Anything to Declare? (31 page)

Just before myself and team two were due to carry out the knock on the home address, I received a phone call from Peter explaining what had happened. Peter informed me that our raid should be held back until he could arrive and break the bad news to Mrs Warner.

Thirty minutes later, team one arrived at our location and Peter briefed us all that the knock was suspended. He then went into the home address to break the bad news, accompanied by a Police FLO (Family Liaison Officer), who are specially trained to deal with bereaved family members. The liaison officer had limited chance to put their training into practice as, when informed by Peter of her husband’s death, Mrs Warner burst into tears and then clutched her chest and dropped dead on the spot.

With the sight of Mr Warner dying still so fresh in his mind and with the chances of his wife also having a heart attack seeming so remote, for one weird moment, Peter later said, he thought Mrs Warner might be faking her own heart attack. It sounds extreme but, by this stage in our careers, we had seen people try anything to avoid arrest. However, in this case, Mrs Warner was indeed suffering from a bad dose of death.

It was probably the strangest end to a raid that we’d ever experienced. We concluded that the Grim Reaper must have been having a very slow day on that day and so had decided to speed up the harvest.

* * *

Investigation officers can be great show-offs, sometimes, when it came to successful cases. And I must admit that I was no different from the rest. Just as a footballer might brag about a goal he scored or a boxer might go on about a knockout he delivered, so law enforcers like to do the same. A good place to revel in the acclaim of your peers was the Government Forensic Service (GFS). At some time or another, and usually the sooner the better, you had to get your seized gear to the experts to be examined and officially designated. The GFS was happily housed in the Forensic Service labs and, unlike the unrealistic lab boys on shows like
CSI,
the real forensic guys barely step outside their ‘office’.

On arrival at the GFS labs, you sat in a large waiting room with other police and Customs officers from all over the country, each of us clutching some vital evidence that needed testing for an official classification so we could proceed with the case.

I was having a pretty good day when it came to bragging rights because I’d turned up carrying forty kilos of pure heroin in see-through seizure bags. Most police officers would never see this amount in their whole careers so the coppers in the room were impressed; the other Customs boys there, less so. But then, they were carrying less than I was today so I was Top of the Pops. There were questions and requests for a closer look, so I sat there and told them about the seizure and that this was actually one of our smaller cases. There followed a number of appreciative ums and ahs from the captive audience. Ten minutes later, I was joined by a couple of Investigation colleagues from a specialist cocaine team and they brought with them fifty kilos of coke. The ums and ahs started all over again.

All of us had arrived early so that we could get our evidence booked in and then shoot back to the office so we were still waiting for the reception team to open up the lab and start work. It was always a little nerve-jangling carrying around a couple of large bags that you knew were worth a few million pounds each. And so we were always quite glad to get them signed over to the labs.

After our little evidence-comparison contest, we started to chat among ourselves. I started to talk to a young copper sitting next to me who was from Manchester and had a large freezer box in his lap.

‘So, what’s in the box? Anything interesting?’

He shrugged and said, ‘Oh, it’s nowt as exciting as yours. It’s just somebody’s arse.’

The room went dead silent. I smiled and nodded and tried not to look too impressed. But I knew I was failing miserably so I just gave in.

‘Did you say “somebody’s arse”?’

‘Well, it’s a buttock, actually. We think it could be a left one, but, if you hold it the other way up, it could be the right. Dunno, really.’

He lifted the freezer-box lid and in seconds every officer in the room was in a scrum around it. Dry ice smoke billowed out of the box and, when it dissipated, there, peeking out of the ice and staring us all in the face, was an actual man’s arse cheek.

‘We came across it after a really big, vicious gangland fight in the city centre last night. It’s a clean cut so we think it was cut off by someone wielding something extremely sharp, like a samurai sword. The trouble is, there was no one left about to reclaim it. We’ve warned all the local hospitals to keep an eye out for anyone who comes in with such an injury. Or –’ he looked up as he closed the lid ‘– anyone who has trouble sitting down.’

Even I had to admit defeat and concede that, in the game of evidence Top Trumps, the Unidentified Arse from Manchester had won the day.

I’ll let you in on a little secret: busting drug dealers could get very addictive. Sure, you start out on the soft stuff – pulling over a doper coming back from Amsterdam with a spliff in his sock. But before you know it – and despite all the warnings about weed being a gateway drug to the harder gear – you’re itching for something stronger: a cocaine bust, maybe; and then, when you get one of those, you just want another one – and then even more cocaine confiscations. Finally, it gets to the stage where nothing can satisfy your craving for a drug bust except heroin – a nice, big, juicy heroin seizure. It was very true what they said about heroin – and this seemed to be the case whether using it or confiscating it – it was very more-ish.

What most people don’t realize is that, if taken correctly and with no impurities added from bad ‘cutting’, it is possible to live a comparatively normal life on heroin – though that situation is in itself pretty impossible to recreate because it is based on the unattainable ideal of the user getting a constant supply of unadulterated heroin. It is the other substances that are added to it to reduce the purity of the drug that can be a danger in themselves. I had discovered heroin cut with brick dust, baby powder, Vim and even rat poison. The big problem is that, by the time the user has purchased it from their dealer, they have no idea what it is cut with or how many times it has been cut before reaching the streets. Cutting agents such as brick dust are not really designed to be injected into the human body. It will be classed as an invader and as such the body will attempt to defend itself against this alien intrusion; but, in the long run, the invader usually wins and the user gets septicaemia.

So there is a case to be made for the regulation of drugs, or a synthetic substitute, for registered addicts in order to take the power away from drugs gangs and in order to try to stem the tide of criminal activity committed by desperate users.

But it was never my remit to say whether taking drugs was right or wrong – and making that judgement doesn’t really change anything anyway: taking drugs is just something that some people do. My duty was to stop it entering the country and hunt down those that arranged and participated in the commodity’s smuggling. Drugs gangs invariably were involved in other damaging criminality and the damage tended to spread outwards. The only ones who seemed to benefit were the local luxury-car dealerships where the most successful drug dealers laundered some of their profits by turning up with sports bags full of cash bricks and buying Ferraris and Bentleys outright.

One such lucky lad was a guy we’d been tipped off about by the telephone drugs line that had been set up for members of the public to ring with information. We started following the guy in order to glean some information. He was no slow driver and he made sure our tyres were kept warm whenever we followed him. This meant we had to use fast rotations of the ‘55 car’ (the following car) in order for him not to get suspicious about one car being behind him too long, and also judicious use of our 55 bike, as a motorcycle could follow more easily in traffic and was also less likely to be identified as suspicious.

Our target took us all over and we ended up following him around London and up to Birmingham, Leeds and Liverpool. He really did get around for someone on the dole. He was either a very conscientious job hunter or perhaps someone who we should watch further. When we traced him to his own three-bedroom house, which also had another car – a new convertible BMW – parked outside, we thought that we might be on to a good thing. Even though the pattern of his behaviour was familiar to us as that of someone expecting a delivery soon, our original source of the information about him told us that, as far as they knew, the drugs were not due into the country for another month. So we backed off the intense surveillance and installed lighter, local surveillance around London until nearer the time of the drugs drop.

The first sign that we should have followed our own gut instinct about the timing of the drugs delivery rather than believe the source’s information came in an unusual way. One day, while we were following the guy as he drove around in his BMW with a mate, he turned off into a Ferrari dealership and didn’t emerge for an hour. When he did come out, he was at the wheel of a brand-new red Ferrari. He roared off into the distance and we knew then that the drug delivery he’d been expecting had obviously already successfully arrived and he’d already sold it on. And this new bright-red toy for himself was his way of ‘washing’ some of the cash.

So, again, repeat after me the mantra of not only law enforcement agencies but also the human race: you win some, you lose some, you fuck some up.

I got another sample of the sweet taste of a good drug bust when an investigation of ours involved us sitting on the King drugs gang for about a month, waiting and observing. Members of the gang would regularly take day-trips to Amsterdam but, when we stopped a couple of them on a routine pull at the airport, they were clean. We had the details of Andrew King, the believed boss, and we had put his house under surveillance for a couple of days. It appeared to us that he must have left his wife as he never went near his house and there seemed to be a new man in his wife’s life. There was a slightly worrying aspect to the case in that one of the criminals on the payroll had a private pilot’s licence. Light aircraft were a pain in the arse: they flew low to avoid radar, they could land almost everywhere and, if they didn’t want to touch down, then the gang could fling their drugs importation out of the door at a predetermined place. We had all this at the back of our minds all the time. I didn’t think for one second that King had employed the guy with the pilot’s licence just because he was an amusing conversationalist.

King wasn’t as easy a target as the rest of his gang. He never drove north to see his wife and most of the time he deployed anti-surveillance techniques. Now, many people can do anti-surveillance manoeuvres to avoid being followed, but it doesn’t work unless you know what you are looking for and you don’t know this unless you are trained in it. It was a real pain to us as we had to be extra careful, just in case. I must admit that King kept us entertained with his multiple trips around roundabouts and reversing back down motorway slip roads to try to lose anyone tailing him. He also did most of his work at night, visiting potential dealers, buyers and moneymen.

Night surveillance can be a bit of a task and knackers you out very fast due to the high levels of concentration needed. We eased this slightly by lumping up his car with a tracker and drilling his car lights. The drilling worked like this: one of us would sneak up behind the target’s car when it was parked up and, using a small portable drill, bore a small hole in the rear off-side brake light. The hole was barely visible to the naked eye in the day, but at night it caused a bright white dot to shine out in the middle of the red tail-light cluster. Following this bright white dot at night was so much easier because it distinguished the target car from other cars on the road, and it allowed us to back off a bit and leave a bigger space between the target’s car and our 55 car.

So, if you now notice that your car has got a small hole drilled neatly in its rear-light cluster, you’re either a smuggler (and we’re on to you) or you’ve bought one of their old cars. (In which case, check in the glove box and under the seats too – you might find an old joint.)

After a couple of weeks trailing Andrew King’s gang, we managed to get a phone-tap authority so we could now get some more up-to-date intelligence. This went well and the information we gleaned meant that we didn’t have to sit in observation and surveillance on the gang every single day and night; we could now turn up when something important was happening, such as an arranged meeting or a money handover.

We knew we were getting close to the smuggling run. King was talking about pick-up dates and places, and the pilot was putting out feelers to hire a light aircraft. At the news of this, we all inwardly sagged and thought, ‘Bugger it! A bloody light aircraft job’ – every investigator’s nightmare. But King’s actions cheered us up a bit when he started looking at landing strips in Kent. Some were private and some were unused. What was of help was that, at each site, King would phone the pilot and describe the strip. By the end of a busy week split between the pilot and King, we had got info on the strip to be used and the aircraft that had been hired and paid for.

Behind the scenes, in preparation, we had lots going on. The RAF were brought onside for the mid-air radar tracking, air traffic control would work in league with the RAF, and we would be informed the second the plane dropped off-radar and came in to land. We also had two more teams of surveillance officers on standby so that all of the gang could be controlled. And we had the Kent police ready and waiting to assist. It was a law enforcement and high-tech surveillance orgy and, hopefully, only the bad guys would get screwed. What could possibly go wrong?

After a tense wait, the light aircraft finally came in at altitude, registering on the RAF radar, and was tracked by them until it dropped height and went off-radar and under the detection system. Air traffic control notified us of this. So now we knew it was on – the landing was imminent; the light aircraft would soon emerge from the low cloud. We were all waiting nearby in vans and cars, out of view of course, and also careful to be hidden from being spotted at height by the pilot.