Anything to Declare?

by Jon Frost

  As for Billy, well, let’s just say that we didn’t see him again for at least six years.

  10. The World’s a Stage . . . and We Are the Trapdoor

  As your mum would say, it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye. And you might want to be struck blind by some of the things Customs officers have to see. There was a Lufthansa jet inbound from Berlin that was having trouble with its landing gear after take-off – the front wheels had to be lowered and raised a few times before they locked into place. So the airport was already on standby for a crash landing. All emergency services were ready and raring to go, and all security was on high alert. And so were we. You might wonder why. Well, a quirk of the law is that Customs officers have to attend all air crashes to protect the Queen’s revenue by salvaging the duty frees. I know: how sick is that? Even we thought it was mad.

  So I drove to the runway with a flashing-lights convoy of police cars, ambulances and multiple fire engines. As the plane came into view, dropping in altitude to beam in on the correct flight path, we were all in a state of suspense – it’s difficult to imagine a way for a large commercial jet to land without wheels that leads to a good outcome. As the jet roared over the runway, its wheels started to drop . . . and the plane’s tyres hit the tarmac with a puff of smoke. It taxied to its terminal and we followed, but, just before it arrived at its stand, a large lump of something fell out of the front-wheel housing. All the emergency vehicles stopped except the fire trucks, which followed the plane. We got out and walked to where the mystery bundle was now lying. We found one of the saddest things it had ever been my misfortune to see: the body of a teenage boy, a stowaway in the undercarriage, crushed to death by the retracting wheels on take-off, his body then frozen solid by the sub-zero icy air of high altitude. Listed: Stowaway DOA.

  Airports and their officers see not only some of the wonders of the world but many of its fatal blunders, too.

  The pay-scale for uniformed Customs officers at ports and airports was much lower than those of comparative ranks in the police. So overtime and shift allowances were always sought-after commodities. One area for guaranteeing increased numbers of beer tokens was babysitting duty, or doom watch as we called it. This tedious job had to be done night and day, and consisted of sitting and watching a prisoner at the open door of their cell. But we didn’t do this for everyone – oh no, you had to be special. The three categories requiring a twenty-four-hour-a-day babysitter included the two categories of drug smuggler I’ve already mentioned – stuffers and swallowers – and a third: the doomers. The doomers were those who had threatened to hurt or kill themselves, and there were far more of these than you may think.

  One doom watch I was glad to just miss occurred when my colleague Pat, who had just finished his eight-hour shift and was due off the following day, was collared by the senior officer who offered him another eight hours at overtime rate for a spot of babysitting. We had a Ghanaian swallower in custody and, as yet, he had not produced what we suspected he had inside him. Pat jumped at the chance of extra beer money and joined Kevin, who was already stationed at the door to the cell. Kev had been with the smuggler all day and explained to Pat that the chap was constantly complaining of being ill. Apparently he had been sick a few times and Kevin had needed to clear it up. Another lovely perk of the job. Then, just as they were talking, the bloke vomited again. This time poor Pat had to clear it up – the overtime was suddenly not smelling too good.

  As per the protocol, the on-call doctor arrived to examine our smuggler from Africa. Kevin decided to stay around for a few minutes to see if the doctor thought that the chap was faking it. But, after examining the patient, the doctor moved suddenly out of the cell and into the corridor and, just as quickly, he got hold of Kev and Pat, pushed them back into the room and slammed the door shut! Pat and Kev, too surprised and overwhelmed by the doc’s unexpected actions to have resisted him, stood there agog. The doctor then suddenly slid back the metal plate in the door and shouted, ‘Stay there! You are all under quarantine! Lassa fever!’ Pat and Kev went a little white at that point.

  Lassa fever is known as (you’ll like this) ‘an acute viral haemorrhagic illness’, similar to Ebola. Lovely. It first originated in West Africa – where, indeed, our smuggler was from – and is caught from rat shit. In humans, it can lead to organ infection, eye pus, facial swelling and nasal bleeding. Which is a really great look for a zombie party but not such a hit if you have to pick up the kids from school. The virus is also excreted in urine for three to nine weeks and in semen for three months. Fancy breaking that good news to your missus.

  So there Pat and Kev were – locked in a small cell with their own version of the Exorcist who, at any given minute, was liable to start bouncing ropes of infected puke off the walls or squirting hot shit down his trouser legs like twin sewage pipes from hell. Some overtime!

  All three of them were rushed off to the nearest hospital with a specialist contagious diseases ward. On the basis of in for a penny/in for a pound, the lads decided to still keep up their watch on our smuggler; and it amused the nurses that our boys had to regularly check his shit with a stick. When the surveyor paid them a visit, he was shocked to find that Pat and Kev were having the time of their lives. The reason? Well, they realized that they were going to get a three-week stay in hospital with food and rest and attentive nurses and, best of all, they would be paid full whack, twenty-four hours a day. For three weeks they’d be on triple money, which to me was still not enough for the risk of becoming a Customs Officer of the Living Dead with a ball sack full of rat germs.

  This was one of the dangers of working in airport Customs – your workplace could become a big meeting place for a house party for the world’s exotic diseases.

  But sometimes the smugglers hit back with more than what they might infect us with. The Lassa fever incident was a pure accident but it did take two well-trained officers away from the front line for a few weeks. But at least they would recover. That wasn’t always the case regarding what was aimed at Customs officers. A few years ago, Canadian Customs was having great success against cannabis smuggling from the West Indies. Over three weeks, they were finding a lot of toasted breadfruit wrapped up in silver foil and containing cannabis. On the fourth week, the smugglers hit back. They had reeled the officers in nicely with the breadfruit consignments and then, instead of cannabis within the foil, it was suddenly magnesium and black powder plus a few sharp metal objects. Two officers at different airports suffered the same injury – they had all their fingers blown off, the result of a real homemade grenade that exploded its deadly contents when the packages were opened to the air.

  We were targets here, too, but not for the breadfruit bombs. We sometimes found hypodermic needles hidden along the inside of suitcases to make a mess of your hands when you touch-searched the interior. If you found one with your fingertips, you just hoped the needle wasn’t a used one that was infected with something. Hidden razor blades were another nasty little trick just waiting to lop off a few fingertips. These little hideaway horrors were sometimes put in bags that were from a drug-source country but were not picked up by a passenger. The bad guys knew that we were immediately suspicious of these bags because it looked like a smuggler had lost their bottle and left a case full of drugs behind – we would be into this unclaimed luggage like a ferret down a hole. It only takes one dirty needle or a row of very fine blades to ruin your piano playing for life.

  There was one incident where breadfruits and finger damage came together in an unusual and unexpected way. Tracey, an Essex girl and proud of it, had just been promoted from the local VAT office to the airport. She was a lovely person but it was quickly evident that her mind was not always fully on the job. As the boarding officer, when a jet landed from Kingston, Jamaica, Tracey bagged the first examination bench and pulled over a passenger. Inside his case she found one of the infamous breadfruits wrapped in foil and, never having seen one before, she quick as a flash whipped out her br
andnew search knife, flicked open the sharp blade . . . and promptly lopped off the end of her index finger. Blood everywhere. Cue very quick dash to hospital with a fingertip in a bag of ice cubes.

  There are certain flights from source countries that Customs drools over. These are the flights where you know that at least 10 per cent of the passengers are smuggling drugs. A combination of social deprivation and available local ‘produce’ leads to the high figures. One of our ‘drool factor’ flights was an inbound route from the Montego Bay in the West Indies. It was only a question of what you stumbled over first, cocaine or cannabis. Even the poor old drugs dogs were overworked when Montego Bay flights touched down. The dogs signalled on so many bags that we had to run two hounds on any one flight. And they were given so many reward snacks for good finds that they were in danger of getting overweight! And that was just the dog-handlers.

  We were so successful at finding gear that the Jamaican ambassador eventually wrote a snotty letter to our surveyor, complaining that we were stopping too many innocent visitors. With tongue firmly in cheek, our surveyor wrote back that, if the passengers on those particular flights would kindly stop smuggling, we would be happy to stop stopping them.

  Flights from China were generally uneventful, but I thought I had broken my duck with this Chinese Army basketball player. This chap was big. I’m six foot but he towered over me at about six foot ten or eleven. I pulled him over with his bag for something to do (we did get bored sometimes and, in those situations, a near-seven-foot-tall passenger was bound to stand out). He was calm and polite as I rummaged through his bag’s contents until, that is, I grasped a smallish package wrapped in red velvet. It had been carefully sealed with some very fine stitching. As I examined it, the passenger started to get very upset, which is usually a good sign that you’ve found more than a few sugar lumps. This could, I thought, be a real slam dunk. I flicked out my trusty lock-knife to do the honours of cutting open the package, and my passenger started going absolutely ballistic. Such was the commotion that three other officers had moved over to the scene. As I cut away the last couple of stitches, I was convinced that I had another smuggler bang to rights . . . and then a human index finger fell from the velvet package on to my exam bench. Well, I wasn’t expecting that. It turned out that it was the preserved remains of his great-great-grandfather’s finger. Why he was carrying it, I’ve no idea – maybe as a good luck charm.

  In another case, a Mr Beck was visibly shaking and stuttering his answers to my questions. Immigration had stopped him as he arrived from Israel and they weren’t too happy with his reason for travel to the UK. To find more documents, Immigration then did the usual thing of bringing their detained passengers to us for a ‘turnout’, that is, a further search. Immigration could do it themselves but then they would be buggered if they found something like a kilo of coke. So it was easier for both departments if we did the turnout.

  In this case, Mr Beck was starting to snap, crackle and pop, and I don’t think it was because of his breakfast cereal. He was hopping from foot to foot as if on a hot tin roof and was soaking in sweat. There was definitely something up here. He was almost vibrating as I examined his baggage. Right at the bottom of his suitcase I found a number of envelopes containing lots of tablets. But, surprisingly, they were all Valium. Although Valium is a prescription-only medicine (POM), we were not interested in it; but it did explain his nervousness. Or did it?

  The Immigration officer had found stamps in our passenger’s passport that showed that he had travelled between Israel, Thailand and the UK a number of times over the last few months. Was this some new drugs route that we had no idea about? I knew that Thailand was well known for heroin and cannabis but where on earth did Israel fit in?

  I decided to probe a little bit deeper and took Beck in for a body search. He stripped down and there he stood, naked as the day he was born, but with a large body belt around his waist. At first he refused to remove it but myself and a fellow officer approached him, so off the belt came and Mr Beck collapsed into tears. Only one thing for it now – we sat him down for a cup of tea. (Well, we weren’t savages!)

  As yet, I hadn’t opened the body belt. But neither Mr Beck nor his belt was going anywhere fast. He soon stopped his crying and started his pleading: ‘I’m so sorry, it’s not my fault, I just wanted to sell them.’ I had arrested him and cautioned him so that now we had to write down everything he said. I calmed him down again and undid the body belt, looking for the drugs. I found nothing but lots of paper wraps. I would expect to find drug wraps on a street dealer but never on a smuggler, there was just no need. Then I undid one of the wraps and four large diamonds fell on to the table, bounced a little and then lay there, sparkling in the lights. We all stared, equally amazed. Even Mr Beck seemed shocked – but that was at being caught. I emptied the other wraps and found four diamonds in each of the thirty wraps: 120 large diamonds, undeclared and hidden in a body belt. I did a quick calculation on the huge amounts of VAT and duty that would be owed. No wonder our diamond geezer had been vibrating at the baggage desk.

  My senior officer was over the moon as his monthly revenue figures for seizures were just about to shoot through the roof. We dispatched two officers with the diamonds to a local jeweller that we used for valuations. The value he gave us was double the amount that I had estimated. And it was about to get better . . . and stranger. During my interview with Mr Beck, he stated that he had purchased the diamonds in the Far East and brought them to the UK to sell to a dealer in London’s Hatton Garden with whom he had some kind of arrangement. But apparently the dealer didn’t want them; they were just a little too flawed. So Mr Beck then went to Israel where, he said, he found a well-known rabbi who was also known to the UK dealer and the rabbi wrote a letter telling the dealer to buy the stones from Beck. So back he came to London and back to the dealer again with his letter in hand. On seeing Beck and the same stones, and then reading the rabbi’s letter, the dealer had a heart attack and collapsed. Poor old Beck flew back to Israel with the stones and waited for news of the dealer’s improved health. When at last he heard through a friend that the dealer was back in his shop and looking chipper, Beck boarded the next plane to the UK and . . . promptly got nabbed by Immigration and Customs, and here he now was, in a cell with me.

  I was slightly speechless at this confession. I thought at first it might be all invented for sympathy but then realized it was just mad enough to be true. But what Mr Beck didn’t realize was that there was a hidden consequence to his bouncing in and out of the UK like he was flying on Pinball Airways or as if his braces had got caught in the doors at Heathrow. We knew that there is a strange but nasty little twist in the laws concerning smuggling – every time he entered the UK without declaring and paying the tax on the diamonds counted as a fresh offence. So not only did I have him for one smuggling attempt and all the tax that was due, but for a total of three smuggling runs, which was three times the tax and duty.

  Mr Beck burst into tears, and I didn’t blame him. I think in his position I would have done the same thing. He said he had no money, that it was all tied up in the stones. Oh dear. How sad. Never mind. I knew it was going to take one hell of a special cup of tea to make this better.

  And so, in the end, a woman with probably more diamonds than anyone else on earth – Her Majesty the Queen – became the official owner of 120 brand-new ones. It was like throwing pork pies to a fat man.

  One disgusting item that we would come across regularly, when searching passengers from certain African countries, was bush meat. It is a generic term for meat from, guess where, the bush. That may sound innocent enough but in reality it meant it may be zebra, lion, gorilla or chimpanzee flesh. In the early days, we were lucky enough to have a blanket ban on meat imports by passengers, and today the bush-meat trade is banned under CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species).

  When you examine the business of bush meat, you realize that the ban is partly in place becau
se of the way we feel about the animals from which the meat comes. We should perhaps look at ourselves first before we criticize Africans for eating their local resource. We eat pork, which is abhorrent to the Jewish community; we eat beef, which disgusts the Hindu community. So I sometimes wondered if we were really in a position to tell off the African nations for eating something that had wandered into their back garden. Sometimes it really is a matter of context . . . and what tasty animal happens to be easiest to catch. For that reason, I imagined a quarter-pound lion burger with chips was bloody expensive.

  Food came into the UK from every country and in every shape and form. One day I stopped a chap from the West Indies in the green channel and opened his large suitcase. There were three T-shirts, two pairs of pants, a pair of socks and twenty-five kilos of large, still wet red snapper fish. The fish weren’t even wrapped in anything or prepared. It was as if the bloke had just caught them, threw them straight into his suitcase, put his clothes on top almost as an afterthought, and then thought, right, let’s go to England for some chips! The trouble was that this was so mad and so blatant a smuggle that it occurred to me it could have been a double-bluff for a drugs run. It did indeed smell very fishy. Which meant that I knew I had to gut and check every single fish.

  At the end of a very messy and unsuccessful dead-fish cavity search, I stood there with my bloodied knife in hand, looking and smelling like I’d been savaged by a gang of angry haddock. It turned out the fish were clean . . . well, not clean, but drug-free anyway.