by Jon Frost
At this, Pat stopped dead, looked down at the bag and the clothes, which were now spread all over the floor and the examination bench, looked back up at Leonard and smiled enigmatically. Then he turned, walked over to our office, whose door was open, and shouted in, ‘Has anyone here heard of some jockey shithead by der name o’ Leonard Pinnenr?’
He was greeted by howls of laughter from all the staff within the office and cheers and applause from passengers without.
Pat walked calmly back to the bench.
‘I’m terribly sorry, Mr Pinner, der answer is “No”!’ And with that he disappeared back into the suitcase. Then, with a nice piece of sleight of hand, Pat re-emerged from the bag with a loud ‘Ah ha!’ and held aloft an envelope in his hand. We all now appeared from the office and, with the passengers, made a sizable audience. We genuinely didn’t know what ole Pat was planning here. Even Leonard stopped in the middle of his stream of verbal abuse.
Pat ripped open the envelope and from inside produced a sheet of folded A4 paper. We all looked at each other. He unfolded the sheet and on it, for all to see, were large letters spelling ‘I AM LEONARD PINNER AND I REALLY AM A SHITHEAD!’ That was for all the ‘little’ guys who had for many years been shat on by one of the world’s shortest, biggest bastards.
We left Leonard to pack his own bag and scurry away. Not one of his best performances. You could say he fell at the first.
Sometimes animals even attempted to enter the country of their own volition, without human help. An Omega Air flight from Nigeria was a good example. Even though the flight was from Nigeria – one of the number-one target countries in the world because of the amount of illegal seizures – not many officers wanted to enter the hell that was this African aircraft’s cargo flight hold. Many of us would quite happily wait until the aircraft had unloaded before going anywhere near it. It was on such an occasion that I sat in the boarding car and watched an Omega aircraft being emptied. But about halfway through the unloading we heard a scream from the interior of the craft and two cargo men came barrelling out the rear of the Hercules aeroplane. I quickly stood up and stopped one of them to ask what was up.
‘Fucking enormous rat, Jon, is what’s up,’ he said. At first, I swear, I thought it was a small dog.’ Apparently, this ‘king of rats’ had actually attempted to attack them as they searched the hold.
Within minutes, the whole aircraft had been abandoned, even the Nigerian crew quickly bailed out. The airport police were notified, as were a couple of chaps from the Environmental Agency. They all arrived minutes later in a flurry of flashing blue lights and screaming sirens, which I thought was a bit over the top, but the rat must have been pretty impressed. So here was the situation: we had an abandoned Nigerian cargo Hercules aircraft with one very angry resident rat, six police officers (two of which, believe it or not, were armed with Heckler & Koch MP5 automatic rifles), two environmental health officers (who didn’t want to get out of the car) and little ole me. So we had the police with their Kochs out and health officers who wouldn’t even get out.
There was an emergency runway meeting in which we all put forward potential solutions. The armed police decided on the initial action to take place. Their idea was a simple but effective one, I thought: to blow the rat into kebabs with the aid of their rifles. And it did seem a shame not to make use of them. So they duly cocked their weapons and strode purposefully towards the rear ramp of the plane. But I suddenly realized what the now obvious error was with this plan; so I ran after them and managed to stop them before they entered the plane’s hold. I explained that firing live ammunition within the confines of a high-altitude aircraft was perhaps not the smartest idea that had ever been had – the chance of an unlucky ricochet, for one thing, was too great, as was the possibility of causing some unknown damage to the aircraft. This seemed to piss them off somewhat. ‘OK, smart arse,’ one of them said, ‘you come up with a better idea!’
I thought for a second and then walked over to the police Land Rover, reached in and took a large spade from inside. Trying not to look too afraid – which would have been easier carrying one of their guns rather than a police-issue garden implement – I disappeared into the rear of the Hercules. Everything got very dark, very quickly. I waited for my eyes to adjust. By following the sound of it, I quite quickly found it – it was what the African crew would have called a ‘bush cutter’ but what one of us had already quite accurately described as a fucking enormous rat. It was hiding behind two large cargo pallets. I took a deep breath, tried not to gag on the disgusting stench in there, and luckily managed to hit it with the first swing of the spade. I don’t know if rats can get into heaven but this one would’ve had to knock twice because the spade had split it in two.
It was with a feeling of small victory that I walked back down the ramp into the sunlight and out to the tarmac and passed the shovel, with the last remains of The Beast of Flight OA-172 on the scoop, back to the police officers. They turned a little green at the sight of it, which, I have to admit, was understandable. The officers looked at each other, then the spade, then me. One of them said I was a mad dog for going in the plane like that – and the nickname stuck: Mad Dog was what I had to live with for quite a while.
Animals (and their riders) weren’t always there just to give us trouble. Sometimes we actually used them in our duty. Drugs dogs, for example, were a vital tool. The two we had at the airport were both legendary – Finn and the aforementioned Arthur. Finn looked like a giant, mean poodle but was actually an Irish water spaniel and was as tough as a gypsy bare-knuckle fighter. He also had a smell that could KO you in the first round; true to his breed’s name, he loved water, any water, no matter how filthy, and took to flinging himself in it whenever he could. And, if it wasn’t water, then it would be shit that he was rolling himself around in or the rotting carcass of a dead animal. What made it more unbearable was that over the years his handler, John, had become immune to the smell, so he’d appear for duty with slavering, stinking Finn and wonder why we all jumped out the windows.
Arthur, on the other hand, was . . . worse. He was a German short-haired pointer with a large snout and a docked tail that, for some reason, was bald and pink, so it just looked like an erect, waggling penis. He also had his breed’s trait for ‘scenting’, meaning that every night Arthur would take a dump in his kennel, then take his beanbag bed in his mouth and wipe it around all the walls, before falling contentedly to sleep. His poor handler had to hose it out very day, with Arthur sat behind him with a kind of dopey, doggy smile on his face.
Arthur had a great nose attached to very large jaws full of very large and sharp teeth. He’d started his life as an RAF explosives dog until they discovered that he had Jaws of Death and would rip open a suitcase with one bite, snap up the offending target item and then shake the crap out of it – not good in an explosive-seeking situation as both dog and handler could quickly end up as a mixed kebab. So he was put on the doggy transfer list – or, as we liked to think of it, a promotion – and moved to HM Customs, where I had the pleasure of watching him rip open suitcases with a single, savage bite. I even got to see those big teeth closer than I ever would have really liked.
One summer afternoon, I was behind the baggage hall waiting for the Jamaica flight bags to arrive. Arthur and his handler Mickey soon appeared as this flight was a good hit for cocaine and cannabis. Mick pointed to some Paris bags that had just arrived. ‘Do you mind if I warm Arthur up on those bags before the Jamaica flight arrives?’
‘Go ahead,’ I said – watching a drugs dog do its stuff is amazing, and they didn’t come any better or bigger than Arthur.
‘OK. And can you pop this in your pocket while I go get the beast out of the van?’ he said and handed me one of the dog’s training aids, a small plastic tube containing a rag scented with cannabis. I put it into my pocket and wandered over to the belt as the Jamaica bags started to trundle through. As I watched all the bags being lined up for Arthur’s sniff test, I saw
Mickey walking over with a strange smile on his face. ‘Whatever you do,’ he said, ‘don’t make any fast movements.’
I looked down and saw Arthur, jaws open, inches away from my crotch. Mickey grabbed him just as the dog was about to lunge at my lunchbox and make a messy meal out of it. Even from the other side of the loading bay, he had caught a whiff of the training aid and he was determined to get to it whether my balls were in the way or not.
In the end, it was not Arthur who got them both into trouble but Mickey. One day, he boarded a Korean Airlines jumbo jet with the dog and jokingly announced that the takeaway they’d ordered had arrived. Oops.
We had more than a few good officers at the airport. Mark was a cracking officer. He seemed naturally to have as strong a nose for smuggled gear as either Finn or Arthur. He had been in uniform for twenty years and he took me under his gold-braided wing. He was a real officer’s officer with more airport drugs seizures than he could remember and a stack of commendations up to his chin.
Once when a flight from Ghana arrived, Mark decided to give it his once-over. Many people think that we have radar for smugglers, and in some cases it’s true (and it serves us well to have people think that), but Mark genuinely did have sensitively twitching and very accurate antennae. So, while most of us had pulled passengers aside who looked good for carrying drugs, I noticed that Mark had pulled a Ghanaian businessman in a suit with an attaché case and Crombie overcoat. Mark had a short chat with him and the passenger placed his case on the examination bench. I was right next to them, so I could hear the exchange.
‘So, Mr Apeezy,’ Mark smiled, ‘you have nothing to declare today? You’re not smuggling anything?’
Mr Apeezy was quite loud, but friendly, in his denial. ‘No, no, no, sir. I never smuggle. It is against my God.’
I saw Mark smile his lopsided smile and his brows drawbridge in sympathy, as if to say, ‘I see.’ We all knew what this meant: another Mark seizure about to be made. But what could it be? He hadn’t even opened the suitcase yet. Mark sighed with the kind of weary resignation that comes from over twenty years of having to politely listen to people lying through their teeth to you.
‘Mr Apeezy, I am arresting you for the attempted importation of what I assume is . . .’ Mark raised an eyebrow and cocked his head ‘. . . a monkey of some kind?’
Mr Apeezy’s demeanour changed rapidly and he suddenly screamed, ‘But how do you know this?’
‘It’s really quite simple, sir,’ said Mark levelly. ‘For the last thirty seconds, your Crombie has been making its own way to the exit door. I’m afraid you’re nicked.’
We all swivelled our heads as one and saw that Mark was right – one Crombie going walkabout. It turned out that Mr Apeezy was a monkey smuggler. He had drugged the monkey and then sewn it into the lining of his overcoat for the duration of the flight. Unluckily for him, it had awoken in the airport and – the inside of an overcoat not being its natural habitat – it had very understandably made a bid for freedom.
When we later congratulated Mark on a good job, he just shrugged. ‘It was easy really: as he was coming from the baggage belt, I couldn’t help but notice that his Crombie was having a piss . . .’
6. Beware the Boys in the Black and Gold
I hate you, you hate me – let’s get this over with.
You could sometimes get the idea that the line above summed up the Customs officer and the passenger attitude towards each other. There’s a natural antipathy between the two that goes both ways, bred from the demands of the job. But, when you approach the dreaded blue/red/green declare/nothing-to-declare channels, it’s not so much a gauntlet of hate that you have to run, but a gauntlet of immense suspicion. And if there’s an ‘Us and Them’ situation it is only between Customs as the Us and smugglers as the Them. Officers don’t want to waste their time or yours by stopping and searching someone who is bringing nothing more into the country than the tan-lines from their flip-flops. That just helps the ones that should be searched to get through.
In the 1,500 years of Customs’ existence many strange items of interest have passed into the sphere of Customs’ control. One of the major times for new smuggling legislation was during the Napoleonic Wars. The catalyst behind this golden age of smuggling was ole shorty himself – Napoleon. He identified that, as an island nation, Britain’s economy leaned heavily on import and export tax because of our reliance on tax from a huge list of goods such as booze and tobacco but also such things as playing cards, cloth, lace and anything else you could think of. So, Napoleon cleverly reasoned, if he could flood certain markets with untaxed goods, he could damage the English treasury. I could almost suggest that this was one of the first occasions of direct economic warfare.
The French set up warehouses in their Channel ports to supply the ‘free traders’ with everything they needed, from barrels of booze to playing cards. At the start of the war, the drink issued on British naval ships was brandy (a French-produced spirit). The British government identified the potential supply problems and so replaced the ‘brandy tot’ with rum, which became the sailors’ tipple. It was unpopular to start with but tastes soon changed. Another advantage of switching to rum was that it was produced within the growing British Empire. Kipling, the author and not the cake maker, penned a whole poem on the subject called ‘A Smuggler’s Song’: ‘Five and twenty ponies/Trotting through the dark –/Brandy for the Parson, ‘Baccy for the Clerk/Them that asks no questions isn’t told a lie –/Watch the wall my darling while the Gentlemen go by!’
Since then, it’s been the job of Customs officers to not watch the wall as the smugglers go by. And in one of those strange historical eccentricities of British law, ten-oared boats are still illegal in this country, believe it or not. It’s because Napoleon’s shipwrights invented smuggler cutter ships that could turn into the wind and use their ten oars to make their escape. And, at this time in history, Customs and Excise officers were heavily armed and also operated armed revenue cutters. In fact, it was the Excise men that ran the press gangs on behalf of the Navy.
Until recently, many of the prohibitions from these days still existed, such as bringing in foreign prison-made goods, badger-haired shaving brushes or Napoleonic coinage – not that there was really any need for them still to be banned; we weren’t exactly overrun with badger-haired shaving-brush smuggling operations. As far as concealments went, sailors used to weave tobacco into ships’ ropes and bottles of brandy would be hidden in barrels of the ship’s tar. And just to prove that some things never go out of fashion – in both crime and detection – almost 200 years later I would be finding 10 kg of cocaine within 200 yards of climbing rope, and packs of drugs hidden in barrels of bitumen. Funny how the modern smugglers think they are up to something new!
One strange Customs law that still exists is one that I came across on duty when I stopped and searched a perfectly respectable-looking gentleman for no reason other than I had a feeling and, as it happened, the feeling turned out to be right. Though I wasn’t at all expecting to find what I did: when I opened his suitcase I saw that it was completely full of human hair, long strands of it bundled together. Now he wasn’t some kind of strange hair fetishist that was sneaking up behind women and snipping off bits of their hair: he was actually a wig maker. His trade, he said, was with the Jewish community in north London. His problem, though, was that he had attempted to avoid paying tax on the stuff and had tried to make it through the ‘nothing-to-declare’ green channel. But we now had him by a different kind of hair – the short and curlies. The duty and tax on hair is higher than that on gold.
Between Stansted, Gatwick and Heathrow airports, I’d see a wide selection of passengers from all walks of life – and some of those walks were pretty funny (you try walking normally with half a kilo of drugs up your jacksy) – and I also worked with fellow Customs officers who were just as varied. Most of them were perfectly normal, ordinary fellas. But don’t panic, I’ll tell you about the other ones instead.
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Terry was a strange one, and how he ever got into the uniform branch I shall never know. Because Terry’s particular affliction was that he couldn’t talk to strangers. Now that’s a little bit of a drawback when your job, essentially, is spending all day long stopping, searching and talking to strangers. I suppose if Terry could have just searched passengers that he knew then he would have been OK – but then he wouldn’t have had any friends left!
It wasn’t that he didn’t want to talk to people: it was that he really couldn’t do it. So the ideal position was found for him as the keeper at the airport’s Queen’s Warehouse, which, contrary to popular opinion, was not a storage facility for Elton John’s wardrobe. He did the job very well because all he had to talk to all day was himself, the warehouse boxes and the officers he knew. I liked him for the fact that he made the senior officers see red as he always looked like a complete and utter bag of shit. His uniform was always clean but he flatly refused to iron it . . . flat. His excuse was that he didn’t get paid to iron his uniform, though he did get a tax allowance for cleaning it.
Another officer, jockey-hating Patrick from the south of Ireland, was usually an absolute gentleman in every way. He was only about five foot four yet had nerves of steel. He didn’t panic or back away from danger at all. One day, a massive Swedish bodybuilder threw a steroid strop in the airport over some minor inconvenience and physically lifted his whole baggage trolley – complete with suitcases – up over his head and threatened to drop it on Patrick. It would have tonked little Pat into the ground like a tent peg. But, before we could get around the benches and rugby tackle the big Swede, Patrick had gone into his sweetly smiling routine.