by Jon Frost
Both Fletcher and his new partner in crime, Evans, were known to us. We had intel on them and had done some reccies and surveillance but without ever being able to catch them at it. So it was now a matter of watching and waiting for their next move. Being in Investigations was sometimes like the front-line soldier’s description of war – long, quiet periods of fuck-all-to-do followed by loud, intense periods of people trying to fuck you up.
We waited about three months, and then our control centre received an anonymous call relating to Fletcher. The caller stated that he had been approached to move a large quantity of cannabis resin that was coming in from the continent that week. His contact was Fletcher and all his dealings were with him only. That fitted the picture as we knew that Shaun was a ‘hands on’ chap; he was either too drug-addled or too arrogantly confident to put the usual distance between himself and the drug consignments, which is what most dealers did so that they had a buffer between themselves and what would become the evidence to send them down for years. (And the fact that he had been shopped by one of his ‘colleagues’ proved that, in the criminal underworld, fear wasn’t as good a motivator as respect. Unpredictably violent criminals were often wanted out of the way, even by their own kind, and were never missed after they were gone.)
Evans, our singing smuggler, was the boat driver. The RHIB was, we learned, his boat and his retirement present to himself. How these two unlikely partners in crime had first hooked up, God only knew, but I couldn’t imagine it was at choir practice.
Through manipulation of the informant, we eventually got even more detailed information of the kind that we were after. Fletcher and Evans would make landfall at a certain beach in Kent the following week, at around two o’clock in the morning. That was when we would carry out the knock.
‘The knock’, as we called it, was our equivalent to what the police called a strike or what the military would call an attack. In other words, it’s Customs’ own phrase for a law enforcement pounce, grab and arrest – bang to rights.
There are many kinds of knock. The most common is the pre-planned knock, where, because of intelligence gathering from surveillance and undercover work, ID know in advance what they are going to do. This is bread-and-butter stuff.
A ‘rolling knock’ is where the fun is. For example, if I was doing an undercover bootleg cigarette job, we would never know what was going to happen. Was the lorry going to be unloaded into storage? Was it going to be redirected? Would the main men be there? Would it turn nasty? Would we need an escape route? Lots of possibilities and unknown quantities. But when the bits fell into place, we would knock the job.
Usually, there is only a two-minute warning before a knock is on, and that’s when you’d squirt adrenalin through every pore. Every officer would scramble for handcuffs and notebooks at the same time as moving into a position to knock. When the ground commander finally gave the word, the world would go into a blur as cars, officers, members of the public and professional criminals alike all went flying in all directions. We mastered the art of leaping from moving cars and, believe it or not, I’d even seen a driver do it, such was his eagerness to be in on the knock and take someone down (I forget where the car ended up . . .). Which just shows what the imperative is – arrest everyone and secure everyone and, quite often, shout at everyone (psychological intimidation was often vital); secure goods, secure evidence, protect the public and, in the pursuit of all this, it often meant bollocks to Customs officers’ personal safety. But then we knew what we’d signed up for.
The department decided to issue body armour about ten years ago but even then it was a pool item – that is, too few items between too many – and, anyway, you wore it only if you wanted to. Even doing undercover work, I would rarely end up wearing anti-stab protection as the bloody stuff would get in the way even though you couldn’t see it.
We were never officially issued batons or any other form of self-defence weaponry but we didn’t let that stop us – most of us didn’t want to go up against violent career criminals with little more than our dicks in our hands and the Lord’s Prayer. So we tended to carry ‘a little something’: extendable metal batons, truncheons, blackjacks, etc. During the later undercover CROPs jobs in the countryside and rural locations, I would carry a Ghurkha kukri knife and a dagger, which was a concealed wrist dagger/thrusting blade, first used by Second World War Special Operations Executives.
It was not unknown for Customs to use SO19 – the undercover armed police unit from the Metropolitan Police – when knocking a major drugs gang; the SBS (Special Boat Service) for boat and maritime jobs; and the SAS (Special Air Service) for other operations. But these forces, no matter how specialized, secretive or powerful, would always be under our command.
As for additional surveillance equipment, we would often be what they now call ‘first adopters’, which meant we would often get to test and deploy things like night sights or infrared sights prior to the special forces. The police would then get access to it after a few years.
Sometimes, though, we didn’t need anything more sophisticated in terms of equipment than a size-ten boot and a battering ram.
One instance of this was when my team and I were at Heathrow Airport. We had just followed one of our targets from Sutton, south London, to Terminal 3 and watched him board his flight. It was a nice and easy job. Now we’d await his return and welcome him and his drugs package with open arms and a closing cell door.
We were just about to head back to London when the senior officer of the local investigation unit called us into his office. He had a job on and could we help? Well, anything beat driving back to the office and ploughing through the waiting piles of paperwork, so we agreed.
The situation was this: at lunchtime, the uniform boys had pulled a known drug dealer in the green channel as he arrived from Spain. The Intel officers had done some homework on this chap and had discovered that, while in Spain, he and another Brit had travelled over to North Africa and back three days before they arrived home at Heathrow. A full baggage and body search discovered 1.5 kg of cannabis oil. Proper cannabis oil was very rare, and it was even classed as a Category A drug because of its transdermal properties, that is, it could pass through human skin. It was worth its weight in gold in the right market.
Unfortunately, Intel had discovered that this chap’s mate had arrived at Gatwick at ten o’clock that morning and the Customs staff there hadn’t stopped him because there was no interest in him at that time. What the senior officer wanted of us was to spin down to the arrested man’s address and carry out a full house search under PACE (Police and Criminal Evidence Act). We had all our search kits in our cars, so it was on.
By six o’clock that evening, we were all outside the target address. I had what we called the Enforcer – a 50 lb steel door ram. If the door wasn’t opened straight away, my aim was to take the door off its hinges. Sometimes on a knock we had literally to . . . knock. We did – no answer. I drew back the enforcer and was about to release carnage when the door swung open and there stood the chap who had arrived at Gatwick that morning. He quickly turned and ran into the living room and I followed, as fast as the 50 lb steel girder in my hands would allow. As I reached the living-room door, he emerged, shouting, and going for my head with a full-sized crowbar. I knew where this was going better than he did. He leaped at me with the crowbar heading for my skull. Mid-air is not the best place to meet the Enforcer. I swung it and he caught it full in the chest. I heard cracking and guessed that his ribs had gone. He flew back, hit the wall and collapsed in a moaning lump.
We all stepped over the body and into the living room, except for ‘Big’ Alan (our rugby-playing brick shithouse) who grabbed the target by one ankle and casually dragged him into the living room like a caveman lugging his latest kill. There, in front of us, lay another kilo and a half of cannabis oil. Bingo. Five minutes later, there was a knock at the front door. Alan wandered out into the hall and answered the knock. Standing there was what can o
nly be described as every single stoned-hippy cliché gathered together in human form: tie-dye T-shirt, sandals, curtains of long hair, nose ring and a broad stoner smile. Hippy Neil from The Young Ones incarnate. He spoke . . . and didn’t disappoint.
‘Oh . . . hey, dude. Wow, man, you’re a size. So, is the gear here, my brother?’
Any neighbours watching this scene would have then observed what looked like a large monster paw reach out from inside the house, grasp Hippy Neil’s head whole and yank him swiftly inside, leaving behind only the smell of patchouli oil and, on the doormat, a single wobbling sandal. And, if the neighbour’s window had been open, they might have also heard a small, startled yelp.
What they wouldn’t have heard was what Big Al said just before the moment of hippy lift-off – ‘Hello, son. Come on in and join the party!’
But for every light-hearted knock that we went on – and, by our standards, someone coming at me with a crowbar was fairly low down the list – we also had the jobs against the career criminals like Fletcher. His drugs drop on the beach was looming up in our very near future.
So, all this in mind, we prepared for the knock on Fletcher and Evans. And, sure enough, at the appointed time and place, their speedboat arrived and the two smugglers offloaded approximately one ton of cannabis resin. Just as they were covering it over with sand, we made our move. It was the most satisfying part of the job: when months or even years of investigation, surveillance, tracking, trailing, tapping, recording, cross-referencing, researching and (worst of all) waiting all came to fruition. No wonder officers got hyped up in the minutes just prior to the knock; they had good reason. None of us really fully knew exactly what situation we were about to run out into – the black holes of a double-barrel shotgun pointing at you, perhaps. We could only best-guess what would be waiting and hope we were prepared. But a career criminal drugs runner at risk of going back inside for a ten- or fifteen-stretch was not the kind to come quietly.
At the signal, myself and thirty other officers leaped out of cover, screaming blue murder, and descended on the beach like a squad of marauding black-clad devils. Evans, drawing on all his experience in the hardened world of teaching children to sing together pleasantly in church, immediately dropped straight to the ground like a sack of shit at a Sack of Shit Dropping to the Ground Contest. The sight of Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise storming the beach seemingly made him rediscover his love of praying on his knees. Fletcher, on the other hand, was off like a greased whippet, accelerating like a professional sprinter and vaulting the cannabis load like a gymnast. He dived headfirst back into the boat, which was still bobbing in the surf. From the speed at which he’d shot away from us, it was easy to see why amphetamine was also called ‘speed’.
Fletcher roared away in the RHIB, but we had planned for this possibility and had our own Customs cutter boat sitting off the coast. The cutter turned and set off after the fleeing craft but unfortunately it was like watching a hippo chase a cheetah – the power-to-weight ratio of the RHIB was superior to our own craft, especially with Fletcher’s boat now lightened of its heavy load; and so, within a couple of minutes, the little speedboat was just a memory and a fading wake in the water. Fletcher, unfortunately, had slipped through our grasp and was gone. That beach at that moment was probably home to more pissed-off Customs officers per square foot than anywhere else in the world.
We tried to track him down, of course, but even he wasn’t reckless enough to emerge into daylight. It wasn’t until quite some time afterwards that we were contacted by a police regional crime team. They had found our old target, Fletcher, and were we interested? Like Canadian Mounties, we were pissed off if we didn’t get our man, and we never forgot it. So we invited the police case officer to our office to tell us the tale.
Apparently, Fletcher had been getting quite a rep in the Netherlands for the supply of speed and ecstasy. A reputation that was starting to interest the Dutch police. He had managed to start his new business from the proceeds of selling Evans’s speedboat. From there it was easy for a man of Fletcher’s ability to build up the right contacts, and soon he was shimmying his way back up the crime tree. The only worry for him was the Dutch authorities. And one morning, when he received a tip-off from an official source that the police were going to turn him over that night, he grabbed everything that he could and made for the coast. Once there, he stole another RHIB and headed for home, hoping that we had forgotten all about him. Mid-channel, he contacted his brother to meet him at a beach in East Anglia. The dutiful brother was there on time, and they had soon unloaded Fletcher’s gear from the boat into the car, including £500,000 worth of ecstasy tablets.
In celebration at arriving safely and being undiscovered, Fletcher popped three or four tablets and decided to drive. His brother was furious and the two argued as they sped through the East Anglian countryside. Fletcher was hitting 100 mph when the car left the road and met a large oak tree coming the other way. Nothing stops a speeding car more dead in its tracks than a thick tree. There’s no ‘give’ in a deeply rooted oak – it’s like slamming into iron. Neither man was wearing a seat belt in the old car, so the younger brother was fired straight through the windscreen like a human rocket, punching a hole in the windscreen like a cannonball. Fletcher also shot forward, straight into the car’s steering wheel, which cut into his head at the bridge of the nose. It being an old car, the steering wheel was made of solid metal (covered only in thin plastic) and so, as it met Fletcher’s skull at extremely high speed, it sliced right through his head, from front to back – neatly flipping off his skull-top like a pan lid.
Our police colleagues said that it was not a pretty sight. Then they showed us the police accident scene photographer’s pictures to prove it. Fletcher had taken so much ecstasy and finally got so off his head that the actual top of it – still covered in tufts of hair and blood – had finished stuck upside down in a pat of cow shit in a field in East Anglia.
18. Pricking Michael Jackson’s Bubble
On a list of things that are bad for your health – such as getting hiccups while juggling chainsaws or tickling your dentist while he’s drilling your filling – add to the list this one: it’s never a good idea to threaten a Customs officer. You’d think that would be pretty obvious to most for the clear reason that, if you’re already being questioned, then to a certain extent you’re already in the crosshairs, so why make things worse?
It’s never a good idea to complain too much in a restaurant before your food’s arrived – you never know what the chef might send back out to you from the unseen, dark recesses of the kitchen (is that really just mayonnaise?). Best to wait until at least you’ve had dessert. Similarly, it’s best to wait until you’ve walked away from and out of hearing distance of an HM Customs officer that could snap on a rubber glove and introduce you to the dark arts of the strip search.
On this basis, I try to never piss off the guy that’s cutting my hair (available weapon: scissors), the barber giving me a wet shave (available weapon: razor) or the doctor due to give me a prostate exam (available weapon: finger in arse).
Sometimes discretion really is the better part of valour. It could save you a lot of bad haircuts, nicks on the neck and sore bottoms.
It follows that even worse than threatening one Customs officer would be to threaten a whole country’s Customs service. I mean, who would do that? Well, during one of the stranger occurrences of my career, this actually happened.
On a US TV show, Michael Jackson was promoting his new live tour of Europe. He was asked if his pet chimp, Bubbles, would miss him while he was away. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m taking him with me. And British Customs can’t stop me.’ Oops.
This was now a case of professional pride versus a very public challenge. The threat was taken seriously; one thing any professional service hates, as much as members of the general public also hate it, is the idea that someone thinks they should get preferential treatment: it offends all notions of fair play. So all
ports and airports got direct HQ orders to seize Michael Jackson’s stage kit and ‘examine thoroughly’.
The next day, all the stage kit arrived at the airport and was put into cargo sheds. No one could enter without Customs clearance. That night, baggage officers and cargo officers joined forces (a rare thing in itself, which gave an indication of how pissed off everyone was) and set about Mr Jackson’s stage kit. Every speaker, mixer and lightbox was taken apart in the hunt for a possible hiding place for Bubbles. Nothing was found. But every bit of kit had to be reassembled and tested. The tour crew were not happy. No word came through, however, about how Bubbles viewed the whole affair. And, to make matters worse, every European Customs service did the same as us. All of them were determined not to be made a monkey of by the chimp-owning singer. And it didn’t end there.
Quite some time later, long after we’d forgotten about the monkey business, a colleague and pal of mine, hippy-lifting Big Al, arrived in the office at Charlie Hotel with a very interesting-sounding invite. He leaned on my desk; the desk sagged.
‘All right, Jon? Wanna come with me and Terry? We’re just off to shoot someone.’
I replied without hesitation, ‘OK.’ It had, after all, been a slow day.
Al smiled, gave the thumbs up, and then he straightened up and my desk returned to its original shape.
We picked up a couple of other officers, Dave and Paul, on the way, and then went out to Thames Quay on the south side of Custom House, opposite HMS Belfast, which sat moored on the Thames.
Now HMS Belfast is a pretty impressive sight – 11,550 tons of steel and guns; a 600-foot-long Second World War battleship bristling with armaments. Pretty difficult to upstage that, you might think. And you’d be right. But right next to HMS Belfast was something new, something that hadn’t been moored there before, something that had never before been seen in London or anywhere else for that matter. We all looked up at it in slight disbelief, speaking to each other while never taking our eyes of it.