MR NICE has sold over 500,000 copies in Britain, was the ninth best selling non-fiction book of 1997 and has been translated into French, German, Hebrew, Spanish and Italian.

Howard Marks

During the mid 1980s Howard Marks had forty three aliases, eighty nine phone lines and owned twenty five companies trading throughout the world.

Bars, recording studios, offshore banks - all were money-laundering vehicles serving the core activity: dope dealing.

Marks began to deal during a postgraduate philosophy course at Oxford and soon he was moving much larger quantities into Europe and America in the equipment of touring rock bands. The academic life began to lose its allure.

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 the CIA, MI6, the IRA, and the Mafia.

After many years and a world-wide 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 April 1995 after serving seven years of his sentence.

Told with humour, charm and candour, MR NICE is his own extraordinary story.