THE man walking towards me has all the rappings of a successful villain, as seen on the Spanish Costas: black silk trousers, matching shirt, gold necklace (medallion hidden), platinum watch and ringed.
But something doesn't quite gel. For all his 22 carat kit, the overwhelming impression is less laddish than sheepish; the last time I saw an expression of such heart melting eloquence was on a Labrador puppy.
Enter Howard Marks hashish smuggler extraordinaire, also known as Mr Nice, one of his 45 aliases, all "borrowed" from real people. Mr Nice is, of course, the one he would choose as the title of his autobiography, an un-put-downable story of a life spent on the wrong side of the law - five years on the run, nine in jail - published next week. What distinguishes both the tale and the teller from other true crime confessions is the author's pedigree. He is a graduate of Balliol College, Oxford.
But is he really Mr Nice or Mr Nasty? From Robin Hood to the Great Train Robbers, when it comes to certain classes of roguery, objective judgment seems to be suspended. Howard Marks, purveyor of fragrant herbs, scourge of Customs and Excise and anyone in uniform plays the part to Errol Flynn perfection, the latest in the line of handsome, balladeering highwaymen in whom gall and gallantry were combined.
But the leap from common criminal to people's hero is one few have made without the benefit of death. Yet Marks appears to have done just that. He was on the run for five years, but no one betrayed him; and he was found not guilty by an Old Bailey jury. All his life people have given this lovable rogue the benefit of the doubt. The only question is why.
At the height of his career Howard Marks was one of the most successful dope smugglers on the planet ("Cash tumbled in and out of my arms.") A grammar school boy from south Wales, he had been introduced to the joys of marijuana while at Oxford. Four years later he was smoking 20 joints a day. What was more natural than to skip the middle man and become his own dealer? His first week netted him a cool £7,500. Later, single consignments of between 20 and 50 tons could make him £250,000 with barely a blink.
His turnover was phenomenal. Bank accounts were opened all over the world. His covers included wine importing, water exporting (Welsh, naturally), a travel agency, a marriage of convenience agency (Hong Kong), a massage parlour in the Hyatt Hotel in Bangkok and, of course, an off shore banking consultancy. All were money laundering outfits for his dope smuggling network.
Unlike hard drugs including heroin or cocaine, cannabis and its variants are bulky and comparatively cheap. The volume needed to fuel even London's requirements is enormous currently around 12 tons a week. At the level Howard Marks was operating dope smuggling was in container loads, plane loads, shiploads, car loads, diplomatic bag loads, even coffin loads. It came from the Lebanon, Afghanistan, Columbia, Pakistan, Thailand, Vietnam. Some methods required forged documents, others merely bribery or a cut (even CIA and US airforce personnel were not immune to his money and his smile).
One of the most successful operations was what became known as the Shannon Scam. Afghanistan hashish was air freighted from Karachi to Shannon.
At that time (the early 1970s) Shannon was a free port and by the simple expedient of pasting a label giving customs clearance on the appropriate container (easily printed), "carpets" and "sporting equipment were openly removed from the airport to the industrial zone that surrounded it, and from there to a Limerick farmhouse to await transport to London by Welsh drop outs and Oxford academics happy to make £10 for each pound of hash stashed away behind door panels of customised Escorts.
In his own eyes, he is a crusader not a criminal and barely sees a need to justify how he made his living. ("Eighty per cent of police constables believe it should be legalised," he claims). At the mention of the phrase "honour among thieves" he bridles. "None of us were thieves. We were just doing deals that happened to be well paid. I have never stolen anything in my life." But apart from the unpleasant episode of the massage parlour in Bangkok, which let's not beat about the bush involved child prostitution ("I wanted to get across my immorality. It is there. It is part of me. Was part of me.") his self portrait is a little too blue eyed for objective comfort.
Like any successful trader it helps to believe in your product and Howard Marks is as committed to the benefits and legalisation of the weed as he was 30 years ago. On September 28th, the 68th anniversary of its prohibition in Britain, he intends to give himself up to a local London police station. "I want to organise a kind of mass smoke in which will probably mean two of us turn up, pass a joint between each other and bet busted Just as long as they don't extradite me to America for breaking my parole conditions I don't mind a night in the cells but I do worry about that."
The Marks mix of self deprecating humour and adolescent like pleasure in his own notoriety is curiously seductive and you suspect (although mercifully for wife and children's sake discretion has ruled) that he was as successful a Casanova as he was a dope smuggler because Howard Marks exudes charm as other men exude sweat. From the Dean of Balliol to the Old Bailey jury and the hundreds in between, no one, it seems, has been able to resist him. Except, of course, for Special Agent Craig Levato, the Drug Enforcement Agency officer whose obsession in nailing his quarry finally paid off, leading to Marks's eventual arrest in Majorca in 1989, a year long imprisonment in Spain, extradition to the United States and final descent into the five year hell of the Terre Haute State Penitentiary in Indiana.
AMID the brutality of Terre Haute, reputedly the toughest in America, Howard Marks's notoriety served as protection. "A qualification for membership of one of the gangs was to do a random killing within the prison, so it was always a little bit unsafe." He shared cells with a selection of America's finest, including a man who ate children.
"I found that if I was locked up long enough with anyone, whether he was in there for eating children, or killing people or rape, eventually I would get to like him. I tried to work out why. It's not that one discovered a heart of gold underneath it all. I think it's because one begins to understand more of oneself. There is that bit in you that could kill. It is there somewhere."
Instead of his daily dope (easily obtainable both in English and Spanish prisons, he says) Marks learnt to get high on meditation and starvation. The latter is particularly effective, he tells me. ("Like LSD, it's all to do with blood sugar not getting to the brain.") He lost weight. He lost his teeth. He lost seven years of his life. But his ego remains intact.
Even though many of those who worked for him ended up in prison (including his long suffering wife who spent 18 months awaiting extradition and trial) at least one death - the suicide of a police officer shortly after he was cleared at the Old Bailey after a nine week trial in 1981 - could be laid indirectly at his door; he is the opposite of repentant.
"The only guilt I have is about going straight, which I haven't properly dealt with." His only regret is "missing out on the children". What about having blown all the money? (Marks denies that any was salted away.) "An error of judgment perhaps." The shaggy dog face breaks into another lottery size grin.
Marks was only 22 when he took his first steps up the ladder of notoriety; he jumped bail for £50,000 (put up by his long suffering parents, who curiously were never obliged to cough up) on a charge of shipping cannabis to the States hidden in rock musicians' loudspeakers. He disappeared for five years. To the tabloid press, with his rumoured connections to M16, the Mafia, the CIA and the IRA, he was a gift. They called him Mr Mystery. What he called himself changed with the seasons and the place, switching identities as frequently as lesser mortals change their sheets. But the smuggling didn't stop, it just became more professional. When the law finally caught up with him in
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