Howard Marks
Mr. Nice
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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 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 the core activity: dope dealing. Marks began to deal small amounts of hashish while doing a postgraduate philosophy course at Oxford, but soon he was moving much larger quantities. 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 organizations as diverse as MI6, the CIA, the IRA, and the Mafia. This is his extraordinary story.
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 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 the core activity: dope dealing. Marks began to deal small amounts of hashish while doing a postgraduate philosophy course at Oxford, but soon he was moving much larger quantities. 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 organizations as diverse as MI6, the CIA, the IRA, and the Mafia. This is his extraordinary story.
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Through networking and more specifically, through one’s capacity to
broker (Simmel’s tertius gaudens) and seize the information benefits needed and sought after by
others that some players achieve more control of opportunities in the network than others - “A
player with a network rich in information benefits has contacts: (a) established in the places
where useful bits of information are likely to air, and (b) providing a reliable flow of information
to and from those places” (Burt 1992: p.15). Those illegal entrepreneurs who attain such a
nonredundantly characterized brokerage position place themselves so that they control not others,
but the information and resources that others need. This was the basic strength constituting
Marks’ lengthy career.
By 1972, he was making £50,000 with each shipment. By the end of the year he was approached by Hamilton McMillan of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), a friend from Oxford University, who recruited Marks to work for MI6 because of his connections in the hashish-producing countries of Lebanon, Pakistan and Afghanistan, for his ability to seduce women, and for his contacts with the IRA. The next year Marks began exporting cannabis to the United States to The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, hiding the drug in the music equipment of fictional British pop groups that were supposed to be touring the country; he further expanded his operations with other smugglers and other methods of trafficking, often using his Oxford connections.
Marks then connected Ernie Combs, member of The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, with John Denbigh, a man with connections in the hashish-producing nation of Nepal. With the help of the Yakuza, large quantities of the drug would be exported to John F. Kennedy International Airport in the guise of air conditioning equipment, where Don Brown's mob (headed by Carmine Galante) would then take possession of the drugs. A 500-kilo deal was set up and executed on 4 July 1975, leaving Marks a wealthy man.
Kathy Etchingman was one of Hendrix’s main lovers. She left Hendrix to marry, Nick Page, who had studied medicine at Cambridge, and after leaving the junior anaesthetic and intensive care post at the hospital, later went to work at the Royal Marsden Hospital. His family had royalty connections and his father was linked to an order of Knights connected to the City guidhalls of Chester. Kathy had met him through her flatmate, Dawn, whose cousin was a flatmate of Nick’s. Nick had been involved with the counterculture in that he had imported from the middle east, where his parents had brought him up, embroidered clothes and various accessories, carpets, silk scarves, jewellery and wall hangings, which he sold to the hip shops of Portobello Road and King’s Road area. He had links also with Turkish smugglers in Hatay who were dodging the Syrian army roadblocks in 1967. The boutiques he brought his goods to, Hendrix and Brian Jones bought from them too.
Kathy after leaving Hendrix for a certain stability with this guy, which didn’t work out in the end, ended up marrying a Roy, who along with Howard Marks and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love’s Ernie Combs and associates, smuggled hash into America by the aid of a particular band’s musical equipment. She finally left him because of the instability this life caused, especially when he was busted and had to flee to Hawai for protection by the Brotherhood over there, who according to Etchingham in her book about Hendrix and herself, were armed. Kathy herself in her book gives the impression that Jefferies only really fell out with Hendrix over management issues that encroached upon Hendrix’s creativity, and that all the suggestions that Jefferies was more sinister than he actually was, and was somehow involved with Hendrix’s passing were absurd exaggerations of people who like to sensationalize.
Hendrix called the summer of love the summer of acid. He considered the LSD of San Fransisco to be superior to the LSD he had taken in London. He also came later to believe that he had took too much and started to get carried away with feeling he was specially chosen to be able to handle it. He later saw himself as using it as a great escape. Him and Mike Jefferies, his manager had one thing in common and that was their involvement with LSD and thus indirectly with the brotherhood who were its main suppliers.
Jimi with his American Indian roots appreciated the Shamanic experience of LSD. He would have known, like the brotherhood, that an affront to LSD is also indirectly an affront to Shamanism. He said of LSD that it can be used properly or improperly and that one should control it rather than let it take control over ones self in an addictive and greedy mentality. Thus like the brotherhood had other things besides LSD to enhance its effect like yoga, meditation, surfing, nature mysticism and vegetarian diet, Hendrix had his guitar, his music. Hendrix had a lot of LSD experiences. He ultimately seen it as positive but admitted from his own experience that it could also be used in a negative way.
Hendrix loved Hawaii and was into the Rainbow Bridge concept at least in essence. In fact it is said that Mike Jefferies tried to pull Hendrix away from Hawaii back to the tour circus against Hendrix’s desire to stay there with new friends and new community and environment.
According to Melinda Merryweather, who was one of the leading characters in the Rainbow Bridge film, he was happy there. He may have wanted a break from there to eat some meat after eating the vegetarian meals there as the others said, escaping to go downtown to a bar to watch a musician playing he was into. Nevertheless he did at least eat the vegetarian food there for a week with the folks there. He could have got meat earlier if he had wanted to. Some say Hendrix thought the food weird and that he found all the topics discussed there as being hippy waffle and drivel. But Hendrix himself seems to talk in such a ‘hippy drivel’ way that those Hendrix admirers who emphasize Hendrix’s hatred of hippy drivel, are in danger of turning eventually and also accusing Hendrix’s lyrics as hippy waffle too, if they later become known to them that is. Case rested. http://www.gaudiya-repercussions.com/index.php?showtopic=2161&st=40&p=48222&#entry48222
The makings of a good scam
The combination of durability, stability, and consistent profit define the makings of a
successful scam. This mix provides the incentives for all players involved and entering the
venture to keep a good thing going - “If”, as Marks tells us, “a scam works, it is rational to repeat
it” (p.266). As he concludes in regard to the summations of the JFK scam that was finally busted
by the DEA in 1979: “Between 1975 and 1978, twenty-four loads totaling 55,000 pounds of
marijuana and hashish had been successfully imported through John F. Kennedy Airport, New
York. They had involved the Mafia, the Yakuza, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, the Thai army,
the Palestine Liberation Organisation, the Pakistani Armed Forces, Nepalese monks, and other
individuals from all walks of like. The total profit made by all concerned was $48,000,000.
They’d had a good run” (p.166).
Rock-group scam / J. Morris (1973): Marks makes contact with one of Plinston's friends, James Morris, who worked as a transportation manager for rock-group equipment into the United States. Together, they create a fictional rock-group ('Laughing Grass') and begin to smuggle mainly Pakistani and Lebanese hashish into the United States (generally by air) by hiding the cannabis inside the group's speakers. Ernie Combs (and his working association, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love) is the receiver and distributor of the goods on the American mainland. In all, 7 consignments are documented in the autobiography. The last consignment was busted in Nevada and eventually led to Marks' arrest in Amsterdam in the fall of 1973 and his subsequent phase as a fugitive for six years to follow.
http://gangsquebec.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Structuring-Mr.-Nice-Entrepreneurial-Opportunities-and-Brokerage-Positioning-in-the-Cannabis-Trade.pdf
broker (Simmel’s tertius gaudens) and seize the information benefits needed and sought after by
others that some players achieve more control of opportunities in the network than others - “A
player with a network rich in information benefits has contacts: (a) established in the places
where useful bits of information are likely to air, and (b) providing a reliable flow of information
to and from those places” (Burt 1992: p.15). Those illegal entrepreneurs who attain such a
nonredundantly characterized brokerage position place themselves so that they control not others,
but the information and resources that others need. This was the basic strength constituting
Marks’ lengthy career.
By 1972, he was making £50,000 with each shipment. By the end of the year he was approached by Hamilton McMillan of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), a friend from Oxford University, who recruited Marks to work for MI6 because of his connections in the hashish-producing countries of Lebanon, Pakistan and Afghanistan, for his ability to seduce women, and for his contacts with the IRA. The next year Marks began exporting cannabis to the United States to The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, hiding the drug in the music equipment of fictional British pop groups that were supposed to be touring the country; he further expanded his operations with other smugglers and other methods of trafficking, often using his Oxford connections.
Marks then connected Ernie Combs, member of The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, with John Denbigh, a man with connections in the hashish-producing nation of Nepal. With the help of the Yakuza, large quantities of the drug would be exported to John F. Kennedy International Airport in the guise of air conditioning equipment, where Don Brown's mob (headed by Carmine Galante) would then take possession of the drugs. A 500-kilo deal was set up and executed on 4 July 1975, leaving Marks a wealthy man.
Kathy Etchingman was one of Hendrix’s main lovers. She left Hendrix to marry, Nick Page, who had studied medicine at Cambridge, and after leaving the junior anaesthetic and intensive care post at the hospital, later went to work at the Royal Marsden Hospital. His family had royalty connections and his father was linked to an order of Knights connected to the City guidhalls of Chester. Kathy had met him through her flatmate, Dawn, whose cousin was a flatmate of Nick’s. Nick had been involved with the counterculture in that he had imported from the middle east, where his parents had brought him up, embroidered clothes and various accessories, carpets, silk scarves, jewellery and wall hangings, which he sold to the hip shops of Portobello Road and King’s Road area. He had links also with Turkish smugglers in Hatay who were dodging the Syrian army roadblocks in 1967. The boutiques he brought his goods to, Hendrix and Brian Jones bought from them too.
Kathy after leaving Hendrix for a certain stability with this guy, which didn’t work out in the end, ended up marrying a Roy, who along with Howard Marks and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love’s Ernie Combs and associates, smuggled hash into America by the aid of a particular band’s musical equipment. She finally left him because of the instability this life caused, especially when he was busted and had to flee to Hawai for protection by the Brotherhood over there, who according to Etchingham in her book about Hendrix and herself, were armed. Kathy herself in her book gives the impression that Jefferies only really fell out with Hendrix over management issues that encroached upon Hendrix’s creativity, and that all the suggestions that Jefferies was more sinister than he actually was, and was somehow involved with Hendrix’s passing were absurd exaggerations of people who like to sensationalize.
Hendrix called the summer of love the summer of acid. He considered the LSD of San Fransisco to be superior to the LSD he had taken in London. He also came later to believe that he had took too much and started to get carried away with feeling he was specially chosen to be able to handle it. He later saw himself as using it as a great escape. Him and Mike Jefferies, his manager had one thing in common and that was their involvement with LSD and thus indirectly with the brotherhood who were its main suppliers.
Jimi with his American Indian roots appreciated the Shamanic experience of LSD. He would have known, like the brotherhood, that an affront to LSD is also indirectly an affront to Shamanism. He said of LSD that it can be used properly or improperly and that one should control it rather than let it take control over ones self in an addictive and greedy mentality. Thus like the brotherhood had other things besides LSD to enhance its effect like yoga, meditation, surfing, nature mysticism and vegetarian diet, Hendrix had his guitar, his music. Hendrix had a lot of LSD experiences. He ultimately seen it as positive but admitted from his own experience that it could also be used in a negative way.
Hendrix loved Hawaii and was into the Rainbow Bridge concept at least in essence. In fact it is said that Mike Jefferies tried to pull Hendrix away from Hawaii back to the tour circus against Hendrix’s desire to stay there with new friends and new community and environment.
According to Melinda Merryweather, who was one of the leading characters in the Rainbow Bridge film, he was happy there. He may have wanted a break from there to eat some meat after eating the vegetarian meals there as the others said, escaping to go downtown to a bar to watch a musician playing he was into. Nevertheless he did at least eat the vegetarian food there for a week with the folks there. He could have got meat earlier if he had wanted to. Some say Hendrix thought the food weird and that he found all the topics discussed there as being hippy waffle and drivel. But Hendrix himself seems to talk in such a ‘hippy drivel’ way that those Hendrix admirers who emphasize Hendrix’s hatred of hippy drivel, are in danger of turning eventually and also accusing Hendrix’s lyrics as hippy waffle too, if they later become known to them that is. Case rested. http://www.gaudiya-repercussions.com/index.php?showtopic=2161&st=40&p=48222&#entry48222
The makings of a good scam
The combination of durability, stability, and consistent profit define the makings of a
successful scam. This mix provides the incentives for all players involved and entering the
venture to keep a good thing going - “If”, as Marks tells us, “a scam works, it is rational to repeat
it” (p.266). As he concludes in regard to the summations of the JFK scam that was finally busted
by the DEA in 1979: “Between 1975 and 1978, twenty-four loads totaling 55,000 pounds of
marijuana and hashish had been successfully imported through John F. Kennedy Airport, New
York. They had involved the Mafia, the Yakuza, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, the Thai army,
the Palestine Liberation Organisation, the Pakistani Armed Forces, Nepalese monks, and other
individuals from all walks of like. The total profit made by all concerned was $48,000,000.
They’d had a good run” (p.166).
Rock-group scam / J. Morris (1973): Marks makes contact with one of Plinston's friends, James Morris, who worked as a transportation manager for rock-group equipment into the United States. Together, they create a fictional rock-group ('Laughing Grass') and begin to smuggle mainly Pakistani and Lebanese hashish into the United States (generally by air) by hiding the cannabis inside the group's speakers. Ernie Combs (and his working association, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love) is the receiver and distributor of the goods on the American mainland. In all, 7 consignments are documented in the autobiography. The last consignment was busted in Nevada and eventually led to Marks' arrest in Amsterdam in the fall of 1973 and his subsequent phase as a fugitive for six years to follow.
http://gangsquebec.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Structuring-Mr.-Nice-Entrepreneurial-Opportunities-and-Brokerage-Positioning-in-the-Cannabis-Trade.pdf
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Operation Julie
http://intelmsl.com/blog/tag/police-intelligence/
Analysis: Part 3 Julie and the French Connection
By Charlemagne on May 2, 2013
Whilst Anacapa may have brought some formality and structure to the process, crime fighters and soldiers had already been engaged in network analysis. On 26 March 1977 dawn raids across England, Wales and France resulted in a 120 arrests, the culmination of a 13 month police investigation code named Operation Julie.At the time it was the largest and most complex police investigation ever conducted by British police. It was focused on the manufacture and distribution of LSD and made more complicated by the original network having evolved into two rival organizations during the course of the investigation.
The British drug dealers had international links, including to the American psychedelic drug guru Thomas Leary and his Brotherhood of Eternal Love. The investigation team used network and quite sophisticated commodity flow charts to analyse the activities of the disparate bunch of hippies, chemists and rugby players who made up these drug dealing organizations. And this was six years before Anacapa Sciences held their first training course in the UK.
Below are two very simplified versions of the network and commodity analysis charts used by the Operation Julie investigators taken from Operation Julie: How the Undercover Police Team Smashed the World’s Greatest Drugs Ring by Dick Lee (who led Operation Julie) and Colin Pratt.
Just an aside but for those us who work in Shrivenham there is an interesting link to Operation Julie; in 1975 drug squad officers went undercover at a hippy music festival held on the old Watchfield airfield (now the site of the wind farm). The weather during the ten daylong event was so hot that nudity became the norm and in order to maintain their cover the police team had strip off with the rest of hippies. I believe this was the first time British police officers had stripped off in public in the line of duty. The Watchfield operation did confirm that large quantities of LSD were in circulation and so led to a larger scale surveillance and undercover effort which later became known as Operation Julie.
Analysis: Part 3 Julie and the French Connection
By Charlemagne on May 2, 2013
Whilst Anacapa may have brought some formality and structure to the process, crime fighters and soldiers had already been engaged in network analysis. On 26 March 1977 dawn raids across England, Wales and France resulted in a 120 arrests, the culmination of a 13 month police investigation code named Operation Julie.At the time it was the largest and most complex police investigation ever conducted by British police. It was focused on the manufacture and distribution of LSD and made more complicated by the original network having evolved into two rival organizations during the course of the investigation.
The British drug dealers had international links, including to the American psychedelic drug guru Thomas Leary and his Brotherhood of Eternal Love. The investigation team used network and quite sophisticated commodity flow charts to analyse the activities of the disparate bunch of hippies, chemists and rugby players who made up these drug dealing organizations. And this was six years before Anacapa Sciences held their first training course in the UK.
Below are two very simplified versions of the network and commodity analysis charts used by the Operation Julie investigators taken from Operation Julie: How the Undercover Police Team Smashed the World’s Greatest Drugs Ring by Dick Lee (who led Operation Julie) and Colin Pratt.
Just an aside but for those us who work in Shrivenham there is an interesting link to Operation Julie; in 1975 drug squad officers went undercover at a hippy music festival held on the old Watchfield airfield (now the site of the wind farm). The weather during the ten daylong event was so hot that nudity became the norm and in order to maintain their cover the police team had strip off with the rest of hippies. I believe this was the first time British police officers had stripped off in public in the line of duty. The Watchfield operation did confirm that large quantities of LSD were in circulation and so led to a larger scale surveillance and undercover effort which later became known as Operation Julie.
