Anything to Declare?

by Jon Frost

  On mobile surveillance, one of the most widely used items was the aforementioned ‘lump’, as we called them, or commonly known as a tracking device. (The name ‘lump’ came from the sound that the device made when it became one with the vehicle.) The ‘lump’ is the name that all law enforcement agencies use and this piece of kit has its origin in the tracking devices that we used in the 1970s and 1980s. In the early days, the tracker was the size of an average sandwich box and not like the tiny thing that is used in modern surveillance. The original had four huge magnets on its top to hold it tightly to the underside of a car. And, if you think about the amount of potholes and sleeping policemen that are around, you realize that the magnets had to be very powerful (one day, after a job, it took two of us to wrench one tracking device free from the underside of a Transit van).

  One evening, our sister team was tasked with lumping up one of our target’s BMWs. He had two, a his-and-hers for him and his missus, and both were parked outside his house in south London. The lumping officer, wearing his best black overalls, crawled under the front BMW and tried to attach the lump, but with no success. For some reason, it wouldn’t stick. He crawled out again. After legging it back to a surveillance car, he grabbed a screwdriver, muttering the words ‘fucking anti-rust proofing’ as an explanation of why the tracker wouldn’t stick. Then he went back under the car, scraped a small area clean of the rust proofing and placed the lump in position – lump! This time it attached smoothly. Job done. But, just as he started to crawl out from under the car, word came over the air that the target and his wife were coming out of their house and heading for the cars. This was the moment to try not to panic. The boys in the surveillance cars were helpless to do anything – they couldn’t reveal themselves without blowing the whole gig. The poor officer under the car was now a sitting duck.

  He held his breath as he saw the feet of the targets approach. Should he wait until they got in the car and then try to slide out at the back? But what if they reversed – they’d run right over him. Same if he slid out the front. If he just lay there waiting for them to drive off, part of the underside of the car might rip him in two or drag him screaming down the road.

  He nervously watched the two pairs of feet stop and then pause on the pavement, and then, luckily for our officer, they moved to the rear BMW – hers – and used that one instead. They drove off and there were mighty sighs of relief all round. And then the case officer’s voice came across the earpieces – ‘Right, please tell me you lumped the other car as well! Not happy if you haven’t!’ So, straight back to business as usual.

  The following morning, my team took up position on the target’s house. I was driving the tracker car and the tracker reader was my colleague, Jayne (who had been in the department for about six years and had worked her way up from a VAT officer to my drugs investigation team). These vehicles we used were known as the ‘smart cars’, as if they did everything by themselves with no need for human input. It would have been easier if they had. Though then I’d have missed out on the fun and excitement of driving the three-litre, twenty-four-valve Vauxhall saloon that I’d chosen out of our fleet. It was a real beast of a motor with tons of power.

  We’d stood all the cars quite far back from the address as we had a very good signal and there was no need to risk ‘showing out’ (getting spotted). So we didn’t even need to be in visual contact distance. At about ten in the morning, the blip on our screen started moving, which meant that the target had come out and moved off. We were off too as we started the surveillance. It wasn’t difficult because we had a clear signal, so we spent the first few hours following without ever actually seeing the BMW in front of us except as a blip on our computer screen. Then it started raining, not your normal pitter-patter but full-on stair rods. It wasn’t too long before we got stuck in traffic and the target’s distance increased to an unacceptable one. We were sat there in traffic, rain drumming on the roof, the road like a river, the wipers working overtime, the powerful engine of the car rumbling under the bonnet but with nowhere to go.

  We called in other cars to make up ground just as I spotted a gap in the traffic and put my foot down. The engine roared, the front end rose slightly and we were free. I gave the old gal some welly in order to try to claw back some of the lost ground. But, just as I hit the throttle and we shot down the road, a bus suddenly pulled out into the space ahead of us. We were now speeding towards what was essentially a large metal wall full of petrol – a double-decker bus with the face of a wide-eyed passenger in every window. I took evasive action, slammed the brake down, the ABS system juddered into life and we ended up sliding sideways at 85 mph, heading for the bus on a road that was more water than tarmac. The worst possible thing had happened: we were aquaplaning – water film forming between the tyres and the road so that we were no longer touching the road at all. Jayne started screaming so badly that I couldn’t hear the radio. We all reflexively braced in anticipation of a big impact. Then just before we became one with London transport, I flicked the steering wheel and floored the throttle. Full power raced to the rear wheels, the fat back end of the Vauxhall swerved around, the car straightened up, and we shot past the bus in long waves of tyre spray. In the rear-view mirror I saw the bus driver lowering his arms from his face.

  After a while, Jayne stopped screaming and decided to give me a little friendly advice. ‘The next time I want you as a driver, Jon,’ she shouted, ‘it will be for my fucking hearse!’

  After hours of further surveillance in heavy rain, the target finally stopped in the Lakeside Shopping Centre. They did like to shop, these big-time criminals. Must be all that spare cash they had lying about the place. I suppose you’ve got to get rid of it somehow. We flooded the place with officers, only to discover that we had spent most of the day following the target’s wife! I found the target car in the car park by following our tracking blip until we were on top of it, and saw that it was her BMW and not his. Jesus. That bastard lumping officer – if he had lumped the right car and been dragged down the road when they drove off, we wouldn’t have wasted a day and had a near-death experience.

  You win some. You lose some. You fuck some up.

  17. Getting into Drugs and Going on the Knock

  My first drugs job as a qualified investigator was a heroin importation into Harwich. A Dutchman called Eric had been stopped as he drove through Customs controls. It was what we called a cold pull, namely, that there was no specific intelligence on him or his car. A cold pull is done on an officer’s experience and suspicion.

  The car was thoroughly searched, as was Eric, but nothing was found. The only suspicious thing was that Eric had a oneway, cash-paid ticket (a pretty rare occurrence and often a good indicator of a smuggling run) and that was it. But the stopping officer was still not happy. Eric’s reason for travel was unconvincing and he was visibly shaking.

  The officer had three options: send the driver on his way, reduce the car to nuts and bolts in a full search or call in a dog. With the officer still suspicious and a dog being on station at that time, the decision was an easy one. It took the drugs dog all of five seconds to indicate the presence of drugs as he sat in the boot of the car barking and covering the carpet in slobber and dog snot.

  With the dog out of the way, the car hall team got down to what they were good at – pulling a car apart. But tonight their job was going to be easier than usual because as soon as they pulled up all the carpeting in the boot – there it was: drugs heaven. Through the bulkhead behind the rear seat were lots and lots of lovely packages that, on testing, proved positive for heroin. In total there were thirty-two packages, or 16 kg of very pure heroin that could be cut down and made into very many wraps, and worth more than I would earn in ninety years (give or take a pay rise or two). So Eric, for the foreseeable future, was in the gentle hands of Customs.

  A find of this size was immediately notified to ID central control and, from there, they notified the heroin team officer on duty, which just happe
ned to be me.

  It was now eleven o’clock at night. I picked up my partner and we flew down to Harwich from central London. When I say ‘flew’ I mean we drove; and when I say ‘drove’ I mean we drove fast; and when I say ‘fast’ I mean that I know a speed camera on the A12 flashed me at 134 mph. We were, unsurprisingly, soon at the port and going over the car and Eric’s paperwork with a very fine-tooth comb. The concealment was very good. The bulkhead that the officers had seen was, in fact, false. Someone had cut out a rear bulkhead from another same-model Audi and welded it eight inches in front of the proper one, and then glued in the carpet. They were also clever enough to leave the car for a few weeks so that the smell of glue and welding had dissipated – that was another telltale sign smugglers often neglected to cover.

  As I chatted with the car hall team about Eric, the car’s alarm system activated. It took us a good half-hour to turn it off and gain entry to the Audi again. This was no Halfords special-offer alarm: this was a system worth more than the ageing Audi itself.

  Far be it from me to give advice to any potential smugglers out there, but you’d have thought it obvious that, if you’re going to embark on a fairly long European cross-border journey, you should have a plausible story ready regarding your reason for travel. Not poor Eric. During my interview with him, he said that he was driving to Britain because . . . wait for it . . . in Amsterdam he had met a man in a pub.

  Now, at this point, I should mention that the person Eric was talking about was actually the World’s Most Wanted Man. Yep, a good 50 per cent of captured smugglers, dealers and drugs runners always started their explanation of their exploits with the words ‘I met this bloke in a pub’. He certainly got around, this bloke, and if we could only find him we could have stopped most of the world’s smuggling trade overnight.

  So, Eric ‘met a bloke in a pub’, a few weeks before, and they’d got talking and within a few hours they had become firm friends. Strangely, Eric couldn’t remember his name. The chap had said to him that he should come to England and they would meet up for a few drinks. So here he was.

  ‘Right. So where does this chap live, Eric?’

  ‘London.’

  ‘And where in London does he live?’

  ‘I’m not too sure.’

  ‘You don’t know, do you, Eric?’

  He thought for a minute. ‘No, not too sure, but I should be able to find him.’

  ‘And how are you going to do that, then?’

  Eric pondered. ‘Well, London’s not that big, is it?’

  You can see that if there is a high rate of depression in Customs officers it is because they have to interview – at tedious length – gibbering idiots. So I started turning the screw in the next inquisition until Eric told us that, before catching the ferry, he had spent the night at a hotel that was local to the port and that it must have been during the night, when he was in bed, that someone put the drugs in the car.

  ‘So, you went to bed and in the night a couple of very good mechanics managed to disarm your state-of-the-art alarm system, removed the carpet in your boot and carefully measured your rear-seat bulkhead, found an exact match in a scrap yard, then returned to your car and in the middle of the night welded in the false bulkhead and then filled the gap with a few million quid’s worth of heroin. Is that what you are telling me, Eric?’

  Eric smiled and, as if I’d just accidentally given him a good alibi, said, ‘Yes – that’s it!’

  Later, during the resultant court case, my interview with Eric was read out to the jury. So, as you can imagine, at least they got a laugh out of their jury duty. Which is more than poor Eric did as he was soon heading for nineteen years at Her Majesty’s pleasure. And I had my first investigation job under my belt.

  Incidentally, during the court case, the original intercepting officer that had stopped the Audi at Harwich could still not put his finger on why he had suspicions about Eric. I knew exactly what he meant; it was like a sixth sense that you built up during your career regarding who you suspected. But, in this case, I like to think it was simply because he was called ‘Eric’.

  It wasn’t just cars driven in from Europe that were used as vehicles for smuggling; at the airports, I’d obviously encountered the use of planes, but here in the Investigation Division, we got to see the use of boats too.

  Cutter boats – that is, a medium-sized boat sanctioned with official authority – have been used in the Customs service for hundreds of years. The maritime arm patrols British waters and stops and searches hundreds of boats every month. Despite our rich naval past, we didn’t have as many cutters as some of our European neighbours but what we lacked in numbers we made up for in quality. They were an expensive fleet to run and man, and their deployment was usually planned months in advance.

  We had been following a gang of cannabis smugglers who had been using local fishing boats to do their dirty work by bringing in the gear from a mother ship. In the trade this is called ‘coopering’. But the fishing boat crews turned against their part-time employers when they found out that they weren’t smuggling tobacco (as they had been told) but were importing drugs. One of the boat captains was so angry that he phoned our free drugs phone line and left us some workable intelligence. (And it made a change from jokers ringing up our free drugs phone line and asking when they could pick up their free drugs.)

  Now the gang had no fishing boats to use, they had to do the job themselves and so they used some of their enormous profits to purchase a RHIB (rigid-hulled inflatable boat), which is a kind of high-speed cross between a speedboat and an inflatable boat. The trouble was, they were better drug buyers than they were sailors and so on a couple of runs they had to throw the drugs overboard before they sank. These bales of drugs later turned up on various beaches and the members of the public who found them handed them in (or, at least, the ones we got back were handed in).

  So myself and my colleagues in Investigations put our Intelligence teams to work on the gang and we soon had a few names and addresses to work with. Our job now was to build up patterns of lifestyle on these new targets, follow them, photo them and check out whoever they met, etc. It didn’t take long for us to have a good picture of how the gang worked and what they were up to.

  But these things take time and investigations sometimes take months, even years. Luckily, a few weeks into the operation, I received a great update from the Intelligence team. Two of the gang’s cars, one towing a large RHIB, had been seen going on to Mersea Island, which is the most easterly inhabited island in the UK and is just off the Essex coast. Their move to the island had happened only a couple of hours earlier. We scrambled immediately. Mersea was only about twenty miles away from our HQ. With any luck, we thought, we could catch them in the act.

  While we were shooting to the island, I contacted the maritime team, explained what the situation was and requested a cutter to move into position, north of Mersea. This would cut off their sea escape if they decided to flee that way. The maritime team said that it would be no problem as they had a cutter in the area. Our next call was to the police to ask if they could put in a control point on the access way on to the island. All was going swimmingly; it looked like we might have the whole thing sorted and sewn up.

  We arrived on the island and plotted up in a good position to be able to view the two cars and the by-now empty boat trailer (the RHIB was gone), as well as covering all the possible exits. As usual in surveillance, it was now a matter of playing the waiting game. Again, we were lucky: within the hour, we spotted the RHIB on the horizon – it was heading at speed to their meeting place on the coast of the island, in all likelihood for another consignment pick-up. I contacted the maritime team again in order to call in our cutter boat to move in and cut off the escape route out to sea. However, when the guy at the maritime HQ answered my call and then asked me a question, I knew our luck had definitely run out:

  ‘OK. How close into the Liverpool docks do you want the cutter to move?’

&n
bsp; ‘What do you mean Liverpool docks? This is Jon Frost calling. Are you sure that you have the right job?’

  There was a slight pause at the other end. ‘Yes, yes, I’m quite sure. Officer Frost requested a cutter to position itself to the north of the Mersey.’

  So our cutter was actually 300 miles north and on the other side of the country, near Liverpool. No way to get another one scrambled in time now. Our luck returned, though, when we observed that the drugs gang were just doing an engine trial on their boat. We moved away with our tails a little between our legs, at least content that no one knew about the cock-up apart from us and the maritime boys, and they weren’t likely to brag about it. Meanwhile, some poor bastard had to skipper the cutter boat all the way back home. Sometimes investigations ended in even more unexpected ways.

  Another fan of the RHIB mode of drugs transportation was a career criminal called Shaun Fletcher. He was a nasty piece of work and he worked full time. Born and bred into a London criminal family, he was the elder of two brothers, and both were so close to being human pitbull terriers I wouldn’t have been surprised if they cocked their legs to piss.

  After making money selling drugs as a doorman at London discos, he’d decided to move up the narcotics ladder and cut out the drugs middleman that he’d been using, and that he’d been losing money to. Fletcher was a martial arts expert and would use his skills on anyone that upset him. And, as most of the time he was high on amphetamines, people seemed to upset him quite often. Fletcher was like a nasty, drug-propelled and steroid-fuelled whirlwind that left in his wake chaos, cracked skulls and cleaning bills.

  He started his new smuggling venture with his brother but it wasn’t too long before they fell out and Fletcher teamed up with, believe it or not, an ex-choirmaster who had changed careers radically and was now importing cannabis from the Netherlands in his speedboat. Nice. From master of the choir to drug buyer.