Mr Nice. Говард Маркс
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while Dutch Nik and Dutch Pete would be driving the 650 kilos of hashish they received to England. I asked who would be selling the hashish once it got to England. I presumed Graham would now revert to using David Pollard and James Goldsack. Graham smiled.
‘You will be, Howard.’
‘But I know that in the past you’ve used Dave Pollard and James. I don’t want to cause problems.’
‘Howard, I also used to use Jarvis and the two Charlies. London dealing is musical chairs. Anyway, Dave Pollard is out of business. You can keep James happy by letting him have some hash to sell at a good price.’
Jarvis, the two Charlies, and I sold the 650 kilos of hashish and made about £20,000 profit between us. I had made £7,500 in just one week. For the first time ever, I felt rich and gradually began to get used to a lifestyle of fast cars, expensive restaurants, and gadgetry. I bought a brand-new BMW, record and cassette-playing equipment of all descriptions, and a water bed. Rosie suggested we rent a flat in Brighton to use at weekends and other periods when I wasn’t tied up moving hash around London. She still had friends in Brighton and missed the proximity of the sea. We rented a ground-floor flat at 14, Lewes Crescent. One of Rosie’s friends was Patrick Lane, ex-Sussex University English Literature graduate working as an accountant for Price Waterhouse Ltd. Patrick and I got on well with each other. He introduced me to his seventeen-year-old sister Judy. Her smile, her waist-length hair, and her long legs tantalisingly stayed in my mind. It wasn’t long before I invited Patrick to participate with me in Graham’s next proposal.
Mohammed Durrani had a variety of ways of getting hashish into Europe. The most common was in the personal effects of Pakistani diplomats taking up positions in Pakistani embassies and consular offices throughout Europe. Durrani would arrange with the diplomat to put about a ton of hashish into the diplomat’s personal furniture and belongings before they left Pakistan. A diplomat’s personal effects would be unlikely to be searched on arrival, and he could always claim diplomatic immunity or blame it on the Pakistani shippers if the dope was accidentally discovered. On this occasion, the personal effects had been delivered to the diplomat’s residence in Bonn. Patrick and I had to rifle through the cabin trunks, remove the hashish, and drive it to a disused gravel pit near Cologne, where Dutch Nik, Dutch Pete, and other Dutch would pick it up and smuggle it to England. Everything went without a hitch, and after taking care of sales in London, I’d made another £7,500.
Graham had made a great deal more and was intent on legitimising his hard-earned money in the form of respectable London businesses. He had met Patrick and liked him, He needed a bent accountant and felt Patrick would be ideal. I could see no disadvantage. Soon Graham and Patrick had established a carpet shop, Hamdullah, and a property company, Zeitgeist, at 3, Warwick Place, Little Venice. They carried appropriate business cards which they flashed at every opportunity.
My lifestyle went from expensive to outrageously flamboyant. In London, Brighton, Oxford, and Bristol, I would pick up the tab at every bar and restaurant I visited. Any of my friends who wished to merely smoke hashish rather than sell it would be given as much as they wanted free of charge. There are few things that give me more pleasure in life than getting people very stoned and giving them good food and wine, but meanwhile I could see very well the sense of using some of my money to set myself up in the way Graham was doing. It would have to be on a smaller scale, but in principle it could be done.
Redmond and Belinda O’Hanlon were undergraduate friends of mine at Oxford. Redmond was now at St Anthony’s doing a D.Phil, on Darwin’s effect on nineteenth-century English literature while Belinda was running a small dressmaking business with Anna Woodhead, the Spanish wife of Anthony Woodhead, another Oxford undergraduate friend. Their clientele were largely Oxford University ladies looking for suitable ball dresses. Anna and Belinda were badly under-capitalised. I gave them the impression that I had recently inherited some money. We agreed to go into business together from small, tucked-away premises near Oxford railway station. Using cash, I bought a bunch of sewing-machines and formed a company, AnnaBelinda Ltd. It immediately did well, and we looked for suitable street-front rental premises to open up a boutique. We found them at 6, Gloucester Street, where AnnaBelinda still stands.
A few more Durrani scams occurred, but they involved significantly smaller amounts. Occasionally I would drive a stashed car across a European border. I’d get a religious flash and an asexual orgasm every time I did. Marty Langford and a couple of other Kenfig Hill school friends, Mike Bell and David Thomas, were also living in London doing boring and menial jobs. I gave each the opportunity of working for me moving and stashing hashish, taking telephone calls, and counting money. Each took it, and I was no longer exposing the London flat to the dangers inherent in street dealing: they were exposing theirs. The four of us were probably London’s only Welsh criminal gang, and were jokingly referred to by our fellow dealers as the Tafia. It was dangerous fun. But I was spending almost as much as I was earning. Thousands of pounds a month were not enough.
Charlie Radcliffe, Graham, and I were smoking joints and counting money in Graham’s Marylands Road flat. We were bemoaning our poverty. Although we were grateful to Mohammed Durrani’s Pakistani diplomats for smuggling hashish into Europe and giving it to us to sell, we were jealous of the amount of money they were making. We would make about 20% of the selling price in London. The diplomats and Durrani made the rest. We, or the Dutch, had to drive the dope into England and then deliver it to wholesalers in London. It was a risky business, particularly with road blocks now being set up all over the place to catch IRA activists. We were taking all the chances, while the Pakistanis were taking none. There was no chance of getting the hashish for a better price in Europe. The Pakistanis knew full well that there were plenty of buyers more than willing to pay at least as much as we were. We couldn’t beat them down.
‘If only we could find our own way of getting hash in,’ said Graham, ‘we would become so rich. Don’t either of you know anyone who works in a key position in an airport or in the docks somewhere?’
I didn’t.
‘I could try Cardiff, Graham,’ I suggested. ‘There are probably some old school friends of mine working in a freight department somewhere. I could go drinking in the pubs where dock and airport workers hang out. I’ll find someone who needs to supplement his income, I’m sure.’
‘Good idea,’ complimented Graham, but without much enthusiasm.
Charlie spoke up. ‘I’ve just met someone who I’m sure will be able to bring in some hash. I interviewed him for Friends, He’s an IRA guy. If he can smuggle in guns, he can smuggle in dope.’
Friends was an underground magazine. Its editor was a South African named Alan Marcuson. Charlie and his lady, Tina, lived in Alan’s Hampstead flat. Together with Mike Lessor’s International Times and Richard Neville’s Oz‚ Friends catered for the tastes and beliefs of 1960s drop-outs, dope dealers, rock musicians, acid-heads, and anyone with a social conscience. The underground press was unanimously opposed to the British presence in Northern Ireland. The IRA’s struggle was seen as championing the causes of the world’s downtrodden and poverty-stricken Catholics. How could one not sympathise? There were increasing doubts and worries, of course, about the violent methods used by the IRA, particularly the Provisional IRA, which had recently broken away from the Official IRA to form a terrorist splinter group. There was also discomfort about the IRA’s rather puritanical stance on smoking dope.
The current issue of Friends carried a very lengthy piece on the IRA, which included an interview with a Belfast member, James Joseph McCann. In the interview he admitted to a petty-criminal childhood in Belfast which led to an involvement during the 1960s with South London’s most powerful and feared gangster,