JOHN DALTON AND THE DRUG WAR

Here's a saga that gives us the drug war at its ripest malevolence It
concerns John Dalton, resident for the past twenty-one months at the
federal detention center in Dublin, California, a few miles east of the
Lawrence Livermore Labs.

All the details here come from an extraordinary series of articles written
by Mark Heimann, published in the Anderson Valley Advertiser earlier this
year. Let's return to 1985. Dalton is living with his first wife on an
eighty acre parcel in Mendocino County, some four hours' drive up 101 from
San Francisco. This is pot growing country. About 4 in the afternoon
bullets start raining down on the cabin, and Dalton sneaks out to the ridge
where the shots are coming from. At this point he's bushwhacked by five men
in camo, who beat him senseless. He comes to, face in the dirt, to find
that his assailants are from the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting,
better known as CAMP.

These are teams of federal, state and local cops. They ask him if he's a
marijuana grower. Dalton says no, and that he will sue. Sheriff's deputy
Charlie Bone, who's dislocated his finger in the encounter, tells Dalton
that they know he's a pot grower and that his troubles are only beginning.

Within eight hours of the arrest, the charges against Dalton are dropped,
and though an attorney tells him he could collect big time, Dalton reckons
the safe course is to do nothing.

In 1992, Dalton, a brilliant mechanic favored by the hotrod set, embarks on
a relationship with Victoria (Tori) Horstman. They are married a year later
in Las Vegas. Horstman is a wannabe cop, consorts with cops and by 1994 is
passing bank deposit slips from her husband's machine shop to DEA Special
Agent Mark Nelson, who forthwith signs her up as a DEA source, 5R3940054.
The Dalton-Horstman menage is not tranquil. Dalton calls the police from
time to time to restore order, and though Horstrnan claims her husband is a
brute, her own 19 year old son has testified, most recently in federal
court that John was "a very mellow man" and a good dad, and that his mother
was a mean drunk.

On one occasion Horstman returns home in a disheveled state, saying she's
been up in a police helicopter, got drunk, thrown up and peed in her pants.
Another time she sends Dalton to find the case for her knife, which she
left hanging on a phone pole while she was helping the police install a bug

What Horstman doesn't confide is that by now she is romantically involved
with Agent Nelson, initial overtures having been made in a DEA safe house,
where, according to a sworn statement by Horstman, "Agent Nelson gave me a
beer and later we kissed and fondled each other... I do want to make it
clear Agent Nelson considered me at all times his personal possession and
got angry if I ever talked. with other DEA agents." Among Nelson's other
possessions are three children and a pregnant wife.

Nelson successfully presses Horstinan to spy on her husband. On at least
two occasions she allows Nelson to search the house while Dalton is at
work. Whenever she demurs, the DEA agent threatens to charge her with.
money laundering on Dalton's behalf.

The most vivid episode in this sequence comes in September 1994, during a
big fed/state/local enforcement drive against marijuana gardens in that
area of Meridocino County. Nelson and a colleague seek out Horstman with
the request that she place a "special FBI tape recorder" behind the
headboard of her marital bed. Dalton duly returns home and describes the
raids to wife and tape recorder, with the latter instrument soon returned
by Horstman to Nelson.

Despite the surveillance, the DEA never gets a shred of evidence linking
Dalton to marijuana growing. Thus balked, they turn to the drug war's
favored tool, a snitch. Two, in fact. Using the statements of these
snitches, one with prior convictions for perjury and fraud, they seize all
Dalton's property for forfeiture, on the grounds that such property is the
fruit of illegal labor. They impound all his cars and trucks, and when
Dalton fixes up a '56 Chevy and takes his kids for a test drive, Nelson
nabs that too, leaving the occupants to trudge home. During the forfeiture
raid, on October 6,1994, a deputy takes Dalton's kids to school, telling
them, "Hope you guys said goodbye to your dad, because you ain't going to
see him for a long, long time:'

As Mark Heimann puts it: "This is standard operating procedure for federal
narcs these days: First initiate forfeiture action and take every single
possession which could be sold to finance an attorney. Then, once the
victim is destitute, hit him with criminal charges so he's forced to take
an overworked and underpaid public defender who can be counted on to push
his client into a plea bargain."

After the raid, Nelson oversees Horstrnan's separation from Dalton; he and
five Feds load up a UHaul with Horstman's stuff while Dalton is out. When
Dalton finds out Horstman is in Blame, Washington, and goes north to patch
up their marriage, Horstman informs Nelson, who himself hurries north with
eavesdropping equipment. Horstman rejects Dalton's overtures, and
ultimately divorces him at the urging of Nelson, who even drives her to the
lawyer's office to sign the final papers.

On September 27,1996, the Feds arrest Dalton, on the basis of a secret
federal grand jury indictment, charging him with marijuana cultivation and
witness tampering. Among the witnesses against him is the operator of a
speed lab facing a life term but rewarded for his testimony with a ten year
sentence. Denied bail, Dalton has been in prison for nearly two years,
awaiting trial.

He's suing the Feds for $44.8 million for outrageous conduct. On May 17,
Federal District Judge Susan Ellston heard Dalton's lawyers, Tony Serra and
Shari Greenburger, argue for dismissal of the case. The court was then
furnished the spectacle of the government's lawyer conceding that DEA Agent
Nelson committed perjury in concealing the timing of his affair with
Horstman. The Feds' last desperate throw is rich with effrontery, seeking
to paint Dalton as an abusive husband. As Heimann remarks, what this has to
do with marijuana cultivation is unclear. At time of writing, Judge Illston
was considering whether to dismiss the case.