Anything to Declare? (12 page)

So the cellophane wrapping on the books was soon off, and then two different smells hit me: first, I was pretty sure that they didn’t use woodwork PVA glue in book production; second, there was a slight fish-and-chip-shop whiff (and one I would later get very used to in my Investigation years) – the scent of heroin. I flicked through the books’ pages but nothing there, so I examined the hardback covers. They felt OK and looked fine apart from the fact that they just seemed a millimetre or two too thick. I started running the blade along the edge of one of the covers. The hardback separated quite easily, revealing inside a very thin, flat package of heroin. My passenger mumbled, ‘Fuck that!’ and was off on his toes. The shout went up from the officer next to me, ‘Runner in the red!’ and I vaulted straight over the examination desk and was after him. The red and green channels converged at sliding exit doors and as two officers were legging it from the green channel and I was barrelling in from the red . . . guess who got to him first? Well, none of us.

As our runner reached the channel convergence, a grey-haired old lady who had just arrived from Jersey was wheeling her overloaded trolley to the exit and straight into the path of our fugitive. Moving too fast to take evasive action, he slammed into the trolley at high speed and there was an audible bone-snapping sound that made us all wince – and then in slow motion he took off, wheeling through the air over the trolley like a dropkicked scarecrow. It was almost majestic, like a gymnast . . . a pissed and really crap gymnast. Fortunately, when he came down, he landed on his softest part – his head – and knocked himself out cold. We dragged his limp and newly broken body to the interview room and watched the hero of the day – the little old lady – obliviously disappear into the waiting throng of families in arrivals. Just like the woman in
The Ladykillers,
I very much doubted that she even noticed what had happened.

The result of my appearance in the red channel was one very broken-legged smuggler and 750 grams of 80 per cent pure heroin. That should have been the end of it. But two months after his trial (at which he was found guilty), our hop-along smuggler decided to take out a civil action against Customs for compensation, stating that we had caused his broken limb. The case was dropped when we pointed out to his legal team that CCTV footage clearly showed that the break was not in fact caused by officers of HMCE but by an unknown little grey-haired lady assassin who had just arrived from Jersey. We helpfully pointed out how she wasn’t one of ours (more’s the pity).

During my early years at the airport, computers were pretty few and far between, but Customs had one advantage over the police when it came to intelligence gathering. The police only had one national computer system, which was the Police National Computer (PNC), and was what we would refer to as a positive intelligence system. This was due to the fact that it only recorded persons who had been caught and charged with a crime. Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise, on the other hand, had an active computer system, CEDRIC. This meant we were able to put people on to the system who were just suspected of being smugglers or even just associated with persons who were known smugglers. There was no need for people to be caught smuggling to be ensconced on our system.

A dodgy character called Billy Cree was one of these suspects who, even though he had previous form, as yet had never been caught by us. He had his fingers in many criminal pies. Essex police knew him very well but, as far as they were concerned, he was always clean, although he was constantly in the company of high-ranking criminals and drug dealers and appeared to be in their employ. He also appeared to be the King of Concealments, with an array of ways of getting past us without being detected.

One day when I was on duty, Cree just happened to be due in on the next Amsterdam flight. We would always get flight passenger manifests from the airlines just before the planes left their foreign airports. This gave us a good chance to run all the passenger names through CEDRIC before the aircraft touched down. It’s an arse of a job when you have a suspect called Smith or Jones but, in Cree’s case, his surname stuck out. We had stopped him five times in two years and he was always clean or, to put it more correctly in our minds, we never managed to find anything on him. Where
was
he hiding his stuff?

My colleague, Big Martin, sidled up next to me as I was checking the Amsterdam passenger list. ‘Anything on the flight, Jon?’

It was a slow morning and most of the officers were busy concerning themselves with the ever-present devil of the Civil Service – paperwork.

‘Looks like we have Billy Cree inbound again,’ I told him.

Now, Big Martin had a particular dislike for characters like Billy. He was a highly respected officer who had seen it all at Heathrow and now wanted a nice easy life out in the country. The only fly in this ointment was that you cannot just relax and sit back in this job: the fun of the chase, the thrill of the find and the joy of catching a smuggler never really leave your system.

‘I don’t think that you have ever had the pleasure of Mr Cree, have you, Martin?’

Martin, who was now busying himself with Cree’s intelligence record, said, ‘No, but looking at this intel log, it seems to me that this chap needs a proper fingertip job. Fancy giving me a hand when he lands?’

A ‘fingertip job’ was a deep and thorough search of every single thing that the passenger had that could be searched or taken to pieces.

Cree was first off the plane and first into the terminal. With only a largish sports bag, he went straight through the baggage hall and into the green channel. If Martin and I hadn’t been so keen to observe if he was mingling with some other passenger, we would have missed him. As he quickly passed us, Martin’s voice boomed, ‘Yes, thank you, sir, over here please,’ and he pointed to a nearby exam bench.

Cree’s mouth immediately slipped into overdrive. ‘Oh fuck me, here we go again, always the bloody same with you fucking VAT men: every time I come through I get stopped and searched. Got nothing better to do, wankers? Fucking bastards!’

You’d think someone smart enough to have discovered how to stroll through Customs undetected might be smart enough not to verbally abuse the boys in the black and gold – but no.

The usual body and bag search produced, as usual in his case, nothing. But I noticed for the first time that Billy paid a little bit too much close attention to the actual bag itself as we were searching it. Martin had noticed this, too. Telltale sign no. 1. So as a test Martin placed the bag to one side and started asking why our passenger was travelling from Amsterdam. And, bingo, with the bag now apparently discounted, Cree perceptibly relaxed. ‘Tell’ no. 2. Martin passed the bag to me to be X-rayed.

Once again, in the early days for technology, Customs didn’t have the money to supply all airports with X-ray machines, but luckily I was on good terms with airport security and they had two of the machines in the outbound lounge search area.

I X-rayed the bag upwards, downwards, sideways and on its ends but nothing showed. Defeated, I walked back and plopped the bag back on to the table. Billy Cree gave the smallest of smiles. ‘Let me guess: nothing. You found bugger all! See, I’ve been telling you, I’m fucking clean and you lot are picking on me. My lawyer will have your plastic sheriff’s badges for this!’

Nothing new there – we were used to threats on an hourly basis and some days would have felt something was missing, and that we weren’t doing our jobs properly, if we didn’t get any.

But it was the victorious smile that was his undoing, as Martin was on the very edge of letting Billy go when that annoying little grin appeared on his face. So Big Martin reached into his pocket and retrieved a knife, pressed the button on the handle, and the blade swung out. Knives were a personal type of thing among officers. Some liked the Swiss Army penknife, some liked a pruning knife, while I personally carried a lock-knife and Martin had a flick-knife – illegal outside of our working environment. But it suited him down to the ground. And, as Martin was a good six foot five and eighteen stone with huge shoulders that you could have a picnic on, no one was going to tell him that he couldn’t have a flick-knife.

With a couple of swift cuts, he had split the stitching on the handles of the bag. Suddenly Mr Cree got jumpy, so jumpy in fact that he tried to grab the sports bag away from Martin. A quick growl from Martin made him back off. Next for the search was the bag’s base hardener, usually a sheet of plastic-sealed thick cardboard. In some sports bags you could remove it and that was the case here. Martin examined it closely, nothing unusual in the sealing or the thickness, but as we were doing a full turnout . . . the flick-knife appeared again and slashed the plastic open. At this, Billy’s head dropped into his hands. He didn’t even bother to show any interest in what we would find because, of course, he knew what was there. Martin reached for his latex gloves and removed all the plastic covering from the cardboard, only it wasn’t cardboard, it was twenty compressed sheets of LSD tabs. Twenty sheets, 100 tabs per sheet, £5 per tab, a nice total of £10,000. One very expensive sports bag and one suddenly very quiet passenger.

God only knows how many trips he had made through various airports back and forth from Amsterdam; and God knows how many others had used the same kind of concealment. We had once again come face-to-face with the next level of smuggling: the commercially prepared concealment from specialist gangs who catered for smugglers and supplied them with very high-quality concealments. The only weapon against that was good old-fashioned distrust, Customs-officer tenacity and a sharp knife.

As for Billy, well, let’s just say that we didn’t see him again for at least six years.

As your mum would say, it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye. And you might want to be struck blind by some of the things Customs officers have to see. There was a Lufthansa jet inbound from Berlin that was having trouble with its landing gear after take-off – the front wheels had to be lowered and raised a few times before they locked into place. So the airport was already on standby for a crash landing. All emergency services were ready and raring to go, and all security was on high alert. And so were we. You might wonder why. Well, a quirk of the law is that Customs officers have to attend all air crashes to protect the Queen’s revenue by salvaging the duty frees. I know: how sick is that? Even we thought it was mad.

So I drove to the runway with a flashing-lights convoy of police cars, ambulances and multiple fire engines. As the plane came into view, dropping in altitude to beam in on the correct flight path, we were all in a state of suspense – it’s difficult to imagine a way for a large commercial jet to land without wheels that leads to a good outcome. As the jet roared over the runway, its wheels started to drop . . . and the plane’s tyres hit the tarmac with a puff of smoke. It taxied to its terminal and we followed, but, just before it arrived at its stand, a large lump of something fell out of the front-wheel housing. All the emergency vehicles stopped except the fire trucks, which followed the plane. We got out and walked to where the mystery bundle was now lying. We found one of the saddest things it had ever been my misfortune to see: the body of a teenage boy, a stowaway in the undercarriage, crushed to death by the retracting wheels on take-off, his body then frozen solid by the sub-zero icy air of high altitude. Listed: Stowaway DOA.

Airports and their officers see not only some of the wonders of the world but many of its fatal blunders, too.

The pay-scale for uniformed Customs officers at ports and airports was much lower than those of comparative ranks in the police. So overtime and shift allowances were always sought-after commodities. One area for guaranteeing increased numbers of beer tokens was babysitting duty, or doom watch as we called it. This tedious job had to be done night and day, and consisted of sitting and watching a prisoner at the open door of their cell. But we didn’t do this for everyone – oh no, you had to be special. The three categories requiring a twenty-four-hour-a-day babysitter included the two categories of drug smuggler I’ve already mentioned – stuffers and swallowers – and a third: the doomers. The doomers were those who had threatened to hurt or kill themselves, and there were far more of these than you may think.

One doom watch I was glad to just miss occurred when my colleague Pat, who had just finished his eight-hour shift and was due off the following day, was collared by the senior officer who offered him another eight hours at overtime rate for a spot of babysitting. We had a Ghanaian swallower in custody and, as yet, he had not produced what we suspected he had inside him. Pat jumped at the chance of extra beer money and joined Kevin, who was already stationed at the door to the cell. Kev had been with the smuggler all day and explained to Pat that the chap was constantly complaining of being ill. Apparently he had been sick a few times and Kevin had needed to clear it up. Another lovely perk of the job. Then, just as they were talking, the bloke vomited again. This time poor Pat had to clear it up – the overtime was suddenly not smelling too good.

As per the protocol, the on-call doctor arrived to examine our smuggler from Africa. Kevin decided to stay around for a few minutes to see if the doctor thought that the chap was faking it. But, after examining the patient, the doctor moved suddenly out of the cell and into the corridor and, just as quickly, he got hold of Kev and Pat, pushed them back into the room and slammed the door shut! Pat and Kev, too surprised and overwhelmed by the doc’s unexpected actions to have resisted him, stood there agog. The doctor then suddenly slid back the metal plate in the door and shouted, ‘Stay there! You are all under quarantine! Lassa fever!’ Pat and Kev went a little white at that point.

Lassa fever is known as (you’ll like this) ‘an acute viral haemorrhagic illness’, similar to Ebola. Lovely. It first originated in West Africa – where, indeed, our smuggler was from – and is caught from rat shit. In humans, it can lead to organ infection, eye pus, facial swelling and nasal bleeding. Which is a really great look for a zombie party but not such a hit if you have to pick up the kids from school. The virus is also excreted in urine for three to nine weeks and in semen for three months. Fancy breaking that good news to your missus.