robbers, he thought he was doing them and society a favour by telling them they should become dope dealers and then they wouldn’t have to go round doing armed robberies. He retrained these guys. The next time Howard and I went to Thailand it seemed that half of Brixton prison had joined him there. In a way, one could say that Howard began the trend of having ‘bad guys’ join the dope business in the UK.
In the mid-eighties we moved to a house in Mallorca where we had a very normal lifestyle. In fact the teachers and other parents were really shocked when we were eventually arrested. They really thought Howard just ran a travel business. We weren‘t ostentatious, we didn’t drive flashy cars, or drip with gold. We had a big house but it was in a little Spanish village.
Yes, we used to travel a lot. We used to eat out in nice restaurants. We always used to fly first class and we stayed in the best hotels – but then he was in the travel business, so it wasn’t exactly surprising. And in Mallorca our life was very ordinary. The children never missed school, they were always on time, and I always attended the school parent evenings and meetings.
Howard was away for ten days every couple of months. The rest of the time we were just an ordinary family. All the kids knew was that he had a travel business which is why we travelled so much. By that stage I had three children – Amber, Golly and a new baby, Patrick.
It became increasingly obvious that Howard was going to get caught because we were told by a friend of ours, an American called Tom, that he was being investigated by the US law-enforcement agencies. We still don’t know exactly who Tom was working for. He claimed he was with the CIA and with the DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration] and he showed us documents showing they were following Howard. They were going to make him out to be the biggest dope dealer in the world and then bust him and bust me too, Tom told us.
He told Howard: ‘You’re at the centre of this investigation. This is what they’re doing.’ Then he said: ‘They’re going to arrest Judy as well.’ But Howard just wouldn’t believe it. He said, ‘They can’t do that. She hasn’t done anything.’
He kept this denial up in the face of all the mounting evidence. He just couldn’t admit any chance of being caught. I was with him when Tom came and knocked on our door with all this paperwork and showed it to us both. It completely freaked me. They were very official papers and the amount of information and details they contained was phenomenal. But I still couldn’t get Howard to stop what he was doing. What could I do? Walking out wouldn’t have saved me. The American authorities didn’t have any evidence against me, but they were determined to get me on any pretext. The first piece of paper I saw accused me of racketeering dope since 1970 or something – when I was fifteen!
The truth is that the things I did do, like couriering hundreds of thousands of pounds of cash around for Howard – all happened before the children were born. There were two different stages in our life together: me actively being naughty and me wanting to be straight because of the kids.
In the new film they’ve made about us, they have me travelling on a false passport with Myfanwy (Howard’s daughter from his relationship with Rosie) who, in the film, they’ve made into my daughter. I said, ‘I really object to this because I never travelled on a false passport with the children.’ They said, ‘Well, we’ll cut Myfanwy out altogether then.’ I said, ‘You can’t do that.’ So they left that bit in, but it’s completely inaccurate. Once the kids were born, I kept my head down and toed the line completely, which was why it seemed ludicrous that the Americans might be out to get me.
Tom showed us the documents about Howard and me being investigated about two years before we were actually arrested. After that, whenever we heard from him, my
Robert D. Hare, Paul Babiak