In Pakistan, a mysterious "Mr. Dennis" aban-

doned four wooden crates of unusual dimen-

sions. In Crystal City, Virginia, police found

a dead body, a spy camera, and a briefcase

filled with cash. In Oakland, California, a

man who claimed to be an agent for the CIA

revealed the details of a terrorist plot. In

Palma, Majorca, a tape recorder silently cap-

tured the most intimate secrets of a world-

wide drug-trafficking organization. So begins

Hunting Marco Polo, a story that is too

fantastic to be fiction.

For more than twenty years Howard

Marks, a.k.a. Marco Polo, was one of the

world s most audacious drug traffickers,

enjoying an apparently charmed life. The

Oxford graduate shipped tons of dope into

the United States and Britain, while bluffing

and bribing his way out of trouble at every

turn. His boast seemed to be true: He was

simply too clever to be caught.

That is, until Craig Lovato, special agent of

the United States Drug Enforcement Adminis-

tration, came on the scene. Lovato, a hunter

by instinct and built like the wrestler he once

was, lived by a simple but stubborn rule:

There s not a crook alive who can t be caught.

And so he set out to prove this belief, stop-

ping at nothing in his obsession to gather

evidence against Marks and his drug-

trafficking combine. Aided by wiretaps, infor-

mants, the DEA, and his conviction that given

enough rope Marks would eyentually hang

himself, Lovato was relentless. His determi-

nation to put Marks behind bars led to an

extraordinary cat-and-mouse game played out