Mr Nice: an autobiography (23 page)

‘Do you know a man who can?’

‘No. But if you do, let him come and do it, or give me instructions.’

‘How much can they send?’

‘I should think it depends on when you want to do it by.’

‘Well, John, the Americans will want to do a ton as soon as possible.’

‘Now I was in America once, and the thing is that Americans will always want more, and there is no end to their madness. Lovely people, for sure, but you have to keep them in line. When my visa ran out, the Immigration asked me why I wanted to extend it, and I said it was because I hadn’t run out of money. He stamped it and said, “Have a nice day.” So, if the Americans ask for a ton tomorrow, say you will do half a ton when Wales win the Triple Crown. That will deal with their madness, and everyone can get on with their lives. It saves all that tidding.’

‘Tidding?’

‘Talking Imaginary Deals.’

Accurately conveying the contents of my conversation with Old John to Ernie wasn’t easy. I told Ernie hashish could be exported from Nepal for about the same price as Robert Crimball charged in Bangkok, but 500 kilos was the most they could do at one time, and someone would have to be sent out to ensure the consignment was smell-proof. Ernie sent his right-hand man, Tom Sunde, with money, instructions, and smell-proof know-how. Tom came to
London first before going to Kathmandu to meet Old John. He had been authorised by Ernie to keep nothing from me regarding the intricacies of the New York scam.

During the 1970s, the most powerful Mafia crime family in the United States was that of Carlo Gambino, the prototype for Vito Corleone in Mario Puzo’s novel,
The Godfather
. Born in Sicily at the beginning of the century, Gambino was still of the old-school belief that the Mafia should steer away from involvement in drug-trafficking. Carmine Galante, the main contender for Gambino’s position as the godfather of the New York Mob, had no such scruples. The Mafia should control everything, including dope. Carmine Galante’s organisation used the services of Don Brown, an Irish-American who made his money dopedealing in Queens, New York, and spent it in Los Angeles. Don Brown knew Richard Sherman, an extremely shrewd Californian defence attorney retained by Ernie Combs. Unwittingly, Sherman introduced Ernie to Don Brown. A scam was born.

Large quantities of missing goods provided strong evidence of the Gambino crime family’s ability to remove items from John F. Kennedy Airport without going through the usual channels. Smuggling quickly followed. The preferred method was to send a cargo of legitimate goods from a New York company to the dope-producing country. The importing company in the dope country would ostensibly return the imported goods as faulty or different from ordered. In fact, a consignment of hashish would be sent and grabbed by the Mob.

As a prelude to the Nepalese scam, an air-conditioning company called Kool-Air had been formed in New York. It was ready to export real air-conditioning equipment. On separate flights, Old John and Tom Sunde, carrying a small suitcase full of Ernie’s dollars, flew to Kathmandu to take care of business. First Old John had to form a Nepalese company capable of importing air-conditioning equipment
and let me know its particulars. A week later, I received a telegram from Kathmandu. The message comprised one word, ‘YETI.’ I knew that yeti was the Nepalese name for the abominable snowman of the Himalayas, but this didn’t help. Ernie was anxious for news. I didn’t know what to tell him, so I cabled Old John in Kathmandu to call me.

‘John, what’s this message mean?’

‘That’s the name of the thing you wanted.’

I wasn’t happy with calling an air-conditioning company The Abominable Snowman.

‘That’s really not a very relevant name, John.’

‘It’s very relevant, I promise you. They haven’t caught one yet.’

I gave up.

‘Okay, John, that’s the name. Is everything else all right?’

‘No. They don’t eat spaghetti here; they like to use chopsticks or they eat wurst or smorgasbord. We can’t get the thing to go for spaghetti.’

Each day I was finding Old John easier to understand. He was unable to ensure that the load would be transferred to Alitalia before it reached New York. He could only manage to ensure the consignment’s New York arrival on other European or Far East airlines. I told Ernie. He said he’d work on it.

With the money Ernie had given me, I added some luxuries to the Regent’s Park penthouse: a stereo system and records. Judy’s father and his girl-friend had moved into the Brighton family flat, so Judy now had the use of her father’s flat, which was quite near Regent’s Park. At about four o’clock on a spring afternoon, I was alone in the penthouse, idly gazing at London’s skyline and listening to
Ladies Love Outlaws
by Waylon Jennings. I looked down and saw four hefty men with overcoats rushing up the street towards the entrance to my block of flats. Something told me they were coming for me, but I didn’t know who they were. The ground-floor entrance doorbell buzzed in the penthouse. I
asked who it was, and a muffled voice said something incomprehensible. I released the downstairs door, put on my stoned glasses, walked out of the flat, and started descending the emergency stairs, reasoning that the men would be likely to take the lift. When I got to the bottom of the emergency stairs, I noticed that the four men were still outside the glass double-doored entrance. The caretaker was holding open one of the doors and talking to them. They all saw me, and the caretaker motioned his head in my direction. I walked slowly and brazenly to the door as if to leave the building. One of the men took a flash photograph of me.

Then another said, ‘That’s not him.’

‘We’re sorry, sir. Excuse us,’ said another.

I flashed them a look of irritation, walked to the street, and took a cab to Soho.

It was obviously the
Daily Mirror
, with or without the police. How did they know? I had no idea, but I couldn’t go back to the penthouse again and had to consider as lost the money and valuables left there. Anthony Woodhead, who was the penthouse’s official occupant, might encounter a few problems, unless it was he who had tipped them off. I was meant to be masterminding the sending to the New York Mafia of the first-ever air-freighted hashish from Kathmandu, and I had nothing in the world but a few pounds in my pocket and a pair of stoned glasses. I telephoned Judy. She picked me up in her car, and we drove to Liverpool and checked into the Holiday Inn under a false name. The next morning, the
Daily Mirror
was slid under the room door. Again I dominated the front page, which was headlined THE FACE OF A FUGITIVE. Underneath was a large picture of me wearing my stoned glasses and moustache. I shaved, put Brylcreem on my hair, and combed it straight back. Judy went out to rent the cheapest possible bedsitter, £4 a week with shared bathroom and kitchen in an area called Sheill Park. I telephoned my parents to let them know I was okay, and telephoned Ernie to tell him what had happened. He was
unperturbed. I didn’t have the nerve to ask him for more money. He had some good news for Old John. The load could arrive on Japanese Air Lines (JAL); the Italians had been talking to the Japanese, and an arrangement had been made.

By far the largest organised crime network in the world is the Yakuza, with a membership of several hundred thousand. Originating in the early seventeenth century as a group of young Robin Hood-type rebels defying samurai overlords, the Yakuza emerged after World War II as a more typically Western collection of gangsters with dark suits and sunglasses. By the end of the 1960s, the Yakuza had forged important links with the Chinese Triads in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Thailand; and an unprecedently powerful Chinese–Japanese syndicate was beginning to send large shipments of heroin to the United States. Some of these went through Kennedy Airport. Now the Yakuza and the Mafia were waiting for Old John’s Yeti to do its stuff.

I gave Ernie the number of the telephone box at the end of the road and told him I would be there between 8 and 8.15 every Tuesday night. I cabled Old John in Kathmandu with the same information and the good news about JAL, and I began to live the life of a Liverpool dosser about to be a rich man. A few hundred pounds was scrounged from some long-suffering friends and family.

My lack of identity documents began to worry me. A 21-year-old policeman had been shot dead by the IRA, and the Birmingham Black Panther and the Cambridge hooded rapist were at large. One could be stopped by the police at any time, and it would be embarrassing for me to be unable to palm them off with a piece of paper showing some false identity. The Driver and Vehicle Licence Centre in Swansea required no proof of identity when applying for a provisional driving licence. I ordered one in the name of Albert Lane, and it was delivered to the Liverpool bedsit. I applied to sit a driving test and passed. A full licence was issued. I joined the local library and opened a Post Office Savings Account,
using the name Albert Lane. A bone-shaker of a Bedford van was purchased for next to nothing, and Judy and I set off on week-long vacations to a variety of campsites. We loved this perpetual holiday lifestyle, but Judy would often complain about my insistence that the tent was pitched adjacent to the public telephone box, whose number had been handed out everywhere from Los Angeles to the Himalayas. I had to make and accept telephone calls at all hours and did not want to be traipsing across moonlit fields in my pyjamas. The telephone box was almost invariably next to the campsite’s bathrooms and toilets. Ours would be the only tent in the vicinity. During the day, we would either take advantage of the campsite’s recreation facilities or join a local library under a couple of silly names. During the evening, we would attempt innovative ways of acquiring further false identities.

Our favourite method was through fortune-telling. Judy dressed up as a sexy clairvoyant and sat alone in a pub. I sat some distance away. Sooner or later, a man of about my age would initiate a conversation with her and find out she was an astrologer, palmist, and numerologist, capable of telling his fortune. She needed a few details, of course: date and place of birth, mother’s maiden name, and his travels or travel plans. Some of them had no intention of going abroad because they didn’t trust foreign beer. We ended up with enough information to procure several birth certificates from St Catherine’s House, London.

On Independence Day, July 4th, 1975, 500 kilos of hand-pressed Nepalese temple balls, some of the best hashish in the world, was flown from Kathmandu via Bangkok and Tokyo to New York. It was being smoked in Greenwich Village the next day. I was very rich again, and I was still in my twenties.

Ernie wanted to do another load right away, a bigger one. Old John wasn’t keen. The suitcases of dollars that Tom Sunde had taken to Nepal had played havoc with the Kathmandu currency markets.

‘This is the American madness. More, more, all the time. Next year the Nepalese won’t plant rice, they’ll plant the thing and all starve. They don’t want money; they want medicine.’

I, however, agreed with Ernie and persuaded Old John to reluctantly commit himself to send a 750-kilo load. It worked. Other loads were sent from Nepal, but none were bigger. After one of the loads, Old John drove an ambulance to Kathmandu stuffed with antibiotics, bandages, and other medical supplies and left it there. He refused to do any more loads. ‘Let Nepal be Nepal.’

Ernie generally sent one of his couriers over with my profit, and I had accumulated a stash of several hundred thousand dollars in cash. I rented flats and cottages in various parts of the country. My main preoccupation was still acquiring false documentation, and addresses were needed to send driving licences and other useful proofs of identity. I became a little silly and even successfully applied for provisional driving licences in the names of Waylon Jennings and Elvis Presley. The Swansea computer didn’t bat an eyelid; it didn’t remember the 1950s. I took the astrologically obtained birth certificates to Post Offices and obtained British Visitor’s Passports.

Johnny Martin introduced me to Philip Sparrowhawk, a jack of all trades from Epsom who, for a price, could obtain bits and pieces of identification. His main source of income was importing textiles from the Far East, but he was also able to do useful things like get back-dated insurance; obtain new, second-hand, and rented cars with minimum formalities; and supply accommodation addresses and telephone lines for short-term use. Through this involvement, Philip and I became friendly, and it wasn’t long before we joined forces and rented office premises at 38A, High Street, Ewell, Surrey. This quickly became the registered office of the Ewell Group of Companies, a cluster of £100 off-the-shelf companies staffed by falsely named directors and secretaries
who never failed to give a suitable reference for an application for a passport or bank account. Some legitimate business transpired at Phil’s insistence, but it was usually of the slightly shady kind: second-hand car dealing, mini-cabbing, backed by overtones of long-firming and insurance fraud.

Apart from the preoccupation with false identity, there was little to indicate I was Britain’s most wanted fugitive from justice. I saw Rosie and Myfanwy frequently, as I did my parents. My social life extended. I re-established friendships with Oxford and Sussex associates, almost all of whom were happy to call me Albi, and made many new ones. They knew who I was, and I was fully aware that any one of them could turn me in to the authorities at any time. I just big-headedly assumed that anyone who knew me liked me and wouldn’t do such a thing. I was too nice to be grassed.

Denys Irving, now fully retired from composing lewd lyrics and enthusiastically pursuing his new hobby of hang-gliding, was working with Mike Ratledge, another friend from Oxford. Mike was the sole surviving member of the Soft Machine, who were, along with Pink Floyd, the freaks’ house band. He had been repeatedly voted
Melody Maker
’s best keyboard player in the world and featured on Mike Oldfield’s smash hit,
Tubular Bells
. Now he and Denys were experimenting with integrated circuitry and electronic music. Both spent all day with soldering irons and circuit boards. My telephoning experiences on the campsites had led me to fantasise about an ideal telephone system. I wanted to be able to carry around a few pieces of change, rather than a bagful, go into any phone box, and phone a specific number, which would automatically divert me to whatever number I then dialled from the phone box. I would have to pay in coins at the phone box for the local connection and whoever rented the specific number would be charged by the telephone company for the onward call to wherever was dialled, be it domestic or international. Also, I wanted to
be able to telephone this specific number from a phone box and ‘give’ it the telephone box number so that anyone else calling this or another specific number would be automatically diverted to the phone box. With such an invention, I could telephone wherever I wanted for pocket money and be reached by whomever I wanted to reach me without his knowing my precise whereabouts. Today, this would be a simple matter. Then, not so, but Denys and Mike, on hearing my fantasy, felt competent enough to be able to make such a machine. Mike devised the circuitry, and Denys did the rest. It worked, most of the time. I ordered the latest and best hang-glider from Ernie to give to Denys. He made me godfather to his and Merdelle’s newly born son, Arthur. Denys went to Lagos, Nigeria, as an audio engineer. He met a marijuana grower and seller. I asked Denys to go back to Nigeria to determine whether marijuana could be air-freighted from there. He came back and said it couldn’t. The hang-glider from Ernie arrived. Denys flew into the ground and died. I felt as if I’d killed him, one of my dearest friends.