Mr Nice

This bestselling account of Howard Marks’ life as an international drug smuggler is now being turned into a major film starring Rhys Ifans, Chloe Sevigny and David Thewlis. Numerous books and TV documentaries have been devoted to Marks’ life. Mr Nice is his personal story.

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.