Mr Nice: an autobiography (20 page)

In Ibiza, Rosie had given up the Santa Eulalia holiday house and rented a
finca
in the middle of nowhere. She was going back to nature. There wasn’t even a bathroom or toilet, and it was several miles from a telephone. I put up with it for a while. Rosie and I were getting on well again. We had confessed our infidelities and were pretending they didn’t matter. She introduced me to one of many Dutchmen who had places on the island. His name was Arend, and he was a heavy-drinking, fun-loving dope dealer from Amsterdam. I asked him what sort of prices and quantities normally prevailed in Amsterdam. I reported them to Ernie. He sent over Gater and another friend of his, Gary Lickert, to Amsterdam with several hundred thousand dollars, and Arend and I invested some money of our own. Gater rented a flat in Maastricht, near Utrecht. A hired truck full of Transatlantic Sounds speakers was parked outside. Arend and I purchased 700 pounds of Lebanese hashish from an Amsterdam wholesaler friend of his. Gater and I stashed the speakers, and one of James Morris’s people drove the truck to Schiphol Airport and air-freighted them to Las Vegas via New York.

It was early September 1973, and Ernie had invited me to come over to California once the Dutch load had been sent. I could pick up my own profit and maybe spend some of it. I was in Los Angeles before the speakers arrived at Las Vegas. Ernie and James Morris met me at the airport. Ernie was tall, thin, bearded, bespectacled, long-haired, and suntanned. He was Californian.

‘Hi. How you doing? Have a good flight?’

‘Yeah. It was long, though.’

Ernie thought for a second, then machine-gunned a few sentences.

‘Shit! I used to do that son-of-a-bitch once a week when I was working with Graham in the early days. What’s his beef, these days? He’s been really kinda rude to me. I get pissed with that. Well, we should pick up our load from Las Vegas airport tonight. You’re booked into the Newporter Inn, an old Richard Nixon hangout. Nixon cracks me up. What you like to do for fun? There’s real good surf here. I got a shed full of surfboards.’

‘I’ve never tried surfing, Ernie.’

‘How about sailing?’

‘Never tried that either.’

‘Not an ocean lover, huh? Okay. You want to go motorcycle riding in the desert? I got a bunch of real nice bikes.’

‘That’s another thing I’ve never done. I’ve been a passenger, but I’ve not ridden one. Not even a pushbike.’

Ernie started laughing uncontrollably. I joined in.

‘I guess it seems strange to you, Ernie, yeah?’

‘You got that right. So what do you do when you ain’t working, watch television?’

‘Sometimes. But usually I just get stoned, read books, and listen to music.’

‘You’ll like California,’ said Ernie.

I did, or what I saw of it, which was mainly the inside of a hotel room in Newport Beach. I wandered around the hotel complex, the bars, swimming pools, and other public areas, and realised that American movies weren’t about fantasy: they were documentaries about Hollywood. There were hundreds of radio stations and dozens of TV channels. In Britain we had only three. The radio stations were fantastic. I listened to a few hours of doo-wop and golden oldies before the commercials drove me mad. All the TV channels were showing sport, cop shoot-outs, sit-coms, game shows, or news. I watched the news. A reporter said, ‘Hey, one of you guys out there has just lost $5,000,000. Today, law enforcement officers seized Nevada’s biggest ever haul of
illegal drugs. Hashish, highly concentrated cannabis from the Middle East, almost half a ton of it, was discovered hidden in speaker cabinets. Over to Las Vegas …’ On the screen came pictures of the Lebanese hashish and the speakers Gater and I had stashed in Holland.

In the movies, the crook, usually a fugitive, always immediately switches off the radio or television when the relevant news bulletin finishes. I didn’t. I stared at it blankly for at least an hour. Was this really happening? I was very jetlagged from my first-ever long flight, and Ernie had given me the most varied collection of hashish and marijuana imaginable. I was as stoned as I’d ever been. This was Hollywood. It probably wasn’t happening.

There was a knock on the door. It was Ernie, and it was happening.

‘Well, we lost that one. The cops …’

‘I know, Ernie. I just saw it on TV.’

‘No kidding. That was quick. What you figure on doing next?’

‘I think I ought to leave.’

‘That’s smart. Here’s $10,000. I guessed you didn’t bring a bunch of money over with you. It’d be kinda dumb if you were coming to pick some up. Here’s my new phone number. Call me.’

‘Thanks, Ernie. How did the load get busted? Do you know?’

‘Sure I do. Didn’t it say on TV? The load transited in John F. Kennedy Airport, New York. When the airport loaders put it on the plane to Vegas, they fucked up and left one speaker behind, which they stuck in some shed in Kennedy overnight, and a dog sniffed it. The DEA took the dope out of the speakers once they were in Vegas and let my guy, Gary Lickert, the kid you met in Amsterdam, pick it up so they could see where he was taking it to. I had that covered. I was watching Gary from a distance. I saw him being followed, overtook him, gave him the signal, and haularsed outa there.’

‘What did Gary do?’

‘Drove in circles around the airport until the cops stopped him.’

‘Will he tell the cops about you and me?’

‘No. He did a tough stint in Vietnam. He won’t crack. But we should play it cool for a while, like a few days. I got friends in the FBI. I’ll find out what they got on us. Take a limo from here to LA airport. When you get there, buy a ticket in some dumb English name like Smith for a flight to the East Coast, somewhere like Philadelphia, then fly in your own name to anywhere you want.’

I flew to New York and stayed at the Hilton overnight, visiting Greenwich Village, Times Square, and the Statue of Liberty. Then I flew to London. Mac wanted to see me. We met at Dillons bookshop and took a cab ride to nowhere in particular.

‘Howard, you know that recently we have had to suffer some embarrassment over the Littlejohn affair.’

‘Yes.’

Kenneth and Keith Littlejohn were bank robbers who had claimed to be infiltrating the IRA at the behest of MI6. The claims had been substantiated, and the British public expressed outrage at their Secret Service’s employing of notorious criminals for undercover work in the independent Republic of Ireland.

‘For that reason, and that reason alone, you and I have to terminate our relationship. We can no longer liaise with criminals.’

‘Dope smuggling is hardly a crime, Mac.’

‘Of course it is, Howard. Don’t talk rot. It’s illegal.’

‘I thought you agreed hashish shouldn’t be illegal. It’s the law that’s wrong, not the activity.’

‘I do. But until the law changes, you’re a criminal.’

‘Don’t you think, Mac, there’s a duty to change laws which are wrong, evil, harmful, and dangerous?’

‘Yes, but by legal means.’

‘You would use the law to change the law.’

‘Of course.’

‘I suppose you would recommend saving a drowning man by telling him to drink his way out of it.’

‘That’s sophistry, Howard, and you know it. This end to our relationship is not my decision. I’ve been ordered to tell you this.’

I felt curiously cheated. My career as a spy was over without my having derived any benefit from it.

‘Mac, if by abiding by my own decisions and beliefs, rather than those of others, I come across something which affects the security of this country, do I take it that I should now no longer bring it to your attention?’

Mac smiled. I’ve not seen him since.

After the Greek sponge fishermen fiasco, Eric was determined to make amends; he went to Beirut. He found his own source of supply who was prepared to give him 100 kilos of hashish on credit. Eric offered to extend this credit to us and bring another suitcase to Geneva. The deal went ahead smoothly. Anthony Woodhead drove the hashish from Geneva to England.

One of Mohammed Durrani’s diplomats turned up in Hamburg with 250 kilos of Pakistani hashish. Graham and I sent out one of the Tafia, who rented a car and a lock-up garage in the outskirts of Hamburg to store the dope.

James Morris rang from Los Angeles. Three of his workers had been arrested in London. He didn’t know why. Neither did Graham or I. We knew American law had been broken, but we couldn’t see how anyone involved had been guilty of breaking British law. Graham didn’t want to bother to find out. He’d been to prison once; that was enough. He wanted to go to Ireland under a false identity to join McCann and supervise matters from there. It was safer. McCann had got him a false Irish driving licence. He left London that night.

Graham was right. Whatever reason was used to bust James Morris’s workers could be used to bust us. I didn’t want to rejoin McCann so soon after breaking from him, but Ireland was the only foreign country one could travel to from England without showing a passport. If there really was a danger of being arrested, I clearly shouldn’t travel around under my own name. I had no choice but to seek refuge with McCann. I borrowed Denys Irving’s driving licence, hired a car, stashed my passport, some dope, money, and bits and pieces in the back panels, and drove to Fishguard. On the ferry I drank several pints of Guinness at the bar before it docked at Rosslare. Once I reached open country, I stopped and rolled a very stiff joint of Afghani. As night fell, I drove towards Drogheda, where McCann was now based. Cruising along at 50 mph, I totally missed a right-angled bend and crashed through a hedge into a field. I lost consciousness.

‘Will he be needing a doctor or a priest?’

Two carloads of people surrounded the steaming, dripping vehicle. Although I was lying awkwardly, I felt no pain and could move all my muscles.

‘I’m all right,’ I said.

‘Don’t you be moving now. We’ll have an ambulance and tow-truck here in no time. No time at all.’

I thought of the dope and my inconsistent identity documents.

‘No, look, I’m perfectly all right,’ I said, leaping out of the wreck. ‘If someone could give me a lift to the nearest telephone, I’ll be able to take care of everything myself.’

‘That’ll be at Bernard Murphy’s down the road. Jump in.’

Bernard Murphy’s, which was actually named something like the Crazy Horseshoe, was heaving with serious Irish Saturday-night revelry. A large group were energetically performing an Irish jig around the telephone. A few young lads were holding the phone and sticking fingers in their ears. I made a reversed charges call to McCann at Drogheda and
told him I was stuck in the Crazy Horseshoe about ten miles outside Rosslare. Would he please come and get me? He arrived in a couple of hours.

‘Some fucking operator you are. Can’t drive a fucking car. Got nowhere to go. Can’t even go back to selling dope on Brighton seafront, or dresses to fucking academics. Like a rolling fucking stone. Why don’t British Intelligence help you out? You can’t do things without the Kid, can you? This is war, H’ard. Soppy Bollocks has joined the struggle. You fucking better, too. You got two fucking choices: I’ll lend you £500 and you fuck off, or, with a new passport that the Kid’ll give you, you handle these two deals from Kabul and Lebalon, or whatever the fuck that place is called, that Soppy Bollocks told me you and him are in the middle of.’

‘What you mean by handle?’

‘Soppy told me the Lebalon nordle is in London. Sell it. The Kabul nordle is in fucking Nazi land. I’ve already blown up a British Army base in Mönchengladbach, and the Baader-Meinhof gang eat out of my fucking hand. I want you to give the Kabul nordle to my man in Hamburg. He’ll sell it.’

‘How much do we all make?’

‘We’re partners, H’ard. Me, you, and Soppy. Equal shares after everyone else has been paid off.’

‘That’s fair enough for the dope in Hamburg if your guys are selling it. But why should you get anything from the Lebanese deal?’

‘Soppy’s already agreed, H’ard.’

We picked up my belongings from the wrecked car and drove to McCann’s Drogheda hideout. The false Irish passport took a few days, during which time McCann constantly berated me for incompetence. It looked perfect and was in the name of Peter Hughes.

‘Is this a real person, Jim?’

‘Peter Hughes is fucking real all right. He’s a member of the Provos, and he’s interned by the Brits.’

‘In that case, it doesn’t seem to be a particularly good idea for me to pretend to be Mr Hughes,’ I said.

‘Well, the cops are not fucking looking for him. He’s in Long Kesh, and they fucking know that. They’re looking for you, H’ard. Think, you stupid Welsh cunt.’

McCann took me to the airport.

‘Let me give you some advice, H’ard. Never fly to where you’re really going. Do the last bit by train, bus, or car. See, there’s an Aer Lingus flight to Brussels. Go on it, then take a train to Hamburg.’

On my arrival in Brussels, the Immigration Officer looked carefully at my Peter Hughes passport. He looked up.

‘Howard?’ he asked.

I froze. I’d been found out. But the Immigration Officer was smiling. Then I realised he was merely making a joking reference to billionaire Howard Hughes.

‘You have a famous name, Mr Hughes.’