Drug Smuggler, 73, Killed in Cocaine Deal, Police Say

A brazen midday attack near the Pasadena Freeway this week took the life of an international career criminal, a 73-year-old retired airline pilot with a list of aliases and charges in half a dozen countries for offenses ranging from gold smuggling to espionage.

Daniel Walcott, most recently of Menlo Park, Calif., was killed over a drug deal involving more than 200 pounds of cocaine, police said Friday.

Walcott and a 72-year-old Miami attorney, Richard Reynolds, were shot multiple times as they tried to get out of their rental car in northeast Los Angeles on Thursday afternoon. Walcott died at the scene, and Reynolds was in critical condition at County-USC Medical Center.

“Our investigation shows it was drug-related,” said LAPD Lt. Jim Grayson. “They weren’t just tourists taking a nice ride in the neighborhood.”

Walcott last made news when he tried to sail $7 million worth of hashish from Pakistan to British Columbia, authorities said. It was a farcical odyssey: The yacht ran aground in a Karachi, Pakistan harbor, an overloaded raft started sinking with the drugs, and Walcott was arrested at the Washington border as a result of a broken headlight.

“He’s had quite a history,” said Sgt. Bruce Vipond of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who investigated Walcott’s smuggling case in 1991. “He’s led a very colorful life.”

Grayson said that Walcott, who was profiled in Time magazine in 1966 for his early criminal exploits, was the type of well-heeled professional often involved in large-scale narcotics trafficking.

“Gangbangers don’t handle all the drug trafficking,” he said. “It’s done by business people.”

Shortly after 3 p.m. Thursday, Walcott was driving a rented Buick north on the Pasadena Freeway when he and Reynolds suspected they were being followed by men in a luxury sedan, Grayson said.

The two pulled off at the Avenue 43 exit in Montecito Heights, northeast of Chinatown, and tried to make a U-turn on a small dead-end street, police said.

The sedan collided with the Buick and trapped the two men. One of its occupants jumped out, pulled Walcott from the driver’s seat and shot him, Grayson said. Reynolds tried to run but was shot from behind.

“The suspect then turned and shot the driver again,” Grayson said. “Then he jumped into the victim’s car and a second suspect followed in their car.”

Investigators said it was clear that the attackers knew their victims. Police did not say how Walcott and Reynolds were allegedly involved in the deal.

Investigators said they have not identified the suspects, but that both are Latino men, 25 to 35 years old.

The victims’ rental car was found Friday morning on Gage Avenue in Bell. It had been leased from a rental office in Lancaster, where the two had arrived in a private plane Thursday, Grayson said.

Officials of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police confirmed that Walcott was the same man who was sentenced to six years in U.S. federal prison for smuggling hashish and who had gained international notoriety for his crimes.

Before his sentence, Walcott and his wife were socialites who lived in a tony hillside section of West Vancouver, Canada, Vipond said.

According to Vancouver Magazine, which ran a long profile of Walcott in 1995, he was a Texas native with an aristocratic air and bombastic speech, who spoke several languages fluently, drank fine wines and claimed to be related to Winston Churchill.

A former airline pilot, Walcott once owned a charter service that flew refugees out of the Congo in 1959.

In 1962, posing as a millionaire, Walcott got a contract from Air India to haul freight between India and Afghanistan, Vancouver Magazine wrote. He was stopped one day by police, who found 10,000 rounds of black market 12-gauge shotgun shells in his twin-engine plane.

Walcott spent 1 1/2 years in a New Delhi prison before he was released with a $420 fine, according to the magazine. Vipond said he had heard the same account from a DEA agent.

In a 1966 Time magazine profile, an Interpol official was quoted as saying: “Mr. Walcott knows how to be a very good bad man.” That same year, he was convicted of gold smuggling in India, according to news reports.

Perhaps his greatest misadventure came in 1990, when Walcott and some colleagues bought a 45-foot yacht in France and sailed to Pakistan. The journey was cursed from the beginning. The crew abandoned ship in Egypt, the boom broke during a gale, and the boat ran aground at Karachi.

There, Walcott bought a little less than a ton of hashish and tried to carry it to the boat on a raft, Vipond said. But the raft began to sink, soaking the cargo. Walcott and his cohorts spent a day drying it.

On the way back to Canada, Walcott’s plane flew to the island country of Malta, where a crew member radioed the wrong landing code to the flight tower. “They were surrounded by Malta military forces because they pushed the hijacking code,” Vipond said.

After landing in Canada, Walcott was arrested by the U.S. Border Patrol because his car’s lights were flickering and its rear end was sagging. It turned out to be carrying 450 pounds of hashish.

“He was a very personable individual,” Vipond said. “I’m sorry to hear he was murdered.”