Anything to Declare? (26 page)

‘Oh . . . hey, dude. Wow, man, you’re a size. So, is the gear here, my brother?’

Any neighbours watching this scene would have then observed what looked like a large monster paw reach out from inside the house, grasp Hippy Neil’s head
whole
and yank him swiftly inside, leaving behind only the smell of patchouli oil and, on the doormat, a single wobbling sandal. And, if the neighbour’s window had been open, they might have also heard a small, startled yelp.

What they wouldn’t have heard was what Big Al said just before the moment of hippy lift-off – ‘Hello, son. Come on in and join the party!’

But for every light-hearted knock that we went on – and, by our standards, someone coming at me with a crowbar was fairly low down the list – we also had the jobs against the career criminals like Fletcher. His drugs drop on the beach was looming up in our very near future.

So, all this in mind, we prepared for the knock on Fletcher and Evans. And, sure enough, at the appointed time and place, their speedboat arrived and the two smugglers offloaded approximately one ton of cannabis resin. Just as they were covering it over with sand, we made our move. It was the most satisfying part of the job: when months or even years of investigation, surveillance, tracking, trailing, tapping, recording, cross-referencing, researching and (worst of all) waiting all came to fruition. No wonder officers got hyped up in the minutes just prior to the knock; they had good reason. None of us really fully knew exactly what situation we were about to run out into – the black holes of a double-barrel shotgun pointing at you, perhaps. We could only best-guess what would be waiting and hope we were prepared. But a career criminal drugs runner at risk of going back inside for a ten- or fifteen-stretch was not the kind to come quietly.

At the signal, myself and thirty other officers leaped out of cover, screaming blue murder, and descended on the beach like a squad of marauding black-clad devils. Evans, drawing on all his experience in the hardened world of teaching children to sing together pleasantly in church, immediately dropped straight to the ground like a sack of shit at a Sack of Shit Dropping to the Ground Contest. The sight of Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise storming the beach seemingly made him rediscover his love of praying on his knees. Fletcher, on the other hand, was off like a greased whippet, accelerating like a professional sprinter and vaulting the cannabis load like a gymnast. He dived headfirst back into the boat, which was still bobbing in the surf. From the speed at which he’d shot away from us, it was easy to see why amphetamine was also called ‘speed’.

Fletcher roared away in the RHIB, but we had planned for this possibility and had our own Customs cutter boat sitting off the coast. The cutter turned and set off after the fleeing craft but unfortunately it was like watching a hippo chase a cheetah – the power-to-weight ratio of the RHIB was superior to our own craft, especially with Fletcher’s boat now lightened of its heavy load; and so, within a couple of minutes, the little speedboat was just a memory and a fading wake in the water. Fletcher, unfortunately, had slipped through our grasp and was gone. That beach at that moment was probably home to more pissed-off Customs officers per square foot than anywhere else in the world.

We tried to track him down, of course, but even he wasn’t reckless enough to emerge into daylight. It wasn’t until quite some time afterwards that we were contacted by a police regional crime team. They had found our old target, Fletcher, and were we interested? Like Canadian Mounties, we were pissed off if we didn’t get our man, and we never forgot it. So we invited the police case officer to our office to tell us the tale.

Apparently, Fletcher had been getting quite a rep in the Netherlands for the supply of speed and ecstasy. A reputation that was starting to interest the Dutch police. He had managed to start his new business from the proceeds of selling Evans’s speedboat. From there it was easy for a man of Fletcher’s ability to build up the right contacts, and soon he was shimmying his way back up the crime tree. The only worry for him was the Dutch authorities. And one morning, when he received a tip-off from an official source that the police were going to turn him over that night, he grabbed everything that he could and made for the coast. Once there, he stole another RHIB and headed for home, hoping that we had forgotten all about him. Mid-channel, he contacted his brother to meet him at a beach in East Anglia. The dutiful brother was there on time, and they had soon unloaded Fletcher’s gear from the boat into the car, including £500,000 worth of ecstasy tablets.

In celebration at arriving safely and being undiscovered, Fletcher popped three or four tablets and decided to drive. His brother was furious and the two argued as they sped through the East Anglian countryside. Fletcher was hitting 100 mph when the car left the road and met a large oak tree coming the other way. Nothing stops a speeding car more dead in its tracks than a thick tree. There’s no ‘give’ in a deeply rooted oak – it’s like slamming into iron. Neither man was wearing a seat belt in the old car, so the younger brother was fired straight through the windscreen like a human rocket, punching a hole in the windscreen like a cannonball. Fletcher also shot forward, straight into the car’s steering wheel, which cut into his head at the bridge of the nose. It being an old car, the steering wheel was made of solid metal (covered only in thin plastic) and so, as it met Fletcher’s skull at extremely high speed, it sliced right through his head, from front to back – neatly flipping off his skull-top like a pan lid.

Our police colleagues said that it was not a pretty sight. Then they showed us the police accident scene photographer’s pictures to prove it. Fletcher had taken so much ecstasy and finally got so off his head that the actual top of it – still covered in tufts of hair and blood – had finished stuck upside down in a pat of cow shit in a field in East Anglia.

On a list of things that are bad for your health – such as getting hiccups while juggling chainsaws or tickling your dentist while he’s drilling your filling – add to the list this one: it’s never a good idea to threaten a Customs officer. You’d think that would be pretty obvious to most for the clear reason that, if you’re already being questioned, then to a certain extent you’re already in the crosshairs, so why make things worse?

It’s never a good idea to complain too much in a restaurant
before
your food’s arrived – you never know what the chef might send back out to you from the unseen, dark recesses of the kitchen (is that really just mayonnaise?). Best to wait until at least you’ve had dessert. Similarly, it’s best to wait until you’ve walked away from and out of hearing distance of an HM Customs officer that could snap on a rubber glove and introduce you to the dark arts of the strip search.

On this basis, I try to never piss off the guy that’s cutting my hair (available weapon: scissors), the barber giving me a wet shave (available weapon: razor) or the doctor due to give me a prostate exam (available weapon: finger in arse).

Sometimes discretion really is the better part of valour. It could save you a lot of bad haircuts, nicks on the neck and sore bottoms.

It follows that even worse than threatening one Customs officer would be to threaten a whole country’s Customs service. I mean, who would do that? Well, during one of the stranger occurrences of my career, this actually happened.

On a US TV show, Michael Jackson was promoting his new live tour of Europe. He was asked if his pet chimp, Bubbles, would miss him while he was away. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m taking him with me. And British Customs can’t stop me.’ Oops.

This was now a case of professional pride versus a very public challenge. The threat was taken seriously; one thing any professional service hates, as much as members of the general public also hate it, is the idea that someone thinks they should get preferential treatment: it offends all notions of fair play. So all ports and airports got direct HQ orders to seize Michael Jackson’s stage kit and ‘examine thoroughly’.

The next day, all the stage kit arrived at the airport and was put into cargo sheds. No one could enter without Customs clearance. That night, baggage officers and cargo officers joined forces (a rare thing in itself, which gave an indication of how pissed off everyone was) and set about Mr Jackson’s stage kit. Every speaker, mixer and lightbox was taken apart in the hunt for a possible hiding place for Bubbles. Nothing was found. But every bit of kit had to be reassembled and tested. The tour crew were not happy. No word came through, however, about how Bubbles viewed the whole affair. And, to make matters worse, every European Customs service did the same as us. All of them were determined not to be made a monkey of by the chimp-owning singer. And it didn’t end there.

Quite some time later, long after we’d forgotten about the monkey business, a colleague and pal of mine, hippy-lifting Big Al, arrived in the office at Charlie Hotel with a very interesting-sounding invite. He leaned on my desk; the desk sagged.

‘All right, Jon? Wanna come with me and Terry? We’re just off to shoot someone.’

I replied without hesitation, ‘OK.’ It had, after all, been a slow day.

Al smiled, gave the thumbs up, and then he straightened up and my desk returned to its original shape.

We picked up a couple of other officers, Dave and Paul, on the way, and then went out to Thames Quay on the south side of Custom House, opposite HMS
Belfast,
which sat moored on the Thames.

Now HMS
Belfast
is a pretty impressive sight – 11,550 tons of steel and guns; a 600-foot-long Second World War battleship bristling with armaments. Pretty difficult to upstage that, you might think. And you’d be right. But right next to HMS
Belfast
was something new, something that hadn’t been moored there before, something that had never before been seen in London or anywhere else for that matter. We all looked up at it in slight disbelief, speaking to each other while never taking our eyes of it.

‘It’s un-fucking-believable,’ said Big Al.

‘No, it’s actually worse than that,’ said Terry. ‘It’s un-fucking-believe-a-fucking-bull.’

‘It’s a bloody liberty is what it is,’ said Dave.

‘It’s certainly looks as big as the Statue of Liberty,’ I said.

Paul chipped in, ‘Did they really open Tower Bridge for it?’

‘Too right they did,’ I said. ‘How else would they have got it to float this far down the Thames?’

‘The cheek!’

‘Really un-fucking-believable.’

Big Al was particularly unhappy that this thing had been moored right outside our offices. He took it as a personal affront. ‘Right, lads,’ he said, clapping his hands together, ‘be back here tonight at 9 p.m. And wear black. We’re gonna have to go extra-secret coverts ops on this.’

Luckily, none of us had to be out on duty that evening and no one was lost to a late call-out. We couldn’t think about anything else for the rest of the day. Sometimes, walking through Custom House, you’d catch a glimpse of it outside through one of the south-facing windows.

Hours later, we were all there, back at the riverside at the appointed time, all dutifully present and correct for the secret meet. All dressed in black. A car flashed its lights at us and then turned and reversed nearer. Big Al got out and opened the boot of the car. We all looked inside, looked at each other, grinned in unison, then looked back inside the boot. It was full of rifles, guns, catapults and crossbows, with ammunition for the guns and bolts for the bows. We all reached in, eagerly took our weapon of choice and then turned and faced our target.

There it stood: a forty-foot-high fibreglass statue of Michael Jackson.

In order to promote his new album,
History,
it had been floated down the Thames, through Tower Bridge – which, of course, had to be opened for it – and moored outside our own Charlie Hotel, right next to HMS
Belfast.
So, next to a battleship that had fought Nazi convoys and that had also, in 1944, carried the King of England, there now stood a big fibreglass model of the King of Pop. It did all look rather odd and more than a little bit ridiculous. And this literal monument to one man’s ego looked even more ridiculous floating next to a battleship that during the war would have been manned by men too modest to even talk about it afterwards.

To make things worse, the statue was, apparently, one of nine such monstrosities in major cities around the world. So we decided that the one in London was going to be the only one that was welcomed by a late-night, five-man firing squad. Well, think about it: if we could detain billionaire friends of the Queen of England, as I’d done at Stansted, and if we could successfully put the brakes on a chimpanzee called Bubbles, then I didn’t see why British Customs officers shouldn’t redecorate the King of Pop.

So, for the next few hours, we threw everything we had at it: every air-rifle pellet and airgun bullet, every crossbow bolt and arrow, every high-powered and brightly coloured paintball, every water bomb, and every catapulted rock and missile we could whistle through the night air.

And, in case you’re wondering, we had decided, early on, that the highest point score would go – naturally – to whoever could knock off the nose. We didn’t quite make the Michael Jackson statue history that day, but at least repeatedly shooting him gave us a little bit of a bad, dangerous thrill.

Jade, a beautiful German girl, eighteen years of age, arrived at Harwich from the Hook of Holland. She was to become the centre of my first cocaine case. She was pulled by the bench staff as Intelligence had discovered that she was travelling on a cash-paid, one-way ticket. Within ten minutes of being stopped and questioned, she broke down and admitted that she was carrying cocaine. She was taken to a cell and strip searched; she was wearing a bodysuit (very much the same design as the body armour that you see the police wear), which contained fifteen kilos of pure Colombian nose sherbet.