Anything to Declare?

by Jon Frost

  ‘It’s un-fucking-believable,’ said Big Al.

  ‘No, it’s actually worse than that,’ said Terry. ‘It’s un-fucking-believe-a-fucking-bull.’

  ‘It’s a bloody liberty is what it is,’ said Dave.

  ‘It’s certainly looks as big as the Statue of Liberty,’ I said.

  Paul chipped in, ‘Did they really open Tower Bridge for it?’

  ‘Too right they did,’ I said. ‘How else would they have got it to float this far down the Thames?’

  ‘The cheek!’

  ‘Really un-fucking-believable.’

  Big Al was particularly unhappy that this thing had been moored right outside our offices. He took it as a personal affront. ‘Right, lads,’ he said, clapping his hands together, ‘be back here tonight at 9 p.m. And wear black. We’re gonna have to go extra-secret coverts ops on this.’

  Luckily, none of us had to be out on duty that evening and no one was lost to a late call-out. We couldn’t think about anything else for the rest of the day. Sometimes, walking through Custom House, you’d catch a glimpse of it outside through one of the south-facing windows.

  Hours later, we were all there, back at the riverside at the appointed time, all dutifully present and correct for the secret meet. All dressed in black. A car flashed its lights at us and then turned and reversed nearer. Big Al got out and opened the boot of the car. We all looked inside, looked at each other, grinned in unison, then looked back inside the boot. It was full of rifles, guns, catapults and crossbows, with ammunition for the guns and bolts for the bows. We all reached in, eagerly took our weapon of choice and then turned and faced our target.

  There it stood: a forty-foot-high fibreglass statue of Michael Jackson.

  In order to promote his new album, History, it had been floated down the Thames, through Tower Bridge – which, of course, had to be opened for it – and moored outside our own Charlie Hotel, right next to HMS Belfast. So, next to a battleship that had fought Nazi convoys and that had also, in 1944, carried the King of England, there now stood a big fibreglass model of the King of Pop. It did all look rather odd and more than a little bit ridiculous. And this literal monument to one man’s ego looked even more ridiculous floating next to a battleship that during the war would have been manned by men too modest to even talk about it afterwards.

  To make things worse, the statue was, apparently, one of nine such monstrosities in major cities around the world. So we decided that the one in London was going to be the only one that was welcomed by a late-night, five-man firing squad. Well, think about it: if we could detain billionaire friends of the Queen of England, as I’d done at Stansted, and if we could successfully put the brakes on a chimpanzee called Bubbles, then I didn’t see why British Customs officers shouldn’t redecorate the King of Pop.

  So, for the next few hours, we threw everything we had at it: every air-rifle pellet and airgun bullet, every crossbow bolt and arrow, every high-powered and brightly coloured paintball, every water bomb, and every catapulted rock and missile we could whistle through the night air.

  And, in case you’re wondering, we had decided, early on, that the highest point score would go – naturally – to whoever could knock off the nose. We didn’t quite make the Michael Jackson statue history that day, but at least repeatedly shooting him gave us a little bit of a bad, dangerous thrill.

  19. The Yardie Coke Smuggler and the Future Mrs Frost?

  Jade, a beautiful German girl, eighteen years of age, arrived at Harwich from the Hook of Holland. She was to become the centre of my first cocaine case. She was pulled by the bench staff as Intelligence had discovered that she was travelling on a cash-paid, one-way ticket. Within ten minutes of being stopped and questioned, she broke down and admitted that she was carrying cocaine. She was taken to a cell and strip searched; she was wearing a bodysuit (very much the same design as the body armour that you see the police wear), which contained fifteen kilos of pure Colombian nose sherbet.

  I got the phone call ten minutes later as I was the duty officer on that week, and I was at Harwich within half an hour. With the capture of a smuggler, the investigation service swung into a fast and well-tested routine. While I was driving to the port, my senior officer was making available as many investigators as he could. The reason for this was to enable what we used to call a ‘live run’. This meant we would get the smuggler’s agreement to carry on with their delivery instructions but under the tight control and surveillance of ourselves. Historically, this had produced amazing results with some of the UK’s greatest drugs hauls and arrests. Sometimes you had to follow the rabbit down the hole to get to Wonderland.

  If I was quick enough and if she agreed, we could get the operation moving within thirty minutes. But I found out the trouble with the plan when I got there: the young woman, Jade, was petrified. She really didn’t want to go through with it, she said, as her boyfriend and his mates would kill her. It was hard not to feel a little sorry for her because she was clearly both naive and bullied. I gave her the standard answer: ‘Don’t worry, there are more of us than them and we will look after you.’ This just made her burst into tears again.

  ‘No, they are Yardies! They carry lots of guns and knives. They don’t mess!’ she said.

  She had a point. Yardies, indeed, ‘don’t mess’ – meaning that, when it comes to settling scores, they aren’t shy. I gave Bob, my senior officer, a call on his mobile to update him. Jade was not going to play but she had told me her instructions and I thought we might be in luck. I explained the situation and its background.

  Apparently, six months earlier, Jade’s friend had taken her to a club on Reeperbahn in Hamburg. There she had met the owner of the club, a British guy who had been in the Army and decided to stay in Germany at the end of his service. He and Jade got on well, although at forty-five he was much older than her. They made a strange couple but Jade, being young and impressed by the guy’s money, fell for him. The guy’s name was Nevin Bull and, as we found out later, Jade was just one of many whom Bull had got close to – most were now prostitutes working in his club.

  But it seemed that luck was on Jade’s side, in some perverse way. They stayed as a couple for a few months and Bull asked her to go on holiday with him to Jamaica. She said she agreed immediately as she had never been abroad before and her family had roots in Jamaica. But, once there, Bull totally changed. He would leave her locked in her hotel room for days as he left her to ‘go do business’. Then, when he did take her out, it was to a Yardie club where she was paraded nude in front of Bull’s associates. Some of them had tried to rape her but she had managed to fight them off. Bull, she said, never batted an eye. In the last few days of the holiday, Bull took her to another hotel where they were to meet what he called ‘the tailor’. Thinking that Bull was going to buy her a new dress, she was willingly measured and the tailor left, telling Bull that it would be ready in two days. Five minutes later, four Yardie gang members arrived at the hotel room and she was locked in the bathroom as Nevin and the men discussed something that Jade couldn’t hear.

  After the four left, Bull unlocked the bathroom door and led Jade into the bedroom where he told her his tale of woe. His club was losing money hand over fist and he had used the last of his own money for this holiday. The four men had lent him some money a few months before and now they wanted it paid back, and if it wasn’t repaid in the next few days then both he and Jade would be shot, cut up and dumped at sea. He said that the men had said that, if Bull was willing to do something for them, they would write off the debt. He told Jade that, if she carried something back to the Netherlands for them, they would both be all right.

  Now anyone with any sense and experience could see this was a classic softening-up technique used by men like Nevin Bull who were used to manipulating vulnerable people, especially women. It’s how most of the young women he now had working as prostitutes for him had first fallen into his world. The only reason Jade hadn’t already been brutalized and passed arou
nd the other gang members was because Bull knew he had to maintain her feelings for him in order to facilitate using her as a drugs mule.

  Jade had been totally taken in, although the story was, to us, clearly nonsense (of course, she had actually been measured by the tailor for the drugs bodysuit). The thing behind her apparent naivety was love: she was madly in love with this character, although it was apparent he showed her little in return. So she believed his story. She also thought that, if she carried out the run, they would be together forever. It was both saddening and pathetic to hear how she believed it to be true.

  For the drugs runs, she was duly fitted with the bodysuit full of drugs and put on a plane to Germany. Her instructions were for her to go to her flat in Hamburg, pack a small holdall, making sure that she had no paperwork linking her to either Bull or Jamaica, and then get the train to Amsterdam and then on to the Hook of Holland (buying a cash-paid ticket for the ferry to Harwich). Once in Harwich, she was to take the train to London and then get a taxi to an address that Nevin Bull had written in her diary. At this address, she would meet up with him again and he would take the drugs to another London address before the two returned to Hamburg together.

  At eight o’clock that evening, some strangers arrived at the address in London. They were actually my drugs team, backed up with some uniformed officers from Harwich and a couple of police officers to keep the peace (and also to be used as human shields if the Yardies reacted badly). The door was answered by a young blonde woman who was removed from the doorway in a firm but polite way, and then the team went steaming in. Thankfully, there were no armed Yardies in the house so Bob, the ground commander, and the police breathed a silent sigh of relief. What was there was Nevin Bull and his best mate, Paul Morrison, sitting at the dinner table each eating a bowl of soup. They were both arrested and transported to Harwich for questioning. Morrison was later released and would appear again, with his wife, as a witness for the defence.

  Right from the start, Bull refused to admit knowing Jade. He even refused to admit that he had been in Jamaica. He stated that he had just driven over from Hamburg to visit an old friend in London. He would stick to this story right up to the trial. So, what did we have on him?

  His passport was found hidden under a bed at the London address with the Jamaica stamps in it showing that he had arrived from there into Heathrow that very morning, having left two days after Jade. Our drugs liaison officer had got his hands on the booking and payment details of the hotel in Kingston that the two of them had shared for three weeks plus CCTV video footage of Bull arriving at Heathrow. Then we had the great evidence of Jade’s diary in which Bull had written down the London address. Another great piece of evidence came in the form of a wrap of cocaine that I had found in Bull’s wallet. Now, we couldn’t go into court and state that because he had a wrap of cocaine he must be a smuggler but, bugger me, it does make a jury think.

  The final nail in the coffin was Jade herself, and the evidence she could provide to the whole affair. But, to start with, it was really hard work. Her on-call solicitor, Matt, was well known to me. We had legally jousted on many a case before. But what you could say about him was that he had a human side and that he was realistic about defending a person who had so much evidence stacked against them. Some solicitors would cause all kinds of shitstorms to try to get their client off, only to have them get a longer sentence in court when they were found guilty. This is always the way: if you’re found guilty in court after a not-guilty plea, you get a longer sentence than if you had pleaded guilty at the start. A good, pragmatic brief should realistically assess their client’s chances of double-screwing themselves with an indefensible not-guilty plea.

  Matt had been with Jade from the first interview and was well aware of how she had assisted us. He had also brought in a German interpreter called Mrs Hess so that there were no misunderstandings during the interviews. Unfortunately, Mrs Hess was an elderly German lady who was not too on the ball with law enforcement techniques. She had a habit of jumping down my throat when she thought I was being rude and, in return, she was much ruder back than we could ever hope to match. Even Matt had to laugh whenever she started barking at me in her strong German accent. That earned him a bark and an evil stare of his own.

  Over the months leading up to the trial, Mrs Hess became a surrogate mother to Jade. Every time either Matt or I visited Jade, Mrs Hess had to be there by her side. It was really quite sweet how she wanted to protect her, but also easily understandable because the young woman was clearly very naive and out of her depth. Matt and I joked about telling Mrs Hess the full horrors of Nevin Bull’s treatment of her young charge and then locking her in a room with him. But we decided we’d rather see Bull convicted of trafficking than Mrs Hess convicted of murder.

  Normally, once we had arrested, interviewed and charged an individual, that was the last we would see of them before the trial, but in this case it was different. If Jade was to be the coffin nail that I hoped she would be, then I needed her to turn Queen’s Evidence, which meant she would have to stand up in court against Bull. To do this successfully, she would have to give me a full, no-holds-barred witness statement of everything that had happened since she met Bull in his club. And here the problem arose. No matter what Bull had led her into, she still thought she was in love with him. I would need Matt and Mrs Hess’s help to try to change that. As it turned out, fate lent a hand in the form of Holloway Prison.

  Most of the public are unaware that there is a huge number of foreign female smugglers in UK prisons and, in Holloway Prison’s case, many of them are linked to the Yardie gangs. One thing that you can accurately say about criminal communications is that their system seems to be so much faster than BT. Within the first three days of her being on remand, Jade had already received four death threats. Matt was straight on the phone to me.

  ‘Jon, you got her in this shit, you get her out,’ he said. ‘If we help her now, I’m sure that she will play ball come the trial.’

  It was questionable whether it was my fault as I wasn’t the one that had got her into drug smuggling – but I could see his point regarding the trial. So I did two things together that would enable her safety. First, I contacted a certain police team based at Scotland Yard. These were the supergrass boys, the officers who could make someone disappear and start a new life. I explained the situation and they jumped at the chance to help (knowing that Customs would foot the bill). Second, and with the help of a nice letter from a judge that I approached, I got Jade moved to a female prison near Sheffield. It made it a swine of a trip up there to interview her, or for her to come to court in Essex, but at least she was safe, and to make double sure of that we had her housed in the hospital wing where she could be watched.

  Two days after the move, Matt, Mrs Hess and I arrived at the prison and met Jade in a closed room and not in the open visiting area. I explained the Queen’s Evidence rules and that Bull was saying that he didn’t even know her. She was still worried. For two hours, I tried my best, along with Matt, but we were not gaining ground. I decided I had to try a shock tactic.

  ‘Jade, look, get this into your head: Bull is going to see you go down and then he’ll be off, back to Hamburg and into the loving arms of one of his other girls. He’s put you in the shit and he’s quite happy to leave you there. And you’re going to be there for the next twenty years.’

  Matt tried to appeal to her in a much gentler manner but I responded with more of the brutal truth. ‘And make no mistake,’ I said, ‘in all that time that you’re inside, you’ll only ever see your parents and family twice a month, if that. That’s if you get to see them at all. But, if you want to throw your life away, that’s up to you.’

  ‘That’s enough, Jon, I think, for now. We need to let Jade think about things.’

  We left the room and Matt turned to me and shrugged. ‘The old good cop/bad cop routine. Think it’ll work? Do you think she gets it now?’

  I said that I wasn’t sure,
but it would be better for her if the routine did work in persuading her to save herself rather than sacrifice herself for a professional criminal. We both now needed a fag so we walked outside and, at the prison door, we each lit up a much-needed smoke.

  ‘So what do you really think?’ I asked Matt.

  He said, ‘I think I’m sexually attracted to Mrs Hess.’

  ‘Is it the moustache?’ I asked. ‘Because I see what you mean. It’s quite sexy.’

  ‘It is, but, if she ever cuts it into a little square Hitler one, it’ll be all over between us . . .’

  Two cigs each and many Mrs Hess jokes later, we turned to see Mrs Hess standing in the doorway, glaring. ‘You are both bastards,’ she told us firmly. ‘But . . . she says she wants to do it.’

  It was with great relief that, when we returned over the next few visits, we managed to get the full story. Then there was a small but very unexpected twist. On one of my last visits, Mrs Hess suddenly grabbed my arm and squeezed it. She said, ‘Have you noticed that Jade has changed?’ I said I had to admit that she was much chattier and seemed to enjoy the visits. ‘No, you idiot,’ Mrs Hess said. ‘She’s in love with you!’

  Well, that could be inconvenient, I thought. It was obviously just a case of someone transferring strong feelings to the person they felt was ‘saving’ them, and in this case Jade had decided that was me. Still, I’d rather she mistakenly believed she was in love with me than someone like Bull. The next time I saw him, I told Matt the news, and he just asked if that meant it left the way clear for him and Mrs Hess.

  We were quietly confident about the court case, but I knew that, even in the highest courts in the land, things can go tits up. What juries hear is never really the full story – it is only what the law lets them hear. The full story is always known by the defendant, often by the police or Customs, sometimes by the defence, and rarely by the prosecution. The jury were last on the list of people who got to know the full facts. Before a case comes to court, large lumps of it are hacked away by the barristers. Interviews are chopped and changed by them and certain facts are removed for different legal reasons. Items such as telephone taps and information from CROPs officers or undercover agents are often usually known to the judge and investigators only. Deals are struck between defence and prosecution, witnesses are cancelled, and so on. Then there are certain things that go on during the case that normal jury members have no idea about, such as the defendant’s criminal past. The defence can only claim that their client is of good character if they have no record, so, if they don’t say anything along these lines, you can tell their client does have a criminal record. But you are never told straight. It was sometimes a question of listening to what was not said.