“I found cannabis smuggling more addictive than any other activity I’d ever done.”
In memoriam: Howard Marks (1945–2016) was a Welsh author and convicted cannabis smuggler, known as Mr Nice, who after his release from a US prison became a bestselling writer, live performer and campaigner for cannabis legalisation; London Real remembers him.
In short: Howard Marks, born in Kenfig Hill in South Wales and educated at Balliol College, Oxford, became one of the best known cannabis smugglers of the 1970s and 80s before his arrest in 1988 and a 25 year US sentence, of which he served about seven. In this March 2013 conversation in the London Real studio, with co-host James ‘The Colossus’ Thompson, Howard told Brian Rose about his first border runs, the real Mr Nice, his dealings with Jim McCann and the Mafia, his MI6 defence, life in the federal penitentiary at Terre Haute, drug policy, crime fiction and his stage shows.
Key takeaways
- He treated smuggling as a game. Howard said he did it for the money and the thrill, and regarded his conviction as losing a game he had chosen to play, not as a tragedy.
- Ignorance of American law cost him. He admitted he never studied US conspiracy and racketeering laws, a mistake that also led to the arrest of his then wife.
- Only cannabis, by choice. He never moved into cocaine, citing unmet demand for cannabis, doubts about cocaine’s safety and his dislike of cutting a product with impurities.
- Prison changed him. Teaching inmates to read and helping with their appeals gave him what he called a spiritual energy, and he said he left a better person than he went in.
- Prohibition, not drugs, did the harm. Drawing on Professor David Nutt’s work, he argued most drug deaths were caused by prohibition and that drugs would be safer legalised and controlled.
- The stage replaced the border. He said the half hour before a live show gave him the same smell of adrenaline he used to feel approaching customs.
Mr Nice and the appeal of the outlaw
Brian Rose first read Mr Nice soon after moving to London in 1997, and opened by asking why the book had struck such a chord. Howard said he had written it after leaving prison, in his early fifties, for readers of his own generation, and was surprised that it was young people who bought it. He had been in prison in the US while cannabis smoking spread far beyond the middle class academics he had known at Oxford.
He rejected the Robin Hood label, since he never robbed the rich, and compared himself instead to Hereward the Wake, the medieval figure he described as the first person called an outlaw. He was candid that he did it for the money, that he found smuggling more addictive than anything else he had done, and that he never felt it was morally wrong.
Borders, passports and the real Mr Nice
Howard described driving cars loaded with hash across several European borders in a single run, and the fear followed by a rush of relief at each crossing. He said the best disguise in the 1960s could be looking like a scruffy hippy, and that in the mid 1980s he travelled in Pakistan to check the quality of hash bought by Californian partners.
He told Brian he had used at least 43 identities. The name that became the book’s title came from Donald Nice, a man convicted of murder who had served his sentence and had no wish to travel abroad, and who let Howard use his identity. Howard argued that law enforcement exaggerated the size of his operation, which he described as loosely knit people coming together for individual deals rather than a cartel.
MI6, the IRA and the Old Bailey
Howard said he was recruited by MI6 through an Oxford friend, and that the security services were interested in his contact with Jim McCann, who claimed to be an IRA officer and whom the IRA disowned. In the political climate of the early 1970s, Howard said, he saw no ethical problem in using an arms smuggler’s routes to move cannabis instead.
When a consignment was seized, both McCann and Howard were acquitted using versions of the same defence, that each had been working against the other’s side. Howard was acquitted at the Old Bailey in 1981, after MI6 conceded he had worked for it, and he said he took the verdict as a sign to carry on smuggling. These are Howard’s own accounts, as told in this conversation and in his book.
Terre Haute and what prison taught him
Howard was arrested in 1988 and pleaded guilty in the US, receiving 25 years. He described the federal penitentiary at Terre Haute, Indiana, where he was scared at first but found a role teaching English, writing letters for fellow prisoners and working as a jailhouse lawyer. He said refusing to give evidence against others counted for a great deal inside, and that he decided against cooperating because he could not have faced his children afterwards.
He was paroled in 1995, which he said astonished him, and believed parole depended more on politics than on behaviour. He told Brian he came out a better person: less self important, more accepting of what he could not control, and newly aware of the value of helping others, which led him into campaigning for cannabis legalisation.
Drug policy and the Mafia
Howard argued that any recreational drug so far discovered would be safer legalised and controlled than left to criminals, though he singled out heroin as dangerous because the effective dose is close to a fatal one. He described decriminalisation without legal supply as irrational, and praised the work of Professor David Nutt, the government drugs adviser who was dismissed after comparing the risks of ecstasy and horse riding.
He also explained how he had worked with members of the Gambino family at Kennedy Airport, who kept a quarter of each consignment as their cut. He said he found them honourable to deal with, and that he was more useful to them alive than dead.
Writing, the stage and the Mr Nice film
In 2013 Howard was writing crime fiction about a female detective, with his second novel, The Score, about to be published. He said he wrote a thousand words on designated writing days, and that cannabis helped the tangential thinking he enjoyed. He also performed at least 50 shows a year, which had grown out of book readings into multimedia and stand up performances.
He talked about being barred from the US and refused entry to Australia, taking ecstasy with his children after his release, and his friendship with Rhys Ifans, who had asked to play him on film long before either was famous and did so in Mr Nice in 2010. The conversation ended with Brian and James thanking Howard for his frankness.
Frequently asked questions
Howard Marks was a Welsh author and former cannabis smuggler, born in Kenfig Hill in 1945 and educated at Balliol College, Oxford. He became one of the best known cannabis smugglers of the 1970s and 80s, was sentenced in the US to 25 years in prison, served about seven, and later became a bestselling author with his memoir Mr Nice, a live performer and a campaigner for cannabis legalisation.
Howard Marks appeared on London Real in an episode published in March 2013, recorded in the London Real studio with Brian Rose and co-host James ‘The Colossus’ Thompson.
Howard Marks died on 10 April 2016, aged 70.
One of his many false identities belonged to Donald Nice, a man who had served a sentence for murder and had no intention of travelling abroad, and who agreed to let Howard use his name. Howard said he enjoyed checking into hotels as Mr Nice, and it became the title of his autobiography.
He was sentenced to 25 years in the US after his 1988 arrest, had the sentence reduced to 20 years on a post conviction motion, and was paroled in 1995 after about seven years, most of it in the federal penitentiary at Terre Haute, Indiana.
Howard said he was recruited by MI6 through an Oxford friend in the early 1970s. He used the claim in his defence at the Old Bailey in 1981, where he was acquitted. The account in this interview is his own.
He told Brian Rose that demand for cannabis was never satisfied, that he believed cannabis was harmless while he was not convinced about cocaine, and that he did not want to be part of a trade that made its profit by cutting the product with impurities.
Rhys Ifans played him in the 2010 film. Howard said the two met soon after his release from prison, when Ifans was singing with the Super Furry Animals, and agreed then that Ifans would play him if the book was ever filmed.
Besides his 1996 memoir Mr Nice, he wrote further non fiction including Senor Nice and The Howard Marks Book of Dope Stories, and crime novels featuring a female detective, beginning with Sympathy for the Devil in 2011 and The Score in 2013.
Full transcript
Read the full transcript of Brian Rose’s interview with Howard Marks
00:00:00 Brian Rose introduces Howard Marks
Howard Marks: This is Howard Marks, and you’re listening to London Real.
Brian Rose: Hi, it’s Brian Rose from London Real. We’ve just finished with Howard Marks in the studio. He is the legendary cannabis smuggler who at one point was shipping 30 tons at a time. He was dealing with the IRA, he was a member of MI6, he was doing business with the Mafia and the Yakuza, and he was being chased by the CIA and the DEA. This man has legend written all over him, and my studio still smells like weed. He is the real deal. We spoke to him for almost two hours, and it was an awesome pleasure. He is a humble man, a highly intelligent man. He went from a small Welsh mining town to Oxford, and then he started his career smuggling, and he always thought of it as doing good, because he still sees no problem with cannabis, and that’s the only drug he smuggled. So he’s a fascinating guy with a really fascinating story. I really hope you enjoy Howard and the next couple of hours. It was a really special moment, and one of my top five London Reals to date, by far.
Brian Rose: I hope you caught Maggie Stiefvater, the author we had on the last episode. She’s sold almost two million books and has been on the New York Times bestseller list for a long time. She’s a cool girl, she had a lot of American sass, and she was a lot of fun. I think we’re going to see her books become movies, in a kind of Twilight way, in the next couple of years, so keep an eye out for her. I always love seeing new talent on the show that I know is going to go places, so someday you can look back and say, I saw them first on London Real. That kind of stuff just gets me pumped up.
00:02:02 Alpha Brain and Audible sponsor reads
[London Real promo removed]
00:03:49 London Real news and welcome
Brian Rose: That’s it. If you want to come and join the party, we’re on Twitter, and we’ve got a Facebook group called London Realers. If you want to become one of the interns, send me an email. We had a big night out with the interns last week, and I’ll be posting some pictures. There were about eight of us, tequila was drunk, and it got a little crazy, so it’s a lot of fun. Some really cool people, and you learn a lot of stuff. I’m off to LA next week, where I’ll hopefully be taping shows with the host of The Drunken Taoist podcast, a very cool dude, a philosophical fighter is what I’d call him. Then I plan on seeing Mr Bryan Callen, who I’m sure you’ve heard on the Rogan show. He also has his own podcast, which is very good, especially the shows when he has his dad on, which remind me of my dad. Otherwise I’m going to try to take a break and get some sun so I’m not so pale. Then we’ll be back in the UK. But for now, I give you Mr Howard Marks.
Brian Rose: Okay, all right guys, here we go. This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. With me today is Mr James ‘The Colossus’ Thompson, a heavyweight mixed martial arts fighter who has appeared in Cage Rage, EliteXC and the Pride Fighting Championships, and who is definitely not Mr Nice in the cage.
James Thompson: I like what you did there, Brian.
Brian Rose: I’ve been working on that for a while. And our guest today is Mr Howard Marks, a Welsh author and former international cannabis smuggler who moved consignments as large as 30 tons, avoided the grasp of international law enforcement for two decades, and was connected with groups such as the CIA, the IRA, MI6, the Mafia, maybe the Yakuza.
Howard Marks: Yes.
Brian Rose: You were eventually brought down by the DEA in 1988 and handed a 25 year sentence in a federal penitentiary, but you were released in April 1995 after serving only seven years.
Howard Marks: That’s absolutely correct, Brian.
Brian Rose: Howard, welcome to the show.
Howard Marks: Thanks very much.
Brian Rose: It’s a real pleasure having you.
Howard Marks: It’s good to be here.
Brian Rose: I think in some ways you’re the quintessential London Real guest.
Howard Marks: Thank you. I don’t know exactly what that means.
Brian Rose: No, I was wondering myself. It’s a good thing.
Howard Marks: It sounds good.
Brian Rose: It’s a compliment, definitely.
00:06:49 Mr Nice and why we love a rebel
Brian Rose: You know, Howard, I moved to Britain in 1997 as an American, and I went to work in the City in finance. One of my first introductions to British culture was reading your book, Mr Nice, and I just assumed that everyone was like you.
Howard Marks: Of course. You must have been very relieved to find that soon changed.
Brian Rose: It was such a wonderfully written book. I don’t know what it was, a lack of ego or your storytelling, but it really hit home for me, and I loved it so much. I was wondering if you could tell us about the book, and also why you think that as a society we love the rebel, the Robin Hood type, the John Dillingers or the Howard Marks, who seem to be flouting the law with some kind of higher purpose or greater good?
Howard Marks: Yes. I think its success was largely due to my having entirely the wrong target audience in mind when I wrote it. I wrote it for fellow geriatrics, really, to give them a sense of nostalgia, or to try to inject some glamour into their lives. None of those bought it at all, but the kids did. So when you mention the lack of ego, that was really just due to thinking I was writing for another group of people.
Brian Rose: So how old were you when you wrote that book?
Howard Marks: I wrote it after I came out of prison.
Brian Rose: So that was your early fifties.
Howard Marks: Yes, early fifties.
Brian Rose: And you thought it was just kind of an ode to the good life of the past?
Howard Marks: Yes, I did. I never thought it would be picked up by the younger generation, which it was.
Brian Rose: And you became kind of a folk hero, a symbol of a new generation.
Howard Marks: Something like that, yes. I think its success was largely due to the amount of cannabis smoking that was going on here, which I didn’t know about, really, having been banged up in prison in the States. I had no idea how popular it was, because in my early days cannabis smoking was pretty much the privilege of middle class academics in universities. The policeman wasn’t smoking it, the plumber wasn’t smoking it, but when I came out of prison everyone seemed to be smoking it.
00:08:57 Cannabis then and now, and legalisation
Brian Rose: Can you explain that? Because these days, especially with medical marijuana in California and in America, everyone seems to be smoking. You were introduced to it at Oxford, is that right?
Howard Marks: Yes, that’s right. As I say, it was deemed some kind of intellectual, academic experiment, and of course everything was imported then, rather than grown in the backyard or in various clandestine places. That’s changed a lot, but I wasn’t aware of that change.
James Thompson: Because, like you say, importing it, there’s so much to that, as you would know, whereas getting a room and setting it up yourself, with the cost, it just seems easier. Is that what usually happens now?
Howard Marks: Yes. Roughly half of the cannabis consumed in Britain is grown in Britain, which of course makes it very difficult for the authorities to legalise it. If it was all imported, they could slap an importation tax or some sort of tax on it. Now it’s going to be very difficult. People don’t pay tax on growing cabbages.
James Thompson: It’s almost like distilleries, isn’t it?
Howard Marks: That’s right, it’s exactly the same. It’s like a post prohibition thing in the States.
Brian Rose: You’ve mentioned that all along, even when you were dealing and smuggling in the 60s and 70s, you assumed it would be legalised at some point.
Howard Marks: Yes, and I’m still in that frame of mind, that it’s just about to be legalised. I’ve felt that for 50 years now, so by inductive logic I’m obviously not worth listening to. But I still feel that optimistic.
Brian Rose: Do you see progress in the States? We just had Colorado and Washington legalise it for non medical uses. There’s still the overshadow of the federal government and what they’re going to do, but is that progress in your mind?
Howard Marks: Oh yes, very much so, and from the most unlikely place. I thought America would be the last country to pioneer decriminalisation or legalisation, particularly for recreational purposes. Medical marijuana, you can see that’s bound to get through sometime, because if there’s something around that can cure you, doctors are almost ethically bound to try and make it legal.
Brian Rose: And you thought the States would be the last place because it has such a Puritan streak. You were caught up in the Reagan era of Just Say No. You could even argue that your arrest and conviction were based on a gung ho president and the War on Drugs.
Howard Marks: Yes. They didn’t have to think about whether or not to arrest me and charge me. I was an obvious candidate for that.
Brian Rose: So in a way it was more of a political decision than a legal decision.
Howard Marks: Yes.
Brian Rose: Did you ever consider yourself a political prisoner when you were in the federal penitentiary?
Howard Marks: No. I did it for the money. I can’t pretend I was doing it for any other reason.
00:12:11 Losing the game: American law and technology
Howard Marks: I was foolish enough not to have studied American law, so I didn’t know whether I was breaking it or not, because there are so many all embracing laws in America, like racketeering or continuing criminal enterprise, which we’re not familiar with over here. I did know I could make a lot of money by doing it, so I just regard myself as having lost at the game I decided to play. I don’t think it’s a case for sympathy or tragedy at all.
Brian Rose: If you’d had more legal insight, would you have done things differently in America?
Howard Marks: Yes.
Brian Rose: And then you probably would have continued longer, maybe never got caught. What would you have done differently?
Howard Marks: Well, for example, my ex wife was arrested.
James Thompson: You start with your ex.
Howard Marks: Well, she was arrested as well, purely because she answered the phone at home. A couple of people would ring up, and she’d say, he’s in Hong Kong for a week or something. By American law, that’s furthering the conspiracy.
Brian Rose: Because she told them where you were?
Howard Marks: Because she was aware that she was assisting someone who could reasonably be expected to be a dope dealer to find her husband, who was a dope dealer. So she got arrested and extradited for those sorts of reasons. Obviously I would have set things up so she would never have had to answer the phone. There’s a list of things like that. It wouldn’t have taken long to read a bit of American law. It was just very stupid.
Brian Rose: You were always one step ahead of the authorities, and I think you’ve said that you even had better technology than the authorities at that time.
Howard Marks: We did. That’s the big difference, I think, between then and now. In those days we had more money to spend than the authorities did. We had faster cars, better communication devices, faster boats. Now the gap in technology between law enforcement and those breaking the law is massive, absolutely massive, particularly when you think of mobiles and computers and the data collection they have. So it would necessarily be a very, very different business now. It probably requires the same sort of characters to do it, but definitely a shifting goalpost.
Brian Rose: Did you have a whole legal team and an accounting team, people you kept close who would advise you what to do and not to do, or was it all in your head?
Howard Marks: It wasn’t that sort of set up at all. I did have an accountant, a conventional firm, but I was careful to ensure that only legitimate money, or apparently legitimate money, would be handled by them.
00:15:10 The addiction of smuggling and Hereward the Wake
Brian Rose: And you had your legitimate phases. You ran a wine importation business out of Palma.
Howard Marks: Yes, I did. I ran lots of things, everything from massage parlours in Bangkok to bars in Spain. They all lost money, but that was my way of paying taxes.
Brian Rose: When you did that legitimate stint in Palma, what brought you back in? Was it the juice, the adrenaline, the fun?
Howard Marks: Yes, all that. I found cannabis smuggling more addictive than any other activity I’d ever done.
Brian Rose: You’ve described it as a game.
Howard Marks: It is a game, yes.
Brian Rose: Obviously there’s the money and everything, but there’s getting one over on them, and especially with cannabis, you’re not harming people. You felt you were actually doing a benefit.
Howard Marks: Yes. I never lost any sleep at night thinking I was doing something morally wrong. I have always felt that the law against cannabis use is rather sinister and evil, so I felt, in some naive, idealistic way, that I was actually doing good.
Brian Rose: Did that keep you going in the hard times? I am doing the better thing, I am Robin Hood?
Howard Marks: Not Robin Hood, because I never robbed the rich.
Brian Rose: Fair enough. So who would you equate yourself with in those hard times, when you thought, I’m doing a greater good here?
Howard Marks: No one’s ever asked me this before. The first person ever to be called an outlaw was a British outlaw called Hereward the Wake, and Hereward is obviously the same name as Howard, really. And the idea of waking people up is part of it. So I’d say more like Hereward the Wake than Robin Hood.
Brian Rose: And what was Hereward known for?
Howard Marks: For being an outlaw, but not exactly breaking the law, more like a dropout, living outside the law, which is what the word really means. I won’t take anything from you, but don’t expect anything from me. Not being encompassed by the system.
Brian Rose: A dropout, really.
Howard Marks: Very close to it.
00:17:40 From Oxford to dope dealer, crossing borders
Brian Rose: I was watching your movie the other night, and I know it’s a movie and it’s not exactly your life, but it portrays you graduating from Oxford with a nuclear physics degree.
Howard Marks: Yes.
Brian Rose: And it seemed like you tried to go straight. You stopped smoking cannabis, you moved to London, you started teaching. So something in your mind must have said, okay, now it’s time to get serious, Howard.
Howard Marks: Yes. I had a conventional career in mind, which was to be an academic, a lecturer or a teacher or a research fellow or something like that, and I was reluctant to let that go. But at the same time my involvement, and the amount of time I was spending on cannabis dealing or cannabis smuggling, was increasing. It was so gradual there wasn’t one moment, but certainly by the time I was 25, looking back, I had abandoned the halls of academia, if you like, and become a dope dealer.
Brian Rose: The movie shows that first deal. Rhys Ifans portrayed you, and we all know he’s a badass actor, and it was fantastic watching him being you. I think you drove a car from Germany or Switzerland, loaded with hash, all the way to the UK. Kids these days forget that there used to be all these individual borders.
Howard Marks: That’s right.
Brian Rose: So you have a potential adrenaline rush, a frightening moment, in every country you go through. Then you have to take the boat across and go through UK Customs as well. How did that feel? In the movie you looked very cool doing it.
Howard Marks: Well, it was wonderfully exciting, and of course scary. You think, God, what’s going to happen? Anything can happen. I might never go home again. I might be gone for 20 years. All that fear comes in, and then you almost submit to it. Okay, I’m going for it. If it happens, it happens. Let’s go, give it all I’ve got. And then when you cross that border, I’ve said several times, it’s like a sort of religious flash, or a non sexual orgasm. It’s just a wonderful feeling when you get through. I’ve never had it from anything else, ever.
James Thompson: It’s almost like gambling, except you’re gambling with your life.
Howard Marks: Well, that is what it is, isn’t it?
James Thompson: I can imagine the relief. Not only is your life okay, but you’ve got X amount in the back of the car.
Howard Marks: And you’ve got lots of money as well.
Brian Rose: And then you do it again at the next border, and the next. You must have been exhausted by the time you got home.
Howard Marks: Yes. The final border is of course the crowning glory.
Brian Rose: How many borders would you pass?
Howard Marks: One run could have up to three or four.
James Thompson: Oh Jesus. I’d be able to do maybe one, but by the third I’d be gone. And not only do you have to roll through, you also have to be composed. Was there any way you used to talk to yourself, or would you try to become someone else in order to be cool with the customs officials?
Howard Marks: There was no script in my mind or anything like that. Just the obvious things. You mustn’t look nervous, you’ve got to look relaxed. Although you can look nervous sometimes. It’s odd. In the 60s, sometimes the best disguise would be a squalid hippy who’s obviously a smoker and not very rich.
Brian Rose: So they’d let him through, because he might have a small amount on him, but he’s not smuggling.
Howard Marks: Yes. So it would change. I’d want to not conform to the profile they had of what a smuggler was, but that would vary, both from their side and in my interpretation of it.
James Thompson: The more you think about it, I would imagine, the worse it gets.
Howard Marks: You know what it’s like when you start thinking of double bluffs, treble bluffs. Again, the similarity with gambling.
James Thompson: Massively. I got lost there for a second.
00:22:02 Pakistan, hash and the perfect joint
Brian Rose: There’s a part in the book where you go deep into Pakistan. Was that to go and pick up some hash?
Howard Marks: It was more to test the quality of the hash. There was a significant investment, about one or two million, by my Californian partners, and Pakistan was obviously very careful about who they let into a hash factory or something like that. So my job was just to ensure the quality. And the Californian lads were very politically minded. America was heavily against the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, so I had to ensure that each block was stamped with something like Smoke the Russians Away or Crumble the Kremlin. So I had to make sure the stamp was right and the quality was right.
Brian Rose: And this was the early 80s that you ventured in?
Howard Marks: This was the mid 80s.
Brian Rose: Did you try to dress up and look like a local?
Howard Marks: Oh yes, and I even had a Pakistani passport as well. Dressing up to look like a local doesn’t require a great deal of make up. You just put something over your head and something over your body, and that’s it, and sit in the back being very, very quiet.
James Thompson: Have you ever tried the THC wax, rather than the hash? I think they do actually call it wax. It’s almost pure THC.
Howard Marks: Yes. It’s like what they also call scuff, or live resin. You scrape it off the plant when it’s alive. Traditionally that’s the way they always used to do it in countries like Nepal and Kashmir, where kids would run through the fields wearing hessian clothes, so the stuff would rub off onto them, and then they would take it off with a knife and either roll it like that to make what they call a temple stick, or like that to make what they call a temple ball.
James Thompson: God, that’s mental.
Brian Rose: What is your preferred method of consuming cannabis?
Howard Marks: A traditional 1960s joint with lots of tobacco, actually, is my preferred method.
Brian Rose: The way you first smoked it at Oxford, pretty much.
Howard Marks: Yes. I think very often the first hit you have of anything remains the best.
Brian Rose: Will you ever stop smoking? Does that thought ever enter your head?
Howard Marks: It does enter my head. I get bronchitis once a year, and it always enters my head then, and usually it doesn’t go away unless I give up smoking for a week or two. In the American prison I gave it up for five years, so I don’t feel that worried about it. If the doctor says, look, you’d better stop, I know I can stop. And there are other ways of getting the same high, by eating it and so on.
Brian Rose: Are you a fan of eating it, or drinking it? In California there are so many things. There are popsicles, and a hundred different lotions, and electronic cigarettes now.
Howard Marks: Yes, I’ve got one of those, a vaporiser.
Brian Rose: They’ve got a portable one.
Howard Marks: Yes. I’ve experimented with all that, and I like them all, really. There isn’t any way of ingesting it that I don’t like. But to answer the question, the preferred way is a traditional UK joint.
Brian Rose: How much does it take to get you stoned now? Have you built up some kind of tolerance?
Howard Marks: No. I get stoned on the first joint of the day.
Brian Rose: And then you stay at that level?
Howard Marks: Well, I can get more stoned. It’s not as if I’ve got any immunity to it, but I have a tremendous familiarity with the state, so it’s unlikely that I can’t function.
Brian Rose: You can still do everything.
00:26:42 43 identities and the real Mr Nice
Brian Rose: You mentioned you had a Pakistani passport. For people who haven’t read your book and don’t have a sense of scale, because I don’t know how much certain Americans know about you, could you give us an idea of the scale? How many passports did you have? I mentioned shipments as big as 30 tons. What kind of money was involved, and what was the scale of your operation before it all changed in 1988?
Howard Marks: Right. As regards passports, I tried to list them all when I wrote my autobiography, and I could remember 43 different identities, most of which would have been backed up with a passport. That might not be the total. It was at least 43, but it wouldn’t be significantly more, I’m sure.
Brian Rose: That’s a lot. And from what I remember, the title of the book came about because you were tired of borrowing other people’s identities. You wanted a guy who wasn’t going to leave the UK, whose identity you could assume.
Howard Marks: Yes.
Brian Rose: And that is Mr Nice.
Howard Marks: That’s right. He’d been released from prison, and we had a common friend, someone who knew both of us. He’d been convicted of murder and released after about 12 years, which is fairly normal over here, and he had no intention of going abroad, because he didn’t like the beer abroad. A simple soul. He was very happy to let me use his identity. Of course the guy is still around, so you can back it up with membership of a snooker hall and so on. You can keep updating it. His name was Donald Nice, and it was lovely checking into hotels in Pakistan. What is your name? Nice.
Brian Rose: It’s a great name. I get the feeling that that’s the part you loved most about it, just the check ins.
Howard Marks: Yes.
Brian Rose: Or hearing that the deal had made it through.
Howard Marks: Yes, all that is good, obviously. Hearing of success at the other end of the world is a wonderful feeling too.
00:28:47 The scale of the operation
Brian Rose: And how big was your empire at one point? What kind of numbers are we talking here?
Howard Marks: Well, it’s been grossly exaggerated, and law enforcement tends to have its own idea of what a criminal organisation is. There was no organisation. It was a bunch of loosely knit people who occasionally came together for a deal, then split off and did another deal with other people, and came back together again. When the DEA say there were 300 or 600 people working for me, it’s just not true, although I wouldn’t have minded if it was true. The DEA also said it was the biggest dope deal in the world. Who could ever know that for sure? They nevertheless exaggerated it all. They even called it the Marks cartel. It wasn’t that sort of organisation at all.
Brian Rose: Is that the kind of language they use to help prop up the framework they try to fit all their evidence into?
Howard Marks: Which I suppose is fair enough.
Brian Rose: And so they’re probably talking about hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of product, or more. Probably billions.
Howard Marks: Yes, and they do the usual thing of using the street value, all the tricks of the trade, to try and increase the chances of a heavy sentence.
Brian Rose: Has there ever been a drug smuggler that you know of who stuck to a single product? For cannabis you might have been one of the largest, but so many of the cartels, as you say, diversified into cocaine and so on.
Howard Marks: Yes, there was a guy by the name of Donald Steinberg, who during the early 80s smuggled enormous quantities of marijuana, and only marijuana. His life is documented in a book called The Underground Empire, a third of which focuses on him. At any one time he would have three ships, each with several tens of tons on them, heading towards the American coast. He would count the money in terms of Samsonites. He knew that a Samsonite full was half a million dollars, so he would just count the Samsonites. That looks about right, okay, fine. So he was massive, certainly the biggest marijuana dealer there’s ever been, but he stuck to his product.
Brian Rose: What happened to him?
Howard Marks: He got arrested. It was at the time the American justice system decided that the best way of dealing with gangs of various kinds was to go for the leader and get him to roll over on everyone else, rather than the traditional way. Who’s your boss? Who’s working for you? Snitch on all of them and we’ll give you a new identity. So something like that, starting from the top down.
Brian Rose: Do you think that if you get so big, if you get to a level of making money or of being good at what you do, you’re always going to get caught? Once they’ve decided you’re known and they’re going to come for you, at some point you are going to get caught?
Howard Marks: I don’t think it’s inevitable, because obviously some people will die before that happens. But that’s really the only way of getting out of it.
Brian Rose: There’s no other little trapdoor?
Howard Marks: No. Even people who stop completely, they’re always prepared to crank it up again, as I would be if I thought I could definitely get away with something.
00:32:49 Tempted to go back, surveillance and MI6
Brian Rose: That’s one of my questions. You got out of the federal penitentiary in 1995, and I do want to ask you about that in a little bit, but since then, have you ever thought about going back to the life?
Howard Marks: Oh, several times. The first time was as soon as I got out, because I thought, tactically, that’s the last thing they’re going to expect.
James Thompson: Jesus, Howard, you are crazy.
Howard Marks: I know. I tried, I started, but so much had changed that I couldn’t get any partners or anything like that. It was hopeless. But yes, I still think of smuggling ways, of course. I’ve always come to the conclusion, before it’s too late, that I probably wouldn’t get away with it.
Brian Rose: As in they’re watching you, or people are worried about being associated with you?
Howard Marks: Both, really. I occasionally come under surveillance now, probably about two or three days every few months.
Brian Rose: I find that hard to believe, that they’re still surveilling you.
Howard Marks: Well, they would look so silly if I got away with it.
Brian Rose: Is that the UK government, or are they in conjunction with the American government?
Howard Marks: The UK government has almost given up. Better the devil we know than the devil we don’t know. He’s not a bad guy really, let’s keep him at it.
Brian Rose: So you don’t have enemies in the UK government as much?
Howard Marks: In MI6 I do, in the British Secret Service. The guy who recruited me, I’ve heard, really doesn’t like me at all.
Brian Rose: And he was a friend of yours at Oxford?
Howard Marks: Yes.
Brian Rose: A lot of people have seen the latest James Bond movie and they think of MI6 as the building on the Thames. Could you describe what MI6 was when you were recruited?
Howard Marks: Yes indeed. Officially it didn’t exist. There was certainly no building or headquarters on the Thames. It officially just simply didn’t exist. It always used to amuse us over here that in America, outside Washington, there’d be a big road sign saying CIA. But there was an understanding that there was a British secret service, and of course it couldn’t officially exist, otherwise it wouldn’t be a secret service.
Brian Rose: But it’s the same organisation as James Bond’s.
Howard Marks: Well, MI6 stands for Military Intelligence 6, and MI5 stands for Military Intelligence 5. MI5 looks after foreign spies who come here, to try to ensure there are no Russian spies, or whoever our enemy is these days, lurking around doing stuff. MI6 was a more proactive thing, where agents would go out to foreign countries and spy. Of course James Bond was one of those, and I was another one. But I didn’t have a licence to kill. I just saw myself as having a licence to deal, really.
James Thompson: So does that mean there’s an MI1, 2 and 3?
Howard Marks: I don’t know why they numbered them. Probably to trick you.
Brian Rose: Did they recruit you because you were smuggling, or because they knew you from Oxford and knew you were a smart guy?
Howard Marks: Both, really. While we were at Oxford they recruited this friend of mine, and so they had a reference. He’s all right, he’s solid. And they had their own information: God, he’s smuggling dope with the IRA, he might be useful. Because at that time the IRA was a problem.
00:36:45 The IRA, Jim McCann and the Old Bailey
Brian Rose: Can you tell us about your involvement with the IRA and how that worked?
Howard Marks: Yes, I can. I met a guy by the name of Jim McCann, who had recently escaped from Crumlin Road prison in Belfast. It was the first escape from there since the Second World War. This was in the very early 70s. He said he was the chief intelligence officer of the Belfast brigade of the IRA, and I believed him. As far as I was concerned, yes, he was an IRA member. But it has to be said that he’s the only person in history about whom the IRA decided they had to say, he’s not one of us. So the safest thing for me to do is to take the IRA’s word for it that he wasn’t.
James Thompson: So when I read your book, this Jim McCann, you hadn’t gone out looking for him to be part of the IRA, and you don’t really know if he was or wasn’t. But because he says he is, or he’s known to be linked, you get tarred with the brush of dealing with the IRA.
Howard Marks: That’s correct. But at that time, in the 1960s, sympathy with the Catholic minority of Northern Ireland was pretty much part of everyone’s left wing agenda. In 1969, for example, the British army was sent into Northern Ireland to defend the Catholics, basically on the IRA side. So there was a lot of sympathy for the Catholic minority. Also, Jim is the kind of person who’s very happy to do interviews with underground and left wing newspapers, so everyone knew of Jim McCann. He was a sort of Fidel Castro of Europe, if you like, that kind of image. An editor of an underground magazine was a friend of mine and had interviewed Jim McCann, so all I knew was that there was this guy who could smuggle loads of arms into Ireland, on the side of someone all of us lefties supported and believed in. I had no problem thinking it would be better if he smuggled in dope rather than guns. That was okay for everyone concerned, as far as I could see. So I went ahead.
Brian Rose: So you didn’t have ethical problems with it?
Howard Marks: No.
Brian Rose: But did it help that they were on the left and you sympathised with the left? That eased your conscience into it?
Howard Marks: Yes, absolutely. They hadn’t started killing kids and things like that, risking the lives of children visiting the Tower of London or something. They were more freedom fighters than terrorists. I know the distinction can easily be blurred, but they came across to all of us in London then as freedom fighters.
Brian Rose: Was it a revolutionary idea to think, I can smuggle dope through these arms connections? Did you just come up with that while smoking?
Howard Marks: I guess so, yes.
Brian Rose: Because it’s not obvious to me. In retrospect it’s obvious, but at the time it doesn’t seem like anyone would have come up with that.
Howard Marks: As far as I know I was the first, but other people might well have thought about it.
James Thompson: Did you hear about the guy and then link it? While he’s getting arms in, you’ll be able to get dope in?
Howard Marks: Yes. They could get things into a northern European airport, into Ireland, and I had the connections to get things onto the planes.
Brian Rose: So it was a massive opportunity.
Howard Marks: It was an easy one.
Brian Rose: And how did that relationship work out over the years? Was it a net gain for everyone, or were there downsides?
Howard Marks: There were downsides, but it was a net gain for sure. We did a tremendous number of consignments, all of which got through, but one got busted after it got through. Jim McCann got charged with it, but he got acquitted, saying he had infiltrated MI6 through me. And of course I later used the same defence, saying I had infiltrated the IRA on behalf of MI6. We both got acquitted, which is absurd.
James Thompson: How many times can you use that get out of jail free MI6 card? You said you were in it for nine months, technically, and you used that card for 15 years.
Howard Marks: Yes. Because it didn’t officially exist, it was meant to be secret.
James Thompson: You could just go, we never really get out of the club. You could just use that forever, really. Once you’re in, you’re in.
Howard Marks: I never even signed the Official Secrets Act. I was just having a pint in the pub, talking about it and giving some information here and there. When I skipped bail, they did a severe investigation into it, and then the lawyer for MI6 admitted, yes, he was an agent for us. All he had to say was no, he wasn’t.
James Thompson: But that put something in the jury’s mind.
Howard Marks: Well, it convinced the jury. That’s all it is, isn’t it, convincing people.
James Thompson: You come up and say you were, and you exaggerate. How are they going to know where the exaggeration is?
Howard Marks: That’s right. Particularly during my trial, the prosecution started by saying, no, he wasn’t a member of MI6, he wasn’t, and then they finally conceded and said, all right, he was.
James Thompson: God, that must have been amazing when you got off.
Howard Marks: Wonderful, yes.
Brian Rose: This is when you were acquitted in London?
Howard Marks: That’s right, at the Old Bailey.
Brian Rose: And what year was that, roughly?
Howard Marks: That was 1981.
Brian Rose: And you probably became much more well known then.
Howard Marks: Yes, that had a lot of publicity, and of course I took it as a direct message from God to carry on smuggling. The big man upstairs. Obviously it’s in my hands, look how it’s going.
00:43:41 Old friends and those who testified
Brian Rose: From reading the book, you mentioned Jim McCann. Good and bad, who are the characters who really stand out for you?
Howard Marks: Well, Jim, of course. He’s the most extraordinary character I’ve ever met, I think. People who know him say that’s the only portrayal of him where you got him right, unreservedly. So I think that must indicate how fascinated I was by this character, that I could get across what he was really like in the book.
Brian Rose: How did the movie do for him?
Howard Marks: It increased his profile, in fact. I think David Thewlis played him very, very well, and almost every scene he was in was true.
Brian Rose: So he was the biggest character. Do you stay in touch with him? What happened to him?
Howard Marks: I have been in touch with him since I left prison. I’ve seen him about two or three times, but not for several years now, not for about six or seven years. I haven’t seen him since the film came out, for example. But our children are friends with each other. They’ve got better things to do than talk about their dads, but they are friends, so there is a contact, and I occasionally see a photograph of him with his kids.
James Thompson: I thought he’d died. I thought it was something about a tank. Am I way off here?
Howard Marks: No, he’s definitely still alive. He’s about 73 now. He was photographed by a newspaper quite recently, within the last six months or so. He lives in Holland and spends a lot of time in Russia. He doesn’t come to Britain.
Brian Rose: Is there any danger in associating with any of your former colleagues, or former associates? Do you have to be careful about appearances when it comes to things like that?
Howard Marks: Generally, no. I would never worry about meeting Jim. Perhaps I would be foolish not to, but I wouldn’t. I see Malik, who was my Pakistani contact, almost every year. I go and visit him in Pakistan, but it’s a friendship. It’s a friendship based on business, but we’re not planning deals. He’s 91 or something like that. We’re friends. He’s godfather to my son, and that carries on.
Brian Rose: He was one of the few people, I think, who didn’t testify against you. Is that right? Because you had a few people who did testify against you.
Howard Marks: Almost everyone else was prepared to.
Brian Rose: In the movie that scene was quite famous, because he refused to. Did he do time on the back of that? And have you had any relations with the people who did testify against you? Do you hold any ill will against them?
Howard Marks: There are a few questions there. We’ll do the Pakistani first. As soon as I was sentenced, when it was all over and there was going to be no trial, because I was pleading guilty, at that point he at least played the game of, well, I’ll cooperate with the authorities. I’d already got 25 years, so there wasn’t much they could do against me.
Brian Rose: So you had already made your deal.
Howard Marks: Yes. And he did cooperate with the authorities after that, but not concerning me. It was quickly discovered that he wasn’t really cooperating with the authorities. He was playing both sides for his own financial gain. So he got arrested again, extradited again, did some sort of deal and got out again.
Brian Rose: Did he do time in the States?
Howard Marks: Not really. He spent some time in prison, but it was more on remand. He never got convicted of anything after that.
Brian Rose: And you said pretty much everyone testified against you.
Howard Marks: Well, not everyone. That would be very wrong, because there were a few very staunch people who didn’t, and I would like to say thank you to them. As regards my attitude to the people who did, one was my brother in law, for example. I don’t think one can start blaming other people for being what they are. I misjudged them. I can only blame my ability, or inability, to judge. He is what he is, and it’s up to me to work out what he is, and if I don’t, I’m taking the chance. So I don’t think, oh, that dirty filthy rat, I’m going to do him one day. Not at all.
Brian Rose: Did you think that at the time?
Howard Marks: Perhaps a bit, yes, before I analysed it myself. I did think that, and I think it largely came about because I thought, I want to see my kids again, shall I roll over? I did think of it, and that’s when I analysed it properly and realised, okay, it’s not for me. I wouldn’t be able to look my kids, or even my parents, in the face if I became a snitch or a grass.
Brian Rose: You’re very famous for never snitching, never grassing people up when you had the opportunity to, and you’ve just talked a little bit about what was in your mind. Was that something you always felt, through your whole smuggling career? I’m never going to give anyone up?
Howard Marks: Oh yes. But I think even those who did end up rolling over thought that too. It’s only when you’re actually in that situation. Even now, if you stuck a gun to my kids’ heads, I’d probably tell you every name I know.
James Thompson: It’s like the game you’re playing has your rules, and the game someone else is playing has their rules, and you can’t always see their rules, especially when there’s a lot to do and you’re moving things about and getting shipments in.
Howard Marks: I see what you mean. That’s very deep.
James Thompson: I suppose you had a lot of time to think about it.
Howard Marks: Well, yes, there’s time to think. You’re in a cell, you’ve got two years to think. I’ll really get to the bottom of this one.
00:50:34 Inside the federal penitentiary
Brian Rose: What was it like in the US federal penitentiary? Because that is the big time. I think you’ve been quoted as saying it was the only federal penitentiary that has a death row, which probably gives it a more ominous feel, or means you’ve got prisoners in there who are the worst of the worst.
Howard Marks: Yes, a more ominous feel for certain. To be reminded every day that there’s a death row, that that building is a death row, of course is ominous. You’re going to think about it, and when you see fellow prisoners helping to build it, you start to think, this isn’t right. It is the only federal prison, I think it still is, that has a death row. There are plenty of state prisons with death rows, obviously, but that’s the only federal one. I think the first person to be federally executed there was Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber. But you don’t associate with the people on death row. It’s the dead man walking thing. They are kept separate.
Brian Rose: So you wouldn’t even glimpse them?
Howard Marks: You might see them being escorted or something like that. I think there was the odd time, a yoga class sometimes, that people on death row would participate in, but it was very, very rare. You might have visits at the same time, but you wouldn’t be having any recreational time with them. So you’re not aware of the people on death row, more of the building.
Brian Rose: Just more aware that it’s possible.
Howard Marks: Yes. As regards the other prisoners there, you don’t get rapists, you don’t get child molesters, you don’t get the rubbish of crime, if you like.
Brian Rose: Because they’re federal crimes.
Howard Marks: Because they’re federal crimes rather than state crimes. But even though that was the principle, many state prisoners, particularly from the gangs, like the Bloods and the Crips, and the El Rukns and the Vice Lords in Chicago, would often be too difficult for the state authorities to handle, so they would be drafted into a federal prison on the grounds that they were too difficult, and then you’d get some of the rubbish. But generally you’d get proper criminals, mainly big drug dealers.
Brian Rose: And how was that first month there, the first six months?
Howard Marks: The first month, yes, I was scared. I wasn’t sure how I was going to handle it at all.
Brian Rose: Did you try to change your personality somewhat? You’re very obviously laid back.
Howard Marks: Well, I’m not naturally a physical threat to anyone, and never have been. But I became very aware that it’s quite easy to step in shit in that sort of environment, even if you’re not looking for trouble. So yes, I changed. I just became more careful, making sure I didn’t bump into people, all that kind of stuff.
Brian Rose: Did you make friends who would watch your back?
Howard Marks: They did, but I would never have to ask them to, because I quickly got a job teaching English grammar, and sometimes teaching people to read. They would ask me to write things for them, even letters to their girlfriends, because they didn’t have the ability to articulate, so I would do that, and that became an important thing to them. I also became a jailhouse lawyer, as a hustle within prison, and succeeded in getting a couple of convictions overturned and sentences reduced. So that made me liked, if you like.
Brian Rose: It made you valuable too. You became their voice, somewhat.
Howard Marks: Yes. That’s what got me through, I think, more than anything.
Brian Rose: And the fact that you didn’t snitch and grass, did that give you a lot of capital in prison?
Howard Marks: Yes, that only helped. Being famous, if you like, although it was less so in America than over here, and being known for not being a snitch, that held a lot of weight.
00:55:20 Parole and the politics of punishment
Brian Rose: Were you surprised when you got paroled? Because it was seven years from a 25 year sentence.
Howard Marks: I was surprised, yes. Astonished, actually. I did reduce the 25 year sentence to 20 years on a post conviction motion, on the grounds that I was being punished more harshly than the judge intended, and I won that motion. So then I was eligible for parole after a third of that time, which is six and two thirds years. But even though I behaved myself impeccably, and brought the education department up to the top of the federal system and all that sort of thing, parole wasn’t granted as a result of your behaviour, really. That’s a threshold to be considered for parole, but parole was judged more on the current political perception of the crime you committed, and drugs have never been good for that. So I was astonished to get parole. I’m only guessing, this isn’t documented, but I think what happened was that the judge was very annoyed with the DEA for lying to keep me in an American prison and not let me transfer to the UK, which is what the judge had wanted, and he was just giving them another kick up the arse, really.
Brian Rose: So they really pushed to keep you in. They wanted to convict you pretty hard.
Howard Marks: Yes, they wanted me to spend as long as possible in prison.
Brian Rose: Is that because you evaded them so well over the years? It became personal, I guess.
Howard Marks: I guess so, but I don’t think it became more personal in my case than in anyone else’s. I think that’s the way they’re trained, the culture.
Brian Rose: We get our man and we do the worst possible.
Howard Marks: Yes. It’s a very political institution, the DEA.
Brian Rose: It gets its direction almost as a mandate from the president.
Howard Marks: Well, it was formed by Nixon, wasn’t it? To find another job for the Watergate burglars, basically. G. Gordon Liddy. Keep him busy.
Brian Rose: It must be strange to see your life affected by the political winds. If you rob a house you get four years and you’re out in two, but for you it’s almost as if your punishment is subjective, over the winds of time and who gets elected. Was that ever frustrating for you?
Howard Marks: It was frustrating, yes, but it’s common knowledge, really. Within prison everyone thinks that their only chance of getting out is an amnesty, which is going to be politically determined, or a change in the law, which is going to be politically determined. So you know you are subject to the whims of political change. You’re very aware of it in prison.
00:58:31 What prison taught him
Brian Rose: What was positive about prison?
Howard Marks: Oh, I know for sure I emerged a far better person than the one who went in. It didn’t do me any harm. I’m not suggesting anyone should check in or anything like that, but it really didn’t do me any harm. It made me stop taking myself too seriously. It made me realise I can’t really control events, I can only control my attitude to any event. And also, and this sounds a bit soppy, the power of helping people less fortunate than oneself. It’s like a spiritual energy which makes me feel good. I never had that before.
Brian Rose: That was the first time you did something like that, teaching English and helping them with their appeals?
Howard Marks: Yes, and that force is quite a strong one.
Brian Rose: Have you kept that up?
Howard Marks: Yes. That’s why, when I came out of prison, I got so much behind the legalisation movement. I felt at last I had an agenda, a moral and to some extent a political agenda that I could pursue, and that was more important to me than writing books or making money or anything like that. Now it’s all become a bit subsumed and interrelated. I get paid to talk about legalising cannabis. But during the first few years I was out of prison, I was definitely a much better person than the one who went in, and probably a better person than I am now.
Brian Rose: I’ve heard you talk about your prison stay before, and it sounds like what some people describe after a psychedelic event. You come out with your ego reduced, feeling more connected to your family and your loved ones.
Howard Marks: Yes, that’s correct, and of course it’s not particularly surprising. You’ve been stuck mainly with your own thoughts for several years, and you’re going to examine yourself a bit more ruthlessly than ever before.
James Thompson: I suppose that depends to some extent on what kind of character you are going into it, though.
Howard Marks: Yes, of course, James, it does. But perhaps it’s more the awareness of the positive aspects of my character that came out in prison. There were times I’d spend very sad, crying to myself, of course, missing my kids like you couldn’t believe, but on the whole I was happy there.
Brian Rose: Did you meditate at all?
Howard Marks: Yes, a lot.
Brian Rose: Did you know how to meditate before you went in?
Howard Marks: Yes, because I’d been in prison before. I’d been in for two years and learned how to do yoga then. But I tended to give it up, to revert to debauchery, every time I was free.
Brian Rose: You talk about learning yoga in the federal penitentiary, and those two things just seem so different to me. Is that something they promote in prison?
Howard Marks: Yes, it’s something they encourage and something you have access to. I found American prison very understanding of, and supportive of, people who wanted to do yoga, because they preferred it to people doing weightlifting and everything. It’s a bit of a daft one, isn’t it? First of all they incarcerate you, ruin your life and make you hate them, and then they make you able to do something like that. So it’s less of a hate factory, in a sense.
Brian Rose: Do you miss the money, or the lifestyle the money afforded you?
Howard Marks: Not really. Occasionally now I get worried about finances running out and not being able to afford things in the future, but that makes me more like everyone else. And I’m not sure I’d opt for winning the lottery. Well, of course I would, what am I talking about? But I’ve done that. That’s been done. I’m looking for other interests in life.
Brian Rose: I think your lifestyle fascinates people who haven’t been there. In the movie, maybe it’s just a great job done by Rhys, but you don’t seem to be consumed by the lifestyle. You seem to enjoy doing the business, but not to revel in the luxury.
Howard Marks: No. The idea of counting massive amounts of one’s own money and gloating over it never struck me as sensible.
01:03:35 Money laundering and why only cannabis
James Thompson: Reading the book, you opened so many different accounts. Do you still have times when you might be smoking and you think, that’s where it is?
Howard Marks: No, I’ve never forgotten where I’ve stashed anything. The bit that’s often quoted, which I think is the bit you’re referring to, is that once upon a time I was with my ex wife, and we were sitting opposite a bank, and she said, I remember depositing something in there. I would give a chunk of money to my ex wife whenever I made a load, and what she did with it was her business. So it was she who forgot she had 30 grand in the bank, not me. I remember I gave her 30 grand.
Brian Rose: Which was a lot of money. I’d be going round all the banks with a metal detector. What was the money laundering situation back then? Was there a complete lack of attention to it?
Howard Marks: Well, there wasn’t any law against it when they first started. You could walk quite legitimately into any bank with a big suitcase full of money, and some countries, in particular Hong Kong and Switzerland, encouraged it. Please put this into my account. Numbered accounts are more for books and films, really. Every account has a number, and you can deal with your bank manager any way you want. If I whistle three times, please deposit it. They were amenable to anything, in Switzerland and Hong Kong, absolutely anything, and Luxembourg too, and the Caribbean offshore places. It was very, very easy, and there was no law against it.
Brian Rose: Through the cannabis dealing, you start off doing that, and as with the passports and the IDs, you become a master of disguise. You have to know a lot about where you’re putting money. Obviously money laundering has got a lot harder, but you have to become proficient in a lot of other areas to run the business to its full potential.
Howard Marks: Yes, you pick up lots of tricks on the way, of course. Certain forms of money laundering work just as well today as they always did. If you inflate sales receipts and stick a bag of cash in.
Brian Rose: Would money laundering be the one factor that would keep you from doing business today the way you did 20 years ago?
Howard Marks: Oh, I’d be able to launder money. It wouldn’t be flying into banks like in the BCCI case, but you can swallow cash in just about any business, particularly second hand cars, or stamps, or coins. There are loads of ways.
Brian Rose: You were known as a cannabis man your entire career, and you must have met people in all of your dealings who encouraged you to move to other products. Why did you never do that?
Howard Marks: Well, there wasn’t really any pressure, or even temptation, to move into, say, cocaine, which would be the obvious choice. There were a number of reasons. The source countries I used for cannabis were not generally the countries for cocaine.
Brian Rose: Pakistan, Afghanistan.
Howard Marks: Yes. Potentially opium, and potentially cocaine in Colombia. I did smuggle marijuana from Colombia, so yes, the potential was there. But I couldn’t even satisfy the demand for cannabis. It never got close to being satisfied, in the UK or in America, anywhere.
Brian Rose: Can you explain that from an economics perspective?
Howard Marks: Just supply not meeting demand. There was so much demand, so why venture into something else? And there were some moral objections too. I was all right about cannabis. I sincerely believed it wasn’t harmful at all, not in any way. I only felt it had positive effects. I’ve taken cocaine a few times now, but the first time I took it was when I was 50, after I came out of prison. It seemed to me then that people who took cocaine just behaved like arseholes and thought they could do things they couldn’t, whereas people who took cannabis were a bit scared, a bit paranoid, a bit more cautious. And I wasn’t entirely convinced that it didn’t have a potential for harm. So I really wasn’t tempted, and certainly there wasn’t anyone saying, right, we need you to smuggle cocaine. There was none of that.
Brian Rose: It’s a whole different set of people, like you said. Not only the people who take it, but the people supplying it. It’s a different ball game completely.
Howard Marks: Yes. And a lot of people think, well, you’re only smuggling this much, rather than a container full. But it’s not a question of money per unit volume. The only criterion really is money per unit time. How much do you make this week?
Brian Rose: So a deal’s a deal. You were doing lots of big deals, and the fact that your deals took up more volume didn’t make any difference. It’s more about the bandwidth in your brain for making the deals.
Howard Marks: Yes, and various other considerations, such as which is easier to make disappear, a suitcase of cocaine or a container load. And another objection, to complete the list: in cocaine, almost everyone who deals it makes their profit by mixing it with some impurity or something, and I’m not happy with that. If I did become a cocaine dealer, I would prefer to put a hundred pounds on it, a margin, rather than dilute it or mix it with some poison. Any structure that seems to favour that, I wouldn’t be happy with.
01:10:07 Legalising drugs and David Nutt
Brian Rose: What do you feel about legalising, obviously cannabis, but all drugs, for that kind of reason? It’s a big question, but that’s what happens.
Howard Marks: Generally I think that any recreational drug so far discovered would be safer to society if legalised and controlled, rather than put firmly and squarely in the hands of the criminal fraternity. But of course, if a drug was synthesised or discovered that made you kill people or rape your kids if you took it, then obviously I think make it illegal, whether it’s natural or not. But I haven’t come across such a drug, except possibly alcohol, which is the only one that’s legal. And to be perfectly honest, with a drug like heroin, where the amount you need to get high is quite close to the amount that can kill you, I think if those two amounts are close to each other that makes it a dangerous drug, so I think a bit about that one. Maybe it’s a question of where these drugs become available. Cannabis, for sure, have it in the greengrocer’s. Heroin, perhaps you’d have to sign on.
Brian Rose: You’d have to go through a procedure, but you’d get pure heroin.
Howard Marks: And you’d have to go through a procedure where someone’s keeping tabs on you, otherwise you don’t get your fix.
Brian Rose: That’s got to be better than some guy on a corner who says see you later. I think you were talking to David Nutt about that, about the dose that gets you high being very close to the dose that can kill you.
Howard Marks: That’s right. David was the first to bring it to my attention, because that was one of the criteria in the scale of harms chart he invented. The nearness of those doses is a factor he considers.
Brian Rose: David is going to be here in May, actually.
Howard Marks: Oh, he’s a lovely man.
Brian Rose: For people who don’t know David, what part of the government was he in before he was sacked?
Howard Marks: He was chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, I think it’s called.
Brian Rose: He was effectively sacked because he claimed that cannabis and ecstasy were safer than tobacco and alcohol, if I’m paraphrasing.
Howard Marks: Yes, mainly because he said that riding a horse is more dangerous than taking an ecstasy pill. And people seem to forget that he actually showed that. He looked at all the people who hurt themselves riding horses, or were trampled, and all the people who died as a result of taking an ecstasy pill, and showed beyond any doubt, to every statistician’s satisfaction, that riding is more dangerous.
James Thompson: And when people do die, it’s because it’s been cut with something that reacts with something else.
Howard Marks: That’s right, or they’ve taken too much water afterwards. I’ve debated with Paul Betts, Leah Betts’s father. He’s a thoroughly nice guy, absolutely okay, and it’s hard not to feel sorry for him. Leah was the girl who died in the first ecstasy related death to get that kind of attention. I’m sure if a car ran over one of my children I’d feel the same way. The emotion is in there. But most deaths from drugs have been caused by prohibition rather than by the drugs.
James Thompson: We’re all used to only seeing prohibition at work. We haven’t seen legalisation at work, and prohibition only makes things worse. I can’t see how, when you really look into it and see what actually happens, it doesn’t make things worse.
Howard Marks: I know. Perhaps when the authorities were initially deciding what to do about drugs, prohibition, perhaps even a War on Drugs, made more sense. But now we know it doesn’t work. It just makes things a lot worse, with unforeseen casualties. Prohibition of drugs is a relatively recent social experiment, and a disastrous one, and that’s obvious to most people.
James Thompson: With the internet, people are getting more information, so I hope it’s a generational thing.
Howard Marks: I think it is largely a generational thing, yes.
James Thompson: But there’s that documentary, The House I Live In, which shows the industry behind it. You’ve got the police, you’ve got prisons that are paid for, you’ve got all these things that would go if drugs were legal.
Howard Marks: The entrenchment of its illegality in society, yes. There are all sorts of consequences, such as those you mentioned, the probation service too. A lot of people’s living is now clearly dependent on drugs being illegal, and you can’t blame them for not wanting to lose their jobs.
Brian Rose: Now, you’re against decriminalisation, is that right?
Howard Marks: Not against it. I would see it as a step towards legalisation, or a sign that the mood of the country was moving towards that. But to allow the consumption of something and keep its supply illegal is to me clearly irrational.
Brian Rose: The David Nutt argument. It’s still very dangerous, there’s still an inflated price, there are criminal dealings on the back of it. It doesn’t really address the problem.
Howard Marks: No. And the other thing is that if it is decriminalised, then people will be taking it who wouldn’t have taken it before.
Brian Rose: Do you think so? I know a lot of people who want to smoke because it’s illegal.
Howard Marks: Which is fair enough, but there are many law abiding people.
Brian Rose: I don’t know that many. All my friends are…
Howard Marks: There is a general feeling that democracy is an okay thing, which requires one to obey the will of the majority, which means you’ve got to listen to fools rather than one wise mind occasionally. Some people simply will not smoke dope because it’s illegal. If it was decriminalised, they might. Obviously the message coming across is that it’s all right to do it, so demand will increase, which means supply has to increase, which means you’re further criminalising the thing in the areas that matter.
Brian Rose: Are you hopeful about what’s happening in the States?
Howard Marks: Oh yes, I’m optimistic. I have a tendency to be too optimistic. That’s just a life force.
Brian Rose: You said you still think cannabis will be legalised next month.
Howard Marks: Yes, for the last 50 years.
James Thompson: I don’t think you’re wrong. It could be any day.
Brian Rose: Howard, what do you think the drug landscape will look like in, say, 30 or 50 years? If we could just hibernate and wake up, what do you think it’s really going to look like when the new generation comes in?
Howard Marks: Well, of course I would think that all drugs would be legalised by then, but that’s what I thought 30 to 50 years ago. I just don’t think we would wake up to that.
Brian Rose: They’ve got a bit of a loophole now where they’re changing the molecules of things, and that makes it something else, like mephedrone. You’ve got these legal highs.
Howard Marks: Yes, it’s a race, really. There are all the underground chemists adding molecules to this, that and the other, but the American legislature has a way of dealing with that. It just says anything that has that kind of effect, no matter what. If you start framing the law in terms of the effect rather than the substance, you will be able to make all sorts of things illegal.
Brian Rose: I wonder why they don’t do that here, then.
Howard Marks: There probably is a move to try to do that. But it would leave the authorities vulnerable to someone saying, well, this guy’s getting the same high from bungee jumping as if he took acid. It would be difficult under British law to do it.
01:19:29 Business with the Mafia
Brian Rose: You always dealt in cannabis, which, like you said, is more peace and love, not even a drug, something you thought everyone should have. But you were still dealing in major quantities around the world. You have the tension of something coming into Shannon Airport and whether Customs is going to get it, and ultimately you’re dealing with big players, Mafia organisations, the IRA and so on. It’s always seemed strange to me that you never had a violent incident with anyone, because when that much money gets exchanged it seems to happen in any organisation. How did you avoid that? I know you were always known as a solid businessman and a very good guy to deal with, which I guess is the key to doing any good business.
Howard Marks: Yes, and that doesn’t apply just to illegal business. It applies to anything, I think. And running across the Mafia isn’t restricted to illegal business either. Whether you’re a fashion designer or a manufacturer, particularly in Italy, you’ll run across the Mafia.
Brian Rose: Or you’ve seen it in Japan, with one of the big camera companies and the Yakuza.
Howard Marks: Oh, it’s so interwoven in Japan, it’s one and the same. So that’s going to happen anyway. I think if you rise to the top of any organisation, you’re going to come across some criminal organisation that has its fingers in there. Getting back to my own dealings with the Mafia, it was mainly the people in the Gambino family who ran Queens, which is where Kennedy Airport is. Before they started bringing in dope with me, they’d be nicking videos, stealing stuff and fencing it, all that Goodfellas kind of stuff.
Brian Rose: Not organised stuff, just clipping pieces here and there.
Howard Marks: Yes, skimming, basically, but with products as well as money. They would not invest a penny, so there was never any question of them losing any investment. I would get the stuff on credit or pay for it, send it to them, and they would keep 25 percent of it until I sold the other 75 percent. That was their cut. Once I’d sold the other 75 percent, I would just give them the money for the 25 percent they were holding. Not that it would occur to me to cheat them in any way, but I couldn’t. It was almost as if they had security, if I went completely mad and thought, right, I’m going to rip them off all I can. There was no way I could.
Brian Rose: So that would be the price for you to be able to do business in that area. Would they be doing anything, sorting out runners, a place to keep it?
Howard Marks: No, no. They would literally say, we’re going to keep this. How do you want to pick up yours?
Brian Rose: They would hold it, and then you’d sell your 75 and give them the money.
Howard Marks: Yes. They were quite happy to wait. They were sitting on an asset. They wouldn’t cheat either. I found them utterly honourable people to deal with.
Brian Rose: And you never thought to yourself, Howard, you’re getting involved with the Gambino family, what are you thinking?
Howard Marks: I was aware of that element of it. I used to be fascinated by organised crime as a kid, reading about it, so I was very aware that this was heavy. But I just found it very, very satisfactory and comforting.
Brian Rose: Fair enough. And as long as you went by the rules, they’re making money for nothing. As long as you’re just getting on with it, they’re getting their share.
Howard Marks: Yes, and I was definitely more useful to them alive than dead.
Brian Rose: Which is always a comforting feeling, I would imagine.
01:23:43 Adrenaline, the stage and regrets
Brian Rose: You know how a lot of fighters, and I’m sure James can attest to this, get these big adrenaline rushes in a fight, and then when they’re not fighting they don’t always know what to do with themselves? You’ve effectively retired from smuggling, so how do you get up in the morning? Where does the adrenaline come from? What motivates you? Do you need the adrenaline?
Howard Marks: Yes, I do need it, and the area I get it from is basically stage fright. I’m on the stage several dozen times a year.
Brian Rose: You were on stage last night in London, for example.
Howard Marks: Yes. And for the half an hour before I’m on stage, every time, I might as well be facing a border. I can even smell it on me, the adrenaline.
Brian Rose: Facing an audience, but 30 minutes before it’s almost like you’re facing a firing squad or something?
Howard Marks: No, like I’m facing a border. I know I’m not risking anything like as much. I’m not risking the rest of my life in prison. I’m risking looking like an arsehole in front of about four or five hundred people, but that’s bad enough. So that’s when I get it now, and I know it’s the same thing, because I can smell it on me. I can smell it in my sweat, and it’s the same smell, the smell of fear, or the smell of adrenaline.
Brian Rose: You have to be thankful for that.
Howard Marks: Yes, I am.
Brian Rose: And is it after the show that you get the endorphin rush, or during the show?
Howard Marks: During the show, when I’m actually doing it.
James Thompson: So you made a living out of transporting weed from A to B, and now you make a living talking about how you made a living.
Howard Marks: That’s true, yes.
James Thompson: What’s the number one question you get faced with most often? What are people most interested in? Just in case we haven’t covered it.
Howard Marks: In terms of the questions most commonly asked, it’s what’s my favourite dope, and do I have any regrets. Those pop up every time.
Brian Rose: And what are the answers?
Howard Marks: My favourite dope is the strongest possible hash, from places like Nepal. And I have no regrets now, because I’m happy now, so I can’t possibly regret whatever got me here. But I know what’s meant by regret, so I can give a long answer and talk about the regret I felt, but I always finish by saying I have no regrets now. I felt regret, of course, lots of times in prison, but I certainly wouldn’t want to put the clock back and risk it not being as good as it is now.
Brian Rose: Exactly. So there’s nothing you would do differently, as such, other than not getting caught?
Howard Marks: Not really, because I think getting caught was an important part of my being happy now. It’s probably the best thing that happened to me.
01:26:52 Writing crime fiction and creativity
Brian Rose: Now you’re a fiction writer. Obviously you had Mr Nice, which was a legendary book, and you’ve written a couple of other autobiographies. Why fiction? It’s not easy to write fiction, I’m sure.
Howard Marks: No, it’s not. It was partly advice from the publishers. There’s a limit to how many autobiographies one can write.
Brian Rose: Some people write ten of them, and they’ve had probably a tenth of your life.
Howard Marks: You could write a wonderful autobiography of one day, I suppose, but I didn’t feel I could do that. So fiction popped up, particularly crime fiction. And I mustn’t forget this, because I’d be dishonest otherwise: there was a lot of talk of laws coming in to prevent authors profiting from their previous criminal activities by writing about them. It was unlikely that could ever be ex post facto, otherwise you’d have to put Nelson Mandela back in prison or something like that. But if I’d written Mr Nice now, they could say, okay, you can write the book, but you’re not making a penny out of it.
Brian Rose: Because the authorities could try to claim that money, since it’s based on illegal doings.
Howard Marks: Yes. It’s not on the statute books, but it’s being proposed and it might be. So that was another reason. You can definitely see the Americans doing something like that. That made me think more seriously about writing crime fiction. But then I realised that if I wrote it from the point of view of a Welsh kid who went to Oxford and became a big dope dealer, I would actually be profiting by writing about myself. It would be difficult to prove I wasn’t. So I wrote it from the point of view of someone who’s the exact opposite of me: female, and a drugs cop.
Brian Rose: So it’s got to be crime fiction. Is it in the first person?
Howard Marks: No, third person. So it’s got to be fiction. Then I think I’ve covered my arse, probably. But obviously I draw on experiences from my criminal past.
Brian Rose: The first book was Sympathy for the Devil.
Howard Marks: That’s right.
Brian Rose: And then you just released The Score a few months ago.
Howard Marks: No, the release is actually next week. I think it’s 4 April, officially, but obviously it exists in some form now, as review copies and so on.
Brian Rose: But it can be pre ordered right now on Amazon?
Howard Marks: It can be ordered, yes.
Brian Rose: And this is going to be a trilogy, is that right?
Howard Marks: Yes, it’s a trilogy. You have to write trilogies these days, particularly in crime fiction. I don’t know why. It’s possibly because of Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. He wrote three books, all of which were published after he died. No one thought anything of his writing while he was alive. He couldn’t sell it. And I don’t know how long this Scandinavian crime fiction dominance is going to go on for, with Jo Nesbo doing his stuff and everything. They’re very good. So a trilogy is the normal thing. The crime publishers don’t expect the first one to sell that much. They usually recommend you go on Twitter and Facebook about it, and keep your fingers crossed that you stay alive until the next two come out. So it’s a trilogy deal, and I’ve got another book in mind after that, not using the same characters, not using the same undercover female cop. Then I don’t know.
Brian Rose: And do you enjoy the writing? Do you find it really difficult? Do you get the same rush when you’re writing, or publishing?
Howard Marks: I don’t get the fear. As to how I write, I’ll designate a day as a writing day. Okay, tomorrow will be a writing day, and I will sit in front of the screen until I’ve written a thousand words, even if they’re crap. I might be able to remix them into something later on, and I hope that what writers call a roll will kick in during those thousand words. Sometimes it doesn’t, and of course it’s a depressing business.
Brian Rose: It’s lonely, isn’t it?
Howard Marks: Yes, it’s got to be lonely, and you can be distracted. Usually you try to do the housework or something, anything other than face the reality of a blank screen. But when the roll does kick in, and I find that smoking cannabis helps that sort of tangential thinking, which is a lovely comfort, when the roll does kick in it’s one of the most enjoyable things in the world, without that fear. It’s not adrenaline. It’s very different.
Brian Rose: You’re creating something. You’re making something out of nothing.
Howard Marks: Yes, particularly if you’re stoned, because you’ve forgotten everything.
Brian Rose: You’ve been quoted as saying that smoking dope, its forgetfulness, is the germ of creativity. Can you explain that?
Howard Marks: Yes, and I can give an example of it. It’s the germ of creativity simply because you’ve got nothing else to rely on. Once you’ve forgotten everything, what can you do? You can’t remember anything, so you’ve just got to create something. I think there’s a parallel, though perhaps you’d disagree. During the 1920s, jazz was mainly performed by black musicians in the States who could play every instrument perfectly and could play loads of tunes, but they used to be quite big stoners, and they’d go up on stage having clearly forgotten almost every tune they’d ever heard. So they had nothing but creativity to rely on, and that created the improvised solo. I think it was a fundamental component of that. That’s what I mean. Now it’s an accepted form of music, an accepted form of creativity, but a fairly recent one.
James Thompson: I love writing. I write a lot, and I really enjoy the experience. Sometimes I’ve got so high that I’ve thought I’ve nailed the truth, but the side effect is I’m going to forget it. The higher you get, the more likely you are to forget it, and not even the next day. Someone says hey, and it’s gone.
Howard Marks: I think there’s no way to avoid that. You will forget some of it, but let’s hope you remember the important stuff. You’ll remember so much good stuff, so don’t be scared that it’s gone. Never be scared. Keep doing it. It’ll come through in another way. You’ve got to keep banging it out.
01:34:58 Ecstasy, LSD and thinking about death
Brian Rose: Are you still involved with dance music? I know you’ve said that whenever a man comes out of prison he should take ecstasy with his children.
Howard Marks: Yes. It sounds a rather glib thing to say, but it just happened to be the case that I was locked up during the period of ecstasy’s popularity, so I hadn’t taken it before I went to prison. And there was a very limited choice of what music you could listen to in prison. Indiana radio stations aren’t known for much beyond country and western.
Brian Rose: And hip hop, you said?
Howard Marks: Yes. The black guys would dominate the TV, for baseball and football and so on, but also for the hip hop, and I used to like that. That was fine. I suppose penitentiaries were cradles of hip hop, in a sense. That’s where a lot of it started and came out of. But I hadn’t heard the other stuff that was coming out over here, the trance and everything like that. And music was very much my first love, of the big three. I was hooked on music before I was hooked on sex or drugs. Music was the first thing I got hooked on in that way. So I came out and asked my kids, what’s been happening on the music scene while I’ve been banged up? And they said, Dad, you’ll never understand unless you take one of these little fellas, unless you take an E. So I made arrangements to get very, very pure E and take it with them, and it was a wonderful experience. Obviously there’s nothing sexual involved with your own children, but I hadn’t seen them for some time, so emotionally I caught up with them, and it was very, very important. It was crucial. I remember thinking then that any dad coming out of prison should just be with his kids and take this. It will get things out. And of course I understood the music as well after that, even if it was just the windscreen wipers playing it on the way back.
Brian Rose: What about psychedelics? Is that something you’ve touched in the past, or something you’re a big fan of? I know in the movie you take some acid, at a time when it was legal, at Oxford.
Howard Marks: Yes. Acid didn’t become illegal in this country until 1966, and I took my first in 1965. Hardly anyone knew what it was then. Again, it was an elite Oxford type thing. I took it at an Oxford college, with a friend of mine who later became a very eminent professor of epidemiology. The funny thing is, I took it every day for quite a long period before discovering that it only works every three days, because of the tolerance.
Brian Rose: You took it every day?
Howard Marks: Yes, for quite a long period. It was very strong acid in those days, and it took me a very long time to work out that it was only kicking in every three days. I was trying to figure out what else I was eating, but it’s simply a three day tolerance. I had a couple of bad trips too, and since then I’ve been very, very respectful of it. I don’t see it as a party drug, really. It’s more of a cerebral kind of medication. Now I take it about once a year or something, just to reinvent myself and update.
Brian Rose: Professor Nutt, as you say, is going to be here.
Howard Marks: He regards psychedelics as some of the safest drugs going, very, very safe, LSD particularly, partly because of the thing I mentioned, the three days. It clearly isn’t addictive. If it doesn’t affect you the next day, it doesn’t have that crack kind of element.
Brian Rose: We had one of his colleagues here, who was actually running tests at Imperial College with an MRI machine, giving people psilocybin and watching what happens in the brain.
Howard Marks: That’s right. David is particularly concerned about the morbidity that affects old people. People do start getting worried about death when they get to about my age, and people are living that much longer, so there’s far more morbidity around. And he does randomised trials properly. He’s a proper scientist. Things like psilocybin are going to stop old people being miserable because they’re going to die.
James Thompson: They should advertise it. Just have a commercial. Are you miserable? Are you old?
Howard Marks: I suppose it’s necessarily the case that one is either going to die young, a tragic death of some kind, or crumble to bits. Crumbling to bits is the best you’re going to get, and anyone who doesn’t realise that clearly needs psychiatric help.
Brian Rose: They’re giving it to terminally ill patients in the States now, giving them psilocybin in a hospital environment, and they find that people get their heads around their whole mortality and accept what’s happening to them, and they can live their lives without being paralysed by knowing they’re going to die.
Howard Marks: Which is very important. To me it’s becoming increasingly important, obviously. It’s an obvious problem that needs a solution, and nature is providing it.
Brian Rose: Do you think about death?
Howard Marks: Yes. I don’t know how often other people think about it, but I’m not thinking about it every day, oh Jesus. I have always thought about it from time to time, and I’m not worried or afraid of death. I sometimes worry about the process. I wouldn’t like to be eaten by lions. That would be a terrible way to go.
Brian Rose: What’s next for you for the next few years?
Howard Marks: We’ve got the third book coming. And if my crime fiction career seems not to have kicked off, then I’ve got one more semi autobiographical thing that I’ll do.
Brian Rose: I think it’s great that you’re writing, by the way, because you don’t have to, so you’re really pushing yourself by doing that.
Howard Marks: Yes, and I enjoy the process. And talking about age, there’ll come a time when I’ll get too knackered to go up and stand on the stage for four hours.
01:42:50 Live shows and travel bans
Brian Rose: Can you talk about your shows? I didn’t want to see yours last night, because I wanted to not know you very well for this show, but I want to come and see you. How often do you perform, and what is one of your shows like?
Howard Marks: The frequency is irregular, but it would be at least 50 a year.
Brian Rose: Fifty, that’s a lot. One a week.
Howard Marks: At least one a week, but usually in clusters, one every night for a few weeks, and then I have time off to write, and then one every night for another period. It tends to be like that. And it evolves and changes. It’s not the same show I’ve been doing for the last 15 years. Essentially there are two different types of show. One has a projector, and I make full use of multimedia, with sounds and visuals and things like that, and the other is just straightforward stand up, without a projector.
Brian Rose: Like stand up comedy?
Howard Marks: Yes. I’m a reasonably successful stand up comic, which is not the normal kind of progression.
Brian Rose: There’s not much that you do that’s normal, however.
Howard Marks: It grew out of book readings, really, because the standard way of promoting a book is by reading an extract out loud in a bookshop, which is about as sterile and clinical and boring and lacking in entertainment as you can get. I don’t think any author has written any sentence thinking, I wonder what this is going to sound like when I read it aloud in Waterstones. No one thinks like that, so it’s bound to be crap, really. Quite a few people realised this, like Irvine Welsh, and started doing readings in pubs, clubs, festival tents, anywhere other than a bookshop, really. And I simply got on that bandwagon, to be honest.
Brian Rose: And you made it more interactive. Instead of just reading out a bit of your book, because you’ve had so much going on, it seems silly not to let people ask questions and tell certain bits of stories. Just an evolution of that, really.
Howard Marks: Yes, it is. A book has been written to be read, so it should at least be modified if you’re going to read it out loud. It just doesn’t work otherwise. You might as well sit down, not say anything, and just read the book. So the shows have grown out of that and shot off in various directions. I’ve got what I call a safety net of about ten different sketches I could do at any time, and I’m still working on the next one.
Brian Rose: Do you still light up on stage?
Howard Marks: No, the smoking ban really put an end to that, even though I think I could get away with it, because the law states that it’s illegal to smoke while performing in public unless smoking is an integral part of the act, and I think I could qualify. But there hasn’t been a precedent yet.
Brian Rose: And the show is four hours long, sometimes?
Howard Marks: That’s the longest it would ever be, and that would include signing and chatting to people afterwards. The minimum length is only an hour, very rarely, and the median would be about two hours.
Brian Rose: And if people want to find out where you’re going to be, is it your website?
Howard Marks: Yes, howardmarks.co.uk.
Brian Rose: And your Twitter is OfficialMrNice.
Howard Marks: That’s right.
Brian Rose: You have a few copycats out there.
Howard Marks: Oh, of course. Particularly on Facebook. I once looked at it in its early days and there were 14 impostors, and three of them had more friends than me.
James Thompson: You’re doing something wrong. You need to copy them.
Howard Marks: I’ve got it the wrong way round.
Brian Rose: Are you allowed back in the States? Would you ever do a show there?
Howard Marks: No, I’m not allowed. It’s a lifetime ban, as what they refer to as an aggravated felon, which sounds pretty tasty and cool, but it just means I did a big drugs deal once. So I’m never allowed in. I’m not even allowed to apply. Obviously I’d prefer to be able to visit, but it doesn’t really matter. There’s enough of the world I haven’t been to yet. I sometimes worry, because occasionally I go to Jamaica, or I might go to Canada, that the plane might be forced to land there, and then I’d never get out. They would arrest me for breaking my parole conditions. Parole can’t be enforced in another jurisdiction, but if I found myself on American soil for whatever reason, if they kidnapped me or something, I would have to serve some time in prison for breaking parole conditions.
Brian Rose: So they’ll never let you in, but if you go in, they’ll never let you out.
Howard Marks: Well, maybe it would depend how long I live.
Brian Rose: I was thinking, how come you haven’t been on the Joe Rogan show? It seems like a no brainer, but I guess you won’t be in LA any time soon.
Howard Marks: Well, it could be done, I suppose. I’ve done CNN occasionally, because they can do down the line stuff.
Brian Rose: And you mentioned before we started filming that China is a place you can’t go.
Howard Marks: Yes, China, because I broke the law in Hong Kong, which is now part of China, and got a conviction there. Australia wouldn’t let me in either, even though I’ve never been there.
Brian Rose: They just don’t like your style.
Howard Marks: They don’t like my style, but they tend to rely on FBI records, so maybe that’s it. I don’t know. It really pissed me off, actually. I’d sold out at the Melbourne literary festival and sold out at the Sydney Comedy Festival, and Kiss FM was backing my application for the visa. You’d think it would be straightforward at that point, and they said no, not a chance, it would be too much disorder. Then I offered to pay for two policemen to be with me 24 hours a day, to pay their wages and everything, so there’d be absolutely no way I could do anything wrong or disorderly, and they just said no. And then I noticed that Snoop Dogg had been let in. So I wrote again. Come on. No, sorry, you can’t come in. And then of course Cheech and Chong went on tour there, and they still wouldn’t let me in.
Brian Rose: So they could change their mind at some point.
Howard Marks: They could change their mind, yes. I haven’t been told not to bother applying in the future. In fact, the reverse: by all means apply again in the future. And it’s ironic when you consider that for that whole country, at first, you pretty much had to be convicted to get there.
Brian Rose: Have you ever hung out with Snoop Dogg, who’s Snoop Lion right now?
Howard Marks: Oh yes, he is Snoop Lion. I forgot. He’s kind of gone Jamaican. But no, I’ve never hung out with him.
Brian Rose: You guys might get along.
Howard Marks: I’m sure I’d get along with Snoop Dogg. I must find out his connection to Australian immigration.
01:50:49 Celebrities, the Mr Nice film and goodbye
Brian Rose: Do people seek you out? Do celebrities seek you out, or do you live a quiet life besides your shows and your books?
Howard Marks: Well, the only celebrities who have very actively sought me out, there are two. One is Sean Penn. The other one is another guy called Howard Marks, who runs Oaktree Capital.
Brian Rose: Yes, I saw him when I was Googling you. He’s worth billions or something.
Howard Marks: He’s one of the richest guys in the world, and we met each other for the first time yesterday, actually, because we’re both fed up of seeing each other when we Google ourselves. A terribly nice man. I spent an hour with him yesterday, and he actively sought me out. And Sean did simply because he read the book and thought it would make a good film, and he was quite instrumental, actually, in ensuring that the film got made in the end.
Brian Rose: Did he produce it, or did he introduce it to the producers?
Howard Marks: He wrote a letter. He came over here and managed to get hold of me, obviously, and we had lunch together, and I told him I’d sold it to the BBC. I’d sold it almost as soon as I’d written Mr Nice, for a song, because I didn’t realise it was going to be a bestseller. I just took whatever price the BBC gave me. Then the BBC felt it was a bit too non PC, and for various reasons they just didn’t do it. Sean wrote a letter saying he would like possibly to direct it, be a producer, maybe act, everything. Please let me champion this film. I think I put the letter in the updated version of Mr Nice. I reprinted the letter.
Brian Rose: And the BBC just looked at it and didn’t bother taking any notice?
Howard Marks: No, none at all, because they’re not like any regular production company. They can sit on something forever. The easiest thing for them to do is wait until the bugger dies.
Brian Rose: That’s the worst. They’re a quasi government institution.
Howard Marks: Yes, they are. They tax you, basically. A TV licence is a tax.
Brian Rose: Don’t get me started.
Howard Marks: They’re problematic. So those are the only two who jump to mind. But quite often, the advantage of being a very minor celebrity, as I am, is that you do get to meet non minor celebrities. At an event where there are lots of celebrities, a number will come up and compliment me on my book and make themselves known to me. So in the sort of places where there are lots of celebrities, a few of them will make themselves known to me.
Brian Rose: Is that cool?
Howard Marks: One hundred percent cool, yes.
Brian Rose: So to go back, because the BBC had the book, is that who the film came through in the end?
Howard Marks: In the end the BBC just relinquished it.
Brian Rose: They bought it off you and then said, oh, whatever?
Howard Marks: They bought it off me, paid me for it. I sold my rights to them. There was some complication between TV rights and film rights, because they constrain each other to some extent, since they all end up as DVDs. They didn’t proceed with it, eventually forgot about it, and it was people like Rhys and Sean and others who forced the issue. The BBC just said, okay, just don’t credit us with it.
James Thompson: I can’t imagine anything worse than someone buying your story to make it into a film and then just sitting on it and doing nothing. I think that would be terrible.
Howard Marks: Well, it is my fault really, James. I could blame the literary agent, but using the same logic, it’s my fault. The standard thing would have been to sell an option. I was just learning this at a later date. By the time we hit trouble, they hadn’t done that. I didn’t realise.
Brian Rose: Were you happy with Rhys Ifans’s portrayal of you? And do you guys still hang out?
Howard Marks: Oh yes. Rhys and I have known each other for 17 years or something like that now. I met Rhys pretty much as soon as I came out of prison.
James Thompson: Is it a Welsh thing? You guys are all pretty close.
Howard Marks: Yes, but it’s more than that, it’s not just a Welsh thing. At the time I met him, he was the singer for the Super Furry Animals, an indie band that’s pretty popular over here.
Brian Rose: Before they became good.
Howard Marks: He was the vocalist. You can say that too. When I met him he was sleeping on the floor of the Super Furry Animals’ drummer and doing some pretty minor things, perhaps reading a story on the radio or something. He hadn’t acted in any films at all. And I’d written Mr Nice, but it hadn’t been published. But we got on, and we talked about what we were hoping for, our ambitions and aspirations, and at one point he said, well, if your book does come out and it’s made into a film, can I play you? And I said yes. No one had asked me that before. So we just stuck to that deal. It was extraordinary. And of course I thought I was doing a young kid a favour, giving the kid a break, and then he goes mega.
Brian Rose: We always do that here. Don’t forget us.
Howard Marks: But because we knew each other, and we would meet at festivals and go on the razz together, on the lash together, and we both had similar lifestyles, he didn’t have to study me at all. He’s very capable of studying people. His portrayal of Peter Cook, I think, was amazing. But he didn’t have to do any of that with me.
Brian Rose: He’s had the best kind of study ever.
Howard Marks: And if they make a film of him, I’d be the best person to play him.
Brian Rose: It goes both ways. Howard, we could probably do this for two more hours, but thank you so much for coming.
Howard Marks: Well, you can tell how much I’ve enjoyed it.
Brian Rose: You seem natural with this. We were talking before about how you should do your own podcast, so we’ll talk about that later. You’re such a natural, even better than I imagined or expected. So thanks for coming on.
Howard Marks: My very best pleasure, Brian. Thanks.
Brian Rose: I appreciate your frankness, and I’m so glad you’re still on speaking tours and everything. I’ll put a word in with Uncle Sam and see if I can sort that out.
Howard Marks: If you can.
Brian Rose: I have a British passport now, so I don’t know if they’ll take any notice. Thank you very much.
Howard Marks: My pleasure.
Brian Rose: Thanks, Colossus, always a pleasure having you.
James Thompson: Thank you so much.
Howard Marks: You’re a natural co pilot.
Brian Rose: You’re a big man and a big hearted man, I’ll tell you that. Please follow James at JColossus on Twitter. He’s got an excellent blog and an excellent YouTube channel. What’s the blog?
James Thompson: Colossal Concerns is the blog, and my YouTube channel is Colossal Collective.
Brian Rose: He’s got some crazy videos. You’ve got a new video coming out soon, right?
James Thompson: Yes, literally soon.
Brian Rose: You’ve got to check out some of his videos. He’s a lot funnier than he looks.
James Thompson: That might have just cost me.
Brian Rose: No, they’re really good. Check him out, definitely. Cheers, man. If you’re listening to us on iTunes, please click and subscribe. If you want to see the extremely good looking Howard Marks, come to our YouTube channel, where you can watch all of us, including the Colossus, at London Real TV. We’re on Twitter at LondonRealTV, and on Facebook, so come and join the party. Namaste. Thank you so much, Howard. And until then, guys, it’s about the journey.
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