Mr Nice

by Howard Marks

  My first assignment for MI6 was to seduce a female employee of the Czechoslovakian Embassy. Mac’s bosses thought she was a KGB agent. She was known to be attending a forthcoming birthday party, and it had been arranged for invitations to be issued to me and Mac. I was shown a few photographs. She looked nice. The party took place in Highgate. I didn’t know anyone there other than Mac. The girl didn’t show up, and I wasn’t even offered expenses. This business was clearly a test of one’s patriotism and patience. No wonder they kept it secret.

  Much as Graham and I were enjoying the lack of business with McCann, it was difficult to resist. We planned to send 1,500 kilos, our biggest load yet, to Shannon and deliver it to Moone. Some we would move in the usual way on the ferry to England. The rest we would take to another house in County Cork, rented by Woodhead, whose location was unknown to McCann, and air-freight it from Dublin to New York in James Morris’s Transatlantic Sounds rock-group equipment. We could take care of paying McCann and the Pakistanis out of the British sales, and McCann wouldn’t know we were making heaps more money by selling hashish in California. I was soon sitting on a ton and a half of Pakistani hashish in the curious Moone property, loading up the first drivers for the ferry before dashing to catch the next flight to London.

  We couldn’t use the Winchester garage as the British destashing point after the Dutch fiasco. James Goldsack had his own facilities, so the first two carloads were sent across on the ferry to him while a few other carloads went to the place in County Cork. While selling the first carload, James Goldsack was busted. The second carload of hashish had been parked outside Hammersmith Police Station. James was being grilled inside the police station. In an extraordinary display of pure courage, Patrick Lane broke into the car and retrieved the hashish. I took it from Patrick to Rosie’s cottage in Yarnton. I repackaged the hashish from its plastic wrappings into suitcases and threw the plastic wrappings on to a pile of litter on the country roadside.

  Transatlantic Sounds rock-group equipment was sent from London to Cork, filled up with hashish at Woodhead’s Irish country place, and air-freighted from Dublin to the United States.

  We badly needed a new destashing premises in England, so Marty rented a farmhouse near Trelleck in Monmouthshire. Hashish from Ireland and Oxford accumulated in Wales. Jarvis sold enough to pay off McCann, Pakistan, and the drivers. The rock-group equipment was destashed in California by Ernie Combs and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Ernie sold the lot at three times the price we would have got in London in just one day. Greatly impressed, we filled some more Transatlantic Sounds speakers with what hashish was left in Marty’s Trelleck farmhouse and sent them from Heathrow to Phoenix. We took a week’s breather.

  There were worries whether James Goldsack would talk. Would he blow the Irish scam? In fact James was as solid as a rock. He admitted being a hashish dealer and refused to testify against anyone else. Nothing seemed to be compromised. The Irish scam was still unknown to the authorities.

  During the week’s inactivity, I invited my parents and grandmother to visit Rosie, me, and the children at the cottage in Yarnton. It was a warm spring Sunday afternoon. My grandmother was doting over little Myfanwy. Emily was playing dressing up with my father. Rosie and my mother discussed maternal matters. I was trying to stabilise. A police car drove up the little lane and pulled to a halt outside the cottage. Two members of the Thames Valley Constabulary emerged holding a few of the plastic wrappings I had just discarded on the roadside. I remained seated, paralysed. My mother looked at me, puzzled and worried. She could tell I was uneasy.

  ‘Does someone called Emily live here?’ asked one of the policemen, unexpectedly.

  ‘Yes, that’s my daughter. Why?’ Rosie was unshaken.

  ‘Is this envelope hers?’ asked the policeman, pulling out a small envelope addressed to Emily at Yarnton.

  I then realised what must have happened. Emily, in childish innocence, must have stuffed one of her letters into the waste-bag containing the hashish wrappings. Instead of taking the wrappings to a rubbish dump or burning them, I had stupidly thrown them away at the roadside. Someone had discovered them. The wrappings were full of crumbs of cannabis, covered with my fingerprints, and accompanied by an envelope which had been in my house. This could be serious.

  ‘Yes, it is. Where did you get it?’

  Rosie was still completely unshaken. Did she realise the danger we were in?

  ‘It was with these, ma’am,’ said the policeman, holding up some plastic wrappings.

  ‘Have you seen these before?’ the second policeman addressed the family group as a whole.

  ‘Well, no,’ said my mother.

  ‘We’ve just arrived from South Wales, Officer,’ said my father. ‘How would we know anything?’

  Dad was always firm with police.

  My grandmother kept playing with Myfanwy as if the policemen did not exist. The first policeman looked me directly in the eyes.

  ‘What about you, sir? Familiar to you, are they? Obviously, they came from here, didn’t they?’

  ‘No, I’ve never seen them before.’

  ‘Oh! Now I remember,’ interjected Rosie with first-class criminal inspiration. ‘The man who came to fix the damp course last week had a big bag of these wrappings left over when he’d finished doing his work. I suppose all the chemicals he used must have been in them.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you have his name and number, ma’am.’

  ‘I certainly do. I was going to call him anyway. His work was so shoddily done.’

  Rosie gave the policemen the name and number. They shot off to harass some poor damp-course man. I excused myself on the pretext of having to attend to important matters at AnnaBelinda, sped off down the M40 to London, and checked into Blake’s Hotel, Roland Gardens, under the name of Stephen McCarthy.

  I was sure the police would return to Yarnton and was haunted by images of Rosie in a police cell and two little girls crying in intense fear and sadness. Rosie was easily persuaded to leave the country, and in my BMW, she, the two little girls, and a wonderful nanny named Vicky drove to Ibiza and rented a house in Santa Eulalia. I stayed at Blake’s.

  I had to find out what was going on and thought maybe Mac would help. I called the Foreign Office and arranged to meet him. I told him what had happened at Yarnton. Later on the same day, we met again.

  ‘Did you find anything out, Mac?’

  ‘I certainly did. You can rest assured that the police are not minded to arrest you. Feel free to go home. But I want you to meet one of my superiors, tomorrow, if possible. He has some questions for you.’

  ‘What kind of questions?’

  ‘He mentioned Ireland.’

  ‘Mac, I can’t talk about that. It involves my dope-dealing business.’

  ‘Howard, I assure you we are not interested in your smuggling of cannabis. That is of no concern to us. Other matters in Ireland may be.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Donald will explain to you tomorrow.’

  Donald, a stern-faced, well-dressed spy, Mac, and I met for lunch at the Pillars of Hercules, just off Soho Square. Donald came to the point.

  ‘We know you have been meeting a member of the Provisional IRA who supplies them with arms and know why you have been meeting him. We would like you to carry on meeting him to get some information from him.’

  ‘Well, I have no plans to see him again right now.’

  ‘That’s fine. But when you do, let McMillan here know.’

  ‘Sure.’

  Mac and I went to his home in Putney. We had a whisky each in his sitting room.

  ‘Howard, this might clear up any uncertainties,’ said Mac, producing a photograph. I looked at it. It was a picture of McCann with his name underneath. Mac took it back from me and went into his study to make a phone call.

  There was no doubt in my mind that I had to let McCann know MI6 were on his case. If MI6 knew he was dopedealing, the IRA would soon get to know, and McCann might get e
xecuted. No more Shannon deals. They had to stop. It was just too dangerous, too heavy. Where had all that peace and love stuff gone? Arms smuggling, Bloody Sunday, executions, and knee-cappings. Ernie’s Brotherhood of Eternal Love came far closer to traditional dope-dealing values of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll; and they could make far more money. No more McCann. I would warn him of the danger, then get out of his life. I wanted that photograph of him so he would know I wasn’t playing games.

  Mac returned. I asked if I could telephone AnnaBelinda. He motioned me towards his study, and I made my phone call, letting my eyes roam over Mac’s bookshelves. A book named The Unconscious Mind snatched my attention. I picked it up, opened it, and the photograph of McCann fell out. I put it into my pocket. That has remained the most inexplicable event in my life.

  Feeling noble and resolute, I left Blake’s and went back to Yarnton. I cabled Rosie to call me and told her it was safe for her to come back. She said she didn’t want to come back. Life in Ibiza was far more meaningful: sun, stars, beaches, and lots of dope to smoke. She suggested that before I turn into a money-making megalomaniac and lose all my friends, I should join her in Ibiza. But I should promise not to bring with me any of my fucked-up lifestyle. She’d made some wonderful friends who wouldn’t appreciate it. I could tell I was losing her. I went to visit Fanny Hill and began a very clandestine affair with her. At the same time, she was having a less clandestine affair with Raymond Carr, the Master of St Anthony’s College, Oxford’s CIA annexe.

  I went to Ibiza and thought it would make a good neutral venue to meet McCann.

  ‘Why the fuck have you dragged me here, H’ard, in the middle of all this hippie shit? You know I’m busy. Why couldn’t you have come to Ireland? This had better be important.’

  ‘It is, Jim. MI6 are on to you.’

  ‘Who the fuck cares? There’s a war going on. And what the fuck’s MI6 got to do with you, you Welsh cunt?’

  ‘An old Oxford friend of mine works for them. They know you and I have been dope-dealing. If they know, other people know, like maybe the IRA.’

  Jim went white.

  ‘Fuck off! Fuck off, will you! You’re playing fucking games.’

  I showed him the photograph.

  ‘You and Soppy Bollocks, I knew you were fucking Brit agents. I knew it. How can I know you haven’t been setting the Kid up all along?’

  ‘Try thinking, Jim.’

  ‘Fuck you!’

  ‘This is it, Jim. No more deals for a while.’

  ‘Okay, H’ard. But I’m staying here in Ibiza for a while for a holiday. My new Dutch girlfriend, Sylvia, and my old Irish girlfriend, Anne, are coming over. We’ll stop with you.’

  ‘I thought you were busy, Jim.’

  In a couple of days, Rosie’s Santa Eulalia holiday house had turned into a madhouse. McCann was playing musical beds with Sylvia and Anne, unsuccessfully encouraging Rosie and Vicky to do the same, and forever filling the house with various odd characters he picked up in the bars in Ibiza. He was making me laugh, so I didn’t mind. I called AnnaBelinda in Oxford. There was a message to phone Eric in Athens. I knew Eric had picked up the hashish from Lebanon. He must have already landed it in Italy, where Johnny Martin had rented a villa in preparation to receive both the dope and Transatlantic Sounds rock-group equipment. Great!

  It wasn’t great. Eric said that there’d been a slight problem. I should come to Athens now. I packed my bags, and Rosie exploded.

  ‘That’s right. Leave me in the middle of all this chaos you’ve brought to ruin my holiday. I told you not to do this. Where are you going?’

  ‘Athens. Fancy coming? Vicky can look after the children.’

  The ‘slight problem’ was that Eric had temporarily stashed 700 pounds of Lebanese hashish on a remote Greek island. A herd of goats had unearthed the dope, which was spotted by some Greek sponge fishermen. The sponge fishermen had taken the hashish to Crete and were selling it at absurdly cheap prices. I knew Eric was telling me the truth. Eric’s solution was to launch a commando-style attack in Crete and recover the hashish. I told him to forget it, but if he ever did get it back, I’d like some. After a quick tour of the Acropolis, Rosie and I flew back to Ibiza.

  Graham favoured a commando solution and wanted to proposition McCann. I persuaded him not to. With no other means at his disposal, he sent Patrick Lane to Heraklion. A week later, Patrick returned with a sun-tan, lots of tall stories, and no dope, but I’m sure he did his best.

  Graham told Ernie that the Italian speaker shipment was off. Ernie said it wasn’t: some friends of his were soon to arrive in Italy having driven from Kabul in a camper stashed with Afghani hash. One of his friends was a draft-dodging Californian scientologist named James Gater. James Morris and I met Gater at Johnny Martin’s rented villa in Cupra Maritima, near Ancona, on the Adriatic coast. We destashed the camper that had come from Afghanistan, put the hashish into Transatlantic Sounds speakers, and air-freighted it to Los Angeles from Rome. James Morris and I caught a flight from Rome to Zurich, where he introduced me to his Swiss banker. I opened up an account at the Swiss Bank Corporation. The banker assured me there would be no problem in my depositing large amounts of cash. Ernie gave me $100,000 for my assistance. Graham said I could keep it all. He wouldn’t interfere with any deal I made with Ernie as long as I did not interfere with deals he intended doing with McCann. We would remain partners on all other deals and could invest in each other’s individual deals without participation. I agreed but couldn’t help worrying about Graham. He was changing from a bourgeois, middle-class monarchist buccaneer to the exact opposite. That was okay, but he was doing it too quickly and doing it under the influence of McCann. God knows what McCann had in mind, but it wouldn’t have been Graham’s political development.

  In Ibiza, Rosie had given up the Santa Eulalia holiday house and rented a finca in the middle of nowhere. She was going back to nature. There wasn’t even a bathroom or toilet, and it was several miles from a telephone. I put up with it for a while. Rosie and I were getting on well again. We had confessed our infidelities and were pretending they didn’t matter. She introduced me to one of many Dutchmen who had places on the island. His name was Arend, and he was a heavy-drinking, fun-loving dope dealer from Amsterdam. I asked him what sort of prices and quantities normally prevailed in Amsterdam. I reported them to Ernie. He sent over Gater and another friend of his, Gary Lickert, to Amsterdam with several hundred thousand dollars, and Arend and I invested some money of our own. Gater rented a flat in Maastricht, near Utrecht. A hired truck full of Transatlantic Sounds speakers was parked outside. Arend and I purchased 700 pounds of Lebanese hashish from an Amsterdam wholesaler friend of his. Gater and I stashed the speakers, and one of James Morris’s people drove the truck to Schiphol Airport and air-freighted them to Las Vegas via New York.

  It was early September 1973, and Ernie had invited me to come over to California once the Dutch load had been sent. I could pick up my own profit and maybe spend some of it. I was in Los Angeles before the speakers arrived at Las Vegas. Ernie and James Morris met me at the airport. Ernie was tall, thin, bearded, bespectacled, long-haired, and suntanned. He was Californian.

  ‘Hi. How you doing? Have a good flight?’

  ‘Yeah. It was long, though.’

  Ernie thought for a second, then machine-gunned a few sentences.

  ‘Shit! I used to do that son-of-a-bitch once a week when I was working with Graham in the early days. What’s his beef, these days? He’s been really kinda rude to me. I get pissed with that. Well, we should pick up our load from Las Vegas airport tonight. You’re booked into the Newporter Inn, an old Richard Nixon hangout. Nixon cracks me up. What you like to do for fun? There’s real good surf here. I got a shed full of surfboards.’

  ‘I’ve never tried surfing, Ernie.’

  ‘How about sailing?’

  ‘Never tried that either.’

  ‘Not an ocean lover, huh? Okay. You want to go motorcycle riding
in the desert? I got a bunch of real nice bikes.’

  ‘That’s another thing I’ve never done. I’ve been a passenger, but I’ve not ridden one. Not even a pushbike.’

  Ernie started laughing uncontrollably. I joined in.

  ‘I guess it seems strange to you, Ernie, yeah?’

  ‘You got that right. So what do you do when you ain’t working, watch television?’

  ‘Sometimes. But usually I just get stoned, read books, and listen to music.’

  ‘You’ll like California,’ said Ernie.

  I did, or what I saw of it, which was mainly the inside of a hotel room in Newport Beach. I wandered around the hotel complex, the bars, swimming pools, and other public areas, and realised that American movies weren’t about fantasy: they were documentaries about Hollywood. There were hundreds of radio stations and dozens of TV channels. In Britain we had only three. The radio stations were fantastic. I listened to a few hours of doo-wop and golden oldies before the commercials drove me mad. All the TV channels were showing sport, cop shoot-outs, sit-coms, game shows, or news. I watched the news. A reporter said, ‘Hey, one of you guys out there has just lost $5,000,000. Today, law enforcement officers seized Nevada’s biggest ever haul of illegal drugs. Hashish, highly concentrated cannabis from the Middle East, almost half a ton of it, was discovered hidden in speaker cabinets. Over to Las Vegas …’ On the screen came pictures of the Lebanese hashish and the speakers Gater and I had stashed in Holland.

  In the movies, the crook, usually a fugitive, always immediately switches off the radio or television when the relevant news bulletin finishes. I didn’t. I stared at it blankly for at least an hour. Was this really happening? I was very jetlagged from my first-ever long flight, and Ernie had given me the most varied collection of hashish and marijuana imaginable. I was as stoned as I’d ever been. This was Hollywood. It probably wasn’t happening.