Anything to Declare? (15 page)

While at the airport one day, I assisted the local investigation team in searching the hangars of a well-known UK-based aircraft repair company (I won’t name them in case you’re flying this week . . . or reading this on one of their planes!). This company ran fleets of enormous long-haul passenger airliners. And in their service bays at the airport we found millions of pounds’ worth of counterfeit, non-authentic aircraft parts. We checked each part on a serial number database against the purchasing company and, surprise surprise, none of the parts existed.

What didn’t come as a surprise was that we didn’t put out any form of press release. The job was hushed up, with the company being fined millions behind the scenes. Why was it hushed up? you might reasonably ask. Well, we had no idea which aircraft had which dodgy parts. And, on top of that, the company had also been supplying these parts to other airline repair companies. It was decided that for the ‘public’s own good’ the job was to be kept secret, which made the company in question very happy.

You could see all type of counterfeit goods being brought into the country from watches to skateboards, from cigarettes to cheese. But the only home market counterfeiting seemed to be pirating DVDs. And sometimes we didn’t even have to be on duty to see this stuff. On many days off-duty, while sitting in a pub in north London with a Customs colleague, I’d been approached by blokes offering every type of DVD from porn films to Disney films to ‘Disney’ porn films (
Snow White Does the Seven Dwarfs,
for example, and, in this version, I think they were all Happy).

It seemed that the high-speed world of home computing was inhibiting the multimillion-pound film industry and its companies from ripping us off for themselves, which was a shame for them.

Another area of Mickey Mouse goods where I felt a little sorry for the smuggler was that of hooky watches. Major companies spend millions of pounds hunting down the makers and distributors of these fake designer watches. It was only the fashion companies that did this, though, as the normal watch companies don’t seem to be that worried about it. So Chanel, for a purely hypothetical example, might bring out some black and gold watch for £10,000; but Chanel are not a watchmaker, so it’s just possible, if you are a cynical old bastard, to believe that all they have done is buy some middle-market £100 watch, glued a Chanel logo on to it and then added an extra two ‘0’s to the price. Now that would seem to me to be more criminal than somebody copying the watch and selling it for a price much nearer to what it was actually worth. Yet the designer companies go berserk at a cheap copy being sold to someone who would never have the money to buy the original anyway. As I said, I was sort of fifty-fifty on the issue of counterfeiting.

The strangest thing was when we discovered people being ripped off and conned not by strangers but by the people closest to them.

Mr and Mrs Robinson looked like an upstanding couple. Both were well dressed and with expensive luggage. They had arrived on a flight from Los Angeles and appeared to be very much in love. The couple had been married for ten years and owned a number of successful hairdressing salons in north London. However, a year before I met them, they had split up when Mr Robinson’s gambling addiction had started to eat away at the businesses profits. Mrs Robinson had thrown him out and had taken control of all their bank accounts. Mr Robinson managed to shake the gambling habit and the two had got back together three weeks before their tenth wedding anniversary. To mark the event, the couple had decided on a second honeymoon in the States and off they went. And now they were back.

I stopped the Robinsons in the green channel as they looked quite affluent – it was our experience that it was the big spenders who would buy lots of nice goodies and not declare them. So I asked the standard questions as I started to search their baggage. A little polite conversation followed and then the couple told me the whole marriage story. It didn’t take long before I found a small washbag full of Gucci watches. I could see straight away that they were counterfeit: they looked and felt cheap. They were gold and white with scissors for hands.

‘They’re for the hair stylists in our salon. Just a little gift from us,’ said Mrs Robinson.

I informed the couple that the watches would have to be seized. Mr Robinson took it badly. He started to shout about how he knew that they were fake and they weren’t even trying to be the real thing. I had to agree with him on that, and I would have turned a blind eye and let him through with them, but the trouble was that, while I’d been checking the watches, a senior officer had walked passed and mouthed ‘good job’. So, that was that, the fate of the fake watches was sealed. But just then I spotted Mrs Robinson’s brand-new Gucci watch on her wrist.

‘Do you mind if I have a look at your Gucci, madam?’ I asked Mrs Robinson.

She looked a little embarrassed as she removed it.

‘Oh dear,’ she said in a not very convincing way. ‘I forgot all about this one. I think we should have gone in the red channel to declare it.’

‘Well . . . actually . . . I don’t think the red channel officer would have been too worried by this one,’ I said as I examined the watch and then slid it into the seizure bag with the other fake Guccis. There were a few seconds of surprise while this information sank in, then a few seconds more while it was processed, then a look of dawning realization on Mrs Robinson’s face as she suddenly sussed what had happened – and then turned to her husband and she released one of the greatest right hooks I have ever seen. Mr Robinson flew backwards with a small cry and met the floor, unconscious with a cracked jaw. Mrs Robinson followed up her punch with an equally perfectly timed cry of ‘Bastard!’ But by then Mr Robinson was already in the land of nod. So what had changed Mrs Robinson into Sugar Ray Robinson?

Apparently, Mr Robinson, with a nice piece of persuasive pillow talk, had convinced his wife to give him £2,000 from their account so that he could, he said, buy Mrs Robinson a nice present, e.g. a real Gucci watch. Which he had apparently done in LA. But, when I’d slipped it into the bag with the other fakes, the penny had dropped and she realized that her dear husband’s addiction had returned. He had clearly gambled away the two grand and then bought her a Mickey Mouse Gucci watch.

By the time I had finished the paperwork with his wife, Mr Robinson had been whisked away to hospital for treatment to his socked jaw. Here’s to you, Mrs Robinson, indeed.

It wasn’t only wives that could do for you – kids could be a self-inflicted lethal weapon, too. Most people have had the experience of travelling with young children and all the joy and fun that brings – the moaning, the crying, the constant toilet breaks and the annoying kicking of the back of the seat in front. And that’s just the behaviour of the parents. But as Customs officers we could be extra evil and use the children as willing intelligence sources against their parents. It’s one of the dangers of travelling with a little mobile truth-telling machine.

One day, I was working the green channel at Gatwick when a flight came in from Jamaica. The Jamaica flights were always a good shot for cannabis, coke and bottles of Wray & Nephew rum, which, at 62.8 per cent alcohol, was like flavoured rocket fuel (normal whisky being 40 per cent). I stopped a large woman and her nine-year-old son who came through the channels. Coming from outside of the European Union, the lady was allowed one litre of the W&N firewater but, on examination of her large quantity of baggage, I discovered she was carrying another fifteen litres. It was the sound of sloshing that gave her away. This kind of rum running was a never-ending conveyor belt; and everybody seemed to try their hand at it (even the West Indies cricket team). But once a ‘find’ is discovered it has to be acted on. During the interview, the lady said she had never done this before and she was very sorry and she’d never do it again; to calm her down, I asked her how she was planning on getting home. She said she was really afraid that her husband, who was due to pick her up, would think that he’d missed them and go home.

It took me another twenty minutes to process the case but I tried to do it as quickly as I could so at least she and her son could get their lift home. In the end, she coughed up about £600 in duty tax and the fine. During all this time, the young lad had not said a word, just watched and taken everything in.

As she was leaving the channels, I asked where her husband might be waiting for her. ‘I’ve no idea,’ she said, ‘but I’m sure he’s been waiting too long and has gone home.’

Then, perfectly on cue, the young lad looked up and very clearly and loudly said, ‘Won’t Daddy be waiting in the same place that he waited last time you were arrested here?’

Bollocks. I’d forgotten to check if she had previous. Feeling a bit embarrassed that I’d not done a background check, I let her and her son on their way. When I thought about it, I really should have questioned the brains of the operation – the nine-year-old.

Is machine better than the man? Well, in my experience in the airports, I would have to say a definite ‘no’ to that one. Over the years, Customs has tried many ways of doing the smuggler-spotting job better than its best trained officers, and every time the machine or the alternative method has seemed to come off second best.

The first form of the ANPR (automatic number plate reader) was deployed at Dover ferry port. The idea was that the number plate reader would scan the plate and send the data to good old CEDRIC, and this in turn would alert the officers in the car hall that a suspect vehicle was approaching. It was a great idea and one that later went on to work well all over the country. The problem was that in the beginning it only worked 50 per cent of the time and this was down to mud and muck on the registration plates. There was a way to solve that but it was one that rather gave the game away: an officer with a mop and bucket standing by the reader, ready to swab down any dirty plates as cars came through. You didn’t exactly need to be a master criminal to realize what that meant.

The next great leap forward into the future was something called the Sniffer Arch that was installed at Heathrow. The manufacturers claimed that, as passengers walked through it, the arch could easily identify the smell of any major drug. So, at last – we thought a little dubiously – the ultimate smuggler spotter had been found. Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, it didn’t work out that way. The arch was more easily aroused than a nymphomaniac on a pogo stick bouncing over cobbles. Every few minutes it started going off, screaming with alarms and whistles and bells and flashing lights; it made the airport terminal look as if a permanent conference of the world’s drug dealers was passing through. Instead of drugs, the machine was registering perfume and aftershave. After a few days of shrieking madness – mostly from us at having to listen to it – the arch was relegated to a back wall, never to be heard of again. And how many people did it catch? Precisely none. (It did later raise a few quid at the local car-boot sale, though.)

The concept of the Sniffer Arch was later revived with more success when it was reconfigured as a detection device for explosives, using lasers to scan for the relevant materials. And anything that stopped passengers from having to undress in the airport had to be a good thing.

Next came a competition not between man and machine but man and fly. The fruit fly, to be exact. A number of European scientists had found that fruit flies could be trained to identify the odour of controlled drugs. In experiments they discovered that the insects would swarm to the specific site location of certain chosen illegal substances. Whether or not they had to turn these little buggers into junkies in order to get them to search out their drug of choice, I don’t know. But, if so, it must have been hell trying to tap up a vein in a fruit fly. And I couldn’t see how a doped-up, cannabis-sensitized fly could be bothered to get up off its tiny, lackadaisical arse and do
anything.
The last thing we wanted in the airport was a swarm of smacked-out insects, dopey bugs and amphetamine-hopped flies turning the Butterflies Ball into an acid house rave.

Flies, apparently, use their highly developed sense of smell to determine their flight patterns and they can detect red wine from three-quarters of a mile away, but in practical terms how could that really help us in drug detection in an airport? Well, the scientists explained that it was all a work in progress. But, as yet, Customs has still not adopted it – much appreciated, I’m sure, by the detection dog officers who didn’t have to retrain as fly handlers! Which is a good job, because I’d be damned if I’d have walked around an airport with another officer with a fruit fly on a tiny leash.

But this was not a new thing; if you look back in history, we have always strived to find something that would take away the guesswork or the reliance on the law enforcer’s intuition. A hundred or so years ago, we believed that criminals could be classified by the bumps on their head, the length of their nose or the distance between their eyes. We laugh at this now, but then it was cutting-edge science that took years to dismiss. Even today, not many people realize that handwriting/graphology readers have now been discredited. It’s rubbish, but, once again, for years we believed in it. Big companies spent hundreds of thousands of pounds using graphologists to hire the best person for the job. They would have been just as successful counting potatoes on the applicant’s hands. Or, indeed, the bumps on their head.

The same is true of voice-stress analysis and even MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) as ways of supposedly detecting the truth from the lies. But the great-granddaddy of them all, and the last great myth of techno-detection, was the lie-detector test. The trouble is that it is unreliable and can easily give false positives – meaning it can make an innocent man look guilty. How many millions have been spent on this piece of unreliable kit? Luckily, we have always been wise enough to know that the machine can be fooled and, in fact, you can train yourself to deceive the technology. The polygraph is more widely used in the United States – despite there being ample cases that show its failure to detect, for example, things like double agents working for the Soviet Union during the Cold War – but the evidence that is produced from the polygraph has never and, I think, will never be acceptable in a British court.