Former drug smuggler's Strathpeffer date
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INTERNATIONAL drug smuggler turned author and racaonteur Howard Marks will be regaling an audience at the Strathpeffer Pavilion with tales of his colourful life.
During the mid-1980s Marks had 43 aliases, 89 phone lines and 25 companies trading throughout the world. Bars, recording studios and offshore banks were all money-laundering vehicles serving the core activity – cannabis dealing.
He avoided international law enforcement for two decades while building one of the biggest smuggling rings in histroy before the law finally caught up with him in 1988 and he was handed a 25-year jail sentence.
On the evening of Friday May 2, Marks will take his new spoken word show, Scholar, Smuggler, Prisoner, Scribe to the pavilion, the only Scottish date in his eight-venue UK tour. Andrea Muir, general manager at the pavilion, said tickets were already selling well despite the show not being until May.
"We always aim to bring things to the pavilion that are a little bit different," she said. "Howard Marks is certainly colourful and controversial but that means there is a great story to be told and he will be narrating it in a very entertaining way.
"Nobody is condoning how he got to where he is but it’s an interesting life story. The show will take the form of anecdotes from Marks and it will be enthralling, humorous and also thought-provoking."
Howard Marks began to deal during a postgraduate philosophy course at Oxford University and was soon moving large quantities of hashish across the world in the equipment of touring rock bands.
At the height of his career the Welshman was smuggling consignments of up to 30 tons from Pakistan and Thailand to America and Canada.
But he was eventually caught and given a lengthy jail sentence by the American Drug Enforcement Agency in the USA’s toughest federal penitentiary, Terre Huate in Indiana.
He served seven years of the sentence and was released on parole in 1995.
A year later Marks released his international bestselling autobiography, Mr Nice, and since then he has become a frequent columnist in national newspapers.
His live shows, in which he talks about a wide range of topics, continue to be sellouts at venues throughout Britain and Europe.
Tickets for the pavilion show are priced £15 and are available online from WeGotTickets.com and Ticketweb.co.uk, the pavilion on (01997) 420124 and June’s Card Shop, High Street, Dingwall.
