It is seven o’clock on a humid Los Angeles evening, and business is winding down at a suburban car showroom. I walk past a team of guys polishing Japanese hybrids with bright white rags, past the twenty-five-cent gumball machines and into the air-conditioned office. An attorney has arranged this meeting with one of America’s most mysterious men — who has reportedly had surgery to change his identity — at his place of work.
His name is Alfred Dellentash. When I first punched his name into Google, six months ago, the results were simply baffling. First, there is an archived People magazine article from 1978, titled: ‘TOURING ROCK STARS GO TO AL DELLENTASH WHEN THEY REALLY WANT TO GET HIGH.’ The headline is a clever joke, you see, because the story is about his multi-million-dollar private jet-leasing business, which he built in his twenties: “Among the acts that have chartered Dellentash’s three Convairs, two helicopters and a Boeing 707 are the Rolling Stones, KISS and the Grateful Dead.”
via The Man Who Got America High | Narratively | Human stories, boldly told..
