Anything to Declare? (11 page)

The second problem that we had was the chap who was the head of the magistrates. He was the squire of some large estate and when sitting in court he would, believe it or not, always wear a white suit and monocle. He looked like a cross between the Man from Del Monte and a Nazi scientist. Which must have been bloody terrifying for those that were up in front of him. That terrifying effect didn’t last long for pornography-smuggling offences, as chances were that he would hand out only a £50 fine and a slap on the wrist. Amazingly, he did pretty much the same for drug smugglers.

But should you appear for an offence that involved illegal activity in something in which he took an interest – such as hunting, shooting or fishing (or knobbing the downstairs staff, probably) – then he would reach for his black cap and try to bring back hanging. If he had been on the bench 200 years ago, he would have been transporting people to Australia for not doffing their cap to him. So that was what we were up against when we had to bring the magistrates into the present day, and fast.

What we urgently needed to do was list all the offences involving pornographic material, plus explain about the trusty old Customs Consolidation Act 1876 (the law that enabled us to seize the goods). So we got together and invented what we called the porno tick sheet. This required a Customs officer to sit through a whole film and tick off each sexual act as it happened. The poor bastard. You can imagine the stampede for this duty.

This form, the porno tick sheet, would then make up the prosecution package and the magistrates could compare the tick sheet to the detailed description of the act that we provided to all the local magistrates. We wrote it in our best and most detached medical language so as not to excite the old magistrates too much and push too many of them into an early grave – the risk of the male members having to be buried sideways in their coffins because of rigor mortis issues leading to difficulties in closing the lid was a very tempting outcome to aim for, but we managed to resist going for it.

Our final push for the modernization of the magistrates’ porno education was to invite one of them to the airport to view a sample of the videos we often seized; this would hopefully make them the local court expert on pornography. This offer of ours, they gladly accepted. I thought how much I would have loved to have been at the meeting when they decided who they were going to send to us to become the font of all perverted sexual knowledge.

The chosen magistrate arrived at our offices the following week. She was Lady Simmons-something-or-other, and was definitely from the established ‘country set’. She was – you could immediately see – quite stern, very prim, terribly serious, probably quietly insane, and the type of woman who would whip her staff with a crop and for sport set the dogs on slow-moving local villagers. She had a stare that could stop a nun smiling at fifty paces. She was wearing the classic combo of brown tweed suit and matching hat, and also, quite ominously, carrying a Margaret Thatcher-style handbag (which could clearly also be used as an offensive weapon). I suspected that inside it there was a full house brick. And I also suspected that, before the end of the day, I would find that out for sure.

We led Lady S. into our viewing room, which housed our video machines and a large-screen TV. She settled down into the comfortable viewing chair with her handbag clenched in her lap and said, ‘Right, let’s get on with it!’

We had prepared a collection of all kinds of pornographic material for our magistrate’s speedy education; a kind of crash course in smashing genitals. Or what someone revising for exams at university would call ‘cramming’ – which was an oddly appropriate word, considering. Myself and three of the boys – Pat, Mark and Harry – stood behind her, ready to answer any questions that she may have. I started the video.

We’d laid on a proper platter of porn, a fulsome feast of filth, all the better to make our case. First up was what we’d term a normal, standard fuck film – ‘Awful. Just awful!’ Lady S. said – then followed by an S & M film with a novel use of a broom handle and a spatula – Oh, my lord!’ – which led to our grand, frothing finale: a bestiality film that ended with a very pleasant young woman wanking off a donkey. Not something you see every day.

‘Turn it off!’ she cried. ‘That animal is NOT happy!’ But as we could all see to a man that the donkey was clearly ecstatic, we all burst out laughing. At which point Lady S. jumped up, shouting, ‘You . . . beasts!’, and started swiping at us with her handbag.

All in all, we decided, it was a pretty good day. And, after that, we never had any bad sentencing again.

So, as you see, we’d stop and search anyone – nuns, vicars, pilots, friends of the Queen, MPs, cute children holding fluffy bunnies (‘That rabbit, princess, is going
straight
into quarantine!’) and even the recently dead.

If nothing else, I hope this proves, once and for all, that we didn’t play favourites and that we didn’t mistrust just anyone. We mistrusted
everyone.
That might make you feel a little better about being stopped yourself – knowing that you are in very good (and very bad) company.

When it came to concealments – both in baggage and in the body – we got to see the big and small, the bold and the beautiful, and the foolish and the painful. Early on, all the concealments were for hiding drugs but later, due to the government’s tobacco policy, cigarettes and tobacco became a valuable thing to smuggle. I know that it sounds strange but the smugglers soon discovered that there was just the same amount of profits to be made running baccy as running cannabis, and if caught the prison sentence was shorter. I looked forward to a government policy that sent the price of chilli peppers sky high and caused smugglers to turn to bringing those in; it certainly would have been easier to spot a chilli mule with contraband peppers up his arse – the smoke from the ears would have been a dead giveaway.

Smuggling organizations are very much the same as small businesses in that they have overheads and profit margins, they lose stock and even lose employees, and their aim is to make as much money as they can and with as little disruption as possible. And what they are very adept at doing is changing with the fashion. Not only will they move between different kinds of drug – as different drugs go in and out of fashion or become easy or difficult to get – but they will also change their methods of concealment.

For the chancers – or ‘personal usage’ smugglers – there were plenty of readymade concealments available to buy or get information about via the internet. But, of course, if Customs knows about them already, then you’re going to get caught in the long run. Potential smugglers never seem to think that Customs officers might be looking at the same concealment advice on the same internet sites as them. Some of the commercially available stashes that we had come across included: hollowed-out disposable lighters (that still worked) with a removable bottle in the base; AA batteries (that worked when tested and could even be recharged) that unscrewed to reveal a small drug stash inside; beer cans that were labelled correctly and even weighed the same as a full beer can but unscrewed at the top to reveal a large storage space; and even shaving-cream aerosols that unscrewed at the bottom and were filled with drugs but were cleverly made to still squirt real foam out of the top. Come to think of it, if we hadn’t been a big bunch of highly suspicious bastards, we’d have never found anything!

Then there was the items that were not always what they seemed to be, such as mobile phones that – in the early days when mobiles were bigger – were in perfect working order and could be used to make calls but inside they hid a small .22 pistol; or phones that had two small aerials and were actually 50,000-volt stun guns. And just think, there were people walking around in the UK with these items because of the ones we missed. So, if you ever see someone on their mobile who suddenly starts glowing bright red with sparks coming off their head, then chances are that they have hit the wrong button on their stun phone.

One noteworthy concealment was found behind the canvases on some national treasures from Eastern Europe. The paintings involved were all over six foot high and the smugglers were convinced that, due to their national treasure designation, we would never touch them. Lucky for us, our drugs dogs had no idea what was a work of art and what wasn’t – in fact, they would sniff and cock their leg over a Picasso. But, after our drugs hounds had run their twitching noses over the canvas, we found that each painting had concealments of five kilos of heroin hidden between the painting and the backing, which increased the value of each painting by about £1 million.

Our problems started after the smugglers were convicted. The government of the country in question was furious at us for not releasing all the works of art after the trial. The matter would drag through court for some time due to the fact that any item discovered concealing contraband immediately becomes the property of the Crown. Whether they ever got them back or whether the Queen just got a few new works of art to hang in her toilet, I don’t really know. It was one for the lawyers to spend a lot of time (and a lot of chargeable hours) working out.

Footwear has always been a popular source of concealments. All that has changed is that the advent of big trainers created more space for concealments: you can get much more hidden in the thick soles of a pair of Adidas than a pair of brogues. Drugs runners (and terrorists) may be convinced that smelly footwear is a no-go area for law enforcement, but it was usually one of the first things that we looked at during a strip search: the shoes came off straight away and then every area from the tongue to the laces was checked as in the past we had found drugs in each part. Trainer manufacturers may as well have their own smugglers on their design teams because modern training shoes have such huge air spaces in the soles that it’s almost as if they were designed with smuggling in mind. What was meant to be an ergonomic design for the sportsman was both a Trojan horse and a gift horse for the smuggler.

Quite often, personal-user amounts of drugs were found in smugglers’ washbags. Every single item that could possibly be adapted
was
adapted to carry drugs: toothpaste tubes, soap, deodorants, the aforementioned shaving foam, contact lens cleaners, tampons, etc. One item that also seemed almost purpose-built for concealment were tubs of face cream such as Oil of Olay, formerly Ulay (other face creams for smuggling drugs are available). The tubs were quite large in comparison to the area in which the cream was held, a bit like Dr Who’s Tardis in reverse, but with a few tugs and a bang on the table, we found we could get the two parts to separate, revealing a large space that was often full of something else that was used to ‘powder the nose’.

Lipsticks are also very popular because it is easy to cut off the end of the lipstick, insert the drugs into the lipstick tube, and then place the cut-off lipstick top back into place. The ultimate lipstick concealment I found was a personal importation from Colombia. There was a pack of twelve brightly coloured lipsticks where every lipstick was actually moulded from cocaine paste. Very clever. They looked perfect, until you realized that no colour came off the lipstick. (At this point I’ll make it clear that we tried them out on the back of our hands; I wouldn’t want to leave you with the awful image of a six-foot, fifteen-stone hairy-arsed Customs officer pursing his lips and trying on different shades of lipstick. I always saved that for the Christmas party . . .)

Of course, the very best concealments are the ones that have never been discovered by any Customs officer and are still in use today. In fact, some concealments are so good that they have probably survived for centuries – going back to the old Napoleonic Wars – and will be passed on down through the generations. I could tell you what they are . . . and I will do when I find out!

I was mostly in the green channel but I knew that it got very boring in the red channel at times, although it shouldn’t have, as many smugglers mistakenly thought that doing the apparently honest thing of entering the red channel and declaring something legal would negate them from a detailed scrutiny that might discover something illegal. It took more than a bit of fake sincerity to fool us. Though I have to admit that there were some officers who were quite happy to sit in the red channel and do nothing but take VAT and Excise fines on over-allowances of booze and fags instead of exercising the rummage gene, that is, the instinct that makes you want to search. Every good Customs officer is a natural bloodhound.

I didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to know that, when a Turkish flight was in the baggage hall, there were going to be long lines of waiting passengers in the red channel with carpets to declare. A pretty dull assignment, and against my better wishes, I was sent over to the red to help out. My first customer was definitely a potential strip-down merchant. He looked like a bag of shit that hadn’t been packed properly and one that hadn’t slept for a week. He slapped down 600 fags in front of me on the bench and mumbled, ‘I wanna pay for these.’ I totted up the VAT that he owed and took the payment. Then I thought, bugger it all, I know this is going to piss off the senior officer but I can’t resist: ‘Whip your bag up here, sir, and let’s have a quick look in it.’ He looked a little taken aback, mumbled something about my parentage and then heaved up his bag.

The officer next to me leaned over. ‘What the hell do you think you are up to, Jon? Look at the bloody queue we’ve got here.’

I made a nice neat pile of the disgusting, stinking clothes that were inside the bag and then I came across four brandnew, A4-size hardback books, all wrapped up in cellophane. Nothing out of the ordinary there, except that they were all the same book:
The Bird Life of Asia Minor.
This guy looked no more like a birdwatcher than my granny did a pole dancer; I doubted that he could recognize anything more than a fried chicken leg in a bucket. And wherever in the world there is a suspicious little Herbert in an airport mumbling insults under his breath there will be a Customs officer ready to flash the blade of justice from its scabbard . . . or, in my case, my trusty little lock-knife (not quite the same as a sword of justice, I know, but I’ve always found it difficult to get a sword under my jacket without snagging my shirt).