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The Review - FEATURE by TOM FOOT
Published: 3 May 2007

Peter Maddock

Memoirs of a coke smuggler

SHOW business brief Peter Maddock spent more than three years in a US correctional facility for smuggling cocaine.
Sandwiched between cellmates serving sentences from rape to double-homicide Maddock, who represented music legends including Keith Moon of The Who, found peace as a playwright.
He finished the first draft of his play Charlie and Henry, on at the New End Theatre in Hampstead this month, the day he was released in 1986.
He says: “It’s a story of sex, drugs and betrayal – based loosely on my life.”
Maddock, who lives in King’s Cross and runs a construction company, set up his own law firm in Haymarket in the 1960s.
He trained as a lawyer with the show business attorney David Jacobs, who represented Judy Garland and The Beatles.
In the 1970s he opened a restaurant in Knightsbridge with the model April Ashley, the first male to female sex change.
He says: “Ashley was a great girl – a celebrity type. The food was appalling but the atmosphere was good. In those days drugs were the choice of the privileged – now everybody’s doing it. One minute you’re buying a gram, then a quarter, then an ounce – suddenly you’re the wholesaler. It’s a strange one. If you have prohibition you get lots more gangsterism. Look at alcohol. Do you think if you legalised cocaine sales would go up?”
Maddock moved to New York in 1982 but was busted for smuggling cocaine through JFK airport.
He says: “A lot of celebrities were pulled into the net and it all became highly publicised. I had the choice to cooperate or to do time and I decided to do the time. “I went to Stonyhurst, a fearsome Jesuit public school at the age of six and conditions in the US Federal system were far better.
“It was upstate New York, Buffalo – quite a pretty location.
“I got to see the underbelly of the beast and had a lot of time on my hands. I ended up teaching Columbian coke barons how to speak the Queen’s English like ‘F*** Awf’”.
So has he learned any lessons from his experience? He says: “If you’re smuggling large amounts of cocaine through JFK airport – don’t pick up your suitcase like I did.”
Maddock is currently writing a play about “reverse paedophilia” planned for stage in October 2007.
He says: “It’s a controversial subject – the play is about dark seduction and the hysteria surrounding paedophilia.”

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