Life with my cocaine queen

Would you please step over here, sir." They were innocuous words, beloved of petty officialdom worldwide, but icy with menace on a warm afternoon as the US Customs agent ushered me away from where he'd just ransacked my luggage.

Suddenly, the easy familiarity of New York's JFK airport became a place of dread - which was hardly surprising, considering that I was wearing a surgical corset with $140,000 in $100 bills (more than £94,000) strapped inside it.

Regular travellers to the US all too easily dismiss the card they must sign on the plane, warning them that it's an offence to bring more than $10,000 into the country without declaring it. More seriously for me, on this April day in 1997, this was drug-trafficking money - my girlfriend's drug-trafficking money.

I felt a mixture of foreboding and rage: why on earth had I jeopardised a long and fulfilling media career by getting involved in the drugs trade, and at such a dangerous level?

Sure, when I began my career as music editor of the underground newspaper International Times in the late Sixties, passing on a few ounces of cannabis to colleagues was culturally acceptable, almost a political statement.

But nowadays, as I was flying into New York as international business manager for a major UK publishing group, cocaine had become my (and the media industry's) drug of choice. This was a serious business with serious consequences.

Once the Customs agents, now four in number, had discovered the money bulking out my Paul Smith suit, my thoughts turned to survival. The agents were thinking of themselves. While one of them made a big deal of checking my shoes for hidden drugs, another was quietly pocketing a $10,000 bundle behind my back. But I wasn't about to accuse them of skimming, and subpoena the one witness who could corroborate that I'd been wearing $140,000 - the witness who had actually helped me pack the corset - because that was my girlfriend, Ingrid.

When I had first caught sight of Ingrid at an Emmylou Harris concert the year before, I had been instantly smitten. She was a slight, coquettish redhead from America in her mid-forties. But alarm bells should have rung when my cocaine dealer, who had orchestrated the evening, introduced her to me with a sincere smile as his "very special friend". Within half an hour I had her phone number and the promise of dinner the next evening.

Ingrid - just one of the names on one of her passports - identified herself over our first romantic meal, at Joe's Diner in South Kensington, as a broker working on behalf of well-heeled Arab and German art collectors. Cultured and charismatic, she presented an image of high-rolling, international sophistication. But it was a brilliant façade. And when she eventually revealed weeks later that she was really the leader of an all-woman drug-trafficking gang, it only served to intensify the spell I was already under.

Her method was neat but risky, and had evolved from her earlier drug dealing in America. Every five or six weeks, two or three slightly bookish or mumsy American ladies in their forties would go to South America and then leave for Portugal or Spain with three or four kilos of 90 per cent pure cocaine concealed in each of their specially-modified bags.

From Lisbon or Madrid, they would usually travel overland to London, where rooms had been booked for them in genteel Knightsbridge hotels. Within hours of their arrival, Ingrid - in the guise of an old friend, "Maggie" or "Marjory" or "Jane" - would turn up with a bottle of "Welcome to London" Bollinger and various expensive toiletries, and depart a little later secreting the cocaine in the same Harvey Nichols carrier bag with a sweater or scarf on top. My, the nerve of the girl.

Once out of the hotel, Ingrid would head straight for the short-stay flat she had rented, hide the drugs and then return home to the South Kensington maisonette we had leased - in my name - opposite Blake's Hotel in Roland Gardens. Each day, after I'd left for my office, Ingrid would take a series of cabs to her temporary workplace where a procession of drug dealers would arrive from across Britain, their smart briefcases and battered rucksacks stuffed with money.

Netting her probably hundreds of thousands of pounds a year, it was a nice little business, and we had a nice little life. Ingrid had been doing it for decades, both in Europe and America. And, as she began to trust me more, I was gradually allowed to meet her two lady lieutenants - youngish women like her, with the same chameleon flair as the "resting" actresses they employed to run the drugs.

Ingrid was, of course, way too smart to use cocaine herself: an occasional flute of Bolly or a Marlboro Light were her only vices, outside world-class shopaholicism. But one day the bubble inevitably burst.

I'd never seen her lacking confidence or betraying fear before, even walking through Chelsea with carrier bags full of Class A drugs, but now she came home white as a sheet.

"The bureau's been busted," she blurted, "and they may have me on a camera somewhere. Plus, I've got to get some money over to New York with the girls at the end of the week."

INGRID had been using a dodgy bureau de change in west London to transform her grubby piles of sterling into less bulky and, in drug-trafficking terms, entirely necessary $100 bills (coca farmers don't know what a tenner is). But the bureau had been raided and closed down, and here was Ingrid with £60,000 and nowhere to go. Maybe I could help, she pleaded. In doing so, I could fully buy in to what I saw as her buccaneering world.

Although my own professional life embraced just as much business class and five-star hotel jet-settery as hers, I was experiencing some kind of mid-life crisis - rooted perhaps in my Sixties counter-cultural background, which made me envious of her audacity.

So I boldly trudged around various bureaux until I found one that did not raise an eyebrow when I enquired if they could change tens of thousands of pounds, no questions asked. And then it was just too easy to take the next step, the one that would precipitate my nosedive from grace, by agreeing to make the first exchange for Ingrid - "because they might have photos of all the people who used the other bureau".

Under Ingrid's "house rules", public pay phones were mandatory. I used one to arrange my first exchange. Yes, the voice answered, he remembered my earlier visit and he could change £30,000 into dollars and ... what was your name again? "Martin Wilson", I answered.

The exchange was quiet when I visited it that Saturday morning. The lone, balding Asian behind the bullet-proof glass had a benign smile I would come to know well over the next few months.

I was admitted through a heavily fortified door and into a dishevelled office, where Mr Ashari - the testy, chainsmoking owner - sat with his money- machine. "Now," he said, "you want dollars and you've got £30,000. Rate is 148 (1.48 per cent)."

"What about commission?" I asked. Ashari looked at me like I was an imbecile, which I clearly was.

"No commission. This is strictly an arrangement between us. We agree a rate, that's the rate, that's it."

Ashari went to his safe and took out a surprisingly slight pack of $100 notes and offered to put it through his machine, just to be sure. I trusted him: we were both gentlemen, after all. I made ready to leave as casually as I could. But I wasn't home-free yet.

"Could you just sign this, Mr Wilson," Ashari said, tearing a strip of paper from his desktop calculator.

It didn't bear the bureau's name, just a record of the exchange rate and the amounts, so I reckoned it was safe to scrawl my real, if poorly disguised, initials.

And then, with just the five lonely bundles bouncing around in my cavernous briefcase, I jumped on my motorcycle and rode triumphantly home, the first of several dozen such journeys I'd make on Ingrid's behalf, sometimes even in my office lunch breaks.

The signatures and the all-too readily identifiable alias would prove to be my undoing in my eventual court case. But they were not the only incriminating evidence.

It turned out that Customs & Excise had been receiving tip-offs from Mr Ashari's gently smiling manager about my and, indeed, several others' criminal transactions, and they had photographs of me regularly entering and leaving the premises.

Still, the actual process of laundercountinging cash was deceptively easy. Just a day or two's notice for Ashari to order the requisite number of dollars from the currency wholesalers, and it was certainly possible to convert hundreds of thousands of pounds in a week or so. Over six months, I totalled some £2 million.

During those months, I revelled in the rituals of the secret world I'd been subsumed into, the camaraderie of my criminal peers and the exquisite irony of a shadowy parallel universe running undetected alongside my normal business life.

Intoxicated by the danger, I'd become blind to both the wider social implications and the personal consequences.

However, within 48 hours of my New York arrest, the exceptional powers of Customs and Excise became evident. The Roland Gardens flat, a house I owned in Wales, and even my office were raided and proof found linking me to our safety deposit vault near Victoria station, where both money and cocaine were concealed.

British police officers flew to New York, where I was out on bail, thanks to a well-off journalist friend. Ingrid's lawyers (she had them on an annual retainer) were made available to me. But they turned down a Customs offer of lenient treatment should I reveal "other parties".

Ingrid and her two lady lieutenants had convened an " emergency summit" in Manhattan and promised me that legal fees - and an "appropriate" reward - would be forthcoming if I kept quiet about their drug-dealing. I was in love, of course, and happy to play ball. So I pleaded guilty only to currency violation and received a sentence of 13 months at the US Federal Correctional Institution at Allenwood, Pennsylvania.

When I was returned to Britain, I was arrested all over again, this time by British Customs, for money-laundering. With heavy heart, I faced the inevitability of another stint in prison. Ingrid had long since disappeared. She had deliberately ensured that I never knew her subsequent whereabouts or phone numbers - the prudence of payphones again.

Luckily, I still had loyal friends, some of them fellow survivors from Underground press days - like the publisher Felix Dennis, now the 56th richest man in Britain, who put up my six-figure bail and gave me somewhere to live while I waited dismally on her Majesty's pleasure.

Three years it was this time, firstly in the dehumanising Victorian squalor of Brixton, followed by the wearily ramshackle HMP Wellingborough.

SO nearly five years after being collared at JFK airport - and with rather less fanfare than, say, Jeffrey Archer - I finally exited the penal systems of our two great nations, feeling ashamed and foolish and clutching a bin liner full of my belongings.

Some months later Ingrid phoned out-of-the-blue, countering my anger and sense of abandonment with empty concerns about my health and well-being, but after 30 seconds she hung-up, and 1471 failed to trace from where.

After all those lost years, resurrecting a career as either an editor, publisher or foreign business manager has proven impossible.

The words "international money laundering" on one's CV carry more oppressive weight than any clichés about paying debts to society.

Murky bank accounts in the Cayman Islands or Belize are the rarefied end of the money-laundering circus and, frankly, even the most upstanding pillars of the community may have unwittingly helped wash the proceeds of crime at their neighbourhood bureau de change.

But I was just a little guy, caught up in something way over my head. I was wrong, but I've paid for it.

Some names in this article have been changed. ° Mark Williams 2003