‘Falcon’ May Fly Free Again

Two men from the Los Angeles area rode in the back seat of a burgundy sedan heading into the Colorado Rockies. They had not seen each other for nearly two decades, and they had much to catch up on.

Larry Homenick, chief deputy U.S. marshal in Denver, grew up in Canoga Park. Tanned and fit at 49, he checked his service revolver with the driver and slid into the back seat.

Next to him sat 45-year-old Christopher Boyce from Palos Verdes. With a prison pallor and the weight of handcuffs, leg irons and a chain around his waist, he was on the way to his new home in Florence, Colo.--the federal government’s toughest prison, the notorious “Supermax.”

Twice before they had crossed each other’s paths. When Boyce was arrested in Los Angeles as a spy for the Russians in the 1970s--the famed “Falcon” of the subsequent book and movie “Falcon and the Snowman”--Homenick guarded the new prisoner. And when Boyce escaped from the federal prison in Lompoc, Calif., and began robbing banks in the 1980s, it fell to Homenick to help snatch him back.

With Boyce again for a five-hour drive last March, Homenick learned to his surprise how much the prisoner had changed: how different, how improved. The time had come, Homenick thought, to set this bird free.

“Chris left me with the clear impression that he is rehabilitated, that he could assimilate back into society with no difficulty at all,” the marshal recalled. “He doesn’t blame anyone but himself. He is not angry at the system. He is just anxious to get on with his life.”

Boyce, in fact, is not far from freedom. Once looking at 2046 as his release date, he is now scheduled for parole in four short years. It is a remarkable odyssey for a man once vilified as one of the country’s worst traitors, and he owes a lot to a third man from Southern California.

Sam Sheldon was just 14 when, as a student at Boyce’s old high school in Palos Verdes, he found himself entranced by the Boyce depicted in the movie “The Falcon and the Snowman”--a local product whose idealism led him astray. Sheldon headed for the public library, read up on Boyce and dashed off a letter to him promising some day to become a lawyer and work for his release.

Teenagers are full of dreams; this one came true.

“This was our neighborhood, and this was our high school,” Sheldon said. “And here was a guy who everybody your age could identify with as being someone like you.

“But,” he added, “I still felt sorry for him.”

Boyce has that kind of appeal. He is known to millions in this country and abroad as the “Falcon,” played in the movie by teen heartthrob Timothy Hutton. He got the name because of his love of falconry as a youth on the Palos Verdes peninsula. He and his partner in treason, Andrew Daulton Lee, later dubbed the “Snowman” because of his craving for drugs, were two of Los Angeles’ biggest disappointments.

Boyce, the son of an FBI agent, landed a high-security job at TRW, which had a series of top-secret government contracts. Like many in his generation, he didn’t like what his country was doing--Vietnam, the CIA, the whole scene.

But he and Lee took the civil protest movement too far. Motivated by greed as well as ideology, they chose to spy against their country. Arrested in 1977 after selling the Soviets thousands of secret documents, including material exposing a proposed espionage satellite system, they were convicted and dispatched to prison.

‘Snowman’ Works for Movie Counterpart

Lee, with a life sentence, was paroled in January. Today he works for the Hollywood production company belonging to Sean Penn, the actor who played him in the movie.

Boyce drew 40 years, with more time tacked on later for the escape and armed bank robbery spree. Unlike his boyhood friend, he had not gone gently into the prison night.

But since then, he has earned a college degree and is working on a master’s in fine arts and creative writing. He worked with the FBI to produce educational videos to teach Army recruits the dark consequences of espionage. To high praise from official Washington, he testified before Congress in 1985 about ways to tighten security for this country’s intelligence network.

Although one parole board member said early parole would be “too lenient” for someone with Boyce’s record as a traitor and bank robber, his last parole hearing last year ended with a recommendation of release to a halfway house in 2002.

“I don’t think there is much more to drive out of Christopher Boyce,” said his prison case manager, George Hart. “He basically does not fit in a prison environment.”

He once was beaten by a prison gang in Leavenworth, Kan., and was the target recently of a bizarre assassination plot by a mentally disturbed inmate in Minnesota. For a half-dozen years, primarily for his own safety, he marked off the prison calendar in a solitary cell at the federal penitentiary in Marion, Ill.

That was before he got into trouble the last time, when he wrote a newspaper opinion piece this winter about prison violence and was abruptly transferred to Supermax, new and shiny and ominous.

Now he and Sheldon are charging that his move to Supermax was cruel and unusual punishment, and they are asking a judge to transfer him to a more relaxed, medium-security prison in Oregon to be near his family. Bureau of Prisons officials decline to discuss their reasons for the transfer publicly.

Supermax holds Oklahoma City terrorist Timothy J. McVeigh, Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski and Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who was convicted in the New York City World Trade Center explosion. Boyce spends 23 hours a day in his cell. He is briefly moved into a recreation cage, where he can see and hear, but not touch, other inmates in their own cages. One of his neighbors is Michael Fortier, the man who knew about the Oklahoma City bombing but did nothing to stop it.

“These people are there for the most part because they have killed people in prison or are regarded as leaders of the major prison gangs,” said David Ward, a sociology professor and criminologist now studying the effects of super confinement on inmates at Alcatraz. “They are prison hell-raisers and escape artists.”

Does Boyce belong in Supermax? Is he being singled out by prison management for previous misdeeds? Said Ward: “I think that the Bureau of Prisons and every prison system has a long memory.”

Those who have come in contact with Boyce during his 20 years in prison say he has come a long way from the 21-year-old college dropout who confessed in 1977 to drinking banana daiquiris and mai tais in the office at TRW Systems in Redondo Beach and, when no one was looking, smuggling classified material out of the company’s “black vault.”

Criminal, Cop Met at Courthouse

Boyce and Homenick first met at the U.S. District Courthouse in Los Angeles. Boyce was still under the spell of the good and bad angels of his youth: virtuous idealism versus his distrust of the government.

“He was overwhelmed by what he was confronted with in jail,” Homenick recalled. “At first he was taken with celebrity, but we had him locked up at Terminal Island with major drug dealers, mercenaries and gang members. So imagine if you’re a young, good-looking man and being tossed in with rapists and murderers.”

At the federal installation at Lompoc, Boyce witnessed a prisoner cut to pieces by a gang armed with shanks. “I heard all of that--the screams, the death gurgle,” Boyce later told Congress. “I was the son and nephew of former FBI agents. I did not expect to live long at Lompoc, and I decided that being shot off the prison fence was a better death than the knives.”

Always resourceful, he talked himself onto the prison Inmate Entertainment Committee and then ordered the movie “Escape From Alcatraz.”

In January 1980, using a piece of wood, a pair of rose shears, a toothbrush affixed to a broom handle and a jar of Vaseline, he vanished from Lompoc, slipping up through a drain grate into the prison grounds and slicing the prison’s razor wire fence.

What followed was one of this country’s greatest manhunts. Boyce kept a step ahead of the law by robbing a dozen banks in a desperate effort to raise the cash that could get him safely hidden away in the Soviet Union.

He was run to ground in Port Angeles, Wash. His time on the loose, plus his armed bank jobs, netted him another 28 years.

Again in chains, Boyce autographed his wanted poster for Homenick and was marched back to prison.

“Spring is like a bittersweet season in prison,” he later wrote in an op-ed piece for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “I must snatch bits and pieces of nature’s moods where I find them. As I become older in prison, time is passing faster and faster.”

Beaten by Gang After TV Comments

Years clicked by with no change, no exit. “In federal custody,” he wrote, “nature seems reduced to cockroaches, ants and flies.”

In 1982, while at Leavenworth, he was beaten by the prison’s Aryan Brotherhood gang after telling Australian television that espionage was “high adventure” and that he had “no problem with the label ‘traitor.’ ”

He was moved to the maximum security prison in Marion, where he lived in solitary confinement at the end of a corridor underneath the prison hospital. He was told it was for his own safety. For six years, there he remained.

“Almost every day was exactly like the previous,” he wrote. “I felt as if I were submerged, alone, in a submarine.”

He rescued himself with books, devouring histories. He studied Shakespeare and Mary, Queen of Scots. In his fourth year he rediscovered falconry.

“My mind clung to falconry as a drowning man clings to a life preserver,” he wrote. “I bought 60 books on the sport.”

Midway through his time in Marion, he worked with the FBI to produce Army recruit programs on the dangers of espionage. In 1985, the year “The Falcon and the Snowman” premiered, he testified before a Senate panel looking for ways to prevent future Christopher Boyces.

He gave them an earful.

He said that he had changed his mind about spying. “It’s a pretty dirty business, actually,” he said.

He described watching the movie with Timothy Hutton at a special prison showing. “I walked away from it feeling like I had been dragged five miles behind a horse. I don’t think that anybody who went and saw that film walked out of there wanting to become a KGB agent.”

He told of the uselessness of celebrity. “Young ladies send me letters telling me they are thrilled at the thought of espionage. . . . They want to be secret pen pals. [But] I don’t have any secret pen pals because the warden reads everything that I read.”

Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) sent a letter to the Bureau of Prisons, asking that the “full extent of his cooperation” with Congress be considered whenever Boyce’s parole was reviewed.

In 1988, he was moved to the state lock-up at Oak Park Heights, Minn., which was paid $98 a day by the federal government to house him.

He took courses in art and history and earned a bachelor’s degree. He began work on a master’s. He consistently received A grades and the praise of his instructors.

He began to paint. He played chess.

Tears Flowed at Parole Hearing

In March 1997, he appeared before the parole board. At one point, he broke down in tears under the weight of so much time lost. At his side sat the young Sam Sheldon, then all of 26 and still a law school student. The road from Palos Verdes had come full circle.

Two years earlier, Sheldon had been attending law school at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minn., where Boyce was coincidentally taking classes by phone.

It took two more letters, but Boyce finally responded. And Sheldon sat at his side at the 1997 parole hearing, working free.

“I was now a part of the so-called establishment and I had become a very conservative political thinker,” Sheldon said. “I had also found out how much Chris had changed.”

At the hearing, prison case manager Hart told the parole commission that Boyce was rehabilitated. “I don’t see much value in his continued incarceration,” Hart said.

Kenneth Walker, a parole commission examiner, said: “Mr. Boyce seems to be a mature individual and one who is truly sorry for his past crimes.”

The commission ruled that Boyce could transfer into a halfway house in September 2002, with full release by March 2003. Next winter, Sheldon and Boyce will ask for even more time off.

An invigorated Boyce returned to prison in Minnesota. He continued writing for the Minneapolis newspaper. Mostly his pieces dealt with prison reform. He described an incident in which a mentally disturbed inmate tried to electrocute him with a makeshift prod wired into a light socket.

He even apologized to his father and described his own efforts to rehabilitate himself. “Tonight,” wrote Boyce, “I will take out my brushes and paints and begin a new portrait. Painting is like a sponge. It absorbs all the hurt and passion in life and leaves me healed for the next day.”

In February he wrote about a convicted spree killer named Craig Bjork, nicknamed “Berserker Bjork.” Boyce told how the man had roamed inside the prison, creating an environment dangerous to all.

“It becomes more difficult for inmates to participate in rehabilitative programs when they must fight to survive in a prison pressure cooker of violence and murder,” Boyce wrote. “Bad men under extreme stress tend to become worse.”

That was it. Warden Jim Bruton suddenly turned Boyce back over to federal authorities. He said he could no longer guarantee his safety.

Asked if Boyce had placed himself in some danger within the prison, the warden said: “I won’t tell you what it was, but there was a reaction.”

Transfer Nearer to Family Sought

Sheldon’s lawsuit charges that Boyce’s free-speech rights were violated. The lawyer, now working in San Diego, wants Boyce transferred closer to his family. After a federal judge dismissed the suit on June 25, Sheldon filed a request for reconsideration Monday.

Of such matters was the conversation on the five-hour drive from Denver to Supermax. Homenick and Boyce, now bearded and a little gray, reminisced about his trial in Los Angeles and his escape from Lompoc. They talked about the prison assaults and his college work and his hopes for an early release.

And when they parted, as the ever-optimistic Boyce walked into his new world of malevolent prisoners such as mass murderer McVeigh, he turned back a final time and made a little joke to show Homenick how to make the best of a bad business:

“Does McVeigh play chess?”