Mr Nice: an autobiography (25 page)

Judy and I took Concorde from Washington to Paris and after a few days flew to Nice. We checked into the Carlton in Cannes. I rang Durrani.

‘You have heard what has happened to crazy Irishman few days ago?’

‘No, Mohammed, I haven’t.’

‘I will explain you.’

Durrani related how McCann had left New York for his wood and glass mansion in Brunswick Beach, Vancouver. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police came to his residence and took him away. Apparently, they had proof he wasn’t James Kennedy of the Massachusetts dynasty and reason to believe he was James McCann, a fugitive from British justice since his escape from Crumlin Road prison, Belfast, several years ago. Bail had been refused. The grounds given by the Canadian authorities were that ‘the protection of the public demands the detention of the applicant. He has escaped custody twice, he has enormous financial backing and is an international fugitive. He is a public menace whose threats to public officials cannot be treated lightly.’

Over at Durrani’s house in the Alpes-Maritimes, I sat down with Lebanese Sam. He found the proposal of being paid 35% of the wholesale price in America for all the hashish he could send from Beirut very attractive. We set up communication methods. There was time to kill before Sam was ready to export the Lebanese hashish and before a meeting with Raoul concerning export of Pakistani hashish could take place. Judy and I rented a Mercedes, and we toured France, ending up in the Dordogne Valley at the converted mill of her brother Patrick Lane. He had given up snail farming (the snails had run away one night) and was eager to restart one of his more lucrative past activities. I had always enjoyed Patrick’s company and knew that Graham had high regard for his accountancy abilities. I thought it might be sensible to use Patrick to open up some foreign bank accounts. Keeping all that cash in safes and safe-deposit boxes in America was limiting its use.

‘Patrick, what do you know about offshore banking?’

‘Absolutely nothing outside Switzerland, which everybody knows about.’

‘If I paid all expenses and gave you a few grand, would you study offshore banking and tax havens and fly around the world to test things out personally? Perhaps you could open up a few company and personal accounts.’

‘When do I leave?’

Judy and I left the Dordogne, drove south, and couldn’t resist visiting Albi. At the centre of the city was the cathedral, a vast fortress-like edifice containing a statue dedicated to St Judith. We took this as the ultimate confirmation that we were meant to be with each other. We went over the Alps to Milano, and, after a wonderful night at the Villa d’Este in Cernobbio just outside Como, we drove across the Italian–Swiss border at Chiasso and along the shores of Lake Lugano. We stayed at the Hotel Splendide in Lugano, Europe’s Rio de Janeiro, and had breakfast overlooking the lake.

‘Albi, I have to tell you something.’

‘Go ahead, love.’

‘I’m pregnant.’

We both burst into smiles.

‘But I’m not going to have the baby in America as Mrs Tunnicliffe. I want him or her to be born in England, Albi. They don’t let women fly if they’re very pregnant, so I’ll have to live a train ride away from London.’

‘You know I’ll have to go to America sometimes, Judy, and maybe even Lebanon and Pakistan.’

‘I know, Albi, but I have no choice.’

The sun’s rays glistened off the lake’s surface. On the opposite shore, framed by magnificent mountains, lay a little village.

‘That place looks so beautiful, Albi. I’d love to go there.’

‘Okay, love, we’ll drive there for lunch and celebrate.’

It was a ten-minute drive. On the bridge over the lake we
passed a restaurant called La Romantica, drove through a village called Bissone, and came across an unmanned border post. There was a sign stating Campione d’Italia, and the Italian flag was flying. Cars were speeding through the border in both directions, so I carried on driving. The village was an exquisite mixture of old and modern architecture, and everyone seemed extremely wealthy. There was a large casino. We drove through the village, and after about a mile of country, the road split into two. We drove down the left-hand fork and were stopped by four Japanese guards. We tried the right fork. It terminated in a tennis stadium. This place was wild. We were in Italy but couldn’t get to anywhere else in Italy. We must still be in Switzerland. In the centre of the village was a restaurant called La Taverna. Impeccably clad waiters ushered us to an alfresco table covered with gleaming glass, cutlery, and porcelain. Our waiter spoke perfect English.

‘Are we in Italy or Switzerland?’ I asked.

‘We accept both currencies, sir. We accept all currencies and all credit cards. May I suggest you help yourselves to the antipasto table?’

‘But which country are we actually in?’ I persisted.

‘Italy.’

‘Do you live here?’ I asked.

‘Now, yes, but I am from Sicily.’

A London taxi drew up outside the restaurant. A handsome, bespectacled fifty-year-old German came in accompanied by a garishly dressed Rastafarian, a rich cockney businessman, a Sophia Loren look-alike, and a blonde Teutonic beauty. The place filled up with eminently watchable personalities.

I had read somewhere that Mafia chieftains drank Brunello di Montalcino with their meat dishes. It was on the menu, and I ordered it. We ate and drank to our hearts’ content.

‘This is an amazing place, Judy. The telephones are Swiss. That policeman is Italian, but the licence plates on his car are Swiss. What is going on?’

Although one couldn’t drive from Campione d’Italia to anywhere else in Italy, there once existed a cable car connecting the village to the nearest Italian mountain, and boats plied between Campione and harbours on the truly Italian side of Lake Lugano. Benito Mussolini built a casino in the village. A secret tunnel, known by everyone, connected the casino to the priest’s house. I loved Campione.

Judy and I toured around Switzerland and opened a few bank accounts and safe-deposit boxes, she in her real name, I in the name of Tunnicliffe. In one of her safe-deposit boxes, Judy stowed away her Mrs Tunnicliffe passport. Lebanese Sam was back in Durrani’s house in the Alpes-Maritimes. Judy went to Campione to look for a flat to rent while I drove from Geneva to Cannes. Sam had arranged everything in Beirut and was ready to send a 1,000-kilo load of hashish to Kennedy Airport. Tom Sunde flew to Zurich with money from Ernie, which I took and gave to Lebanese Sam in Geneva for him to take to Beirut. Two weeks later, Judy and I were sitting in a newly rented flat in Via Totone, Campione d’Italia, overlooking Lake Lugano with breathtaking views of Lugano town and the towering peaks of San Salvatore and Monte Bre. I had just made another $300,000. Lebanese Sam went back to Beirut to repeat the successful scam.

Meanwhile McCann was making spirited attempts to be released from his Canadian captors. Using an intrigued Vancouver media, he declared, ‘I’m offering you a deal. I’ll leave. That’s the deal. If you keep me arrested, the effect will be like a stone dropped into an Irish brine of violence. The ripple will peel you like an apple.’

McCann addressed Canadian Immigration spokesman Jack Betteridge with the words: ‘Mr Betteridge, you are an enemy of the Irish people and will be tried in front of an Irish tribunal. You are also a fucking fascist pig, and justice will be served on you.’

Fascinated British Columbian television audiences heard
McCann repeatedly explain that his arrest was engineered by MI6 as a result of his unearthing an Ulster Protestant gun-running organisation in Vancouver. He claimed he was a member of the Official IRA and had represented Sinn Fein in Vietnam and Cambodia in the 1960s. He had a birth certificate in the name of Joseph Kennedy, and he carefully explained how ‘Jim’ was an old Gaelic abbreviation for ‘Joseph’. Various bomb threats were made to Canadian embassies in Ireland and South America. The Canadian Mounties weakened, gave Jim back his false passport, and put him on a plane for Paris, where he was seen escorting Aki Lehmann, wife of the prominent New York banker Robin Lehmann, at the fashionable Paris night-club Castell’s.

At the beginning of October 1977, Judy and I locked up the Campione flat and travelled by train and ferry to Victoria Station. We checked into Blake’s Hotel in Roland Gardens and began searching for a suitable London flat. Judy was nervous about using a phoney identity to rent the flat in case there were any complications during the birth which might reveal the falsity and get me into trouble. In her own name, she had no bank account, other than a few Swiss ones. We had to find someone prepared to rent a flat for us. Nik Douglas and Penny Slinger were two friends whose slight acquaintance we had made before leaving for America a year earlier. They were living together in Chelsea. Both were extraordinarily talented individuals. Educated in the sciences, Nik produced records and managed pop groups in the early 1960s; moved to Spain and developed new techniques for utilising solar energy in the mid-1960s; studied Sanskrit, Tibetan, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Tantric Yoga in India, Tibet, and Nepal in the late 1960s; and studied homeopathy, Indian medicine, and Eastern alchemy in the early 1970s. He had published many books on Eastern culture and religion and had directed a film,
Tantra
, which had been produced by Mick Jagger. Penny
held a first-class honours degree in Fine Arts. Her surrealist art had been published and exhibited on several occasions. When I met them, they were working together on a number of art and literary projects. I was excited and inspired by them and their work and decided to help them out in whatever way I could. They had never asked me to give them any significant money, but I knew they could use it.

At the end of October, at St Theresa’s Hospital, Wimbledon, I watched Judy give birth to our daughter, who was too beautiful to be called by any of the names we had experimented with over the last few weeks. For days she remained magically unnamed and mysterious. Then Penny, who visited Judy’s bedside with Nik, said, ‘She told me her name was Amber.’

It was, and Judy and I went to register her birth at the registry office. We put down the father’s name as Albert Waylon Jennings, a singer for the group Laughing Grass. Years later, when I was in prison, Amber discovered her birth certificate. She was right in the middle of an adolescent identity crisis. It couldn’t have helped much.

While in London, I ran into Sally Minford, the sister of John Minford, my Balliol Dramatic Society friend. She was now living with Michael O’Connel, a talented musician and recording engineer. They wanted to open up a recording studio and needed capital. Without disclosing the source, I provided some money, and a Pimlico recording studio called Archipelago was formed. In a short period, artists such as Elvis Costello were using the facilities, and Island Records were subletting them.

At a social function in Islington, I ran into Anthony Woodhead. He had not been suspected of foul play after the investigation into my disappearance from the Regent’s Park penthouse. This he had achieved by putting the blame on his Czechoslovakian girl-friend and getting her to admit she had sublet me the penthouse without his knowledge. I had never seen anyone so relieved to see me. He had spent a year in San
Francisco and had befriended a bent US Customs Officer who could clear air-freight at San Francisco Airport provided it arrived on a Pan American flight. Woodhead asked if I knew anyone who could export hashish. I said I knew someone who could do it in Lebanon, and another person who could do it from Thailand. We agreed straightforward terms: he and his friend would pay half the costs in Lebanon (or Thailand); my source and I would get half the money from the sales in San Francisco.

Lebanese Sam’s second deal to Don Brown in New York didn’t make it. Sam got busted in Beirut just before another 1,000 kilos of hashish were about to be exported. There were inquiries made in New York, but Don Brown and the Mob were not questioned. Business could continue, but not for some time, and the method would have to be considerably refined. On arrival in New York the consignment would have to appear as if it had been exported from a non-dope-producing country. The air waybill could no longer show Bangkok or Beirut as the airport of the consignment’s loading. If it did, it would certainly be busted by US Customs. Phil Sparrowhawk flew in and out of Bangkok with message after message and idea after idea. Changing the origin was difficult. There would be no air-freight scams from Thailand to New York for a while, but there might be one to San Francisco from somewhere else.

Durrani came to London to discuss the implications of Lebanese Sam’s bust. He stayed at his house in Dulwich, and I visited him there.

‘Howard, thank you for British passport you sent. It is perfect. Unfortunately, I think you should get new one for you, too. Sam knows you use Tunnicliffe passport. Maybe he wrote down detail which police now have. Maybe not. I don’t know.’

‘I’ll get another one, Mohammed. Thanks for the advice.’

‘I need one more favour from you. I want my son to go to the Oxford University. You can arrange?’

‘It’s not like that, Mohammed, I assure you.’

‘I will pay handsome price.’

‘That’s what it’s not like. You can’t buy your way into Oxford.’

‘But I meet many rich people here in London. They all say their children go to the Oxford University.’

‘That’s because rich people can afford to send their children to expensive schools, and it’s easier to get into Oxford from an expensive school, partly because the teachers and facilities are better and partly because expensive schools have closed scholarships to Oxford and Cambridge.’