Anything to Declare?

by Jon Frost

  One thing we uniforms didn’t need any help in doing better was drinking; the drinking culture in Customs was well established and ingrained. So take it as a measure of my Christmas party intake that, when, the following day, Gary came over to me and said that he agreed with my idea, I had no idea what he was talking about. I couldn’t remember any idea that I had suggested or even talking to Gary the night before. I just hoped that, if the idea was for me to have gender reassignment surgery and change my name to Barbara, Gary hadn’t already bought me a dress, a wig and high heels. That would be just silly. I was obviously more of a Margaret.

  Apparently, I had suggested that the Intelligence team – i.e. Gary – should grow by 100 per cent by adding me to the lineup. I’d always fancied the hush-hush world of Intelligence and I knew I had to start somewhere. Gary said he was going to have a word with the surveyor about it and see how it went.

  A week later, I was in my new Intelligence officer uniform (which was the same as the old uniform but minus the badges of rank). I arrived in the Intel office for training. As this was what we would now classify as the early days for Customs preventive intelligence, the training was basically officers such as Gary making it up as they went along. Intel work was still viewed with some suspicion by a lot of senior officers.

  So, no training as such then, just Gary trying to explain what he got up to and what was expected of us. And this is where the first hurdle appeared. We were preventive Intelligence officers and, as far as our local management were concerned, our job was to find smugglers for our local staff to stop and arrest. But intelligence information is strange stuff and is rarely what you want it to be. During our duties, I found that much of the intel we came across had nothing to do with our airport, and the other intel we discovered had little to do with Customs. We would come across police targets, Europol suspects and Interpol’s most wanted, etc. All interesting stuff – and stuff I filed away as something I could move on to later – but of no use to the airport officers. And our management were unimpressed with the amount of nonlocal intelligence that we processed as it didn’t improve their stats and, as such, to them was a waste of time.

  At this time, we had one computer and that was for CEDRIC (i.e. Customs database) and PNC (police database) use only. We had no other forms of intelligence storage except a card index for suspects that we had come across or smugglers that we had caught. It sometimes felt like our intelligence methods were no better than sticking a pin into a list of names. But we stuck with it and gradually our methods improved and we actually started to talk to other ports and airports. One method that we used was simplicity itself: we would stand behind the Immigration officers in the airport at outbound (departures) and we would memorize the passport details of anyone we thought looked a bit iffy. That meant looking over a shoulder and remembering the full name, date and place of birth, plus what the suspect looked like. You soon started to improve your memory with practice; I could manage four of these clumps of details before I had to write them all down. Gary, with more practice, could do six, and the details would be perfectly correct. These details were then checked on CEDRIC and PNC as well as our index system. If we managed to get a hit, that passenger would be pulled for a search on their return. It was basic but it worked for us. The art of these early days of intel gathering was to be covert enough so that the smuggler never guessed that we were checking up on them. Our Intel team even became successful enough to add a couple more officers.

  There were a limited number of people that I genuinely disliked but a character I kept running into fell easily into that category. We called him Benny the Dip, for the rather obvious reason that he was a notorious pickpocket. He’d been in more purses than a ten-year-old pound coin and in more pockets than pocket fluff. But Benny’s chief problem with his chosen career was that he was crap at it. If he’d tried to nick a kid’s pocket money out of a piggy bank – which he would’ve happily done – he’d have got his finger stuck in the slot. He was so inept that anyone who wanted to write a letter to him – such as a parole officer, a bailiff, a debt collector, the taxman, the DVLA, etc. – could send it directly to Benny at his local police station. And, as with many rubbish and habitual criminals, his crimes were directly linked to his drug habit. Benny would smoke, snort, sniff, chew, chomp, inject or lick anything that he thought could get him high. Personally, I wouldn’t have trusted him to babysit my goldfish, on the basis that he’d probably see if he could inhale it. It’s very hard to trust a man that you can easily imagine with bright-orange tailfins waggling out of one of his nostrils.

  Not only did Benny make appearances at the local police station on a regular basis – matinees too – but he would also show up with distressing regularity at the airport. We began to think that he must have advertised himself as a drugs mule in the local paper:

  Experienced smuggler available. Travels extensively. Own bag.

  Good swallower. Will work for drugs (preferably not goldfish).

  The trouble was that Benny was only ever caught on the occasions when he just had enough on him to be done for possession, not supply, but we were sure that we knew what his MO was, which was to purchase the gear in the Netherlands for a third party, and then post the drugs back to the UK. Our problem was that we had no idea who he was sending them to. Chances were that he would use a different address every time. We never seemed to get the intel at the right time or place to nail him. And this had gone on for a few years, with Benny ducking and diving through both UK and Dutch Customs. But then he finally ran into trouble. It seemed that the Dutch police had got as fed up with him as we were as he was constantly being arrested for drugs offences, being drunk and fighting. Benny the Dip was one of the only people I knew that actually got banned from entering the Netherlands.

  So, Benny had to come up with a new system – and this was to fly to Belgium and then drive or use the train to cross the land border. He was still being picked up and deported by the Dutch and he still kept turning up on their doorstep like a dangerous boomerang. But all good things must come to an end, and his face was now so well known at our airport that he decided to change his travelling arrangements and fly back to Luton. The trouble on this occasion was that Luton was at a standstill because of fog, so on his day of travel Benny yet again arrived in our airport’s green channel. With this info, we tipped off the uniformed airport search boys that he was inbound and, as luck would have it, they were very quiet so we decided to give Benny the full treatment. He was put into the paper suit which is given out to those who have had their clothes removed for testing, and then he was given a nice holding cell. We never really expected much of the urine test as we all knew that he had a little bit of blood in his drugs stream, but, as it turned out, this time we were wrong.

  The procedure was that, if drugs were discovered in the urine on the first test, then we would carry out a second test some time later to see if the reading had increased or decreased. Benny’s second test shot off the scale for amphetamine. This was a positive indication that he had gear concealed inside him as drugs were released into his bloodstream. With the good news of this new finding, Benny clammed up. He wouldn’t speak except to ask for a solicitor. Most of our cells were full that day so we were holding him in an overnight cell with bed and blanket and a babysitting watch waiting for the drugs to emerge. The on-call solicitor phoned the office and demanded that he talk to Benny without any officers within hearing range. Although this was against standard operating procedures, the senior officer said that this could happen as long as we could see Benny’s head. So the officers were pulled out of the cell and a phone was attached to the socket next to Benny’s bed. The officers did as they were told and waited for the call to end before returning to the cell.

  As they approached, Benny stood in the doorway and stated that he was ready for nature to take its course, which meant that the drugs would finally make an appearance. On their way to the toilet, one of the officers noticed a smallish, brown-rimmed hole i
n the backside of the paper suit. Grabbing Benny, they rushed back to the cell where they were almost overcome by the smell of human waste. They lifted the blanket and there, in the middle of a steaming pile, were six golf-ball-sized packages of drugs. Benny smiled. ‘Well, don’t look at me, I never done that. It’s a plant.’

  Our dear friend Benny was given three years and new nickname that sort of rhymed with ‘dip’. And our paths never crossed again.

  As Intel officers at the airport, we were always on the lookout for new ways of catching a potential drugs run. Bob, my manager, came up with a corker. He knew that in my skills armoury I had the ability of a pretty good lock-picker. When likely-looking smugglers were spotted going outbound through passport control, he would pass their details to me, down in the bowels of the airport. I would then pull out their checked-in luggage, pick the locks and see if I could find any evidence that might link them to drug smuggling. Now that might sound a bit hit and miss but it worked really well. The hit rate was high.

  You would never have sussed that passengers Mr and Mrs Whitehead were husband and wife as she was a good twenty-five years older than him. But there they were, snogging each other in the passport queue, so they were clearly a couple. For some reason, Bob’s antennae identified them as ‘possible’ so he passed down their details. Ten minutes later, I had their bags off the belt for a search. Inside there were hypodermic needles, lots of condoms, dental floss and clingfilm – the perfect kit for both personal drug use and an internal drug-smuggling attempt. The two of them were booked out for a two-week stay in Thailand, a drug-supply source country, so they looked a good bet for coming back into the country with more than tan lines and cheap flip-flops.

  So, two weeks later, a four-officer team waited for their arrival. Bob and I watched the couple on CCTV. ‘I see the love is still there,’ Bob said, as the Whiteheads once again came through the airport with their lips latched together, but this time with the addition of the husband’s hand up his wife’s skirt. In fact, this ostentatious display of affection was what had first caused suspicion, as Bob, with all his wisdom and experience, knew that smugglers sometimes fell into the psychological trap of thinking that behaviour that attracted attention would somehow make them look above suspicion. It was the kind of double bluff that Customs rarely fell for because we saw it for what it was: a diversionary ploy that also acted as an inadvertent reveal. In other words, if you give yourself a fake ‘alibi’ and that alibi looks false, then it’s worse than not having one in the first place.

  The couple were both pulled over and their baggage searched, and this time the entire drug-smuggling paraphernalia had disappeared. As the two of them were taken to different interview rooms for body searches, etc., I got a better chance to run their passports and other details through all our computer systems. The result that I got was very surprising, and unpleasant: Mr and Mrs Whitehead were not husband and wife but were, in fact, mother and son.

  In the following hours, both of them showed a positive reaction to heroin on the urine test but neither of them was going to admit to smuggling. After forty-eight hours, Mr Whitehead’s urine reading was going sky high as more drugs were being released internally into his system but his mother’s reading had dropped by a few points. Now this wasn’t unusual with smugglers who were carrying their consignments inside their bodies but the local magistrate didn’t seem to understand the technicalities of the urine test and thought that the slight drop in Mrs Whitehead’s test meant she wasn’t carrying – and so the magistrate refused us an extension on her detention. So, with a huge grin on her face, she was set free.

  Early morning on the third day of detention, Mr Whitehead was as unhelpful as ever, but he did receive his breakfast very eagerly. The officer on babysitting duties, waiting for Whitehead to inevitably pass the drugs out of his body, reported another no show. But, unknown to the officer, just before breakfast had arrived, Whitehouse had shat out the package of heroin into his hand. When the meal did arrive, and before the officer could stop him, Whitehead grabbed the cup of orange juice, slammed the package (still covered in crap) into his mouth and washed it all down with a gulp. This changed the game completely. A well-wrapped package of heroin may make it, intact, through the human body once, but put it back in there for a second time and it’s likely to rupture and kill the carrier. So we got him to hospital ASAP and within two hours he was secured in the contagious diseases ward and handcuffed so that he couldn’t do a repeat performance of his heroin/crap-eating act. The duty hospital doctor was angry with us for the handcuffs and demanded that we remove them. He soon changed his mind when it was explained to him what had happened in the cell. Within the next two days, Whitehead produced fourteen packages of heroin. He later pleaded guilty in court (he had no defence) and was given seven years. He later admitted that his mother had also been carrying the same amount of drugs. We never got to the bottom of why they thought it would be better to pretend to be travelling as a romantically involved couple than as mother and son. But then we’d already learned that the desperation – and eating habits – of people in the grip of drug addiction should not be underestimated.

  Sometimes good things attract bad people. For example, the American delivery company FedEx could get a package from point A to point B almost anywhere in the world within twenty-four hours, which is quite a feat. Now to us, at Customs, that meant one thing: FedEx would be viewed, by smugglers, as the smuggling carrier of choice. Their belief was that the speed of the package’s movement would prevent us from finding any intelligence linking it to either the sender or the recipient. And that was quite true (it still is a problem). False names for the two parties – sender and recipient – left us little to go on. So we had to rethink our whole approach towards identifying naughtiness. The first giveaway was the recipient’s address, such as a hotel room, which perhaps suggested trying to avoid a home detection. This method led me to arrest the secretary of a very famous rock singer.

  I had identified the suspect package as going to a Hilton hotel room in London. The package was then removed when the plane arrived from Memphis (FedEx’s main international hub). A quick examination revealed a package of very pure cocaine. We knew that the consignment would likely be shared between the secretary and her rock-star boss as it’s always in the interests of the celebrity to get their lackey to take the risk.

  As I was repackaging the box with 20 grams of icing sugar, I received a phone call from the FedEx office saying that a Miss Harris had just phoned up to see whether her package had arrived from the States. Now, this was out of the ordinary. I asked them to call her back and say that the package was cleared and that she should receive it at about nine the following morning. This message was relayed, and she then asked if she could come down and pick it up from the Stansted Airport FedEx office. Of course, I immediately said yes to that as it would save me hours of preparation and travel – let the smuggler come to me for once. I thought, I could get used to this.

  She turned up at Stansted within the hour, handed over the correct paperwork, identified herself with her passport and received the package. She then headed for her car where I was waiting with my HMCE-issue silver wrist jewellery. While processing the lady at the custody office, a number of the staff there passed round her American passport. None of us could believe that the woman in the photograph was the same as the one I had just arrested. Her passport photo was taken when she was a Miss America contestant and a stunningly beautiful woman. The same woman at the desk was the result of years and years of cocaine abuse: she was stick thin, her nose was being eaten away by the alkaline drug and her face was all skin and bone. If any of us needed a reason to carry on foiling drug-smuggling operations, there stood the reason.

  Funnily enough, my next significant find while working on the Intelligence team also featured a FedEx package, but this time a portion of the drugs in the package ended up in a place they’d never been before – inside my body.

  I had identified a package arrivi
ng on the evening FedEx flight. It had started its journey in the Colombian capital, Bogotá, and was addressed to a small town in Sussex. Now there was little interest in it other than it was on its way from an obviously drug-saturated country like Colombia. But what had tweaked my extra interest was that the contents were described as a satellite TV box. Nothing strange in that, you may think, but the trouble is that South American stations were working on a different TV system than ours. There was also the fact that the postage cost was more than the box was worth. So I flagged up the FedEx computer and waited for its 9 p.m. flight to arrive. By 10.30 p.m., I had commandeered the box and returned to our workshop, which was located in the main passenger terminal, behind the green channel. I could have passed the job on to the uniform boys but they were too busy with a Montego Bay flight that had just arrived. Unpacked, the box was just an old and battered satellite TV tuner. So out with the screwdriver and off with the back, then stand back and stare. Inside there were no electrical components, just a big chalky, grainy mass of hard-packed powder. A quick field drugs test revealed that it was pure cocaine. And a quick X-ray revealed that it was all pure cocaine, right the way through. That amounted to about 3.5 kg of pure cocaine, wrapped up in a battered aluminium satellite box. Quite a haul considering it was the pure stuff, which meant it would be ‘stepped on’, i.e. weakened by cutting with other powders – until it made many, many more times the weight in wraps and individual deals.

  I contacted Investigation control in London and was passed on to the cocaine team’s duty officer. I gave him all the details that I had and he asked if I could dummy up the package and his team would be up to us at 8 a.m. the following day. ‘Dummying up’ is as simple as it sounds: remove all the drugs and replace them with something that on initial glance would appear to be the same thing. It must weigh the same and you can’t leave any telltale traces that you have been into the package. Which was easier said than done with the satellite TV tuner box and the way the coke was packed hard into it. Having examined the options, I decided that the only way that the coke was going to come out was with the aid of a hammer and chisel, and I got to work.