Gangsters' Wives (5 page)

I came from a big family – three boys and three girls. We were considered quite well-to-do and lived in a big house in Stafford where my father was the managing director of an electronics company. But I think all us children were quite rebellious, which is where the drugs thing came from. We smoked dope and hung out with people who dealt it, so there was always criminality around, although we didn’t perceive it as such.

We were an unconventional lot and out of all of us children, only my younger sister has stayed out of jail. But the rest of us? I guess we weren’t the most law-abiding of children.

When we moved from Stafford to Brighton the rebelliousness became more exaggerated – a bigger scale of what we were doing in a small town in Stafford. But to us it was normal life. No one was shocked by it. It was the seventies and the era of nonconformist, boundary-pushing youth.

My older brother Patrick became involved in Howard’s ‘activities’ which is how I then went on to meet Howard and Rosie at that dinner party.

Howard was incredibly charming – still is. He was also very good-looking and everyone adored him. When he walked into a room, everyone would stare. He just had bucket-loads of charisma, which he has never really lost, although now that I’m older and wiser I can see through it and see how he uses it to manipulate people.

After that dinner party it was as though everyone was talking about Howard, although it was probably because I was listening out for his name. Then he got busted and everyone was talking about that too. But, as I say, to me what he did wasn’t unusual. I guess the fact that Patrick knew him normalised it slightly.

By the time I got together properly with Howard a couple of years later – the night before my history A level, in fact – I knew all about what he did and I found it interesting. If Howard had been a different kind of criminal, it would have shocked me, but then he wouldn’t have been him.

The whole thing about dope dealing at that time was that everyone involved was just normal. It was just a bunch of overgrown students, really. They were all university graduates, all nice people, who just happened to make their money from dealing dope. They all drove BMWs, the same model, but different colours. Even today I can’t look at a BMW without thinking about a dope dealer. Dope dealing then was very different from how it is now – without all the professional criminal elements.

Years later, when Howard came out of Brixton prison and started hanging around with Dave Courtney types, I hated it. I wouldn’t have them in the house or anything because to me they were a different type of person to the people Howard had ‘worked‘ with in the early days. These were people who do nasty things. Howard and his friends weren’t like that at all.

Even though I was a rebel and took drugs, I’d never really done anything ‘bad’. I never even nicked sweets from Woolies which is probably quite unusual. I didn’t even know that’s what people did. To me there was a big distinction between what Howard and the rest of us were doing and ‘bad’ things other people did. I certainly didn’t think we were criminals.

We had great fun in the early days, even though Howard was on the run when we got together. He had been due to face charges, alongside four others, of conspiring to export hashish into the US and had mysteriously ‘disappeared’ before the trial began. When we got together he was living under a false ID. We were broke a lot of the time during those years. We lived in a tent, for God’s sake. It wasn’t as if he was rolling in money, whatever people might have thought. He was spotted by the
Daily Mirror
in April 1975, and found his photo on the front page under the headline ‘The Face of a Fugitive’ so we had to leave London. We borrowed £500, bought a tent and lived in it for months. Luckily it was a beautiful hot summer that year.

I knew our life wasn’t ‘normal’ but I thought it was fun, and who wanted to be ‘normal’ anyway? I’d always been a bit of a rebel, rejecting the idea of a nine to five existence, and at that age you don’t really think ahead. Or I didn’t think. I didn’t consider the consequences. It just felt like being a little bit naughty, nothing more. All our friends were very respectable and they all thought we were a little bit naughty and found it exciting that they had ‘naughty’ friends. It was just that, nothing more, certainly not organised crime.

I became aware Howard had started getting bigger when the Colombian Operation was proposed at the end of the 1970s. Some Colombians wanted Howard to smuggle fifty tons of Colombian weed into the UK. I thought that was just mad. At that time, fifty tons was a huge amount in England. In the end they brought fifteen tons in through Scotland – still an enormous quantity. I was involved in the conversations in that I was there and I knew what was going on and thought it was crazy, even though it was my own sister who introduced Howard to one of the key players involved, an American who owned a yacht-chartering business based on a small island off the coast of Scotland.

But still I didn’t really worry because they were all such nice people. Everyone we hung out with were nice and respectable. And none of them were going ‘tut tut’, so I reasoned it must all be all right. If I bothered to reason at all.

Howard wouldn’t have anything to do with the hard drugs in those days, nothing to do with cocaine. It wouldn’t have been in Howard’s character as he was at the time. And that just reinforced my view that what we were doing was just a little bit ‘naughty’, not really criminal. Just smuggling a harmless, beneficial substance.

My feelings started to change when I had children. Before then I was just as naughty and unconventional and up for doing anything as Howard was. Then, in 1977, I got pregnant with Amber and thought: hang on. I was living on a false passport then and, even though we were travelling all over the world, flying first class and staying in fantastic hotels, I wanted to go home. I wanted to go back to England, reclaim my real identity and basically not put myself in the firing line any more.

From that point I did try to live a much more low-profile life – well, as much as it’s possible to do while living with the biggest drug dealer in the world, as they called him at the time.

Once I had the kids, what Howard was doing and how he was making a living started to become a worry. I had my second daughter Golly (real name Francesca) while he was in Brixton prison awaiting trial after the law had finally caught up with him, and he promised he wouldn’t do it any more. I wanted so much to believe him and we actually got married on 22 July 1980, while he was in prison. I felt optimistic that things were going to be different, but in the event it didn’t take him long to go back on his word.

After he’d gone on trial and been acquitted – which I felt was so lucky – I was very, very disappointed that Howard then went back to crime. I was really, really upset. I thought it was crazy, given all the publicity his case had generated. We argued a lot about it. It would always be ‘oh, this is the last one’, or ‘don’t worry, I’m just the middle man’. There would always be an excuse: ‘It’s all right because …’

I wanted to believe him. I remember very, very well, being in our old house and looking at him and saying, ‘You’re never going to fucking stop, are you?’ He said, ‘I will …’ but he never did. Until it was too late.

Howard never came right out and told me he’d started up again after his acquittal, but I’m not stupid. I knew enough about the business by that stage. You hear something on the phone and think: I know what you’re talking about.

And I hated it. The reason I objected to it was I didn’t want Howard to be arrested. It was about what it could do to our family. It wasn’t a moral judgement. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with hash smoking or smuggling. I didn’t think he was hurting society in any way.

When he came out of Brixton, Howard set up various legitimate companies. The travel business actually did quite well. Now, of course, I can’t believe he’d ever have made a success of anything because he’s been so useless at seeing things through, but back then I still had my rose-tinted specs on and believed what he was telling me. When the money started coming in, he’d explain it by saying: ‘Oh, we made X in the travel agency business.’ How was I supposed to know if that’s where the money really came from? His parents and sister fell for it. Probably because we all wanted to believe it.

When I finally realised beyond doubt he was back at it, and I couldn’t stop him, I said to him, ‘I don’t want to know the details.’ That was very hard because half the time the other people involved would come up and start talking to me about it. I’d just say, ‘I don’t want to know, I don’t want to know.’ I said, ‘I don’t want to be put in a position where I have to choose between my children and grassing anyone up. Please don’t tell me anything.’

It probably sounds silly, but I don’t think I ever gave him a final ultimatum, despite everything. I’d say ‘please stop it or you’re going to get caught’, but I never said ‘stop it or I’ll leave you’. I loved him too much. Plus I wanted to provide a stable family unit for the girls, who absolutely adored their father.

It really worried me though how much the whole dope dealing scene had changed. When Howard went to Brixton prison for those two years and met all these bank robbers, he thought he was doing them and society a favour by telling them they should become dope dealers and then they wouldn’t have to go round doing armed robberies. He retrained these guys. The next time Howard and I went to Thailand it seemed that half of Brixton prison had joined him there. In a way, one could say that Howard began the trend of having ‘bad guys’ join the dope business in the UK.

In the mid-eighties we moved to a house in Mallorca where we had a very normal lifestyle. In fact the teachers and other parents were really shocked when we were eventually arrested. They really thought Howard just ran a travel business. We weren‘t ostentatious, we didn’t drive flashy cars, or drip with gold. We had a big house but it was in a little Spanish village.

Yes, we used to travel a lot. We used to eat out in nice restaurants. We always used to fly first class and we stayed in the best hotels – but then he was in the travel business, so it wasn’t exactly surprising. And in Mallorca our life was very ordinary. The children never missed school, they were always on time, and I always attended the school parent evenings and meetings.

Howard was away for ten days every couple of months. The rest of the time we were just an ordinary family. All the kids knew was that he had a travel business which is why we travelled so much. By that stage I had three children – Amber, Golly and a new baby, Patrick.

It became increasingly obvious that Howard was going to get caught because we were told by a friend of ours, an American called Tom, that he was being investigated by the US law-enforcement agencies. We still don’t know exactly who Tom was working for. He claimed he was with the CIA and with the DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration] and he showed us documents showing they were following Howard. They were going to make him out to be the biggest dope dealer in the world and then bust him and bust me too, Tom told us.

He told Howard: ‘You’re at the centre of this investigation. This is what they’re doing.’ Then he said: ‘They’re going to arrest Judy as well.’ But Howard just wouldn’t believe it. He said, ‘They can’t do that. She hasn’t done anything.’

He kept this denial up in the face of all the mounting evidence. He just couldn’t admit any chance of being caught. I was with him when Tom came and knocked on our door with all this paperwork and showed it to us both. It completely freaked me. They were very official papers and the amount of information and details they contained was phenomenal. But I still couldn’t get Howard to stop what he was doing. What could I do? Walking out wouldn’t have saved me. The American authorities didn’t have any evidence against me, but they were determined to get me on any pretext. The first piece of paper I saw accused me of racketeering dope since 1970 or something – when I was fifteen!

The truth is that the things I did do, like couriering hundreds of thousands of pounds of cash around for Howard – all happened before the children were born. There were two different stages in our life together: me actively being naughty and me wanting to be straight because of the kids.

In the new film they’ve made about us, they have me travelling on a false passport with Myfanwy (Howard’s daughter from his relationship with Rosie) who, in the film, they’ve made into my daughter. I said, ‘I really object to this because I never travelled on a false passport with the children.’ They said, ‘Well, we’ll cut Myfanwy out altogether then.’ I said, ‘You can’t do that.’ So they left that bit in, but it’s completely inaccurate. Once the kids were born, I kept my head down and toed the line completely, which was why it seemed ludicrous that the Americans might be out to get me.

Tom showed us the documents about Howard and me being investigated about two years before we were actually arrested. After that, whenever we heard from him, my name never came up. It was just Howard who was mentioned. Howard kept thinking that by paying Tom more and more money he could keep them away. I didn’t trust Tom and thought he was just taking the money off Howard. Howard wouldn’t have it. Tom wouldn’t do that to him.

The problem is, Howard is completely narcissistic (although at the time I failed to recognise it). He thought no one would ever grass him up and no one would ever catch him out. He really believed he would never be caught, so even knowing that he was being watched, he still carried on making deals.

He had made friends with the infamous Lord Moyni-han in the Philippines. Even though he was told that Moynihan was secretly working for the DEA, Howard carried on dealing with him. How crazy is that? That’s what I mean about him being an egotist. He simply couldn’t believe he was being set up. Howard even sent Moynihan over to see my brother Patrick in Miami to talk about money laundering. Patrick hadn’t been involved in anything dodgy for years but that’s what led to his arrest and to all of us being arrested because, before that, Craig Lovato – the DEA agent who had made it a personal crusade to hunt Howard down – couldn’t get any state to bring the charges against us. They had to find a crime in a particular state. By Moyni-han being introduced to Patrick, it gave them the evidence they needed to bring charges in a Florida courtroom. I have never been able to understand why Howard put Moynihan in touch with Patrick and never said ‘Oh, by the way he’s working for the DEA’.