The Falcon and the Snowman (12 page)

By late in 1974, Culiacán was a Latin-flavored blend of frontier-era Dodge City and Prohibition-era Chicago. Millions of dollars flooded into the poor agricultural center. Over tortuous routes, opium grown on the remote slopes of the Sierra Madre was brought down on week-long trips via mule trains to the city of 360,000 and refined in laboratories in and near Culiacán. Mexican Federal troops periodically mounted offensives to smash the illicit commerce. But
mordida
—bribes—often encouraged officials to be lax in enforcement, and officials who weren't lax, or newspapermen who investigated the traffic, usually found assassination squads waiting for them. The bars, cafés and hotels of Culiacán, and the town houses and sprawling haciendas built by Mexican drug millionaires outside town, became trading floors for a commerce that generated more than 80 percent of America's heroin. Stakes were high, but so were profits. Gangs of rival growers and dealers fought and killed for control of the traffic; they drove Cadillacs and Lincolns that had been stolen in the United States and armed themselves with guns, automatic rifles and machine guns smuggled across the border, and hardly a day passed without at least one gang murder.

It was this world that Daulton entered late in 1974. Through a friend, another pusher, he was introduced in Los Angeles to a young man from one of the ten families that controlled most of the Culiacán drug trade. For Daulton, it was like the discovery of an old prospector finally seeing the glint of gold in a mountain of quartz. Pot and coke were profitable, but neither promised the profits of heroin. Offering automatic pistols to his new acquaintance as gifts of introduction, he ingratiated himself first with this family and later with a second one. At last, he told himself, he had his own predictable source of supply.

When Daulton had been an apprentice in the trade, he bought his merchandise from another pusher in Los Angeles, surrendering, to his regret, part of the profit; occasionally he had made a connection with a minor-league Mexican dealer and had driven his own load over the border from Tijuana or some other border town, the drugs hidden behind a panel in the trunk of his car. But Daulton had for a long time dreamed of bigger things. Now that he had a sure source of drugs, he began to make some changes in his way of doing business. (Years later, when he was asked to describe his business operation, he did so with the pride of an entrepreneur who had opened a tiny corner store and had built it up into a chain of supermarkets.) At first, after he made his initial contact in Culiacán, he paid couriers—“mules”—to bring heroin and cocaine over the border. Although, like other dealers, he recruited as mules young women who sometimes secreted plastic bags of cocaine or heroin in their vaginas while entering the United States, Daulton didn't like this method: it didn't bring in enough dope each trip to satisfy him. So he developed his own stable of mules. There was an old Mexican near Tijuana who would drive a big load of pot across the border in his jeep for $500, and he used him a lot. There was Ike, a middle-aged hippie who had lost a leg in a car accident and had a cocaine habit. Ike was waiting for an insurance settlement from the accident, mostly to support his passion for cocaine, and he ran coke across the border for Daulton. Customs agents in Los Angeles noticed how frequently he arrived from Mexico, and without any success they began to shake him down, opening the lining of his suitcase and searching him thoroughly. They never discovered that he was standing on the cocaine, hidden inside his artificial leg.

Daulton's most satisfying method to bring over the dope, however, was not in a hollow leg, but in a commercial airliner—either doing it himself or using a mule. The method was deceptively simple: Like all the other passengers, he'd book a seat on one of the airlines that flew between Mexico and the United States and then board his plane with plastic packages of cocaine or heroin hidden beneath his shirt. After the plane took off, Daulton got up from his seat and walked down the aisle to the lavatory, entered and closed the door. Using a screwdriver, he pried open a panel in the bulkhead of the plane behind the toilet-tissue dispenser or paper-towel receptacle or elsewhere and then stowed the packages of dope and retightened the panel. After the plane landed in the United States, he cleared Customs, opening his bag for Customs agents. Because he had studied airline flight operations, he knew exactly where the plane was headed next after refueling. Daulton or one of his associates simply bought a ticket on this flight, and when the plane was airborne somewhere over the United States, another trip was made to the lavatory and the dope was removed from its hiding place. “It never failed,” Daulton would reminisce later.

Still, there was an element of risk—always the chance that a shipment that had cost several thousand dollars might be intercepted. And as his sales grew, Daulton wanted more volume; so he devised a scheme to serve as an on-the-spot jobber of marijuana, cocaine and heroin in Mexico. Using his contacts with the Mexican growers in Culiacán, he became a middleman, buying drugs and reselling them to dealers from Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and other cities. These dealers flew to Mexico and transported the contraband themselves over the border or hired their own mules. “I could buy the stuff fairly cheap because of my contacts with my associates,” he recalled. “I made a profit when I sold it in Mexico, and I didn't have to take any risks; it was a sweet way of operating.” His volume doubled, then tripled.

Changes were occurring in the drug business, however, that made Daulton feel uncomfortable and long for the old days. There was a new phrase in the American lexicon—“rip-off”—that had originated with drug dealers to describe a practice of dishonor among thieves: a deal for a drug buy was made; an appointment was made to exchange money and drugs; but at the appointed time, the seller produced a gun and took the money—or the buyer flashed a weapon and stole the merchandise without paying for it.

The essence of the rip-off was to promise and not deliver; it was a process Daulton and Chris would come to know well.

Because of the growing hazards of rip-offs and his busts by undercover narcotics agents, Daulton began carrying a gun. He liked his new image. When he returned from Culiacán, he regaled his friends about the drug wars. He boasted that he was tight with the Mexican Mafia and told of murders he had witnessed and the close scrapes from which he had escaped. His friends in Culiacán, he bragged, often invited him to go to their ranches in the mountains by mule. But, he said, he was too smart to risk getting caught in the crossfire of raids between warring growers. Once, he bragged, one of his suppliers in Mexico had badly needed more weapons to carry on the drug wars, and, he said, he had delivered scores of automatic rifles stolen from an Army base in Texas to cement his relationship.

“I wasn't into revolution,” Daulton said of the gunrunning scheme years later. “But I saw how those people in Mexico were being oppressed. You're talking about people in the mountains where the only cash crop is opium, like Cambodia and Laos; you're talking about people whose families for generations have been growing weed, and you've got the local
Federales;
half the time they're buying it from them and the other half busting them, and the people are unarmed. They wanted guns; that was the only way they could take care of the law. Law isn't done in the courtroom there; it's done in the street.”

Daulton rented a beach house on the Mexican coast to live in when he was out of the country, and when he came back to Palos Verdes he resumed his easy life at his parents' home. Each time a load came in from Mexico, he bankrolled cocaine parties for his friends; he put the coke on a coffee table and invited everybody to “dig in.” He had what he wanted most—money, power over people, travel and high living. Daulton judged himself happy and far more successful than any of his former classmates at Palos Verdes High. Although he longed for a serious relationship with a woman, he eventually gave up trying to romance girls and continued to buy them. Friends rarely saw him with a date at one of his own parties, and when he arrived in Mexico, one of the first things he usually did was take a cab to a brothel.

Daulton worked hard to cultivate what he thought of as his new image and to impress his circle of school dropouts, addicts, pushers and drug-abusing teen-age castoffs from broken homes in Palos Verdes that he was a
somebody
. Once, when Andy Boyer, with whom he'd served time at the Wayside Honor Rancho, came by his house to buy marijuana, Daulton acted as if the visit were a reunion of old college classmates comparing notes on postgraduation careers, and he were the one who had succeeded. He whipped out a wallet with an inch-wide wad of cash and led Boyer on a tour of some of his hiding places where he cached his drug inventory—concealed drawers in a cabinet he had built, the head of a straw horse mounted on a wall in his room and a spot behind a ventilation grille. And then he boasted to Boyer that he'd made the big time—he had cracked the Mexican Mafia.

But for all of Daulton's successes, two shadows loomed over his life: his increasing addiction to heroin, and the possibility that he might have to go back to jail.

A few weeks after Judge Donahue freed him from Wayside, Daulton had abandoned his classes at Harbor College and begun missing appointments with his probation officer. Suspecting he was dealing again, the probation officer warned Daulton that probation would be revoked unless he got a full-time job. Daulton had been ducking his P.O. because it would mean taking a urine test, and that would reveal that he was using drugs again—an infraction that in itself could mean a return to jail. Daulton had addicted dozens of friends to drugs, and now he had addicted himself to heroin, a drug that he boasted would never ensnare him. He didn't inject heroin, but snorted it—lodging a few grains in a nostril and sucking it in until euphoria overtook him.

Honoring his multiple pledges of secrecy, Chris at first did not mention to friends his new job in the vault. But after a while, as the weekly round of drug parties went on as usual, Chris began to drop hints to Daulton about it. At first, he said that he had a new assignment he couldn't discuss; then one night he casually mentioned to Daulton that he'd been to the local CIA headquarters in the basement of the Tishman Building near International Airport that day, but said slyly he couldn't say anything more about it. After Chris rented a small cottage not far from the TRW plant, he tantalized his friend with another hint: TRW, he said, had made him get a telephone because he had a new job that gave him more responsibility. Daulton, ever curious, pressed his friend to explain what was going on. All he got was knowing smiles and once an enigmatic reply: “I'm working with birds.”

By the beginning of 1975 there was no doubt where Daulton was in life: he was fully submerged in the drug culture and hypnotized by its easy life. Chris, on the other hand, was trying to inhabit two universes. By day he played his role in the high-stakes game of espionage-from-space. By night he rejoined the bored youths of Palos Verdes and Daulton's loutish cadre of jobless drug cronies from the beach cities north of The Hill, partying and getting high. Ostensibly, the two friends were as different as the sun and the moon. Chris was intense, hardworking, an introspective young man who his parents said was going to become a lawyer: Daulton was by now the self-styled racketeer, with long unkempt hair and a scruffy goatee, who sometimes carried a gun, talked in a swagger and gave away drugs to addict the unaddicted.

One Saturday night in January, there was another party at Daulton's home. As usual, beer, pot and cocaine were supplied by the generous host.

After midnight, everybody had left except Chris. He and Daulton were complaining about the world they had inherited—about Watergate, Vietnam, air pollution, corruption in big business and government, and other assorted perceived evils. Daulton saw in these evils a larger force that was the source of his own problems. Political crooks like Nixon were beating the law, but not he, even though selling drugs was a victimless crime that filled a legitimate public need. “It's a hell of a lot better than people who go on welfare,” he declared smugly. He complained again how the courts were hassling him, trying to send him back to jail for a victimless crime. But, he told Chris emphatically, he wasn't going back.

The conversation turned to Chris's job, and for the first time, details about life in the Black Vault came out: Chris told his friend what he did in the vault, about the CIA's satellites and how they spied from space with eyes so fantastic they could isolate a single man on a desert. Outrage at what he regarded as a mindless arms race that would inevitably lead to a horrible nuclear holocaust and what he saw as his own role in it welled up in him, and he bitterly assailed man's suicidal pursuit of nationalistic pride.

His mind disoriented by cocaine, Chris foggily traced the similarities he found so fascinating between the lifeless espionage robots with which he worked at TRW and the flight and eyes of falcons. As Chris described the globe-circling orbits of Rhyolite satellites, his narrative shifted seamlessly into a description of his falcon sweeping through the air, and Daulton couldn't follow from one moment to the next whether he was talking about real birds or man-made ones.

By the following weekend, Chris had come to a decision.

There was another party at Daulton's, and like the one the week before, it ended with the two friends alone in Daulton's living room stoned on cocaine. But it wasn't the drug that induced what Chris was about to do. The cocaine was only a catalyst: It served to sharpen Chris's ability to see exactly how corrupt his country's morals had become; how the United States was living a lie, preaching democracy while propping up dictatorships, toppling democratically elected governments and murdering and maiming in the name of blind nationalism. It gave him insight into the whole cancerous tapestry of perverted American principles. What he was about to do had been taking shape in his mind for many months—perhaps since his first briefing about the Black Vault and its dirty tricks. He had decided he had no choice but to do what he was about to do.