Marks put most of his energy into embracing the 1960s counterculture, and his room at Balliol became a haunt for dope-smokers. As a fresher he was persuaded by three pretty girls to join the Oxford University Conservative Association although he never attended any of its meetings, he believed that his membership was 'favourably regarded' by those who later recruited him into MI6. This question remained unanswered, as did most of them.'īut he was accepted by Balliol College, where he read physics and smoked his first spliff. Marks later recalled: 'I had heard of neither Thucydides nor Gibbon, and had never seen a copy of The Times. Among the questions that confronted him was: 'Is a copy of The Times more useful than a Thucydides or a Gibbon?' Marks' headmaster at Garw Grammar School, near Bridgend, recommended he sit the exam for Oxford. Both his grandfathers had been miners, and for the first five years of his life he spoke only Welsh. Granted parole after seven years for 'exemplary behaviour', he returned to his native South Wales, in 1996 publishing an autobiography, Mr Nice (one of his aliases was Donald Nice), which became a best-seller.ĭennis Howard Marks was born in the village of Kenfig Hill in Glamorganshire on August 13, 1945, the son of Dennis Marks, a captain in the Merchant Navy, and his wife Edna, a primary schoolteacher.

In 1988 Marks was arrested by the American Drug Enforcement Agency and sentenced to 25 years in jail. He had business links with the American Mafia, the Colombian trafficker Pablo Escobar and the IRA. He is said to have had 43 aliases and 25 companies trading worldwide. Marks liked to cultivate the image of a hippie adventurer injecting some pizzazz into the pedestrian lives of his clientele he was, in fact, a highly intelligent operator who, in the process of becoming one of the world's biggest cannabis smugglers, was (briefly, and not very successfully) a spy for MI6.

Mr. Nice by Howard Marks