Grass

In 1970, Sparrowhawk staked his entire capital on Nijinsky in the Epsom Derby - and won. With his large capital base he was able to launch a business importing clothing into the UK. Life was sweet. Phil enjoyed living it up as a young business tycoon, but one day in the mid-1970s his brother introduced him to a hippy student friend and life would never bee the same. Enter Howard Marks. Marks was enthused by Phil's Far East connections and educated him about marijuana and the growing numbers of the population that enjoyed smoking it. The self-styled 'Mr Nice' persuaded Phil to join his burgeoning drugs business. Soon Phil's gambling habit stepped up a plane and he eventually struck out on his own. Read of his experiences with corrupt governments, his donation to Mother Teresa after sitting next to her on a plane and being plagued by guilt, how the IRA nearly killed him when they thought his grass was really grass, the death of Lord Moynihan as the net tightened on the syndicate, and his scheme to dump the world's nuclear waste on some small islands off New Zealand, thwarted by Greenpeace at the last minute. The winning streak ended when the US Drug Enforcement Agency arrested Phil in Thailand. By this time he has amassed a fortune of nearly 30 million, which was promptly confiscated. He spent the next four years in two of Thailand's most notorious prisons,