The Falcon and the Snowman by Robert Lindsey Page A

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.
    â€œI 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