The lawyer was expecting assassins. “Those people who put the snake in my mailbox do not think of themselves as criminals, I’m sure, but believe themselves to be serving a higher purpose.” Lance Kenton grew up in Synanon. Morantz called the rattlesnake attack “Synanon’s Pearl Harbor,” the event that summoned the force of the law and exposed what he called …
In the late 1950s, Charles “Chuck” Dederich started a drug rehabilitation program out of a storefront in Santa Monica. Over the next decade and a half, the group, named Synanon, expanded across the country and evolved into a self-help movement with thousands of members, including many who were not addicts but were simply drawn to its idealistic vision — no …
Mikel Jollett, frontman for the Airborne Toxic Event, isn’t playing much music these days. In the first chapter of “Hollywood Park,” Mikel, 5, and his brother Tony, 7, are settled down for the night when their mother wakes them and drives them to her parents’ house up the coast. “Eight years old in the back yard with a hunting knife …
