After leaving Eglin Air Force Base Hospital, Donald Nichols moved in with his older brother Judson, who lived in central Florida with his wife, Nora Mae, and their four children. Near the small town of DeLand, they owned an old farmhouse that sat on concrete blocks, had asbestos siding, and needed work.
A devout Christian, Judson was a welcoming brother. He had always worried that Donald, more than any of his siblings, had been scarred as a boy by the sexual antics of their mother. Judson had recently landed a job as head of bus operations for Volusia County Schools. After years of struggling to feed and clothe his family, the job provided him with a regular salary, along with a realistic expectation that he and his wife could fix up their house. Still, they drove an old Plymouth. Like most people who came of age during the Depression, they worried about money. To supplement Judson’s salary, the family raised ferns for sale in flower shops.
Donald’s arrival was a seismic disturbance, and the tremors began even before he showed up in person. He sent the family an expensive set of fine china in a big aluminum trunk, each piece carefully wrapped in tissue paper. The children, ages two to fourteen, did not know what to make of the fancy, imported dinnerware, but quickly found a soothing use for the tissue: it replaced pages of the Sears, Roebuck catalog they had been using as toilet paper.
When he arrived in the flesh, Nichols was driving a new car, a white 1958 Chevrolet Bel Air with twin headlights and a V-8 engine. He was also carrying loads of money.
“You would have known Uncle Don only one day before he made you know that he was rich,” said Donald H. Nichols, Judson’s oldest son, then fourteen. “He had so much cash and he loved to show it off. He’d pull a wad out of his pocket, maybe a thousand dollars or two. The money was always a mystery to us the whole time we knew him. He never said where it came from. He didn’t want anybody to know how much he had. It wasn’t millions, but it was probably a few hundred thousand dollars.”
After he moved into the farmhouse, Uncle Don, who had a loud and commanding voice, often issued orders to everyone in the household. He bought mountains of junk food—chips, crackers, candy bars, and Cokes—and shared it reluctantly with his nieces and nephews. He had a tiny 16-millimeter movie camera, a tool of the spy trade that intrigued the children. Stay away from it, he warned: it contains secrets from Korea.
In his Chevy, he took the family on rides that were often disturbing. At an all-you-can-eat chicken restaurant, he gorged on so much chicken that the owner called the police. At all-you-can-drink roadside juice stands, he guzzled orange juice until he threw up. At supermarkets, he would hijack grocery carts, taking them from parents distracted by their kids. Then he would rush to the checkout counter, buy everything in the cart, and race away in his Chevy, smiling broadly. Stopping at a roadside amusement park, he once ordered the entire family—including Judson and the reluctant Nora Mae—to get out of the car and go down a steep slide on a small rug. With his young nephew Donald riding shotgun, he drove his big car at more than 120 miles an hour on the back roads of central Florida, grinning and glancing sideways to gauge the terror in the eyes of his passenger.
“He was crazy Uncle Don, a kind of overgrown kid. You didn’t want to grow up to be like him,” Donald said. “He was looking desperately for fun. The things you would expect from a military guy like him—cigarettes, booze, and women—they were not in the picture. Instead, at the drop of a hat, he would do something stupid. It was all superficial, being crazy. He challenged me to a ‘blender contest.’ Mix up anything from the fridge and drink it. I put gumdrops, pickles, mustard in. He drank it all and threw up. It was good fun for kids, not so much for my parents.”
Soon, three boys from Korea moved in—Uncle Don’s adopted sons. In his autobiography, Nichols said he had “prepared for the exit of my sons” during his final weeks in Korea. It might also have been during this time that he arranged for the shipment of his cash back to Florida, a movement of funds that had to have been concealed from customs authorities.
The oldest adopted boy, Lee Tae Chon Nichols, turned sixteen in the summer of 1958. He had been one of Nichols’s houseboys at the spy base outside Seoul. Naturalization records list his occupation as “cook” and show that he arrived in the United States on November 19, 1957, around the time Nichols checked into Eglin Air Force Base Hospital.
The second oldest, Bruce Nichols, whose Korean name was Kim Si Koo, was ten. He had also arrived in the United States the previous November. Records show that Bruce and Lee were born in Seoul.
The youngest, Donald “Donnie” Nichols II, was five. As explained previously, he arrived in the United States in 1955 because his adoptive father feared the boy was being stalked by North Korean assassins. Before Donnie showed up at Judson’s house he had lived in Hollywood, Florida, with Nichols’s eldest brother, Walter Sr., a local policeman, and his wife, Fern. Nichols would claim decades later that Donnie was the only child of his marriage to Kim In Hwa. But in the spring of 1958, he did not mention a wife who died in childbirth—he said Donnie was adopted.
In the DeLand farmhouse, seven children and three adults squeezed into three small bedrooms and shared one bath. It was crowded and tense. Nora Mae was unwilling to leave her children alone with her brother-in-law. Nichols treated his two older Korean boys less like sons and more like servants. They would, in time, become resentful and testy. It was clear to everyone that Donnie was Uncle Don’s favorite. After several bumpy weeks with Judson’s family, Nichols and his sons moved out.
He bought a nearly new house in South Florida. Located less than a block from the Fort Lauderdale Country Club, with four bedrooms and three baths, it was much larger and fancier than the homes of any of Nichols’s brothers. The deed on the property in Plantation, a suburb of Fort Lauderdale, shows that on May 2, 1958, Nichols paid an unspecified amount of cash to take over a ten-thousand-dollar mortgage.
After enrolling his sons in local schools, Nichols began searching for something to do with the rest of his life. He was thirty-five and an exile from the military, the only American institution he understood. He did not—and probably could not—plug into the old-boy network that many retired intelligence officers use to arrange lucrative government contracts or jobs in corporate security. “I found the civilian touch isn’t exactly ‘Heaven’ for retired military officers,” he wrote. “[T]he majority of people I met didn’t seem to give a damn about anyone but themselves.”
Like many parents in a new town, he made friends through his children. He took neighbor boys fishing with his sons. He started a wholesale plant nursery and began buying real estate, purchasing at least three undeveloped parcels in Broward County. Most of the houses in his middle-class subdivision, called Country Club Estates, were two or three years old, and Nichols got to know his neighbors while discussing suitable trees and shrubbery to plant around the ranch-style houses. But he could not find a full-time job that suited him and was often bored.
“In addition to my inability to adjust to the change of pace from espionage to civilian life, I found it impossible to adjust to the new atmosphere which had taken place in Florida after my long absence,” he said in his autobiography. “For lack of something better to do in those interminable days in Florida, I made a study of palms. . . . I continued as a lone wolf resting under and studying my stately friends, sometimes suppressing the desire to howl my melancholy song of affinity with these abnormal lords of the plant world.”
Nichols did not appear to show symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. In the 1960s, as his brother Judson and Judson’s children saw him, he was cogent, articulate, certainly sane—though at times manic and often brooding. With family, he sometimes talked about his time in the psych ward, describing electroshock treatments as very painful. He repeatedly told them that the government wanted him to forget what he had done in Korea and that he, too, wanted to forget.
Yet he displayed his war medals in his house and told war stories: about massacres he had witnessed, tanks and MiGs he had captured, a secret trip into Manchuria, schemes that captured teams of North Korean agents, and his “very close friend” Syngman Rhee.
The more Uncle Don talked about Korea, the less his family trusted his stories.
“It was just his personality,” recalled his nephew. “You never quite believed him or knew where you stood with him. I never saw a moment of introspection. I never saw the inside of the guy. He never questioned what he was doing with his life. Today, I would call him a phony. He was missing a tick. Empathy. He was missing empathy.
“You couldn’t tell if he was bullshitting or not. He was a master manipulator. We thought he manipulated the air force to get a medical discharge. We thought this guy has figured a way to get a lifetime pension early. He claimed he knew Syngman Rhee, but we wondered if it was real. We never understood the importance of what he did. We flat-out missed it.”
At six in the evening on December 18, 1965, Nichols telephoned a twelve-year-old neighbor boy and invited him to his home. The boy lived a few blocks away, on the far side of the Fort Lauderdale Country Club. He was a playmate of Donnie’s, and Nichols had taken him along on a family fishing trip. But when Nichols invited the neighbor boy over, his three adopted sons were elsewhere.
“So I asked my mom and dad if I could go over to his house and they said yes,” the boy said later in a sworn deposition. “I got on my bike and went over to his house and he said he had a Christmas present, which he didn’t.”
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?