Mr Nice. Говард Маркс
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to fear. But I’m not taking my clothes off.’
I was beginning to worry about the £300 in my sock. If it was illegal to take £25 cash out, then it surely must be illegal to bring in twelve times that amount, or was it?
‘Then you leave me no choice. I will hold you both for attempting to smuggle perfume into the United Kingdom and on suspicion of carrying other contraband. You either let me strip-search you now or the police will do so when I put you in their cells.’
‘I’ll take the second option.’
‘That’s up to you. There is another alternative. You declare what contraband you have to me and hand it over. If I accept your declaration as true, we’ll deal with the matter without strip-searching.’
‘I’ve got £300 in my sock,’ I stupidly confessed.
‘Show me.’
I took off my shoe and sock and gave him the bundle of fifteen £20 notes and the fine-payment receipt.
‘Did you take this money out of the country, sir?’
There didn’t seem much point admitting that fact.
‘No. A friend gave it to me in Frankfurt. I didn’t know what else to do with it. Is it illegal to bring back money, too, if I’ve been away for just a short time?’
‘No, Mr Marks, bringing sterling into the country is not illegal, but taking more than a certain amount out of the country is. Why did you put it in your sock? So we wouldn’t see it?’
‘Just for safe-keeping, I suppose.’
‘Is this receipt also in your sock for safe keeping? What is your occupation?’
‘Well, I’m sort of unemployed at the moment, but usually I’m a teacher.’
‘Who is Kenneth Graham Plinston?’ he asked, looking at the name on the receipt.
‘Just a friend, really. He owed some money in Germany and asked me to sort it out.’
‘You always pay off his debts? Are you that well paid a teacher?’
‘No, I used his money. It was his friend who gave me the money in Frankfurt.’
‘What was this friend’s name?’
‘Sal.’ I knew I had to lie on that one.
‘Italian, is he?’
‘I think so.’
‘Just one moment, Mr Marks.’
The Customs Officer left with the receipt. After several minutes, he returned with a senior official-looking man in plain clothes.
‘Good morning, Mr Marks. I’m with Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise Special Investigative Branch. We are going to charge you the duty on the perfume you bought. In the matter of the £300, we can’t touch you. Here it is. We know your friend Mr Plinston. We know how he makes his money. We trust you aren’t going the same way. Stick to teaching.’
Graham seemed totally unperturbed when I got to his house and gave him the receipt and report of my brush with the law.
‘I don’t think there’s much to worry about there, Howard. We’re friends, and that’s that.’
‘I’m not worried about it‚’ I said. ‘I’m just telling you what happened. I really couldn’t care less.’
‘That’s good. Howard, something’s just come up. Would you like to make quite a decent sum of money by doing a couple of days’ work in Germany driving some hash around to various friends of mine?’
‘Graham, I’ve never driven abroad. I can’t imagine driving on the wrong side of the road.’
‘There’s always a first time.’
‘Maybe, but it shouldn’t be when I’ve got dope in the car.’
‘Couldn’t you hire someone, Howard, to be your driver? I’ll be paying you plenty.’
‘Yeah, I’m pretty sure I could do that.’
‘Okay, Howard, I’ll call you from Frankfurt in a few days when I’m ready.’
Neither Jarvis nor the two Charlies were interested in venturing from the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. It was too much of a disruption. However, Charlie Radcliffe’s attractive lady, Tina, had a New Zealand friend called Lang. He had years of all kinds of smuggling experience and was in London looking for work. He was more than happy with the German proposition. We agreed to split profits.
Lang and I met Graham in Frankfurt airport. Graham explained that a ton of Pakistani hashish was in a lock-up garage. The assignment was to rent an appropriate vehicle, go to the garage, load up the hashish, deliver some to a group of Californians in a predetermined lay-by, some to a couple of Germans in Frankfurt, and the rest to a group of Dutchmen at a pre-arranged location in the middle of the Black Forest. Lang and I would be paid £5,000 between us.
We rented an Opel estate car with massive space for baggage. The lock-up garage was in an expensive suburb of Wiesbaden. Inside the garage were twenty 50-kilo wooden boxes with ‘Streptomycin, Karachi’ stencilled on each. The smell of hashish was overpowering. We loaded up the Opel, covered the boxes with a rug, and drove to the lay-by. A couple of Cheech and Chong look-alikes were waiting in a large saloon car. We pulled up alongside. One of the Californians jumped out and opened the boot. Lang and I opened the back of the Opel, and the three of us transferred five of the twenty boxes to the saloon. We shook hands. The saloon car drove off.
The Dutch and Germans were not ready to receive their hashish. Lang and I had to kill a few days. We drove the Opel from Wiesbaden, along the banks of the Rhine, to a village called Osterich. There we checked into a hotel, curiously named, in English, The White Swan. We wined and dined and broke into one of the boxes. We got stoned.
The day before the rendezvous with the Dutch, we took a boat down the Rhine to Wiesbaden. Lang wanted to get some English newspapers. While we were crossing one of the city’s main streets, a car came quickly round the corner, shot the red pedestrian light, and almost knocked Lang over. In a moment of understandable anger, Lang hit the back of the car with a rolled-up newspaper. The car screamed to a halt. A huge red-faced German jumped out of the car, ran over to Lang, gave him a tremendous thump across the head sending his glasses splintering on the road, ran back into the car, and drove off. It was all over in seconds. Lang was barely conscious and was blind without his glasses.
‘You’ll have to drive tomorrow, mate,’ was all he said.
The rendezvous with the Dutch was at a remote but accessible clearing in the Black Forest. With fear and apprehension, I drove the hashish-filled Opel into the country’s wooded depths. It took no time to adjust to driving on the other side. We got to the clearing. There was no one there. After twenty minutes, two Volvos arrived. Inside one was Dutch Nik, whom I’d once met at Graham’s. Inside the other was a man who introduced himself as Dutch Peter. We gave them thirteen boxes.
At an efficient German chemist’s, Lang soon fixed himself up with a pair of new prescription glasses and was able to drive the Opel into Frankfurt for the final drop-off to an unnamed German in the car park of the Intercontinental Hotel. It passed without incident.
Graham had been supervising matters from his room in the Frankfurter Hof. He had bought a new BMW. He asked if we wanted to keep him company for a few days, after which he would pay us off. Lang wanted to get back to London and was happy to be paid there. I stayed with Graham, who was collecting bags of money. After a couple of days, we hid the money, a mixture of United States dollars and German marks, in the BMW, and drove to Geneva. Graham banked large quantities of German and American cash in his Swiss bank account after first giving me our payment. I asked what happened to the hashish we had distributed and was told that the German would be selling his hashish in Frankfurt,