Anything to Declare? (17 page)

As they approached, Benny stood in the doorway and stated that he was ready for nature to take its course, which meant that the drugs would finally make an appearance. On their way to the toilet, one of the officers noticed a smallish, brown-rimmed hole in the backside of the paper suit. Grabbing Benny, they rushed back to the cell where they were almost overcome by the smell of human waste. They lifted the blanket and there, in the middle of a steaming pile, were six golf-ball-sized packages of drugs. Benny smiled. ‘Well, don’t look at me, I never done that. It’s a plant.’

Our dear friend Benny was given three years and new nickname that sort of rhymed with ‘dip’. And our paths never crossed again.

As Intel officers at the airport, we were always on the lookout for new ways of catching a potential drugs run. Bob, my manager, came up with a corker. He knew that in my skills armoury I had the ability of a pretty good lock-picker. When likely-looking smugglers were spotted going outbound through passport control, he would pass their details to me, down in the bowels of the airport. I would then pull out their checked-in luggage, pick the locks and see if I could find any evidence that might link them to drug smuggling. Now that might sound a bit hit and miss but it worked really well. The hit rate was high.

You would never have sussed that passengers Mr and Mrs Whitehead were husband and wife as she was a good twenty-five years older than him. But there they were, snogging each other in the passport queue, so they were clearly a couple. For some reason, Bob’s antennae identified them as ‘possible’ so he passed down their details. Ten minutes later, I had their bags off the belt for a search. Inside there were hypodermic needles, lots of condoms, dental floss and clingfilm – the perfect kit for both personal drug use and an internal drug-smuggling attempt. The two of them were booked out for a two-week stay in Thailand, a drug-supply source country, so they looked a good bet for coming back into the country with more than tan lines and cheap flip-flops.

So, two weeks later, a four-officer team waited for their arrival. Bob and I watched the couple on CCTV. ‘I see the love is still there,’ Bob said, as the Whiteheads once again came through the airport with their lips latched together, but this time with the addition of the husband’s hand up his wife’s skirt. In fact, this ostentatious display of affection was what had first caused suspicion, as Bob, with all his wisdom and experience, knew that smugglers sometimes fell into the psychological trap of thinking that behaviour that attracted attention would somehow make them look above suspicion. It was the kind of double bluff that Customs rarely fell for because we saw it for what it was: a diversionary ploy that also acted as an inadvertent reveal. In other words, if you give yourself a fake ‘alibi’ and that alibi looks false, then it’s worse than not having one in the first place.

The couple were both pulled over and their baggage searched, and this time the entire drug-smuggling paraphernalia had disappeared. As the two of them were taken to different interview rooms for body searches, etc., I got a better chance to run their passports and other details through all our computer systems. The result that I got was very surprising, and unpleasant: Mr and Mrs Whitehead were not husband and wife but were, in fact, mother and son.

In the following hours, both of them showed a positive reaction to heroin on the urine test but neither of them was going to admit to smuggling. After forty-eight hours, Mr Whitehead’s urine reading was going sky high as more drugs were being released internally into his system but his mother’s reading had dropped by a few points. Now this wasn’t unusual with smugglers who were carrying their consignments inside their bodies but the local magistrate didn’t seem to understand the technicalities of the urine test and thought that the slight drop in Mrs Whitehead’s test meant she wasn’t carrying – and so the magistrate refused us an extension on her detention. So, with a huge grin on her face, she was set free.

Early morning on the third day of detention, Mr Whitehead was as unhelpful as ever, but he did receive his breakfast very eagerly. The officer on babysitting duties, waiting for Whitehead to inevitably pass the drugs out of his body, reported another no show. But, unknown to the officer, just before breakfast had arrived, Whitehouse had shat out the package of heroin into his hand. When the meal did arrive, and before the officer could stop him, Whitehead grabbed the cup of orange juice, slammed the package (still covered in crap) into his mouth and washed it all down with a gulp. This changed the game completely. A well-wrapped package of heroin may make it, intact, through the human body once, but put it back in there for a second time and it’s likely to rupture and kill the carrier. So we got him to hospital ASAP and within two hours he was secured in the contagious diseases ward and handcuffed so that he couldn’t do a repeat performance of his heroin/crap-eating act. The duty hospital doctor was angry with us for the handcuffs and demanded that we remove them. He soon changed his mind when it was explained to him what had happened in the cell. Within the next two days, Whitehead produced fourteen packages of heroin. He later pleaded guilty in court (he had no defence) and was given seven years. He later admitted that his mother had also been carrying the same amount of drugs. We never got to the bottom of why they thought it would be better to pretend to be travelling as a romantically involved couple than as mother and son. But then we’d already learned that the desperation – and eating habits – of people in the grip of drug addiction should not be underestimated.

Sometimes good things attract bad people. For example, the American delivery company FedEx could get a package from point A to point B almost anywhere in the world within twenty-four hours, which is quite a feat. Now to us, at Customs, that meant one thing: FedEx would be viewed, by smugglers, as the smuggling carrier of choice. Their belief was that the speed of the package’s movement would prevent us from finding any intelligence linking it to either the sender or the recipient. And that was quite true (it still is a problem). False names for the two parties – sender and recipient – left us little to go on. So we had to rethink our whole approach towards identifying naughtiness. The first giveaway was the recipient’s address, such as a hotel room, which perhaps suggested trying to avoid a home detection. This method led me to arrest the secretary of a very famous rock singer.

I had identified the suspect package as going to a Hilton hotel room in London. The package was then removed when the plane arrived from Memphis (FedEx’s main international hub). A quick examination revealed a package of very pure cocaine. We knew that the consignment would likely be shared between the secretary and her rock-star boss as it’s always in the interests of the celebrity to get their lackey to take the risk.

As I was repackaging the box with 20 grams of icing sugar, I received a phone call from the FedEx office saying that a Miss Harris had just phoned up to see whether her package had arrived from the States. Now, this was out of the ordinary. I asked them to call her back and say that the package was cleared and that she should receive it at about nine the following morning. This message was relayed, and she then asked if she could come down and pick it up from the Stansted Airport FedEx office. Of course, I immediately said yes to that as it would save me hours of preparation and travel – let the smuggler come to me for once. I thought, I could get used to this.

She turned up at Stansted within the hour, handed over the correct paperwork, identified herself with her passport and received the package. She then headed for her car where I was waiting with my HMCE-issue silver wrist jewellery. While processing the lady at the custody office, a number of the staff there passed round her American passport. None of us could believe that the woman in the photograph was the same as the one I had just arrested. Her passport photo was taken when she was a Miss America contestant and a stunningly beautiful woman. The same woman at the desk was the result of years and years of cocaine abuse: she was stick thin, her nose was being eaten away by the alkaline drug and her face was all skin and bone. If any of us needed a reason to carry on foiling drug-smuggling operations, there stood the reason.

Funnily enough, my next significant find while working on the Intelligence team also featured a FedEx package, but this time a portion of the drugs in the package ended up in a place they’d never been before – inside my body.

I had identified a package arriving on the evening FedEx flight. It had started its journey in the Colombian capital, Bogotá, and was addressed to a small town in Sussex. Now there was little interest in it other than it was on its way from an obviously drug-saturated country like Colombia. But what had tweaked my extra interest was that the contents were described as a satellite TV box. Nothing strange in that, you may think, but the trouble is that South American stations were working on a different TV system than ours. There was also the fact that the postage cost was more than the box was worth. So I flagged up the FedEx computer and waited for its 9 p.m. flight to arrive. By 10.30 p.m., I had commandeered the box and returned to our workshop, which was located in the main passenger terminal, behind the green channel. I could have passed the job on to the uniform boys but they were too busy with a Montego Bay flight that had just arrived. Unpacked, the box was just an old and battered satellite TV tuner. So out with the screwdriver and off with the back, then stand back and stare. Inside there were no electrical components, just a big chalky, grainy mass of hard-packed powder. A quick field drugs test revealed that it was pure cocaine. And a quick X-ray revealed that it was
all
pure cocaine, right the way through. That amounted to about 3.5 kg of pure cocaine, wrapped up in a battered aluminium satellite box. Quite a haul considering it was the pure stuff, which meant it would be ‘stepped on’, i.e. weakened by cutting with other powders – until it made many, many more times the weight in wraps and individual deals.

I contacted Investigation control in London and was passed on to the cocaine team’s duty officer. I gave him all the details that I had and he asked if I could dummy up the package and his team would be up to us at 8 a.m. the following day. ‘Dummying up’ is as simple as it sounds: remove all the drugs and replace them with something that on initial glance would appear to be the same thing. It must weigh the same and you can’t leave any telltale traces that you have been into the package. Which was easier said than done with the satellite TV tuner box and the way the coke was packed hard into it. Having examined the options, I decided that the only way that the coke was going to come out was with the aid of a hammer and chisel, and I got to work.

Two hours later, and without the protection of a face mask, I was still hammering away like a good-un. An hour after that and it had all been completed, and I had dummied up the package with the substance that we used to calibrate our X-ray machines for drug detection – same weight and density as the real thing. The satellite tuner box was put back together, packed in its FedEx parcel and ready for the Investigation team to carry out a controlled delivery to the destination address where it would arrive just ahead of a gang of large-booted Customs officers who would gently kick the door off its hinges and then ever-so-politely question the occupants about their future career plans before kindly escorting them to the nearest police station for a further cosy chat and some tea and biscuits.

Meanwhile, I was . . . you might say . . .
buzzing.
Even though I’d been at work all day from the early hours and was physically very tired, I got no sleep whatsoever the whole night. Or the next. Because, of course, all my hammering away with a chisel, without wearing a face mask, at a block of solid cocaine meant that I’d snorted enough Class A powder to revive a dead donkey and propel it to a clear win at the Grand National.

Luckily, we didn’t yet have staff drugs tests, so it didn’t go down on my record that for at least one day I was higher than Keith Richards in a hot air balloon.

As Customs Intelligence teams improved, we started to get access to airline computer systems, which gave us details of ticket payments and full details of a passenger’s travel. This was so successful that we could, and often did, inform overseas Customs agencies of smugglers that were heading for their borders. This in turn became reciprocal and the intel started flowing back to us. Intelligence started to come of age and Customs management realized that they were sitting on a gold mine. So our Intel team grew to six officers. Another change that occurred was that, against the wishes of the Intel team’s first officer, Gary, we moved from wearing unranked uniforms to plain clothes. I kind of missed the uniform but, now we were in plain clothes, so to speak, we really did feel like we were part of the genuine undercover mob.

Similarly, as our airport intel grew in importance and effectiveness, all ports and airports started increasing their teams. And this is where an obvious problem occurred. Where does one get one’s Intelligence officers from? Well, they were taken from the red/green channels at the airports as there was nowhere else to get them from. So now we had less officers stopping passengers, and those officers that remained tended to act only on intelligence-based information. It became in some ways self-defeating and an ever-tightening circle.

It may be a surprise to all who read this, but Customs does a great deal in times of war. The greatest misunderstanding and misinformation about Customs concerned the so-called ‘supergun’ parts going to Iraq. Matrix Churchill was a Coventry firm involved in exporting machine tools, which it was said could then be used for making military equipment. The press never understood what happened and the senior Customs officials never really put over the correct information. Yes, Customs did indeed know about the exportations of the gun parts and wanted to stop them but the British secret services wanted to know where they were headed and who was behind the whole project. This can only be done if Customs allowed what we called a ‘live run’, that is, a free run-through of information or goods in order to flush out further information and intel at the other end. Then, at the end of the exercise, when the secret services had all the information that they needed, we seized the very next exportation.