Mr Nice

by Howard Marks

  We continued to Murray Hill Station and had lunch at the Cecil Hotel, which was run by a Pakistani who spoke perfect English. Murray resembled an old-fashioned ski resort, complete with primitive cable-car lifts, but there was no snow and it seemed unlikely that there ever would be. There was a brewery which produced a bottled drink named London Lager. It was the best bottled beer I had tasted in my life, owing its quality to a strict adherence to a hundred-year-old recipe imported from the British when they knew how to make beer.

  Back at the Holiday Inn, Islamabad, Raoul came round. He confirmed the existence and uses of the Krow. He also gave me the air waybill for the new shipment of hashish ready to leave Dubai. I flew to Paris and stayed overnight at L’Hôtel d’Alsace in Rue des Beaux Arts, where Oscar Wilde spent his last days. I called Ernie. He was in poor health as a result of a persistent thyroid problem and asked if I would handle things in New York on this occasion. Handling things meant collecting a couple of million dollars from Alan Schwarz once he’d sold the hashish and giving Don Brown 25% of it.

  I caught an Air France flight to New York, freshened up at the East 77th Street apartment, and met Don Brown at Mortimer’s, an Upper East Side restaurant run by an Englishman, John Beamish, and popular with free-spending culture-vultures and cocaine dealers. Don was a portly, redheaded man with thick glasses. He was jovial and liked corny wisecracks. He seemed an unlikely candidate to be running the criminal side of Kennedy Airport. I met Don again the next day for dinner. This time he brought one of his friends, an Italian called Willy. We were eating at Nicola’s, a restaurant popular with gangsters, actors, and CIA refugees. On the wall, next to covers of recently released books about the Mafia, were notices that cash was the only form of payment allowed in the restaurant.

  ‘So you’re called Don, too, huh?’ said Don Brown in a classic attempt to promote unease, trying to make me wonder whether he was having me followed and checked out. Ernie had probably told him I was trotting around the world as Mr Donald Nice and getting a kick out of it. We weren’t supposed to divulge these details to each other, but we did. Likewise, Ernie had told me Don’s surname was Brown. I wasn’t supposed to know, of course.

  ‘I would rather be Nice than Brown, Don.’

  Don roared with laughter.

  ‘Mr Nice, we’ve done our shit, and the Jewish kid, Alan, has got it. When you give me and Don the money, we don’t want to have to count the motherfucking shit, and we don’t like small bills. Your shit from Dubai weighed exactly 2,308 pounds, which means you owe me $577,000. I get that $577,000 before any other cocksucker gets a dime. Are we straight on that?’

  ‘If that’s what Ernie did, that’s what I’ll do, Willy.’

  ‘Yeah, I guess that is what Ernie did, so you do it. Give the money to Don.’

  Don was still laughing at my, not that funny, comment.

  ‘So how do you get a name like Nice, for Jesus Christ’s sake?’

  ‘I chose it, Don. I bet you didn’t choose Brown, did you?’

  ‘You got that right. Okay, time to go. I’ll be in the Pierre Hotel until you bring me the money.’

  ‘What room number, Don?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ll be using the name Nasty.’

  Don Brown was true to his word, and after receiving cardboard boxes of dirty dollars from Alan Schwarz, Mr Nice took $577,000 to Mr Nasty.

  Thai sticks were piling up in Bangkok, and Ernie wanted to do the next air-freight scam from there. I was a mere investor. Phil Sparrowhawk was also now given the privilege of investing. A ton of Thai sticks left Bangkok, and disappeared. None of Don Brown’s crowd or those who worked for Richard Crimball in Bangkok could trace it. Eventually it was found lying in a freight shed in Charles de Gaulle airport, Paris. The load of ‘sewing machines returning under warranty’ had not attracted any undue attention, but there didn’t seem any way of getting it to New York on Alitalia or Japanese Air Lines, the only two ‘friendly’ airlines. I thought of a solution. The New York company would send a large consignment of real sewing machines, this time to a newly formed company in Rome. The Rome company would find the sewing machines unacceptable and decide to return them under warranty. The New York company would instruct Alitalia to consolidate both the Paris and Rome shipments at Rome and forward them to New York. It was complicated, but it should work. It did.

  I stayed in New York. Ernie decided to do another Bangkok scam. This one didn’t work. The DEA busted it in New York and arrested sixteen New Yorkers alleged to be at the centre of the Donald Brown organisation. I took the next flight out of New York.

  Luckily Donald Brown himself had not been arrested. Neither had Willy the Italian. It was still safe for me to be Nice. But there would be no more air-freight scams to New York. They had come to an end. Between 1975 and 1978, twenty-four loads totalling 55,000 pounds of marijuana and hashish had been successfully imported through John F. Kennedy Airport, New York. They had involved the Mafia, the Yakuza, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, the Thai army, the Palestine Liberation Organisation, the Pakistani Armed Forces, Nepalese monks, and other individuals from all walks of life. The total profit made by all concerned was $48,000,000. They’d had a good run.

  Judy’s sister, Natasha, visited Judy and me in London. She had spent several months sailing in the Mediterranean, and had met a hashish-smuggling Californian sailor called Stuart Prentiss. They exchanged confidences, and Stuart expressed a keen desire to meet Natasha’s hashish-supplying brother-in-law. Stuart had a boat and he wanted to use it to smuggle hashish into Scotland. He owned a yacht-chartering business based on Kerrera, a small island a few miles from Oban, and was confident of his ability to import hashish safely without attracting attention from the authorities. He didn’t have a source of supply in the Mediterranean. Lebanese Sam was still in prison, so I tracked down Eric to see if he still had any of his Lebanese connections. He didn’t. There had been all sorts of problems in Beirut: people had been killed in the war, others had emigrated, the quality of commercial hashish had greatly deteriorated, and heroin had become the export of choice. However, Eric had cultivated a connection in Morocco, Sharif, whom he had yet to use. For a reasonable price, Sharif claimed he could deliver a ton of hashish to a boat anchored offshore close to Al Hociema. We went ahead.

  It proved to be a trouble-free scam. At the end of 1978, Stuart’s boat delivered a ton of Moroccan hashish to his remote Scottish island. Every day for a week, 300 pounds of the load would be taken to the mainland, driven to London, and sold.

  Nothing got busted; everyone got paid. I brought up the subject of a repeat performance. Stuart said he wanted to do just one scam a year. I said I could wait. With the profits, Judy bought a flat in Cathcart Road, Chelsea. We started doing it up.

  The time had come for World-wide Entertainments to waste some of its money on legitimate businesses. In an attempt to compensate for my lack of talent in rock music, I thought I should manage and finance someone else’s. At a Christmas party I met P. J. Proby and Tom Baker. Proby had sung demo discs for Elvis, toured with the Beatles in the Sixties, and had a few British hit records and West End performances to his credit. Tom Baker, a friend of Proby’s, used to act in The Virginian and was now a film director. He was looking for a suitable manager for Proby, someone with money and recording facilities. I, as Mr Nice, took on the job.

  There had not been any significant mention of me by the media for over four years. But in July 1979, it was discovered that Chief Superintendent Philip Fairweather’s confidential report into my disappearance while on bail during 1974 had been leaked to the press. Britain’s top crime reporter, Duncan Campbell, wrote about it in the New Statesman, explaining that Fairweather had been summoned by MI6’s legal adviser, Bernard Shelton, and told that ‘a former Balliol College fellow undergraduate of Marks, who is now an MI6 officer, contacted Marks with a view to using his company AnnaBelinda, which also had a shop in Amsterdam, as a cover for his activities. He later realised that Marks was engaged in certain a
ctivities and requested him to obtain information concerning the Provisional IRA.’

  I didn’t pay the article much attention at the time, but this was the first admission by any British government authority that I had worked for MI6 and had been asked to spy on the IRA.

  Jim McCann, after his media-inspired face-off with the Canadian Immigration authorities, had not been in France long before he was arrested in the club-house of a villa estate on the Riviera by a squad of French and German police. They locked him up in Marseille’s notorious Les Baumettes jail and began the process of extraditing him to Germany to face charges of bombing the British Army base at Mönchengladbach in 1973. Luckily for McCann, there was grass-roots concern in France about the country’s failure to behave as a proper asylum for political refugees and its tendency to cave in to other countries’ extradition demands. The French Government had not long ago acceded to German demands for the surrender of Klaus Croissant, a lawyer to the Baader-Meinhof organisation. There were protests, and subsequent attempts by the Italians, who wanted a French-residing supporter of the Red Brigade, and the Spanish, who wanted back a member of the Basque guerrilla group, ETA, were thwarted by determined champions of political asylum. McCann’s defence was taken on by the same Marseilles lawyers who had successfully dealt with the ETA case. To his lawyers, McCann told one story: he was not James Kennedy, he was James McCann, a fund raiser for the IRA. To the Communist paper Libération, he told another: his name was Peter Joseph (Jim) Kennedy, and he was a harmless underground journalist. The Organisation Communiste Internationale, a Trotskyist trade union group, rallied to McCann’s cause, referring to it as ‘un scandale judiciaire et politique’. McCann was overjoyed and made the following pronouncement:

  Camarades. Je suis très touché par votre solidarité … mes

  circonstances personelles sont le resultat d’une conspiration

  entre les services secrets anglais et allemands de l’Ouest,

  tumeur fasciste au coeur de l’Europe democratique.

  Yours in Combat,

  James Kennedy (McCann)

  The French followed the Canadian strategy and gave up. They refused to extradite McCann to Germany because his blowing-up of a British Army base was a political act, and they gave him political asylum. We met at La Coupole in Montparnasse, Paris.

  ‘The Kid’s a fucking legend, H’ard, a fucking legend. I’ve got these Trotskyite fucking snail-eaters in the palm of my hand. No one can touch me. I’ve got political asylum. But I need some fucking bread, man. Those Marseilles lawyers cleaned me out. Are you still dope-dealing, H’ard?’

  ‘No, Jim. I took your advice. Now I’m into high finance.’

  ‘Fuck off, will you? I know you’re still dope-dealing. I need you to send me some nordle from Kabul.’

  ‘How much? A couple of ounces okay?’

  ‘I need half a fucking ton, at least, you Welsh cunt.’

  ‘Are you saying you’ve got Paris airport straightened?’

  ‘I can straighten anywhere I fucking want to, H’ard. You know that. But I need you to send the nordle to Ireland.’

  ‘What? Shannon again?’

  ‘Dublin. It’s nearer that fucking Welsh ferry of yours. You know people in Kabul, do you?’

  ‘Only the same ones you know. Why don’t you ask them yourself?’

  ‘Well, Durrani’s fucking dead, and that cunt Raoul thinks I ripped him off.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Of course I fucking did. I had problems, man. It’s better you ask him, H’ard.’

  ‘If I ask Raoul to send dope to Ireland, he’ll know it’s for you. He’s not going to go for it. But I do have someone in Bangkok.’

  ‘Where the fuck’s that?’

  ‘It’s the capital of Thailand.’

  ‘I’ve never fucking heard of it.’

  ‘It used to be called Siam.’

  ‘What fucking use is that? I need nordle, not cats.’

  ‘Jim, the nordle from Thailand, Thai sticks, is some of the best in the world.’

  ‘I know what fucking Thai sticks are, you stupid Welsh fucker. I was smoking them last night.’

  ‘Well, I’ll send you some of those.’

  ‘Okay, H’ard, but it’s got to be done quickly, and no fuck-ups.’

  Phil Sparrowhawk was still living in Bangkok. I flew there to see him and checked into the Hyatt Rama Hotel as Mr Nice. Phil introduced me to Robert Crimball, Ernie’s Brotherhood of Eternal Love associate. There would be no difficulty airfreighting Thai sticks to Ireland from Bangkok airport. The marijuana had already been harvested and dried. But there was one problem: the marijuana had not yet been tied on to sticks, and this would take some time. Robert felt there would be market resistance to Thai marijuana not presented in the traditional form, entwined around a six-inch stick. I said that might be true in America, but in England, if the dope got you stoned, there would be little market resistance. London heads would be quite likely to return the bare sticks complaining that they didn’t get you high.

  I stayed in Bangkok for just one night, then went to Hong Kong to pick up money that Patrick Lane had arranged to be collected by Mr Nice from the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank. Phil came with me, and I gave him the money. I flew from Hong Kong to Zurich and then took a train to Lugano to meet Judy and Amber. We were now resettling in Campione d’Italia. A few months earlier, Patrick Lane had moved his home and tax haven consultancy business from Campione to Ireland. The business had not made a single penny. Still, his presence in the Emerald Isle might prove useful.

  McCann had rented a smart executive home near Fitzpatrick’s Castle in Killiney, the Beverly Hills of the Dublin area. Judy, Amber, and I moved into it for a week. The scam worked fine, and McCann brought round a large van full of tins of Thai marijuana. There was a total of 750 kilos. As in the old Shannon days, I used a few friends for driving the marijuana from Ireland to England or Wales. I had also agreed to use two friends of Phil. He had promised them some work.

  There were a total of fifteen cross-Channel runs. Thai marijuana was much bulkier than hashish, and each car could only take 50 kilos. Phil’s two friends, who included English international soccer star Eddie Clamp, did the last run. They got busted by Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise at Liverpool. This was the first-ever proof to the authorities that large quantities of dope were being smuggled through Ireland. It had been happening for over eight years. The method of entry remained unknown.

  ‘We’ll do another one, H’ard, but none of your fucking burglars, Third-Division Scottish footballers, and academics on that fucking Welsh ferry. This time the Kid will bring it over. You understand me, do you?’

  ‘How are you going to bring it over!’

  ‘As bananas.’

  ‘Bananas?’

  ‘Our Gerard’s got a fruit company. They take fruit from Southern to Northern Ireland every fucking day. And they take it from Northern Ireland to Scotland.’

  ‘Don’t they get stopped and searched, Jim?’

  ‘According to you Brits, Northern Ireland is the same fucking country as Scotland. So how can there be any Customs? I thought you were a fucking dope smuggler. You should know these things, man.’

  ‘I’m talking about the land border between Southern and Northern Ireland, Jim.’

  ‘That’s no fucking border.’

  ‘I know, but they still have Customs and searches, don’t they? Like the Welsh ferry.’

  ‘Fuck the Welsh ferry. And no fucker searches the Kid. If the boys can take guns over every day for the struggle, and farmers can take their pigs over to get bigger subsidies, I’m fucking sure I can take over some fucking bananas.’

  Phil sent another load from Bangkok to Dublin. On a late summer’s morning, I sat in a rented car just outside the ferry terminal at Stranraer on the west coast of Scotland waiting for the arrival of the ferry from Larne. McCann’s fruit lorry was meant to be on it. Jarvis sat in a large van in a car park a mile away. I watched every vehicle drive off
. There was no fruit lorry. There was no answer from Jim’s telephone in Killiney. I gave up waiting and set off for London, listening to the car radio. The lunchtime news described how a big articulated truck running north from the docks at Cork with a load of South American bananas had pulled into a lay-by on the main road just south of Dublin. A rented van was parked in the darkness. Men from both vehicles emerged and began to talk. By chance, a courting couple at the other end of the lay-by were watching the proceedings. A man with a strong Belfast accent spotted the couple and screamed, ‘Fuck off out of here.’

  The couple left and called the police. A patrol car arrived at the lay-by. McCann confronted it with a pistol. A policeman got out and kicked the gun out of McCann’s hand. McCann dived into a car and drove it into a hedge. He was overpowered, yelling, ‘I did it for Ireland.’

  The Irish Army bomb disposal team blew open the truck doors. There was no bomb. Instead, there were twenty-one tea chests full of Thai marijuana: the largest bust in Ireland.

  Seven

  MR NICE

  During the late 1970s, most of the twenty-eight tons of marijuana that Americans smoked every day came from Colombia. Hundreds of tons a month were loaded on to large freighter ships in Colombian ports. These mother ships would anchor miles away from the South Florida coastline and offload, several tons at a time, to a fleet of smaller craft that would land their cargoes at private moorings and deserted beaches. Some of the imported marijuana would be sold in Florida, while the rest would be distributed to other dope-smoking populations. The first of these operations was the brainchild of Santo Trafficante, Jr., the chief of the Florida Mafia. Trafficante had inherited this position from his father, a partner of New York Mafia boss Salvatore ‘Lucky’ Luciano. Trafficante had set up casinos in Cuba in 1946 but was jailed when Fidel Castro took control in 1959 and ousted the Mafia. For some reason, Castro allowed Trafficante to leave Cuba with all his money. On his return to America, the CIA paid him to assassinate Castro. Trafficante took the money and tipped off Castro. According to Chicago Mafia leader Sam Giancana, Trafficante was then asked to assassinate President Kennedy. The rest is uncertain, but Trafficante was certainly efficient, and Colombian marijuana was flowing in at such a rate that its wholesale price began to plummet. Consumers wanted something different. Eventually, ton loads were being sold on the streets of Miami and Fort Lauderdale at the rock-bottom price of $200 a pound, while hashish and Thai sticks were fetching $1,000 a pound. In London, the situation was very different. Moroccan and Pakistani hashish was plentiful and affordable at £300 a pound, and any decent marijuana would be similarly priced. It had always been possible to make a profit by smuggling hashish from London to America, as I had done with the rock-group scams, but now the low price of Colombian marijuana in America had made it equally possible to profit by smuggling marijuana from America to London. A few small consignments had made their way over, and Trafficante and his underlings were pleased to make some foreign-exchange earnings. They thought of the possibility of smuggling large quantities to Europe, not from America, but directly from Colombia. Trafficante, Louis Ippolito, and Ernie explored the thought. Ernie was happy to do any amount. Trafficante wanted to do a minimum of fifty tons. He thought anything less wouldn’t be economically feasible.