Gangsters' Wives (4 page)

Courtney and I stayed in the hospital the whole time he was in the coma. Courtney slept under his bed every night. So I was there when he came round. It was amazing, like watching someone being born again. Dave has these gorgeous blue eyes – he’d woo your mum with those eyes, believe me – and he opened them. He had these red bloodshot whites and those same bright blue eyes. He kept opening them and shutting them.

I was so excited I can’t even describe it. But I think I’d seen one too many Hollywood movies. I said, ‘Babe, you need to communicate, I’m going to write out the alphabet.’ I got a piece of paper and wrote it out in big red letters. Then I said: ‘As I point to the letters just blink at me when to stop.’ But when I’d got an ‘M’ followed by a ‘Z’ I thought: Hmm … there’s something wrong here.

After he regained consciousness, he was on morphine because of the pain and it made him hallucinate. He thought the hospital was prison. One day he rang me up at home saying: ‘Get me my trainers.’ Then one of the men who was visiting him also rang saying, ‘Dave wants his trainers.’ I said, ‘What does he want his trainers for? He can’t walk. He’s got no pelvis, it’s completely shattered. He’s like Bambi. He’s not going anywhere.’ But it was the morphine. The nurse said, ‘Bring the trainers. It’ll shut him up.’

It traumatised me. He was hallucinating and I didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t real. Morphine does that, it’s a mind bender. But no one ever explained that at the beginning.

There was a boy in the hospital, a paraplegic. He’d had a crash in his car and he’d gone through the windscreen and his whole body had twisted. He was in a wheelchair. His dad saw me struggling with what was happening to Dave and said, ‘Listen. It’s the morphine. Me and my wife had to go through this. Our son saw us bursting into flames. We thought he’d been mentally scarred, we thought he had mental problems but it was the morphine.’ That really helped me.

Later that same night, a nurse had moved me away from the bed so she could do something, and I’d fallen asleep. Then I was woken up with a big crash. That was Dave making his great escape from prison. He’d got up, all Bambi-like and crashed to the ground. He had blood all over his face.

I was so happy when Dave came out of the hospital, but it wasn’t plain sailing after that. Far from it.

In 2003, me and Dave had a breakup which lasted more than four years. We had a fight and he fell on me and I got broken. I went to the hospital. Despite all the stuff that was said and written, I was never a battered wife. Never. I’m the first girl out of all those fourteen kids. There were a load of boys before me, so I grew up knowing how to fight. I can stand up for myself.

He didn’t beat me up. We were having a fight and he fell on me and as he’s bigger than me, he hurt me. It’s as simple as that. But to my family it was something else.

I went to the hospital. When I came out of the X-ray room, my mum and dad and my brothers and sisters that could get off work were all there. My dad started crying. My mum said, ‘How do you think I feel, seeing you here?’

Now as far as relationships go, I never run to my family complaining about what someone has done. The way I see it, you spend most of your relationship trying to get your family to love your bloke in the first place. And my family did love Dave, but seeing me in the hospital shook them up.

When I came out and saw their faces, I took the chip out of my phone and threw it away so Dave couldn’t contact me. And that was my mistake really. Having no contact meant his imagination ran wild and I’m still trying to mend things from that.

I went to stay in this caravan for a few days with my sisters and my mum right after the fight and it was all negative, negative, negative. I know they were worried about me, but it was doing my head in. I thought: It’s still Courtney’s dad you’re talking about and I still love him. I know I can’t wipe my bum, I know I’m a bit busted up, but I still love the geezer.

I knew if I went back to London it would be more of the same – all negative, and I couldn’t face it so I rang my mate up in Ashford and he arranged for me and Courtney to go and live up there for a while. But he’s a working man, his wife was working. I come from London and I was dying up there. Courtney would be at school and I’d be stuck there on my own. Fridays I’d go to get her early. The minute she’d get out of school I’d go down to London.

When I’d been in Ashford about four months, I was told Dave was making plans to go to live in America and take Courtney with him. With hindsight, I shouldn’t have believed it unless I heard Dave say that with my own ears. But I did. I was advised that the only way to stop him was for me to formally accuse him of beating me up and I’m sorry to say that’s what I did. I made that accusation of domestic violence because I was afraid of him taking Courtney away. And that’s the only reason. If I could take it back, I would.

As a result, he was nicked. To get off the domestic violence charge, he got loads of people to come in and say this, that and the other in court. It was hurtful stuff and it wasn’t true, but he got off with it.

It put a big wedge between us. Dave knows why I did it now, but at the time it was awful. I went out on a few dates in the time we were apart, but men would always think I wanted to hear how hard they are, and how fantastic. They felt they had to live up to Dave. And I’d think: I don’t want to hear that. You’re not him, so don’t try to be. It was horrible. It was really horrible.

We didn’t see each other at all in that time. He didn’t see Courtney either because he didn’t want to risk her becoming a pawn between the two of us. That was a big thing. I didn’t offer for him to see her, and he didn’t ask.

It changed once we moved back to London. Courtney started doing this drama class with another kid from school, and me and the other mum used to take it in turns to take them. One day the other mum rang me and said, ‘I’m not sure, Jen, but I think Courtney’s dad is two cars behind us. What should I do?’

I didn’t have time to think. I said, ‘She needs her dad to come and put his arms around her and tell her he loves her’, and before I’d even got off the phone I could hear Courtney shouting ‘My dad, my dad’, and going nuts. When the other mum rang back, she said, ‘They’re both sitting there sobbing.’

We’ve been back together eighteen months and I’m so happy. But that doesn’t mean everything has settled down now. The police will never stop trying to pin something on Dave. I think it’s got a lot to do with that bit at the end of
Bermondsey Boy
where he was asked: ‘Did you do it?’ and he smiled at the camera and said: ‘No comment.’ It’s stuck in so many people’s minds.

If anyone comes near us, the Old Bill are on them. My daughter came to visit us the other day and her car got stopped and searched. She’s never been stopped and searched in her life.

The police have the keys to our house in Plumstead now. Dave gave them a set so they wouldn’t have to keep kicking the door down. They haven’t used them. They keep sending letters saying, ‘Can you come and collect your property?’ We’ve also had Dave’s eyes painted onto the roof of the house so that the police can see them from their helicopters and know he’s watching them.

The constant police attention means Dave couldn’t do anything naughty now, even if he wanted to. He’s too well known. But I’m not naive enough to promise he’d never do anything again ever. There’s people out there who have got scars on their bodies through being with Dave and protecting him. If they came knocking on the door and said, ‘Dave, I need help’, I don’t expect Dave to say no. No way I don’t. I’d expect him to go and do what you do as a mate. Because that’s what mates do. What am I going to say – that he shouldn’t have any mates?

People have this misconception that we’re rolling in money. Not a chance. The money is a myth. Sure, Dave has had money in the past, but he isn’t money-driven and it’s all gone. He walks around like royalty with nothing in his pocket. We get occasional big bits of money from Dave’s books or whatever, but because we spend so much time without any, it just goes right away. The trouble is you can’t borrow a fiver when everyone thinks you’re a fucking multimillionaire.

I’m a qualified tiler, and I have a props hire business, although it only just breaks even. When Dave made the film
Hell to Pay
we had to hire guns from an armoury. Because there were loads of extras needed, we got our mates to bring their mates so there’d be loads of people milling around that we didn’t know and after each shoot, there’d be a gun missing. To be honest, it was only to be expected, boys will be boys and criminals will be criminals. But it was embarrassing having to tell the armoury – and expensive having to pay for new ones. So I set up a props company myself – Prop-a-Job. We know lots of people who make films where they need a sword or a gun, or Dave uses them on photoshoots. Problem is that because the directors are usually our friends, and the films are low budget, the business has never exactly been profitable. Contrary to what people believe, we’re not rolling in it. We get some money from my tiling work, or Dave does the odd ‘Audience With’. But that’s it.

But the police even try to stop that. I know what they think, that it’s glamorising crime, but I’m sorry, people want to know about that stuff. Dave will be booked to do ‘An Audience With …, in a club or a pub and the pub owners will get a call saying ‘cancel that show or you won’t even get a TV licence, much less a drinks licence’. And then Dave gets a call from the pub to say the Old Bill have said they can’t put on the show.

So we stay home – Camelot Castle in Plumstead. It’s a great house. The sex dungeon in the garden was built before the kitchen – get the priorities right. The dungeon is part of our lives. We use it regularly. When Dave turned fifty In 2009, we had an all-night party in there with us and four other people. It was wicked.

The swinging is just fun. I used to think it would improve trust between us, but now I don’t think that any more. Now it’s just something we do for a laugh, I don’t think about it any deeper than that. We don’t have an open relationship though. We swing together.

The house is very tongue in cheek. The living room is decorated with guns and weapons, but it’s not supposed to be serious. Above the fireplace in the living room there’s a painting of Dave with angel wings and a knuckleduster. The painting has got Dave’s DNA in. The bloke cut Dave and mixed the blood with the pigment for the paint so that the painting can never be copied. It’s got real gold on it and diamonds, flawed diamonds.

Everything about Dave is over the top. Everything is larger than life. I’m the one who has to be boring and sensible sometimes and take things seriously, but I don’t mind that. I can deal with it. I just get on with it quietly and leave him to his thing.

He wears the trousers in our house, but I tell him which ones to wear.

Update: Since our interview, Dave has yet again been back in prison, this time facing a charge relating to possession of firearms
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Judy Marks spent nearly three decades in the shadow of her charismatic husband, Oxford-educated international drug smuggler Howard Marks. At one point Marks was so successful he was estimated to be trafficking a tenth of all the marijuana smoked in the world. He and Judy travelled the world in style on false passports, living under different aliases and sometimes on the run, until the birth of the first of their three children led her to seek out a more settled existence. While Judy tried to keep the family on the straight and narrow, Howard carried on his smuggling activities, despite being warned that he was under constant surveillance. The result was that, in 1988, he and his wife were arrested at their Mallorcan home. Howard spent seven years in prison in Spain and the States, Judy eighteen months, separated from her children, who suffered terribly
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Two decades on, and now divorced from Howard, all traces of the jet-set life Judy once lived as the wife of Mr Nice (Howard’s favourite alias) have vanished. The car she
picks me up in on a Palma street corner has seen better days. Inside, its ashtray overflows with cigarette butts. The views from her top-floor apartment are staggering, but the furnishings are more about shabby chic than interior design, more about comfort rather than fashion
.

Judy herself is hospitable and sharply funny, but visibly nervous, and constantly questions whether what she has said makes her sound too embittered, too angry. With Howard now a fixture on the UK celebrity-speaker circuit, and a film about to come out about their lives together, it’s clear Judy feels that she was in a sense sacrificed for Howard’s new-found fame; yet, fiercely protective of her children, she worries about maligning the father they still adore. It’s a delicate balancing act
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Sometimes nowadays I find myself thinking: I wish I’d never met Howard Marks. That shocks me, because I never used to think like that. But these days I find myself thinking it more and more. Because even though we were together for the best part of three decades and I loved Howard unconditionally, there are some incidents you just can’t forgive. And more that you can’t forget.

If you’d have told me I’d ever feel this way when we first got together in the early 1970s, or even when he returned home from jail in 1995, I’d have thought you were mad. I was so besotted by him.

And inevitably the thought then strikes me that I wouldn’t have my beautiful, wonderful children if I hadn’t met him. And we did have an amazing connection, which many people spend a lifetime seeking. We were soulmates.

I’d first met him at a dinner party in Brighton in 1970 when I was just sixteen and he was ten years older. I was terribly attracted to him but he was with Rosie, his girlfriend at the time, so I didn’t think anything could happen, particularly after I’d got stoned and passed out. Seriously uncool. Strangely, Rosie told him after this dinner party that he would end up with me. He thought she was completely crazy.

At first I didn’t know what he did for a living but afterwards I heard through the grapevine that he was a drug dealer. It didn’t bother me though. I wasn’t particularly shocked by what he did. I’d been dabbling in the drugs scene since I was thirteen or fourteen so it all seemed fairly normal.