The Good Bad Man

India is the world's richest market for smugglers. One man who took a fling at reaping some of those riches sat last week in a maximum-security cell in Bombay's city prison. He is Daniel H. Walcott, 39, a broad-shouldered, persuasive Texan whose profile is known to readers of Interpol circulars the world over. Pilot and swashbuckler, he operates under at least four aliases and has been charged in half a dozen countries with a variety of violations, from running an illegal transatlantic passenger airline to swindling and espionage. Says an Interpol official: "Mr. Walcott knows how to be a very good bad man."

Big Shot. Walcott first turned up in India in the early 1960s as president of a four-plane freight airline. Suavely posing as an American millionaire, he won a contract from Air-India to haul freight between landlocked Afghanistan and Indian rail centers. Traveling freely throughout India, Walcott often made short hops in his twin-engine Piper Apache until one day in 1962, when police checked the plane and found a crate that everyone had assumed contained spare parts for one of Walcott's laid-up DC-4s. Instead police found 10,000 rounds of 12-gauge ammunition, an item that fetches six times its U.S. price on India's black market.

Arrested on a minor smuggling charge, Walcott languished in the Delhi jail for half a year until his bail was posted by Air-India's prestigious chairman, J. R. D. Tata. Then Walcott left India for points unknown, but he dutifully returned a few months later for the trial. He was found guilty, fined $420, but the prison sentence was commuted to the time he had already spent in jail. Walcott was free but not his Piper, which had been seized for debts. No one, however, seemed to mind that Walcott continued to care for the plane, pouring a few quarts of gas into its tanks each day, in order to run up the engines for a few minutes.

He ran them up, all right, especially on the day, weeks later, when he finally had enough fuel on board for an escape. Five airport guards tried to stop him by hanging onto the tail. He blew them off with a blast of prop wash and headed for Pakistan, but not before circling over the Delhi jail to drop a packet of cookies to his former fellow inmates. Flying low, he eluded the Indian Air Force jets that were scrambled to bring him back. After landing at Karachi, he declared to reporters: "The only violation of Indian law I have committed is to waive procedural red tape because I have had more than I can stomach."

Bluffing in Bombay. The next place where Walcott waived a law was Beirut. He aroused the suspicion of the Lebanese counterintelligence, which charged that Walcott had taken aerial photographs of Lebanese military installations and sold them to Israeli agents. Before they could arrest him, Walcott skipped out, leaving behind his plane. A Lebanese military court sentenced him to seven years' imprisonment at hard labor. But by that time Walcott had been in London to recruit two pilots and rent a plane under the pretext that he ran a freight-hauling service for oil companies in the Middle East. Picking up a consignment of 675 Swiss watches in Nicosia, he headed back to India under the name of Peter Philby.

Just about everything went wrong. The contact man who was to meet him on a beach 50 miles south of Bombay was not there, and the plane's nose wheel collapsed on landing, bending the propellers in the sand. Undismayed, Walcott coolly ordered the local police to guard the plane while he and the co-pilot caught a bus to Bombay, taking along two suitcases full of watches. In Bombay, Walcott apparently quietly disposed of the watches and picked up the second pilot. Then all three men bluffed their way into the line of debarking passengers at Bombay's International Airport. In that way, they were able to get their passports stamped as new arrivals. As legal travelers, nothing could stop them from making a fast exit, which is just what they did on the next plane to Karachi.

It was none too soon. At the site of the nosed-in plane, police found a hastily buried box. What that box contained the police refused to say, but whatever it was prompted India's Central Bureau of Investigation to assign a team of topflight investigators to try and track down Walcott. His trail led first to Europe again, then doubled back to Pakistan, where he showed up with a converted B-26 bomber shortly before last autumn's border war. The Pakistanis suspected that he was air-dropping watches and gold into India, but before they could interrogate him, Walcott skipped off, leaving the plane behind.

Taped-On Diamonds. It was a routine police check that finally caught Walcott. Using a British passport in the name of Barry Phillips Charles Comyn, Walcott and an accomplice apparently went to India last month by sea and rail from Ceylon and registered at a fashionable Bombay hotel. A detective questioning the hotel staff about foreign guests learned that the two men often made person-to-person calls to Colombo. The name they asked for, remembered the detective, belonged to Walcott's contact man there.

After calling up reinforcements, police rapped on "Comyn's" door. When it opened, there was Walcott. A search revealed diamonds taped to the sole of his foot with a Band-Aid and other stones in a sock, which all together were valued at $32,500. For six hours of nonstop grilling, Walcott refused to admit his true identity. Then, according to the police, he broke down and began to tell all. Acting on his information, police have already pulled in several suspects and some smuggling gear, including a jacket with specially constructed pockets for carrying gold bars. Many Bombay gold traders were anxious, for rumor had it that Walcott had been mixed up with a gang that had smuggled no less than $150 million in gold and diamonds into India during the past four years.

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