DRUG SMUGGLER, 73, KILLED IN COCAINE DEAL, POLICE SAY

Crime: Daniel Walcott, a well-heeled, well-known narcotics trafficker,
was chased off the Pasadena Freeway and gunned down by men who stole
his rental car. A companion was critically injured.

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."