Anything to Declare? (33 page)

The fog was bad news. It meant that the drugs gang couldn’t land at the farm strip, and they were also fogged in over in the Netherlands. So, another night in the CROP. Unlike the police CROPs officers, we would always deploy with the knowledge that we could be out in the field (literally) for days on end, with our post-op pick-ups always at night. So, even if a job went down at nine in the morning, we wouldn’t get picked up until midnight. Home comforts were non-existent. Cold food was the order of the day (and low-fibre food was preferred as we all prayed that one of the others wouldn’t need a crap). We would piss in plastic bottles and, if needed, crap in clingfilm and take the whole lot home with us. On the occasions when we were in tight, dug-out CROPs, then our partner would have to drop his trousers where he lay and drop his guts right next to you. But it meant we would stay hidden and alive.

The weather critically delayed everything. Two days later, we were still there: sleeping rough, eating rough, getting cold, getting wet, talking crap, trying not to crap, trying to remain hidden no matter what. We didn’t want to blow it now. Eventually, the rain stopped and Nick was on the radio: the drop plane had finally left the Netherlands and was heading in our direction. Our mobile surveillance team were moving into our area but were on a different radio channel. Pete clicked his radio on to their channel and listened to them getting ready for their part of the knock.

The plan was this: from the spotting, unloading and the departure of the plane, the operation was in our hands. Then the plane would be followed on radar to its destination in the Midlands where the pilot would be arrested and the plane seized. Meanwhile, at our end, whoever met the plane on the ground was to be allowed to leave the airstrip, then knocked.

Pete and I got our respective camera kits ready – spare film, lenses and batteries in certain pockets so we could get to them quickly – and, finally, my Ghurkha blade (just in case). If we were spotted by the gang, they would see three guys in camouflage pointing something at them and probably wouldn’t know we were just shooting them with film, not bullets. And they might act accordingly. Though if they turned out to be fully armed, our knives and batons would do absolutely sod all.

Thirty tense minutes passed before we got the ‘heads up’ from Nick. A motorway maintenance van had driven past the entrance to the farm, slowly, twice, and was reported as heading back again. Two minutes later, the van arrived, dead opposite us, on the other side of the grass strip. Pete and I slid into the water- and muck-filled ditch and slithered to our respective camera positions. Covered in camouflage and shit from the ditch, I started shooting pictures. We used an expensive but standard Nikon FM2 camera. The reason for this was that it worked wet or dry, frozen or cooked (something that couldn’t be said about all high-tech cameras).

At the sound of a plane’s engine, I swung around and started shooting the red and white Piper as it landed and taxied up to the van. For the next ten minutes, Pete and I shot away as the pilot unloaded 200 kg of cannabis resin and the van driver and his helpers slung it into the van. All the gang on the ground regularly looked around as if scanning for signs they were being watched, but, although this was the time when we were most exposed, as we tried to get evidence, we managed to remain hidden. As these actions were taking place, Den gave us a running commentary over the radio. We would need all these details later when we wrote our witness statements.

Then the smugglers shook hands and the plane was away, followed shortly by the van. Job done – both theirs and ours.

The pilot was arrested when he landed in the Midlands. And, ten minutes after his departure, the van driver had to stop because of a bad road accident on his route – an ‘accident’ our surveillance team and the local police had set up so that the van couldn’t try to make a break for it. As soon as the van pulled over, the driver was unceremoniously dragged from it at gunpoint. Those involved were later put away for nine years each.

One unforeseen consequence of this CROPs mission was something that happened four years later. Myself and Pete were in Custom House and sitting in on a training-room lecture about how good remote-control cameras were and how they were superior to the traditional, old-fashioned CROPs-officer-operated cameras. The lecturer clicked through a series of photographs taken six months earlier by the new remote camera kit. They showed a red and white Piper aircraft, a motorway maintenance van and the unloading of 200 kilos of cannabis resin. Pete and I exchanged puzzled looks. The lecture ended and then Pete and I had a few quiet words with the lecturer and pointed out where the photos had actually come from and that the multiple angles and changing viewpoints in the pictures could only come from the mobility and decision-making of an ‘old-fashioned’ human being, not from a remote-control fixed camera. The pictures would never be shown again.

Pete and I left the room feeling somewhat vindicated. We didn’t like to think we’d crawled through mud and bramble hedges and slept in dirty ditchwater for three days just so some bloody high-tech camera could get the credit.

Though, when singing the praises of real live officers over remote camera devices, we did, admittedly, leave out the bit about crapping in clingfilm.

Covert loads – an illegal thing hidden in a legal thing – come in every shape and size and can be absolutely anything. In the case of the UK’s largest ever heroin importation, the cover load was bentonite. I have to admit that, like most people, I had no idea what this was and had to take to a dictionary to find out. To save you the trouble, in case you don’t know either, bentonite is an absorbent clay most commonly used as cat litter. It just happened that the main man behind the heroin-smuggling attempt owned a bentonite quarry in Turkey. Which was nice. Whether he had this quarry before deciding to smuggle or whether he purchased it to assist in the smuggling attempt, we didn’t know. But successful bigtime drug dealers could certainly turn over enough money to buy their own small islands, let alone a small quarry. And there was a very good reason why bentonite was used as the smuggling agent.

The importation of the drugs themselves was a long, drawn-out operation. We had the main men, John Dalgleish and Hamim Soylu, under constant surveillance for nearly fourteen months, which was one of our longest surveillance gigs. It is a testament to the surveillance tradecraft we had been taught that, in all that time, none of us was ever spotted.

We had good intel that these fellows were two of the big boys when it came to Class A importations so we knew the time was well spent. If we brought them down, we’d be blowing a pretty big hole below the waterline in HMS
Heroin
’s regular dockings in the UK. So we watched Soylu shopping with his family every week, we watched him ice skating with his daughter, we watched him when he went abroad with his secret girlfriend and we even followed him on holiday with his family in the UK.

One particular week of surveillance ended up going down in Customs folklore.

We were in position on the target house at 7 a.m. on a beautiful July morning. We had a full surveillance team of eight cars in the surrounding area of the Soylus’ home. This was just the normal level of surveillance in this particular job, which reveals just how important it was. If we were correct, we thought that today he would go shopping with his wife and later take his daughter to the ice rink in north London. But by 10 a.m. we’d had neither sight nor sound of our target, which was surprising as he was very much a creature of habit.

Becoming concerned, the case officer contacted our headquarters in London and asked them if they could ‘ping’ Soylu’s mobile phone and find out his whereabouts. The ‘ping’, as we called it, was the electronic triangulation of a mobile phone signal between different signal masts, thereby identifying the phone’s location. We waited twenty minutes before control contacted us back and informed us that Soylu was now in St Ives. We wondered what he was doing in the town of St Ives, near Cambridge.

‘No, no!’ replied control. ‘Not St Ives in Cambridgeshire. He’s in St Ives in Cornwall!’

Well, that meant he was now nearly 300 miles away at the very tip of south-west England. Even with all the surveillance we had in place, he’d still managed to elude us somehow. However, we thought his escape from our grasp was more by accident than design because we were still quite sure he wasn’t on to us.

We were more than aware that our boy had many contacts in Wales so we hoped that this trip had been taken to find an out-of-the-way meeting point for them all to get together. Without having to issue any orders, the case officer waved at us as we all shot past him in our cars. It was now a question of who could get to St Ives first. It was a matter of pride and a matter of driving at speed but with skill. I was with Rob, my team partner, and we decided to take the stance of the tortoise and let the others hare away. By the time we arrived in St Ives, we were second in the convoy and this was down to good map-work by Rob and, all modesty aside, some cracking driving by me (courtesy of my advance-driving tutor Clive’s great teaching).

St Ives isn’t the biggest holiday destination in the world; it’s quite small and quaint. Which made it easier to find our quarry. But then we knew that the smaller the place, the more difficult it is to track someone without being rumbled. We managed to identify our target’s vehicle in the car park of a small hotel near the cliffs. Then one of our footmen officers spotted Soylu in the town with his wife and daughter. This rang a few alarm bells. We thought that, if you are going to have a drugs meeting with some of the nastier members of society, i.e. other drugs gang members, you don’t take your wife and kid. Even we didn’t think that Soylu was cynical and nasty enough to dupe his family into coming with him on a ‘holiday’ while he was really using them as cover. There had to be something that we were missing. We found out what that was a couple of hours later when our boy phoned a contact in Wales to say that he was to be unavailable for the next week as he had taken his family on holiday. The trip then was genuine.

So what were we to do? We couldn’t commute 300 miles every day to Cornwall to keep up the surveillance, and the more local team from Bristol were tied up on their own job near Birmingham. Which just illustrates how investigation teams rarely work within their own areas; the job may start at a port or airport within their jurisdiction, but often ends up on the other side of the country where the established target actually lives.

In our case, Soylu was on holiday and we couldn’t just let him wander around the coast of southern Britain without a Customs presence. Despite what we might think, in the end, we wouldn’t put it past him to use the holiday as an excuse to also meet up with some of his ‘business colleagues’.

So we were to have a holiday as well, following him and his family wherever he went for the next eight days. The one rule that we could not break was that we should always remember that our target’s wife and child were not part of this operation. They were innocents (we had no evidence of any involvement by the wife). So, for example, if our target escorted his daughter to a playground, we would have to drop back, as this was the rule, but we still had to try to keep one eye on him at all times, just in case his mobile phone should ring. This was absolutely vital, as proof of mobile phone use had become a central plank in prosecution case evidence.

In the case of mobiles, we had to record in our notebooks the time that any call was received and the time that the call was ended. In court, when mobile telephone evidence was used by the prosecution, the defence barrister would often state that we could not prove that their client was using that particular telephone at the time. If we could provide evidence of the use of the mobile telephone at the time of a particular call, then we could place telephone and target together at the correct time. This may sound petty, but this is the way that the bad guys played the game in court – with a lot of spin on the ball. We had to have our own ways of getting that ball back over the net.

Soylu had chosen one hell of a week to go on holiday: the weather was absolutely glorious. We had a very particular problem with summer surveillance: we would have to swap between being the driver and the passenger every day or suffer the consequence of having a beautiful tan on just one arm. Jobs like these sometimes made up for the ones where we would be sitting all night in a freezing car (with no heater on because we couldn’t run the engine), starving, dying for a piss, exhausted and trapped with a fellow officer who farted like a bull elephant on a diet of beans. I say ‘sometimes made up for . . .’ because we had far more of the night-time freezing-and-farting jobs than the sunny holiday ones.

Another hell that we had to suffer on the St Ives operation was staying in some very expensive hotels. Though, I hasten to add, not by our choice. This was the absolute peak holiday time and as such every single reasonably priced hotel was chock-full. This meant we had to go upmarket and stay in the only hotels that were not full – the posh ones. This was the very first time in my career when we were staying in a hotel that was actually better than the target we were following. My hotel in Torquay overlooked a beautiful bay in which you could watch dolphins playing in a perfectly still sea.

If, during the day, Soylu took his family to the beach, we would do our best to stick to the rules and only have a couple of officers covering him. For the rest of us, it was heaven: we closed down our cars and lay out in the sun, eating ice cream and breathing in good karma. These breaks also enabled us to get to a supermarket and pick up much-needed clean underwear, shorts and T-shirts – after all, we had left in an unexpected hurry. A fellow surveillance officer, the aforementioned Dangerous D., made an expensive mistake in St Ives. During lunch, he spilled soup over his only pair of trousers and desperately needed a new pair. He got his driver to pull up by a clothes shop near the front and, with the engine revving hard, Dangerous dashed inside. He grabbed the first pair of trousers that he saw in his size, put his credit card on the counter and asked the assistant to be as quick as possible. He almost fainted when he saw that the slacks cost £150 – unluckily, he’d chosen the most expensive shop in town. His driver was by now sounding the horn, desperate to be on the move, so for Dangerous there was nothing he could do but pay up. (And so pissed off was he when he found out that he couldn’t claim them on expenses that he barely took them off for the next year.)