Inside Allen Klein’s Role in 1967 Jagger-Richards Drug Bust

Whether this was true or not, Jagger, Richards, and Fraser were all convicted at trial in June and sentenced to prison, Jagger for three months in Brixton, and Richards and Fraser for a year and six months, respectively, at Wormwood Scrubs. As incredible as the episode was, its least likely feature may have been the identity of their eventual savior. The day after sentencing, William Rees-Mogg, an editor at the conservative Times of London, published a scathing essay decrying the thinness of the case and the injustice and idiocy of the sentences. Inspired by Alexander Pope, the editorial, entitled “Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel?” caused an outcry and forced the court to vacate Jagger’s and Richards’s sentences. Jagger, said to be devastated by the sentence, wound up spending three nights in prison, all of them, reportedly, in the infirmary.

Richards spent only one night in prison and said he was treated well by his fellow inmates, but he was nonetheless relieved to be out. He soon turned wryly philosophic. “The judge managed to turn me into some folk hero overnight,” he said. “I’ve been playing up to it ever since.” The day Jagger and Richards were released from jail, policeman Norman Pilcher, who’d already busted Donovan for drugs and would later target George Harrison and John Lennon, arrested Brian Jones for marijuana possession. Klein sent Perrin to bail him out and that evening invited Jagger, Richards, and Marianne Faithfull to his penthouse suite at the London Hilton to celebrate their release. Allen was at first stunned and then enraged when a package delivered to his suite for Marianne proved to contain a small box with a false bottom from which she produced a ball of hashish. Klein grabbed it from her, flushed the hash down the toilet, and tossed the box off the balcony. He couldn’t believe it — Jagger and Richards had just gotten out of jail! “You people are stupid!” he snapped. Marianne just pouted. “You didn’t have to throw it away.”