The Falcon and the Snowman (6 page)

Daulton never shared the full intensity of Chris's passion for falconry, but the sport was a bond that kept them together long after other classmates drifted away and found new interests off The Hill. If it had not been for this bond they would probably have gone their separate ways. Instead, the two friends spent one or two weekends a month traveling to the Mojave Desert of California and into the mountains beyond to photograph birds, set traps and take turns holding a rope while the other, the rope tied to his waist, descended a cliff to inspect the eyrie of a bird. And when the day was over, they usually lit up a joint and passed it between them. It was in these moments at the end of the day that Chris loved to let his mind roam: he imagined how a falcon must feel as it soared above him with eyes so powerful they could find a tiny prairie dog scooting through sagebrush from two thousand feet; or how the bird felt in a stoop, diving at 150 miles an hour at a helpless pigeon. As the vapors of the drug eased into his lungs, setting in motion a biochemical chain reaction in his brain, Chris retreated even deeper into his fantasies. He imagined himself a Renaissance prince flying a huge falcon while wearing flowing robes of satin. And then he might turn to a different fantasy—a vision of himself flying his falcon while dressed in a tuxedo. One day, he told Daulton, he would do just that.

7

“Andrew Daulton Lee?”

“Yes,” the defendant replied.

Daulton looked up at Judge Allen Miller of the Los Angeles County Superior Court in Torrance, California, on February 4, 1972. The previous October, he had been busted for selling marijuana to a high school student. The district attorney's office had reduced the charge to possession—rather than sale—of a marijuana cigarette. But it was a serious offense nonetheless.

Three years later, the California Legislature would downgrade possession of small amounts of marijuana to a misdemeanor. It would be treated no more seriously than a traffic ticket. But when Daulton went to court, the stigma that had cloaked marijuana use for so long in middle-class America had not yet dissolved. Possession of marijuana was a felony, punishable by a year in prison or more.

Still, the winds were changing; the courts had seen hundreds of young men and women like Daulton, many of them from the well-off families of the Palos Verdes Peninsula, brought up on drug charges. The early ones had gone to prison. But society was beginning to question whether the punishment being meted out fitted the crime.

Judge Miller glanced at the stubby young man before him who had been convicted of possessing marijuana and noticed that he had no other arrests on his record. His lawyer appealed for a second chance, saying Daulton had just enrolled at Whittier College—a respected school whose alumni included Richard M. Nixon. If the judge was lenient, the lawyer said, Daulton could start a new life at Whittier the following day.

“Full-time schooling in Whittier?” the judge asked.

“Full-time,” the lawyer responded.

“Well, that's pretty good. Do you have a job—do you intend to have a job on the outside?”

“I intend to get a part-time job,” Daulton said.

“I'll make this a misdemeanor by sentence,” the judge said. “One year in County Jail.”

Daulton's spirits plummeted. But then the judge added: “I'll suspend the sentence and place you on probation for a period of three years.” There would be a $150 fine; an agreement that Daulton would have to avoid illicit drugs and drug users; periodic reports to probation officers—but no jail sentence.

“Mr. Lee, I don't know what the drug situation is out at Whittier. But if it comes to my attention, very frankly, that you continue to use marijuana or dangerous drugs, and it probably would if you had another bust, I can advise you that I'll give you at least six months in the County Jail for violation of probation. I'm just indicating to you that it may not be worth your while to continue to smoke marijuana.”

Daulton looked at the judge as sincerely as he could and said he was off drugs for good.

Daulton dropped out of Whittier the following spring, continuing the pattern he had begun on his graduation from Palos Verdes High two years earlier in June, 1970. During the two years, he had tried three colleges—Hancock and Whittier and Harbor, briefly—and a half-dozen jobs. He had started jobs as a deliveryman, as a telephone sales solicitor, as a cabinetmaker, as a shipping clerk and as a skin diver in a marina, where he helped clean and repair yachts. But none of the jobs paid nearly as much as he could make from pushing drugs. And the work was harder. Daulton liked full-time jobs even less than he liked college, and inevitably, he drifted back to what he knew best—drug dealing.

His arrest in October, 1971, had slowed the momentum of the entrepreneur from Palos Verdes. But soon after Judge Miller gave him probation, he went back to work trying to enlarge his business. And for a while he did very well indeed: by the summer of 1973, a year after he left Whittier, Daulton had a drug business that was grossing $1,000 to $2,000 a week. Daulton had always had a streak of generosity, and now that he had really big money he was no different; most weeks, he spent hundreds of dollars throwing parties for friends at which he bought the drugs, and he could be counted on to pick up the tab for expensive dinners. One night he took three girls to a mosquelike Moroccan restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, seated them all around him on pillows resting on the floor and joked that he felt as if he had a harem. The bill for the night was almost $250.

He slept until eleven or so most mornings, showered, made a few phone calls to his runners and then played handball or tennis for an hour or two. There'd be a few sales in the afternoon, then dinner at a restaurant near the Peninsula, and a party at night, and at three or four he'd get to bed. Every few weeks there was a trip to Mexico or San Diego, just across the border from Mexico, to replenish his inventory. It was a period that Daulton would recall later with the kind of affectionate nostalgia that people reserve for recounting the best years of their lives:

“It was before the era of the rip-off; I sold marijuana and hashish that was the finest in the world—hashish from Afghanistan, the finest flower tops from Mexico. I was selling weed at the time for a hundred and fifty dollars a pound when you could buy a kilo [2.2 pounds] for that much. People were telling me, You're out of your mind, you're overpriced. But within six months everybody was coming after me; they said they were willing to pay because I had the best product.

“I had a clientele you wouldn't believe: older, more sophisticated people. I had the best product, and the best, cleanest highs. And in those days you could trust the people you were dealing with. The way it was then, we were into getting high first, making a profit second. Later, the whole thing got out of proportion. It became cutthroat, rip-offs, anything goes. When I first got into it, well, it broke down to a very legitimate business; it was illegal, but it was a very legitimate kind of business.”

Eventually, Daulton was admitted to The Brotherhood, a measure of social acceptance in his milieu at least equal to his parents' acceptance by the Palos Verdes Country Club. The Brotherhood was a drug cult founded by Dr. Timothy Leary, the onetime Harvard lecturer who in the late nineteen-sixties became an advocate of LSD and other drugs. Daulton would describe his association with The Brotherhood later as almost a religious experience, with drugs as its god: “We were just a tightly knit group of people who were aligned in the distribution of a high quality of drug. We weren't talking about the overthrowing of governments; we were just talking about a different awareness, of viewing things from a different perspective. We didn't want to hurt anybody.”

Except for Chris, Daulton was by now spurning former classmates who had opted to lead conventional lives. “It was hard to find anything in common with people who worked all day,” he would explain. “They were all hooked to the grind of working eight to four, coming home, getting drunk every night, waking up with a hangover and going to work. I was sleeping late, playing handball, traveling; I had money, women when I wanted them; you couldn't ask for a better life.”

Early in 1973, Daulton moved out of his parents' home into an apartment in Torrance, a city on the flatlands north of the Peninsula, with Aaron Johnson, another product of The Hill whose father earned $200,000 a year as vice president of a steel company. A muscular blond athlete who always had a string of girls pursuing him, Johnson, like Daulton, had abandoned college and was making his living by selling drugs. The two soon agreed to become partners. Daulton also formed an occasional partnership with Barclay Granger, another friend from Palos Verdes High.

On the last day of July, 1973, with business thriving and Daulton enjoying himself as never before, a shaggy youth with shoulder-length hair and an unkempt beard approached Johnson in a bar and said he wanted to buy ten pounds of marijuana. When the new customer later showed up at their apartment to pick up the weed, Johnson said he would go after the merchandise and left with an empty shopping bag for one of the places where he and Daulton stashed their inventory. Daulton stayed behind and was chatting with the new client when cops—so many he couldn't count them—shoved their way into the apartment. Suddenly, the new “customer” pulled out a revolver and announced he was a police officer. When Johnson returned, he and Daulton were taken to jail, and samples of marijuana, hashish, hashish oil and peyote found in Daulton's bedroom were seized by the police. Within two days, he and his friend posted bail of $5,000 apiece—not much money for the prosperous drug traffickers—and they were released. Unruffled, they resumed business as usual.

Four days later, the fourteen-year-old brother of Barclay Granger offered to sell a gram of cocaine to a bearded undercover policeman in Huntington Beach, a town on the coast south of Long Beach. The policeman expressed delight at the quality of the cocaine, asked for more and arranged to buy an additional twenty-three grams for $1,300 on July 12. Granger's brother made the delivery, was arrested and led the police to his brother and Daulton, who had been using the fourteen-year-old as part of a cadre of youthful runners. Granger and Daulton quickly posted $10,000 each and were released on bail for the second time in two weeks.

Daulton had now been arrested twice while he was on probation for his 1971 arrest. His parents warned him that he would have to go to jail. Daulton said that the arrests, both of them, were a frame-up. “Don't worry,” he said. “I'll beat it.”

He was wrong.

“I beg the court to let me continue probation,” Daulton wrote Judge Burch Donahue of the Los Angeles County Superior Court early in 1974. With the help of his attorney, Daulton had managed to postpone the moment of reckoning on the two new arrests for almost six months. But he had finally run out of delaying tactics and faced the revocation of his probation. He pleaded for mercy: “I have a deadly fear of the violence and homosexuality in jail; too many people have told me of it,” he wrote.

But Judge Donahue, who had taken over Daulton's case from Judge Miller, said two felony arrests for selling dangerous drugs while the defendant was on probation was too much. He revoked Daulton's probation and sentenced him to serve one year in the Los Angeles County Jail's minimum-security work camp, the Wayside Honor Rancho.

If Daulton behaved himself, the judge said, he might consider a reduction in the sentence at some point in the future. But first, he said, Daulton would have to show a will to rehabilitate himself. Daulton entered the jail farm on March 7, 1974.

While Daulton had plunged into drug dealing so profitably, convinced that he had found his life's calling, Chris was still groping for his direction in life. In January, 1972, he enrolled at Harbor Junior College—an episode of mononucleosis had made him miss the previous semester—and he earned a B-plus average, suggesting he had rediscovered some of his old academic prowess. But Chris, still unable to resolve his religious doubts, felt disoriented. In the summer of 1972, 43 made a pact with himself: he would give the church one year; if it would save his faith, he would gladly become a priest.

He decided that the best place to resolve his doubts was under the influence of the Jesuits, the most intellectual of the religious orders. In September, 1972, he entered Loyola University, the Jesuit institution that his father had attended. If the Jesuits could subdue the devils that were nibbling at his beliefs, he told himself, he would enter the priesthood the following year and devote his life to God and the Church.

These were fast-moving times in America and in the world, and Chris continued to devour the news reports on television and in the newspapers. There were President Nixon's visit to China, the departure of the last American ground troops from South Vietnam and, from Chile, reports of troubles within the administration of President Salvador Allende. Chris avidly followed news of the presidential campaign and President Nixon's landslide victory over George McGovern and the reports beginning to emerge from Washington suggesting that the Nixon Administration might be attempting to hide some politically embarrassing secrets. There were other stories in the paper, although Chris did not notice all of them, including the dispatches from Australia noting that after twenty-three years of rule by the Liberal and National Country parties, the Labour Party, led by Edward Gough Whitlam, had been elected to run the country.

As Chris lost himself in texts on religious philosophy, metaphysics and history, the news began to turn increasingly sour. The nation's Vice President resigned after pleading no contest to accusations of tax evasion. Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo were prosecuted for attempting to alert the public to corrupt policies pursued by the United States Government during the Vietnam War. There were reports that America had secretly bombed Cambodia. After the fall of the Allende government in Chile, there were ugly rumors that the Central Intelligence Agency might have had a hand in his death. And throughout the year, the cancer of Watergate continued to spread.