Mr Nice: an autobiography (4 page)

‘Yes, Howard, your passport has been sent. Your parents, who send you all their love, paid for your open ticket, and that’s also been sent.’

I finally found an Immigration Liaison Officer.

‘Yes, we’ve received your passport and ticket, but they’ve been mislaid. Don’t worry. We’re all on the case. We’ll find them.’

Apparently everyone’s ticket and passport got mislaid at some stage. We just had to wait patiently. There was nothing we could do.

A Walkman was permitted. I bought one and spent every day walking twenty miles around the jogging track listening to the oldies’ station. During my years inside, my daughter Francesca, now fourteen, had regularly written to me of her fondness for my record collection. Little Richard, Elvis Presley, Waylon Jennings, and Jimi Hendrix were among her favourites. Soon we could listen to them together, and she could educate me on the new music I’d missed. I became sun-tanned, nostalgic, and bored. Three days before my supposed release date of March 25th, I was pacing the track listening to a New Orleans disc jockey raving about the latest and greatest British band, the Super Furry Animals. They were from the Welsh valleys. I was listening to them calling me home when the prison loudspeaker cracked.

‘Marks, 41526-004, report to the Immigration Office.’

‘We’ve got your passport and your ticket,’ said the Immigration Officer. ‘Everything’s ready for you to leave. We can’t tell you precisely when, of course, in case you initiate plans to prevent it. But it’ll be soon.’

My release date came and went, and a week or so passed by. ‘Lovato’s doing it,’ I thought. ‘He’s persuading his buddies in the DEA to stop me leaving.’

On Thursday, April 7th, Komo, a Thai who’d been fighting deportation for seven years and who’d not been outside of a prison for seventeen years, came running towards me.

‘British, British, you’re on the list. Leaving tonight. About 1 a.m. Please leave me Walkman.’

Komo’s prison job was cleaning and tidying the offices of
the administrative staff, so he had access to confidential information. He also had about twenty Walkmans, which he would attempt to sell to new arrivals. Every long-term prisoner has to have a solid hustle. But it was such good news that I immediately handed over my Walkman.

‘Good luck, Komo. Maybe see you in Bangkok one day.’

‘Me never go Bangkok, British. They kill me there. Me American. Stay here.’

‘They’ll kill you here, too, Komo,’ I said, ‘but much slower and more painfully.’

‘Slow is okay, British, and very slow is very good.’

I couldn’t risk telephoning anyone with the news. It might not be true, and besides, the phones were tapped. If the authorities discovered that I was leaving, they just might change my travel plans.

There were eight others leaving that night: an Americanised Nigerian of British nationality and seven South Americans.

‘Is this all your property, Marks?’

I had approximately one hundred dollars, a pair of shorts, nail-clippers, comb, toothbrush, alarm clock, papers confirming my ‘release’ date of two weeks ago, a credit card I could use in prison vending-machines, and five books, including one written about me,
Hunting Marco Polo
.

‘Yes, that’s it.’

I put the money in my pocket. It felt strange. First time for over six years. How often was I going to be thinking that? First time for over six years. Money, sex, wine, a joint of marijuana, a bath, an Indian curry. All around the corner.

My other belongings were put into a cardboard box. I was given a pair of blue jeans with legs about a foot too long and an extremely tight white tee-shirt. This was called being ‘dressed out’, a gift from the United States Government for those re-entering the free world.

We were handcuffed, but not chained, and squeezed into
a small van. Then we picked up two other guys from another prison exit. One seemed Hispanic, the other seemed northern European. Everyone was silent, excited by his own thoughts. The van’s engine made a terrible racket as it headed towards Houston and the dawn, just beginning to break. By nine o’clock, it was like sitting on a rock in a sardine can on fire. By ten o’clock, we were sitting in an enormous holding cell at Houston International Airport, along with over fifty other criminal aliens.

The northern European asked the Nigerian, ‘Where do you live?’ His accent was strong South Welsh. I had never met a Welshman in an American prison, nor heard of one. I’d met very few Americans who’d heard of Wales.

‘Are you Welsh?’ I interrupted.

‘Aye,’ he said, looking at me with deep suspicion.

‘So am I.’

‘Oh yeah!’ Deeper suspicion.

‘Which part are ’ew from?’ I asked, laying on the accent a bit.

‘Swansea,’ he said, ‘and ’ew?’

‘Twenty-five miles away from ’ew in Kenfig Hill,’ I answered.

He started laughing.

‘You’re not him, are you? God Almighty! Jesus wept! Howard bloody Marks. Marco fucking Polo. They’re letting you go, are they? That’s bloody great. Good to meet you, boy. I’m Scoogsie.’

We had a chat, a long one. Scoogsie explained how he, too, had just finished a drug sentence, and he told me of his early days in the business.

‘My wife has worked for a long time in a drug rehabilitation centre in Swansea. Not a bad partnership, really. I get them hooked; she gets them off. We keep each other going, like.’

Memories of South Welsh humour had often helped me through the bad times in prison. Now I was hearing it for
real. I was heading back towards my roots, and they were reaching out for me.

Looking confused, the Nigerian belatedly replied to Scoogsie’s original question.

‘I live in London. I am being deported there. I am never coming back here. They took away my money, my property, and my business. Just because someone I didn’t know swore in court that I sold him some drugs.’

An all too familiar story.

The number of deportees in the converted aeroplane hangar was dwindling. ‘Anyone else going to London?’ Scoogsie asked.

No one.

Soon, there were just the three of us left. We’d found out that the Continental Airlines flight to London should be leaving in an hour. An Immigration Officer came in holding a gun.

‘This way, you three.’

A small van took us to the gangway. With his gun, the Immigration Officer indicated we should climb the steps. The Nigerian led the way. Scoogsie followed and spat dramatically on American soil.

‘None of that!’ ordered the immigration man, waving the gun.

‘Don’t mess it up now, Scoogsie. You know what they’re like.’

‘I know what the fuckers are like, all right,’ said Scoogsie. ‘I hate them. I wouldn’t piss in their mouths if their throats were on fire. I’m never going to eat another McDonalds. No more cornflakes for breakfast. And pity help any Yank who asks me the way anywhere. Let anyone dare try to pay me in dollars. God help him.’

‘Take it easy, Scoogsie. Let’s get on board.’

Walking into the aeroplane was like entering the starship
Enterprise
. Passengers with spacey haircuts and clown clothes took out computers of all shapes and sizes. Had
things really changed that much, or had I forgotten what it was like? Lights flickered on and off. Glamorous and smiling women, the like of whom had existed only as photos on a prison cell wall, walked the aisles. One actually talked to me.

‘Mr Marks, your seat number is 34H. It’s in the aisle. We shall hold your passport until London. Then we’ll give it to the British authorities.’

I didn’t like the sound of that, but I was too mesmerised to pay much attention. Scoogsie and the Nigerian were placed out of sight. I sat down, gloated over magazines and newspapers and played with knobs adjusting seat position and volume of canned entertainment, like a child on his first flight. I had flown on commercial airlines thousands of times before, but I remembered none of them. Take-off was magic. I saw Texas disappearing. Then, all of America vanished. There is a God.

‘Would you like a cocktail before your meal, Mr Marks?’

I had drunk no alcohol and smoked nothing for three years. I was proud of my self-discipline. Perhaps I should carry on as a teetotaller.

‘Just an orange juice, please.’

A tray of food was placed in front of me. In the old days, I would rarely eat while flying: apart from the caviare and foie gras given to first-class passengers on long-haul flights, it was all fairly disgusting and well below the cordon bleu standard to which I had become accustomed. Prison fare had cured me of that bit of pompous pseudery. This meal was the best I could remember, and I loved fiddling around with the little packets of condiments. There was a very small bottle of red wine on the tray. Surely, I could drink that. It was exquisite. I ordered six more.

I began worrying about the remark made by the air hostess. Which British authorities? There were so many I’d upset and so much they could still do me for. While I was spending the last six years in prison, the British authorities had obtained evidence that I had been involved in countless
other marijuana and hashish importations to England, ones that I hadn’t been charged with. They’d also found more of my false passports. There are no statutes of limitation in British law. They could bust me if they wanted to.

Two books had been written about me, each making it clear that I was an incorrigible rogue with nothing but contempt for the forces of law enforcement. Fourteen weeks earlier, at the end of a high-profile, colourful, nine-week trial, I had been acquitted of being the ringleader for the largest-ever importation of marijuana into Europe – fifteen tons of Colombia’s best. The charges had been brought by Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise. It had been their biggest-ever bust. They would never forget me.

A chief inspector of police had committed suicide after being blamed for leaking my involvement with the British Secret Service to the press. Scotland Yard had lost a good man because of me. There wouldn’t be many friends there.

MI6 weren’t too happy with me either, smuggling dope with the IRA when I was supposed to be spying on them.

Ten years ago, after assessing me as having earned two million pounds from cannabis smuggling, the Inland Revenue reluctantly settled for a total tax liability of sixty thousand pounds. As a result of public proclamations by the most senior of DEA staff, it was now accepted as a matter of fact that I had well over two hundred million pounds in Eastern bloc bank accounts. The tax man would want some, no doubt.

Even if the British felt I had been punished enough, Special Agent Craig Lovato was bully enough to change their minds. During the mid-1980s, he’d almost single-handedly mobilised the law enforcement agencies of fourteen different countries (United States, Great Britain, Spain, Philippines, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, Pakistan, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, Switzerland, Austria, and Australia) to band together in unprecedented international co-operation to get me locked up forever. He
would be bound to take my premature release as a personal failure and suffer extreme loss of face. He’d get the British to arrest me on arrival. He’d get tough with them and promise them helicopter rides, computers, and days shopping in Miami malls. What was waiting for me at London’s Gatwick airport?

A large-scale map appeared on the screen and indicated we were descending over the Welsh mountains. Kenfig Hill seemed a long time ago.

My earliest memory is of throwing a cat into the deep ocean from the deck of a ship. Why did I do it? I swear that I expected the cat to go for a swim, catch fish, and return triumphantly. So, I didn’t know any better and mustn’t blame myself. But maybe consigning Felix to a watery grave was symptomatic of a character far from nice. If it’s any comfort to cat lovers, the image still haunts me. Whenever my life flashes before me, which happens not only when I’m about to die, that cat’s face is the first I see.

We were on the Indian Ocean. The ship was the
Bradburn
, a 10,000-ton freighter owned by Reardon Smith and Co., Cardiff. The cat belonged to the Prince of Siam, and was the darling of the rough-and-ready ship’s crew. My father, Dennis Marks, son of a boxer/coal miner and a midwife, was the skipper of the
Bradburn
, and he was coming to the end of his twenty-one years’ service in the British merchant navy. He had been allowed to take my mother, Edna, schoolteaching daughter of an opera singer and a coal miner, and me on various lengthy sea journeys. Between 1948 and 1950, I went everywhere. I remember very little, just the cat. Perhaps the reason this cat is indelibly imprinted on my psyche is that
when my murderous actions were discovered my father was constrained to give me a spanking in front of the crew, who were seething with hate and developing murderous intentions of their own. He has never hit me since.