Anything to Declare? (2 page)

Well, serves me right, I thought – the curiosity of the Customs officer strikes again. Trust me to have a butcher’s and find . . . what looked like a butcher’s. That’ll teach you, Jon, you nosy, suspicious old bastard. I was just glad that, technically, this was actually nothing to do with Customs. I could wipe my hands of it, if not my nostrils.

I was just getting ready to leave and call it in when the first police arrived, obviously alerted already by someone equally suspicious. The first officer came closer, looked in, turned green, and immediately bent over and noisily parked his breakfast all over his shoes. They went from being shiny black to multicoloured pebble-dash. The second officer smiled weakly at me, nodded, and to his credit he straight away got on with what he knew had to be done – secure and make safe the shotgun (which, as he picked it up, you couldn’t help but notice, was dripping with something that belonged
inside
the human body but was now irretrievably
out
).

Great start to a Monday morning, I thought a little while later as I sat in the canteen eating a large fry-up. Oh, come on, don’t hold that against me – as they say, breakfast is the most important meal of the day! (Though that young copper might have disagreed.)

And all this, remember, had happened
before
I’d actually clocked on, so technically I hadn’t even been at work. Not for the first time, something encountered during the course of a day made me think: if that’s the kind of thing that this job reveals to you even when you’re off-duty, then you can imagine what you might have to look forward to when your shift actually does begin. Perhaps even more bodies floating past me in the river.

It’s Monday mornings like that one that make me think back to how I got into this and where it all started.

Everyone, as they say, has to start somewhere. My starting place in Customs was at Stansted Airport on the ‘old’ side of the runway, that is, on the other side of the runway to the new high-tech ‘greenhouse’ terminal designed by Norman Foster at a cost of £100 million. What would become known as the old Stansted (but which was at the time new to me) was a pretty simple creation from the 1970s with single-storey buildings and Portakabins. The passengers, believe it or not, actually had to
walk
from the plane to the terminal. And the staff canteen was really no more than a glorified prefab Nissen hut from the time when Stansted was in the hands of the 8th Air Force of the USAAF (United States Army Air Force) during the Second World War. From looking at the regular canteen menu, I think they left some of their food behind as well.

But, having already served in the regular Army, I was used to food that wasn’t exactly haute cuisine. After I had left the regulars, I’d joined the Territorial Army, which also allowed me to return to college in Cambridge. Near exam time, I was on TA duty in the officer’s mess of the Royal Anglians when I’d been approached by an ageing captain who was a little drunk. He was apparently worried that I was heading for the dole in the next couple of weeks and informed me that Customs at Stansted Airport was looking for bench officers. For some reason, even though I’d never considered it before, the idea immediately grabbed me. And I wrote and posted a letter of interest within the next twenty-four hours.

As new recruits, our training consisted of three intensive months: first month, we were at our home airport of Stansted and we covered all the basics: law, rules and regulations (you needed to know the different Customs Acts of Parliament inside out), spotting potential targets, etc. Month two was spent on a residential training course, in my case held at a hotel in Eastbourne, away from our station, and here officers from all over the country were brought together for role-play training, advanced training in interviews and paperwork (notebooks and witness statements), training in passenger stops and advanced lessons based on the first month’s teaching. Our third month was at a different port or airport – Gatwick was my temporary posting – to the one where we were mentored all the time. Then a probation period continued for nine more months at the home station where we were assessed on how we carried out our duties with any cock-ups noted – strip searching the Queen, letting through a live monkey disguised as a hairy child, detaining someone for being in possession of a concealed banana . . . that kind of thing.

Our exams were an ongoing thing, structured very much like the military – explanation, demonstration, imitation, test. There was no computer-based training. In fact, we only had one computer and that was a secure Customs and Excise Departmental Reference & Information Computer (CEDRIC) terminal in the Intelligence office.

The failure rate was low for preventive training Customs officers because, although the uniform service was an attractive option to many people, when they discovered the hours and the exacting work required, most dropped out even before their training started. On top of this, the interview stage we’d been through to get there was tough. You had to show you had the right stuff to progress any further.

Like Judge Dredd, we had to know the laws inside out and back to front. I knew that, when I was operational, I wouldn’t get time to sit and flick through the law books. The important front-line laws were: the Customs and Excise Management Act (CEMA, which was our bible), the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE), the VAT Act, the Customs Consolidation Act 1876, the Misuse of Drugs Act, the Customs and Excise Tariff, the Firearms Act, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), the Counterfeit Act and the Misdescription of Goods Act amongst others. So you can see that my bedtime reading at this time wasn’t exactly a barrel of laughs. There aren’t many chuckles to be had in the VAT Act.

The training was hard and intense and we were expected to learn quickly. There is a reason for this: HMCE was regarded as the best Customs service in the world. I trained with all sorts, from the mad and the bad to the whip-smart and disciplined – drawn from all walks of life for all kinds of reasons. The training hammers us all into shape and then nails us into a stiff black (though officially ‘Customs Blue’) uniform with bright gold braid and scary peaked cap (ominous X-ray stare, officer’s own).

After the first month’s book and theory training, my tutor, Mick, decided to let me loose to have a go on the general public, just to see if I had what it takes. Mick was a very experienced, long-in-the-tooth former Excise officer who had moved over to Customs. He knew that all the theory in the world won’t tell you whether or not you’re ready for harsh reality – at some point, you’ve got to get stuck in and hit ‘the channels’ (as we called the red/green declare/nothing-to-declare exits). As I walked in uniform down the shining concourse of a London airport for the first time, the polished floor reflecting the strip lights above, I knew that I’d found the right job and the right place to be. I was now officially a HMCE Airport Preventive Officer (APO) working the bench (search table) on incoming channels and airplane searches at Stansted Airport.

On this particular day, an Amsterdam flight had just landed and so I positioned myself behind a bench and tried to look like I knew what I was doing, helped by the fact I was wearing my evil-looking HMCE-issue cap with its white cover and steep shiny black peak and my black APO uniform decorated with gold braid – the passengers didn’t know that single gold band on my sleeve meant I was only a newly appointed APO. (They probably also didn’t know that the historical reason why the gold braid doesn’t go all around the arm on a Customs officer uniform is because we donated the inside half of the braid to the military in the First World War.)

I stood there watching everyone file past knowing that, like when it comes to spiders, they’re more afraid of you than you are of them. I remembered from my training that they said that spotting potential targets is like trying to find Willy Wonka’s Golden Ticket. Although the training gave us guidelines in the area, in the end it quite often came down to experience. But, until you got that experience, you needed something to go on, so it was broken down into categories of suspicion:

a) Paperwork: Passports that showed trips to drug-source countries; flight tickets paid in cash; and diaries (some people are actually stupid enough to write down everything that they have been up to, including the illegal acts).

b) Dress: Are they wearing the right type of dress for the place from which they have just arrived? For example, wearing a business suit on a package flight from Ibiza is going to stand out. People mistakenly think that simply looking smart is enough to avoid suspicion. But it is better to look scruffily right than too smartly wrong.

c) Drug paraphernalia: Cannabis T-shirts, golden razorblade necklaces, etc. seem almost
too
obvious – but they aren’t.

d) General appearance: Many drugs users are employed as mules because they are cheap and can be paid in the product that they are smuggling, so telltale signs of a user are often the signs of a carrier.

e) Nervousness: Again, this seems obvious but it is more difficult to read because it is only a certain
kind
of nervousness that rings our alarm bells; mostly we expect people to be a little bit nervous when stopped by Customs.

f) Amsterdam: Just because it’s Amsterdam. Nuff said.

On top of this, we would be supplied by our Intelligence teams with what we called ‘Trend Alerts’, that is, specific areas of suspicion that occurred during certain times and for certain reasons. For example, as I was beginning my training, there was a fashion for smuggling gangs to give British pensioners free holidays to Spain – and all the little grey-haired old ladies and gentlemen had to do in return was to bring back a package. It was based on the understandable idea that little old ladies seem more trustworthy. Unless, of course, you’re a big, bad Customs officer who wouldn’t trust a nun on a crutch.

Sometimes I knew that passengers made things easier for you by being . . . well, let’s not beat around the bush . . . by being idiots. T-shirts with a big cannabis leaf on the front tended to get noticed, as did ones with ‘Free The Weed’ written across them. No sign is too obvious, so don’t think that these passengers got a pass on the basis that you wouldn’t wear a cannabis leaf T-shirt
and still
have a travel bag full of weed. Unsurprisingly, often the two went together. So walking through Customs in that kind of attire meant that you may as well have done it with your pants already around your ankles – it would have certainly saved time.

Contents of baggage also gave away massive clues, and clues so obvious you would think the passenger would see it themselves. Often they didn’t. So packets of Jumbo Rizlas with some of the cardboard missing (torn off to make a homemade filter – a roach) on someone coming back from Amsterdam was enough to earn them a pull on the grounds of stupidity alone. And burnt spoons in the luggage may have been taken out, but the track marks up the arms could not be hidden – both obvious signs of heroin use. But one of the favourite giveaways was photographs showing the traveller toking on a big spliff.

Unfortunately, none of these obvious signs were present and none of the usual alarm bells were being rung by the passengers off the Amsterdam flight, so, on the basis that I had to stop someone, I eventually motioned to a young Dutchman to come over to me so I could conduct my first ever search. The passenger was a chap called Van der Mons who, it turned out, was a glasshouse erector working in Lincolnshire. Which was sort of appropriate as the Dutch were among the first to heat larger greenhouses, using charcoal braziers – and we all know what is often grown in greenhouses in Holland.

I rummaged through his bag as if every single item hid a terrible secret – remote control exploding underpants? Socks impregnated with heroin (or was that just skin flakes)? Comb that doubled up as a flick-knife? Well, I didn’t know; during training it was drilled into us to trust no one, be suspicious of everyone and search everything. What I found was an excess amount of tobacco and a telltale packet of Jumbo Rizla. With Mr Van der Mons’s passport in hand, I wandered over to Mick and told him what I had found.

‘So then,’ he said, ‘do you want an SOP?’

That was Search of Person. I didn’t really know: did I really want to look up a stranger’s arse this early in my career? But I knew that I did want a good result so . . . in for a penny. Mick took me over to the senior officer. By the book, I had to officially request an SOP, giving my reasons. This I did, and Mick and I escorted our Dutchman into a search room.

Now, I’m not a lover of the naked male form – I don’t even like my own – but I didn’t know then that over the next few years I was to see more naked men than the choreographer of the Chippendales. In the case of Mr Van der Mons, we politely asked him if he would strip down and Mick asked him to lift his bollocks.

‘
Boll
-locks? Boll-locks? What are “boll-locks”?’ he said, laughing.

‘Er . . .
them
things,’ said Mick, pointing to our Dutchman’s testicles.

He happily complied, laughing all the time and occasionally shouting out,
‘Bollocks!
Good! I like! Bollocks. Ha!’

We found about 9 grams of cannabis resin . . . but in his trainers, under the tongue – so all along all we’d needed to do was ask his shoes to open up and say ‘argh’.

He was fined and sent on his way and, as for me, well I was the golden boy for having got a successful ‘find’ on my first pull – albeit a small find and albeit more by luck than judgement. Though, having said that, often on certain flights from Amsterdam, it would sometimes have been difficult
not
to pick someone who was carrying.

After this time on practical experience, I left the airport to join my friend and fellow trainee, Brian, and resume my uniform training until I was ready to hit the channels full time.

By the time Brian and I were at stage three of training a few months later, we were at Gatwick Airport and about to learn that there was truth in the old saying that there was more than one way to skin a cat . . . and smuggle a cat . . . and hide a cat in your luggage . . . and smuggle drugs in a cat, etc. You could also say that, if you worked at an airport long enough (or, if you were unlucky, even for just one day), you would eventually see everything. Twice.