by Jon Frost
Jon Frost is an experienced Customs officer of over twenty years’ standing. He has served as a HM Customs Preventive Officer in London airports, an Operational Intelligence Specialist, an Investigation/Surveillance Specialist (Drugs), an Anti-Corruption Manager (Overseas) and National Intelligence Coordinator, and an Investigation Specialist for SOCA (Serious Organised Crime Agency). He is also experienced in army-trained covert surveillance (CROPs) for the long-term observation of criminal gangs and operations.
Anything to Declare? is the first book of a planned series of Jon Frost memoirs.
Anything to Declare?
Jon Frost
CONSTABLE • LONDON
In memory of
Vera Elsie Clack
8.9.27—5.8.2013
The gentlest of women, who put Mark and I on the right path for adult life.
Constable & Robinson Ltd.
55–56 Russell Square
London WC1B 4HP
www.constablerobinson.com
First published in the UK by Constable,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd., 2014
Copyright © Jon Frost, 2014
The right of Jon Frost to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in
Publication Data is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-47210-942-2 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-1-47210-944-6 (ebook)
Printed and bound in the UK
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Contents
Introduction: As is the Custom
Part 1: In Uniform
1. Counting the Bodies Before Breakfast
2. The Tattooed Side of the Moon
3. DOA: Dead on Arrival
4. Fear of Flying . . . with Bloody Good Reason
5. Monkeys, Rats, Jockeys and Other Animals
6. Beware the Boys in the Black and Gold
7. Shooting the Queen’s Corgis
8. You Strip Search the Vicar – I’ll Question the Nuns
9. Hide and Seek . . . and We Shall Find
10. The World’s a Stage . . . and We Are the Trapdoor
11. Mickey Mouse Goods (Including the Ears)
12. Machine v. Man/Customs Officer v. Pilot
13. Uniformed Intel
14. Plain-clothes Intel
Part 2: Undercover (On the Knock)
15. Joining the Fun Factory: Checking in to Charlie Hotel
16. Spooks and Lumps
17. Getting into Drugs and Going on the Knock
18. Pricking Michael Jackson’s Bubble
19. The Yardie Coke Smuggler and the Future Mrs Frost?
20. Ghosts, Heart Attacks and Half-arsed Evidence
21. Addicted
22. CROPs: The Art of Using a Clingfilm Toilet
23. Holidaying on Heroin
24. No. 1 with a Cocaine Bullet
Epilogue: Thrills and Spills . . .
Introduction:
As is the Custom
You know when you’ve just come back from holiday and, as you stagger knackered through the cold airport, in shorts and flip-flops, with your wonky-wheeled luggage trolley, and you get to the red/green/blue Customs channels and – even though you know you’re not bringing anything back from abroad other than burned feet, hotel shower gel and a souvenir hangover – you still get that uneasy feeling walking through ‘nothing to declare’?
Well, sorry for putting you through that but we’re kind of glad you feel that way. Because it means we’ve created the right environment to ensure that the uneasy feeling will be much, much worse for the people that we really want to catch – the criminals and smugglers bringing in contraband that may seriously harm you and yours. We want them to get that horrible feeling: sweaty palms and nervous gulping is an easily spotted dead giveaway. And, if you saw the things that we would regularly find hidden on and in people, you’d probably agree.
Oscar Wilde, when going through New York Customs, made the most famous remark ever uttered to a Customs officer when he said that he had nothing to declare but his genius. It’s a great line, but I’m surprised that the undoubted genius of Wilde didn’t alert him to the fact that that’s exactly the kind of smartarse remark that’s going to have any Customs officer snapping on the old rubber glove with relish and saying, ‘Right, sonny Jim, let’s see exactly where you’ve hidden that genius . . .’
Anyway, like they say, as is the custom, I’ll introduce myself: I served over twenty years in Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise (HMCE), initially as a uniformed officer at London airports, then moving on to a role as a preventive Intelligence officer before promotion into the plain-clothes and undercover Customs Investigation Division. Later still, I moved to the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA). Most of what I have seen and done has never been made public except for some of the larger drugs jobs, and even then very few people knew what occurred before the arrests took place. Between uniform, investigation work, overseas postings and covert operations, only the names have been changed to protect those involved.
Some of what we did should have never have happened and some things should never have been seen by anyone, but someone had to do the job and that was us.
Prior to the formation of the admittedly less effective SOCA, HM Customs Preventive & Investigation counted for more than 70 per cent of all UK drug, gun and porn seizures. Just one Customs Investigation heroin team would seize more heroin in a year than the whole of the UK’s police forces (and there were six Customs heroin teams).
In more than twenty years, I have worked with the mad, the bad, the brave, the stupid, the spectacular and the heroic. The Customs officers I have known came from all kinds of backgrounds. It was quite rare for the department to recruit directly from school and it was unknown for a person to join the Investigation Division without having a good grounding in Customs, Excise or VAT. I have served with former policemen, engineers, soldiers, sailors, airmen, council gardeners, bouncers and even double-glazing salesmen. It was never the pay that drew these people in. Sometimes it was the glory or the power of wearing a uniform. For the ex-military guys, it was the worry of not wearing a uniform. Every officer had their own reason for joining. Mine was luck.
The work of Customs officers at ports and airports was and is essential. HMCE was regarded as the best Customs service in the world and, having worked around the world in many countries, I learned that it was true. Customs has always stated that it protects society – and, take my word for it, some of what Customs seizes on its way into this country would make your hair stand up and scream. In my time as a uniformed officer I seized many weird and wonderful things: passengers, aircraft, presidential aircraft, a working tank, cars, lorries, boats and coffins; and I uncovered wild animals, killer snakes, bush meat, animal porn, poisonous vodka, dodgy medicine, bootleg prescriptions, pirated pills, toxic alcohol, firearms, sidearms, swords, explosives, stolen gold, dirty money, blood diamonds, child pornography, dead parrots and every drug known to man (and a few as yet unknown). And that was all just from searching the living. The dead? Well, we searched them, too. We had to. It’s amazing what you can hide in a coffin.
There were many aspects of the job that made you think twice about ever again putting your fingers anywhere near your mouth. Every single hiding place and hole in the human body has at
one time been used by smugglers, and I’m afraid the poor old Customs officer has to sometimes look inside them. And, yes, even the dead ones. In fact, we sometimes preferred the corpses – especially on a Monday morning or when suffering from a hangover – as the dead don’t argue, swear or spit at you.
When you’ve confiscated everything from a suitcase full of human hair to a live, urinating monkey hidden in the lining of a passenger’s overcoat, you know you can never return to a normal line of work. And from being a uniformed officer I then went into plain-clothes and undercover Customs work and things really got . . . even less normal.
Over the years, there have been many so-called detection methods for criminals and criminal activity, from the low-tech reading the bumps on a human head to the high-tech airport Sniffer Arch (more of that later); from the lie detector test to actually using fruit flies to try to identify drugs (yes, it’s true). But I don’t think any method has yet been found that beats the knowledge, the experience, the suspicion, the gut instinct, the skill, the bloody-mindedness and the ever-twitching antennae of that uniformed human radar detector – the good old-fashioned Customs officer.
Unfortunately, or fortunately, this ‘trusting no one’ technique usually pays off. When I was at work in the airports, in front of me would be a long queue of incoming passengers (including smugglers), and behind me there were 88,000 square miles of Great Britain. We were all that stood between the two. So, when you next step off a plane, the Customs officer may be the first unfriendly face you see, but they are actually the last border defence that we have.
Just don’t try to sneak in a monkey under your overcoat – we know the signs . . .
Part 1: In Uniform
1. Counting the Bodies Before Breakfast
There’s an old Japanese proverb that says, ‘If you sit by the river long enough, the body of your enemy will float by.’ You could also say that, if you worked at an airport long enough, you would eventually see everything.
One day when I was on the early shift, I was just about to drive into the staff car park when I noticed a vehicle parked up in an unusual place. Next to the car park there was a deadend road that hadn’t yet been connected to wherever it was intended to lead. Down this road there was a Ford saloon that had both front doors wide open, as if its driver and passenger had got out in a hurry and legged it. And speaking of legs, on closer inspection there appeared to be a man’s legs hanging out of the driver’s door, and there also appeared to be a pair of woman’s legs sticking out from the passenger’s door. Maybe they were sunbathing or having a quick nap, but it seemed an odd place to do it.
Now, Customs runs airports (by ancient legislation, no foreign entry point into Great Britain can exist without Customs authority) – security do their bit and so can the police, but Customs officers are always on the lookout for smuggling attempts or dodgy goings-on and the telltale signs of either. So I thought this looked strange enough for me to have a closer butcher’s.
As I slowly drove a little closer to the car, I could tell that something was seriously wrong. As well as the two pairs of legs sticking out of the car (which were immobile), both the front and rear windows were smashed – and yet the car didn’t look as if it had been in an accident. At least I couldn’t see any frontal impact.
As I got out of my car and walked towards the vehicle, all I could hear was the blood in my ears and the roar of incoming aircraft above my head. I slowly stepped nearer and called out a hopeful ‘Hello’, thinking that they would perhaps both sit up, startled, embarrassed that they’d been caught doing whatever they were doing. But something inside me wasn’t surprised when there was no response. Now I could feel the tiny cubes of safety glass scattered around the car crunch underfoot. And, even though I had a bad feeling about this, when I got near enough to peer inside I was quite shocked at what I saw: the whole inside of the car was decorated with sheets of fresh blood, as if the interior had been reupholstered with a kind of dark, sticky red leather. I noticed for the first time that one of the man’s shoes was off, lying on the floor, right next to a double-barrel shotgun. A quick assessment made it plain to me that the man had used the shotgun to completely blow off the head of his wife; and he’d then orally taken the same double-barrelled medicine himself. There was blood, bone and brain matter all around the inside of the car, and presumably four eyeballs and sixty-four teeth must have been scattered around inside there, too. I’d heard of shotgun weddings but this was my first experience of a shotgun divorce.
By now, the commercial jets above me weren’t the only incoming flights I had to deal with. Obviously word, and the smell, had got round the local area and there seemed to be a busy flight path of flies and insects circling the car and making their approach for landing.
Well, serves me right, I thought – the curiosity of the Customs officer strikes again. Trust me to have a butcher’s and find . . . what looked like a butcher’s. That’ll teach you, Jon, you nosy, suspicious old bastard. I was just glad that, technically, this was actually nothing to do with Customs. I could wipe my hands of it, if not my nostrils.
I was just getting ready to leave and call it in when the first police arrived, obviously alerted already by someone equally suspicious. The first officer came closer, looked in, turned green, and immediately bent over and noisily parked his breakfast all over his shoes. They went from being shiny black to multicoloured pebble-dash. The second officer smiled weakly at me, nodded, and to his credit he straight away got on with what he knew had to be done – secure and make safe the shotgun (which, as he picked it up, you couldn’t help but notice, was dripping with something that belonged inside the human body but was now irretrievably out).
Great start to a Monday morning, I thought a little while later as I sat in the canteen eating a large fry-up. Oh, come on, don’t hold that against me – as they say, breakfast is the most important meal of the day! (Though that young copper might have disagreed.)
And all this, remember, had happened before I’d actually clocked on, so technically I hadn’t even been at work. Not for the first time, something encountered during the course of a day made me think: if that’s the kind of thing that this job reveals to you even when you’re off-duty, then you can imagine what you might have to look forward to when your shift actually does begin. Perhaps even more bodies floating past me in the river.
It’s Monday mornings like that one that make me think back to how I got into this and where it all started.
2. The Tattooed Side of the Moon
Everyone, as they say, has to start somewhere. My starting place in Customs was at Stansted Airport on the ‘old’ side of the runway, that is, on the other side of the runway to the new high-tech ‘greenhouse’ terminal designed by Norman Foster at a cost of £100 million. What would become known as the old Stansted (but which was at the time new to me) was a pretty simple creation from the 1970s with single-storey buildings and Portakabins. The passengers, believe it or not, actually had to walk from the plane to the terminal. And the staff canteen was really no more than a glorified prefab Nissen hut from the time when Stansted was in the hands of the 8th Air Force of the USAAF (United States Army Air Force) during the Second World War. From looking at the regular canteen menu, I think they left some of their food behind as well.
But, having already served in the regular Army, I was used to food that wasn’t exactly haute cuisine. After I had left the regulars, I’d joined the Territorial Army, which also allowed me to return to college in Cambridge. Near exam time, I was on TA duty in the officer’s mess of the Royal Anglians when I’d been approached by an ageing captain who was a little drunk. He was apparently worried that I was heading for the dole in the next couple of weeks and informed me that Customs at Stansted Airport was looking for bench officers. For some reason, even though I’d never considered it before, the idea immediately grabbed me. And I wrote and posted a letter of interest within the next twenty-four hours.
As new recruits, our training consisted of
three intensive months: first month, we were at our home airport of Stansted and we covered all the basics: law, rules and regulations (you needed to know the different Customs Acts of Parliament inside out), spotting potential targets, etc. Month two was spent on a residential training course, in my case held at a hotel in Eastbourne, away from our station, and here officers from all over the country were brought together for role-play training, advanced training in interviews and paperwork (notebooks and witness statements), training in passenger stops and advanced lessons based on the first month’s teaching. Our third month was at a different port or airport – Gatwick was my temporary posting – to the one where we were mentored all the time. Then a probation period continued for nine more months at the home station where we were assessed on how we carried out our duties with any cock-ups noted – strip searching the Queen, letting through a live monkey disguised as a hairy child, detaining someone for being in possession of a concealed banana . . . that kind of thing.
Our exams were an ongoing thing, structured very much like the military – explanation, demonstration, imitation, test. There was no computer-based training. In fact, we only had one computer and that was a secure Customs and Excise Departmental Reference & Information Computer (CEDRIC) terminal in the Intelligence office.
The failure rate was low for preventive training Customs officers because, although the uniform service was an attractive option to many people, when they discovered the hours and the exacting work required, most dropped out even before their training started. On top of this, the interview stage we’d been through to get there was tough. You had to show you had the right stuff to progress any further.
Like Judge Dredd, we had to know the laws inside out and back to front. I knew that, when I was operational, I wouldn’t get time to sit and flick through the law books. The important front-line laws were: the Customs and Excise Management Act (CEMA, which was our bible), the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE), the VAT Act, the Customs Consolidation Act 1876, the Misuse of Drugs Act, the Customs and Excise Tariff, the Firearms Act, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), the Counterfeit Act and the Misdescription of Goods Act amongst others. So you can see that my bedtime reading at this time wasn’t exactly a barrel of laughs. There aren’t many chuckles to be had in the VAT Act.