Mr Nice: Howard Marks

He was Britain's most wanted man. He spent seven years in America's toughest penitentiary. You'll like him.

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

At the height of his career he was smuggling consignments of up to thirty tons of marijuana, and had contact with organisations as diverse as MI6, the CIA, the IRA and the Mafia. Following a worldwide operation by the Drug Enforcement Agency, he was arrested and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison at the 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.