Anything to Declare?

by Jon Frost

  I put my findings to the sisters and they were all suitably embarrassed, while still smiling sweetly (it suddenly occurred to me they actually might all be stewed from drinking the other three bottles on the flight!). The chief nun – is that an official rank? – spoke for the group.

  ‘Well, officer, would you believe me if I told you that it was a miracle?’

  I thought that was a pretty good effort so I smiled and replied, ‘Well, Sister, actually I don’t need to. You see, there are six of you and you don’t have any other alcohol so these three two-litre bottles of gin are the same as your legal entitlement. So feel free to carry on . . .’

  The poor ladies had wasted their time rebottling their gin. Perhaps it was some power from above that had protected them from becoming known smugglers. But then, I thought, how on earth do I tell my mother that part of my job now is making nuns blush?

  I could never really suss why people would try to smuggle large amounts of booze when they were a foot passenger. Did they really think that an officer would search their bag of clothes and not find ten bottles of Scotch? My favourite booze chancer was a very short chap called Percy. He arrived from Tenerife with his wife and three suitcases, and they all headed for the green channel. I pulled them over for a chat. One case contained both of their clothes and the other two were completely full of bottles of wine. Percy was very apologetic. He said he’d forgotten about the wine and that he knew he should have gone in the red channel to declare it. He started to reload his trolley and reverse his route, so to enter the red channel. I stopped him and told him that I was more than happy to work out the duty for him as I knew that it wouldn’t take long. I told him the amount and he asked if he could pay by card. He searched through his wallet and pockets but couldn’t seem to find his card. Then Mrs Percy remembered that they had put it in the suitcase with the clothes for safe keeping.

  Percy banged the clothes suitcase on to the bench and scrambled to open it. As he flung open the lid the whole case slid off the bench and emptied its contents on to the floor – Speedos, bathing costumes and Hawaiian shirts flew everywhere – but there was one T-shirt that didn’t fly like the others. This T-shirt hit the ground with a loud clang. They were either using a hell of a lot of starch at the laundry or there was something hidden inside. Percy shot forward to retrieve it but I got my foot on it. I unfolded the T-shirt and inside was a well-used, twin-handled corking machine. So now we had reason to uncork the two suitcases full of (apparently) red wine.

  After I had opened all thirty bottles, I couldn’t find one with red wine in it. There contained instead every spirit under the sun – whisky, gin, rum, vodka, etc. – and it took me over an hour to work out the duty and the fine. It came to such a high amount that Percy and his wife abandoned it all to the Crown, and its final destination was down the drain. Shame, but that’s where it went. The airport drains probably had the only alcoholic rats in the country.

  I couldn’t help but think of the two of them – little Percy and little Mrs Percy – night after night after night, uncorking, refilling, rebottling and corking again all those bottles. What a holiday. No wonder they didn’t have a tan.

  Part of the job that made me go more red than Percy’s wine – mostly through holding my breath too long – was having to search such things as the dead body that had recently arrived back on an unexpectedly early return from a holiday in the Costas – unexpectedly early because the deceased had back-flipped off a fourth-storey balcony into a swimming pool that was actually around the other side of the hotel.

  There is something about having to search a corpse in a coffin that, not for the first time, can make you wonder how you got here. We could usually tell how long they’d been on holiday by how tanned the corpse was – faint tan lines, probably died in the first few days; back and shoulders like a lobster’s arse, probably died at the end of a two-weeker. Any smuggler who thinks a coffin is less likely to be searched doesn’t know UK Customs – we’d unwrap the body of Tutankhamun or machine-wash the Turin Shroud if we thought it held iffy gear. Our old friend ‘Jaws of Death’ Arthur was a great drugs dog but we had to make sure he was kept on a short leash near any dead bodies we were searching so he couldn’t bite off one of the hands and make it his new chew toy. I didn’t fancy having to chase him up the runway, shouting, ‘Drop the hand, boy! DROP it!’

  It’s all in a day’s work when you don’t know what’s coming out of the blue above. Such as a potentially drugs-laden shit bowser full of excrement off a jumbo jet. Happy days.

  After that type of thing, it was a blessed relief to get back to searching members of the clergy. I pulled aside a mild-looking Church of England vicar who seemed very nervous. Maybe he’d been given a heads-up by the nuns I’d searched. Whatever it was, he looked rattled. He pleaded that he needed the toilet, which just aroused more suspicion, and I soon discovered why when, in an attempt to hide his contraband, we found him stuffing into his underpants a stash of what turned out to be child pornography. Heavenly wings weren’t much in evidence, even though his feet didn’t touch the ground as he was whisked off to the nearest police station. No one was off limits, not even a pilot of God.

  And not even the real pilots, aircraft cabin crews and, at the ports, the ship captains and seamen – they are always kept under a wary eye. For obvious reasons: as you can easily guess, with their frequent trips abroad, smuggling is always a possibility. It’s not that the people who work for airlines are likely to smuggle but that it is what you would class as a temptingly opportunistic crime: their privileged position provides the opportunity and therefore the temptation. Another potential strength of the aircraft-staff-as-smugglers (and, therefore, a weakness of ours) is that they always know the workings of ports and airports as well as the workings of the Customs staff, security and the police.

  As far as normal allowances go, the aircrew have reduced fag and booze allowances due to the amount of times they can travel in a day (short hauls over to Europe, for example). But you might well think, well, that pretty looking trolley-dolly or that snappily dressed captain would never smuggle, would they? To which myself and every other Customs officer in the country would reply – my arse.

  So, at the larger airports, the aircraft crew have to clear Customs at a different location to that of the passengers. For example, Gatwick Airport puts the aircrew through a totally different building called Concord House; there is no need for a full Customs mob to attend so it can all be handled by a couple of officers. ‘Crew Clearance’, as it is called, was often referred to by us all as the Penal Colony because it was such an unattractive and unwanted duty. Mess up big time in the channels or piss off your senior officer and you would be reassigned to the Colony.

  At smaller airports like the old Stansted, the crew would clear through the ‘Declare’ red channel and so they were as vulnerable for a check as much as any other passenger. I’d seen half bottles of Scotch hidden in pilots’ underwear, body-packed hand-rolling tobacco wrapped around a stewardess and cigarette packets concealing cannabis on co-pilots.

  Sometimes the evidence trail we found led to things that were completely unexpected – and unwanted. One day late on in the channels, I stopped one of the incoming male cabin crew members who seemed ill at ease. When he was undressed for the strip search and obligingly bent over, he revealed a string dangling down from his bum. Now that threw up two possible explanations: he was either smuggling drugs and the string was part of the packaging; or he was smuggling a very expensive firework and it was the fuse. I strongly hoped it wouldn’t be a firework – the last thing you want is an arse exploding in your face; I’d always prided myself on never being shitfaced at work. So, I thought, sonny Jim here is obviously smuggling drugs – I was certain of it. And I was wrong. It turned out that the dangling string was actually the string of a tampon that was currently in situ because of this crew member’s anal syphilis. Which is a nice thought for everyone to take with them on their next flight when the meals come around.<
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  There were actually stranger things that could be found on, and in, people walking through airports. In the days before pornography was so readily available on the internet, we were, you might say, very hot on pornography. The UK pornography laws are very strange as no MP has ever really wanted to get involved in sorting them out. I don’t think there’s much career mileage in handling the nation’s porn. So in our situation we used the Customs Consolidation Act 1876. Even though the law-makers had no idea what technology was to come, there was a section of the Act that is in constant use, right up to today. It states that we can seize any goods that are likely to deprave a youngster’s mind. We were in a position to use the Act on a daily basis as we would get six to eight Amsterdam flights a day. The porn capital of Europe never let us down.

  Mr Taylor looked to be a well-dressed businessman. He was actually a Member of Parliament and a fairly senior politician. I was having a slow day so pulled him over for a chat in the green channel. The initial questioning was fine and he stated that he had been to a business meeting with the car giants Ford in Amsterdam. Big mistake. The trouble with giving too much detail to a lie is that the detail, unless it’s perfect, can give you away. What the passenger didn’t know was that, as well as all the Amsterdam flights, we also had the Ford motor company’s own private airline flying out to Cologne three times a day. So Mr Taylor’s story didn’t quite hold water.

  Not knowing what I might be in store to find, I asked him to pop his bags on to the exam desk and he instantly transformed into a loud and very accomplished verbal abuser. He started swearing and I was called every name under the sun and a few from the dark side of the moon. I was told that I had no right to go through his bags. It’s not just that Customs officers, like everyone else, have an aversion to being sworn at; it was that Mr Taylor’s behaviour was what they call a ‘tell’ in poker – something that inadvertently reveals what you are thinking. Once he had lost his temper, I knew that I was going to find something in his bag and I had a feeling it would be drugs. But I was wrong. His bag carried not drugs but porn films, and loads of them, wrapped up in his socks, pants and shirts. Right at the bottom of his case there was, much to my surprise, a monster fifteen-inch-long bright-pink rubber dildo. Now whatever my personal view on this – and whether I couldn’t give a chuff or not – Customs officers are like the police in that, once they become alerted to something, they have a professional duty to act upon it.

  Mr Taylor was still going mad as I seized and bagged the evidence and he was still swearing at me as he repacked his suitcase. In the interview room, the direction of his future depended on one of two answers: whether or not they were for his own use or to give to other people, which would have been the more serious charge of intent to supply. Luckily, he chose the right answer, and Patrick and I escorted him to his awaiting car and, inside, his waiting wife. As he climbed into the driving seat of his brand-new BMW, I had a quiet word with his wife just to say that her husband had been helping us with a few matters. I noticed Patrick was standing by the driver’s door and I couldn’t quite see what he was up to. As the BMW drove off, all became clear: on the car’s roof aerial Patrick had stuck something, and there it was, pointing proudly upward, the monster fifteen-inch bright-pink rubber dildo wobbling in the wind. Our upstanding Member in the car now also had one on top of it.

  We were having a problem with porn. It wasn’t that we weren’t getting enough of it – we were making seizures every few days. The quandary we had was that, when the cases hit the magistrates’ court, they were giving out minimal fines regardless of the different types of material. So we set up a meeting with the local magistrates to see what the problem was.

  Now, the local magistrates were rather aged and that was the first problem. Their experience of the varied content of pornography was rather limited. Just like the myth that the reason there was no law against lesbianism was because Queen Victoria refused to believe that there was such a thing so the law was limited to male homosexuality in order to get royal assent, so it was with our local bench: they believed that the only pornography available was the standard male/female vanilla missionary kind. We had to think of a way to open their eyes – preferably without stopping their hearts.

  The second problem that we had was the chap who was the head of the magistrates. He was the squire of some large estate and when sitting in court he would, believe it or not, always wear a white suit and monocle. He looked like a cross between the Man from Del Monte and a Nazi scientist. Which must have been bloody terrifying for those that were up in front of him. That terrifying effect didn’t last long for pornography-smuggling offences, as chances were that he would hand out only a £50 fine and a slap on the wrist. Amazingly, he did pretty much the same for drug smugglers.

  But should you appear for an offence that involved illegal activity in something in which he took an interest – such as hunting, shooting or fishing (or knobbing the downstairs staff, probably) – then he would reach for his black cap and try to bring back hanging. If he had been on the bench 200 years ago, he would have been transporting people to Australia for not doffing their cap to him. So that was what we were up against when we had to bring the magistrates into the present day, and fast.

  What we urgently needed to do was list all the offences involving pornographic material, plus explain about the trusty old Customs Consolidation Act 1876 (the law that enabled us to seize the goods). So we got together and invented what we called the porno tick sheet. This required a Customs officer to sit through a whole film and tick off each sexual act as it happened. The poor bastard. You can imagine the stampede for this duty.

  This form, the porno tick sheet, would then make up the prosecution package and the magistrates could compare the tick sheet to the detailed description of the act that we provided to all the local magistrates. We wrote it in our best and most detached medical language so as not to excite the old magistrates too much and push too many of them into an early grave – the risk of the male members having to be buried sideways in their coffins because of rigor mortis issues leading to difficulties in closing the lid was a very tempting outcome to aim for, but we managed to resist going for it.

  Our final push for the modernization of the magistrates’ porno education was to invite one of them to the airport to view a sample of the videos we often seized; this would hopefully make them the local court expert on pornography. This offer of ours, they gladly accepted. I thought how much I would have loved to have been at the meeting when they decided who they were going to send to us to become the font of all perverted sexual knowledge.

  The chosen magistrate arrived at our offices the following week. She was Lady Simmons-something-or-other, and was definitely from the established ‘country set’. She was – you could immediately see – quite stern, very prim, terribly serious, probably quietly insane, and the type of woman who would whip her staff with a crop and for sport set the dogs on slow-moving local villagers. She had a stare that could stop a nun smiling at fifty paces. She was wearing the classic combo of brown tweed suit and matching hat, and also, quite ominously, carrying a Margaret Thatcher-style handbag (which could clearly also be used as an offensive weapon). I suspected that inside it there was a full house brick. And I also suspected that, before the end of the day, I would find that out for sure.

  We led Lady S. into our viewing room, which housed our video machines and a large-screen TV. She settled down into the comfortable viewing chair with her handbag clenched in her lap and said, ‘Right, let’s get on with it!’

  We had prepared a collection of all kinds of pornographic material for our magistrate’s speedy education; a kind of crash course in smashing genitals. Or what someone revising for exams at university would call ‘cramming’ – which was an oddly appropriate word, considering. Myself and three of the boys – Pat, Mark and Harry – stood behind her, ready to answer any questions that she may have. I started the video.

  We’d laid on a proper platter of porn, a
fulsome feast of filth, all the better to make our case. First up was what we’d term a normal, standard fuck film – ‘Awful. Just awful!’ Lady S. said – then followed by an S & M film with a novel use of a broom handle and a spatula – Oh, my lord!’ – which led to our grand, frothing finale: a bestiality film that ended with a very pleasant young woman wanking off a donkey. Not something you see every day.

  ‘Turn it off!’ she cried. ‘That animal is NOT happy!’ But as we could all see to a man that the donkey was clearly ecstatic, we all burst out laughing. At which point Lady S. jumped up, shouting, ‘You . . . beasts!’, and started swiping at us with her handbag.

  All in all, we decided, it was a pretty good day. And, after that, we never had any bad sentencing again.

  So, as you see, we’d stop and search anyone – nuns, vicars, pilots, friends of the Queen, MPs, cute children holding fluffy bunnies (‘That rabbit, princess, is going straight into quarantine!’) and even the recently dead.

  If nothing else, I hope this proves, once and for all, that we didn’t play favourites and that we didn’t mistrust just anyone. We mistrusted everyone. That might make you feel a little better about being stopped yourself – knowing that you are in very good (and very bad) company.

  9. Hide and Seek . . . and We Shall Find

  When it came to concealments – both in baggage and in the body – we got to see the big and small, the bold and the beautiful, and the foolish and the painful. Early on, all the concealments were for hiding drugs but later, due to the government’s tobacco policy, cigarettes and tobacco became a valuable thing to smuggle. I know that it sounds strange but the smugglers soon discovered that there was just the same amount of profits to be made running baccy as running cannabis, and if caught the prison sentence was shorter. I looked forward to a government policy that sent the price of chilli peppers sky high and caused smugglers to turn to bringing those in; it certainly would have been easier to spot a chilli mule with contraband peppers up his arse – the smoke from the ears would have been a dead giveaway.