by Jon Frost
Inside the living room, our target was in the middle of trying to stuff the heroin packages under the sofa. We nicked him on the spot and treated him to a pair of HMRC locking wrist jewellery. With the target now slumped on the sofa, cuffed, we carried out a full house search. All the while, Terry kept the dog entertained on its back in the hall, preventing it from jumping up and having a nibble on any of us.
As we filed out the front door, our suspect looked down on his dog with a sorry expression. ‘Bloody great guard dog he is!’ We had to agree, though Terry was in two minds: the beast seemed playful enough but, as soon as his stomach was not being tickled, the low growling began again. We took our smuggler to the car and then, when we looked back at the house, we all burst out laughing: through the open door all we could see were the whites of Terry’s pleading please-don’t-leave-me eyes.
As I loaded our arrestee into the car, he told us that we couldn’t leave behind Chops (the beast). He said that the other members of the drugs gang knew how much Chops meant to him and they would hold him hostage to ensure that he didn’t talk to us. Or that they’d kill Chops in an act of revenge. On top of this, the dog was worth a fortune in the breeding world. Apparently, young Chops was actually worth more than one of our surveillance cars parked outside – which, I figured, meant he was worth about five-grand per dog bollock. On the plus side, I knew that, if we or the police kept Chops safe from harm, there would be more chance our suspect might turn chatty when we interviewed him.
We all had a quick chat and decided to bring Chops with us. I volunteered to go and rescue Terry because I already had something in mind. Back in the house, he was still keeping Chops happy on his back on the floor. Upside down, the dog’s big black lips fell away from its teeth and they were a scary sight to behold. I figured that one lucky thing was that the dog was so frightening that, if the thing bit you, you’d probably die of shock before you got to experience being eaten alive. I stood over Terry and the animal, Terry’s right hand still automatically scratching the dog’s belly. This was too good an opportunity not to milk.
‘Terry. Good news.’
‘What’s that?’ he said eagerly.
‘We’ve found out the dog’s name.’
Terry glared.
‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘he’s called Chops.’
‘Are you fucking kidding me?!’
‘No. He really is called Chops,’ I said. ‘But . . . there’s some bad news.’
‘What’s that?’
‘We have to bring Chops with us.’
‘Sod off!’
‘We do. But there’s some more good news.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Our suspect says you can stop tickling the dog’s belly.’
‘Thank fuck.’
‘But . . . there’s some more bad news.’
‘What’s that?’
‘If you stop tickling him, he’ll probably bite you.’
‘Oh fuck . . .’
‘But there is some more good news.’
‘Yeah?’
‘There is a way to stop Chops eating you . . .’
‘Which is?’
‘You have to wank him off.’
Pause.
‘Oh. Fuck. You. Jon.’
‘No, Terry. Not me. The dog.’
We eventually got the slobbering animal in the car – and also the dog. But Chops wouldn’t go in the back – he was having none of that. His owner pointed out that Chops would only travel in the front passenger seat (and I guess no one had ever argued with him about that). Apparently, he liked the view from the front seat and it made him look important. I could understand that. So Terry took him round the front of the car and in he jumped. Once he had the seatbelt on, old Chops looked quite regal in the front. I had to agree, that’s definitely where he belonged. Even better was the fact that Terry’s driver, Dave, was a dog hater – they scared the shit out of him (I think it might have been Dave that whimpered) – and now he was sitting right next to the Mike Tyson of hounds.
I was now standing at the front of the car, looking back at it. Through the windscreen, I saw Dave turn his head very slowly to the left to look at the dog; I saw Chops – seatbelt on, spit dripping from his lips and teeth – turn his head to the right and look at Dave; I saw Dave turn his head very slowly back to me, looking out at me with those same please-don’t-leave-me eyes. Of course, I immediately burst out laughing. Now the hound was safely locked in the car, it was really funny, in that way that it’s always funny when it’s happening to someone else.
My last sight of the car was it driving slowly away with Dave pressing the right side of his face hard against the driver’s window, and Chops sitting in the passenger seat like Lord Muck. And I’m pretty sure the dog was grinning.
Occasionally, we ran into human beings who made it seem as though dealing with big slobbery dogs like Chops was the better alternative. In the case of a chap named Mac Taylor, it wasn’t a question of if we arrived to nick him, but just when. Mac Taylor was a security official for a large shipping line and prior to this he was a police sergeant who had overstepped the line too many times and had been sacked. The problem about being a sacked copper is that your pension is gone (unless you’re sufficiently far up the professional food chain that your bosses give you the option of rebranding your imminent sacking as ‘early retirement’, and then as a reward for your incompetence you get to live out your days on a taxpayer-sponsored retirement plan).
Naughty Mr Taylor had moved from being a dirty cop to a dirty importer: he had been facilitating illegal importations. It didn’t seem to matter to him whether it was drugs, fags, booze, porn or firearms; it was all money in the bank for him. As with the African witch doctors selling their ineffective juju spells, Taylor sold the services of a band of crooked dock workers. But these were very effective. It was very much like a rip-off gang at an airport but much more technical. Within the gang, there would be a crane driver, a driver for the container trailer (the maffy), as well as shift-leaders and administration staff. All of them were bent and on the payroll under Taylor’s control. Taylor had already been overseas a number of times to source transhipment countries and there was little doubt in our minds that he was also selling the services of his criminal enterprise abroad.
We arrested him and interviewed him. Then my colleague Paul and I drove him to the local police station. For the first time in his life, he was the one on the receiving end of wearing some very fetching Hiatt silver wristwear (Hiatt being the handcuff maker of choice for law enforcement agencies). We used local police custody offices to charge offenders so that they would slip smoothly into the court system. Taylor was going to be charged and then he would be in front of a magistrate first thing in the morning for a bail hearing and for the magistrate to push the case up to the Crown court.
We all arrived at the police station and entered the custody office. Paul walked Taylor to the charge desk and, addressing Taylor, the custody officer said, ‘Hello, mate, long time no see.’ It was obvious from this point that the custody sergeant and Taylor were old friends and had possibly even served together.
I started to walk around to the side of the custody officer’s desk so that we could go through the paperwork together but before I got there he jumped up quickly, thrust out his left hand and grabbed me by the windpipe and, with his right hand, raised his baton. ‘Where the fuck do you think you’re going, shithead? Get back round the desk before me and my baton tell you your future!’
At this point, Mac Taylor held his hands up and jangled the handcuffs to show that he was actually here under arrest, not on business. The sergeant, who had not noticed the cuffs, now sussed that he had made a mistake and that it wasn’t me that was the arrestee. Without so much as a shrug of an apology, he released my throat and put his baton back in its harness. He then carried on as if nothing had happened. For the next half-an-hour, he was what we term ‘a total shit’.
Having never seen a Customs smuggling charge before
, this custody sergeant refused to accept it, so I had to call for the duty inspector. He in turn informed the sergeant that everything was in order and that he should proceed. Eventually, we had Taylor charged and locked up. I stood by the door of the interview room and called to the custody sergeant, ‘Can you please pop into the interview room for a second, sergeant?’ He snapped back that he was too busy. I was rapidly losing the little patience I had left.
‘I didn’t say come into the interview room or carry on with what you are doing – I meant get in here now!’
With hand on baton, he sauntered into the interview room. I asked him if he’d sit down, but he turned on me again and said he was going to stand. The end of my tether being reached was announced by a loud noise that sounded suspiciously like me saying, ‘SIT. FUCKING. DOWN!’
He sat fucking down.
‘Now, having seen the way that you treat what you think are prisoners,’ I continued, ‘let me tell you your future’. This definitely got his attention, which immediately made me wonder if there was some dodgy business link between him and Taylor. ‘I can plainly see that you and Taylor are old mates and, as we continue with this investigation, if I or my colleagues should find any mention of you or come across your telephone number, you’ll be spun off your desk and into an interview room quicker than slippery shit off a shiny shovel. OK, sunshine?’
Paul and I felt better as we left the police station knowing that we were leaving behind a little Hitler that we had just done a Winston Churchill on. I rubbed my neck where the bruises were beginning to appear and thought about the fact that, if we found any evidence linking the desk sergeant to Taylor’s activities, his neck would end up being at far greater risk than mine.
* * *
The whole of my Investigations team ended up in the car hall at Dover docks. The uniformed officers, under our instruction, had pulled an old Mercedes that had driven through Europe from Turkey. The search was relatively simple as we knew where the gear was hidden. The uniforms emptied the boot, lifted the spare wheel and hey presto – ten kilos of the distinctive brown powder of Turkey’s finest smack.
We bundled the driver into an interview and explained the ways of life to him. Or, at least, the way we conducted the business of drug busts. He was ‘encouraged’ to cooperate, which he was happy to do. There’s a huge difference between serving twenty years in jail and four years with time off for good behaviour. The driver, a Mr Khan, said he was to deliver the gear to an address in London where he would receive his payment from the main man. His instructions were to call the main man once off the ferry.
‘Right, then, you’d better do it,’ Dave told him.
Khan made the call and we recorded it. We knew the mobile number that the main man was using had been used before on other Turkish heroin jobs. So we knew we had a chance to get a heavy repeat offender. We bedded Mr Khan down in a nice fluffy cell for the night and we retired to the hotel to plan our attack. The following morning, with the operation planned, checked and re-planned, we were ready to go. Back at the port, Khan was instructed to call the main man again and tell him that he’d had an accident in the car. He was also to say that he was in hospital with suspected concussion and that he couldn’t leave until the following day. Khan’s phone call was a real bit of Oscar-winning acting. The main man fell for it. Khan then arranged to meet his boss the next day at the car park where he said he’d abandoned the damaged Merc, next to a large hotel, near the Dover seafront.
So, we’d managed to buy ourselves a day’s grace. Dave and Chris, another of the lads on this job, took the Merc out for a little drive. To fit in with Khan’s story, it had to look as if it had been in an accident. They didn’t tell us exactly what they had planned but they did have a sledgehammer in the boot and smiles on their faces. First, they drove a couple of miles into the countryside and found an unemployed tree. Dave jumped out and Chris promptly drove the Merc into the tree. From the driver’s seat, Chris looked out at Dave, who stared back at him, looking wide-eyed and surprised. Thinking he’d done much more damage than intended – and stranding the car out in the middle of nowhere would have been a real problem at that stage – he quickly jumped out and only then did he see the cause of the surprise: a three-kilo package of heroin had fallen out from where it was stashed under the front bumper.
Chris said, ‘Crikey. Result!’
Then to make it look like the car had been in a rear-end shunt, Dave took the sledgehammer out of the boot and smacked the rear bumper. ‘Smack’ being the appropriate word because another three-kilo bag of heroin dropped out from under the rear bumper and into the road.
Chris cheered, ‘Do it again, do it again!’
‘Bollocks to that. With my luck, Lord Lucan might fall out.’
They got the car back to the port and this time the uniforms did a full search without us interfering. No more gear was found. But it was strange to think that, if the Merc had at some point genuinely been involved in a big rear- and front-end smash, it would have resulted in the air being filled with clouds of heroin powder from the exploding bags. Try claiming for that with your car insurer.
We parked up the Merc in the middle of the half-empty car park. It was an ideal position, covered by three CCTV cameras and two of our own. We were not going to miss a thing. At one o’clock, Mr Khan was slipped into the front passenger seat and we took up our positions, all within instant knock distance. At 2.30, the main man of this drugs-importation operation arrived and parked near the exit. This gave him a chance to have a good gander around the car park before approaching the Mercedes. Our senior case officer suddenly exclaimed, ‘My God! Look . . .’ We all peered closer. ‘It’s bloody Del Boy!’
He was right. Far from being the super-cool figure that drug dealers are sometimes portrayed as in crime dramas, our boy wore a large brown sheepskin coat, a tweed flat cap, gold chains and, to complete the picture, was chuffing on a big fat cigar. The only things missing were Rodney and Granddad sat nearby in a yellow three-wheel Reliant. We watched ‘Del’ as he had a wander off towards the Merc. He peered in, saw Khan and jumped into the driving seat. The damage to the car had obviously convinced him the story was true.
We gave them a couple of minutes to reacquaint themselves, then the commander called the knock. Chris was off like a gundog. He definitely wanted the main man. He ran to the driver’s door, which he flung open. Leaving no room for resistance, Chris grabbed our target by the hair with both hands and dragged him out of the car and on to the ground. Then, with both knees pressed into the target’s back, he bent back his arms and cuffed him. Job done . . . if not done a bit more enthusiastically than was perhaps strictly necessary. Still, we’d seen other arrestees quickly turn violent when we’d pulled them, so to us it was a case of all’s fair in love and drug busts.
But Del Boy was incensed. ‘Get the fuck off me!’
‘Now, now, old son,’ said Chris, getting to his feet. ‘Remember – who dares wins!’
‘Fuck you. These cuffs are fucking killing me!’
Dave chipped in, ‘Come on, you know it makes sense!’
And, despite every Only Fools and Horses catchphrase being thrown at him on the drive back to the station, our own Del Boy never realized why we were using them.
Many months later, in court, Chris had to defend his arrest actions. Our own surveillance video of the op was now played in court for all to see. The defence counsel stared hard at the video as the jury watched all the action unfold. When our target first appeared on screen, walking across the car park, a few of the jurors looked at each other and you knew they were thinking only one thing – ‘Del Boy!’ Chris had his head and eyes lowered. The defence counsel struck. ‘So, officer, having seen your violent attack on my client, what are you thinking now?’
Chris looked up, looked at the judge, looked at the jury and looked at Del Boy as he sat in the dock. ‘Well,’ said Chris, in a loud, clear voice, ‘I was just thinking how bloody lucky I was that he wasn’t wearing a wig!�
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Customs one, defence counsel nil. Actually, make that Customs two, because Del Boy got sent down for a tenstretch. You might say that only fools smuggled horse.
Both the port of Dover and the heroin from Turkey kept us very busy because of the established connection between the two: Dover being a chosen gateway for the drugs gangs. Once, the rest of the team were down at Dover waiting for a lorry full of heroin coming in from Turkey, but I was already busy with a call I’d got from Heathrow Airport. It was a very busy Friday afternoon so it took me two hours to get to the airport. When there, I was fully briefed by the local team. They said a Mr Shah had arrived from Islamabad that afternoon and had been stopped in the green channel. He had reason to be: a search of his large suitcase revealed 15 kg of very pure heroin, wrapped up in a couple of blankets. He was now in the interview room but hadn’t been questioned further. He had informed the search officer that he didn’t speak English very well.
I grabbed a local uniform officer and entered the interview room in my standard unamused Customs officer mode. ‘Mr Shah, my name’s Mr Frost. You are still under caution and I will be recording anything that you say. Mr Green here tells me that you don’t want a solicitor, is that correct?’
Shah sat back in the chained-down interview room seat. ‘Yes, yes, that’s right. I have nothing to hide. I want to tell the truth.’
‘I see that your English has suddenly improved. Do you still want an interpreter?’
Shah admitted that his English was quite good. He told me that he was a gold trader in Pakistan and that he and his brother often travelled to America via the UK to trade in gold. But this time was different; he’d had a heart murmur a few weeks ago and was off to a hospital in New York to have checks carried out. A search of his briefcase revealed various forms from a hospital in New York and on face value it appeared that he was telling the truth. The trouble was the contents of his suitcase, and that I didn’t believe he was carrying 15 kg of heroin so it could be used on himself as an anaesthetic should they decide to operate.