began

The former Stolper Co is a financial management company that merged with another financial services business to form Wealth Oklahoma in 2025. It initiated a new position in Allison Transmission Holdings (ALSN -2.01%), acquiring 75,606 shares in the third quarter, an estimated $6.4 million trade based on the average price for Q3 2025, according to its October 10, 2025, SEC filing.

What happened

Wealth Oklahoma disclosed the purchase of 75,606 shares of Allison Transmission Holdings in its quarterly report filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on October 10, 2025 (SEC filing). The new holding was valued at $6.4 million as of Q3 2025, with the transaction representing 1.9% of Stolper’s $330 million in reportable U.S. equity assets.

What else to know

This is a new position; the stake now accounts for 1.9% of Wealth Oklahoma’s 13F reportable assets as of September 30, 2025.

Top holdings after the filing are as follows:

• BRK-B: $18.96 million (5.75% of AUM) as of 2025-09-30
• JPM: $17.74 million (5.37% of AUM) as of 2025-09-30
• AAPL: $14.90 million (4.52% of AUM) as of 2025-09-30
• GOOGL: $11.92 million (3.6% of AUM) as of 2025-09-30
• COF: $10.73 million (3.25% of AUM as of Q3 2025)

As of October 9, 2025, Allison Transmission shares were priced at $81.02, down 18.4% over the prior year ending October 9, 2025 and underperforming the S&P 500 by 33.9 percentage points over the past year.

The company reported trailing 12-month revenue of $3.2 billion for the period ended June 30, 2025 and net income of $762 million for the period ended June 30, 2025.

Allison Transmission’s dividend yield stood at 1.3% as of October 10, 2025. Shares were 35% below their 52-week high as of October 9, 2025.

Company Overview

Company Snapshot

Allison Transmission designs and manufactures fully automatic transmissions and related parts for commercial, defense, and specialty vehicles. It also offers remanufactured transmissions and aftermarket support.

The company generates revenue primarily through product sales to original equipment manufacturers and aftermarket services, including replacement parts and extended coverage.

Allison Transmission serves a global customer base of OEMs, distributors, dealers, and government agencies, with a focus on commercial vehicle and defense markets.

Image source: Getty Images.

Allison Transmission is a leading provider of fully automatic transmissions for medium- and heavy-duty commercial and defense vehicles worldwide. The company leverages a broad distribution network and long-standing OEM relationships to maintain a strong position in the auto parts sector.

Foolish take

Founded in 1915, Allison Transmission is a veteran of propulsion systems technology. It’s the world’s largest manufacturer of medium and heavy-duty fully automatic transmissions, according to the company.

Allison Transmission’s sales are down slightly year over year. Through the first half of 2025, revenue stood at $1.58 billion compared to $1.61 billion in 2024.

This lack of sales growth is a contributor to the company’s share price decline, adding to its dismal 2025 outlook, which it slashed due to softness in demand in some of its end markets, such as for medium-duty trucks. Allison Transmission now expects 2025 revenue to come in between $3.1 billion to $3.2 billion, down from $3.2 billion to $3.3 billion.

With Allison Transmission shares hovering around a 52-week low, Wealth Oklahoma took advantage to initiate a position in the stock. This speaks to Wealth Oklahoma’s belief that Allison Transmission can bounce back. This might be the case, given Allison’s recent acquisition of Dana Incorporated, which provides drivetrain and propulsion systems in over 25 countries.

With a price-to-earnings ratio of 9, Allison Transmission’s valuation looks attractive, which also explains Wealth Oklahoma’s purchase. The stock certainly looks like it’s in buy territory.

Glossary

13F reportable assets: U.S. equity holdings that institutional investment managers must disclose quarterly to the SEC on Form 13F.
AUM (Assets Under Management): The total market value of investments managed on behalf of clients by a financial institution or fund manager.
Dividend yield: Annual dividend payments divided by the share price, expressed as a percentage, showing income return on investment.
Trailing twelve months (TTM): The 12-month period ending with the most recent quarterly report.
Original equipment manufacturer (OEM): A company that produces parts or equipment that may be marketed by another manufacturer.
Aftermarket services: Products and support provided after the original sale, such as replacement parts, maintenance, or extended warranties.
Stake: The amount or percentage of ownership an investor or institution holds in a company.
Quarterly report: A financial statement filed every three months, detailing a company’s performance and financial position.
Distribution network: The system of intermediaries, such as dealers and distributors, through which a company sells its products.
Defense market: The sector focused on supplying products and services to military and government defense agencies.

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton and Jesse Jackson continued firing verbal shots at each other Friday, escalating a week-old battle that risks extending into next month’s Democratic National Convention.

Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, suggested that Jackson is using “for his own purposes” the controversy that followed Clinton’s condemnation of a black rapper during a Rainbow Coalition speech last Saturday.

Responding to questions during a televised appearance before a convention of radio talk-show hosts in Washington, Clinton said Jackson’s continuing anger over the incident is “a mystery to me,” especially considering the fact that Jackson seems more angry now than he did a week ago.

“Each day the temperature has been turned up,” Clinton said.

In an interview published Friday in the New York Times, Jackson was quoted as saying Clinton used the speech before his organization to “stage a well-planned sneak attack, without the courage to confront but with a calculation to embarrass.”

Jackson also said Clinton was using the rapper’s comments to advance his presidential campaign with white voters by “containing Jackson and isolating Jackson.” Such a racial appeal, he said, “again exposed a character flaw” in Clinton, a reference to questions about Clinton’s morality that the candidate has worked hard to erase in the minds of voters.

The interview was the latest in a series of efforts by Jackson to exclaim how offended and embarrassed he was by Clinton’s behavior.

In a telephone interview with the Los Angeles Times earlier this week, Jackson said Clinton failed to address his proposal for a $500-billion program to aid urban areas at the Rainbow meeting, but chose to engage in “a divisive political maneuver” aimed at him.

“Clinton has a ploy and I have a plan,” he said.

In his speech before Jackson’s organization, Clinton complained that rapper Sister Souljah urged blacks to kill whites instead of killing each other. He also chastised the coalition for recognizing Souljah at a convention which was honoring a white man who filmed the Rodney G. King beating and several blacks who risked their lives to rescue white riot victims.

“After I gave that speech, Jesse Jackson invited me to come back that night and play the saxophone,” Clinton told reporters here Friday. “He went back and had a very cordial meeting with me. So all these discoveries of things after the speech are for his own purposes.”

Clinton said he would “not back down” in his criticism of Souljah. “If Jesse Jackson wants to ally himself with that now and claim that’s the way he felt then, that’s his business,” Clinton said. He added: “Something has happened since the speech. This is not about the speech.”

If Jackson continues drawing attention to his dispute with Clinton, it risks becoming an issue at the July nominating convention, a prospect that Clinton forces had not anticipated.

Many key Democratic Party officials are former Jackson associates, including chairman Ronald H. Brown, but they were hoping for a harmonious meeting that could showcase Clinton. The dispute dominated discussions during convention planning sessions in New York on Friday, where Washington, D.C., Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly was reportedly selected as a keynote speaker.

Some officials feared that Jackson would use delegates pledged to former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. to seek the vice presidential nomination, but Jackson denied he was interested.

Jackson is publicly flirting with the independent candidacy of Texas businessman Ross Perot. But Clinton said he does not believe the controversy with Jackson will cost him black votes. “I’ve got to stand for what I believe and say what I believe and voters either respond one way or the other,” Clinton said.

Times staff writer Geraldine Baum from New York contributed to this story.

Sept. 9 (UPI) — A Miami area condo was showing visible signs of structural strains weeks before it collapsed and killed 98 people, federal investigators revealed Tuesday.

The update from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) comes four years after the catastrophic collapse of the Champlain Towers building in Surfside, Fla. The incident drew national headlines, leaving questions about what caused the 12-story building to suddenly fall apart.

NIST investigators determined that the collapse likely started in the building’s pool deck instead of the structure of the tower, aligning with preliminary findings into the cause of the incident. Co-lead investigator Glenn Bell said that “it is more likely that the failure started in a pool deck slab-column connection,” according to a news release.

Investigators used computer simulations, large-scale structural testing and signs that the building was in distress weeks before the collapse, according to the release. Those signs included a sliding glass door that had come off its frame, a horizontal crack in a planter wall and a vertical gate shifting so much that it became jammed and could not be opened.

The signs of distress were concentrated in a small area of the pool deck and the street-level parking lot, both of which began to give way at least seven minutes before the rest of the tower collapsed, the release stated. Additionally, a leak in part of the garage ceiling that was cracked had undergone many repairs and became significantly worse a day before the collapse, investigators found.

Investigators are fine-tuning their analysis of the role steel reinforcement corrosion, concrete shrinkage and shoddy construction joints in the pool deck slab had in the collapse. They intend to complete their technical work by the end of the year and draft reports on their findings. A significant update on the investigation is expected by spring 2026.

Previously, Surfside Mayor Charles W. Burkett suggested a sinkhole caused the collapse. Lawyers for victims also argued that construction on a neighboring luxury building destabilized the condos.

The collapse destroyed 55 condominium units and left the remaining 136 units to be demolished. In 202, a Miami Judge approved a $1 billion settlement to surviving family members, condo owners and people injured.

Reporting from CINCINNATI — Before he became the king of Atlantic City casinos, before he put his name on steaks or starred on reality television, Donald Trump served his own apprenticeship in the less glamorous family business of renting apartments.

Trump, in his autobiography, recalled learning valuable lessons from his father, Fred: Hunt for bargains. Chase out deadbeats. Spend some money on paint and polish.

Some alleged there was another part to the Trump formula: Make it tough for black people to move in.

In two court cases, built on evidence gathered from frustrated black apartment-seekers, housing activists and former employees, Fred, and, in a later case, Donald Trump faced accusations of systematic discrimination against African Americans, cases that the Trumps ultimately settled without admitting any wrongdoing.

Some would-be tenants were turned away at a complex in Cincinnati, where Donald Trump says he got his start as a property manager. And in New York, the allegations led to what was then one of the largest housing discrimination lawsuits filed by the federal government.

More than 1,000 pages of documents in the two cases in Cincinnati and New York, reviewed by the Los Angeles Times, demonstrate how accusations of racial discrimination dogged the family business from the earliest days of Donald Trump’s career. And they illustrate how young Trump, faced with an early crisis, responded aggressively to charges of bias.

Since he began his run for president more than a year ago, Trump has frequently been criticized for trading in racially tinged appeals, describing some Mexican immigrants as rapists and questioning whether a federal judge’s Mexican heritage made him incapable of being fair to Trump.

He angered some Native Americans by attacking a U.S. senator as “Pocahontas” and spurring supporters into sarcastic war whoops. Most recently, he criticized the parents of a fallen soldier, suggesting their Muslim beliefs forbade his mother from speaking in public after her husband denounced Trump’s call to bar Muslims from entering the country.

Hillary Clinton recently began using the discrimination cases in attacks on Trump. Introducing her running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine, recently in Miami, she said, “While Tim was taking on housing discrimination and homelessness, Donald Trump was denying apartments to people who were African American.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment for this story. Trump once called the federal charges “outrageous lies.”

“I have always tried to see to it that buildings which we own and manage are well-run and that there is equal opportunity for anyone to rent apartments,” he wrote in a 1973 affidavit. “The fact is that our apartments have the same ratio of minority tenants as exists in the community as a whole. Our organization has never discriminated and does not now discriminate.”

Trump’s father once was one of the biggest landlords in New York, with 14,000 units in 39 buildings, mostly in Brooklyn and Queens. Folk singer Woody Guthrie lived in one of Fred Trump’s Brooklyn projects when Donald was a toddler, and reworked his song “I Ain’t Got No Home” into a protest against the complex’s exclusionary policies:

We all are crazy fools

As long as race hate rules!

No no no! Old Man Trump!

Beach Haven ain’t my home!

At a foreclosure auction in 1964, Fred Trump bought Swifton Village, a half-empty complex that was the largest in Cincinnati. Donald Trump was just a high school senior in a military academy, but assumed increasing responsibility in managing the complex through college and business school.

In his book “The Art of the Deal,” Trump described Swifton Village as his “first big deal.” He recounted, in a chapter titled “The Cincinnati Kid,” booting poor, nonpaying tenants who had “come down from the hills of Kentucky” with “seven or eight children, almost no possessions.”

His experience in Cincinnati “gave [him] a lot of confidence,” Trump said recently at an Ohio rally.

Swifton Village had a reputation as a white complex, said Carol Coaston, now 72, who began working at a Cincinnati fair housing agency, Housing Opportunities Made Equal, around the time the suit was filed. That fall, just two or three apartments out of 1,167 in the complex were rented to black families, Fred Trump’s lawyer told a judge.

“You just kind of, growing up here, knew certain areas where discrimination occurred or you didn’t feel welcome,” Coaston said.

As the Trumps worked to upgrade Swifton Village, they employed a racial quota system and turned away black applicants, according to a lawsuit filed against Fred Trump’s company in 1969, a year after the Fair Housing Act became law. Donald Trump was not named in the complaint.

According to records from the suit and in housing agency files, a young black couple named Haywood and Rennell Cash spent four and a half months trying to rent an apartment, without success. They had two young children and were desperate to find an apartment close to Haywood’s job at General Electric and leave his mother’s crowded house. Haywood Cash said an agent took his $83 deposit, but he was repeatedly told no vacancies existed and “they couldn’t predict any.” Other African Americans were given similar explanations.

Days after the Cashes’ last inquiry, a white woman and a man posing as apartment seekers were told an apartment was available immediately and given a break on income requirements. “She urged that we get over there quick with a deposit to hold it,” wrote the woman, Margaret Faye Boyar, in a statement in the housing agency’s records.

Boyar went to the complex with Haywood Cash. When she said she did not want the apartment, but was instead helping the Cashes, the property manager “jumped out of his chair,” told Boyar to “get the hell out,” and used a racial slur, according to the lawsuit. He “began screaming at me, saying that what I was doing was ‘fraud’ and that ‘neither you nor Mr. Cash can have any damn apartment,’” she wrote.

Fred Trump’s attorneys, while denying any discrimination, tried at first to have the suit moved to the Ohio Civil Rights Commission, which could have delayed the Cashes’ claim by a year, according to the renters’ lawyer. But eventually, Fred Trump agreed to rent them an apartment and an appeals court dismissed the agency’s effort to expand the case into a class-action suit.

“Their vetting operation consisted of looking at what color your skin was,” said Gwenda Blair, who wrote a history of the family’s real estate empire. “It’s certainly a one-step process.”

The New York case, filed by civil rights lawyers from the Justice Department in 1973, generated front-page headlines. The complaint alleged that the Trump company used various tactics to discriminate, including falsely claiming a lack of vacancies and requiring stiffer rental terms. The case included allegations of discrimination at at least 17 Trump properties in New York and two in Norfolk, Va.

One of those people who said they were turned away was a then-31-year-old law student from Jamaica.

“I liked the setting, I liked the view, I liked the apartment,” said the woman, Henrietta Davis, now 75. “I am a person who believes that I have an equal right to do anything I want.”

She said she visited the Brooklyn complex and was told a place was available. When she called back the next day to plan her move, she was told no apartment was available after all.

“It was very obvious,” she said. Davis said the agent encouraged her to apply at another, integrated Trump building, adding that a black judge had recently rented there. Davis said she filed a complaint with a housing agency and moved on.

“Look, it’s against the law,” she said. “They were not supposed to have been discriminating, and they discriminated, and they had to face the consequences.”

The court case included allegations from whites sent by the Urban League to pose as renters, who were offered apartments while blacks were turned away, and statements from at least 10 people who worked for the company and described tactics used to discourage black applicants. One doorman reported to investigators that he was told to tell black visitors that no apartments were available; a building superintendent in Queens said he was told to attach a paper to applications from blacks with a letter “C,” for “colored.” He said he was afraid the Trumps would have him “knocked off” if he talked. Another employee said he used the code “number 9” to flag black applicants.

By that time, 1973, Donald Trump was president of Trump Management. Instead of settling the case, he hired lawyer Roy Cohn, who had been a prominent aide to Sen. Joseph McCarthy during the anti-communist hunts of the 1950s. Cohn launched an aggressive counterattack.

Trump and Cohn denounced the civil rights lawyers at a news conference, and Trump had Cohn file a counter-suit, claiming $100 million in damages to his reputation; it was dismissed. Cohn kept the government busy with procedural protests, and obtained affidavits from some witnesses — including the Queens superintendent — recanting their statements and claiming that they had been threatened. One said the government lawyers had engaged in “Gestapo tactics.”

After two years of wrangling, the complaint was resolved with a consent agreement in which Fred and Donald Trump agreed not to discriminate, to send a list of vacancies to the Urban League and to advertise that their apartments were open to all. At one point, Fred and Donald Trump haggled over the fine points of the ad requirements before a judge.

“We were not convicted. We would win this case if we fought it,” Fred Trump said.

“Don’t be too sure of that,” said the judge, according to a transcript of the hearing.

Three years after the settlement, the Justice Department reopened the case, charging that the company was using the same tactics to chase away black tenants, saying that “racially discriminatory conduct by Trump agents” was occurring frequently. Court records do not indicate how the second court action was resolved.

Blair, the author, said that the experience in fighting the New York charges helped to forge Trump’s brash, confrontational style — even when facing serious charges of racial bias.

“His whole winning formula is to always be unpredictable,” she said. “You don’t know what he’s going to say, except that he’s going to kick somebody in the shins.”

Tanfani and Bierman reported from Washington. Times staff writer Michael A. Memoli in Cincinnati contributed to this report.

Twitter: @jtanfani, @noahbierman

ALSO

Many blue-collar whites, key to Trump, criticize poor people as lazy and content to stay on welfare

Paul Manafort has guided dictators and strongmen, but can he manage Donald Trump?

Clintons made $10.6 million last year, tax return shows, as Donald Trump is pressed to release his own

Some 1,500 students are scheduled to sit their end-of-school exams, despite Israel’s genocidal war.

Hundreds of Palestinian students in Gaza are taking a crucial end-of-secondary-school exam organised by the besieged enclave’s Ministry of Education in the hope of entering university studies.

Earlier this month, the ministry announced Saturday’s exam, which will be the first since Israel began its genocidal war on Gaza after the Hamas-led attack in southern Israel in October 2023.

The ministry confirmed that about 1,500 students are registered to take the exam, which will be conducted electronically using specialised software, adding that all necessary technical preparations have been carried out to ensure smooth administration.

Some students are sitting the online exam at home, while others are taking it at venues depending on the region they are in, with safety considerations in mind, given the daily Israeli bombardment.

Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum, reporting from Deir el-Balah, stressed that for Palestinian students, the exam is a critical gateway to higher education, scholarships and a future beyond the Israeli blockade.

He said: “Even in a warzone, with no classrooms, no books and barely any internet, Gaza’s students are showing up, logging in and sitting their final exam, refusing to let war erase their future.”

After the war started, the education of many students in Gaza has been put on hold, and the results of Saturday’s exam will allow them to continue their studies at university.

Many should have been at university by now, but remained at the high school level due to the war, as Israeli attacks have devastated Gaza’s education system, along with the rest of the territory’s civilian infrastructure.

In response, Gaza’s Education Ministry has launched an online platform – the first of its kind in Gaza – to enable high school seniors to take their final exam.

“Students have downloaded the app to take their exam, but they face many challenges,” Morad al-Agha, the exams director of the Central Gaza Governorate, told Al Jazeera.

“We have raised these concerns with the ministry to make sure they’re resolved, so students can sit for their exams without disruption.”

‘It is so difficult’

Students log in from cafes, tents and shelters – wherever they can find a charged device and a working internet connection.

Before the final exam, they have completed a mock test, designed not only to test their knowledge but also the system’s stability.

However, students tell Al Jazeera that going digital in Gaza has not been easy.

“We are taking exams online, but it is so difficult,” student Doha Khatab said. “The internet is weak, many of us do not have devices and there is no safe space to take the test. We also lost our books in the bombardment.”

To support them, a few teachers have reopened damaged classrooms and are offering in-person guidance.

“It is the first time the ministry has done this online and students are confused, so we’re trying to guide them step by step,” teacher Enam Abu Slisa told Al Jazeera.

The war in Gaza and the destruction of 95 percent of educational infrastructure have left more than 660,000 children out of school – nearly all of Gaza’s school-aged population, according to the United Nations.

Many former UN-run schools are now being used as shelters for displaced people and also face relentless, deadly Israeli attacks.

A report to the UN Human Rights Council found that Israeli forces systematically destroyed education infrastructure in Gaza. The report described these actions as potential war crimes.

PA Media

PA Media

PA Media

‘Quite aggressive’

‘Not a complicated case’

SAN FRANCISCO — Inside the once-bustling campaign headquarters for California’s medical marijuana initiative hangs a portrait of an angel with delicate wings, a sly smile and a cannabis leaf tattooed on its chest.

For those involved with Proposition 215, it takes only a glance to guess the portrait’s subject. It’s Dennis Peron, San Francisco’s silver-haired pot guru, an angel to some, a devil to others, but unquestionably a critical force–perhaps THE force–behind California’s historic Nov. 5 vote to legalize marijuana for medical use.

Although indicted in a felony drug case, the 50-year-old Peron was jubilant on election day as the ballot measure headed for victory.

Admirers lined up several deep inside the campaign’s Market Street office to shake his hand, offer him hugs. The lights of television cameras illuminated his face, and when Peron, between interviews, needed a moment of quiet in the packed room, the din abruptly fell to a hush.

“If there has to be a hero in all of this, it’s him,” said A. Das of Boulder, Colo. “Dennis Peron has put his life on the line for this.”

Das strode forward to shake Peron’s hand, then began handing out hemp cookies. Peron sat casually on his desk, smoking the stub of a joint, telling one person after another, “Thank you, brother. Thank you, brother.”

*

It’s almost impossible to imagine Peron in a dark suit and tie, peddling computers. But the choice was one he wrestled with in the early 1970s, fresh from Vietnam. The idea soon wore off. So, too, did his childhood desire to become a psychiatrist.

The horrors of the war, Peron says, convinced him he needed to live in poverty and work for peace. He chose San Francisco and decided to make ends meet by dealing pot.

“I decided I’d be a hippie faggot,” he says, offering, with a laugh, the words he says would later be used against him by police during drug busts.

Peron acknowledges his deep roots in marijuana culture and admits he’s been dealing for more than 25 years. In an autobiography published this year, Peron said bluntly: “Marijuana made me the person I am.”

Evidence of that is scattered in his past. In the early 1970s, he helped run the Big Top supermarket, a one-stop drug emporium that led to jail time. Then came the Island Restaurant, “a two-way feed, with the pot supermarket upstairs supplying customers for the food downstairs.”

Meanwhile, Peron was building his “family” and living in communes. He became politically active in the pro-marijuana movement and in gay rights and other civil rights causes.

Peron recalls those days as “the best of my life.” But then came San Francisco’s AIDS epidemic, Ronald Reagan’s presidency and the subsequent “war on drugs.”

Friends told him he’d never be able to deal marijuana with Reagan in office. Peron considered their advice and kept right on dealing.

It was during the early 1980s, Peron says, that he began to see how marijuana eased the suffering of AIDS patients and gave them dignity in death. The observation became more personal when his lover, Jonathan West, succumbed to AIDS in 1990.

“At that point, I didn’t know what I was living for. I was the loneliest guy in America,” Peron recalls. “In my pain, I decided to leave Jonathan a legacy of love. I made it my moral pursuit to let everyone know about Jonathan’s life, his death, and his use of marijuana and how it gave him dignity in his final days.”

A year later, Peron “almost single-handedly” collected enough signatures to put Proposition P on the San Francisco ballot. The measure, advocating the use of pot as medicine within city limits, passed by a 4-to-1 margin, and Peron set his sights on a larger audience.

*

“Oh, man, you can’t believe how deep this has gone, how deep these guys are going to go to defeat [Proposition] 215,” Peron said days before the Nov. 5 election.

His Cannabis Buyers’ Club, which ostensibly provided marijuana to people with AIDS, cancer and other diseases, was raided by state agents in August. Sixty pounds of pot and $750,000 were seized. The club was shut down.

Later, Peron was indicted in neighboring Alameda County on drug charges, accused of running the club as a front to deal marijuana. Undercover agents caught him on videotape, allegedly handing over $900 worth of pot, seemingly more than would be needed to help with a medical problem.

Peron pleaded “morally not guilty,” charging state Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren staged the raid as a political tactic against the medical marijuana initiative.

More personally, as the Proposition 215 campaign wore on, Peron found himself distanced from key allies. The fear shared by some at Yes on 215 was that the darker side of Peron’s image–a defiant pothead facing indictment–might damage the initiative’s chances.

But Peron never stepped aside.

He granted countless interviews, appeared on local television news almost nightly in support of the initiative. He worked the phones. And he kept referring to Lungren as a dirty trickster, the second coming of Nixon. He called detractors within the campaign bullheaded, driven by jealousy.

“If I had resigned, what would it have been? [They’d say], ‘Mr. Peron ran away.’ See, I don’t run away. You’re talking to the wrong guy.”

*

Soon after the election, Peron is hard at work. As director of a group called Californians for Compassionate Use, he’s drafting “contracts” he hopes will let sick people legally secure marijuana through a doctor.

He’s making plans to reopen the Cannabis Buyers’ Club under a new name: the Cannabis Cultivators’ Co-op, a legal nod to restrictions of the new state law.

“Everything I was doing all along was the right thing to do,” he says.

A glance back at the powerful opponents who tried to derail Proposition 215 makes victory all the sweeter, he says.

“Look at them, they had [U.S. Sen.] Dianne Feinstein, [Clinton drug czar] Gen. [Barry] McCaffrey, every sheriff in the state, Dan Lungren, all on their side. They had the endorsement of three presidents, and then they tried to make me their poster boy.

“If they succeeded in making it a referendum on me, then I won,” he says. “And it feels like vindication.”

“But this was never about me,” he adds, quickly. “All of this, all along, was about love and compassion.”