Anything to Declare?

by Jon Frost

  Smuggling organizations are very much the same as small businesses in that they have overheads and profit margins, they lose stock and even lose employees, and their aim is to make as much money as they can and with as little disruption as possible. And what they are very adept at doing is changing with the fashion. Not only will they move between different kinds of drug – as different drugs go in and out of fashion or become easy or difficult to get – but they will also change their methods of concealment.

  For the chancers – or ‘personal usage’ smugglers – there were plenty of readymade concealments available to buy or get information about via the internet. But, of course, if Customs knows about them already, then you’re going to get caught in the long run. Potential smugglers never seem to think that Customs officers might be looking at the same concealment advice on the same internet sites as them. Some of the commercially available stashes that we had come across included: hollowed-out disposable lighters (that still worked) with a removable bottle in the base; AA batteries (that worked when tested and could even be recharged) that unscrewed to reveal a small drug stash inside; beer cans that were labelled correctly and even weighed the same as a full beer can but unscrewed at the top to reveal a large storage space; and even shaving-cream aerosols that unscrewed at the bottom and were filled with drugs but were cleverly made to still squirt real foam out of the top. Come to think of it, if we hadn’t been a big bunch of highly suspicious bastards, we’d have never found anything!

  Then there was the items that were not always what they seemed to be, such as mobile phones that – in the early days when mobiles were bigger – were in perfect working order and could be used to make calls but inside they hid a small .22 pistol; or phones that had two small aerials and were actually 50,000-volt stun guns. And just think, there were people walking around in the UK with these items because of the ones we missed. So, if you ever see someone on their mobile who suddenly starts glowing bright red with sparks coming off their head, then chances are that they have hit the wrong button on their stun phone.

  One noteworthy concealment was found behind the canvases on some national treasures from Eastern Europe. The paintings involved were all over six foot high and the smugglers were convinced that, due to their national treasure designation, we would never touch them. Lucky for us, our drugs dogs had no idea what was a work of art and what wasn’t – in fact, they would sniff and cock their leg over a Picasso. But, after our drugs hounds had run their twitching noses over the canvas, we found that each painting had concealments of five kilos of heroin hidden between the painting and the backing, which increased the value of each painting by about £1 million.

  Our problems started after the smugglers were convicted. The government of the country in question was furious at us for not releasing all the works of art after the trial. The matter would drag through court for some time due to the fact that any item discovered concealing contraband immediately becomes the property of the Crown. Whether they ever got them back or whether the Queen just got a few new works of art to hang in her toilet, I don’t really know. It was one for the lawyers to spend a lot of time (and a lot of chargeable hours) working out.

  Footwear has always been a popular source of concealments. All that has changed is that the advent of big trainers created more space for concealments: you can get much more hidden in the thick soles of a pair of Adidas than a pair of brogues. Drugs runners (and terrorists) may be convinced that smelly footwear is a no-go area for law enforcement, but it was usually one of the first things that we looked at during a strip search: the shoes came off straight away and then every area from the tongue to the laces was checked as in the past we had found drugs in each part. Trainer manufacturers may as well have their own smugglers on their design teams because modern training shoes have such huge air spaces in the soles that it’s almost as if they were designed with smuggling in mind. What was meant to be an ergonomic design for the sportsman was both a Trojan horse and a gift horse for the smuggler.

  Quite often, personal-user amounts of drugs were found in smugglers’ washbags. Every single item that could possibly be adapted was adapted to carry drugs: toothpaste tubes, soap, deodorants, the aforementioned shaving foam, contact lens cleaners, tampons, etc. One item that also seemed almost purpose-built for concealment were tubs of face cream such as Oil of Olay, formerly Ulay (other face creams for smuggling drugs are available). The tubs were quite large in comparison to the area in which the cream was held, a bit like Dr Who’s Tardis in reverse, but with a few tugs and a bang on the table, we found we could get the two parts to separate, revealing a large space that was often full of something else that was used to ‘powder the nose’.

  Lipsticks are also very popular because it is easy to cut off the end of the lipstick, insert the drugs into the lipstick tube, and then place the cut-off lipstick top back into place. The ultimate lipstick concealment I found was a personal importation from Colombia. There was a pack of twelve brightly coloured lipsticks where every lipstick was actually moulded from cocaine paste. Very clever. They looked perfect, until you realized that no colour came off the lipstick. (At this point I’ll make it clear that we tried them out on the back of our hands; I wouldn’t want to leave you with the awful image of a six-foot, fifteen-stone hairy-arsed Customs officer pursing his lips and trying on different shades of lipstick. I always saved that for the Christmas party . . .)

  Of course, the very best concealments are the ones that have never been discovered by any Customs officer and are still in use today. In fact, some concealments are so good that they have probably survived for centuries – going back to the old Napoleonic Wars – and will be passed on down through the generations. I could tell you what they are . . . and I will do when I find out!

  I was mostly in the green channel but I knew that it got very boring in the red channel at times, although it shouldn’t have, as many smugglers mistakenly thought that doing the apparently honest thing of entering the red channel and declaring something legal would negate them from a detailed scrutiny that might discover something illegal. It took more than a bit of fake sincerity to fool us. Though I have to admit that there were some officers who were quite happy to sit in the red channel and do nothing but take VAT and Excise fines on over-allowances of booze and fags instead of exercising the rummage gene, that is, the instinct that makes you want to search. Every good Customs officer is a natural bloodhound.

  I didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to know that, when a Turkish flight was in the baggage hall, there were going to be long lines of waiting passengers in the red channel with carpets to declare. A pretty dull assignment, and against my better wishes, I was sent over to the red to help out. My first customer was definitely a potential strip-down merchant. He looked like a bag of shit that hadn’t been packed properly and one that hadn’t slept for a week. He slapped down 600 fags in front of me on the bench and mumbled, ‘I wanna pay for these.’ I totted up the VAT that he owed and took the payment. Then I thought, bugger it all, I know this is going to piss off the senior officer but I can’t resist: ‘Whip your bag up here, sir, and let’s have a quick look in it.’ He looked a little taken aback, mumbled something about my parentage and then heaved up his bag.

  The officer next to me leaned over. ‘What the hell do you think you are up to, Jon? Look at the bloody queue we’ve got here.’

  I made a nice neat pile of the disgusting, stinking clothes that were inside the bag and then I came across four brandnew, A4-size hardback books, all wrapped up in cellophane. Nothing out of the ordinary there, except that they were all the same book: The Bird Life of Asia Minor. This guy looked no more like a birdwatcher than my granny did a pole dancer; I doubted that he could recognize anything more than a fried chicken leg in a bucket. And wherever in the world there is a suspicious little Herbert in an airport mumbling insults under his breath there will be a Customs officer ready to flash the blade of justice from its scabbard . . . or, in my case, my trusty little lock
-knife (not quite the same as a sword of justice, I know, but I’ve always found it difficult to get a sword under my jacket without snagging my shirt).

  So the cellophane wrapping on the books was soon off, and then two different smells hit me: first, I was pretty sure that they didn’t use woodwork PVA glue in book production; second, there was a slight fish-and-chip-shop whiff (and one I would later get very used to in my Investigation years) – the scent of heroin. I flicked through the books’ pages but nothing there, so I examined the hardback covers. They felt OK and looked fine apart from the fact that they just seemed a millimetre or two too thick. I started running the blade along the edge of one of the covers. The hardback separated quite easily, revealing inside a very thin, flat package of heroin. My passenger mumbled, ‘Fuck that!’ and was off on his toes. The shout went up from the officer next to me, ‘Runner in the red!’ and I vaulted straight over the examination desk and was after him. The red and green channels converged at sliding exit doors and as two officers were legging it from the green channel and I was barrelling in from the red . . . guess who got to him first? Well, none of us.

  As our runner reached the channel convergence, a grey-haired old lady who had just arrived from Jersey was wheeling her overloaded trolley to the exit and straight into the path of our fugitive. Moving too fast to take evasive action, he slammed into the trolley at high speed and there was an audible bone-snapping sound that made us all wince – and then in slow motion he took off, wheeling through the air over the trolley like a dropkicked scarecrow. It was almost majestic, like a gymnast . . . a pissed and really crap gymnast. Fortunately, when he came down, he landed on his softest part – his head – and knocked himself out cold. We dragged his limp and newly broken body to the interview room and watched the hero of the day – the little old lady – obliviously disappear into the waiting throng of families in arrivals. Just like the woman in The Ladykillers, I very much doubted that she even noticed what had happened.

  The result of my appearance in the red channel was one very broken-legged smuggler and 750 grams of 80 per cent pure heroin. That should have been the end of it. But two months after his trial (at which he was found guilty), our hop-along smuggler decided to take out a civil action against Customs for compensation, stating that we had caused his broken limb. The case was dropped when we pointed out to his legal team that CCTV footage clearly showed that the break was not in fact caused by officers of HMCE but by an unknown little grey-haired lady assassin who had just arrived from Jersey. We helpfully pointed out how she wasn’t one of ours (more’s the pity).

  During my early years at the airport, computers were pretty few and far between, but Customs had one advantage over the police when it came to intelligence gathering. The police only had one national computer system, which was the Police National Computer (PNC), and was what we would refer to as a positive intelligence system. This was due to the fact that it only recorded persons who had been caught and charged with a crime. Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise, on the other hand, had an active computer system, CEDRIC. This meant we were able to put people on to the system who were just suspected of being smugglers or even just associated with persons who were known smugglers. There was no need for people to be caught smuggling to be ensconced on our system.

  A dodgy character called Billy Cree was one of these suspects who, even though he had previous form, as yet had never been caught by us. He had his fingers in many criminal pies. Essex police knew him very well but, as far as they were concerned, he was always clean, although he was constantly in the company of high-ranking criminals and drug dealers and appeared to be in their employ. He also appeared to be the King of Concealments, with an array of ways of getting past us without being detected.

  One day when I was on duty, Cree just happened to be due in on the next Amsterdam flight. We would always get flight passenger manifests from the airlines just before the planes left their foreign airports. This gave us a good chance to run all the passenger names through CEDRIC before the aircraft touched down. It’s an arse of a job when you have a suspect called Smith or Jones but, in Cree’s case, his surname stuck out. We had stopped him five times in two years and he was always clean or, to put it more correctly in our minds, we never managed to find anything on him. Where was he hiding his stuff?

  My colleague, Big Martin, sidled up next to me as I was checking the Amsterdam passenger list. ‘Anything on the flight, Jon?’

  It was a slow morning and most of the officers were busy concerning themselves with the ever-present devil of the Civil Service – paperwork.

  ‘Looks like we have Billy Cree inbound again,’ I told him.

  Now, Big Martin had a particular dislike for characters like Billy. He was a highly respected officer who had seen it all at Heathrow and now wanted a nice easy life out in the country. The only fly in this ointment was that you cannot just relax and sit back in this job: the fun of the chase, the thrill of the find and the joy of catching a smuggler never really leave your system.

  ‘I don’t think that you have ever had the pleasure of Mr Cree, have you, Martin?’

  Martin, who was now busying himself with Cree’s intelligence record, said, ‘No, but looking at this intel log, it seems to me that this chap needs a proper fingertip job. Fancy giving me a hand when he lands?’

  A ‘fingertip job’ was a deep and thorough search of every single thing that the passenger had that could be searched or taken to pieces.

  Cree was first off the plane and first into the terminal. With only a largish sports bag, he went straight through the baggage hall and into the green channel. If Martin and I hadn’t been so keen to observe if he was mingling with some other passenger, we would have missed him. As he quickly passed us, Martin’s voice boomed, ‘Yes, thank you, sir, over here please,’ and he pointed to a nearby exam bench.

  Cree’s mouth immediately slipped into overdrive. ‘Oh fuck me, here we go again, always the bloody same with you fucking VAT men: every time I come through I get stopped and searched. Got nothing better to do, wankers? Fucking bastards!’

  You’d think someone smart enough to have discovered how to stroll through Customs undetected might be smart enough not to verbally abuse the boys in the black and gold – but no.

  The usual body and bag search produced, as usual in his case, nothing. But I noticed for the first time that Billy paid a little bit too much close attention to the actual bag itself as we were searching it. Martin had noticed this, too. Telltale sign no. 1. So as a test Martin placed the bag to one side and started asking why our passenger was travelling from Amsterdam. And, bingo, with the bag now apparently discounted, Cree perceptibly relaxed. ‘Tell’ no. 2. Martin passed the bag to me to be X-rayed.

  Once again, in the early days for technology, Customs didn’t have the money to supply all airports with X-ray machines, but luckily I was on good terms with airport security and they had two of the machines in the outbound lounge search area.

  I X-rayed the bag upwards, downwards, sideways and on its ends but nothing showed. Defeated, I walked back and plopped the bag back on to the table. Billy Cree gave the smallest of smiles. ‘Let me guess: nothing. You found bugger all! See, I’ve been telling you, I’m fucking clean and you lot are picking on me. My lawyer will have your plastic sheriff’s badges for this!’

  Nothing new there – we were used to threats on an hourly basis and some days would have felt something was missing, and that we weren’t doing our jobs properly, if we didn’t get any.

  But it was the victorious smile that was his undoing, as Martin was on the very edge of letting Billy go when that annoying little grin appeared on his face. So Big Martin reached into his pocket and retrieved a knife, pressed the button on the handle, and the blade swung out. Knives were a personal type of thing among officers. Some liked the Swiss Army penknife, some liked a pruning knife, while I personally carried a lock-knife and Martin had a flick-knife – illegal outside of our working environment. But it suited him dow
n to the ground. And, as Martin was a good six foot five and eighteen stone with huge shoulders that you could have a picnic on, no one was going to tell him that he couldn’t have a flick-knife.

  With a couple of swift cuts, he had split the stitching on the handles of the bag. Suddenly Mr Cree got jumpy, so jumpy in fact that he tried to grab the sports bag away from Martin. A quick growl from Martin made him back off. Next for the search was the bag’s base hardener, usually a sheet of plastic-sealed thick cardboard. In some sports bags you could remove it and that was the case here. Martin examined it closely, nothing unusual in the sealing or the thickness, but as we were doing a full turnout . . . the flick-knife appeared again and slashed the plastic open. At this, Billy’s head dropped into his hands. He didn’t even bother to show any interest in what we would find because, of course, he knew what was there. Martin reached for his latex gloves and removed all the plastic covering from the cardboard, only it wasn’t cardboard, it was twenty compressed sheets of LSD tabs. Twenty sheets, 100 tabs per sheet, £5 per tab, a nice total of £10,000. One very expensive sports bag and one suddenly very quiet passenger.

  God only knows how many trips he had made through various airports back and forth from Amsterdam; and God knows how many others had used the same kind of concealment. We had once again come face-to-face with the next level of smuggling: the commercially prepared concealment from specialist gangs who catered for smugglers and supplied them with very high-quality concealments. The only weapon against that was good old-fashioned distrust, Customs-officer tenacity and a sharp knife.