Mr Nice

During the mid-1980s, Howard Marks had 43 aliases, 89 phone lines, and owned 25 companies throughout the world. Whether bars, recording studios, or offshore banks, all were money-laundering vehicles serving his core activity: dope dealing. Marks began to deal small amounts of hashish while doing a postgraduate philosophy course at Oxford, and soon he was moving much larger quantities into Europe and into America. The academic life began to lose its allure. At the height of his career, he was smuggling consignments of up to 50 tons from Pakistan and Thailand to America and Canada and had contact with organisations as diverse as MI6, the CIA, the IRA, and the Mafia. Numerous newspaper profiles, books, and television documentaries have been devoted to Howard Mark's life. Touched with humour, charm, and candour, Mr Nice is his own extraordinary story.