Anything to Declare?

by Jon Frost

  I managed to get the lot done in a week and Operation Howiff was now up and running. It didn’t take too long before the first target appeared on our radar. The guy, called Mac, fitted the standard profile of a smuggler, complete with the one thing that always rings an alarm bell – travelling on a cash-paid one-way ticket. He arrived at Stansted from Amsterdam on the early-morning flight. I had already issued instructions that he should be given the full works but they weren’t even needed. The initial search of his bag revealed half a kilo of pure cocaine and the subsequent body search found the other half a kilo. Quite a good way to start an operation. Later in the day, I contacted the Dutch with the news. If they weren’t especially interested before, they certainly were now. Then things went quiet with the gang for a couple of weeks; this was a normal thing to happen, as a gang tries to find out exactly why they’d lost a valuable load.

  It was becoming increasingly obvious to us that this smuggling organization was large and that it had never been hit before. They had reacted so quickly to our nabbing one of their mules that it was clear they weren’t used to it happening – they didn’t have a Plan B in place to put into immediate action – and the shockwaves led to a temporary lockdown. It was turning into a cat-and-mouse game between us and them. I knew they could send out a bait, that is, a small carrier that they wouldn’t worry too much about losing, but they could use to gather info on how we were operating, and from that work out how to foil us. So I wanted to be sure that, when we pounced, we got more out of the operation than they did.

  As it turned out, the next hit we got didn’t even enter the UK. Via the airways computer system, I identified a group travelling from the Netherlands to Suriname – three adults and three children, with the adults all being on my list. I contacted the Surinamese authorities and, despite their being 4,500 miles away, the wonders of technology meant that we received a cracking set of photographs of the group within an hour of their clearing Surinamese Customs. I called a halt to anymore surveillance in Suriname because this was still very early days for the operation. The three adults with children continued on their two-week holiday and we bided our time and waited to pounce.

  Twice a day, I checked all the flights leaving the Suriname capital of Paramaribo, just in case the family decided to sneak back to the Netherlands before their planned return date. That was a possibility if they suspected they were being tracked. But they played it straight and, when I was sure they were on their return plane home, I contacted the Dutch authorities again. And so awaiting them when they landed in Amsterdam was a Customs team ready to give them the full monty. We now had to just sit tight and wait to see what transpired.

  It was always a nervous time waiting to get a result, positive or negative, back from the uniformed boys on the front line. I’d been there, of course, doing the searches of passengers that we had been tipped off about by our own Intel boys. But working on the other side now in Intel was somehow more nerve racking. The phone finally rang at ten o’clock that night: the whole family had been stopped and searched – even the children, as drugs mules were known to use kids to carry their stash – and the result was 75 kg of top-quality, uncut cocaine. The Dutch were over the moon, as was my senior officer as that was 75 kg to add on to our yearly total of seizures.

  After this large find, I was given access to any resources I needed – surveillance teams, undercover officers, etc. – in the hope of pursuing the gang with further success. But in reality I knew that I didn’t need any of them. All I required was copies of any address books found in searches or any new names that might crop up in interview. I knew that I could now take the four targets that we had captured off my list, but, with new intelligence coming in all the time, I had to add another seven targets to the total.

  Once again, the organization reacted quickly to the seizure and went into a defensive hibernation. You could almost hear the turning of cogs and the clicking of wheels as they set in motion the mechanism to discover the problem. I knew that during this time a gang would start to look at itself to see if it could identify where any information was leaking out, who might be a weak link or who might have been turned by the police to work on the inside – or even if they were being infiltrated by undercover Customs officers or police. We hadn’t planted anyone, and I didn’t want a Dutch undercover operative to join the gang because, as far as I could work out, all the members were from Suriname or the Netherlands Antilles.

  During this downtime in the gang’s activities, I was able to study it via the information that I now held. It was obvious that there were four head members, a number of henchmen and moneymen and, last as always (and the most disposable), the mules. The worry for me was that they would start employing unknown mules from their homeland, which would make them more difficult to track – but the Dutch assured me that they were quite confident that they could target newly arrived nationals coming into the Netherlands.

  Things finally came alive again when the crew clearly got tired of hibernating and restarted their operations. Our next hit happened closer to home. To get an idea of the pattern of the lifestyle of the gang, our Dutch colleagues had placed one of the gang’s four leaders under surveillance. We were all pleased when the chap (with girlfriend in tow) led the surveillance team to Amsterdam airport. As always, he purchased two last-minute, cash-paid, one-way tickets to Heathrow. I was pretty pleased with this as it would give me a chance to update my paperwork and get some photos of them, which I was sadly lacking.

  I just managed to get to Heathrow fifteen minutes before the Amsterdam flight arrived and brief the evening shift senior officer (who, it turned out, was an old mate from my uniform days). He asked what the chances were that the passengers were carrying drugs. I told him they were slight as I assumed that, as one of the main men of the gang, he wouldn’t be willing to get his hands dirty and risk being nabbed. But then again, I thought, he did have his girlfriend with him so he might think he could easily pass as an ordinary traveller.

  So the Heathrow team went to work on the couple, targeting the girlfriend as the most likely to be carrying. This annoyed our real target, the boyfriend, who started to get very angry and abusive, but the team ploughed on. The team leader finally left the search and joined me in the office.

  ‘Bad news, Jon, I’m afraid. She’s clean. She may have taken some coke this morning but, other than that, nothing. Sorry.’

  ‘Oh well, never mind,’ I said. ‘I thought it was too good to be true that we’d get them that easily.’

  ‘But,’ he continued, ‘that boyfriend of hers is being a right twat to my team. Can I have your permission to spin him as well?’

  Well, I couldn’t see any harm in it, plus I’d always hated (as we all did) passengers who got out of their prams and started throwing rattles around.

  ‘Fill your boots, mate,’ I said, ‘but I can’t see him carrying, unless he’s dumber than he looks and thicker than he sounds.’

  Fifteen minutes later, the team leader came back to me with a big smile and told me that Mr Big’s urine test results were off the scale. That meant that he had it all inside him, there was no doubt about that. And, when we later scanned him, what we found was almost half a kilo of pure cocaine, swallowed in small packages.

  Sometimes it only takes one crack to smash a pot. And, in taking out one of the four heads, we fatally weakened the structure of the gang, as well as making it extra paranoid about its operations. And each bust led to our gaining more intel on the gang and its workings. We continued to get some large drug seizures from the rest of the intelligence we gathered and took millions of pounds’ worth of gear out of circulation. And all of this – an internationally ranging investigation requiring tri-national cooperation between the British, the Dutch and the Surinamese that severely dented a drugs gang trading between two continents – all of it came about just because of a £12,000 cash seizure and a harmless-looking address book found in a passenger’s sports bag. Sometimes a little intel went a long, long way.
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  Another thing that was on its way was me. After coming out of uniform bench work, moving into uniform Intelligence and then plain-clothes Intel, I’d now got a taste for the real undercover work – I wanted to move on to Investigation.

  In a way, for all its successes, Intel had become a bit of a monster, and was seen as a cure-all for instant results, a bit like how drugs dogs had been seen fifteen years before when it was believed that they would completely solve the problem of smuggling. Which, of course, they didn’t; every new part of the system was just that – a new part. And no one part could ever replace the team, and the effort and expertise it takes to run a successful team. But everyone was now getting involved in the so-called Intel revolution. Senior officers, who had been sceptical years before, had started to build their own Intel empires. Things had really changed. We were even put on training courses run by officers who had only been in Intel for a couple of years. So I thought that it was time for a change.

  I decided to get into heroin.

  Part 2: Undercover (On the Knock)

  15. Joining the Fun Factory: Checking in to Charlie Hotel

  The Intel team at Stansted had expanded and we all had our own specialist skills: mine were lock-picking, outbound baggage rummage, a nose for drugs runners and, weirdly, seeming to know every Turkish smuggler south of the Humber. I was also training BAA security in concealments – that is, the smugglers’ nefarious art of hiding their contraband. This was all well and good but I guess that most people at some point reflect on their work position, and I’d got to that stage. I had an itch that needed a good scratch. I decided that I wanted another challenge in life and that challenge would be the Customs Investigation Division (ID).

  The ID had always been a ghost organization to us in uniform. We were aware of their existence and we knew that they were supposed to be the elite investigation unit in UK law enforcement, but other than that we knew very little. Even a couple of months of searching for details about the ID when I was still in Intel revealed very little about them – they tended to keep themselves to themselves.

  My big break came with the announcement in the department weekly orders (DWO) of an ID recruitment trawl. These were few and far between: the last one had been eighteen months before and, to my knowledge, very few people got through it. So, with nothing to lose, I sent for the application form. What I received back was more than a form; it looked like very hard work. In fact, it was so comprehensive that it took a good two weeks to complete. I even sat down with a mate (who we called Reverend G.) who was already in the ID and we went through it together. Following his good advice, I ripped it up and started again, checked it with the Revd, and then ripped it up and started yet again. Finally, off went the form with a cheery smile and I instantly forgot about it. My hopes weren’t that high.

  It took a month for the ID sifting team to go through the applications. They had a few hundred applications and only a limited number of vacancies. I was lucky enough to get selected for an interview. But things in the Civil Service are never simple so it wasn’t a case of just turning up for an interview. The next step was an ID recruitment interview course, which would take a couple of days at the Customs Training Unit, Heathrow. There, we were put through mock interviews, taught how to answer questions and what questions to ask back to the panel. London Airports Collection (the overseeing Customs body for the major London airports) wanted to be known as the best region when it came to turning out officers with the right stuff for the ‘elite’ Investigation Division.

  I turned up for the interview with my head near full of questions and answers, standing straight as a guardsman and dapper-suited. Most of the questions asked of me were about my experiences dealing with heroin smugglers and the weapons-of-mass-destruction case. Before I knew it, the interview was soon over and I was sitting in the nearest pub wondering how I’d done.

  A month later, I was still in the Intel department and was on an intelligence course being brought up-to-speed on the latest methods. But evenings spent in the bar were actually where most of the learning was really done, chatting with your peers from around the country. Suddenly, the head of the course wandered into the bar and asked for our attention: apparently someone was in the class who had no right to be there. We all looked at each other, wondering who it was.

  ‘Jon Frost, if you would make your way to the bar and purchase everyone a drink,’ said the course leader. ‘It appears that this course is for Intelligence officers only, and I have just heard from your surveyor that you are now an investigator! Well done and mine’s a Scotch!’

  An investigator who was on a different course walked over and put his arm around my shoulder. ‘Well, brother investigator, welcome to the fun factory. One thing to remember: when the shit hits the fan and everything is going wrong . . . you volunteered for the ID. And mine’s a pint, by the way.’

  ‘Charlie Hotel’ was the call sign for Custom House, London, which was the home of the Customs Investigation Division. The building, on Lower Thames Street, just past Tower Bridge and opposite HMS Belfast, was a vast, imposing Grade-I listed Portland stone building that was almost 200 years old and was originally purpose-built for HM Customs after the growth of trade, the opening of the docks and the increases in duties during the Napoleonic Wars. The interior was a rabbit warren on a number of floors and contained warehouses, cellars, over 150 offices and the famous ‘Long Room’, measuring 190 feet, hence the name. On the ground floor was the central Queen’s Warehouse, and underneath were the dark and dingy cellars (which would later house the Queen’s Warehouse), which were fireproof and were originally used to store wine and spirits seized by Customs. The building itself was like some great architectural version of a hard Customs officer rendered in stone. One look at it told you that it was built to represent a profession that didn’t muck about when it came to the carrying out of its duties.

  At any one time, the Queen’s Warehouse part of Custom House would hold more Class A and B drugs than anywhere else in London. It was lucky that the building was such a fortress as any drugs gang brave enough to carry out a smashand-grab there would have set themselves up for life. As a new Investigation officer, I was hoping to add to that impressive haul in the Queen’s Warehouse rooms.

  The offices above there held the best officers that Customs Investigations had to offer. The teams were grouped into branches. These covered heroin, cocaine, cannabis, weapons of mass destruction and warfare, VAT, Excise, gold, drugs finance and all the intelligence back-up required for each one of these commodities. The south side of Custom House facing the River Thames was decorative but the north-facing roadside of the building looked relatively nondescript for something that protected society so very well. During the day, and sometimes under cover of night, there was a constant coming and going of surveillance cars and officers, and a steady hum of work being done in the offices that was essential to keeping Britain as free of drugs as it could reasonably be made. Charlie Hotel even had its own custody suite with cells and interview rooms as well as some of the best custody officers that I was to ever work with.

  My first day as a trainee investigator was just like the first day at big school. You watched and listened to everything and kept your mouth shut. You may have thought you were the greatest Customs officer that the country had ever known but it meant nothing at all now, because to the ID you were just a pleb who got in the way and took up good breathing space. No new entrant could possibly know the complex makeup of the Investigation Division. I learned it would take the six months of probation just to get an idea of your own branch. Then it would take another six months before you could call yourself an investigator. If you were lucky.

  I was grabbed for the heroin branch because of my prior workings against the Turkish heroin smugglers. Years of intelligence from my duties in uniform and working at Intel were stored in my mind and someone in Investigation thought that the heroin branch would profit from it. I knew the training was not going to be a walk in the park,
and the initial training lasted for most of the probation period; we then moved on to specialist training such as a police surveillance driving course, followed by the general surveillance course, which would mark your ascendancy into the division. But, at all times, you had the vulture of potential failure sitting on your shoulder. Do the wrong thing and I knew you were RTU (returned to unit), which was a bit of a bugger if, like me, you’d had a large leaving party. It would be quite a humiliation to go back to the airport and say that you didn’t make the grade. But that did happen to people, and other officers just decided that the life of an investigator was not for them. In fact, if I’d known what lay ahead, I might have said that those recruits who decided to RTU of their own volition were the bravest and smartest of us all.

  So it didn’t take too long before you realized what you had let yourself in for. When not on training, you joined your own team and most of the time the team would be out on the ground, somewhere in the UK. I had a rented flat in the East End of London but I didn’t see very much of it. That was the life of an investigator; how officers managed their family life on top of surveillance, I never did work out. What I also didn’t know was that working in the demanding world of investigation would change my life so much that I became consumed by the job.

  Early on, I learned that for all the dedication of the investigative officers they were just like the uniform boys in one important way – any excuse for a drink. So, on the occasional days when we would have the required fire or bomb alarm test at Custom House, you would find that the test would always be carried out in the afternoon. Why? Well, your average investigator is very well educated in the ways of the world, so, once the alarm was sounded, we would grab our coats and phones and head for the exits. The exodus would then continue to the street outside, and then to the street next to that one, and then the one after that, until the distance for the safest possible evacuation was deemed to be the exact same distance to the bar of the nearest pub. Which was a huge but very pleasant coincidence. And that would also mean that the day was over. When the alarm bells stopped ringing, there were never any officers left out in the street to go back into the building. Charlie Hotel was, on those days, full of vacancies.