childhood friend

Barefoot, in shorts and a tropical-themed short-sleeved shirt, Will Burroughs walks through the narrow backyard of his Venice home and passes a football to his 7-year-old son Jack.

It’s a playful moment that instantly sparks the curiosity of the family’s Australian cattle dog, Banjo, who comes running from the first floor of the newly added accessory dwelling unit, or ADU, at the rear of the property.

Even though it’s a small gesture, it encapsulates what Burroughs and his wife, Frith Dabkowski, hoped for when they added the ADU to their backyard.

With their home in the background, Frith Dabkowski and husband Will Burroughs are joined by their son Jack and dog Banjo on a single ribbon of wood that runs the entire length of the garage.

“They’re fun,” architect Aejie Rhyu said of the creative couple as she walked by the undulating two-story ADU she helped them realize.

Rhyu’s assessment helps to explain the joy that permeates the family compound, from the pink Los Angeles Toile wallpaper in the bedroom (humorously adorned with illustrations of L.A.’s beloved mountain lion P-22, the La Brea Tar Pits and Grauman’s Chinese Theatre) to the tricked-out garage on the first floor, which includes overhead bike storage, an espresso maker, a mini-fridge and a large flat screen TV that allows Sydney-born Burroughs to watch Formula 1 car races and cricket games at 4 a.m. when his family is asleep.

The one-bedroom unit features a full kitchen, custom millwork, colorful bathroom tile and a waterfall island that dips to create a dining room table.

Like so many ADUs in Los Angeles, the couple’s addition was driven by a need for more space to accommodate work and family life. At a time when California ADU laws continue to evolve to encourage more housing, the couple saw it as an opportunity to demolish their garage and build a new multipurpose flexible space that includes an office, garage and housing for family members from Australia who stay for weeks at a time.

To help them create an ADU that was fun and ambitious, Burroughs reached out to his childhood friend, Australian architect James Garvan, whom he has known since kindergarten.

A view of the ADU, including its rooftop terrace, from the street …

… and from the backyard.

Garvan said that when he first received a call from Burroughs about designing an ADU, he was impressed by the American concept of adding a second home on the same property as a larger one. “It’s an elegant way to activate parts of the city that are otherwise unused,” he said.

The couple collaborated with Garvan on the design plans, but because he was in Australia, they subsequently engaged local architect Rhyu to deliver the project. Despite his location on the other side of the world, Garvan worked with the team during FaceTime and Zoom meetings.

The ground floor of the ADU serves as a garage, office and media room for the family.

Burroughs installed a subwoofer speaker beneath the sofa to give the garage the feel of a movie theater during family movie nights. “Jack went flying off the couch when we watched “Top Gun,” he said, laughing.

“We wanted to contribute to the street and not just to the backyard,” Garvan said of a neighborhood tour he took on FaceTime with Burroughs. “It was crucial that the ADU referenced the neighborhood. That’s why we have the lovely tapered geometry and white fence paneling as cladding — it continues the fence and ties the house to the neighborhood.”

The couple, 41-year-old marketing executives who met while working at an advertising agency in San Francisco, may have wanted a showstopper. But they also wanted to respect their neighborhood, where small bungalows coexist alongside enormous, newly built homes in a Brutalist style.

Dramatic shutters that can be opened and closed give the ADU the feel of a music box.

“We were adamant about not having a monolithic structure,” Burroughs said, emphasizing the neighborhood’s diverse architectural styles where noted Los Angeles architects such as Frank Gehry, Ray Kappe and Barbara Bestor have all practiced their craft.

Dabkowski, who was born in England and moved to Dallas when she was 11, shared a similar perspective in not wanting the ADU to stand out too much. “I grew up in the suburbs where homes were built in a development and all looked the same,” she said. “I love the array of different houses in Venice, but it is jarring when people build something out of scale with the neighborhood.”

Situated on a corner lot, the two-story ADU appears simple and square from the street and curvaceous and soft from the backyard. While the traditional 1949 bungalow out front is one level, the ADU out back is tall but doesn’t overwhelm the atmosphere of the street.

Working with Plot Design LA, the family were able to preserve a segment of the backyard, which gives the dog and kids room to run around. “There’s a nice thoroughfare,” Burroughs said. “Kids ran around and threw water balloons at Jack’s 7th birthday party.”

Jack Burroughs, 7, plays with blocks as the family dog Banjo runs into the ADU.

Once inside the compound, the ADU, which cost approximately $450,000 after several increases due to the custom millwork and spiral staircase, is not what you would expect. And that’s precisely the point.

“We told James from the beginning that the ADU is separate from the house and is supposed to be different,” Burroughs said.

Pink Los Angeles Toile wallpaper from Flavor Paper adds a touch of whimsy in the bedroom of the ADU.

Clad in stained cedar siding with shutters that open and close like a music box, the ADU is composed of a 460-square-foot garage on the ground floor and a 560-square-foot one-bedroom unit one flight up. A custom steel spiral staircase connects the two floors on the outside of the building, as it would have eaten up too much space if placed inside. Above it all is a rooftop terrace with views of Santa Monica, the Marina and Penmar Park, with Burroughs affectionately comparing it to “being up in the trees.”

Inside, the open-plan kitchen, living room and dining area are flooded with natural light from two large circular skylights. A waterfall island, equipped with storage on either side, dips to form a dining room table. Floor-to-ceiling custom cabinets in the kitchen continue into the living room, where they create a media center. Adjacent to a queen-sized Murphy bed, there’s a stackable washer and dryer, as well as a linen closet. Cork tile flooring adds warmth and serves as an acoustic buffer to help separate the unit from the office space below.

Architect Aejie Rhyu of ARA-la Studio in Los Angeles collaborated with Australian architect James Garvan on the project, which took more than a year to complete.

Working with interior designer Danielle Lanee, Dabkowksi added colorful accents to the living spaces to make the interiors “warm, inviting and fresh.”

“They wanted the ADU to be a fun experience for their guests,” noted Rhyu. “There’s an outdoor shower. Colorful lighting. It’s quite different from the main house, but it works because it’s situated on a corner lot. When you are in the backyard, you note that, but from the street, it almost feels like its own separate structure.”

Will Burroughs and his future architect James Garvan prepare to rollerblade in Sydney, Australia.

(Courtesy of James Garvan)

At one point, Burroughs worried they were having too much fun with the colorful interiors, which include pink and red clé tile in the bathroom, pale green custom cabinets in the kitchen and pink Flavor Paper wallpaper in the bedroom. “I was worried it would feel like you were living in a Mondrian painting,” he said.

Now that it’s complete, however, Burroughs is thrilled with the way it turned out. “Frith added a lot of whimsy to the ADU,” he said. “I love that it feels homey and functional, and I love the balance with the architecture. Once you walk inside, you don’t feel like you’ve sacrificed form or function.”

In Sydney, where he grew up, Burroughs said architecture is often designed in harmony with the landscape. Here, his childhood friend was assigned the same task. “I was impressed that James was able to take a rectangular block … and make it sit beautifully with the trees and fence line,” he said. “And Aejie took drawings from afar, accomplishing them by walking around with a camera and reviewing drone footage. Aejie was able to take his high-order thing and make it work.”

Looking ahead, the couple envisions the unit could work as a rental, but for now, it has been booked by family and friends, including those who were displaced by the Pacific Palisades fires in January. The couple have hosted Burroughs’ parents for six weeks at a time, and friends with three kids — who shared the Murphy bed — stayed for 10 days.

In the living area of the ADU, custom millwork includes a Murphy bed, floor-to-ceiling storage, a linen closet and a stackable washer and dryer.

“It’s nice to have enough space where family can come and stay comfortably for a decent amount of time,” Dabkowski said. “Staying in an Airbnb is expensive.”

The ADU impressed Burroughs’ parents so much that they hired Gavan to design a home for them in Sydney now that they are downsizing.

“They were so impressed with the skylights, the airflow of the unit, which improves our quality of life tremendously,” Burroughs said. “Our mothers are best friends. He’s [Gavan] going to be a part of the family even more now.”

“I am happy that my friends like their home, but I hope the community likes it too,” Gavan added. “I hope it contributes positively to the streetscape.”

The ADU is designed to engage with the landscape and nestle into the garden, says architect James Garvan.

The couple treasure the personality and history of their 1949 bungalow. “We just love it so much and don’t feel like we need to match the ADU,” Dabkowski said. “The old and the new can live in harmony together.”

(Lisa Boone / Los Angeles Times )

Christopher Boyce and Andrew Daulton Lee were childhood friends, altar boys raised in the Catholic pews and prosperous suburbs of the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

By the mid-1970s, Boyce was angry about the Vietnam War and Watergate. He was a liberal, a stoner and a lover of falcons. Lee, a doctor’s adopted son, was a cocaine and heroin pusher who was spiraling into addiction.

How they became spies for the Soviet Union is a story emblematic of 1970s Southern California, where the state’s massive Cold War aerospace industry collided with its youthful anti-establishment currents.

Everyone agrees it should never have been possible.

In the summer of 1974, Boyce, a bright but disaffected 21-year-old college dropout, got a job as a clerk at the TRW Defense and Space Systems complex in Redondo Beach. He won entree through the old-boys network: His father, who ran security for an aircraft contractor and was once an FBI agent, had called in a favor.

In this series, Christopher Goffard revisits old crimes in Los Angeles and beyond, from the famous to the forgotten, the consequential to the obscure, diving into archives and the memories of those who were there.

Boyce made $140 a week at the defense plant and held down a second job tending bar. TRW investigators had performed only a perfunctory background check. They skipped his peers, who might have revealed his links to the drug culture and to Lee, who already had multiple drug busts and a serious cocaine habit — the white powder that would inspire his nickname.

In “The Falcon and the Snowman,” Robert Lindsey’s account of the case, the author describes Boyce beginning the day by popping amphetamines and winding down after a shift puffing a joint in the TRW parking lot. Falconry was his biggest passion. “Flying a falcon in exactly the same way that men had done centuries before Christ transplanted Chris into their time,” Lindsey wrote.

Boyce impressed his bosses and was soon cleared to enter the steel-doored fortress called the “black vault,” a classified sanctum where he was exposed to sensitive CIA communications pertaining to America’s network of espionage satellites. The satellites eavesdropped on Russian missiles and defense installations. Among the goals was to thwart a surprise nuclear attack.

Reading CIA communiques, Boyce didn’t like what he saw. Among its other sins, he decided, the U.S. government was deceiving its Australian allies by hiding satellite intelligence it had promised to share and meddling in the country’s elections.

“I just was in total disagreement with the whole direction of Western society,” Boyce told The Times many years later. He attributed his espionage opportunity to “synchronicity,” explaining: “How many kids can get a summer job working in an encrypted communications vault?”

Soon he made his life’s “biggest, dumbest decision.” He told his buddy Lee they might sell government secrets to the Soviets. Lee talked his way into the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, where Russians fed him caviar and bought classified documents with the toast, “To peace.”

Lee’s KGB handlers devised protocols. When he wanted to meet, he would tape an X to lampposts at designated intersections around Mexico City.

For more than a year, thousands of classified documents flowed from the TRW complex to the Soviets, with Boyce sometimes smuggling them out in potted plants. In exchange, he and Lee received an estimated $70,000.

At parties, Lee showed off his miniature Minox camera and bragged that he was engaged in spycraft. In January 1977, desperate for money to finance a heroin deal, he flouted KGB instructions and appeared unannounced outside the Soviet Embassy. Mexican police thought he looked suspicious and arrested him.

He held an envelope with filmstrips documenting a U.S. satellite project called Pyramider. Under questioning, Lee revealed the name of his co-conspirator and childhood friend, who soon was also under arrest. Boyce had just returned from a hawk-trapping trip in the mountains.

The espionage trials of the two men presented special challenges for the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles. The Carter administration was ready to pull the plug on the case if it meant airing too many secrets, but a strategy was devised: Prosecutors would focus on the Pyramider documents, which involved a system that never actually got off the ground.

Joel Levine, one of the assistant U.S. attorneys who prosecuted Boyce and Lee, said only a fraction of what they sold to the Soviets ever came out at trial.

“I was told these other projects should not be revealed. It’s too costly to our government, and you can’t base a prosecution on them either in whole or in part,” Levine said in a recent interview. “You just gotta stay away from it.”

For federal prosecutors in L.A., hanging over the case was the memory of a recent humiliation: the collapse of the Pentagon Papers trial, as a result of the Nixon administration’s attempt to bribe the presiding judge with a job. It had caught prosecutors by surprise.

“We were afraid it would ruin our reputation forever if something like that were to happen,” Levine said. “So we made it very, very clear right from the get-go that if we smelled something like that was afoot, we would walk into court and have the case dismissed on our own.”

The defendants had sharply different motives. Lee was in it for the money, Richard Stilz, one of the prosecutors, said in a recent interview. But “Boyce was totally ideology. He wanted to damage the United States government,” Stilz said. “He just hated this country, period.”

The defendants got separate trials. A rift that had been growing between them deepened with their mutually hostile defenses. Lee’s defense: Boyce had led him to believe he was working for the CIA, feeding misinformation to the Russians. Jurors convicted Lee of espionage, nonetheless, and a judge gave him a life term.

Boyce’s defense: Lee had blackmailed him into espionage by threatening to expose a letter he had written, while stoned on hashish, alleging secret knowledge of CIA malfeasance. Jurors convicted Boyce as well, and a judge gave him 40 years.

In January 1980, at a federal prison in Lompoc, Boyce hid in a drainpipe and sprinted to freedom over a fence. He was on the run for 19 months. He robbed banks in the Pacific Northwest until federal agents caught him outside a burger joint in Washington state.

He was convicted of bank robbery and got 28 more years. In 1985, the same year a popular film adaptation of “The Falcon and the Snowman” was released, Boyce testified on Capitol Hill about the despair attending a life of espionage.

“There was no thrill,” he said. “There was only depression, and a hopeless enslavement to an inhuman, uncaring foreign bureaucracy…. No American who has gone to the KGB has not come to regret it.”

He spoke of how easily he had been allowed to access classified material at TRW. “Security was a joke,” he said, describing regular Bacardi-fueled parties in the black vault. “We used the code destruction blender for making banana daiquiris and mai tais.”

Cait Mills was working as a paralegal in San Diego when she read the Lindsey book and became fascinated by the case. She thought Lee had been unfairly maligned, and she spent the next two decades fighting to win him parole.

She got letters of support from the prosecutors and the sentencing judge attesting that Lee had made strides toward rehabilitation. He had taken classes in prison and become a dental technician. He won parole in 1998.

She turned her attention to freeing Boyce, with whom she fell in love. She wrote to the Russians and asked how much value there had been in the stolen TRW documents and received a fax claiming it was useless. He got out in 2002, and they married. They later divorced but remain close. Both live in central Oregon.

Stilz maintains the damage to America was “enormous.”

“In a murder case, you have one victim and a person dies,” Stilz said. “In an espionage case, the whole country is a victim. We were so far advanced over the Russians in spy satellite technology. They leveled the playing field. That’s probably the most important point.”

He gives no credence to the Russian government’s claim that it derived no value from the secret information. “Of course they’d say that,” Stilz said. “What do you think they’d say? ‘Oh yeah, it allowed us to catch up with the United States in terms of spying.’ They’re not gonna say that.”

Cait Mills Boyce said that Boyce and Lee, childhood best friends, no longer speak, and that the silence between them wounds Boyce.

“He said, ‘I love that man; I always loved him. He was my best friend.’ It hurt him so badly.”

She said Boyce, now in his 70s, lives a solitary life and immerses himself in the world of falconry. “His entire life, and I kid you not, is falconry,” she said. “He will die with a falcon on his arm.”

Part of what pushed him into the world of espionage, she thinks, was the challenge. “I think his uncommon smarts led him down a whimsical path that ended up being a disastrous path, not just for him but for everybody involved,” she said.