Hon. Reggie B. Walton

Education: West Virginia State, American University's Washington College of Law.

Delinquency History: Adjudicated delinquent three times in juvenile court for fighting while a teen.

They call it "the Home of Champions." The small, otherwise obscure town of Donora, Pennsylvania is where Ken Griffey, Sr., Stan Musial and a host of other fine athletes went to high school. In fact, current star, Ken Griffey, Jr., was born in Donora and started his baseball career as a little leaguer there.

It's also where Judge Reggie Walton—a former federal prosecutor and America's first Deputy Drug Czar—grew up. Walton had dreams of playing professional football and even received an athletic scholarship to West Virginia State College—but not before three court appearances as a kid for fighting in what he describes as the "tough little steel mill towns" dotting the Monongahela River. One of the fights the future-judge was involved in could have resulted in the victim's death, and served as a wake up call, setting him on a course for a stellar legal and political career.

When Reggie Walton was born in 1949, his father, Theodore Walton, was a steel worker like so many Donora residents, and his mother, Ruth Walton, was a housewife. Walton came from an intact family, which was plunged into financial stress when the local steel mill closed in 1960, and his father was laid off.

"At first, my father couldn't get a job, and there were no job opportunities for black females in those days," he explains. "Besides, my parents thought it was best if my mother stayed home and raised the three of us."

Theodore Walton was paid $900 in severance when the mill closed, $50 for each year he worked there. And there was no work to be had in, or anywhere near, Donora. Since these were the days before food stamps, Walton remembers his family relying on surplus food provided by the government and what his father grew on a piece of land he had cleared.

Reggie Walton was working by the time he was 10, selling newspapers on a street corner from 7:00 to 11:30. He later took a 4:30 a.m. paper job along with an after-school paper job working both from the time he was 12-years-old until he graduated from high school. Between football practice and work, "I didn't get a lot of sleep during those days," he says with a smile.

A few years after he lost his job in the steelmill, Theodore Walton got a job as a janitor in the Pittsburgh Gimble's Department Store and a second job at night.

"I hardly ever saw my father when he was working those two jobs," says Walton. "And I started to get out of control, not listening to my mother, my machismo started to take over."

Walton's machismo manifested itself in fighting on more than one occasion. And, on more than one occasion, the police got involved.

"Those steel towns were tough little towns," he says. "There were a lot of bars and a lot of brawls and you had to be prepared to fight, or you had no manhood. Many of my former friends are either dead, or have been, or are currently in prison, or on drugs or abusing alcohol."

Ironically, although Walton readily admits to his involvement in the fights for which he appeared in court, his first encounter with the police was for a crime he did not commit.

"The principal benefit I derived from the juvenile justice system was the confidentiality of my record, which meant that my youthful indiscretions didn't prevent me from getting a football scholarship to college or from becoming a lawyer."

"The first time I was detained was a classic false arrest," he relates. "Some other young black male had stolen something off a delivery truck. The guy who did it looked nothing like me. I remember being angry about being suspected of committing the crime because the actual perpetrator was one of the ugliest guys in town," Walton says with a smile. "The only reason I was detained is because I was a young black male."

Walton's first two real encounters with the law—in the ninth and eleventh grades—were for fighting. Some of the fights Walton was involved in were over a girl while attending a dance.

"You ask anyone, and they'll tell you I'm tough on crime," he states. "And I have no problem sending someone away for a long time if I think it's necessary. But for a great many of these kids, they need a chance and an opportunity to turn themselves around."

"I didn't go to an actual court for any of my cases," he recalls. "They held hearings right in the police station, with no lawyers. I just represented myself. Of course, in all three cases, I did not prevail. Two of the court encounters resulted in verbal reprimands and the third a referral to juvenile probation."

"I received nothing from the juvenile authorities by way of supervision," Walton remembers. "But I got plenty of supervision at home, so I didn't really need it. The principal benefit I derived from the juvenile system was the confidentiality of my record, which meant that my youthful indiscretions didn't prevent me from getting a football scholarship to college or from becoming a lawyer."

As a high school junior, Walton discovered his father's guns and his straight razor and started sneaking them out of the house tucked into his pants. Fortunately, Walton was never arrested carrying the weapons. In fact, he never displayed the weapons in anger or threatened to use them.

"Back in those days, you thought you were a big man if you were merely carrying a gun and could show it off," he says. "But if you used it instead of your fists, you were considered a punk."

Around this time, Theodore Walton got tired of his son's behavior and disrespect for Mrs. Walton. Reggie Walton considers it a turning point in his life when his father literally grabbed him by his shirt collar and ominously threatened that there was going to be a serious price to pay the next time the younger Walton disrespected or failed to obey his mother.

Despite his troubles with the law, and his minimal academic performance in high school, Walton continued to excel on his high school's football team as its starting halfback. His play on the gridiron resulted in athletic scholarship offers to a number of colleges, including West Virginia State College, which he ultimately attended—but not before one final serious crime nearly derailed his career and his life, and threatened the life of another.

"We had heard that there were some guys up at the projects, messing with some of our girls," Walton remembers. "So we all piled into a truck to find them and teach them a lesson."

Walton assumed that they were just going to rough these guys up and leave it at that. But when they tracked one of the kids down and started beating him up, one of the boys Walton was with took out an ice pick and started stabbing the unsuspecting boy.

Walton's rise in the legal profession from that point can only be described as meteoric. He became the Chief of the Career Criminal Unit in the U.S. Attorney's Office in 1979 at the age of 30, and during his time in that post, he never lost a case. At the age of 32, he was appointed by President Ronald Reagan to the D.C. Superior Court, the second youngest judge ever appointed to the district bench.

Although he was stabbed nine times, the victim did not die, partly because Walton and a friend rushed him to a hospital. The victim had nine puncture wounds in his back and a broken nose and jaw. When Walton learned that the boy's parents had no car, he drove to their home, picked them up, and took them to the hospital.

The next day, the police questioned Walton, who was deliberately vague about his involvement in the beating. At the time, his cousin, Ronnie Neal, was in town for a visit. Walton and Neal left town the next day for Middletown, New York. Walton assumed that, once the police caught the boy who committed the stabbing (who was himself shot and killed over a girl several years later) his problems were over. His assumption proved to be correct.

"I saw my whole future flash before my eyes at that time," Walton relates. "It really had a profound effect on me." Walton has never been in trouble since that time.

In Middletown that summer, Walton repeatedly locked horns with his older cousin, Julius Neal, who himself had had some troubles as a youth and who saw Walton heading down a dangerous path.

"Julius and I fought all the time about my behavior," Walton remembers.

"'You're gonna blow it if you go to college and get into this type of trouble,' he would tell me."

At West Virginia State, Walton made a conscious decision to enter a scholarly fraternity, as opposed to one full of athletes. He chose the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity because it had a reputation for turning out black leaders like Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Thurgood Marshall, and Adam Clayton Powell.

Walton struggled at first in college, not so much due to lack of ability—as subsequent achievements would attest—but because he had never focused on academics until attending college. But he worked hard and made Dean's List in his senior year.

Still, with a poor showing on the law boards, his chance of attending law school appeared slim. Fortunately, he was enrolled in a program established by the federal government, the Council on Legal Education Opportunity (CLEO), which was specifically designed to increase the number of black attorneys, who constituted about only 2 percent of America's lawyers at that time.

In 1971, CLEO sent Walton to an intensive summer-long program at Howard University School of Law in Washington, D.C. He graduated near the top of the class, earning an academic scholarship to American University's Washington College of Law.

Law school did not come easy for Walton, who had to study 12 to 13 hours a day, in addition to the various jobs he worked to supplement his scholarship and loans. He graduated in 1974 and took a job as a public defender in Philadelphia. He left that job for a position at D.C.'s United States Attorney's Office in 1976.

Walton's rise in the legal profession from that point can only be described as meteoric. He became the Chief of the Career Criminal Unit in the U.S. Attorney's Office in 1979 at the age of 30, and during his time in that post, he never lost a case. He was promoted to Executive Assistant to D.C.'s U.S. Attorney—the number three position in the office—a year later. At the age of 32, he was appointed by President Ronald Reagan to the D.C. Superior Court, the second youngest judge ever appointed to the D.C. bench.

Eight years after he became a judge, Walton was introduced to William Bennett, the new Drug Czar, by his brother Bob Bennett who knew Walton from his work in the U.S. Attorney's Office. William Bennett had been appointed by President George Bush to head the brand new Office of National Drug Control Policy, and his brother had gathered a few knowledgeable colleagues to offer their thoughts about drugs and crime at an informal get-together.

"I told him that, I don't mean to say that only minorities are involved with drugs," Walton says. "But that they are disproportionately involved. You're going to need a minority at the top level of your administration, if you want to have credibility on this issue in minority communities."

A few weeks later, William Bennett called Judge Walton and, much to Walton's surprise, offered him the number two spot in the Drug Czar's office.

Walton spent the next two years traveling over a half-million miles, spreading the Bush Administration's anti-drug message across the country. When Florida Governor Bob Martinez took over as Drug Czar in 1991, Walton was made the Senior White House Advisor on Crime to President Bush and was then reappointed by Bush to the D.C. Superior Court.

Although he's only 50 years old, Walton is already talking about the time, a few years from now, when he will be eligible for a reduced case load and senior status as a judge. But that's not because he wants to take it easy. With his new free time, he hopes to start a residential school for delinquent and otherwise at-risk youth, to work with young people who, like himself, hold promise for the future that is just waiting to be tapped.

"You ask anyone, and they'll tell you I'm tough on crime," he states. "And I have no problem sending someone away for a long time if I think it's necessary. But for a great many of these kids, they need a chance and an opportunity to turn themselves around."

"A lot of proposals have come out to just lock 'em up and throw away the key," he states. "But the vast majority of these young people are going to be back on the street sooner or later and we had better think of ways to help them turn their lives around or they're going to wreak havoc on us."