In 1985 Mr. Norton, whose ancestors were Irish, moved to Ireland and became outraged at attacks on the homes of Roman Catholics in Northern Ireland. He and his wife, Eleanor, made a trip back to California, purchased a small cache of guns and shipped them to France, intending to direct them to Ireland to be used by Catholics to defend themselves. The couple were arrested in France, and Mr. Norton, then 60, served two years in prison. (His wife was released sooner.)
Upon his release, he still faced charges in the United States for illegally exporting firearms, so he and his wife moved to Nicaragua. One night, according to his son, robbers broke into their home outside Managua and tied them up, but Mr. Norton got loose and shot and killed one of them.
“No charges were filed,” Bill Norton wrote in an e-mail. “The shooting was ruled justified.”
In the early 1990s, Mr. Norton, who had been a member of the Communist Party and a civil rights activist as a young man — he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1958 — moved to Cuba. But after observing the struggles of poor Cubans, he became disillusioned with socialism and left the country after a year, traveling to Mexico, where he decided to risk arrest and return to the United States. He enlisted the aid of his first wife, Betty, and their daughter Sally, who drove from Los Angeles to Tijuana to pick him up.
“We smuggled him across the border,” Sally Norton said in a telephone interview. “He was a terrible mess at that point.”
Bill Norton said that “for quite a period” his father was reclusive and paranoid, unsure of whether he was still wanted by the F.B.I.; a family lawyer eventually determined that he was not, Sally Norton said.
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