A MILLION MILES FROM WINDSOR CASTLE
Next week Meghan’s dad will walk her down the aisle. As this extraordinary dispatch reveals it couldn’t be a greater contrast to the loneliness and despair of the seedy, murder-plagued Mexican town he calls home
HE BARELY ever emerges from his drab-looking bungalow before the sun starts to go down each day, an unkempt and shambling figure in polo shirt and baggy jeans on a mission to the local shops to stock up on another six-pack of beer or his favourite chicken tacos.
Thomas Markle is known to few of his fellow American expats in the shabby Mexican coastal community of San Antonio Del Mar — but then he doesn’t exactly stand out from the crowd around these parts.
One can only hope he fits in perfectly next weekend when, watched by billions worldwide on TV, he takes his daughter down the aisle in St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle.
It couldn’t be a more unlikely setting for Meghan Markle’s father and friends say he has been dreading this step onto the world stage for months. It’s not hard to see why, just as it’s not hard to see why Meghan hasn’t yet personally introduced Prince Harry to her father.
As I discovered when I visited his home on the outskirts of the highly dangerous border city of Tijuana in Mexico’s Baja California state this week, the obvious social differences between his daughter and the Queen’s grandson are nothing compared with the vast chasm that separates Thomas Markle from his new in-laws in the Royal Family.
Mr Markle, 73, was once a gregarious and successful Hollywood lighting director but is now, as his alarming waistline suggests, going to seed in decidedly unglamorous retirement among other cash-strapped American retirees.
They have all answered the siren-call south over the Mexican border to a life of cheap food, cheap beer, virtually no tax and no questions asked sun-soaked anonymity just a half-hour drive from San Diego.
Some reports have implied that Mr Markle is living in glamorous, beach-side, ocean-view splendour just up the coast from the Rosarito Beach Hotel, once famous as a fashionable getaway for legendary Hollywood stars such as Marilyn Monroe, Rita Hayworth and Lana Turner.
Very much the opposite. Perched on a cliff, San Antonio Del Mar — where homes start at an affordable $150,000 (£110,000) and tend to cater for the bottom of the American expat market — has a forlorn air.
It feels almost deserted as soon as you are waved past the single security guard manning the gate to the development. Mr Markle’s unprepossessing residence is one of hundreds of small homes crammed along a series of cobbled streets running parallel to the cliffs.
SEPARATED
by ugly, rusting chain-link fences, many houses appear to be in a perpetual state of semi-completion, others are just dilapidated. The stairs down the cliffs to the beach have all rusted or crumbled away and the only access is via a staircase made of old car tyres.
It runs alongside a large stinking open sewer emptying out onto an empty and rocky brown sand beach where even the birds are speckled a dirty brown. Tucked under the cliff directly below Mr Markle’s home is a vast mountain of rubbish comprised of car parts, bottles and household detritus.
Rocks running close to the shore make swimming — even if one ignored the smell of sewage — distinctly inadvisable. Amenities for residents — of whom about half are Americans, with a few Europeans including the odd Brit — are similarly uninviting. The drab shops across the main road include a tacos takeaway, cafe and grocery which Mr Markle patronises.
Few expats here need to speak Spanish and Mr Markle is no exception, although the Mexican woman who occasionally serves him with coffee and takeaway salads said, with a smile, that he does at least try to get out a few words.
Also here is Plan B, a bar catering for U.S. expats where the owner, Chris Larsen, is planning to host a Royal Wedding viewing party and invite Mr Markle’s few friends.
It will make a change from the bar’s other attraction, a handmade wheel of fortune on which, for a dollar a spin, customers can try to win prizes such as a hotdog or ‘Kiss the Cook and drink a shot’.
A beer here costs just $2.50 (less than £2) which means you can drink all day for a fraction of the cost of over the border in California.
Mr Larsen explained how, with homes costing as little as $500 (£368) a month to rent, cheap food and minimal taxes, American retirees can cash their social security cheque and eke it out for the month. ‘They can get away from the strictures of American life here,’ he says.
Mr Markle is not one of the bar’s regulars, I was assured. That might involve socialising, which isn’t one of his strong points.
Most expats insisted they didn’t know him which was, they said, surprising in such a close-knit small community.
Below the Plan B bar is a new police checkpoint, a Portakabintype affair which was installed because locals became alarmed at the time it took officers to arrive from neighbouring towns.
Giving the lie to claims that foreigners are never affected by Mexico’s shocking levels of violent crime, Chris Silva, a retired marine engineer, says that a few years ago an American was murdered across the road by two women who robbed and tortured him in his home.
This region is gripped by an unending vicious war between rival drug cartels.
San Antonio Del Mar is sandwiched between Tijuana and Rosarito, which both have some of Mexico’s highest murder rates.
Tijuana is rated the world’s fifth most dangerous city while some Rosarito neighbourhoods display banners warning criminals that they face lynch mobs if they commit burglaries.
On a Facebook group called Rosarito Beach Uncensored, expats exchange crime horror stories such as armed break-ins and the appearance of dead bodies by the roadside.
Prospective newcomers are warned on Facebook that they risk being shot if they go to ‘the wrong places’ and that they cannot rely on the police. ‘When things go wrong here, they go very wrong,’ warns a local woman.
Members of the Facebook group greeted the revelation that Mr Markle lives in the area by warning online that he’d now have to move
or face being kidnapped by the gangs who target anyone remotely famous in the hope of a ransom. Several mocked the security in his ‘gated’ community as pathetic.
The news that Prince Harry asked permission to marry his daughter on the phone rather than meeting his prospective father-inlaw in person is — in this light — entirely understandable.
So what drew Mr Markle to this sunny but otherwise unlovely corner of the western hemisphere? After all, he could have found a quiet life in slightly more appealing places.
The answer has primarily to be money. Despite still reportedly owning a pokey flat in LA, he declared himself bankrupt in California in 2016, with credit card debts of £24,181 and savings of just £160.
He has been the subject of four legal claims in 20 years for unpaid tax bills, although his son, Thomas Jr, says he has a good pension and is far from destitute.
Thomas Jnr also said that his father is extremely careful with money, so the idea of being able to live in Mexico for virtually nothing must appeal.
Friends of Meghan insist she has supported her father and paid many of his bills over the years. Mexico also offers famously cheap healthcare which, given that Mr Markle still limps from an old knee injury, may have been another factor in his relocating.
He moved to Mexico after retiring in 2011, living in rented homes in Rosarita before gravitating to San Antonio. The lack of official records means it’s not clear whether he owns or rents his home.
Stressing that he is not referring to Thomas Markle, longtime U.S. expat Gil Sperry says: ‘A lot of people come here to disappear. To disappear from responsibility, financial or familial. Many just drink their sorrows away.’
While Mexico wasn’t ‘lawless’, he added, it was possible to do a lot of things there that weren’t possible in the U.S.
To be fair, more adventurous expats volunteer in local orphanages, join painting classes or wine tours. There’s also sailing, fishing and golf nearby.
Sedentary Mr Markle chooses to do nothing, say friends.
According to Thomas Jr, who has visited him, his father often sleeps until the afternoon, then spends his days reading, watching TV news and old films.
The local handyman who looks after his home concurred. ‘He drinks beer and sleeps,’ he said.
ACCORDING
to his son, Mr Markle, once a workaholic, hasn’t adapted well to retirement. Friends from years back say that he has long been prone to bouts of despondency and they got worse after his darling Meghan went away to university in Illinois.
Then, he could distract himself with work. But that’s no longer an option.
Ramon Moreno, owner of a storage company where Mr Markle keeps some of his possessions, says he is a friend of Meghan’s father. He puts a more positive spin on his strange existence.
‘He’s very quiet, very intelligent,’ he said. ‘ He’s not an active man but he likes to read, he likes to eat tacos. He lives a frugal life.’
Mr Moreno added: ‘ He doesn’t have close friends. Americans here often live their lives in their homes — few of them speak any Spanish — and they keep to themselves.’
‘He’s not a recluse, he just prefers his own company.’ Mr Moreno also said Mr Markle had told him he was an Episcopalian (the U.S. branch of the Anglican Church). However, the vicar of the area’s only English- speaking Anglican church said Mr Markle wasn’t a congregation member.
Mr Moreno added that Meghan’s father had admitted he had put on weight from eating too much junk food because of the stress of the impending nuptials.
Describing Mr Markle as ‘excited, nervous and proud’, Mr Moreno said: ‘ He believes Meghan and Harry have a lot in common.’
As for Mr Markle’s relationship with Meghan, after Thomas Jr claimed she had shunned their father, Meghan’s friends have been anxious to stress there will be no dissent next Saturday.
The children from his first marriage — estranged from Meghan and not invited to the wedding — have made clear he doted on her, even after he separated from her mother, Doria Ragland, when Meghan was six.
Despite his dislike of publicity, Mr Markle has recently been photographed in a series of shots that appeared rather contrived.
In one, he was clutching a book about Britain, in another he was sitting in an internet cafe looking at a news report about his daughter and Prince Harry, and in a third he was having his measurements taken — presumably for a morning suit to be made in London.
When I spoke to the young Mexican who measured him, he said Mr Markle had arrived accompanied by a photographer who snapped pictures of him.
There’s speculation that, following royal tradition, Mr Markle will — like Kate Middleton’s father, Michael — receive his own coat of arms as a wedding gift. They would be personalised with symbols and colours to reflect his family.
With such a varied life — from Hollywood to Mexican drug havens — he has a very wide choice.