Anything to Declare? (25 page)

Cutter boats – that is, a medium-sized boat sanctioned with official authority – have been used in the Customs service for hundreds of years. The maritime arm patrols British waters and stops and searches hundreds of boats every month. Despite our rich naval past, we didn’t have as many cutters as some of our European neighbours but what we lacked in numbers we made up for in quality. They were an expensive fleet to run and man, and their deployment was usually planned months in advance.

We had been following a gang of cannabis smugglers who had been using local fishing boats to do their dirty work by bringing in the gear from a mother ship. In the trade this is called ‘coopering’. But the fishing boat crews turned against their part-time employers when they found out that they weren’t smuggling tobacco (as they had been told) but were importing drugs. One of the boat captains was so angry that he phoned our free drugs phone line and left us some workable intelligence. (And it made a change from jokers ringing up our free drugs phone line and asking when they could pick up their free drugs.)

Now the gang had no fishing boats to use, they had to do the job themselves and so they used some of their enormous profits to purchase a RHIB (rigid-hulled inflatable boat), which is a kind of high-speed cross between a speedboat and an inflatable boat. The trouble was, they were better drug buyers than they were sailors and so on a couple of runs they had to throw the drugs overboard before they sank. These bales of drugs later turned up on various beaches and the members of the public who found them handed them in (or, at least, the ones we got back were handed in).

So myself and my colleagues in Investigations put our Intelligence teams to work on the gang and we soon had a few names and addresses to work with. Our job now was to build up patterns of lifestyle on these new targets, follow them, photo them and check out whoever they met, etc. It didn’t take long for us to have a good picture of how the gang worked and what they were up to.

But these things take time and investigations sometimes take months, even years. Luckily, a few weeks into the operation, I received a great update from the Intelligence team. Two of the gang’s cars, one towing a large RHIB, had been seen going on to Mersea Island, which is the most easterly inhabited island in the UK and is just off the Essex coast. Their move to the island had happened only a couple of hours earlier. We scrambled immediately. Mersea was only about twenty miles away from our HQ. With any luck, we thought, we could catch them in the act.

While we were shooting to the island, I contacted the maritime team, explained what the situation was and requested a cutter to move into position, north of Mersea. This would cut off their sea escape if they decided to flee that way. The maritime team said that it would be no problem as they had a cutter in the area. Our next call was to the police to ask if they could put in a control point on the access way on to the island. All was going swimmingly; it looked like we might have the whole thing sorted and sewn up.

We arrived on the island and plotted up in a good position to be able to view the two cars and the by-now empty boat trailer (the RHIB was gone), as well as covering all the possible exits. As usual in surveillance, it was now a matter of playing the waiting game. Again, we were lucky: within the hour, we spotted the RHIB on the horizon – it was heading at speed to their meeting place on the coast of the island, in all likelihood for another consignment pick-up. I contacted the maritime team again in order to call in our cutter boat to move in and cut off the escape route out to sea. However, when the guy at the maritime HQ answered my call and then asked me a question, I knew our luck had definitely run out:

‘OK. How close into the Liverpool docks do you want the cutter to move?’

‘What do you mean Liverpool docks? This is Jon Frost calling. Are you sure that you have the right job?’

There was a slight pause at the other end. ‘Yes, yes, I’m quite sure. Officer Frost requested a cutter to position itself to the north of the Mersey.’

So our cutter was actually 300 miles north and on the other side of the country, near Liverpool. No way to get another one scrambled in time now. Our luck returned, though, when we observed that the drugs gang were just doing an engine trial on their boat. We moved away with our tails a little between our legs, at least content that no one knew about the cock-up apart from us and the maritime boys, and they weren’t likely to brag about it. Meanwhile, some poor bastard had to skipper the cutter boat all the way back home. Sometimes investigations ended in even more unexpected ways.

Another fan of the RHIB mode of drugs transportation was a career criminal called Shaun Fletcher. He was a nasty piece of work and he worked full time. Born and bred into a London criminal family, he was the elder of two brothers, and both were so close to being human pitbull terriers I wouldn’t have been surprised if they cocked their legs to piss.

After making money selling drugs as a doorman at London discos, he’d decided to move up the narcotics ladder and cut out the drugs middleman that he’d been using, and that he’d been losing money to. Fletcher was a martial arts expert and would use his skills on anyone that upset him. And, as most of the time he was high on amphetamines, people seemed to upset him quite often. Fletcher was like a nasty, drug-propelled and steroid-fuelled whirlwind that left in his wake chaos, cracked skulls and cleaning bills.

He started his new smuggling venture with his brother but it wasn’t too long before they fell out and Fletcher teamed up with, believe it or not, an ex-choirmaster who had changed careers radically and was now importing cannabis from the Netherlands in his speedboat. Nice. From master of the choir to drug buyer.

Both Fletcher and his new partner in crime, Evans, were known to us. We had intel on them and had done some reccies and surveillance but without ever being able to catch them at it. So it was now a matter of watching and waiting for their next move. Being in Investigations was sometimes like the front-line soldier’s description of war – long, quiet periods of fuck-all-to-do followed by loud, intense periods of people trying to fuck you up.

We waited about three months, and then our control centre received an anonymous call relating to Fletcher. The caller stated that he had been approached to move a large quantity of cannabis resin that was coming in from the continent that week. His contact was Fletcher and all his dealings were with him only. That fitted the picture as we knew that Shaun was a ‘hands on’ chap; he was either too drug-addled or too arrogantly confident to put the usual distance between himself and the drug consignments, which is what most dealers did so that they had a buffer between themselves and what would become the evidence to send them down for years. (And the fact that he had been shopped by one of his ‘colleagues’ proved that, in the criminal underworld, fear wasn’t as good a motivator as respect. Unpredictably violent criminals were often wanted out of the way, even by their own kind, and were never missed after they were gone.)

Evans, our singing smuggler, was the boat driver. The RHIB was, we learned, his boat and his retirement present to himself. How these two unlikely partners in crime had first hooked up, God only knew, but I couldn’t imagine it was at choir practice.

Through manipulation of the informant, we eventually got even more detailed information of the kind that we were after. Fletcher and Evans would make landfall at a certain beach in Kent the following week, at around two o’clock in the morning. That was when we would carry out the knock.

‘The knock’, as we called it, was our equivalent to what the police called a strike or what the military would call an attack. In other words, it’s Customs’ own phrase for a law enforcement pounce, grab and arrest – bang to rights.

There are many kinds of knock. The most common is the pre-planned knock, where, because of intelligence gathering from surveillance and undercover work, ID know in advance what they are going to do. This is bread-and-butter stuff.

A ‘rolling knock’ is where the fun is. For example, if I was doing an undercover bootleg cigarette job, we would never know what was going to happen. Was the lorry going to be unloaded into storage? Was it going to be redirected? Would the main men be there? Would it turn nasty? Would we need an escape route? Lots of possibilities and unknown quantities. But when the bits fell into place, we would knock the job.

Usually, there is only a two-minute warning before a knock is on, and that’s when you’d squirt adrenalin through every pore. Every officer would scramble for handcuffs and notebooks at the same time as moving into a position to knock. When the ground commander finally gave the word, the world would go into a blur as cars, officers, members of the public and professional criminals alike all went flying in all directions. We mastered the art of leaping from moving cars and, believe it or not, I’d even seen a driver do it, such was his eagerness to be in on the knock and take someone down (I forget where the car ended up . . .). Which just shows what the imperative is – arrest everyone and secure everyone and, quite often, shout at everyone (psychological intimidation was often vital); secure goods, secure evidence, protect the public and, in the pursuit of all this, it often meant bollocks to Customs officers’ personal safety. But then we knew what we’d signed up for.

The department decided to issue body armour about ten years ago but even then it was a pool item – that is, too few items between too many – and, anyway, you wore it only if you wanted to. Even doing undercover work, I would rarely end up wearing anti-stab protection as the bloody stuff would get in the way even though you couldn’t see it.

We were never officially issued batons or any other form of self-defence weaponry but we didn’t let that stop us – most of us didn’t want to go up against violent career criminals with little more than our dicks in our hands and the Lord’s Prayer. So we tended to carry ‘a little something’: extendable metal batons, truncheons, blackjacks, etc. During the later undercover CROPs jobs in the countryside and rural locations, I would carry a Ghurkha kukri knife and a dagger, which was a concealed wrist dagger/thrusting blade, first used by Second World War Special Operations Executives.

It was not unknown for Customs to use SO19 – the undercover armed police unit from the Metropolitan Police – when knocking a major drugs gang; the SBS (Special Boat Service) for boat and maritime jobs; and the SAS (Special Air Service) for other operations. But these forces, no matter how specialized, secretive or powerful, would always be under our command.

As for additional surveillance equipment, we would often be what they now call ‘first adopters’, which meant we would often get to test and deploy things like night sights or infrared sights prior to the special forces. The police would then get access to it after a few years.

Sometimes, though, we didn’t need anything more sophisticated in terms of equipment than a size-ten boot and a battering ram.

One instance of this was when my team and I were at Heathrow Airport. We had just followed one of our targets from Sutton, south London, to Terminal 3 and watched him board his flight. It was a nice and easy job. Now we’d await his return and welcome him and his drugs package with open arms and a closing cell door.

We were just about to head back to London when the senior officer of the local investigation unit called us into his office. He had a job on and could we help? Well, anything beat driving back to the office and ploughing through the waiting piles of paperwork, so we agreed.

The situation was this: at lunchtime, the uniform boys had pulled a known drug dealer in the green channel as he arrived from Spain. The Intel officers had done some homework on this chap and had discovered that, while in Spain, he and another Brit had travelled over to North Africa and back three days before they arrived home at Heathrow. A full baggage and body search discovered 1.5 kg of cannabis oil. Proper cannabis oil was very rare, and it was even classed as a Category A drug because of its transdermal properties, that is, it could pass through human skin. It was worth its weight in gold in the right market.

Unfortunately, Intel had discovered that this chap’s mate had arrived at Gatwick at ten o’clock that morning and the Customs staff there hadn’t stopped him because there was no interest in him at that time. What the senior officer wanted of us was to spin down to the arrested man’s address and carry out a full house search under PACE (Police and Criminal Evidence Act). We had all our search kits in our cars, so it was on.

By six o’clock that evening, we were all outside the target address. I had what we called the Enforcer – a 50 lb steel door ram. If the door wasn’t opened straight away, my aim was to take the door off its hinges. Sometimes on a knock we had literally to . . . knock. We did – no answer. I drew back the enforcer and was about to release carnage when the door swung open and there stood the chap who had arrived at Gatwick that morning. He quickly turned and ran into the living room and I followed, as fast as the 50 lb steel girder in my hands would allow. As I reached the living-room door, he emerged, shouting, and going for my head with a full-sized crowbar. I knew where this was going better than he did. He leaped at me with the crowbar heading for my skull. Mid-air is not the best place to meet the Enforcer. I swung it and he caught it full in the chest. I heard cracking and guessed that his ribs had gone. He flew back, hit the wall and collapsed in a moaning lump.

We all stepped over the body and into the living room, except for ‘Big’ Alan (our rugby-playing brick shithouse) who grabbed the target by one ankle and casually dragged him into the living room like a caveman lugging his latest kill. There, in front of us, lay another kilo and a half of cannabis oil. Bingo. Five minutes later, there was a knock at the front door. Alan wandered out into the hall and answered the knock. Standing there was what can only be described as every single stoned-hippy cliché gathered together in human form: tie-dye T-shirt, sandals, curtains of long hair, nose ring and a broad stoner smile. Hippy Neil from
The Young Ones
incarnate. He spoke . . . and didn’t disappoint.