In 1965, Ringo leased flat 1 at 34 Montagu Square, around a mile from Abbey Road, and kept it as a city pied-à-terre even after he moved to Weybridge, Surrey. He’d rented the apartment first to Paul, then to twenty-five-year-old Jimi Hendrix, who wrote “The Wind Cries Mary,” a May 1967 British single that also appeared on his debut US album Are You Experienced, while living there. Ringo evicted Hendrix after the celebrity tenant damaged the apartment’s walls during an acid trip.

Late in the morning of October 18, 1968, John, age twenty-eight, and Yoko, thirty-five, are in bed and half naked when a loud knock sounds on the door.

“I’ve got a message for you,” John hears someone say.

John wonders if it’s a reporter looking for an exclusive comment on the couple’s recent public announcement about Yoko’s pregnancy. She’s now six months along and due in February.

John’s not wearing his glasses, but he can make out a figure standing by their bedroom window. His first thought is that it must be one of the Kray twins, a pair of infamous London gangsters and stone-cold killers known for their violent shakedowns of business owners and entertainers.

Once John puts on his glasses and sees a police officer standing there, he knows why they’ve come knocking. He’d been forewarned by a reporter from the Daily Mirror.

The drug squad’s coming to get you.

Yoko runs to fetch some clothes.

“Ring the lawyer, quick!” John tells her, refusing to open the front door.

The couple has been living on what John describes as “a strange cocktail of love, sex, and forgetfulness,” or what Yoko calls “a diet of champagne, caviar, and heroin.”

Officers led by Detective Sergeant Norman Pilcher of the Scotland Yard Drug Squad start to force their way in through a back window. Pilcher is famous for staging celebrity drug busts. He’s already arrested Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Donovan.

Pilcher pushes his way past John and Yoko, trailed by a plainclothes detective, two detective constables, two canine handlers, and a policewoman. It’s an incredible show of force—especially since Pilcher and his team are unable to find any drugs in the apartment.

Mindful that police may have been watching the apartment since back when Jimi Hendrix was in residence, John and Yoko have been careful to keep the place scrubbed. Even so, Yogi and Boo-Boo, the drug-sniffing dogs, zero in on forgotten traces of cannabis inside a cigarette roller, a film can, and a binoculars case.

Norman Pilcher can’t hide his gap-toothed smile from the reporters crowded outside the apartment as John and Yoko are driven in a squad car to the Paddington Green police station.

LENNON AND FRIEND CHARGED IN POSSESSION OF MARIJUANA, the New York Times reports via the AP wire, detailing a further charge of obstructing the execution of a search warrant.

At Marylebone Magistrates Court, John agrees to plead guilty and pay a £150 fine.