Mr Nice: an autobiography (29 page)

I sent Jarvis out to Campione, where I had stored my Mr Nice passport and other Nice documentation, instructing him to bury the passport in the public gardens in Campione. There it remains. I kept noticing strange things: clicks on telephone lines, the same unfriendly faces wherever I went. I was being followed. But if they knew who I was, why didn’t they bust me?

I was sitting at the bar of the Swan Hotel, Lavenham. I had become very paranoid at Hans Court and had booked a weekend break in the name of John Hayes. Judy was settling Amber into bed. The hotel provided a baby-listening service, and she was going to join me at the bar before we had dinner.
Two men about my age came up to the bar and ordered their drinks. I had ordered a Tio Pepe sherry, and I took it to a vacant table. Suddenly, one of the two men grabbed my arm.

‘Can I see your watch?’ he asked, and firmly put a pair of handcuffs on his and my wrists.

I recovered quickly enough. It was fairly obvious I was being nicked.

‘We are Customs Officers and we are arresting you.’

‘Why am I being arrested?’

‘You are being arrested on suspicion of being involved in a cannabis drugs offence. Do you understand?’

‘Yes.’

‘What is your name?’ asked one of the officers.

Maybe they didn’t know who I was and thought I was a regular dope dealer.

‘I’m not saying.’

‘Why not?’

‘No comment.’

‘Are you staying in this hotel?’

‘No comment.’

‘Are you staying here alone?’

‘No comment.’

‘Turn out your pockets.’

I emptied out my pockets: a driving licence, a book containing up-to-date accounts of the Colombian scam, and a key to the falconry in Pytchley that gave me access to the several tons of dope there.

‘This driving licence is in the name John Hayes. Is that your name?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is this your address?’

‘No comment.’

‘What do you do for a living, Mr Hayes?’

‘I’m training to be a Customs Officer.’

He didn’t even smile. A couple of other Customs Officers came up to our table.

‘This has been found in Room 52, your room. It is clearly hashish. Is it yours?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘This hashish was in your jacket pocket. Are you suggesting we put it there?’

‘I don’t know, do I?’

‘Does it belong to your girl-friend in your room?’

‘No, it’s mine. Could I see Judy and our daughter?’

‘Of course. You must regard us as your friends. I’m Nick Baker, and this is my colleague Terry Byrne. We can go up to your room before we all go to our London office in New Fetter Lane.’

I hugged and kissed Judy and Amber. I knew they wouldn’t mess with Judy, just question her a bit and let her go. I also knew, more certainly than I have ever known anything in my life, that no matter how much she was questioned she wouldn’t tell them a thing.

‘Be strong, love,’ we both said.

At London the questioning continued.

‘What do you do for a living, Mr Hayes?’

‘My work is of a secret nature. Look, what’s all this about?’

‘Have you got a passport?’

‘No.’

‘You’ve never been abroad at all?’

‘No.’

‘What do you do for a living?’

‘I can’t answer these questions. My work is secret.’

‘What time did you arrive at Lavenham?’

‘No comment.’

‘Do you know Martin Langford?’

‘No comment.’

‘Do you know Stuart Prentiss?’

‘No comment.’

‘Do you know James Goldsack?’

This went on for ages. I asked after a while if I could
merely raise my finger rather than having to say ‘no comment’ all the time. Baker wouldn’t oblige.

‘Mr Hayes, I am making a contemporaneous note of this interview. I won’t see your finger being raised. Would you make an audible reply, please? Do you understand?’

‘Bleep.’

‘Is John Hayes your real name?’

‘Bleep.’

‘Would you object to giving us your fingerprints?’

‘Bleep, bleep.’

‘Is that because your real name is Howard Marks?’

A wave of relief came over me. I was me again for the first time in six and a half years.

‘So, Howard, how have you been earning a living these last few years?’

‘No comment.’

And so it went on through the night until Baker and Byrne took me to Snowhill Police Station. Judy came to see me the next morning and asked me to marry her. I said yes.

After thirty-six hours in the cells, I was hauled in front of Judge Miskin at the Old Bailey. Represented again by Bernard Simons, I was being remanded back into custody at Brixton Prison for the 1973 speaker scam. The next morning, the Guildhall magistrates also remanded me into custody for conspiring to import several tons of Colombian weed and having a bunch of false passports. Also with me were Marty Langford and Bob Kenningale, who had both been arrested at Whitehead’s falconry; James Goldsack and his worker, Nick Cole, both of whom had been arrested in London; Californian yachtsman Stuart Prentiss and his worker, Alan Grey; and Patrick Lane’s assistant, Hedley Morgan. Patrick Lane somehow escaped the net and fled to the security of Ernie in California. Customs Officer Baker told the magistrates that the Customs had just busted us with more dope, £15 million worth, than the grand total of dope they’d ever busted up to that point. I felt proud,
completely forgetting the consequences of being accused of such severe illegality. Newspaper headlines proclaimed that I had just been severely grilled by the British Secret Service, that I had joined the IRA, and that I had been protected by the Mafia.

Back at Brixton, these bulletins, coupled with radio news reports, had assured that I would be accorded a notorious criminal’s welcome. I was separated from my co-defendants and put in a two-man, toilet-less, water-less cell in A Wing. My cellmate was a shifty young Jewish fraudster named Jonathan Kern. A Wing comprised a ground floor and three upper floors of cells and accommodated about 200 prisoners. There were some notable legends from London’s gangland: Ronnie Knight, husband of actress Barbara Windsor; Duke and Dennis of the feared and respected Arif family, Turkish Cypriots who became London’s most heavily investigated crime family since the Krays; Tommy Wisbey, the Great Train Robber; and Mickey Williams, a half-Irish and half-Jamaican Londoner whose behaviour even Her Majesty’s Prison, Durham’s infamous control units could not inhibit. One morning, Mickey was next to me and Jonathan Kern as we were ‘slopping out’ plastic buckets of our night’s excrement.

‘Watch him, H. He’s a wrong ’un, a real wrong ’un. He’d grass up ’is own muvver.’

Kern heard him and walked away.

‘Thanks, Mick.’

‘It ain’t nuffink, H. He ain’t in your business, is he?’

‘No, Mick. I didn’t know him before.’

‘Coz there is a few wrong ’uns in your business, H. You know what I mean? I thought he might have been one of ’em. And it’s such a good business, H. But someone ought to shut a few mouths up. I heard your co-defendants talked a bit?’

‘Yeah, they said more than they should, more than they wanted to, but they’re not really criminals, Mick.’

‘Then why are they doing crime, H? Tell me that. If they
can’t do the time, they shouldn’t do the crime. That’s simple. Am I wrong? I know I ain’t. I know what I’m doing when I get out. No more jumping over bank counters with a gun. I’m doing drugs. But there’ll be no grasses in my firm. No live ones, anyway. Let’s keep in touch when we’re on the out, H. I got loads of geezers who work in the airport and docks in London. Might be able to ’elp each other.’

This was typical of many conversations I and other dope dealers had with more traditional criminals in British prisons at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s. The money we had made in our profession tended to dwarf that made by robbers, fraudsters, and thieves. Prisons are excellent forums for the combining of criminal talents. If a dope smuggler is locked up twenty-four hours a day with a forger, a counterfeit air waybill or bill of lading will come up in the conversation. Accordingly, many heavy criminals had begun to deal dope, all kinds from anywhere. Some of the results were predictable. A lot more ruthlessness and violence was injected into dope-trading activity. Rip-offs and guns became more common. Inevitably, a Customs Officer was shot and killed while busting a container of Moroccan cannabis. The perpetrator was a London villain. Instead of seeing this tragedy as an obvious consequence of the folly of drug prohibition (high profits attracting criminal organisations), the authorities seized upon it as proof of a congenital association between drugs and violence. Marijuana smokers and dealers, despite being generally lawabiding and peace-loving, were in bed with ruthless assassins and should be treated as such. Give them long and stiff sentences.

I made several appearances in Guildhall Magistrates Court, mostly for administrative reasons and for futile bail applications. I would hardly be given another chance to abscond. Returning to prison from one of these court appearances, I looked into a prison interview room I was walking past and observed Jonathan Kern talking to Her
Majesty’s Customs Officer Baker. They didn’t see me. Later on in our cell, Kern began asking questions about my case. I hadn’t yet seen any of the evidence against me, but Kern’s link to Baker could provide a valuable avenue of misinformation. I could give no end of false leads as to what my defence was. I wove a fantastic tale for Kern’s ears and told him that the marijuana had been provided by Peruvian terrorists, who were now anchored off Ireland with a further sixty tons. Unfortunately, Kern was again seen talking to Baker, this time by a heavy East Ender, who gave Kern a thumping as soon as he had the chance. Kern was transferred to another prison. I was given another cell to occupy. This time I shared with a man called Jim Hobbs. He had been arrested for having sexual relations with a man under the age of twenty-one, but he kept the nature of his offence fairly quiet. Sex offenders (nonces), like convicted policemen and grasses, get a rough time in British prisons. They are considered fair game for a bit of physical torture. It wasn’t much use Hobbs’s explaining that the under-age victim was actually eighteen. At best he was a poof, an iron. And he might be lying. Hit him anyway. Despite his strange leanings, I liked Hobbs and appreciated his disdain for authority and his generosity to prisoners without funds.

The prison authorities had no objection to my getting married and even went so far as to let me out, escorted by two prison guards, to a Welsh Congregational Chapel in South London to perform the deed. The wedding was most definitely shotgun: Judy was five months pregnant, and my daughters Myfanwy and Amber were the bridesmaids. Johnny Martin was best man. After the wedding, I begged the two guards to allow me to attend the reception. They would be very welcome guests, and I promised not to escape. In a chauffeur-driven Cadillac, Judy, a guard, and I were driven to the Basil Hotel. Champagne and congratulations flowed. Judy and I were allowed to spend some time alone in a hotel bedroom. The guards and I got drunk.

I got on with most of the guards at Brixton and encountered little or nothing in the way of sadism or cruelty. The coveted position of A Wing tea-boy was offered me, and I took it. There were lots of perks. I was allowed out of my cell for most of the day. The screws brought me little presents of harmless contraband: Danish blue cheese and dirty magazines. I was given social visits of a couple of hours rather than the few minutes allotted by prison rules. Remand prison regulations were less stringent than they are now. A prisoner was allowed a meal and some alcohol to be delivered to him from outside on a daily basis. It was easy to smuggle in dope with the food. I still had quite a lot of cash that the authorities hadn’t confiscated. Almost all the wholesale dealers who had owed money for Colombian marijuana I had given them on credit paid up in full. Johnny Martin, who had been interviewed by HM Customs, but not arrested, looked after the cash stash.

Ernie felt guilty for having allowed uncool American gangsters access to the British stores of Colombian weed. If he had controlled them, there would have been no bust. Ernie offered to pay all my defence costs, however high. He told Judy she would never have to worry for money. All his connections and wealth were at her disposal.

Judy had to take up Ernie’s offer sooner than we thought. Her sister, Natasha, had been busted attempting, without our knowledge, to do a scam on her own. She and her boyfriend were caught off the Mexican coast with a small boatload of marijuana. They were languishing in filthy Mexican jails. Ernie got on the case and got her released. It did take a while, but during that time, Natasha and her boy-friend were imprisoned together in a luxury apartment with a balcony and all modern conveniences. While inside, Natasha conceived and gave birth to a baby boy. She called him Albi. Ernie definitely had excellent connections in Mexico.

On November 23rd, 1980, my adorable daughter Francesca was born. I had petitioned the Home Office to allow me to attend her birth, but they refused.

She was the only child of mine who was welcomed into this world in my absence. It made me angry not to be there, but her birth gave me the strength I needed to face the future. Tough times and a long period in prison seemed at hand. Then one of my heroes, John Lennon, was gunned down in New York, killed either by a lunatic or by the CIA. His death echoed his profound definition of life: ‘that which happens when you are making other plans’. The tragedy saddened me but also increased my fighting spirit. Judy sent me a book on yoga, and I began a discipline to which I’ve always adhered when incarcerated: half an hour a day of yoga positions and ten minutes of meditation.