WE WERE NOTHING LIKE BONNIE AND CLYDE

The Former Wife Of Drug Smuggler Howard Marks Tells Tom Leonard About
Their Life On The Run Together With Three Small Children

Most books about international drug smugglers and fugitives from
justice are filled with pictures of suitcases with false sides,
secret boltholes and police mugshots. Judy Marks's memoirs contain
family album fare - holiday snaps, smiling children and wedding
shots, albeit ones in which the happy groom is on day release from
Brixton prison.

This reflects, she says, her desire to provide "a woman's
perspective" on what her former husband, the notorious drug smuggler
Howard Marks, described as their "Bonnie and Clyde" life.

Judy, a convent school girl, was 16 when she met and fell in love
with Balliol graduate Marks. By 19, she was living with him and,
after he skipped bail on drugs charges, she spent the next seven
years on the run with the man who became one of the world's biggest
cannabis smugglers and supposedly Britain's most wanted criminal.

At one time, he was estimated to have been trafficking as much as a
tenth of all the marijuana smoked in the world - as much as 15 tons
of the stuff at a time. Meanwhile, he and Judy were living the high
life, moving around Europe and America using a plethora of fake
identities, and mixing with mobsters and celebrities (chiefly, the
actress Margaux Hemingway).

Arrest and two years in prison for Marks in 1980 only temporarily
halted his smuggling career and they were soon off again, this time
married and with three small children in tow. But, in 1988, police
raided their Majorca home and mum and dad both ended up behind bars.

Marks subsequently wrote a bestselling autobiography in which he
successfully painted himself as Mr Nice (one of his aliases) - a
charming, harmless hippie of a criminal who only smuggled the soft
stuff. He grew his hair and is now a minor celebrity and after-dinner speaker.

After all the Markses went through together, you would think nothing
could break their marriage, but three weeks ago their divorce came
through and the title of her book, Mr Nice and Mrs Marks, is no
longer technically correct. Judy, now 51, says they stayed together
until 2003 and thinks she can make another book out of how it all
went sour. She will reveal that it was down to a combination of his
infidelity and absence from the family.

Ironically, she admits, she could love the drug smuggler, but not the
celebrity.

"I loved him completely unconditionally," she says. "And especially
given how much the children went through and suffered, I've always
felt that we had to keep everything together. He wasn't a bad father
to them, except for the way he earned his money.

"But Howard spent more and more time away and he has now become a
celebrity, which I think has become more important to him than the
family. Which is very sad."

The daughter of respectable, affluent middle-class parents, Judy
clearly had wild-child tendencies before her brother introduced her
to Marks - 10 years her senior - at a dinner party in Brighton in
1972. No sooner had they sat down to eat than Marks had taken out a
huge piece of hashish and rolled a joint (she was struck by the
"sensuality" of his rolling technique). The night before her history
A-level exam, he seduced her.

She was smitten by undoubted charm and good looks, and admits his
drug dealing made him more exciting. But she never trusted him with
other women and he recently admitted he has never been faithful to
anyone. He, in turn, says he was struck by Judy's waist-length hair,
"tantalisingly" long legs and her willingness to mother him.

Life on the run was hardly uncomfortable because they stayed in
expensive hotels, but it had its drawbacks. "I didn't like not being
able to give my family my phone number or address," she says.

The stress caused by their covert existence only struck home, she
says, when they were finally arrested in 1979, while staying at a
plush hotel in Suffolk. "There was a tremendous sense of relief,"
says Judy. "It wasn't until that point that I realised how draining
it had been."

After Marks's spell in Brixton prison, he was no longer a fugitive,
but he was still smuggling. Before Spanish police arrested them in
1988 on behalf of the Americans, Judy had a premonition that she was
about to be separated from her children. "I was certainly living in a
constant state of fear at the end," she says. "I was very, very
jumpy, I had a terrible appetite and I felt I was being watched all the time."

Judy spent 18 months in prison in Spain and the United States. During
Marks's seven years in an American jail, she, as a convicted felon,
was unable to visit him.

Her publisher has inevitably pounced on Marks's description of them
as "just like Bonnie and Clyde", but it doesn't ring true from her
book and she doesn't agree with it either. Despite his supposed
hippie philosophy, there doesn't seem to have been much equality in
their relationship. Instead, she seems to be a bit of a drudge,
running errands when Marks was stuck without a passport or identity,
or else just cooking meals and looking after the children.

On rare occasions when she had a more centre-stage role, she
sometimes blew it. When he took her along to meet some senior
mobsters in Miami, she got leglessly stoned. Mortified, Marks
complained that she had ruined his credibility as someone who was
"meant to be the biggest smuggler in England". "He hated me being
uncool," she says now.

Her naivety comes across strongly in the book: her surprise at
discovering the authorities were after her, too; her "shock" at
finding guns under the bed of some drug-smuggling friends in America;
her amazement that Marks could be mixing with the sort of East End
villain who once threatened her.

One might assume she simply spent the 1970s and 1980s too stoned to
know what was going on, but she denies it. Marks may have constantly
had a joint in his mouth, but she insists she gave up regularly
smoking cannabis in her early 20s.

But she largely agrees with my impression of their relationship.
"Yes, I was very naive and I was manipulated," she says. "It was very
hard when you're completely in love with someone and you want to keep
the family unit together. You want to believe it really is the last
job. I found it quite extraordinary that, even when he'd been told
that every policeman in the world was after him, he still carried on.
He was mad, selfish and irresponsible."

Did she feel irresponsible herself? She says she had a "bad time"
worrying when pregnant with Amber, but decided she could deal with
one baby on her own. When she became pregnant again, she wouldn't
consider an abortion. But she feels no guilt about their upbringing,
insisting that she "always kept up their schoolwork".

While Marks was in Brixton prison, Judy told Amber that he was
working in a toy factory. He wasn't always in toys. When the family
was moving around, the children were told daddy was in the travel
business. By the time the Spanish police finally came calling, the
children were a little more clued up. "Amber certainly knew that he
smoked funny tobacco and that the police didn't like it," says Judy.
"I think that's how I explained it to my other daughter, Golly, too.

'The arrests were a dreadful shock to them and, apart from that, they
then had to put up with my sister's boyfriend, which was obviously
incredibly traumatic." The children lived with them while Judy was in
prison. She says that the boyfriend battered her sister in front of
them and kept her son, Patrick, locked in his room for hours.
"Patrick didn't speak for months and Golly was definitely disturbed," she says.

They are well-adjusted adults now, she adds. Amber, 27, is a defence
barrister, Golly, 25, is a yoga teacher in Majorca and Patrick, 19,
is doing his A-levels in Brighton.

What is her children's attitude to drugs? "Very much that cannabis
should be legalised and that it's not particularly harmful, which is
what I believe as well," says Judy. "But I worry about the 'skunk'
that children are smoking these days because so many friends of mine
have sons, in particular, who seem to have psychological problems."

She last saw Marks five weeks ago when he read her book. "He was very
surprised I hadn't been harsher on him," says Judy.

She still lives in Majorca, where she makes a living renting out
rooms in Palma and interior decorating. Does she miss her life with
Marks? "Of course," says Judy. "It's wonderful staying in nice hotels
and going to nice restaurants, and travelling. But I don't miss the
stress of all the smuggling at all."

She sometimes wishes she had never met him, but where would she be
now if she hadn't? Married to a Surrey stockbroker? "I doubt it" says
Judy. "I don't think that was in my character."

'Mr Nice and Mrs Marks' by Judy Marks (Ebury) is available for
UKP10.99 + UKP1.25 p&p. To order, please call Telegraph Books on 0870 428 4112