Senor Nice

The long-awaited and hugely-entertaining sequel to Mr. Nice.

During the mid-1980s, Howard Marks had forty-three aliases, eighty-nine phone lines and companies trading throughout the world. At the height of his career he was smuggling consignments of up to fifty tons from Pakistan and Thailand to America and Canada. He was eventually busted and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison at Terre Haute Penitentiary, Indiana for marijuana smuggling. He was released in April 1995, after serving seven years. Senor Nice tells the story of what happened next.

After release from prison, Marks changed careers: he wrote two best-selling books, became a sports and travel writer, stood as a parliamentary candidate, and embarked on a long-running sell-out series of one-man shows. While performing in his home town of Kenfig Hill, Wales, an elderly aunt told him of his outlaw ancestry: William Owen, the legendary Welsh smuggler (who had operated for some time in South America) and his great-great-grandfather Patrick McCarty, the half-brother of Billy the Kid, who had joined Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in Patagonia. So, Marks decided to explore South America.

His travels took him to Jamaica and Panama in the footsteps of the Welsh buccaneer Henry Morgan; to a search for obscure Welsh settlers in Brazil whom he never found; and a search among the thriving Welsh community in Patagonia for signs of Billy the Kid's half-brother.

Richly comic and charged with the sense of adventure that induced this Oxford graduate to become the world's most notorious marijuana smuggler, Senor Nice is the hugely entertaining sequel to Mr. Nice.


From the Hardcover edition.