Mr Nice: an autobiography (21 page)

After several hours on the train, I checked into the Atlantic Hotel, Hamburg, where I was meant to stay until McCann called with his friend’s whereabouts. I had the keys to the car and garage. Meanwhile, Marty Langford had checked into the International Hotel, Earls Court, London, with a carload of Lebanese hashish in the hotel car park. Charlie Weatherley was going to sell it. I called Marty. He wasn’t in his room. I left my number with reception. I called again after a while. Someone else answered the phone in his room.

‘Could I please speak to Marty?’ I asked.

‘Yes, this is Marty, go ahead.’

The voice wasn’t remotely like Marty’s.

‘This is Marty. Who are you?’

I put the phone down and rang again.

‘Could you put me through to Mr Langford’s room, please?’

‘Hello, hello, this is Marty speaking.’

It was now obvious to me what had happened. Marty had
been busted, and the police were in his room finding out what they could. I had stupidly left my hotel number in Hamburg with the receptionist at the International Hotel, Earls Court. It was time to check out and scarper.

On the flight schedule board at Hamburg airport there were two flights leaving almost immediately, one to Helsinki and one to Paris. I couldn’t remember in which country Helsinki was situated, so I bought a ticket for the Paris flight. At Paris I was able to get a flight to Barcelona, and from there to Ibiza. By the time I landed, I had a heavy fever. For the next two days, I stumbled around Rosie’s primitive
finca
deliriously searching for a telephone and a toilet. Rosie ignored me. When I recovered, I went straight to Ibiza airport and called Marty’s, Weatherley’s, and a host of other London numbers. No answer. I called McCann’s in Drogheda. No answer. I caught the next flight to Amsterdam and went to Arend’s flat. I called McCann’s again.

‘Don’t you ever call this fucking number or show your fucking face in my country again. My Anne is in prison because of your fuck-ups. She’s with those fucking Nazis, man. Marty and his two friends are over here. I’ve given them sanctuary. You promised them riches and gave them fucking ashes, you Welsh cunt.’

The torrent continued. I was able to piece together what had happened. Charlie Weatherley had gone to Marty’s rooms to get a sample of the Lebanese. He was stopped by a hotel security man on the way out, and when asked which room he had come from, gave Marty’s. The security man hauled Charlie up to Marty’s room to check. Marty, thinking that Charlie must have been busted, denied all knowledge of him. Marty panicked, packed his clothes, left his room, left the carload of Lebanese, and fled to Ireland, taking the rest of the Tafia with him. McCann had no idea what had happened to me. He sent his girlfriend, Anne McNulty, and a Dutchman to Hamburg to pick up the car from the
lock-up garage with the spare keys that Graham had. They got busted by the Hamburg police.

‘Jim, I’m genuinely sorry about Anne. Is there anything I can do?’

‘I don’t need your fucking help. I’ve already personally declared war on those fucking Nazis. They know what the Kid’s capable of. Unless they want a fucking reminder of World War II, they’d better let Anne go.’

I called up Ernie. He said he’d come over to see me in Amsterdam during the next few days. The Paradiso, Amsterdam’s first legal joint-smoking café, had just opened. I was beginning to like the city with its pretty canals, hooker window displays, and liberal dope-smoking policy. Perhaps I should settle here. One evening, I went to the Oxhooft, a night-club, and ran into Lebanese Joe.

‘Hey, Howard, man, it’s good to see you. What are you doing here?’

‘I might be living here from now on.’

‘Same as me, man. It’s a cool place. Give me your number. Here, have a smoke.’ He put a piece of Lebanese hashish in my top pocket.

Ernie arrived and checked in under a false name at the Okura Hotel. I told him my tales of woe.

‘Hey, don’t worry. We’re going to do something from this Amsterdam place real soon, even if we go back to our old way of taking new European cars to the States. It made me a bunch of money, I’ll tell you. Here’s $100,000. Start buying. And here’s a sole of Afghani. I know there ain’t nothing good to smoke in Europe. Can I give you a lift anywhere? I got a rent-a-car.’

‘Yes please, Ernie. I think I’ll open up a bank deposit box to put this money in and then get to Arend’s.’

Ernie drove me to the Algemene Bank Nederland. I opened up a safe-deposit box in the name of Peter Hughes and placed the $100,000 and the Irish Peter Hughes passport inside. Arend was overjoyed at the idea of buying some
more hashish in Amsterdam. We made a pipe out of Ernie’s Afghan. There was heavy knocking on the door. It burst open, and six Dutch police swarmed through the flat. I got up to leave.

‘I don’t live here. I have an appointment. I have to go,’ I stammered.

One of the police stopped me and searched me. He found the piece of hashish Lebanese Joe had given me. He asked for my passport. I still had my own. I gave it to him.

‘Are you Dennis Howard Marks?’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘We are arresting you and will now take you to the police station.’

Three of them marched me downstairs and put me into the back seat of a car before climbing in. At the police station, they went through my pockets again and took everything away. They took down my particulars and led me towards the cells. Mick Jagger was singing
Angie
on the police-station radio. I was busted.

In April 1974, almost six months later, I was sitting in a flat near the top of a high-rise building in the Isle of Dogs, overlooking the River Thames and Greenwich naval station. I was skipping bail. Over my Amsterdam lawyer’s protests, the Dutch police had put me aboard a BEA flight to Heathrow. Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise Officers came on the plane at Heathrow and took me to Snowhill Police Station, where I was charged under the hitherto unenforced Section 20 of the Misuse of Drugs Act, 1971, with assisting in the United Kingdom in the commission of a United States drug offence. Californian James Gater, who had been arrested at Heathrow airport a couple of days before my arrest, and a few of James Morris’s workers were my co-defendants. After three uneventful weeks in Her Majesty’s Prison, Brixton, I was granted bail for sureties totalling £50,000. On bail, I lived with Rosie and the children at 46, Leckford Road, Oxford, premises formerly rented and occupied by William Jefferson Clinton, who was to become the President of the United States. The evidence against me was strong, partly because I had been daft enough to admit to Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise my documented
illegal activities in Holland in the hope that my offence would be treated as a Dutch rather than a British one. That strategy had backfired, and my solicitor, Bernard Simons, was certain I would get convicted and was not too optimistic of my getting less than three years in prison.

The East End flat belonged to Dai, my old schoolteaching companion. Thames Valley Police must obviously have made some enquiries into my whereabouts, but no one seemed to be getting very excited. I had written a note to Bernard Simons so that everyone could know that nothing untoward had happened. I had just skipped bail. The trial had started without me the previous day, May 1st, 1974. My co-defendants pleaded guilty and got sentences ranging from six months to four years. Ernie had promised to pay off any sureties demanded by the judge as the result of my skipping bail. He felt indebted to me because at the time of my arrest in Amsterdam I was the only person in the world who knew his whereabouts, and I had not disclosed them to the authorities. I was biding my time.

Dai had woken me up early before going to school.

‘Howard, you’ve been on the news.’

‘What! What did it say?’

‘Well, there were only three headlines: one about Prime Minister Harold Wilson, one about President Nixon, and one about you. I couldn’t take it all in. Something about MI6 and the IRA. I’ll go out and get the newspapers.’

The
Daily Mirror
’s entire front page was devoted to a story about me headlined WHERE IS MR MARKS?, describing how I was an MI6 agent, with arrest warrants out for me in seven countries, who had been kidnapped, beaten up, told to keep my mouth shut, and persuaded to become an IRA sympathiser. There was no clue as to how the
Daily Mirror
had got hold of the information that I had worked for MI6. There were general statements claiming that I had told some friends I was a spy. In fact I had told only Rosie, my parents, and McCann. Rosie, when interviewed by the press,
categorically stated there was no connection between me and the IRA or the security services. Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise had been made aware of my MI6 involvement: Mac’s telephone number had appeared in the telephone records of an Amsterdam hotel, and I had successfully used my promise of not mentioning MI6 in court as a lever to secure bail. HM Customs would have been unlikely to spill all to a
Daily Mirror
reporter. The
Daily Mail
’s front-page headline was YARD FEAR NEW IRA ABDUCTION, and the text claimed that I had last been seen in the company of two Customs Officers and that police were now investigating the possibility that I had been executed by the IRA. Later the same day, Thames Valley Police vehemently denied that I had been an MI6 agent spying on the IRA, and Bernard Simons kept saying he’d heard from me, and that I was not being held against my will. But the media took no notice. That was too boring. In fairness, the
Daily Mirror
felt obliged at least to present an alternative theory: the next day’s front page was headlined THE INFORMER, and the report stated that I had been kidnapped by Mafia drug smugglers to prevent me from appearing at the Old Bailey and grassing them up. Other reports suggested I had staged my own kidnap. The public, though, preferred the spy/IRA theory, and that’s what the television and radio news stations gave them. Who were my enemies? – the police because they were being forced to look for me everywhere, the IRA because I’d smuggled dope, the Mafia because they thought I was going to talk about them, Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise because I didn’t turn up to get my conviction, Her Majesty’s Secret Service for my switching of loyalties, or the media for reasons I didn’t understand? Did it matter? All I had intended to do was change my appearance and carry on scamming. I already had a bit of a moustache. All this off-the-wall publicity would just make me more careful. Still, it all felt rather unreal and occasionally scary.

*

The media circus stopped as suddenly as it had begun. The Old Bailey trial judge deferred any decision regarding the estreatment of the bail sureties. I might have been abducted, he said, and therefore could not be termed an absconder. My main duty was to ensure that my family knew for certain that I was unharmed. Dai was not keen on my using his telephone for any purpose, and I assumed that most of my family’s telephones were tapped as a result of the nation-wide search for me. Through circuitous and complex manoeuvres involving conversations with my sister in Wales, I was able to have clandestine meetings with Rosie, Myfanwy, and my parents while I continued perfecting my disguise. After about two months, I looked very different and felt no fear walking the streets. Each morning, I would buy a few newspapers and have a coffee at a dock-workers’ café. One hot early July morning, I was at the newsagent’s and saw a
Daily Mirror
front-page headline, THE LONG SILENCE OF MR MYSTERY. Underneath was a photograph of me. I bought a copy. The report stated that Thames Valley Police had called off the search for me and that my disappearance had been the subject of discussion in the Houses of Parliament. Another blaze of publicity followed in the
Daily Mirror
’s wake.

‘You need another name and more disguise,’ said Dai. ‘Everyone’s talking about you on the Tube. I’m not calling you Howard any more. And I’m not calling you Mr Mystery either.’

‘Call me Albi,’ I said, partly in deference to my old friend Albert Hancock and partly because it was an anagram of bail.

‘All right,’ said Dai. ‘Why don’t you get yourself a pair of glasses?’

‘From whom?’

‘I think they’re called opticians, Albi.’

‘But there’s nothing wrong with my eyes, Dai. They won’t give me a pair.’

‘You walk into a dentist; he’ll say you’ve got bad teeth. You walk into an optician, and he’ll say you need glasses. That’s the way they make money. Anyway, I read the other day that the stuff you keep smoking causes long sight. Why don’t you smoke a load and go to an optician?’