The Texan Who Built an Empire of Ecstasy

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Just above where the San Marcos River tumbles down a small dam several miles east of Interstate 35, the crumbling redbrick hull of an old cotton gin presides over the eastern shore, and a grove of pecan trees shades a wide meadow to the west. It’s as pretty a spot as you’ll find in Central Texas, with year-round 72-degree water and layers of history.

Off to the side of the cotton gin, a glint of shiny metal reveals a silver Blue Bird bus parked semipermanently next to a shipping container and a couple of lawn chairs, where a man in shorts rolls a cigarette and leans back to tell his story.

During the eighties and nineties, Robert Jenkins was a pioneering manufacturer and distributor of the club drug ecstasy. He is 65 years old now, with a stubbly white beard and a raspy voice an octave higher than you’d expect it to be. A parade of goat-headed devil tattoos spirals up his left leg, less menacing than jauntily defiant—much like his tales of celebrity clients, notorious nightclubs, and aluminum suitcases bursting with powder. Even the darker episodes, involving disloyal snitches and nighttime raids, get told with an impish grin.

To a visitor sitting with him in this bucolic setting that doubles as his backyard, the world he describes can be disorienting. This affable guy, who does odd jobs to supplement his Social Security checks and lives quietly on the fringe of society, did what?

Jenkins occasionally interrupts himself for a trip into the shipping container to retrieve some artifact—a society magazine, a newspaper clipping, a box of photos and phony business cards. What emerges is a portrait of a Texas archetype, the charismatic and ambitious empire builder. Or maybe Jenkins is another breed of Lone Star classic, the unrepentant outlaw. Or maybe, as he likes to suggest, he was just along for a wild ride at a moment when Texas happened to be out in front of the rest of the world—for better or worse.

If 1980s Dallas was the ultimate ego city, awash in new money and glitz, the Starck Club was its unchecked id—the pleasure center pulsing beneath its conservative costume. There, in the shadow of a highway overpass just north of downtown, Park Cities socialites and striving suburbanites and less-savory party people would preen for a discriminating doorman before descending a staircase into a drug-fueled bacchanal.

New wave and techno beats boomed out of subwoofers built into the dance floor, former patrons remember, so that it felt like they were dancing inside the music. Guest performers included Stevie Nicks, Grace Jones, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Pioneering DJs such as Mike DuPriest, Kerry Jaggers, and Rick Squillante played sets that would go on to define American dance-music culture for a generation. The club’s interiors were by an up-and-coming Frenchman named Philippe Starck, who would become one of the most influential industrial designers of the twentieth century. Prince showed up. So did Tom Cruise, and Cyndi Lauper, and George W. Bush.

The pills were what brought it all together. Ecstasy in particular, otherwise known as E, or X—or MDMA, for its chemical compound, 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine. Pop a speckled little pill, and within about thirty minutes, a user’s eyes would light up, pupils dilated. A flood of dopamine and serotonin would make everything start to look, sound, and feel better than ever. On X, everyone seemed sexier and more confident. Conversations took on new levels of understanding and compassion. Then came a euphoric orgy of dancing and drinking and pressing up against others—gay, straight, Black, white—who were feeling the same. After three or four hours, the high would start to fade, but cracking another half a pill, fifty or sixty milligrams, could push the party to well past closing.

Surrounding the dance floor, obscure videos were projected onto flowing curtains that ringed the VIP seating. That was where you’d find Jenkins—mid-twenties and trim, dressed head to toe in black, with feather-light blond hair and ice-blue eyes—along with a rotating crew of friends and associates, fashion models, artists and idle hipsters, and often a professional wrestler or two. Little ribbons fluttered in the air-conditioning vents, he recalls. When the fluttering stopped, it was a sign from the club staff that law enforcement had shown up and it was time to stash the drugs.

Not that Jenkins was selling right there—he was partying like everyone else. The mid-eighties were early in his career, but he was already a few steps removed from the street-level dealers. He supplied pills in bulk to others, who in turn sold them in smaller batches to those who hawked X on the dance floor, $20 a hit.

At the end of any given night at the Starck Club, Jenkins and his crew, flush with cash, would get a few bottles of Cristal and retire to someone’s hotel room for an after-party that lasted until sunrise—at which point everyone would partner up and fall into bed somewhere. Jenkins was as much the architect of the debauchery as the club owners and DJs were. And, like any ambitious entrepreneur with a popular product, he knew this was just a step on the way to ever-bigger things.

Jenkins grew up in Tarrytown, the West Austin neighborhood that’s long been home to the city’s ruling class. His dad was a dentist and inventor of office-productivity tools. His mom was a leader of the local Junior League and worked as a personal shopper for Neiman Marcus. Their home, a five-thousand-square-foot white-columned affair with a wide front porch amid a stand of oaks, was decorated with fine art and furniture and rugs.

Young Robert didn’t take to society life. As a teen in the mid-seventies, he would marvel at the cool people who traipsed in and out of the home of one of his friends, whose mother was a fixture in the Austin music scene. Jim Franklin, the legendary counterculture artist behind iconic album covers and Armadillo World Headquarters concert posters, was a mainstay. Glimpsing a whole other lifestyle, one every bit as high-profile as the one his family maintained but not nearly as uptight, entranced Jenkins. So did the outlaw drug culture that had risen alongside it.

He wasn’t alone. “Everyone I knew in high school was trying to be a dope dealer,” he remembers. But when his parents caught him with a bag of quaaludes when he was fifteen or sixteen, they shipped him off to a military prep school, Admiral Farragut Academy, in St. Petersburg, Florida. On a property formerly known as the Jungle Country Club Hotel and once frequented by notorious gangsters, the school had a reputation for academic excellence but also tended to end up with the wayward sons of privileged families.

Rather than pick up the kind of discipline his folks had hoped for, Jenkins was introduced to a world of more hardened and experienced hustlers than he’d ever seen in little old hippie Austin. One classmate, who’d been sent down from the Northeast, said his dad worked for a notorious crime family. When Jenkins went to visit after graduation, in 1978, the friend had just gotten a new Corvette for his birthday. “We went out tooling around in that and eating pills,” he says.

College wasn’t a great fit for Jenkins, who bounced from the University of Texas at Austin to the University of Oregon, with a stint on an oil-pipeline crew in South Texas in between. In the early eighties, he landed at Austin College, in Sherman, where he met one of the most important friends he’d ever have. Bob Carson, who came to be known as China Bob, was also a student who’d taken some detours—in his case, to try his hand at being a commercial artist and to live for a time with his mother in Hong Kong. He too arrived at college a couple of years older than his peers.

Carson had grown up about an hour’s drive south, in the White Rock Lake area of East Dallas, and as early as junior high had started selling pot to the smokers hanging out by the bike racks at Bryan Adams High School. At Austin College, he found a similar market among fraternity and sorority members—who were also, it turned out, Jenkins’s clients. The two competitors—Carson tall, with a sonorous Southern voice, and Jenkins shorter and fiery—initially eyed each other warily. Yet at a small school in a small town, a merger was all but inevitable.

They knew they could do better together than they could eating into each other’s profits. They also recognized that they both possessed an entrepreneurial spirit and a bottomless appetite for life—which, in turn, required money to fund hobbies like riding motorcycles and experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs. An opportunity to level up came when Carson’s dad, a retired professional drag racer with a hot rod shop and unconventional ideas about how to finance his son’s college education, connected them with an acquaintance, a hot rod collector who sold marijuana and cocaine in large quantities.

The connection was also named Bob, and he was a bona fide big-time drug dealer, according to Carson and Jenkins. They describe him as a fortysomething single man who operated out of three adjacent homes in the Dallas suburb of Richardson. He lived in one and stored his merchandise in the other two. A hidden door inside an oak-paneled pool room in the middle house led to a long, narrow chamber that ran the length of the wall, with a collection of firearms hanging at one end and stacked bricks of cocaine at the other.

To Carson, walking into that space for the first time was life-changing, like passing through a portal into a different world. He and Jenkins had been “playing around,” selling small amounts of weed, and here was a guy who would front them as much as one hundred pounds. Carson visited the dealer alone the first time and hauled sixty pounds back to Sherman, the marijuana packed into black plastic garbage bags in the back seat of his white VW Beetle. He sat outside Jenkins’s duplex apartment and beeped the horn until his friend came out to see the surprise. “Game on,” Jenkins said.

Monthly trips to Richardson did more than exponentially increase the amounts of drugs and money the pair were dealing with. They witnessed a level of professionalization that for the first time made selling drugs look more like a long-term vocation than a casual hustle. They would enter the contraband room, count the money they’d earned, and measure out the next batch of drugs to sell. All business—in and out in an hour.

To hear Jenkins tell it today, he was every bit as blown away by what he and Carson saw at the Richardson house as his partner was. But Carson remembers his friend taking it in stride, even drawing inspiration from it. “Nothing could shock Robert,” he says. “He had lived a very colorful life for years before I met him. He started experimenting a lot younger than I did.”

When Carson returned to Hong Kong for a summer internship, Jenkins became the main point of contact with their supplier. He soon began dealing beyond Sherman, selling weed in Austin and Dallas. By the time he lived up to his parents’ hopes by graduating, with a history degree, he had a thriving business and a world of opportunity in front of him.

Until 1985, MDMA was entirely legal in the U.S. First synthesized in 1912 by scientists at the German pharmaceutical giant Merck as part of a blood-clotting research project, the compound got little attention until the seventies, around the time psychologists started experimenting with it as a therapeutic tool. From there, it started trickling out to recreational users, including at avant-garde clubs like New York’s Studio 54. But it didn’t explode nationally until the Starck Club opened, in 1984, the same year the Republican National Convention nominated Ronald Reagan for reelection at the Dallas Convention Center, less than a mile away.

Maybe the timing was coincidental, and the drug’s popularity would have spread far and wide anyway. Maybe Dallas’s conservative image was constraining its inner freak, and the Starck Club provided just the right mix of glam and gluttony to let it loose. In any case, that year you could buy MDMA pills over the counter by slipping the bartender some cash.

Management tended to look the other way on these unofficial transactions, which were a moneymaker for the club because ecstasy kept people drinking and dancing. And since the pills led users to fawn over one another, they weren’t exactly causing the kind of trouble that would attract the police. But sex and drugs have a way of scandalizing parents and polite society, and pressure quickly mounted on lawmakers to do something. On July 1, 1985, the Drug Enforcement Agency classified MDMA as a Schedule I drug. The first ecstasy bust in the nation reportedly happened in Dallas, at a gas station off Preston Road, barely more than a week later.

As the ecstasy trade started booming, Jenkins took note. He initially made small batches by pouring MDMA powder into capsules by hand, one at a time, and selling them at a downtown Austin gay club called Halls. It was “manual, labor-intensive, painstaking work,” Jenkins remembers—not exactly a romp. But when it was clear the drug would soon become illegal, he knew it was time to jump in for real. A penalty of years in federal prison for a first offense would scare a lot of people out of the business, he figured. Somebody had to keep the party going.

Jenkins had kept in touch with Carson and sent occasional shipments of weed to him in Hong Kong in a hollowed-out Sony Walkman. Now he had a business proposal—to partner up again in the drug trade, this time with a new focus. “Hey, this X thing, you might not know about it, but it’s very popular,” Jenkins said. “It’s about to be illegal, which is going to make it very profitable.” He asked his friend to join him in the new venture when he returned to Texas.

Around the same time, a UT-Austin doctoral candidate in cell biology named Rob Widdowson, who’d fallen in with a group of BMX riders who loved to cruise around Austin high on ecstasy, started experimenting in a lab with alternatives to MDMA. The law regarding ecstasy was specific about the chemical compound it targeted—which left a glaring loophole for slight variations. Prior to the eighties, a common street name for MDMA was Adam. The best-known variation, called Eve, switched out the methylamine in MDMA for ethylamine, making it MDEA. Eve delivered a high that was a little harsher, a little more electric, and not as pleasant and loving. Widdowson landed on substituting hydroxylamine for methylamine, making MDHA. Its effects weren’t harsh, like Eve’s, and lasted longer than Adam’s. He called it Heaven.

Widdowson turned to Jenkins to handle its distribution, and Jenkins helped turn Widdowson’s process into an industrial operation. This feat required creativity to get chemicals and lab equipment in bulk. With money he’d saved from the weed business, Jenkins bought one of the first laser printers on the market, which sold for $7,000, and began making letterheads and business cards for fake companies to use as fronts. Escroc Incorporated—cheekily using the French word for con man—purchased laboratory equipment. A furniture-stripping company ordered chemicals in 55-gallon drums. A vitamin-supplement company secured an 1,800-pound machine that could make scores of pills per minute. A new machine would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, Jenkins recalls, but he found a used one for about $20,000. Some of the pills had the letters “HVN” stamped on one side, for Heaven, and others had the letters “BOB,” for the various Roberts who’d played parts in getting the operation going.

For one round of production, Jenkins and his partners set up the stamper in a friend’s garage in the historic Clarksville neighborhood of Austin. They had to line the walls with plastic sheeting to contain the clouds of ecstasy dust that would billow out of the machine as it noisily pumped out the pills—Bam! Bam! Bam!

The first time Jenkins and Carson showed up at the Starck Club, they didn’t make it past the doorman. Jenkins was wearing blue jeans. He was no stranger to nightclubs, and he had grown up around fashion, but he’d always resisted the kind of established order that the Starck’s conspicuously sparkly dress code represented. That night they left and hit other bars, in nearby Deep Ellum, but soon after, Jenkins returned wearing a black button-down, pleated black slacks, and a pair of handmade French dress shoes by Joseph Fenestrier—a fashionable outfit both slightly subversive and understated enough not to attract attention.

Before long, Carson remembers, “We’d walk up, and the red rope would come back.” That was partly their luxury apparel doing its job. But, just as much, the duo became known by the club’s gatekeepers as big spenders and an essential element of the party inside. They had their own table.

Jenkins’s MDHA pills weren’t the only ones in circulation at the Starck Club, to be sure, but few suppliers, if any, could bring the kind of volume he could, thanks to the steady flow from his pill press. It was clear from the start that the federal government would close the loophole that made drugs like Eve and Heaven technically legal, so Jenkins treated his pills as illegal and tried to keep a low profile. His strategy was validated by the 1986 passage of the Controlled Substance Analogue Enforcement Act, which said that any drug that was “substantially similar” to a Schedule I drug and intended for human recreational use could be policed as a Schedule I drug.

Jenkins proved a savvy marketer. One of his moves involved creating novelty by adding red or blue food coloring to the pills, or maybe a little anise oil to boost the scent. He likens it to Procter & Gamble selling soap. As soon as demand levels off, it’s time to offer new formulations of the same product to get people excited again. “Hey, I’ve still got those domes,” a dealer could say to a customer. “But I’ve got these new ones too. You want to try out the new ones?”

As in any sales organization, Jenkins set up multiple layers of seniority and, in the process, kept himself well removed from street-level legal dangers. He would supply pills to a handful of lieutenants, and they would build their own networks of dealers who reported to them. Carson explains that they put limits on what their associates could sell by classifying drugs in two broad categories. “There are drugs that might cause you to hook up with someone you don’t know that well,” he says, “and then there are drugs that you would spend your children’s Christmas money for.” He and Jenkins wanted to be in the business of selling the former, not the latter—even though they used plenty of hard drugs themselves in their free time.

The sales restrictions were less a matter of establishing a moral high ground and more a practical business decision, a way of managing risk and giving the business a clear focus. “It was just kind of understood that the hug-drug scene was cool, but the powder scene [cocaine, heroin, and speed] was a bad thing,” Carson says. “And it could bring heat down on everything that we were doing that wasn’t so evil.”

Jenkins had previously sold cocaine, and he’d seen some ugly realities of the drug world in the process. His time on a pipeline crew, for instance, came after he’d accrued debt from using coke himself, and it put him up close to fights and gangs and overdoses. Soon after he got into the X business, he says, their Richardson supplier killed himself after getting busted. Rather than face prison, he shot himself in the head.

To try to avoid conflict, Jenkins established a rule that he and his lieutenants would never front more pills to a lower-level dealer than they were willing to risk losing. If the dealer ended up not being able to pay them back, they simply wouldn’t do business with that person again. “Our deal was like, ‘Join the party,’ ” he says. “ ‘And if you f— us around, you’re not invited anymore.’ ”

Yet Carson notes that they “did have to maintain kind of a scary persona” to keep associates from ripping them off. He learned to carry himself a certain way—to project not just toughness but an untouchable level of success without being too flashy. “You’re riding the best motorcycles, you’re hanging out with the best-looking girls,” he says. “It’s just kind of like, ‘This guy’s not to be f—ed with.’ ”

That didn’t always work. Carson once cornered a “boisterous, sloppy” young dealer with spiky bleached-blond hair at the Starck Club and tased him in the groin with a stun gun—“which is about as weapon as I got,” he says. The dealer had been conspicuously throwing money around in the club—even while he owed Carson. “You need to make good with me,” Carson growled at him, while a few big guys from club security formed a circle around them to shield anyone else from seeing what was happening.

Jenkins preferred more of a carrot than a stick approach to leadership. He took to picking up the check for everyone in the crew when they’d go out—to show he was “top dog” and essentially buy loyalty. And he was quick to tell Carson it was a bad look when a conflict did erupt. That was easy for him to say, of course, because he worked with only a small group of close associates, who were unlikely to try to rip off their source. “He was pretty damn good at
insulating himself,” Carson says. “He was always a bit like a conductor—a planner, a strategist.”

Jenkins doesn’t see himself in those days as all that different from some of the work hard, play hard Dallasites he ran into at the clubs—the kind of well-dressed, money-motivated people who still define some of the city’s most conservative enclaves. During the day, he busied himself with securing raw materials and turning batches of powder into pills. “I was working hard the same way that a guy on Wall Street works hard,” he says. “They talk about their eighty-hour weeks, but they’re just addicted to the money. It’s the same thing.”

Listening to Jenkins tell his stories up there overlooking the San Marcos River, it’s impossible not to wonder if it’s all real. Memories tend to get fuzzy or exaggerated over decades, especially when enough drugs are involved. Some details simply can’t be verified. Jenkins talks about partying with pop stars and scions of famous families. He tells of being smuggled into a federal detention center to meet with an enforcer for another drug ring. He says one of his chief competitors at the Starck Club was savagely beaten and robbed in his home one Halloween by masked men who turned out to be off-duty cops “jacked on steroids.”

Most often, others vouch for his stories, or documents back them up. Jenkins compares himself to Mr. Magoo, the 1950s animated character who bumbles his way into countless ridiculous situations and manages to emerge none the worse. It’s a conveniently self-deprecating way to pin his drug-world odyssey on dumb chance. In reality, his ability to skip along from one unlikely episode to the next had more to do with his habit of saying yes, the kind of “why not” mentality life coaches preach today.

Jenkins had originally agreed with Rob Widdowson that they would each pull $2 million from the business and then quit, clean and simple—and rich. But the deeper he got into the business, the more Jenkins found that the idea of hitting a number and bowing out had lost its appeal. There were simply too many opportunities, including one that came via a club-world fixture named Eric Kimmel who lived in the same Deep Ellum loft building as Carson.

The publisher of a small fashion magazine called Haute, Kimmel was well-known in Dallas as a kind of playboy. He walked around barefoot in Armani suits, drove an old Jaguar coupe, and hung out with models from the Dallas agency Kim Dawson. The magazine, filled with society-party pics and elaborate fashion spreads, never made much money, but it allowed Kimmel to finance his lifestyle by bartering advertising space for freebies and favors. By 1987, though, the Texas economy was struggling through an extended oil bust, and the ad market was drying up. Kimmel needed a new plan.

The owner of a Paris-based chain of fashion boutiques called Hippolyte, which had recently opened a location in Dallas, inspired an idea. Kimmel thought moving to the City of Light might be Haute’s salvation. After all, the magazine already had a French name, the fashion business was always thriving in Paris, and the city’s designers and boutique owners would surely swoon over a Texan in their midst. While today Kimmel doesn’t recall the terms of their arrangement, Jenkins says he invested in the venture and agreed to work with a Dallas printer to publish the magazine. Kimmel would remain editor in chief, based in Paris.

For Jenkins, even if he ended up losing six figures on an English-language magazine covering the Paris fashion scene, there was an incentive to do it: a whole new market for his drugs. Plus, it sounded like a great adventure.

Within a few months, he sent a girlfriend over to Paris with a few thousand pills. He had gone before her to start casing nightclubs, such as the legendary Les Bains Douches, to establish a network of dealers. He’d survey the scene while doing X himself. “I would just sit there, and within an hour I could figure out who the dope dealers were,” he says. At Le Palace, he met a baby-faced young Corsican man whom he started supplying with a thousand pills at a time and who took at least one batch to Ibiza, the Spanish party island in the Mediterranean.

Kimmel had landed an apartment in the Latin Quarter, not far from Notre Dame, and they kept Jenkins’s ecstasy there, in a large suitcase. Accounts differ on exactly how many pills made it to Paris—Jenkins says 30,000, but Kimmel later told a reporter 6,000. In any case, Jenkins used young women as drug mules, he says, partly because he wanted to limit his own legal peril but also because he figured they’d be less likely to get searched. Kimmel, who’d never been involved in the drug trade back in Dallas, began to use some of the pills in his customary bartering in the publishing business, but he never became an actual dealer.

Things rolled along for the better part of a year—enough time to produce a couple of issues of the magazine, Jenkins says—until one day, in 1988, police raided the Paris apartment, allegedly tipped off by a couple of Paris Haute contributors who’d taken some pills for themselves and been sloppy about keeping quiet. Jenkins was back in the States, and Kimmel had just returned home from Le Palace at dawn and crashed into bed when four officers pounded on the door. It was billed as the first European ecstasy bust. Kimmel was arrested and taken to jail, with bail set at one million francs, or nearly half a million dollars today. Eventually, he was sentenced to five years in prison and served less than two.

Five thousand miles away, Jenkins was left wondering whether his business partner would rat him out to make a deal with prosecutors eager to uncover a larger drug ring. As time went on, Jenkins grew furious. He was out thousands of pills, and he had pallets of printed magazines in Dallas that would never ship—a couple hundred thousand dollars lost, all told. He could get over that. But it was quite another thing to be looking over his shoulder to see if Interpol was after him. He never returned to France, and he couldn’t find a way to forgive Kimmel.

Jenkins was growing more sensitive about his legal peril, especially after a scare he’d had while traveling from Taos, New Mexico, where Widdowson had set up a large-scale lab. Jenkins had just picked up a batch of Heaven and stuffed several dozen pounds of the powder into plastic garbage sacks inside a large metal Zero Halliburton suitcase, which he wrapped with packing tape to prevent the latches and handle from failing under the weight.

In those days, passengers typically didn’t have to show identification to board planes, so Jenkins booked his drug flights under the name Buster Snellings, a joke inspired by a National Lampoon bit about a “dope millionaire” by that name. But this time, a ticket agent in Albuquerque asked to see Jenkins’s driver’s license. He explained that a friend had made the reservation, and the agent gave him the benefit of the doubt, he says—but then a baggage handler came out and asked if they could remove all the tape so the suitcase would scan properly in the X-ray machine.

“What do you mean? I’ve been traveling with that thing for years, and it always scans—try it again!” Jenkins practically shouted. He was sure he was finally going down. But when the handler disappeared back into the baggage area and didn’t return, Jenkins got on the plane.

He sweat through his shirt on the flight back, and at baggage claim, he watched the silver suitcase circle multiple times while eyeing the crowd to see if anyone was surveilling him. Then he grabbed the bag and hightailed it out of the airport. It was the last time he ever flew commercial with drugs and one of the last times he did business with Widdowson, who holds a grudge to this day because he says Jenkins never paid him in full for their final deal. Widdowson got raided by the DEA shortly thereafter and escaped to Belize, where he lived as a fugitive under an assumed name.

Widdowson was on the lam. Eric Kimmel was in a French prison. Bob from Richardson was dead. As the eighties gave way to the nineties, even the Starck Club was gone—closed in 1989, as a wilder, baggy-pants rave scene arose that made the club’s swishy glam seem mannerly by comparison. Yet through the tumult, Jenkins’s appetite for more of everything continued to grow.

A chemist who’d collaborated with Widdowson in Austin had begun producing large batches of Heaven from a lab he’d set up in Washington State. Jenkins considered this product to be superior to Widdowson’s, and the chemist was extremely careful. Almost nobody knew his name, and even Jenkins didn’t know how to get in touch with him—the chemist would reach out when he was ready to do business. People called him the Monster. He accepted only gold bullion as payment. All that suited Jenkins just fine—the more clandestine the better, especially after his scare in New Mexico.

Dallas was too small a market for Jenkins and Carson to satisfy their individual ambitions, so Carson set up shop in Atlanta. From there, armed with Jenkins’s pills, Carson started exploring the East Coast, even making a foray into New York City’s notorious club world, which he found challenging because “honest people were hard to find, and it was more cutthroat” than he was used to. He says he did “a few large, successful deals” and a couple that went bad before he moved on. Florida was more fruitful.

Jenkins started seeking other markets as well, including Kansas City. To support the new distribution and produce pills out of all the powder the Monster was supplying—hundreds of thousands of doses per year, he estimates—Jenkins needed far more manufacturing capacity than the old single-station pill press could provide. He had already invested in a 32-station tablet maker that could turn out thousands of pills per hour. In Liberty, Missouri, at the edge of Kansas City, he rented a metal storage building, where he’d run the machine every couple of months.

In Kansas City, he also met the man who would take his business to Hollywood. S.E.J.—known only by his initials and called Sej, pronounced “Sedge”—was tall, with a boyishly handsome face, long hair he kept dyed black, and a pair of black leather pants he wore almost every day. An aspiring musician from a rough neighborhood in Kansas City, Sej was equal parts charmer and tough guy, and when he settled in L.A., he started hanging around bars on the Sunset Strip during the hair-metal scene and befriending bands such as Mötley Crüe.

When Jenkins’s operation reached Chicago, a Dallas native named Jon Schy introduced the pills to the booming house music scene that had emerged there, in the former industrial buildings of the West Loop neighborhood. As many as a thousand partyers would pack into the 10,000-square-foot loft he shared with four guys, two of them bouncers at nearby bars. Schy installed nightclub-style lighting and eight-foot stacks of speakers and hosted sets by some of the legendary DJs of that era. He remembers Rollerblading in circles in the middle of the room one night, naked and high on ecstasy, holding two cats by the arms while the animals’ feet skimmed just above the floor.

Jenkins’s life became a coast-to-coast blur of self-indulgence. He eventually had lieutenants in eight cities, with many of them overseeing their own expansions. “I’d work my ass off for a week and then drive around the country and do anything I wanted for a couple of months,” he says. “Everywhere I would see somebody, they would give me money—tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands.” He didn’t save anything.

He bought a vintage Rolls-Royce at one point, a 1957 Silver Cloud I with a black top. A red Ducati motorcycle. A dark brown Mercedes-Benz sedan and a 24-foot Mercedes box truck with custom panels in the back that lifted out so he could stash pills behind them. He bought a bus, a tan 1978 Blue Bird Wanderlodge with a plush motor home interior, and he began living on the road.

After purchasing two small helicopters and a few dozen military-surplus jet engines, he started a company with a plan to create engine packages for souped-up flying machines. Southwest Minicopters never sold one of its experimental aircraft while he was involved, but it did turn Jenkins’s restless mind to a new hobby. At one air show, he bought a plane for himself, a single-engine Cessna. He sank hundreds of thousands of dollars into his aviation business, which, in the end, was a smoke screen for the real business anyway.

At this point, he’d been using heroin every day for many years. He’d picked up a habit of abusing opioids during his oil-pipeline days. Now he kept a small plastic Afrin bottle filled with a black-tar heroin mixture in his pocket and would snort little puffs throughout the day. He started spending increasing amounts of time in strip clubs, often bunking in his bus with dancers he met. Just as his ambition had transformed him from college hustler to drug lord, his appetite had made him a junkie. A “why not” mindset had long given him carte blanche, but over time, the consequences of unrestrained indulgence took hold.

One day in L.A., after Jenkins bought a pair of steel-toed boots at a boutique on Melrose Avenue, he spotted a man walking across the street and had to do a double take. It was Eric Kimmel, back from prison in France. A few years of simmering resentment came to a boil, and Jenkins took off across the street and jumped his old friend before Kimmel saw it coming, punching him and kicking him with his new boots. Kimmel, who is much larger than Jenkins, acknowledges the fight but says Jenkins was able to beat him so savagely only because he had the element of surprise. In any case, it was the middle of the day on a busy shopping strip, so Jenkins fled as quickly as he’d attacked. He says he later met up with Kimmel to apologize and gave him several thousand dollars to call it even. (Kimmel denies receiving the gift.)

In the mid-nineties—he can’t say for sure which year—Jenkins found himself in Las Vegas at the Luxor, the pyramid-shaped casino resort fronted by a larger-than-life replica of the Great Sphinx of Giza. A row of stone ram’s-head fountains spouted into a long swimming pool in the back, one of several bodies of Caribbean-blue water surrounded by barely clad revelers. In the near distance, the lights of the Strip beckoned Jenkins’s appetite for vice. He was waiting for a friend to arrive for a few days of unbridled excess—as if that weren’t his everyday reality—and he couldn’t feel a thing.

“Everything just seemed boring,” he remembers. He had all the money, drugs, and sex he could possibly want, but it didn’t matter. “I felt like there was nothing in Las Vegas that could stimulate me.”

He’d acquired all the trappings of success—valuable collectibles in addition to the cars and clothes. Inspired in part by the wall of firearms he’d encountered back in Richardson, he’d bought vintage handguns and rifles, including a hundred-year-old German pistol and a sniper rifle he says was used during the Bosnian War. He had antiquities as well, such as a collection of thirty Tyrian shekels, the amount Judas was paid to betray Jesus.

He wasn’t just accumulating things—some he’d use and move on from. “Really rich drug dealers, they hide their money by buying a $300,000 watch, because you can buy that watch and then fly somewhere and sell it and have that money there,” Schy says. “Robert was constantly buying s— and then selling it for less. But he was making so much money, it was all funny money.”

Jenkins says there was no great bolt of clarity that led him to feel numb that night at the Luxor, no urge to clean up and grow up. “Definitely not that,” he says. He was a philosophy minor in college, and today he calls himself an absurdist—a kind of nihilist who focuses on the conflict between man’s search for meaning and the impossibility of finding it. In the face of that futility, why not just say yes to whatever you feel like?

“He’s not driven by Judeo-Christian guilt or anything like that,” says his old pal Carson. “I, on the other hand, was for years torn by guilt, like, ‘I don’t deserve all of this.’ ” As the nineties wore on, Carson started using his “ill-gotten gains” to buy real estate in Atlanta and go legit—but in the process, the guilt sent him into a deeper and deeper spiral of “self-destructive” drug use.

Jenkins had no problem justifying the ecstasy business to himself. “I probably got a million people laid, and that’s worth something, right?” he says, only half joking. And since it’s biologically difficult to overdose on pure X, he didn’t worry about doing mass harm. Ecstasy-related deaths, when they occur, often result from some ancillary cause—dehydration or alcohol poisoning, for instance—and Jenkins chalked that up to user error, not his doing.

His perspective relies on a selective reading of the facts. On the one hand, because ecstasy has not been shown to be addictive in the same way as other stimulants such as cocaine and methamphetamine, it’s described as a safer illegal drug. But it can increase one’s heart rate and body temperature to dangerous levels, effects that can be intensified in the conditions in which users tend to take it. Hours of dancing in a hot and sweaty club can increase the risk of dehydration. The euphoric high can mask the effects of alcohol or other drugs people consume along with ecstasy. What’s more, the purity of X is widely variable, and pills can be laced with other substances, such as ketamine or fentanyl.

In some studies, MDMA use has also been shown to damage brain cells that release serotonin, essentially dulling the very senses that ecstasy heightens. As the DEA puts it in a fact sheet it circulates for parents and educators, “It is ironic that a drug that is taken to increase pleasure may cause damage that reduces a person’s ability to feel pleasure.”

Maybe years of pill popping had done just that to Jenkins. Or maybe, as he felt, the drug game was no fun anymore. The necessary chemicals had become harder than ever to procure. Law enforcement and media attention were starting to create a public panic about ecstasy abuse among adolescents. Pressure was mounting on lawmakers to institute harsher sentencing in ecstasy cases. Meanwhile, most large-scale ecstasy production was by then occurring in labs in Belgium and the Netherlands, while Israeli and Russian organized crime groups were increasingly controlling distribution, especially in the largest markets, such as Los Angeles.

Not long after the Luxor, Jenkins decided to walk away from the business. If nothing matters, then there’s nothing to hang on to. An old acquaintance, a Canadian hustler named Terry, took over for the price of the “markers” Jenkins had out to his network—meaning Jenkins expected to be paid out for the pills he had fronted to dealers already, and no more. Terry became one of the few people to know the Monster’s identity and had Jenkins take the big tablet maker out to the West Coast so it would be closer to the source. Carson and Schy walked away at that point too.

Jenkins also began extricating himself from his expensive aviation business. He had enough money and valuables to keep going for a while without a plan. And he had a girlfriend, Missy Conner. Jenkins had met her in a strip club in Kansas City where she was dancing, and she’d become a fixture in his life—maybe the love of his life. She was six feet tall and blond, with hair usually in braids and a comfort with her body that often led her to forgo clothes, no matter where she was or whom she was with. In Conner, Jenkins found a companion whose appetites were as unrestrained as his.

They’d moved into a little bungalow with a small pool and a two-car garage in the Crestview neighborhood of Austin. A friend had bought the house for Jenkins and then transferred it to Conner’s name. Conner started dancing at the Yellow Rose Cabaret, just a few blocks away on Lamar Boulevard. They vacationed at Burning Man. Jenkins finally kicked heroin, a success he credits to his taking up chain-smoking cigarettes.

He was in his mid-thirties and semiretired. He’d figure out what to do next—he always did.

Bam! Bam! Bam! One morning in 1999, in the predawn darkness, a series of flash-bangs and smoke bombs went off in front of the little house in Crestview, Jenkins remembers. A team of law enforcement agents stormed in, dressed in black and carrying assault rifles. Jenkins and Conner were sleeping in their bedroom, Conner naked as usual, and they soon had gun barrels in their faces. An officer whom Jenkins remembers as “six four, with fish-scale tattoos on both arms” pulled him out of bed and onto the floor and drove a knee into his back.

In that moment, Jenkins realized he’d been betrayed. A longtime friend named Kevin had been busted a few months before for a large-scale marijuana-growing operation on a ranch in South Texas near Hondo. Facing the possibility of a long prison sentence for having been caught with more than two thousand marijuana plants, Kevin decided to cooperate with prosecutors to help bring down somebody else. Jenkins says he had helped run electricity to Kevin’s garage, which powered the grow operation, and that was enough to tie him in as a coconspirator. He thinks the feds had heard his name plenty of times over the years as the ecstasy kingpin, and now they had a chance to get him.

Kevin agreed to surreptitiously record Jenkins and Conner. As Jenkins recalls, they met for lunch on San Antonio’s River Walk, during the week of Kevin’s sentencing, and a strolling mariachi band was too loud for a recording device to pick up the conversation clearly. Kevin then invited the couple up to his hotel room, where they continued to talk—drunkenly, thanks to the enormous fishbowl margaritas they’d consumed. The topic of Kevin fleeing to Mexico while he was out on bond came up, and Jenkins urged his friend to do it. “Anything, anything, anything is better than going to prison,” he told Kevin, according to court records. “Anything.”

When he’d first heard of Kevin’s bust, Jenkins had moved his gun collection to a storage unit. That precautionary measure meant the house was clean of weapons, but Jenkins had never expected it would be raided—and never suspected he was being set up. He was ultimately prosecuted for aiding and abetting Kevin’s weed farm. It was like nailing Al Capone for tax evasion. Jenkins was never charged for dealing X.

He was sentenced to 37 months and served just over two years, first at a detention facility in San Antonio and then at a federal prison in Bastrop. Conner forged an unlikely friendship with Jenkins’s parents, and together, the three visited Jenkins every week. In the prior fifteen years, Jenkins had barely seen his mother and father, who only vaguely knew he was up to no good. He would show up for the occasional holiday when he happened to be clean and talk about obviously fake jobs, and they’d learned not to ask too many questions about where all his money came from.

Now they knew, at least in broad strokes, and they chose to build a relationship with him and his partner. Jenkins had never stopped calling his father Daddy, and now he had a chance to renew the relationship. His mother got him a subscription to Gourmet magazine, and every week Jenkins would choose an elaborate recipe. Then Conner and his parents would go back to Austin and cook it in the big house in Tarrytown. They’d report back on how it had tasted, to give him a virtual family experience.

Today Jenkins calls his time in prison a “positive experience, a class you can’t sign up for.” In some ways, it mellowed him out. “You learn patience,” he says. But he didn’t spend restless nights reconsidering his life choices, either. His greatest point of pride wasn’t personal reform but rather adhering to a strict code among felons: He says he never cut a deal with prosecutors by squealing on anyone else. “I held my mud.”

When he came back from what Conner called his sabbatical, Jenkins moved back in with her and took a construction job, working first as a laborer and eventually in safety operations for a structural steel erector—a contractor that assembled the skeletons of new buildings, a booming business in fast-growing Austin. Not since his stint in the oil fields had Jenkins done that kind of daily grind of dirty work.

He had to be properly employed as a condition of his five-year probation, but he needed a way to support himself in any case. He’d burned through the remains of his drug money and gradually sold off most of his expensive toys. He’d taken out a loan against the house and drained his equity in that. Jenkins also tried to reimburse his father, who had covered most of his legal fees.

Jenkins and Conner got married on the beach near Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, in 2003, at a resort owned by the family of one of Jenkins’s prison friends. A few weekends a year, they would throw pool parties in the Crestview backyard, Conner and her friends from the Yellow Rose usually topless. The first few times, Jenkins invited his next-door neighbors, John Acker and his wife, a couple with young kids, to come on over. They politely declined and took pains to keep their children from catching the view over the fence from the kitchen window.

But over the years, the neighboring couples built a friendship. The one time the Ackers ever made a cameo at a party next door, Conner had told them they absolutely could not miss a fire dance one of her friends was going to put on. That night, surf guitar music blared from a stereo as the dancer emerged for the performance dressed in leather and straps. John watched, speechless, as “two burning orbs linked by a long chain” streaked through the darkness, and his wife stood beside him holding a baby monitor.

Jenkins eventually started his own business, one that specialized in tilt-wall construction, casting and standing up the concrete walls of big-box stores. He worked in the industry for a total of eighteen years, eight of them on his own, but eventually, consolidation forced many of the small players like Jenkins to fold. He hung on, but by the end, there was no underlying value to his business.

That’s the Jenkins that John Acker remembers—the hardworking, hard-living guy next door who made friends easily and was always ready with a cackling laugh. Once when Acker was headed out to return a library book, Jenkins stopped him to ask its title: Commentaries on the Civil War, by Julius Caesar. “Oh!” Jenkins exclaimed. “You should also read The Conquest of Gaul.” He’d read it in college. Another time, Acker was heading inside after playing with his kids in the yard when Jenkins happened to look over the fence. Jenkins had never shown Acker a sentimental side, but here he was, clearly soaking in this picture of wholesome family living. “You’re a lucky man, Jack,” he said.

One day this spring, at his home along the river, Jenkins makes his way carefully down a set of wooden stairs to the basement of the abandoned cotton gin. The dirt-floored space was used as the set for Leatherface’s lair in the 2003 remake of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. A high school friend of Jenkins’s owns the building, which claims to have once been the world’s largest cotton gin of its kind.

When Jenkins’s old construction boss retired, he gave Jenkins one of his prized possessions: a silver Blue Bird bus, seven feet longer than Jenkins’s original and tricked out inside, the kind of bus a man could live in. It’s been Jenkins’s home for ten years, parked alongside the cotton gin. When he first moved out by the river, he was not long out of the steel business and couldn’t help but see possibilities for the building. He drew up plans for a distillery and restaurant.

“Over here is where we were going to have refrigeration,” he says, nodding to a dark corner, “and a dumbwaiter over there, and we were going to put in a freight elevator.” He shares details about the new walls he planned to erect and steel support beams he wanted to install. On the main floor, an open-air brick shell, enormous old steel-mesh cylinders hang from the ceiling. Jenkins hoped to repurpose them as light fixtures—one of the only parts of the restaurant project that ever got off the ground.

“A year went by, and then another, and another . . .” He trails off. The owner had other life priorities come up. Today Jenkins keeps a BMW motorcycle, one of his last expensive toys, and a small wooden boat in the building. He doesn’t regret that he lost a chance to build something again. “I don’t feel ambitious,” he says. “I always was, but now, you know, watching my parents get older, myself get older, what I want is just for things not to change for a while.”

One of the only regrets he admits to having in his life is attacking Eric Kimmel in L.A. “It’s not selling pills. It’s not being a heroin addict. It’s that I dragged this guy into my world, and he suffered for it.” Kimmel lives in Puerto Rico today, and the two talk occasionally on the phone. “Even though he’s good with it now, nothing’s changed for me,” Jenkins says. “I’m still embarrassed about it.”

Bob Carson remains Jenkins’s closest friend. He spent almost twenty years in Hangzhou, China, married to a Russian ballerina and returned to the States after she died of cancer. Now he lives drug-free in Atlanta and works as a project manager for an elevator business. Jon Schy lives in Chicago and builds elaborate event sets for Fortune 500 companies. Sej died when he ran a Cadillac convertible into a tractor trailer. Rob Widdowson, who eventually turned himself in and served a prison sentence, lives in Belize with his adopted son. Kevin didn’t flee to Mexico and was released from federal prison in 2002. Nobody knows where the Monster is.

MDMA is still illegal in the U.S., but in 2023 Australia became the first country to legalize the drug as a prescription medication. A growing body of well-funded research supports its effectiveness in therapy, especially for treating PTSD.

Jenkins and Conner eventually split, but they remain close. She has an apartment in Austin but travels a lot for her management job with a day-spa chain. Jenkins’s parents live in a retirement home. Jenkins makes the hour-long drive into Austin once a week to eat dinner with them and read to his dad. He worries this article will disappoint them.

Robert Jenkins, the top dog, the King of X, knows what his life today looks like, karma finally biting him, the ex-con drug dealer living in a bus by the river. But then again, he’s always lived on his terms, and he’s the one sitting there with the million-dollar view.

This article originally appeared in the May 2025 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “The King of X.” Subscribe today.

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