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Mr Nice

TinCan TV

Mr Nice is due to be released early next year, fourteen years on from the publishing of the book that it's based on

Born in 1945 in Kenfig Hill, a small Welsh coal-mining village near Bridgend, Howard Marks attended Oxford University where he earned a degree in nuclear physics and post graduate qualifications in philosophy.

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

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

Bars, recording studios, offshore banks: all were money-laundering vehicles serving the core activity: dope dealing. The Daily Mail described him as ‘the most sophisticated drugs baron of all time'.

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, always maintaining a strict anti-gun and anti-violence ethos and never dealing in hard drugs.

In 1988 following a world-wide operation by the Drug Enforcement Agency, Howard Marks was busted and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison at the United States Federal Penitentiary, Terre Haute, Indiana, the site of America's only Federal Death Row and the country’s toughest penitentiary. He was released on parole in April 1995 after serving seven years of his sentence.

In 1996 he released his autobiography, Mr. Nice, which remains an international best seller in several languages and was the best selling non-fiction book of 1997.

On the subject of his book, he says:

"Through a plethora of media interviews and several public book readings, it became clear that the predominant reason why so many adolescents and university students read and enjoyed Mr Nice was their frustration with the law prohibiting cannabis consumption and trade. Until then, I had no idea of the extraordinary extent of cannabis use by young people today."

During 1997, Howard performed his first live shows, which discussed his life as a marijuana smuggler and his views on drug use and legalisation. The shows received excellent reviews throughout the national press, and his now legendary one-man comedy show, An Audience with Mr Nice, continues to sell-out at venues throughout Britain and Europe.

Howard Marks wrote a monthly column for Loaded for five years and has also written features for many of the UK’s broadsheets. He continues to campaign vigorously for the legalisation of recreational drugs.

2010 will see the release of biopic Mr Nice starring Rhys Ifans and Chloe Sevigny as Howard's ex wife and mother to his children Judy.

"Rhys grew up close to the place where Howard was born," said producer of the film Luc Roeg. "As he was growing up, Marks was an infamous figure. Since then, their lives have crossed through music. Super Furry Animals [in which Ifans was a band member] did a benefit gig when Marks was released from prison. It was a very demanding role for Rhys and he wanted to have the first shot at playing him."

Roeg added: "Marks was a beguiling character. He was highly educated and rose from a working-class background to get to Oxford at a time when the university didn't have any quota system. He applied his charm and intellect to what he did. Rhys has a lot of these qualities, he is very charming and he is as anti-establishment as Howard. It is a high-energy, epic film, a Lawrence of Arabia of stoner movies. Marks went to places like Afghanistan, near the Khyber Pass, when it was incredibly dangerous. The film spans three decades."