Marks liked to cultivate the image of a hippie adventurer injecting some pizzazz into the pedestrian lives of his clientele; he was, in fact, a highly intelligent operator who, in the process of becoming one of the world’s biggest cannabis smugglers, was (briefly, and not very successfully) a spy for MI6. He is said to have had 43 aliases and 25 companies trading worldwide. He had business links with the American Mafia, the Colombian trafficker Pablo Escobar, and with the IRA.
In 1988 Marks was arrested by the American Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and sentenced to 25 years in jail. Granted parole after seven years for “exemplary behaviour”, he returned to his native South Wales, in 1996 publishing an autobiography, Mr Nice (one of his aliases was “Donald Nice”), which became a bestseller.
Dennis Howard Marks was born at the village of Kenfig Hill in Glamorganshire on August 13 1945, the son of Dennis Marks, a captain in the Merchant Navy, and his wife Edna, a primary schoolteacher. Both his grandfathers had been miners, and for the first five years of his life he spoke only Welsh.
Howard’s headmaster at Garw Grammar School, near Bridgend, recommended that he sit the exam for Oxford. Among the questions that confronted him was: “Is a copy of The Times more useful than a Thucydides or a Gibbon?” Marks later recalled: “I had heard of neither Thucydides nor Gibbon, and had never seen a copy of The Times. This question remained unanswered, as did most of them.” But he was accepted by Balliol College, where he read Physics and smoked his first spliff. As a fresher, he was persuaded by three pretty girls to join the Oxford University Conservative Association; although he never attended any of its meetings, he believed that his membership was “favourably regarded” by those later responsible for recruiting him into MI6.
In December 1967 he married Ilze Kadegis, a Latvian primary schoolteacher he had known in his days as an undergraduate, and took up residence in London. “I smoked hashish every day for the next 22 years,” he later recorded.
His diploma secured, Marks briefly toyed with a BPhil at Sussex University, but he was already dealing in cannabis: “I started wholesaling in London, shifting about 100 kilos a week, which was quite a significant amount in those days – but if you’re a wholesaler you come into contact with a lot of smugglers, and from there I became a smuggler myself.”
His marriage broke down, but he was soon earning thousands of pounds a month, driving dope across European borders or into England. Before long he had persuaded a member of the IRA to help him import drugs into Britain through the Irish Republic.
By his own account, Marks was “recruited to work for [MI6]” in 1973. Aware that Marks was a drugs smuggler, and that he was in contact with a member of the IRA, MI6 asked him to get information. Instead, Marks tipped off his Irish contact, and MI6 soon terminated the relationship .
Meanwhile, Marks opened a Swiss bank account. Large quantities of hashish were moved into Europe and America in the equipment of touring rock bands, Marks later explaining: “I just did it through the roadies, the bands didn’t know and they were earning enough money anyway. I wasn’t going to cut them in… I’d order special speaker cabinets with hidden compartments. Then I realised we didn’t need to use real bands so I just began making the names up and doing it that way.”
In late 1973 he was arrested in Amsterdam and sent to Britain, where he was charged under the Misuse of Drugs Act. He skipped bail, grew a moustache and travelled to Italy on a false passport, where he lived for several months in a Winnebago. In the autumn of 1974 he returned incognito to Britain, where he resumed his smuggling activities, airfreighting dope from Nepal to the Mafia in New York.
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Using a new identity (Albert Lane), he enjoyed flying by Concorde and staying at the Plaza in New York and the Carlton in Cannes.
In 1978 he became “Donald Nice”, and late that year arranged for a ton of hashish to be smuggled by boat on to an island in the west of Scotland. The following year he imported a further 15 tons through Scotland . He moved into a £500-a-week flat in Knightsbridge and ate caviar omelettes for breakfast.
In 1980 Marks was arrested by British customs officers and charged with dealing. At his trial, Marks pleaded not guilty, claiming that he was an agent for MI6 (which he no longer was). He was acquitted, but found guilty of using false passports and sentenced to two years in jail.
By the mid-1980s he had settled in Majorca, from where he continued his smuggling operations. It is said that at one stage he controlled 10 per cent of the world’s cannabis trade; the largest consignment he moved was 30 tonnes of Thai marijuana. (“The US drug authorities said it was 50 tonnes,” Marks later said, “but I know for a fact it was only 30.”)
The DEA was now determined to end his activities. In 1988 he was arrested in Majorca and in November the next year he was extradited to the United States, where he was sentenced to 25 years and sent to the Terre Haute Penitentiary in Indiana. Having occupied his time reading classic novels, practising yoga and playing tennis, he was released in 1995.
In his new role as master ex-smuggler, Marks campaigned for the legalisation of cannabis, standing for Parliament on the issue in 1997. “I accept that the business has become more violent,” he said, “but that’s the fault of prohibition – they’re just leaving it to the gangsters to take care of. Prohibition has been shown to be counterproductive… You can’t possibly hope to shut down every lab and plantation in the world – it’s just inconceivable.”
In the same year he applied for the job of Tony Blair’s “drugs tsar”, receiving the reply: “Dear Mr Marks, thank you for this application for the post. The selection team have carefully considered it along with all other applications and I am sorry to inform you that we were unable to include you in the candidates invited for interview. I hope that your disappointment will not prevent you from applying for other positions we may advertise in the future.”
Marks contented himself with appearing on radio; opening a tapas bar in Leeds; becoming a regular on the speaking engagement circuit; and writing for newspapers. In 2003 he said: “I’ve just got back from Vietnam, where I was doing a travel piece for The Observer. I’ve got to think of the old age pension, I can’t be talking about drugs all the time, can I? Not that I object to being synonymous with drugs, but I’m an old fogey and have to think of other stuff sometimes.” A biopic, Mr Nice, with Rhys Ifans as Marks, was released in 2010.
In recent years Marks wrote a sequel to his autobiography, Señor Nice – Straight Life from Wales to South America, and ventured into crime fiction with a book called Sympathy for the Devil.
Marks had a daughter by Rosie Lewis, and two daughters and a son with his second wife Judy, from whom he was divorced. In January 2015 inoperable colon cancer was diagnosed.
Howard Marks claimed that most of the money he had made from dealing had been confiscated or absorbed by legal fees. He also insisted that he had never dealt in hard drugs or been party to violence. “I’m just an old hippy,” he suggested. “I like to get stoned and look at sunsets.”
Howard Marks, born August 13 1945, died April 10 2016
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