Obituary: Howard Marks – cannabis smuggler turned author turned showman
Dope dealer who considered smuggling his destiny and karma, talked his way out of conviction, wrote a bestselling autobiography and drew crowds to his one-man shows
Howard Marks, who was Britain’s best-known and most charming drugs smuggler, and also a successful author and raconteur, died on April 10 aged 70. He translated a lifetime of international cannabis dealing and a long stretch in an American jail into a best-selling book, Mr Nice (1996), and a career as a stand-up performer.
Born in Kenfig Hill, a coal-mining village near Bridgend in Wales, to Dennis, a merchant sailor, and Edna, a schoolteacher, Howard spoke only Welsh for the first five years of his life. In 1964, he became the first boy from Garw grammar school to win a place at Oxford University and it was while studying physics at Balliol College that he first entered enthusiastically into the world of dope that was to define his life.
After graduating in 1967, he turned down the possibility of an academic career, as he found the lure of cannabis-smuggling more seductive. He had already set up a boutique in Oxford, called Annabelinda, as a way to launder his growing profits. Initially using a network of friends, he gradually became one of the biggest traffickers of cannabis in Europe. He used the sound systems of British bands, both real and fictional, to smuggle tonnes of cannabis into the US; he always stuck to soft drugs, not least because of the death of a friend, Joshua Macmillan, from heroin.
All went relatively smoothly until 1973, when Marks was arrested in the Netherlands and accused of international trafficking. By chance, one of his Balliol contemporaries, Hamilton McMillan, was in MI6 and had previously asked Marks to use his entree into the underworld on behalf of British intelligence. Marks duly told the customs investigators that he had been asked to infiltrate IRA drug-smuggling operations, a claim made more plausible by his association with a maverick Irishman, Jim McCann. However, he was extradited to Britain and held in Brixton prison before being granted £20,000 bail.
