Mr Nice: an autobiography (34 page)

Italy began as the clear favourite. I’d spent that six months as a fugitive in Genova in 1974. Judy and I had maintained
a place in Campione d’Italia for three years. We felt fairly familiar with the Italian language and traditions. The Mafia still fascinated me despite my familiarity with some of their operations. We decided to do some exploration, starting with Tuscany. We flew to Pisa and rented a house outside nearby Lucca. We visited Florence, Siena, and Livorno. We saw an open-air opera at Puccini’s house and drank some Brunello di Montalcino. The sensuality of the country and people captivated us again, but we were getting increasingly irritated by such quaint Italian customs as paying exorbitant fees to sit on a beach and frowning on foreigners not sporting Gianni Versace socks. Nevertheless, there were always the addictive autostradas, so one morning we rose early and drove south.

At Castellamare di Stabia, the eight-lane autostrada from Rome suddenly turns into a horse-and-cart track. The visitor has four conventional choices: see Naples and die from mugging, go to Capri and die from poverty, trudge through Vesuvius’s volcanic ash in Pompeii, or die from exhaust fumes crawling around the Malfi coastline. We ignored these distractions, parked the car at Naples airport, and caught an Itavia flight to Palermo, Sicily. My suitcase flopped onto the carousel, pursued by three large, snarling Alsatians. Judy looked horrified.

‘What have you got in that case, Howard?’

‘Nothing, love. Don’t worry. This is a domestic flight. They can’t search our bags. We haven’t come in here from any foreign country.’

‘But, Howard, you swore you would never carry dope when we travelled with the children. Those were your precise words.’

I had faithfully promised not to bring out any hash with me from England, and, as a supreme sacrifice, I had stuck to that promise. Something weird was happening.

‘Who are you meeting here? I knew something was going on when you suggested coming here.’

Judy knew nothing of the 250-kilo bust involving me, Mickey Williams, and McCann. But my agitated behaviour over the last couple of weeks had ignited her suspicions.

‘I’m not meeting anyone here. I promise. I’ve no idea what this is about.’

It was true. I didn’t.

Four armed policemen grabbed me and escorted me and my suitcase to an empty room. Judy was told to
aspetti, per favore
. The Sicilian cops tore my baggage apart, looked in every crease and pocket, and took away each item of paperwork. The words of the Dutch chief prosecutor ran through my mind: ‘For this charge, Mr Marks, you can be prosecuted and serve consecutive sentences in England, America, Holland, Austria, France, Ireland, and Italy.’

I had already been done for it in England and Holland. Were they going to do me in Italy now, for the same charge? During the 1970s, I’d entered and exited Italy with a variety of different passports and broken the country’s stringent currency regulations on countless occasions. Did they know this?

One of the Sicilian cops came back, clutching my paperwork and brandishing a computer print-out. Grinning broadly, he extended his hand.

‘Ah! Signore Marks.
Il capo di contrabando. Il spione. Benvenuto a Sicilia
.’

This was unexpected. Judy and the children were politely ushered in. We were all taken to a furnished room.

‘
Dove restare in Palermo?
’

I explained we had booked rooms at the Villa Igiea (the old haunt of Lucky Luciano and Palermo’s finest luxury hotel). The policeman called the hotel and summoned its chauffeur.

Palermo is a seriously criminal city. The city’s centre is dominated by its prison. The mega Mafia trial involving several hundred defendants was in full swing. A newly-dug tunnel connected the prison to the courthouse. Tanks
guarded the gates. The heavily armed guards allowed no photographs. Around the corner, olive-skinned kids played Sicilian hopscotch within the white-chalked outlines of recent murder victims. Photographs were not encouraged. None of the taxi-drivers used their meters. All the clothes boutiques and hairdressers were men’s. Bodyguards were everywhere. Telephonic communications, particularly by Italy’s standards, were excellent. The cuisine was among Europe’s finest. The solitary international flight was a weekly non-stop to New York, packed with hit men and currency-regulation violators posing as olive-oil exporters. I wasn’t bored for a moment, but I had to agree with Judy that it was no place to develop my legitimate business empire. We left, but not before I had opened an account at the Banca di Sicilia. Asking people to pay into an obvious Mafia account might increase the speed of settlement.

A day or so later, we were at the departure lounge of Pisa’s international airport. Poking around the duty-free shelves, I ran into Neil Kinnock. He was smoking a cigarette. I liked what I knew about Kinnock. Would he turn out to be the long-awaited (at least in Wales) combination of King Arthur, Owain Glendower, and Nye Bevan that would oust the iron lady Thatcher and become our new Prime Minister?

‘You’re Mr Kinnock, aren’t you?’

‘Yes. What part of Wales are you from?’

We launched into an enjoyable discussion of South Wales geography and weather. We lamented the recent performances of the Welsh rugby team.

‘Howard. Come here,’ Judy’s voice boomed from nowhere.

‘Wait a minute, love, I’m talking to Mr Kin …’

‘Please, Howard, come here at once.’

She was angry. Why?

I excused myself from Neil Kinnock’s presence. Judy started walking away, very briskly.

‘What’s the matter, Judy? What is it?’

‘What on earth do you think you’re up to talking to that evil screw from Brixton prison? You’re meant to be glad to have seen the back of people like that. Was he the one you were secretly meeting in Palermo?’

It was a fact. Neil Kinnock looked remarkably like a Brixton screw whom Judy had frequently encountered while visiting me in prison.

‘Judy, that was Neil Kinnock. He would have been a good straight man to know. You just blew it.’

Judy went a deep shade of red and buried her head in my chest. We broke into laughter.

After we boarded the plane, the children saved our faces a little by going up to Kinnock and getting his autograph.

The Dutch system of justice is extremely civilised. Mickey was released after serving a few months, and the authorities did not appear to want to find anyone else to arrest. We met again at Richaux, opposite Harrods.

‘Them Dutch nicks ain’t ’arf good, H. Blinding food, screws you can ’ave a laugh with. You could do a ten standing on your head. So what you been up to, H?’

I explained my intention to live abroad.

‘Ever been to Palma, H?’

‘Not really, Mick.’ I had, in fact, once visited Palma when doing the Morocco to Scotland scam, but it was only for one night, and I’d stayed on a boat.

‘Give it a whirl, H. I got a gaff there. You can use it anytime.’

Mickey’s kind offer was accepted. We flew to Palma de Mallorca and stayed at Mickey’s flat in Magaluf. The immediate vicinity fulfilled all one’s nightmares about package holidays. The streets were packed with screaming British soccer hooligans. Pubs with names such as London Pride, Rovers’ Return, Benny Hill, and Princess Di emptied lager louts into a bewildering array of discothèques, souvenir stalls, and fish and chip shops. Strangely enough, there were
very few street fights. A similar alcoholic and boisterous mass thronging an English street would very quickly turn into a riot. The holidaymakers looked happy. Even paradise couldn’t compete with guaranteed sunshine, ubiquitous promiscuity, and non-stop drinking. A lot of money was being spent. It would be easy to make some with minimum investment. But could one bear to live here?

‘It can’t all be like this,’ said Judy. ‘Let’s rent a car and have a look around the island.’

She was right. Within minutes, the stench of booze and vomit was replaced by sweet perfumes of cherry and almond blossoms. Most of Mallorca is deserted and beautifully tranquil. The highest mountain is taller than any in the British Isles. At its foot live people who have never seen the sea, thirty miles away. Small villages hang off hills and provide accommodation for some of the world’s greatest artists, musicians, and writers. The city of Palma is a delightful mixture of medieval Italian and Moorish architecture. Non-vandalised telephone boxes are in abundance, and people smoke hash in the street. The airport is one of the busiest in the world. The weather is perfect. We figured we could live here. We looked around for a home, found a few possibilities, and went back to London to decide.

Ernie had left several messages on my private answering machine asking me to call. I rang the number he’d left and spoke to him in the same code we’d used for a decade. Through other well-rehearsed codes, he asked if I still knew hash exporters in Pakistan and, in particular, did I know one able to air-freight five tons of the best hash to New York? Ernie was very definitely back in business. I said I’d get on to it right away. Ernie was the one person Judy could not object to my dealing with. He’d done so much for us. I mentioned to Ernie the DEA manual McCann had given me. Ernie told me they were selling them in dime stores. Concentrate on Pakistan.

I thought of Salim Malik, whom I’d met at Mohammed Durrani’s deathbed. He might not even remember me. He’d only spent two minutes in my company and thought my name was Mr Nice. I called the number from a London phone box. He answered. He didn’t remember me from Adam but agreed to meet me on neutral territory. He suggested Hong Kong or Damascus. I chose Hong Kong.

It had been four years since I’d last visited the Far East. I was looking forward to it. I thumbed through
Time Out
in search of a cheap air fare. A company called Hong Kong
International Travel Centre appeared to have the best prices, so I went to its offices in Beak Street. All the company’s considerable business was run by just one Chinese couple, a heavily birthmarked young male called Chi Chuen (Balendo) Lo and his beautiful and older girlfriend, Orca Liew. He was from Hong Kong, she from Malaysia. I was impressed by the way they operated and took an immediate liking to them. I promised to visit them on my return from Hong Kong. They promised to buy their Christmas and New Year refreshment from Drinkbridge.

British Caledonian took me from Gatwick to Dubai and from Dubai to Kai Tak, arriving mid-morning, the day before my arranged meeting with Salim Malik. I checked into the Park Hotel on Chatham Road, Kowloon side, and decided to be a tourist for a day.

During my few years’ absence, Hong Kong had changed; or maybe there was just an awful lot more of it and twice the population. Vast stretches of development land had been reclaimed from the sea. Monstrous high-rise buildings wrapped in bamboo scaffolding cages were hastily replacing not-so-high-rise buildings. Due to a respect for plant life far exceeding that of most Western environmentalists, Hong Kong’s civil engineers and planners had ensured that no trees would be damaged by construction work. The result was a series of incongruous juxtapositions of gnarled woodwork and neon. The trees looked pitifully small, like bonsai trees in Kensington Gardens.

I walked along Kowloon’s new promenade and gazed at the mind-blowing skyline of Hong Kong Island. I took the Star Ferry, still plying between Hong Kong and Kowloon, still as cheap as ever and still plastered with instructions for the Chinese not to spit. I did the Hong Kong Island tourist routine: took the tram up the Peak, ate a tiger’s prick at the Jumbo floating restaurant in Aberdeen, took the world’s longest escalator to Ocean Park, sipped snake’s blood in Jervois Street, and drank in a hooker bar in Wan Chai.

Newspapers were full of reports bemoaning the promises London was making to Peking regarding the return of Hong Kong to Chinese rule. British Government supporters excused the apparent cowardice by maintaining that it was simply a case of a 100-year lease running out. But this was blatantly misleading. In fact, the lease applied to just a part of the Kowloon peninsula and the so-called New Territories. The rest, a main chunk of the Kowloon peninsula (Tsim Sha Tsui), Hong Kong Island, and a few hundred other islands, the British had simply ripped off and appended to the Empire. The Chinese had no internationally recognisable claim of ownership. But this caused Peking little concern. After all, at any time since the Sixties, the Chinese could have grabbed the lot by making one phone call to Westminster. Margaret Thatcher would not be able to do what she did in the Falklands. When Portugal turned left in the mid-Seventies and tried to give up Macao, its colony in China, Peking refused. Not yet. The Chinese would take everything back when it wanted to. It wants to in 1997. It will. Who runs the place, anyway? Five million Chinese, twenty thousand Americans, and seventeen thousand British. Who’s kidding whom? The Chinese are long-term planners. It took them over 150 years to build their Great Wall. It took them only 100 years to be given on a silver platter the largest shopping, banking, and shipping centre in the world. They know what they’re doing.