Anything to Declare?

by Jon Frost

  ‘Now stop it, yer big focker. If you pulled out your ole fella and it was bigger than mine then I may get a bit worried. OK?’

  The Swede stopped, cracked up laughing and slowly lowered the trolley down. (We later heard that he went on to become a top contender in the World’s Strongest Man. The Swede, that is, not Patrick. Patrick just went on to eat a swede . . . in the canteen.)

  During his allocated annual break, Patrick decided to take his wife to Rhodes on a surprise holiday. It was a surprise to us as well as we didn’t even realize that he was married. So we decided to pull a prank on his return. Two weeks later, his flight touched down back in England – and at our airport. Bit of a mistake. Pat had forgotten our golden rule – never fly into the airport at which you also work.

  Three of us uniformed officers identified Patrick’s large suitcase behind the scenes of the baggage belt. I picked the lock and the other two emptied all of Pat and his wife’s clothes into a large bag. The clothes were then replaced with a large concrete paving slab, so big that it took all three of us, grunting, to heave the bag back on to the baggage carousel. Then we rushed round and stood at the end of the channels. We could see Patrick and his wife, and he gave us a courteous nod as we attempted to do the professional thing and ignore him. Pat then started doing the Baggage Carousel Unlucky Fucker Look – that is, like everyone else, standing there like a lemon, peering at the belt, wondering why on earth your bag always comes out bloody last. But, when the bags started to appear, it was only then that we noticed there was a problem – another bag, identical to Patrick’s, was also on the belt. A senior officer, in on the whole thing, sidled up to me and the eight other uniformed officers who were lined up for the floor show and, without taking his eyes off the belt, he whispered, ‘Please tell me that you got the right bag . . .’

  Luckily, we had identified it not just by how it looked but also by the name and baggage tag number. Pat looked at the tag of the first one and let it pass; it disappeared around the belt and he waited for the one that he now knew was his to reach him. But, as he started to move to grab it, he was suddenly brushed aside by a very annoyed old lady.

  ‘Excuse me, young man, that’s mine!’ She had obviously missed the appearance of the first suitcase and was convinced that this one was hers – and, with the determination and sharp elbows of a jumble-sale veteran (and former rugby player, from the looks of things), she made a grab for it with one hand while fending off Pat with the other. Her vice-like grip on the handle was impressive but the staying power of an eighty-pound slab of concrete meant it was not for moving. So, in quick succession: the lady pulled – the bag stood still – the lady heaved – the bag stood still – the belt moved around – the lady clung on, fell over, gave a little yelp and then got dragged along the shiny floor on her backside, knocking over passengers like bowling pins as she held on tightly for dear life. Pat slowly turned to look at us, eyes wide, smiling, with that you-cheeky-cheeky-fockers look on his face. But all he saw was the retreating backs and shaking shoulders of ten black uniforms as we all fled back to the channels, crying with laughter. We could still hear the little yelps and cries for help as we slid away.

  Why she didn’t let go of the bag, I’ll never know, but that part of the airport floor around the baggage carousel got a bloody good polish.

  An officer whom, unfortunately, we didn’t get to play that trick on was Richard. Even we, his fellow Customs officers, hated him, so God knows what everyone else thought of him. He was the world’s most perfect example of why ‘Richard’ should sometimes be shortened to ‘Dick’. And he was another one that we were surprised to find had a wife, but simply because we couldn’t fathom how he’d got another human being to stand him long enough to make it up the aisle. We thought a stun gun must have been involved.

  He arrived at the airport as an experienced senior officer but, from day one, he started making enemies. One of his first official acts was the implementation of the red line in our duty-log signing-in book. The two day shifts started at seven and eight o’clock. At seven o’clock, Richard appeared with a ruler and red pen and proceeded to draw a red line in the book, meaning that any one arriving a minute late would have to sign in under the line. He did the same for the eight o’clock shift. Not a good way to make friends with new colleagues.

  He carried on not making friends as if it was a sport. Patrick pulled over a young lad who had arrived from Amsterdam. A baggage search revealed that cigarettes weren’t the only thing that he’d been smoking in the Netherlands. Patrick needed the agreement of a senior officer to carry out a further search. Unfortunately, the senior officer was Richard. Pat explained to him why he wanted the search, and, without a moment’s hesitation, Richard replied, ‘Well, he’s black, search him!’ Now, that wasn’t the type of people we were: we didn’t distrust anyone, we distrusted everyone – equally. So Patrick immediately turned on his heel, returned to the young lad and said, ‘Right. Don’t do drugs! Now bugger off!’ He didn’t even search him; it was his way of trying to redress the balance. It didn’t take long for word to get around about Richard’s little outburst. His hate rating increased but he seemed to enjoy it even more.

  We did some research and found out that he had a history of being about as popular as a turd in a swimming pool (on his good days, he moved up to being as popular as a fart in a space-suit). He had attempted to join the Investigation Division. The ID was strict when it came to your first six months’ service. If you didn’t shine, you were returned to your original post. Richard started rubbing people up the wrong way from the beginning. But they had their own ways of dealing with his type. He was sent on a solo mission to Dover. His instructions: to identify a white Mini (registration not known) that belonged to a known criminal (name not given) arriving on a ferry (which one not known) from France. Richard’s job was to follow it to its final destination in the UK. Easy job, but what Richard didn’t know was that the operation didn’t exist.

  His first white Mini took him into Wales, but when he contacted the senior officer with the address he was told, ‘No, that’s not our man. Back to Dover!’ So he returned. The next white Mini took him to Manchester, and he received the same answer from the senior officer. The third white Mini took him to Newcastle, the fourth to Birmingham and the fifth to Cornwall. He was on the road for a total of six days before it dawned on him that this operation was a ‘sickener’ – a job invented to crack him. It worked; he drove back to London and requested a transfer. Good for ID, bad for us.

  After three months, we’d had enough of him. We could do nothing right in his eyes. He would tear up official paperwork if it was written in blue ink rather than black and banned officers from bringing in any food that smelled too much. We knew he had to go when we realized he was so bad that he’d even give Customs officers a bad name.

  Our get-rid offensive started simply but effectively. We’d had brand-new lockers delivered. Richard had spent quite a lot of departmental money on them. Compared to what we’d had before – which were like school gym lockers – these were state of the art. But within a few days, as is always the way, officers started individualizing their own lockers with name tags, pictures and small stickers. Richard went ballistic. He got the poor old office manager to remove all the stickers and tags while he himself pinned up an official notice that contained enough exclamation marks to crucify Christ: ‘PLEASE NOTE!! – The placing of name tags or stickers on the official lockers is banned!! It will be seen as defacing official government property!! The perpetrators will be reprimanded!!’

  All through the day and night, officers made themselves busy bringing stuff from home, scrounging stuff from the airlines and airport shops, etc. The following morning, Richard arrived to witness the handiwork of myself and all my colleagues: every single locker had disappeared – hidden under thousands of tags, stickers, pictures, photos and signs of every kind. Two lockers were even fully wrapped in Christmas paper with giant ribbons and bows. It was the first of many prank
s. Richard was on his way within the month but he did have the final say. He gave all the officers that worked under him the lowest possible ratings on their annual reports (black marks that could never be removed, affected your promotion chances and prevented a pay rise). Thanks, Dick.

  I’d become justly proud of the officers of HM Customs. It was as rare as rocking-horse doo to find a genuine ‘bad un’. But we had one at the airport called Chaz. He was my reporting officer for a short while and I knew that the senior officers hoped that I’d lose my temper and wipe his clock clean. He was also, among others things, a meat burglar.

  We were very hot on the importation of all food types, especially meat, with its potential for disease. Ireland was a major source country for the bulk of meat seizures. The Irish were very proud of their produce and rightly so, but the meat ban covered all countries and all meats from dried chimpanzee in a Nigerian suitcase (not an unusual find) to a pound of sausages in a carrier bag from the Emerald Isle. And to stop us seizing their purchases, passengers sometimes even ate their meat, raw, right in front of us. Which wasn’t too bad for the passenger if it was a fillet steak but it was quite a sight if it was three pounds of black pudding. We tended to just stand back out of curiosity and see what would happen. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a Scotsman so desperate to get his money’s worth that he tries to stuff a whole haggis in his gob at once.

  Having seized the offending food, we would place it in a giant chest freezer that would be cleared out by a little man from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF). The white MAFF van arrived at the same time, same day, every week, so it wasn’t too difficult for Chaz to time his pilfering. Nobody really checked the weights as we passed the food over to the MAFF man so Chaz had it made. A pound of steak here and a couple of kilos of sausages there. Until, that is, he got a touch too greedy and spotted a huge great ham that had been seized from a Spanish passenger. Now these hams were very popular in Spain (you may have seen them hanging in bars) and are very expensive. But Christmas was two weeks away and Chaz decided to add the ham to his meaty Christmas list.

  He hung on until his late shift, which occurred the day before the arrival of the MAFF van. He then waited until there was a flight in and we were busy screening passengers. He grabbed the ham and a few kilos of assorted meaty treats and snuck out of the office into the airside car that we had parked out the back. He then drove the short distance to the edge of airside area, near to where his own car was parked the other side of a wall. His next job was to throw the stolen booty over the wall – only his meat heaving was met by a thump and a loud scream. Spooked, Chaz jumped into the car and sped back to the office. An hour later, we were visited by the local police. It appeared that a member of the public was returning to their car when they were badly assaulted by a large flying ham joint and lassoed by several strings of pork sausages. It was so lucky for Chaz that he had taken the meat out of the Customs seizure bags and put it into plain carriers. Still, it did prove that pigs really could fly . . . but also that they came down to earth pretty sharpish, too.

  The police never made the link to our office, but the person who did notice something was the MAFF chap. After Chaz stopped his antics, he commented to our senior officer that our meat seizures must have shot through the roof as he seemed to be picking up more food than ever from our seizure freezer!

  So Chaz could not go unpunished for our silence. He was an old revenue officer of the type that we would refer to as a Waterguard man (‘Waterguard’ being the term used for preventive Customs officers from the mid-1800s until 1970). Whenever he was duty officer, he always kept an eye on the TV monitor that covered the baggage area, and the second he spotted a single passenger he would start shouting at us to get in the channels as he dashed out of the office with his little pigeon-toed run. So, knowing this, during the week we had the opportunity to video the passengers arriving on a Toronto flight. This was a jumbo-jet load and, as such, completely filled our baggage hall. We then waited a few days until Chaz was the duty officer on a late shift and one night we put the video of the incoming flood of Toronto passengers through the CCTV system just five minutes before his clocking-off time. We had no flights due until 6 a.m. the following day. Chaz looked up at the monitors, saw the apparent crowds piling through, did a quick double-take at the sight, and was then off shouting and running for the channels. Two minutes later, once he was inside, we made sure the channels were locked up nice and secure until the next flight at 6 a.m. As we headed home, we could just hear a little voice crying out, ‘Hello? Is anybody there? I seem to be locked in.’

  Almost every port or airport had one officer that the rest of the staff would regard as a mascot. They were often the officer that had the Midas touch with smugglers. At our airport the mascot was Harry. He was originally from the West Indies and was built like a weightlifter, although he was only about five foot two – so, stood next to me at over six foot, we did look a bit comical, like Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger in Twins. Some of the height disparity was made up for by Harry’s one-foot-high Jackson 5 afro hairstyle. One morning, though, when he returned from a two-week holiday, we were all really shocked to see that Harry was totally bald: he’d gone mad with the hair clippers and reduced his height by about 20 per cent.

  Harry was such a well-liked feature that regular travellers often stopped to say hello to him; he was as much a part of the airport as the duty-free shops. But his personable nature hid his speciality – sweet-talking the truth out of unsuspecting passengers. One day a woman swept brazenly through the green channel wearing what was obviously a very expensive fur coat – difficult to prove it was a purchase if we didn’t find a receipt. But, before we could say anything, Harry ran after the woman and as he neared her he started saying what a beautiful coat it was and how it really suited her and that it must have cost a fortune. The woman turned, smiling, saying that it had cost nearly £3,000 and that she’d bought it on holiday in the States. Harry’s smile didn’t drop, but hers did when he put his hand on her shoulder.

  One day, Harry had gathered all the new officers around a baggage bench in the green channel. His morning lecture, between flights, was the identification of real and fake Rolex watches. We were all ears – this was a popular subject as there had been a number of seizures over the previous month of fake Rolexes, which because of their value were always a popular target.

  Harry started his demo by first producing a Rolex and passing it around so that we could all have a good look. Unless you had seen a real Rolex, you would be hard pushed to tell the difference. Next, he produced a brown paper bag into which he placed the watch. The bag was then placed on the baggage bench and we were instructed to stand back. Harry now reached under the bench and produced a club hammer, with which he enthusiastically went to work on the bag and the watch inside. A few seconds of vigorous hammering later and the only thing in one piece was the hammer. Harry emptied what was left of the watch out of what was left of the bag. The bench was sprinkled with little cogs and wheels, tiny screws and glass. We all stood open-mouthed. Harry smiled and said, ‘And if by now the passenger is in tears . . . then, gentlemen, it was definitely a real Rolex.’ And with that he turned and walked back into the office.

  It was easily the best demonstration I had ever seen.

  On the basis that even a broken clock is right twice a day, an officer of ours called Alan was allowed to carry on working. Though he had got too out of control to continue working in the channels; he was just too mad to be let loose on the general public anymore: his temper had become clingfilm thin and he didn’t really bother about his appearance. Something had to be done about him so our surveyor (the head of airport Customs) took the bold step and made him a Queen’s Warehouse officer. This was a very responsible job, looking after all the seized goods such as money, drugs, etc. The question remained as to whether he was the right man for it.

  Our question was answered a fortnight later when I found him slumped in the c
orner of the Queen’s Warehouse. He was on the floor, out cold and with a stun gun in his hand. He came round slowly, peered at me and Pat through his thick bottle-bottom glasses and stammered, ‘I . . . I don’t know what all the trouble’s about . . . I only . . .’ and then fainted again. It turned out that out of idle curiosity he had shocked himself with the stun gun, just to see what it felt like, y’know, to piss and shit his pants. As you do. When you’re not well.

  On top of trying to destroy his own nervous system, one of Alan’s actual official duties was to destroy certain seized items such as fake watches, plants and booze when he was given permission to do so by the London Queen’s Warehouse. So, one afternoon, he was doing just that when he suddenly ran from the warehouse screaming loudly and clutching his face. He had been ordered to destroy a number of red-pepper gas canisters. The standard operating procedure (SOP) on these was to incinerate them but Alan had a better idea. He decided to empty all the gas bottles underwater. Bad idea. The gas, like any gas, is somewhat lighter than water and so tends to bubble up and enter the air. Alan was on his third cylinder before the gas hit. It enveloped poor Alan and he had to be rushed straight to hospital. It took three days to clear the gas out of the contaminated warehouse. I suppose we should have just been thankful he hadn’t decided to jolt himself in the naked arse with the stun gun at the same time or the whole bloody place could have gone up. Picture the headline: ‘QUEEN’S WAREHOUSE BURNS IN CUSTOMS OFFICER ARSE SHOCKER!’

  The one thing that surprised me most of all when I joined the uniformed service was the amount of drinking that went on. For some reason, rum was a favourite with preventers – perhaps in historical homage to the British consumption of rum during the Napoleonic Wars – but the rum was taken only after copious amounts of beer had already been ingested. We couldn’t claim we were drinking for medicinal purposes because no one has ever been that ill. There were lunchtime drinking clubs and evening drinking clubs, depending which shift you were on. The worst of the lot was the night shift. With few flights after nine o’clock, the team would start the proceedings with a takeaway curry and then the booze would flow. Sleep for a few hours followed, before the arrival of the first flights at six in the morning.