This is an LA Times Studios podcast.

The lawyer was expecting assassins. His work had made him dangerous enemies, and he was taking every precaution.

And so by October 1978, Paul Morance was checking underneath his car for bombs and warning people

in his Pacific Palisades neighborhood to look out for strangers.

He went door to door and told all of them, if you ever see a suspicious car in front of my house,

please write down the license number.

This is Narda Zakino, a former Los Angeles Times reporter who knew

Paul Morantz well and worked with him. And he told them that his life was threatened and if they

saw anything suspicious to let him know. Better than anyone, the 32-year-old attorney was aware of the

violent side of the drug rehab organization he'd been aggressively challenging in court,

synon. The group's increasingly unhinged and paranoid founder, Chuck Dieterick, who called

himself Big Daddy, harbored a special animosity for Paul Morantz. He was enemy number one. I mean,

Dieterick hated him. Paul Morantz had purchased a shotgun in case his enemies burst through his door. He had alerted the local authorities that his life was in danger. But Morance was distracted as he arrived home on the late afternoon of October 10, 1978. Distracted because he was an exuberant baseball fan, and the World Series was about to start,

with the hometown Dodgers playing the Yankees.

Distracted as he reached into the mail slot of his living room wall to retrieve what looked like a package.

I wasn't wearing glasses because I didn't own any because I was too vain.

And I often didn't put in my heart contacts because they were too painful.

This is Morant's decades later describing that moment to an interviewer.

This was a time which before I start my car, I would search underneath it.

I would look both ways, crossing the streets.

I wouldn't enter my house if my dogs weren't barking.

And yet with all these precautions, I just didn't think.

...