During the mid 1980’s Howard Marks had forty-three aliases, eighty-nine phone lines and owned twenty-five companies trading throughout the world. Bars, recording studios, offshore banks - all were money-laundering vehicles serving the core activity: dope dealing.
Marks began to deal small amounts of hashish while doing a postgraduate philosophy course at Oxford and soon he was moving much larger quantities into Europe and America in the equipment of touring rock bands. The academic life began to lose its allure. At the height of his career he was smuggling consignments of up to thirty tons from Pakistan and Thailand to America and Canada, and had contact with organisations as diverse as M16, the CIA, the IRA and the Mafia. After many years and a world-wide operation by the Drug Enforcement Agency, he was busted and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison at Terre Haute Penitentiary, Indiana. He was released in April 1995 after serving seven years of his sentence.
Howard Marks now lives with his family in Majorca. His autobiography “Mr Nice” was a top seller on its hard back release and has just been released in paper back for the first time in the United Kingdom.
He stood for Parliamentary election in the May 1997 British elections, representing four constituencies on a legalize-cannabis ticket. He lost his deposit in all four seats as the Labour party swept to victory. As Marks himself says, everyone was so keen to see an end to Conservative rule that had he had an opportunity to vote he probably wouldn’t have voted for a minority candidate either!
He is now considering standing for the office of Mayor of Palma, Majorca....
Book Extract
“I was running out of passports, ones I could use. In a few weeks I intended to visit San Francisco to pick up several hundred thousand dollars from someone keen to exploit his connections, both with me and with a bent US Customs Officer working in the imports section of San Francisco International Airport.
A few years earlier, I had been declared the most wanted man in Great Britain, a hashish smuggler with documented links to the Italian Mafia, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, the IRA, and the British Secret Service. A new identity was vital. I'd already gone through about twenty different identities, most of which had been backed up by a passport, driving licence, or other indicators of documented existence, but they'd all either been discovered by friends/enemies or compromised by featuring in some suspicious trail meandering through a recent scam.......”
