Mr Nice: an autobiography (71 page)

‘Give it to us straight, Teach.’

‘Because you have good taste. You gave us the music. We gave you the lyrics. Now we’ll start with punctuation marks. Do you know what they are? What’s this?’

I wrote a full-stop on the board.

‘That’s a period, Teach.’

A Rastafarian Posse member objected.

‘Wapen him, Teach. Him say “period”. Me say “fullstop”. Ah Jamaica me come from. In Jamaica a “period” mean a bitch bleeding.’

The head of the Department of Education summoned me to the next room.

‘Marks, you’re teaching GED, right.’

‘That’s right.’

‘You don’t appear to have one.’

‘One what?’

‘A GED, Marks. I have no record of you having a GED or a high-school diploma.’

‘I don’t have either. That’s right.’

‘Now the powers that be might consider it inappropriate for a prisoner without a GED to be teaching other prisoners how to get one. You see what I’m getting at?’

‘But I’ve got a Master’s degree.’

‘There are plenty of people with Master’s degrees who can’t teach GED. The haircutting school in this prison gives Master’s degrees to people who can’t read.’

‘But I got my Master’s degree at Oxford.’

‘Oxford, Wisconsin. Who was your inmate supervisor?’

‘Not Oxford, Wisconsin prison. The University of Oxford in England.’

‘Well, no disrespects, but the United States Government is a bit wary of foreign qualifications. Generally, it doesn’t recognise them.’

‘It recognises foreign convictions.’

‘Maybe. I’m not a criminologist. I’m an education specialist, and I take the view that if the foreign qualification is meaningful, then the holder will have no objection to being re-tested by a more appropriate body. Shall I put your name down to sit the next GED examination?’

I passed. Wearing a radiant blue gown and mortar board, I was presented with a certificate by a smiling, tongue-in-cheek Webster.

In conjunction with a local university the prison’s Department of Education also funded and ran evening classes. I wanted to attend, but they weren’t available to non-American citizens. This really infuriated me. The US Government were tearing around the world extraditing people and then refusing them an education in prison
because they were aliens. I went to see the head of the Department of Education to complain.

‘Yes, Marks, what’s the problem?’

‘This is straightforward discrimination. Why aren’t we aliens allowed to pursue further education?’

‘You have to remember, Marks, that each course a prisoner takes costs the American taxpayers $2,000. Have you paid much in the way of American tax?’

‘It costs the American taxpayer $25,000 a year to keep me here. Don’t you think it would make economic sense to spend 10% more and enable me to emerge as a useful community member rather than a biker or crack dealer?’

‘I don’t know, Marks. I’m not an economist. I’m an education specialist.’

‘It seems insane to me. And unconstitutional. Don’t you have something called the Fifteenth Amendment which prohibits discrimination on the basis of nationality?’

‘I don’t know, Marks. I’m not a lawyer. I’m an education specialist. Anyway, Marks, you should have thought of that before you came to America and broke our laws.’

‘I didn’t want to come here. I was brought against my will.’

‘Well, you shouldn’t have broken any laws after arriving here, whichever way you were brought.’

‘I haven’t.’

‘Then take it up with your lawyer, Marks. I can’t help you. I’m an …’

‘I know.’

A correspondence course was possible. I applied to the University of London to do an external law degree. I was accepted and began some preparatory study in the prison’s law library. There was plenty of overlap between American and English law.

Forty dollars a month is not much, even if one is provided with free accommodation, food, clothes, and leisure activities. I had significantly greater expenses than the
average American prisoner because of the costs of making international telephone calls, the only way I could talk to my family. Furthermore, prisoners who had unpaid fines (I had one of $50,000) would be forced to make substantial monthly contributions to the debt under the guise of ‘The Inmate Financial Responsibility Program’. The only jobs that paid really well ($200 a month) were at the prison industry factory making army blankets for the US troops in Iraq. Fuck that. Everyone not helping the war effort had to find a ‘hustle’, an illegal way of making money within the prison system from those lucky enough to have funds or getting paid for doing their bit for Desert Storm. Possible hustles included stealing food from the kitchen, stealing knives from the factory, stealing all manner of stuff from the stores, making and selling alcoholic beverages, taking sports bets, doing other prisoners’ laundry, making customised greetings cards, painting portraits, giving blow-jobs, enforcing debt payment, and interior decorating of cells. Some prisoners became jailhouse lawyers, helping people attempting to obtain post-conviction relief from the courts. It was an ideal hustle for me, and I busied myself articulating other prisoners’ presentations to judges, lawyers, and Congressmen. A couple of early successes were achieved – a conviction overturned and a sentence reduced by ten years – and these ensured that I was heavily in demand. I never actually charged for my work, but I was almost always given something: food stolen from the kitchen, a tennis racquet, a Walkman, a hand-stitched Marco Polo jogging suit, a leather briefcase. Money Orders from New Jersey and Florida, all marked ‘remittance to inmate from family’, dribbled into my account. I made an average of $300 a month. It was more than enough.

Hunting Marco Polo
, by Paul Eddy and Sara Walden, was published and sent to me in Terre Haute by the
Mail on Sunday
, who wanted me to review it. I did. The book was written rather like a police manual but was accurate enough
in its coverage of material with which I was familiar. One feature irritated me: its presentation of my arrest as the culmination of a chess-type battle of wits between equally armed opponents (me and Lovato). Lovato had a colossal federal budget and had the co-operation of fourteen different governments’ law enforcement agencies; I had a bunch of nice guys.

Much had taken place outside the prison walls between my departure from Miami MCC and my receiving of a GED diploma at the end of 1991. In a sickening display of bullying and cowardice, the DEA persuaded the Dutch authorities to re-arrest Old John after his arrival in Amsterdam. They extradited him to Miami. He appeared in front of Judge Paine, refused to say anything other than plead guilty, was sentenced to time served, and set free. Balendo Lo pleaded guilty to money laundering and was immediately set free. Philip Sparrowhawk was extradited from Bangkok to Miami. He told the DEA everything he knew and was set free. Of the ten people extradited at enormous expense from all over the world, nine of them were almost immediately released once they had appeared in front of Judge Paine and pleaded guilty. I was the only one the US Government wanted to keep locked up.

After his release, Malik went back to Pakistan. Then he went to Hong Kong, where he was arrested and extradited back to the United States. I have no idea why, or where he is now. But for sure, Lovato was involved.

McCann was arrested by the German police in Düsseldorf. They found some hashish and a false passport in his car. For some reason the Germans did not charge him with the 1973 bombing of the British Army base in Mönchengladbach for which they had been obsessively seeking his extradition for almost two decades. Instead, through courtesy of information supplied by Roger Reaves, they charged him with supplying a German boat and captain with a ton of Moroccan dope bound for England. Perhaps,
like the Americans, they thought of it as a more serious offence. A German judge, McCann’s prosecutor, and McCann’s defence lawyer eventually came to question me in Terre Haute. I swore that I had nothing to do with any Moroccan hashish deal and that as far as I knew neither had McCann. McCann was acquitted, despite the German prosecution taking the extraordinary step of paying Lovato to make an eleventh-hour appearance at a German court to discredit my testimony. Fucking McCann. He still hasn’t got a dope conviction.

By placing a notice in
The Times
, Lord Moynihan faked the death of his baby son to ensure that his even younger son would sit in the House of Lords. DEA Agent Craig Lovato was godfather to at least one of his sons. Then Moynihan actually died of a heart attack in the Philippines. Or so the world’s press would have us believe. There’s no corpse.

In clouds of secrecy, Tom Sunde voluntarily surrendered to the DEA to be debriefed. He pleaded guilty to a dope charge and was sentenced to five years’ probation. His mentor, Carl, continued to search for President Ferdinand Marcos’s millions. In doing so, he stepped on the toes of the Swiss authorities, who sought his extradition from Germany. The Germans refused to give him up. Immediately afterwards Jacobi was arrested in Hong Kong pursuant to a United States extradition request based on DEA allegations that he had sold me information. Hong Kong declined to extradite.

Roger Reaves was re-arrested. After escaping from Lübeck prison, he had decided to become a fugitive in America. The authorities recognised him and put him in a county jail. A tunnel was discovered in his cell. He was transferred to USP Lompoc, California. Ron Allen, the Chicago dealer who was with me in Pakistan, was finally caught. He pleaded guilty in exchange for a short sentence. Only Gerry Wills remained unbusted.

Judge Robert Bonner, the head of the DEA, visited
London. In response to questions asked about my 25-year sentence, the
Daily Telegraph
quoted him as saying: ‘I don’t know how we keep people like Marks out of drug trading unless you put people like him in the slammer. I’m not troubled by the length of the sentence. He should serve it.’

The
Daily Telegraph
also made reference to a report that I had £50 million tucked away. I wrote to the editor:

It was such a wonderful and much needed Christmas surprise to read in your columns that I am the owner of £50 million concealed in Caribbean and/or Eastern bloc bank accounts. I was totally unaware that I had this loot. All they say about the damaging effects of cannabis on the memory must be true.

Federal Bureau of Prison rules preclude my sensibly and responsibly using this money. Providing, therefore, you undertake to pay my federally imposed fine, settle my wife’s mortgage, keep my family from starving, and pay for my children’s school fees, I would be delighted to transfer these funds to any purpose you choose.

Please let me know whether or not you are interested. If so, I will send you a duly notarised power of attorney form granting you access to any and all funds of mine held in any bank account in any country.

Incidentally, there were a couple of errors in your report. I am incarcerated in a federal penitentiary, which is in Indiana not Florida. Also I was fined $50,000 not £100,000. Still, that’s all the more for you if you take advantage of my offer. Trusting and hoping these were the only inaccuracies. Howard Marks.

My letter was published, but no one took up my offer. Things looked up for a while when Bill Clinton announced
he was standing for office. An Oxford-educated, dope-taking, philandering, draft-dodging leader was just what this ridiculous country needed. Then he said he stuck joints in his mouth but didn’t inhale them and that he definitely wouldn’t legalise any dope. The
Mail on Sunday
came to interview me. They said they had proof I lived with Clinton in Oxford. (Maybe he was just a passive stoner.) I didn’t remember living with Clinton anywhere, but I didn’t deny it. Perhaps one day I could use this strange rumour to my advantage. I declined to answer any questions about my old mate Bill. It wouldn’t be fair to him. Clinton had been at University College, Oxford, failing his B.Phil. when I was doing postgraduate work at Balliol and living at Garsington. I never met anyone who smoked joints without inhaling.

Much was made plain to me during the same year (1991), all thoroughly depressing. My assumption that I would be released on parole as soon as I was eligible (November 1996) provided I behaved myself was totally wrong. Whether or not one is granted release on parole in the United States is not determined by one’s institutional conduct, as it is in the British parole system, but by the current political perception of the offence committed. I didn’t know this. I had not met anyone who had been granted parole. Drug smuggling was considered to be responsible for all of America’s worst problems. Large-scale smugglers of any drug didn’t get parole. The news hit me hard. Instead of release in 1996, I had to get used to the idea of getting released a few years into the next century. I checked the law books on parole cases. Parole had been refused to marijuana smugglers on the basis of the excessive quantities involved, the unusual sophistication of the scam committed, the seniority of the particular parole applicant within the scam, the number of people to whom he gave orders, its international character, and the case’s notoriety. I wasn’t optimistic. In the law library, I also discovered a Parole Commission policy statement taking an official stance of discouraging prisoners from pursuing
careers in law. Such plans for release would be unfavourably reviewed. I dropped out of the University of London’s external law degree course.