Hunting Marco Polo

For more than 20 years Howard Marks knew no other life than that of trafficking marijuana. He began selling it to make ends meet in 1966 when he was an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford. Between 1971 and 1973 alone he smuggled ten tons of cannabis into England. He charmed, bluffed and bribed his way out of trouble at every turn, fooling the British police and the Government in the process. This is the story of an international drug-trafficking organization and of the obsession of one man to put Marks behind bars. Craig Lovato, a special agent of the US Drug Enforcement Administration, stopped at nothing to gather evidence against Marks and his confederates, evaluating thousands of taped telephone conversations, surveillance photographs and documents. His pursuit of Howard Marks became a cat-and-mouse game played out in 14 countries around the world. In November 1989 Marks, by now in a Spanish prison, was extradited to America. Yet, even behind bars in Miama awaiting trial, Marks did not give up. For months he worked on an elaborate defence, designed to beat the prosecutors with an mixture of dissimulation and outright perjury.
He remained supremely confident, but then Lovato played his final card. The authors are former members of the "The Sunday Times" Insight team. They also wrote "The Cocaine Wars".