Mr Nice

by Howard Marks

  My views on cannabis differed in some ways from those of Jarvis and the two Charlies. They were far more radical than I and tended to see hashish as a new meaningful currency capable of overthrowing the fascist overlords. They wished hashish to remain illegal. It gave us a means of living and salved our rebellious consciences by fucking up the establishment. We were true outlaws: we didn’t really break laws, not real ones; we just lived outside them. We didn’t pay tax because we didn’t want our money being used by the armed forces to kill innocent foreigners and by the police to bust us. We just wanted a good time, and we worked hard and took risks to get it by supplying a badly needed service. I went along with most of this but couldn’t begin to condone the punishing of those who wished to smoke marijuana and, therefore, could not logically condone the illegality of the hashish trade.

  Graham had hatched up several plans while incarcerated. Some were hindered by his inability to enter Germany without first paying his rather hefty fine. I agreed to take £5,000 of Graham’s money to Frankfurt to give to Lebanese Sam. He would then take care of the fine. Currency restrictions made it illegal to take more than £25 out of the country, so I stuck the money down the back of my trousers and checked in at Heathrow. A couple of policemen did an unexpected anti-terrorist passenger search. Before I had time to realise the danger I was in, I had been incredibly inefficiently searched and motioned through the boarding gate. I didn’t feel relief. I just felt a bit dazed and confused.

  On the way back the next morning, I hid the receipt for the fine payment and £300 generously given me by Sam in my sock. I bought some duty-free perfumes for Rosie. Customs stopped me at Heathrow.

  ‘Where have you come from, sir?’

  ‘Frankfurt.’

  ‘Is this all your luggage?’ he asked, pointing to my small briefcase and plastic bag of perfume bottles.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you buy these perfumes duty-free?’

  ‘Yes, at Frankfurt airport.’

  ‘Do you realise, sir, that it is illegal to buy duty-free items if out of the country for less than twenty-four hours?’

  ‘Yes,’ I lied.

  ‘How long have you been abroad?’

  ‘Two days,’ I lied again.

  ‘Would you mind opening your briefcase, sir? I would just like to have a quick look.’

  The briefcase contained only my used airline ticket, a toothbrush, and a book appropriately entitled The Philosophy of Time.

  ‘Travelling light, sir?’

  ‘I stayed at a friend’s house. I didn’t need to bring anything.’

  The Customs Officer picked up my used airline ticket and looked at the dates.

  ‘I thought you said you had been gone for two days. This ticket shows you left London last night.’

  ‘Yes, two days: yesterday and today.’

  ‘Would you come this way, sir?’

  The Customs Officer led me to a cold, breeze-blocked room.

  ‘Let me see your passport. Thank you. Would you mind taking off your clothes?’

  ‘Of course I mind.’

  ‘Mr Marks, if you have no contraband, you have nothing to fear.’

  ‘I have no contraband, and I have nothing to fear. But I’m not taking my clothes off.’

  I was beginning to worry about the £300 in my sock. If it was illegal to take £25 cash out, then it surely must be illegal to bring in twelve times that amount, or was it?

  ‘Then you leave me no choice. I will hold you both for attempting to smuggle perfume into the United Kingdom and on suspicion of carrying other contraband. You either let me strip-search you now or the police will do so when I put you in their cells.’

  ‘I’ll take the second option.’

  ‘That’s up to you. There is another alternative. You declare what contraband you have to me and hand it over. If I accept your declaration as true, we’ll deal with the matter without strip-searching.’

  ‘I’ve got £300 in my sock,’ I stupidly confessed.

  ‘Show me.’

  I took off my shoe and sock and gave him the bundle of fifteen £20 notes and the fine-payment receipt.

  ‘Did you take this money out of the country, sir?’

  There didn’t seem much point admitting that fact.

  ‘No. A friend gave it to me in Frankfurt. I didn’t know what else to do with it. Is it illegal to bring back money, too, if I’ve been away for just a short time?’

  ‘No, Mr Marks, bringing sterling into the country is not illegal, but taking more than a certain amount out of the country is. Why did you put it in your sock? So we wouldn’t see it?’

  ‘Just for safe-keeping, I suppose.’

  ‘Is this receipt also in your sock for safe keeping? What is your occupation?’

  ‘Well, I’m sort of unemployed at the moment, but usually I’m a teacher.’

  ‘Who is Kenneth Graham Plinston?’ he asked, looking at the name on the receipt.

  ‘Just a friend, really. He owed some money in Germany and asked me to sort it out.’

  ‘You always pay off his debts? Are you that well paid a teacher?’

  ‘No, I used his money. It was his friend who gave me the money in Frankfurt.’

  ‘What was his friend’s name?’

  ‘Sal.’ I knew I had to lie on that one.

  ‘Italian, is he?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Just one moment, Mr Marks.’

  The Customs Officer left with the receipt. After several minutes, he returned with a senior official-looking man in plain clothes.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Marks. I’m with Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise Special Investigative Branch. We are going to charge you the duty on the perfume you bought. In the matter of the £300, we can’t touch you. Here it is. We know your friend Mr Plinston. We know how he makes his money. We trust you aren’t going the same way. Stick to teaching.’

  Graham seemed totally unperturbed when I got to his house and gave him the receipt and report of my brush with the law.

  ‘I don’t think there’s much to worry about there, Howard. We’re friends, and that’s that.’

  ‘I’m not worried about it,’ I said. ‘I’m just telling you what happened. I really couldn’t care less.’

  ‘That’s good. Howard, something’s just come up. Would you like to make quite a decent sum of money by doing a couple of days’ work in Germany driving some hash around to various friends of mine?’

  ‘Graham, I’ve never driven abroad. I can’t imagine driving on the wrong side of the road.’

  ‘There’s always a first time.’

  ‘Maybe, but it shouldn’t be when I’ve got dope in the car.’

  ‘Couldn’t you hire someone, Howard, to be your driver? I’ll be paying you plenty.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m pretty sure I could do that.’

  ‘Okay, Howard, I’ll call you from Frankfurt in a few days when I’m ready.’

  Neither Jarvis nor the two Charlies were interested in venturing from the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. It was too much of a disruption. However, Charlie Radcliffe’s attractive lady, Tina, had a New Zealand friend called Lang. He had years of all kinds of smuggling experience and was in London looking for work. He was more than happy with the German proposition. We agreed to split profits.

  Lang and I met Graham in Frankfurt airport. Graham explained that a ton of Pakistani hashish was in a lock-up garage. The assignment was to rent an appropriate vehicle, go to the garage, load up the hashish, deliver some to a group of Californians in a predetermined lay-by, some to a couple of Germans in Frankfurt, and the rest to a group of Dutchmen at a pre-arranged location in the middle of the Black Forest. Lang and I would be paid £5,000 between us.

  We rented an Opel estate car with massive space for baggage. The lock-up garage was in an expensive suburb of Wiesbaden. Inside the garage were twenty 50-kilo wooden boxes with ‘Streptomycin, Karachi’ stencilled on each. The smell of hashish was overpowering. We loaded up the Opel
, covered the boxes with a rug, and drove to the lay-by. A couple of Cheech and Chong look-alikes were waiting in a large saloon car. We pulled up alongside. One of the Californians jumped out and opened the boot. Lang and I opened the back of the Opel, and the three of us transferred five of the twenty boxes to the saloon. We shook hands. The saloon car drove off.

  The Dutch and Germans were not ready to receive their hashish. Lang and I had to kill a few days. We drove the Opel from Wiesbaden, along the banks of the Rhine, to a village called Osterich. There we checked into a hotel, curiously named, in English, The White Swan. We wined and dined and broke into one of the boxes. We got stoned.

  The day before the rendezvous with the Dutch, we took a boat down the Rhine to Wiesbaden. Lang wanted to get some English newspapers. While we were crossing one of the city’s main streets, a car came quickly round the corner, shot the red pedestrian light, and almost knocked Lang over. In a moment of understandable anger, Lang hit the back of the car with a rolled-up newspaper. The car screamed to a halt. A huge red-faced German jumped out of the car, ran over to Lang, gave him a tremendous thump across the head sending his glasses splintering on the road, ran back into the car, and drove off. It was all over in seconds. Lang was barely conscious and was blind without his glasses.

  ‘You’ll have to drive tomorrow, mate,’ was all he said.

  The rendezvous with the Dutch was at a remote but accessible clearing in the Black Forest. With fear and apprehension, I drove the hashish-filled Opel into the country’s wooded depths. It took no time to adjust to driving on the other side. We got to the clearing. There was no one there. After twenty minutes, two Volvos arrived. Inside one was Dutch Nik, whom I’d once met at Graham’s. Inside the other was a man who introduced himself as Dutch Peter. We gave them thirteen boxes.

  At an efficient German chemist’s, Lang soon fixed himself up with a pair of new prescription glasses and was able to drive the Opel into Frankfurt for the final drop-off to an unnamed German in the car park of the Intercontinental Hotel. It passed without incident.

  Graham had been supervising matters from his room in the Frankfurter Hof. He had bought a new BMW. He asked if we wanted to keep him company for a few days, after which he would pay us off. Lang wanted to get back to London and was happy to be paid there. I stayed with Graham, who was collecting bags of money. After a couple of days, we hid the money, a mixture of United States dollars and German marks, in the BMW, and drove to Geneva. Graham banked large quantities of German and American cash in his Swiss bank account after first giving me our payment. I asked what happened to the hashish we had distributed and was told that the German would be selling his hashish in Frankfurt, the Californians would buy brand-new European cars and ship them stuffed with hashish to Los Angeles, while Dutch Nik and Dutch Pete would be driving the 650 kilos of hashish they received to England. I asked who would be selling the hashish once it got to England. I presumed Graham would now revert to using David Pollard and James Goldsack. Graham smiled.

  ‘You will be, Howard.’

  ‘But I know that in the past you’ve used Dave Pollard and James. I don’t want to cause problems.’

  ‘Howard, I also used to use Jarvis and the two Charlies. London dealing is musical chairs. Anyway, David Pollard is out of business. You can keep James happy by letting him have some hash to sell at a good price.’

  Jarvis, the two Charlies, and I sold the 650 kilos of hashish and made about £20,000 profit between us. I had made £7,500 in just one week. For the first time ever, I felt rich and gradually began to get used to a lifestyle of fast cars, expensive restaurants, and gadgetry. I bought a brand-new BMW, record and cassette-playing equipment of all descriptions, and a water bed. Rosie suggested we rent a flat in Brighton to use at weekends and other periods when I wasn’t tied up moving hash around London. She still had friends in Brighton and missed the proximity of the sea. We rented a ground-floor flat at 14, Lewes Crescent. One of Rosie’s friends was Patrick Lane, ex-Sussex University English Literature graduate working as an accountant for Price Waterhouse Ltd. Patrick and I got on well with each other. He introduced me to his seventeen-year-old sister Judy. Her smile, her waist-length hair, and her long legs tantalisingly stayed in my mind. It wasn’t long before I invited Patrick to participate with me in Graham’s next proposal.

  Mohammed Durrani had a variety of ways of getting hashish into Europe. The most common was in the personal effects of Pakistani diplomats taking up positions in Pakistani embassies and consular offices throughout Europe. Durrani would arrange with the diplomat to put about a ton of hashish into the diplomat’s personal furniture and belongings before they left Pakistan. A diplomat’s personal effects would be unlikely to be searched on arrival, and he could always claim diplomatic immunity or blame it on the Pakistani shippers if the dope was accidentally discovered. On this occasion, the personal effects had been delivered to the diplomat’s residence in Bonn. Patrick and I had to rifle through the cabin trunks, remove the hashish, and drive it to a disused gravel pit near Cologne, where Dutch Nik, Dutch Pete, and other Dutch would pick it up and smuggle it to England. Everything went without a hitch, and after taking care of sales in London, I’d made another £7,500.

  Graham had made a great deal more and was intent on legitimising his hard-earned money in the form of respectable London businesses. He had met Patrick and liked him. He needed a bent accountant and felt Patrick would be ideal. I could see no disadvantage. Soon Graham and Patrick had established a carpet shop, Hamdullah, and a property company, Zeitgeist, at 3, Warwick Place, Little Venice. They carried appropriate business cards which they flashed at every opportunity.

  My lifestyle went from expensive to outrageously flamboyant. In London, Brighton, Oxford, and Bristol, I would pick up the tab at every bar and restaurant I visited. Any of my friends who wished to merely smoke hashish rather than sell it would be given as much as they wanted free of charge. There are few things that give me more pleasure in life than getting people very stoned and giving them good food and wine, but meanwhile I could see very well the sense of using some of my money to set myself up in the way Graham was doing. It would have to be on a smaller scale, but in principle it could be done.

  Redmond and Belinda O’Hanlon were undergraduate friends of mine at Oxford. Redmond was now at St Anthony’s doing a D.Phil. on Darwin’s effect on nineteenth-century English literature while Belinda was running a small dressmaking business with Anna Woodhead, the Spanish wife of Anthony Woodhead, another Oxford undergraduate friend. Their clientele were largely Oxford University ladies looking for suitable ball dresses. Anna and Belinda were badly under-capitalised. I gave them the impression that I had recently inherited some money. We agreed to go into business together from small, tucked-away premises near Oxford railway station. Using cash, I bought a bunch of sewing-machines and formed a company, AnnaBelinda Ltd. It immediately did well, and we looked for suitable street-front rental premises to open up a boutique. We found them at 6, Gloucester Street, where AnnaBelinda still stands.

  A few more Durrani scams occurred, but they involved significantly smaller amounts. Occasionally I would drive a stashed car across a European border. I’d get a religious flash and an asexual orgasm every time I did. Marty Langford and a couple of other Kenfig Hill school friends, Mike Bell and David Thomas, were also living in London doing boring and menial jobs. I gave each the opportunity of working for me moving and stashing hashish, taking telephone calls, and counting money. Each took it, and I was no longer exposing the London flat to the dangers inherent in street dealing: they were exposing theirs. The four of us were probably London’s only Welsh criminal gang, and were jokingly referred to by our fellow dealers as the Tafia. It was dangerous fun. But I was spending almost as much as I was earning. Thousands of pounds a month were not enough.

  Four

  MR McCARTHY

  Charlie Radcliffe, Graham, and I were smoking joints and counting money in Graham’s Marylands Road flat. We were bemoaning
our poverty. Although we were grateful to Mohammed Durrani’s Pakistani diplomats for smuggling hashish into Europe and giving it to us to sell, we were jealous of the amount of money they were making. We would make about 20% of the selling price in London. The diplomats and Durrani made the rest. We, or the Dutch, had to drive the dope into England and then deliver it to wholesalers in London. It was a risky business, particularly with road blocks now being set up all over the place to catch IRA activists. We were taking all the chances, while the Pakistanis were taking none. There was no chance of getting the hashish for a better price in Europe. The Pakistanis knew full well that there were plenty of buyers more than willing to pay at least as much as we were. We couldn’t beat them down.

  ‘If only we could find our own way of getting hash in,’ said Graham, ‘we would become so rich. Don’t either of you know anyone who works in a key position in an airport or in the docks somewhere?’

  I didn’t.

  ‘I could try Cardiff, Graham,’ I suggested. ‘There are probably some old school friends of mine working in a freight department somewhere. I could go drinking in the pubs where dock and airport workers hang out. I’ll find someone who needs to supplement his income, I’m sure.’

  ‘Good idea,’ complimented Graham, but without much enthusiasm.

  Charlie spoke up. ‘I’ve just met someone who I’m sure will be able to bring in some hash. I interviewed him for Friends. He’s an IRA guy. If he can smuggle in guns, he can smuggle in dope.’

  Friends was an underground magazine. Its editor was a South African named Alan Marcuson. Charlie and his lady, Tina, lived in Alan’s Hampstead flat. Together with Mike Lessor’s International Times and Richard Neville’s Oz, Friends catered for the tastes and beliefs of 1960s drop-outs, dope dealers, rock musicians, acid-heads, and anyone with a social conscience. The underground press was unanimously opposed to the British presence in Northern Ireland. The IRA’s struggle was seen as championing the causes of the world’s downtrodden and poverty-stricken Catholics. How could one not sympathise? There were increasing doubts and worries, of course, about the violent methods used by the IRA, particularly the Provisional IRA, which had recently broken away from the Official IRA to form a terrorist splinter group. There was also discomfort about the IRA’s rather puritanical stance on smoking dope.