Mr Nice: an autobiography (64 page)

After learning that there wasn’t in fact an extradition treaty between the Philippines and the United States, the DEA persuaded the Manila authorities to deport Ronnie Robb to Amsterdam. The Dutch police promised the DEA to grab him on arrival at Schiphol Airport. They did, and he joined Hobbs in an Amsterdam prison. Extradition proceedings were begun.

In England Jimmy Newton’s bail had been revoked, and he was in Miami prison. He holds the distinction of being the only non-American person ever to be extradited to America
for the crime of supplying within non-American territory another non-American with a non-American passport. Worse still, Balendo Lo had been re-arrested as the result of a renewed United States extradition request for precisely the same charge. The British, after deeming that Balendo should not be extradited, were prepared to lock him up and give the DEA another chance.

I was beginning to see what Roger meant. The Feds do not give up.

The Audiencia Nacional was packed with the world’s press. Judy, Geoffrey Kenion, and I stood in a bullet-proof glass box in the middle of the court. We had microphones. Geoffrey went first. He had agreed to be voluntarily extradited. At the holding cells below he had explained to me that his lawyers had worked out a deal for him to plead guilty and tell the DEA the little he knew. He would then be released. I believe he made the right decision. He did not participate in any dope scam. He did a money run for me about which the DEA already knew.

Judy went next. She said she was innocent and did not want to be extradited. She wanted to present her reasons through Gustavo.

I got up and denounced each of the judges by name. They had violated my constitutional rights. They were the subject of an
antijuicio
. They should be dismissed. I did not recognise their authority to deal with me. The judges’ faces angrily flushed to a deep red. They yelled at the defenceless court interpreter. They told me to keep quiet. The case would continue despite my protests.

Gustavo spoke at length about the suffering Judy had experienced. Lovato had arrested her and rudely interrogated her in her nightclothes. She had been needlessly and mercilessly locked up hundreds of miles away from her young children, who were undergoing deep traumatic stress. There was no evidence presented that she had broken any
law. She had a completely spotless record. There were scores of the most complimentary testimonials from highly respectable members of Spanish and British society. The DEA were charging her with the crime of being my wife. This was repugnant to the Spanish system of justice.

After about an hour, the judges became restless and uncomfortably bored. They adjourned the hearing for a week.

At the lawyers’ visiting cell, Gustavo was furious.

‘The judges aren’t even listening to me. They have made up their minds.’

‘What, with Judy, too?’

‘Well, Judy still has a good chance, but they will certainly rule for you to be extradited.’

‘I’m kind of resigned to that, Gustavo. I’m presuming you can keep battling in the appeal courts until the two years are up.’

‘I can, and I will. But this hearing may be your last public appearance. The appeal courts do not require your presence.’

‘So?’

‘Given the way things are going, perhaps you should employ the tactic of the last resort.’

‘Which is?’

‘At the end of the hearing, you will be asked if you have anything to say. If you verbally insult the King of Spain or the country of Spain, this is a serious crime with which the court will have to proceed. I’m not suggesting you do this, Howard, you understand. I’m just explaining the law.’

‘I understand, Gustavo. If I did publicly insult King and country, what would happen?’

‘The guards on duty at the Audiencia Nacional would grab you. The court would close. The press would have a field day. There would be court cases. The injustices you’ve suffered would become publicly aired. The whole episode would become Spain’s biggest scandal. It would waste a lot of time, which would be useful.’

I wasn’t looking forward to this one little bit. I’d rehearsed the speech in Spanish. It was just a few lines: ‘Spain is now an American colony. The King of Spain has no balls. He is no better than a whore, bending his body and his morals to his American master. I spit in his face and shit on the Spanish flag.’

As the prison van drove from Alcala-Meco to the Audiencia Nacional, I saw hundreds of Madrileños going about their business on this glorious early spring morning. They stopped to talk and laugh with each other. They sat in cafés, shamelessly chain-smoking and drinking their prebreakfast coffee and brandy. Children were skipping past them, bubbling with the joy of life. The faces of the men were proud but friendly. The women were either kind mothers or sex goddesses. I loved these ordinary Spanish people, with their healthy contempt for regulation, their inability to get stressed, and their devotion to having a good time. They’re Europe’s best. Newspapers and magazines carried photographs of King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia engaged in ordinary activities like drinking beer and playing a onearmed bandit. I couldn’t offend these people. It wasn’t their fault. I didn’t believe in what I was going to do, so I chickened out. I sat in silence throughout the court hearing, knowing that, in one way, I had given up. How could I possibly fight the DEA if I wasn’t even ruthless enough to insult the people who were locking me up on the DEA’s behalf?

The Audiencia Nacional ruled that Judy and I should be extradited on the Florida federal charges. We did get one victory: I was deemed non-extraditable on the 1973 Nevada rock-group-scam federal charges because too much time had elapsed. It was a hollow victory, as my Florida federal RICO charges included the 1973 rock-group scam. (One of RICO’s prosecutorially endearing qualities is its ability to circumvent statutes of time limitation.)

I lodged an appeal. Judy felt very strongly that she had lost her last chance to beat extradition. Equally strongly, she felt
that no court in the world could possibly convict her of dope smuggling. She wanted to go to Florida and establish her innocence in front of a trial judge. Geoffrey Kenion went to Florida, where the trial of those co-defendants already in America was soon to start. Panic messages from Patrick Lane begged Judy to continue resisting extradition until his trial was finished. He was afraid the DEA would force her to testify against him. Reluctantly, she joined me in my appeal against the extradition order.

The interest I had in the Miami trial prevented me from sinking too low. Also helpful was a rearrangement of the housing arrangements in Alcala-Meco: all non-Spanish prisoners were now in the same cell block. It wasn’t exclusively for foreigners, but largely so. Roger Reaves, Darin Bufalino, and Jacques Canavaggio were pleased to see me. Zacarias was also there. He had too many connections to be locked up in the same cell block as other Madrid gangsters. The first day I was there, he did nothing but smile and feed me strong joints of Moroccan.

The second day, we were not let out from our cells until early evening. Everyone was excitedly huddled around the day’s copy of
El País
. The news was mind-blowing: Esteban Zacarias Sanchez Martinez had escaped from Alcala-Meco, from this very cell block. Zacarias, probably stoned out of his head, had sawn through his cell bars, climbed on to the roof, climbed in the shadow of gun towers over at least three perimeter walls and fences, and escaped from Spain’s topsecurity prison. Roger was seething with envy.

‘I told you it could be done from here. Good Lord, you know I did. I bet he used that jeweller’s string to cut through the bars. Marie never sent it to me; otherwise, I’d be in South Africa growing pot. Goddamn it! Why wouldn’t she send it? I’m going to appeal against being extradited to Germany. I’ll stay here awhile. If that stoned hippie Zacarias can get out of here, you bet your arse I can.’

Jacques Canavaggio approached.

‘This is good news about Zacarias, Marco Polo, no? What is happening in your case? Are they going to try you in Spain? I think this
acción popular
was a very good idea. My trial, of course, will be in Spain. I am glad it is nowhere else.’

An idea struck me.

‘Jacques, the
acción popular
so far has not worked, but maybe you could make it work.’

‘Whatever I can do, my friend.’

‘Tell the Spanish police that the fifteen tons of Lebanese dope in your cave in the Costa Brava came from me. Then the Spanish will have to try me here.’

‘Marco Polo, I am Corsican. We tell the police nothing. But maybe I can persuade one of my co-defendants from France to give the police your name. Would that help?’

‘Thanks, Jacques.’

‘It is my pleasure, Marco Polo.’

More helpful than any of this was the arrival in Alcala-Meco of John Parry, the alleged launderer of the Brinks-Mat millions. He had been picked up by the Spanish police in the Costa del Sol and transferred to Madrid for extradition proceedings. Scotland Yard wanted him badly. Within two minutes of conversing with him, I knew I had met one of the very few life-long friends one makes during years of prison. His compassion, intelligence, humour, and ability to keep himself and others cheerful continually uplifted my spirit. We spent all our out-of-cell time with each other. My parents and his wife befriended each other on their monthly visits to see us. The
funcionarios
moved him to the next cell to mine. We discussed our cases at length and worked on each other’s defences.

Most of my creative defence work had to wait until the outcome of the Miami trial of Patrick Lane, Ernie Combs, and others. The trial began in April. Reports were sent to me via Judy’s sister, Natasha Lane, now living in Florida, and Marcus. Jimmy Newton, Geoffrey Kenion, John Francis (who had allegedly assisted John Denbigh in money
transfers), and Wyvonna Wills (Gerry’s wife) did deals pleading guilty for immediate release. All except John Francis agreed to be witnesses for the prosecution if called. Staunch attempts were made by the defence lawyers of those pleading not guilty to throw out the telephone-tap evidence. To everyone’s surprise, including that of the prosecution, Judge James C. Paine ruled the telephone taps to be admissible. Ernie, his girl-friend Patty, and Patrick were convicted by a jury. Rick Brown, Ernie’s long-term dopemover, and Teresita Caballero, a girl-friend of Patrick’s whom I’d never met, were acquitted. Sentencing of those convicted would take place in a couple of months.

The trial transcripts, together with copies of the actual cassette recordings of the taped phone taps and taped conversations with Lord Moynihan, were sent to me from Miami. None of the defendants had taken the witness stand to speak in their own defence. No constructive defence had been offered. I knew this was a mistake. Only guilty people decline to be cross-examined and rely on prosecutorial incompetence to obtain their freedom.

The DEA had made one enormous boob. Presumably not knowing of the existence of Jarvis, they had incorrectly assumed that it was I who had delivered the crates of hashish to the American President Line at Karachi Wharf in 1984. DEA agent Harlan Lee Bowe and Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise Officer John Stephenson were so convinced of this that they had managed to persuade various Pakistani employees of the American President Line to positively identify me. I knew I wasn’t in Pakistan at that time. There would be plenty of records to establish that fact and show to a court, yet again, that Michael Stephenson didn’t always get things right. This time, unlike at the Old Bailey, the accusation would be correct.

I listened to the cassettes and searched for the recording of my denial to Moynihan of involvement in the Canadian scam or any recent American scam. It was missing. I searched for
reference to it in the trial transcripts. A DEA agent testified that his secretary had inadvertently erased twenty minutes of recordings, but that Moynihan had confirmed that during that twenty minutes I had admitted involvement in Canadian and American scams. So the DEA were prepared to destroy evidence that didn’t suit them and commit perjury to explain its disappearance. No big surprise.

The original reel-to-reel recordings of the telephone taps no longer existed. The Miami court was given the rather pathetic explanation that the Spanish police were forced through reasons of economy to re-use the reel-to-reel tapes. It apparently did not occur to the DEA that an extremely small fraction of the several million dollars they were expending on this case could have equipped the impoverished Spanish police with a fully functional, state-of-the-art recording studio, let alone with a few blank reels.

Craig Lovato had, however, managed to copy his own carefully chosen selection of five hundred conversations and bits of conversations before the Spanish ran out of tape. From these he compiled a set of ‘composite duplicates’, a kind of cut-and-paste auditory collage. Lovato was confident he knew the identity of each person speaking, whereas, in fact, he had made almost thirty misidentifications. Some were understandable. Others weren’t: Chi Chuen Lo’s very Cantonese accent was once identified as the voice of Lord Anthony Moynihan, while the cockney twang of Mickey Williams was continually identified as Salim Malik’s voice.

I spent hours every day making my own transcripts of the tapped telephone calls. The transcripts provided by the United States prosecution were laughably inaccurate. Most of the errors were clear evidence of perceptual bias, making me think they had been prepared by Lovato. ‘Tight’ was transcribed as ‘Thai’, ‘eight o’clock’ as ‘Bangkok’, ‘drag’ as ‘drug’, ‘cats’ as ‘cash’, ‘of course’ as ‘at the coast’, ‘fits in with your’ as ‘that big shipment of yours’, and ‘overlapping’ as ‘mobile operative’.