 2005). As the
Weekly first reported on our
Navel Gazingblog, he was arrested by
U.S. Customs agents at
San Francisco International Airport on Sept. 26 around 9 p.m., just minutes after arriving from Hong Kong on the second leg of a trip that started a day earlier in
Kathmandu, Nepal.
Along with many other members of the Brotherhood, Smith, better-known as “Brennie” among family and friends, allegedly traveled toKandahar, Afghanistan, in the late 1960s and smuggled hashish back to California insideVolkswagen buses, mobile homes and other vehicles. The Brotherhood distributed more LSD throughout the world than anyone else and famously raised cash with acid sales to bust Leary out of prison and help him escape toAfghanistan, where he was arrested in 1973. Smith was indicted for his role in the group but was among about a dozen members who managed to evade arrest in August 1972 when a task force made up of federal, state and local cops raided Brotherhood houses from Laguna Beach to Oregon to Maui—where many members of the group had fled after OC became too hot—and arrested some 50 people.
