DURING THE 1970s Welshman Dennis Howard Marks built up one of the most sophisticated drug smuggling operations in the world.
Using 43 aliases and 89 telephone lines, he moved large amounts of hash into Europe and America, regularly coming into contact with the Mafia, the CIA, MI6, and the IRA along the way.
By the early eighties he was Britain’s most wanted man. Today he is a best selling author and public speaker who fascinates audiences with his recollections of his adventures and experiences. Galway will get to hear many of these when the Róisín Dubh presents ‘An Evening with Howard Marks aka Mr Nice’ on Friday November 26 at 9pm.
Howard was born in August 1945 in the coal-mining village of Kenfig Hill to relatively well-to-do parents. He attended the Garw Grammar School and gained a place at Balliol College, Oxford, to study physics.
It was the mid-1960s and the dream was of peace and love. Oxford University was a world away from Howard’s origins in Wales.
“It’s predominantly a place of privilege,” he said in a 1990 PBS documentary entitled The Hunt for Howard Marks, “but exceptions were allowed. You know, the odd kind of peasant from the valleys was accepted in and I was lucky enough to be there.”
He played up to the ‘son of a coal-miner’ image at the prestigious school and became somewhat of a working-class hero among his new friends.
It was at university that Howard first smoked marijuana and it was to have a profound effect on him. Smoking pot was very much part of the scene in Oxford and Howard became a small-time dealer of marijuana and LSD.
He shied away from heroin but it was soon to make its presence felt in the university campus when Joshua Macmillan, grandson of the then British prime minister Harold Macmillan, died of suspected overdose.
“My memory is really just of Joshua Macmillan’s body being carried down the stairs,” Marks stated in The Hunt for Howard Marks. “It is a very shocking experience and I’d always been frightened of heroin before that, and that kind of sealed the issue as far as I was concerned.”
When Howard graduated from his studies in the late 1960s he set about expanding his marijuana dealing. He bought into an Oxford boutique as a front for his drug dealings and expanded upon his international contacts.
He travelled to Thailand constantly and from there shipped tons of marijuana to Europe and North America. He also developed connections with the Marcos government in the Philippines through a character named Lord Moynihan.
Howard adopted aliases such as John McKenna, Donald Nice, and Albert W Jennings and went from country to country virtually undetected by the authorities. It is believed that for 20 years he was one of the biggest marijuana dealers in the world.
Eventually the drug enforcement administration caught up with ‘Mr Nice’ and in 1990 he was sentenced to 25 years in prison, though he served only seven years. Upon his release he published a best-selling autobiography, Mr Nice, and he wrote a monthly column for Loaded for five years.
Howard has campaigned vigorously for the legalisation of recreational drugs and stood for election to Westminster on the issue of the legalisation of cannabis. He has made several cameo appearances in films such as Ecstasy and Human Traffic. Last month a biopic of his life was released starring Rhys Ifans as Marks.
Tickets are available from the Róisín Dubh and Zhivago.
