The boy said Nichols took him into the den and “started showing me these indecent pictures. . . . Naked ladies. And he undid my pants and started playing around with my personals; and after a while, he put his mouth to my personals, and I came to a climax and then he quit and gave me two dollars and I went home.”
A few weeks later, the boy told his father what had happened and also described two similar sexual encounters with Nichols. The boy’s alarmed father soon heard from other parents in Country Club Estates whose sons had told them similar stories. The parents wanted to know “what was going on.” Five months later, on May 2, 1966, the father went to the Broward County Courthouse in Fort Lauderdale and swore out an affidavit accusing Nichols of assaulting his son.
Sheriff’s deputies arrested Nichols four days later. A brief news story appeared the following day at the bottom of the local news page in the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. Under a one-column headline, MAN CHARGED WITH ASSAULT, it identified Nichols by name, noted the charge of “indecent assault upon a child,” and reported that he posted bail of twenty-five hundred dollars before his release from the county jail. The forty-three-word article did not disclose the age or sex of the child, nor did it include any biographical details, except Nichols’s address. If the newspaper had learned that he was a retired air force major and a much-decorated veteran of the Korean War, it probably would have written more. But Nichols had been smart. In giving his occupation to deputies, he described himself only as “retired,” according to the arrest record.
Nichols clearly felt stressed in the spring and summer of 1966. He appears to have tried to ease it with Coke, candy, and junk food. By the time he was arrested in May, his weight had ballooned to 320 pounds. His spy instincts also seem to have kicked in. Broward County property records show that he sold four parcels of land, including his house—all for cash, all on the same day, August 1, 1966. Three days after he signed paperwork for those land sales, Nichols was charged with a second sex crime. An arrest warrant accused him of the statutory rape of a fifteen-year-old girl.
In September, Nichols fled Florida, became a fugitive from justice, and attracted the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He took off in his car, along with Donnie and a pedigreed Chihuahua named Mama and her two puppies. In the most bald-faced lie in his autobiography, he explained his departure as a spur-of-the-moment lifestyle choice, a sudden response to the ennui of South Florida living.
“I decided one day this was not for me. When Donnie returned from school, I told him we were headed out. . . . [We] found ourselves on the open road, destination unknown. In the following weeks, we visited the states of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California in search of a location pleasing to us where I thought I could raise my youngest. Eventually, we found ourselves in Guadalajara, Mexico. Choosing Mexico proved to be a wise move. I felt healing in myself.”
While it was surely a relief to find sanctuary in Mexico, their journey was hardly that of a father seeking an amiable location to rear a son.
His flight was driven by panic. He faced a felony trial and five years in prison. After his arrest, Nichols knew that his sexual predilections, which he had indulged without legal consequences on his spy base in South Korea, were secrets he could no longer control. He could expect that testimony at the trial would disgust his brothers and their wives, as well as his neighbors in Country Club Estates.
Nichols’s two older adopted boys did not leave Florida with him, and it is not clear whether he left them behind or they chose not to go. In his last will and testament, Nichols said that Lee and Bruce Nichols “deserted their brother Donald, II, and me in 1966.” This suggests that he wanted them to come to Mexico and that they refused. In his autobiography, Nichols spun a slightly different story, writing that both of the older boys decided to go out on their own in 1966. Lee, who was twenty-five that year, had found work as a full-time cook in a local Chinese restaurant and his job came with a furnished apartment, Nichols claimed. He said that Bruce, then eighteen, left for California to become a surfer. “He wasn’t doing too good in school—was surf-board crazy.” Their version of these events could not be learned. Bruce Nichols died in California in 1985 at thirty-seven; extensive efforts to locate Lee Nichols failed.
Whatever their reasons were for not going to Mexico, Nichols’s relationship with both of them appears to have permanently soured when he fled Florida. Lee later told Judson Nichols that he never again wanted to see or talk to his adoptive father. Bruce had never gotten along with him. The two often fought and Nichols criticized Bruce in front of relatives for being “lazy.” Both Lee and Bruce eventually cut off all contact with the man who had brought them to the United States. No evidence has emerged to suggest that Nichols sexually abused them, but family members later wondered about it. “In retrospect, I think it was very strange that Uncle Don had adopted three boys from Korea—and two of them would not want to have anything to do with him,” said Diana Carlin, Nichols’s niece.
Nichols would never forgive the boys for leaving him. In his will, under the heading “Adopted Sons,” he declared: “I specifically make no provisions of any type [for Lee and Bruce]. I desire they get none of my earthly possessions at all. Memories are more than enough.”
After four months of traveling across the United States, the Mexican getaway ran into a roadblock of Nichols’s own inadvertent making. On the last day of 1966, a Saturday, he left a paper sack containing twenty-five thousand dollars on the counter of Colleen’s Coffee Shop in Escondido, California—about forty miles north of the Mexican border. Before Nichols discovered his loss and could rush back to the coffee shop to claim the cash, a waitress had turned it over to police. To retrieve it, Nichols had to pay three visits to the Escondido police station, show identification, and repeatedly explain why he was Mexico-bound with a bag full of hundred-dollar bills. By his third visit, police had learned that he was a fugitive from Florida. He was arrested on Tuesday, January 3, on warrants for statutory rape and indecent assault on a child. Donnie, then twelve, was taken to a nearby emergency shelter for children. While Nichols was being booked into the San Diego County jail, deputies found a cashier’s check for fifteen thousand dollars drawn on a nearby California bank, where Nichols had apparently just deposited another tranche of the cash he had in his car. His traveling money was equivalent, at the time, to about six times the average annual household income in America.
The Los Angeles Times and the San Diego Union wrote brief news articles about the arrest, and wire services picked up the story. Versions of it appeared in the Miami Herald and other newspapers in Florida. What made the arrest moderately newsworthy was not that it nabbed a former spymaster from the Korean War, as no one then realized who Nichols was or what he had done. The articles focused instead on the oddity of a former air force officer leaving behind such a sizable amount of cash. In any case, Nichols hired a lawyer and posted cash bail of $2,750. Then he secured his sack of money, collected his son and his Chihuahuas (it is not clear where the dogs were kept during Nichols’s two nights in jail), and took off for Guadalajara, apparently forfeiting his bail money.
FBI agents were soon on the case. They went to the home of Judson Nichols, who by then had moved to Miami to serve as director of school bus transportation for Dade County. “We got a knock on the door, and it was couple of guys who wanted to talk to my dad about Uncle Don,” said Judson’s daughter, Diana, who was eleven at the time. “The FBI wanted to know if my dad had been in contact with him.”
When Judson told the agents that he had talked to his brother on the phone, they insisted that he try to bring Donald back to Florida. “The FBI twisted my dad’s arm,” said Judson’s oldest son, Donald, who years later became a defense lawyer. “My dad had an eighth-grade education. He wasn’t much better educated than Uncle Don. The FBI used some legal mumbo jumbo, threatened my dad with charges that he was harboring a fugitive
or aiding a fugitive.”
The threat worked and Judson called his brother, urging him to come home to face charges. On the phone, Donald said he might consider returning if Judson came down to Mexico so they could talk in person. Judson flew to Guadalajara and spent a week with Donald and Donnie. During that time, Donald allowed himself to be photographed by Judson—a rarity, as he often refused to allow his picture to be taken, especially when he was overweight. But in Mexico, he had something to show off, a new physique. He had lost more than a hundred pounds and was all but unrecognizable.
Judson secured his brother’s promise to turn himself in. But in many conversations with Donald, he did not learn about the charge of indecent assault on the twelve-year-old boy. He had not seen the one short newspaper article about his brother’s arrest and knew only about the statutory rape charge from the girl of fifteen. Judson’s children say no one in their family ever learned about the charge involving the boy. “If my father and mother had known, they would have been very disgusted and would have completely cut off ties,” Diana said.
When Judson returned to Miami, he hired a legendary South Florida defense attorney, Irwin J. Block, to help his brother. In the early 1960s, Block had helped represent Clarence Gideon in a landmark case, Gideon v. Wainwright, in which the Supreme Court established the right of a poor defendant to have a lawyer. In another celebrated Florida case, Block worked for nearly a decade without pay to get two black men off death row for a 1963 murder they had not committed. Block also defended clients who paid him extremely well. In all his cases, he was known and feared for his relentless pretrial preparation.
After Nichols surrendered at the U.S.-Mexican border on December 8, 1967, he was transported by Broward County sheriff’s deputies from Nogales, Arizona, back to Fort Lauderdale. The stress of returning to the United States to face trial and possible imprisonment had apparently put Nichols off his healthful Mexican diet. When he was arrested in Nogales, Nichols had regained all the weight he lost in Guadalajara and weighed 325 pounds.
In Fort Lauderdale, Irwin Block had already gotten busy filing motions, one of which obtained Nichols’s release on bail. He moved in again with Judson and family, bringing Donnie and several Chihuahuas into their house in Miami. As he had a decade earlier, Nichols also arrived with astonishing amounts of cash. Large-denomination bills were stuffed into his knee-high socks. “He had brought the money back from Mexico and wanted to put it into the freezer,” said Diana Carlin, his niece. “I remember my mom was horrified. My dad said to Uncle Don that if he wanted to stay with us, he had to get the money out of the house.”
Irwin Block, who was likely paid with some of this money, was quietly efficient and spectacularly effective in defending his new client. Nichols did not face a jury trial on the statutory rape charge. It was apparently dismissed after the girl who had accused him changed her story and blamed another man for assaulting her.
A trial on the charge of indecent assault on the twelve-year-old boy in Country Club Estates was held in late May 1968. It began after Block had taken a lengthy deposition from the boy, as well as from two other boys in the neighborhood who said Nichols had abused or tried to abuse them. Block also deposed the boys’ fathers. Questions asked during the depositions elicited some confusion and discrepancies among the boys and their fathers about the dates of the assaults and when the boys reported them to their parents. No transcript of the trial was available in court records, but inconsistencies in the accusers’ depositions might have weakened the state’s case. After a four-day trial, a jury found Nichols not guilty.
Block also succeeded in keeping Nichols’s name out of the newspapers. There appears to have been no press coverage of the trial in Fort Lauderdale or anywhere in South Florida. When military historians began writing about Nichols in the 1990s, they did not know about the accusations against him in Broward County in the 1960s. No one in Judson Nichols’s family learned about the accusations from the boys in Fort Lauderdale until the author of this book found their depositions in 2016.
In his autobiography, Nichols did not write about the trial or thank Irwin Block for his legal work. Instead, he blandly said that he left Mexico due to “ill health” and because he “felt that Donnie needed an American environment.” But in recounting his return to Florida, Nichols did include a singularly revealing passage that describes the kind of man he wished he could be. The portrait is painted in the words of two “female friends” who were supposedly talking about Nichols as he prepared to leave Guadalajara. As his book reports their overheard conversation, they saw Nichols as an attractive, charismatic, and dangerously sexy man of mystery:
Behind those baby green eyes there is a monster’s bastard brain that won’t quit. It runs all the time, it won’t sleep and God help you if you get on the wrong end of his stick for love—or hate, for he was equally endowed with both emotions. You know he never just enters a room, he charges it, and everything including your windows and doors all seem to quiver under the strain of his presence. But this is just one of Nichols’ many facets. He has a pack of dogs, collects antiques, stamps, coins, kids, old guns, etc.—as if they were running out of style. If he was ever short of them, he isn’t now. Someday he has to settle down and build a twenty acre house just for his collection of kids and junk. If he does I bet you won’t find standing room for the prevalence of his dog guests. He loves women, but damn if he’ll let anyone know it, how do you get to a man like that?
CHAPTER 12
Nolo Contendere
After his acquittal, Donald Nichols moved out of his brother’s house. With Donnie and the dogs, he drove four hours north on the Florida turnpike and settled in the central Florida town of Brooksville. He might have chosen the town, which then had a population of four thousand, because real estate was cheap. Legal fees had probably taken a bite out of his cash reserves.
Brooksville and surrounding Hernando County would one day be absorbed into the sprawl of suburban Tampa, but in the late sixties, the town and county were part of the rural segregationist South. The region had a notably sinister history of racist violence. Hernando County had the nation’s highest lynching rate between 1900 and 1930. Brooksville was named after Preston Brooks, a champion of slavery who represented South Carolina in the U.S. House of Representatives in the nineteenth century. He became infamous in 1856 for using his cane to club and seriously injure a Republican U.S. senator from Massachusetts, the abolitionist Charles Sumner, in an assault on the Senate floor. Appreciative citizens of what had been Pierceville, Florida, celebrated the beating by changing their town’s name to Brooksville. In all likelihood, Nichols did not know this story when he moved to town. But he surely would have noticed the Ku Klux Klan, which regularly paraded through town.
Before the move, Nichols had hatched a new plan. He would write a book about his life as a spy. He asked General Partridge to write a foreword. Retired by then, Partridge was happy to oblige. In the fall of 1968, he mailed Nichols five pages of praise. It began:
“If I were called upon to name the most amazing and unusual man among all those with whom I was associated during my military service, I would not hesitate for a second in picking out Donald Nichols as that individual. His name and deeds are unknown to the general public or even to the people of the military establishment, yet Nichols successfully directed and often assisted in carrying out a long series of extraordinary exploits that called for imagination, for a high order of organizational capability, for maximum operational skill under the most difficult circumstances and for personal courage far beyond the normal call of duty.”
(Six years later, when Partridge participated in an air force oral history project, he was more measured, saying that while Nichols “was a genius; he finally went crazy, really, literally.” Three years after that, in another interview with the air force, Partridge said that Nichols “finally fell apart mentally.” It is not clear whether Nichols ever met in person with Partridge
after returning to the United States. Partridge’s judgment appears to have been strongly influenced by the clinical reports the general received from air force psychiatrists, with whom he exchanged letters in 1957.)
With Partridge on board, Nichols turned next to Serbando Torres, his closest wartime aide. Sounding like the squadron commander that he had once been, Nichols wrote to Torres and instructed him to put down on paper “right away” the details of the “dates, places, times” they had spent together before and during the war. “I expect a lot from you to fill in the wide hole covering [the] period you were with me,” he wrote. He told Torres not to fret about security considerations. “Forget the classification,” he said. “Trust me on this. I’ll handle that angle. You put down, please, all you can remember.” Torres was still serving in the air force when he received the letter in 1969, and he chose not to help Nichols.
Nichols pushed ahead with the book anyway, working on it sporadically throughout the 1970s. He found a local schoolteacher, Joynelle Pearson, to assist him with organization and grammar. He asked his brothers and their wives to send him letters and share memories from childhood. He asked his former executive officer in Korea, Major George T. Gregory, to describe what he knew about their spy adventures during the war. Gregory came through with an account of his former boss that was even more positive, if less factually reliable, than what Partridge had sent him. Nichols included the entire fifteen pages from Gregory as a book chapter titled “The Unknown Lawrence of Korea.” Nichols also asked the National Archives in St. Louis to send him a complete list of his twenty-one U.S. medals and decorations, as well as seven medals from the South Korean government.
Finally, Nichols found an air force veteran of the Korean War, Robert “Bobby” Meadows, who owned Brooksville Printing, to be his typesetter, book designer, editorial adviser, and publisher. On and off, the two veterans spent more than a year together in Bobby’s print shop. They worked weekends and late into the night, arguing about text, photographs, and the cover design. Steve Wyatt, Bobby’s son, who was thirteen when the book came together, said Nichols always wore black combat boots, blue jeans, and steel knee braces.