Report: Drug Bust Story in Keith Richards' Autobiography Not Accurate

Once upon a time, there lived a man named Keith Richards who really loved drugs.

Police notoriously weren't exactly all that cool with just how much Richards loved his drugs. That's how Richards notoriously kept getting himself arrested.

Then on June 27, 1973, the Chelsea police drug squad raided Richards' Cheyne Walk, London home and Richards ended up slapped with 25 criminal drug charges.

That's where the story starts getting colorful, depending apparently on who's telling it.

Richards historically resolved that particular bust’s charges by paying a 250-British pound fine because he saw proof that the police went overboard because they had it in for Richards specifically.

That can’t be changed. Richards’ recent memoir “Life” details how he remembers the incident, but one could understand how that memory might be fuzzier than a muppet with static-cling; atop that, recently released police documents which also contradict Richards’ account and might make it seem he got off extraordinarily light and Chelsea police got the shaft.

The Guardian reports that according to the docs released by Britain’s National Archives, police arrived at Richards’ home – where he loved, ironically enough, just doors down from Rolling Stones bandmate Mick Jagger – and found marijuana and marijuana resin, heroin, Mandrax tablets, syringes, pipes and burnt spoons, but also firearms including a .38 Smith and Wesson, a shotgun and around 110 rounds of ammunition.

Oh, they also found Richards and companion Anita Pallenberg – described in the write-up as “his common law wife and a housewife” – sleeping in their first-floor bedroom. Police found still more drugs as they searched upstairs.

Richards told police when asked about the drugs that they were “down to Marshall Chess,” who son of Chicago’s Chess Records founder and runner of the Stones’ own label who Richards claimed was renting the house where he and Pallenberg were “just spending the night” after a marathon recording session the night before.

Detective Inspector Charles O’Bannon then claimed Richards started wandering toward a bathroom mid-questioning, and when he then asked “Keith, could you come back here?”, Richards snapped back “Mr. Richards to you.” O’Bannon also questioned Richards’ story on account of all the gold records on the wall inscribed to “Keith Richards” or “The Rollng Stones,” not “Marshall Chess.”

The docs claim that Richards eventually admitted that he owned the house and that he didn’t have a license for the guns, but also tried disposing of some burnt spoons. He’d ordered a manservant to bring him and Pallenberg drinks, then tried to fetch the suspicious-looking implements from the bathroom to stir them, but was stopped by police.

He explained away the revolved by saying that it was a gift that roadie Leroy Leonard purchased in San Francisco for $200. Richards explained he’d kept it because he’d just recently been through Jamaica, where he’d been warned previously that he would need protection.

He claimed in “Life” that the shotgun was an antique children’s miniature dating back to an 1880s French nobleman. He also claimed that police tried to set him up for a year in prison by charging him as though the undersized shotgun were an illegal sawed-off weapon.

Ultimately, he plead not guilty only to the charges regarding the shotgun, and the judge fined him ten pounds for each count. The forensic report from the scene labeled the gun a 9mm Belgian  short-barrel shotgun, unused and in bad shape. It also indicated that police only found drugs in small quantities.

It does seem that “innocent” by certainly be a strong word describing Richards.
He knew he’d been caught and tried something that rarely works with drug/alcohol-addled American college students when dealing with police: lying.

It’s a wonder at first glance that the judge didn’t take that fact into consideration when pronouncing sentence, but then again, this was the 1970s, before the drugs were nearly reviled as they are now. One must think that the judge probably regarded one simply possessing such small quantities as being a danger maybe to themselves, but certainly not many others.