Anything to Declare? (34 page)

So then, was our enforced holiday really worth it? Too right it was. We managed to provide evidence of Soylu on his mobile telephone at the vital moment that he passed information about a container number to his gang regarding the drugs shipment – and this evidence also enabled us to target the dirty container. Plus, we had put in place a fatal blocker to the ‘my client wasn’t using his phone’ defence before it was even attempted in court.

On top of this, I managed to get a stunning suntan. Both arms. This eight-day trip went down in the annals of investigation history, as did we as the officers most liable to win the award for Jammy Bastards of the Year.

But we didn’t realize then just how important and critical this whole case was until we actually carried out the knock on the container that Dalgleish, Soylu and their pals were importing. What was waiting for us was beyond even our wildest dreams: a UK-record haul of 400 kg, nearly half a ton, of heroin. We made the news headlines.

The concealment of the drugs was very clever. And this is where we return to our old friend bentonite/kitty litter. The density of the bentonite was very, very similar to the density of the heroin, so it was incredibly hard to identify one from the other via X-ray (though I daresay shooting them into your arm would have revealed a big difference). This meant there was a high chance that the heroin would not be discovered if the container was X-rayed at the port. Luckily, we had intelligence that told us when and where the drugs were to be imported, right down to the vital container number. But the bentonite theory was well founded because the local officers had to X-ray the container several times before they actually found the drugs. Personally, I thought that instead of sniffer dogs they should have just brought in some ‘pisser cats’ to identify the dodgy kitty litter.

So this well-run and ambitious drugs gang had been severely wounded. In order to ensure that his company appeared legitimate, Soylu had even made a number of previous importations, all delivered to an address in South Wales. All of these importations of cat litter, 30 tons of the stuff, had already been delivered and filled the large warehouse to the brim.

Following the successful arrest of the whole gang, we had to start cleaning up what was left behind. Now, whether or not it was a punishment by one of my bosses because of some insubordination, I couldn’t say – it was! – but I ended up being tasked with disposing of the kitty litter. I was sent to the warehouse in South Wales. But 30 tons of
anything
is difficult to dispose of. We could not flood the market with cheap litter as that would be wrong. We didn’t want the bottom to fall out of the cat-crap material market, did we? So what was I to do with all this stuff? I had a couple of days in South Wales to ponder the question.

I asked the locals in the pub and the other warehouse users if any of them had any idea what to do with it. Some of the ideas they came up with really are not printable; other ideas were so stupid that they were actually quite clever. The owner of a local golf club offered to take all of the bentonite off my hands for nothing. He thought that he might be able to use the litter in his fairway bunkers. Trouble was that when bentonite is wet it turns into wet clay. I was actually all for the idea because I loved the idea of completely screwing up the lives of golfers. Who wouldn’t? But I knew this would just lead to my getting into even bigger trouble.

I was also approached by the owner of a stable who thought that the dust could be used on his all-weather track. Once again, the resulting wet clay would have slowed his horses down to a crawl and may even have injured them. The stuff was useful when it was dry but when it got wet it was no use to man nor dog nor horse. Just cats. So what about selling it to zoos for the massive cat-litter trays they must use for their tigers? I thought I better not follow that one up . . .

It was the case officer on the investigation that saved my bacon when he delivered the news that, unbelievably, the defence barrister for a number of the arrested smugglers had decided that the cat litter was to be kept as evidence! This was 30 tons of moisture-intolerant rock dust, which would have to be stored in dry conditions at taxpayers’ expense. And the reason given for this was that the defence team might want the jury to see the original concealment in person. Why on earth did the defence think that we spent lots of money on taking pictures and videos of the concealment from every available aspect? Maybe they thought we just did it for fun. However, we played along rather than give them some excuse to object to the investigation. We didn’t want to fall at the final hurdle.

My problem now was how to move 30 tons from South Wales to the East Midlands so we could store it for the court case. In the end, we made use of that great secret weapon that is always at the forefront of the war against drugs – the forklift truck. Yep, I had it all lifted into a convoy of large articulated, curtain-sided lorries. It took three days, with bentonite dust spilling everywhere and filling the air. I inhaled so much of the shit that when I sneezed clay fired out of my nose – or at least the bits that hadn’t already started to harden in my nostrils. By the time we had finished, I was sneezing out clay bullets.

Strange, I thought, how I’d spent most of my career identifying, questioning, searching, interviewing, following, arresting and charging people who, for recreation, spent their days inhaling various illegal and expensive substances for pleasure . . . and here I was snorting nothing more exotic than cat-crap dust.

As I drove at the head of the three articulated-lorry convoy that was carrying evidence of the largest heroin seizure yet made in the UK, I thought about how it was a bloody good job that I didn’t have a feline pet of my own waiting for me when I got home. There was the possibility that it would try to shit on my bentonite-stuffed nose. And because by now I was so thoroughly sick of anything to do with cats I would have booted it squarely up the arse.

On an undercover CROPs job on the Isle of Wight, we’d had a run-in with some crime squad officers on the island who nearly cocked up an investigation of ours. The surveillance on the mainland was being conducted by both Customs and police, but on different targets. There were regular daily briefings between the case officers and the ground commanders of both groups so that everybody knew their jobs, so avoiding any ‘blue on blues’, which was the police codename for what the Army called ‘friendly fire’ or, in other words, shooting your own.

On the Monday, it was agreed that Customs CROPs would deploy on the island to carry out recces and close-target recon. There were to be no other Customs or police surveillance officers anywhere near: just ourselves and our back-up teams. CROPs work is dangerous at the best of times so we didn’t need our airwaves messed up by any surveillance boys. From surveillance of the previous two days, we were 90 per cent sure that all the main targets were on the mainland and hadn’t yet got to the island.

We deployed at one o’clock in the morning. It was dark, cold and clear and, thankfully, there was no moon to give away our movements. One of our teams was closing in on part of the target address to check out the household security system when a call came through saying that a car had unexpectedly swung into the long drive of the target premises, almost illuminating the team with its headlights. They dived for cover and sent out a danger message over the radio. All the teams, including mine, stopped dead in their tracks, and then we disappeared into the nearest undergrowth. Could this be the target or one of the gang turning up without warning? We all knew we could really be screwed here.

The car stayed in the same position for a few minutes, giving one of our teams the opportunity to get its registration and note that there were three people in the car, all males. No weapons could yet be seen. The team radioed the details to our ground crew who ran checks on the car reg. And, lo and behold, it was a police surveillance car from the regional crime squad that was working alongside us. It couldn’t have been a mere mistake or a wrong turn, because they would have to have taken a ferry to get to the island. The following morning, the three officers were standing in front of both their own and our governors for what we called ‘an interview without coffee’ and what everyone else called ‘a right fucking bollocking’. Blue on blue, indeed.

Ultimately, that mission had turned out a good result. And a month later we were now heading back out to the Isle of Wight for what would turn out to be our biggest job yet – Operation Eyeful. We had no idea yet but a record-breaking 400 kilos of cocaine worth £90 million was heading our way. It was appropriate in a way that it was being brought to the Isle of Wight because the island had a rich history of smuggling; as well as taking salvage goods from shipwrecks, historically the locals had also made a living from smuggling goods from France. But, this time, they were coming from a bit further afield.

What we did know was that it was being organized by a big-time smuggling ring run by a drug trafficker called Michael Tyrrell and his British wife Julie Paterson aka the ‘Cocaine Queen’. Tyrrell was from the West Indian island of Antigua and was well known there and in the United States for his criminal activities, especially with an associate called Frederick Fillingham, although the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) had been unable to touch him. Paterson was no decorative gangster’s moll – she owned a yacht charter company and was a yachtswoman herself with three Atlantic crossings under her belt.

Between the three of these characters, they seemed to have everything sewn up: Tyrrell had the drug connections; Paterson owned a yacht charter service; and Fillingham was a boat builder and sailor. The perfect combo for drug-smuggling operations by sea then.

We’d had the drug organization under surveillance for months. Whenever they were in the UK, Tyrrell and Paterson were kept under close surveillance and were observed buying equipment in preparation for their next big job. It would be interesting to see if a trafficker who had managed to elude the mighty power of the DEA would have as much success against a small island called Britain. We did once have the world’s greatest Navy fleet so we’d have to see if our rich maritime history was deep enough in our DNA to be able to bring the Cocaine King and Queen to book.

My involvement began humbly enough with my driving our CROPs Land Rover down to Southampton. It was the day before my birthday, so I wasn’t too happy. I soon cheered up as I saw my mate and colleague, Puddy, waiting for the Red Funnel line ferry to the island. He was his normal chirpy self. ‘Hello, me old mucker. What the fuck are we doing in this God-forsaken place?’

He was quite right. Large commercial docks are not the places that romantic stories about smuggling are made of. We knew the job we had been called back to the island to carry out was going to go down soon and CROPs were an essential part of the operation, but we didn’t know much else. I would love to say that the ferry trip was smooth, but it wasn’t. Puddy scowled at the waves: ‘If this keeps up it’s going to be one bastard of a night for a boat landing.’ And he was to be proved right.

We joined up with the rest of our merry band of CROPs officers at a secret location. Only the people who needed to know knew that we were there and what our mission was: CROPs was always a very secretive part of an investigation. Very few people could identify us, even in the broader investigation team. Outside the investigation, hardly anyone in Customs and Excise even knew of the cadre’s existence. We did jobs that people didn’t talk about. It was as rare as snooker ball fur for us to appear in court. Even in the drugs-drop aircraft job we did before, all the jury knew of us when it came to court was that the pictures had been taken by an officer ‘in a position to observe’. There was no specific mention of CROPs. And, in this latest instance on the Isle of Wight, it was so bloody secretive that even we didn’t know yet what it was; we weren’t in a position to observe anything, not even our own involvement.

Once we were all gathered and the kit had been unloaded, we got together for a briefing. Before the briefing started, my mind drifted back to the last annual CROPs meeting we’d had a few months earlier. We were told that the bad guys had just learned how to be a little worse by improving their CROPs-officer-hunting techniques. Previously, the better gangs had employed soldiers and ex-Marines to hunt us down, but now things had got more dangerous, thanks in part to the Cold War. The officer taking the annual briefing produced a very strange piece of kit for us to look at: Russian by design and manufacture and definitely military, our colleagues in military intelligence had managed to get it on the black market. They had known of its existence but never before been able to get their hands on one. It was, to put it bluntly, an OP hunter – designed to identify observation positions or even hidden tanks or artillery spotters. And, since the end of the Cold War, there had been no more need for this technology so someone had started selling them off to the criminal underworld. And what exactly was this piece of kit that, months later, I was still thinking about and even fearing?

It was a device with a computer-controlled passive laser that would scan 180 degrees to its front in search of a reflective surface, which was the kind of telltale surface not usually found in the countryside. This surface could be a camera lens, a tank sight, a weapons scope, etc. Once the device identified a target, the passive laser would concentrate its search down to the exact position of the reflection and zoom in so as to build up a picture of the reflective surface. If it was a nonmilitary target, the laser scanner would then restart the scan. But, if it was what it classed as a legitimate target, the operator would engage the secondary, full-power, non-passive laser. Using the scan and targeting, the main laser would lock on to the target and fire. This main laser was very powerful. And, we were told, if the laser locked on to a camera, scope or binoculars being used by a CROPs officer, it was powerful enough to burn a hole right through the lens, the device you were holding and then your head in a single shot. If all the other dangers and indignities of CROPs work weren’t enough, we now had the thought of possibly facing something that could burn you an arsehole in the back of your head.