4Noel ‘Razor’ Smith
VIDEO
Noel “Razor” Smith’s life of crime began innocently enough. As a child, he was arrested for stealing some apples. According to him, this incident, and provocation from the local police, caused him to escalate his crimes. At 16 years of age, he was sentenced to three years in jail for armed robbery.
Noel’s time in jail did anything but rehabilitate him, as he was surrounded by adult criminals and began to establishing contacts among the London underworld. After his release, he went on to carry out more than 200 bank robberies.
During one of his many stretches inside, he spent nine months in solitary confinement. He taught himself how to read and write in order to deal with the boredom and discovered that he had a talent for storytelling. He submitted one of his stories for a short competition, and to everyone’s surprise, it came in first place. This gave him the confidence he needed to embark on something grander. He purchased a typewriter with his winnings and started working on his autobiography.
In 1997, he was released again and randomly met the famous author Will Self. The two became friendly, and when Smith was jailed again, he began sending some of his work to Self for feedback. Self’s advice was simple: He told Smith that his work was good but that he wouldn’t get anywhere with it unless he stopped getting arrested.
Finally, after the tragic death of his son, Smith took Self’s advice to heart. According to him, he’d realized that “there ain’t no glamour in crime.” Despite the fact that the prison service had once classed him as “below average intelligence,” Smith managed to complete his first novel, A Few Kind Words and a Loaded Gun. It was published in 2004, receiving mostly positive reviews. The book ended with a real event that had seen Smith sent back to prison: While working as a road sweeper, he’d attacked a member of the public who’d emptied his ashtray on a spot Smith had just cleaned. “I dropped my broom and hit him hard with three punches . . . He was still squealing, so I kicked him in the bollocks.”
Smith was serving a life sentence for bank robbery and possession of illegal firearms when his novel was released, and he hadn’t exactly been a model prisoner. He had at least 58 convictions on his record. These included aggravated violence toward prison officers, inciting riots, making improvised weapons, and attempting to escape. Nevertheless, he resolved to try his best to receive parole, kept his head down, and kept working on his writing.
Finally, in 2010, he was released for the last time. After spending 33 years of his life in jail or on the run, he got a job as an assistant editor for Inside Time. He hasn’t reoffended since.[7]
3Howard ‘Mr. Nice’ Marks
VIDEO
Howard Marks was born in Bridgend, South Wales, in 1945. He started smoking cannabis while studying for a degree at Oxford University in the late 1960s, and when he graduated with the qualifications of a nuclear physicist, he took a completely different path in life, becoming a cannabis smuggler. He quickly became one of the top smugglers in the world, working with the American Mafia, the IRA, and MI6.
Marks thought his new vocation would be temporary (believing that the government would soon legalize marijuana and start collecting taxes) and used his education to come up with a steady line of tricks in order to move vast amounts of cannabis across national borders. For example, two of his best schemes involved hiding 30 tons of marijuana underwater in the ballast of deep-sea salvage ships and creating a fake band so that he could fly cannabis in musical equipment. Soon, his operation ended up becoming so grand that he required an incredible 89 phone lines to run it.
It wasn’t long until the CIA took an interest in him.
As the authorities closed in on him, Marks proved elusive. After a drug charge in Nevada in 1976, he fled and wasn’t seen again until he made a random appearance onstage in London in 1979 . . . surrounded by Elvis impersonators. He was arrested again in the Scottish Highlands in 1980. Although he was found to be in possession of $30 million worth of marijuana, he escaped conviction due to his canny arguing in court that he had been working for MI6 all along. Although he had worked for MI6 in the past, this wasn’t true. However, the confusion and embarrassment it caused the British government meant that Marks was acquitted.[8]
Eventually, the DEA tracked Marks down to his hideout in Spain. Marks was arrested, extradited, and sentenced to up to 25 years in prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. He was paroled seven years later and wrote his autobiography Mr. Nice, named after one of his many pseudonyms.
The book catapulted Marks to infamy, and he went on to become a columnist for Loaded magazine in 1996. He appeared in the Super Furry Animals track “Hangin’ with Howard Marks,” cameoed in the 1999 movie Human Traffic, and even campaigned for election in 1997 under a ticket of marijuana legalization.
His book went on to sell millions of copies and was eventually adapted into a movie in 2010. Marks spent decades campaigning for the legalization of marijuana, and although he lived long enough to see marijuana decriminalized in several US states, no such change in the law took place in his native Britain. He once remarked: “After my experiences at the hands of the US legal system, America is the last place in the world that I thought would be leading the change.”
Marks announced that he had been diagnosed with inoperable bowel cancer in early 2015. Sadly, he passed away in 2016.
2 Chicago May—The Queen Of Crooks
Photo credit: The Awl
May Duignan was born in 1871 to a poor rural family in County Longford, Ireland. At 19, she began her life of crime by stealing her family’s savings and buying herself a ticket to the United States. From then on, she fell into a globe-trotting life of crime that, according to Frank Colomb’s book Chicago May—Queen of the Blackmailers, involved “swindles, betrayal, conspiracy and revenge” as well as “assault, barbarity, brawling, cruelty, robbery, pickpocketing, drifting, beggary, dereliction and attempted murder.” She was also one of the first people to use the photograph as a method to blackmailpeople. Her growing notoriety gained her the nickname “The Queen of Crooks.”
Among May’s countless crimes and convictions and dismissals, she also took part in a heist that netted over $250,000 from the American Express company in Paris. Mary and her boyfriend of the time were later arrested. He was sentenced to life on Devil’s Island. She was sentenced to to five years in Montpellier. But after seducing and blackmailing the prison doctor, May was released early. However, in 1907, after the same boyfriend escaped and tracked her to London, convinced that she had ratted him out, she was arrested again—this time for her involvement in the ensuing shoot-out between her, her ex-boyfriend, and her new boyfriend.[9]
These are just a few of May’s exploits, which were famous enough at the time for London newspapers to run headlines proclaiming her the most dangerous person in London, Europe, and the world. Years later, and May, now 56, ill, and chained to a prison bed, was found by a prison reformer named August Ames, who convinced her to document her exploits in a book. May took his advice. She wasn’t a writer by trade, but she kept working at it. The book came out in 1928, but May died virtually destitute the following year.
1 Henri Charriere
Photo credit: papillon-charriere.com/
In 1931, a professional safecracker was arrested and convicted of murdering a Monte Marte gangster. Although Henri Charriere admitted to being a criminal, he claimed that in this instance, he was an innocent victim of “dishonest informers.” Nevertheless, he was convicted and sent to a penal colony in French Guiana called Cayenne.[10] Life in the penal colony was hellish, and three years later, Charriere escaped, hiding out briefly in a leper colony before sailing on a rickety boat to the Gulf of Venezuela, where he lived among some island natives until he was recaptured and sent to another colony—this time the notorious Devil’s Island.
Fearing another escape attempt, the authorities kept Charriere in solitary confinement for three years. However, this just made him more eager to escape, and over the years, he carried out another eight escape attempts. The eighth was successful. Charriere constructed a raft of coconut husks to carry him across the shark-infested waters that surrounded the island. He spent years hiding out in Venezuela.
Eventually, Charriere read an autobiography detailing the criminal exploits of Albertine Sar Razin and decided to attempt his own book. Charriere’s novel, Papillon, was hugely successful and became the basis for the film of the same name, starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman. There has been some criticism that Charriere may have embellished his story or conflated parts with those of other prisoners he met while incarcerated. In 2005, a 105-year-old nursing home resident named Charles Brunier claimed to be the real Papillon, stating that he had been in detention with Charriere.
However, whether his story was an autobiography, a semiautobiographical novel, or a work of complete fiction, it is a fascinating book that changed Charriere’s life forever and is well worth a read.
Comments