The Nutty Professor

Here’s an amazing piece of the life of Timothy Leary from the NYTimes book review of Timothy Leary: A Biography.

…he finally went to jail, and was likely to be kept there for years
before he would be considered for parole. Characteristically, he
compared himself to "Christ . . . harassed by Pilate and Herod." In a
twist that could have occurred only in 1970, a consortium of drug
dealers paid the Weather Underground to spring Leary from the
California Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo – he pulled himself along a
telephone cable over the fence, then was picked up by a car – and
transport him to Algeria. He duly issued a press statement written in
the voice of the Weathermen, the money line of which was: "To shoot a
genocidal robot policeman in the defense of life is a sacred act."

But
when he and his wife, Rosemary, arrived in Algiers, they found
themselves wards of the exiled Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver,
who was probably smarter than Leary, possibly crazier, and had little
use for him. As Leary acknowledged, rather shrewdly: "It was a new
experience for me to be dependent on a strong, variable, sexually
restless, charismatic leader who was insanely erratic. I usually played
that role myself."

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