They weren’t gamblers, not in the usual sense. No casino lights, no dealers in tuxedos. Just a pair of young men in the backwash of Southern California’s aerospace boom, playing a game they didn’t quite understand the rules of.
One of them — Christopher Boyce — called himself “The Falcon.” A quiet genius from Palos Verdes, born into privilege, with a job at TRW, the sprawling defense contractor in Redondo Beach. Inside its heavily secured communications center, Boyce handled satellite intelligence meant for the CIA — code names, encrypted dispatches, cables marked “Eyes Only.”
The other — Andrew Daulton Lee — “The Snowman.” Streetwise, restless, moving contraband and charm in equal measure, orbiting the same upper-middle-class world from a rougher angle.
They’d known each other since childhood, altar boys once at Saint John Fisher Church. Now, sitting in a parked car off Whitney Collins Drive, they were drawing from a new deck — one stamped not with clubs or hearts, but with the insignia of American intelligence.
Boyce dealt the cards. Lee carried the bets across the border — cash and microfilm to Soviet agents at the embassy in Mexico City. Each drop was a new hand. Each meeting, a bluff they hoped would hold. The game grew bigger, faster. Stakes out of control.
In January 1977, Lee was caught outside the embassy; Boyce folded days later in California. The judge rightly called it espionage. To them, it might have felt like losing a high-stakes hand they never should’ve played.
But the echoes carried through Los Angeles like cigarette smoke — the hum of duplicity, the thrill of risk, the idea that in this city, everyone’s dealing something.
In that particular year—1977, dealing semiconductors for the TI-99 was also an option.