Book description
Howard Marks was released from Terre Haute Penitentiary, Indiana in
April 1995 after serving seven years of a twenty-five year sentence
for marijuana smuggling. It was time for a change of career.
So he wrote two best-selling books, became a sports writer and
travel writer, stood as a parliamentary candidate in Norwich North,
Norwich South, Southampton Test and Neath, applied to become the
country's Drug Czar, and embarked on a long-running sell-out series of
one man shows.
While performing in his home town of Kenfig Hill, he fell among old
friends who made extraordinary claims for Welsh culture (Was Elvis
really Welsh? Was there really a tribe of Welsh-speaking Native
Americans?) At the same time his elderly aunt told him of his outlaw
ancestry: William Owen, the legendary Welsh smuggler (who had operated
for some time in South America) and his great-great-grandfather
Patrick McCarty, the half brother of Billy the Kid, who had joined
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in Patagonia. He decided to explore
South America.
His travels took him to Jamaica and Panama in the footsteps of the
Welsh buccaneer Henry Morgan; he went to Brazil looking for groups of
Welsh settlers so obscure he never found them (although he did succeed
in finding his musical idol Jimmy Page); and he searched among the
thriving Welsh community in Patagonia for signs of Billy the Kid's
half brother. Richly comic and charged with the sense of adventure
that would induce an Oxford graduate to become the world's most
notorious marijuana smuggler, Señor Nice is the hugely
entertaining sequel to Mr Nice.
During the mid-1980s Howard Marks had forty-three aliases,
eighty-nine phone lines and owned twenty-five companies trading
throughout the world. At the height of his career he was smuggling
consignments of up to thirty 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. Following a worldwide operation by the Drug
Enforcement Agency, he was busted and sentenced to twenty-five years in
prison at Terre Haute Penitentiary, Indiana. He was released in 1995.
Señor Nice
tells the story of what happened next.
