Howard Marks obituary: 'Britain's most charming drug smuggler' | Hacker News Reader

Howard Marks obituary: 'Britain's most charming drug smuggler'

theguardian.com

52 pointswallflower47 comments

Mr. Nice was a great book -- definitely recommend it.

great book with great entrepreneur spirit

He did his time. That he wrote a biography, toured as an orator and was immortalised by Rhys Evans were self conscious acts. Working with terrorists is unforgivable, the troubles were bad. Marks seemed genuine and tells it well, he was after all a Welshman.

i once had the opportunity to sit right next to him, having a little bit conversation.

there were like 15 other people in the room and he was the star, so not much of a chance to talk about profound topics.

I remember him being a exceptionally quiet and polite person.

farewell

I really dislike the glorification of criminals in the British press.

Here you have an apparently charming man who knowingly caused a great deal of violence and human misery with his trade.

His masterstroke[1] was having the audacity to blame the laws of the time for the violence in his trade - and getting people to agree that, yes, he has no responsibility for his actions, it's the laws that should be blamed!

And that's without even touching on his business associates; how you can call yourself Mr Nice while teaming up with the IRA and still look at yourself in the mirror every morning is beyond me.

[1] In later life. Staying out of prison by claiming to be an MI6/SIS informant was pretty clever, given that MI6 wouldn't even officially confirm their own existence until well into the 90s, let alone publicly comment on specific individuals and cases.

>who knowingly caused a great deal of violence and human misery with his trade Are you talking about the same Howard Marks?

I was thinking that. All he did was import a good deal of cannabis which is now becoming legal in many places. I'm not sure he was involved in any violence. He did seem rather wrecked when I saw him talk which was probably not a great ad for smoking loads.

He had involvement with the IRA to smuggle drugs through Ireland, they used the money to buy guns to kill loyalists.

Sounds more like the CIA

Then you may have a strangely rosy view of the kinds of organizations that the CIA is working against.

Like democratically elected governments in sovereign states?

Working with the IRA was enough for me to dislike the man. People seem to forget the IRA used to blow people up quite a bit.

I googled the IRA involvement at it looks like he didn't work with them directly but he worked with another smuggler, James McCann who did smuggle arms to the IRA.

Most governments around the world have "blown people up quite a bit". Is anyone who works with any government now immoral?

The IRA aren't/weren't in government. The IRA are terrorists.

I wasn't suggesting otherwise. I'm simply saying that, if nobody did any work with any 'organisation' that has blown people up, a lot fewer people would be in work right now.

Society can be quite fickle and forgetful sometimes when it comes to that sort of thing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umkhonto_we_Sizwe

""" I really dislike the glorification of criminals in the British press.""" It should be noted that he wrote for The Guardian and this is an article from the Guardian website.

It should also be noted that that fact is duly noted in the obituary itself. For fairness.

Have you read any of Marks' books? I know they only tell his side of the story, but the type is there on the page to be scrutinized. He was genuinely approached by MI6 to offer/collect intel, he may have hammed it up in court for his own benefit, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen.

He also disliked the IRA connections, apparently, but smuggling via Ireland was easier than via France/mainland Europe. In the politics of the time, and perhaps from being Welsh, it was easier to excuse the IRA, I think a fair few Welsh and Scottish subjects of HM Elizabeth II would have had sympathies with the "cause", although not with the manner in which it was being fought for (violence versus Scotland's wait of 30-40 more years for a referendum; some Irishmen obviously wanted a resolution within their lifetime).

The Mr. Nice moniker comes from having bought a passport/identity from a real person by that name (Nice as in the French town), which he then traveled under and adopted. It was genuinely his name for a while.

MI6 was known to exist even it not confirmed by the govt. Ever heard of James Bond? Myth rooted in fact, every UK citizen who has read Flemming/Greene/etc knew there was an MI6.

Whatever you think of Marks, he does have a folk hero side that appeals to the British, someone who found his way into the establishment, but then rejected the banality of that life and instead lived a life most of us haven't the gall to even attempt. I think that is why he is appreciated by the British press.

>> "violence versus Scotland's wait of 30-40 more years for a referendum; some Irishmen obviously wanted a resolution within their lifetime"

I don't think you can really draw a comparison between the two. The Troubles didn't start simply because the Irish wanted to control their own affairs they started due to the fact that Irish Catholics were being heavily discriminated against.

As a Scot who watched the 'troubles' on the news week after week, year after year, I respectfully disagree. Many Scots I believe felt that the Irish had the courage to do what we did not: to take the matter into our own hands. Those same people also held the contrary view that violence was not the answer, and that common sense would prevail. They can now feel venerated in that they took the higher ground.

Recent events in Scotland however, display that the political situation/plight is not different enough that you can merely dismiss it as you do, almost half the population of Scotland want self-rule (for the record, I'm not among them). The details may differ but the desire is equal.

I don't disagree about a desire for independence but unless there have been huge civil rights abuses in Scotland in the last 40 years that I'm unaware of (maybe there have been, please correct me if there were) then then necessity for change is different.

Well, it depends who you talk to, and honestly I haven't the time nor the inclination to get into the details of Scottish politics right now, but some would say the last 300 years of Scotland's history are one long human rights abuse. Some would disagree.

In JavaScript terms: Is Ireland === Scotland? or... Is Ireland == Scotland?

Ireland != Scotland; there's no Scottish Bobby Sands and no Scottish Easter Rising. The sectarianism maps differently too. The Scottish independence movement is largely secular.

"last 300 years of Scotland's history are one long human rights abuse"

Apart from sectarian bigotry, which I don't think was ever quite as institutionalized as it was in NI, what human rights abuses are you referring to in the last ~100 years?

As a "Yes" voting Scot I have to say that I think the rights of Scots were treated with great respect by the rest of the UK - we wanted a referendum for independence and we got one.

I suspect '300 years' takes us back to 1707 and the Acts of Union.

I think most (not 'some') people would disagree with the hardline nationalist view that we've endured 300 years of human rights abuses since then.

I don't think the deep sectarian divide in Northern Ireland can be dismissed as a 'detail'. It makes the situation over there fundamentally different from that in Scotland.

For Scotland you can pretty much talk about the Scottish people as a more or less unitary group. The devolution referendum was decided based on debate and argument. Sure there was a strong nationalist component of it, but that didn't completely override all other factors. It was just one of many important factors, and you can't argue that someone to voted Yes or No is clearly more or less Scottish then the other. Factors other than national identity play important roles. For example if the UK votes to leave the EU, that will likely play a decisive role in many Scots switching to prefer independence so they can stay in the EU.

When talking about the situation in Northern Ireland, you can't really talk about 'The Irish' as a group the way you do in your post. A vote on devolution there would have nothing to do with debate or weighing of pros and cons. Staying in the EU or not would be a footnote. Any such vote would be a straight down the line sectarian census.

The troubles were far more about the sectarianism than independence. There was little evidence of sectarian overspill in Scotland outside of Glasgow. That was down to Irish emigrants settling en-masse in Glasgow, and probably explains Glasgow having an Orange order, the Rangers/Celtic divide and the like.

Scots seeking independence is rather different from the Irish situation mainly as the driver is not religion. For the record I agree with self-rule for Scotland, but am a Sassenach who would wish to move to post-independence Scotland. ;)

Dundee utd in Dundee, Hibs in Edinburgh, even in England, Everton was traditionally the catholic club in Liverpool and Man utd in Manchester. I'd say Glasgow remained the most bitter one on account of its close links to Ulster. If you read about Irish navvies working on the canals and the railways in Britain it was in Scotland that they were the most disliked and where the most violent incidents occured. Even today a lot of scots seem to be anti irish. You see it to a lesser extent in Liverpool as well if you scratch the surface of some people.

I'm not that strong on this aspect of history, but it has always seemed to be an association rather than a sectarian divide. Even though it was well known Everton was the catholic club, plenty of catholics supported Liverpool from the beginning, for instance. Glasgow and surrounding areas seemed the strongest exception.

You're right about sentiment in Liverpool though. That probably stems from the port and strong association as the point of migration leading to a large Irish community.

Not sure why you were down voted this is correct.

Probably because there is nothing "correct" about it, it is simply opinion (that shouldn't be downvoted either). Something is not "correct" because you agree with it.

What exactly is opinion? That catholics were discriminated against or that the discrimination was a major driving factor behind the IRAs recruitment and/ot reason for existence?

As a paid-up Yes/SNP supporter with a little familiarity with NI, I think it's a really bad idea to compare the two situations.

The Troubles were not about having a "resolution", and indeed having a referendum within the Six Counties would have produced a result for staying in the UK. The troubles were about discrimination and violence: both street violence and state violence. The solution involved the reform of the RUC and the imposition of human rights law and anti-discrimination law.

Whereas the Scottish question has not been characterised by any significant level of violence on either side of the politics - there's a bit of it around the Old Firm, but it doesn't pervade public life in anything like the same way. Scotland got its first devo referendum in '79, albeit sabotaged by the turnout requirement.

> MI6 was known to exist even it not confirmed by the govt. Ever heard of James Bond? Myth rooted in fact, every UK citizen who has read Flemming/Greene/etc knew there was an MI6.

Unless there's more to this than it sounds like - why would people assume an agency in some fictional stories was real?

known to exist even it not confirmed by the govt. is the key phrase. MI5 even kept up official denial of their existence for some years after moving into a huge, highly conspicuous building on the Thames.

It does open up a big-picture question of "what is a fact in politics", when operating in the face of official denial and secrecy. MI6 was mentioned in the popular, banned memoir Spycatcher, published in 1987: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spycatcher

The specific phrase that I was questioning was every UK citizen who has read Flemming/Greene/etc. Parent makes it sound like people knew about it from reading spy stories, which seems unlikely.

I really dislike the glorification of criminals in the British press.

I agree. I had the same reaction when I first heard about the cosy nickname for England's own ISIS terrorist, "Jihadi John".

knowingly caused a great deal of violence and human misery [and then] having the audacity to blame the laws of the time for the violence in his trade

As another commenter noted, public opinion is shifting in favour of his assessment about drugs.

To his credit, when I saw him speak in the late nineties and some in the audience cheered when Jim McCann (his IRA contact) was mentioned, he stopped and spent several minutes explaining that Jim McCann was a horrible human being.

So horrible that he did business with him.

To be fair, the both sides were historically full of despicable acts.

The IRA were criminals first and political terrorists second. The entire IRA operations revolved around profiteering from guns, drugs, prostitution and protection rackets. If you are working in a criminal underground in Ireland there wasn't/isn't much choice but to deal with them.

I can understand that reaction. In his book, he seems a bit like a fun goof, when you don't factor in that it's describing reality

I've read mr nice. He talks about buying a brothel somewhere in asia, and then later selling it when he finds out that the fathers of the women sold into prostitution liked to take their virginities themselves first.

But the fact that they were being sold into prostitution in the first place seemed not to bother the nicest drug smuggler in the world.

It was in Don Muang airport Bangkok fronted as a massage parlour if I recall correctly. [1]

https://books.google.ca/books?id=vT_TNsre6YEC&pg=PA318&lpg=P...

Regardless of personal opinions about Marks, the war of drugs has created an insanely profitable black market that is ideal for funding terrorism and other unsavoury activity.

There's a reason Roland went to Ireland along with Lebanon, Palestine, and Berkeley.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com