by Jon Frost
I charged Shah and had him locked up on remand until the trial. At this point, the investigation started. Every area had to be explored to find out the how and the why. Shah and his brother lived in Rawalpindi and, when the Pakistan drugs authorities paid an unannounced visit, it was no surprise that the brother was away on business. The authorities found some matching blankets to those that we had found wrapped around the heroin. They also found a telephone book containing English mobile numbers underlined in red. Sometimes such numbers could be real gold dust, but in this case it turned out that the phones were pay-as-you-go and the numbers had been ditched.
Once we had a prisoner in custody, the real hard work started: that of putting a legal case together. We didn’t just pass all the paperwork up to a legal department; no, the case officer had to put the prosecution together himself, hopefully with the help of the rest of their team. Every prosecution case consisted of reams of statements from witnesses, such as the intercepting officer, any other officer that may have assisted them, interviewing officers, the translator, transcribers, the government chemist, fingerprint specialists, lab workers, etc. The list was long. And, even though many statements that you took would never be seen or heard in court, you could be sure that, should you miss a statement, it would be that same one that was demanded by the defence lawyers. The taking of these UK statements was time consuming, but the very worst job was getting (or trying to get) overseas statements. In most instances, the case officer would have to put in for something called a commission rogatoire. This was permission, linked to an international agreement between law enforcement bodies, allowing a case officer to gather evidence in a particular country. We called them ‘comrogs’ and they were nightmares to get in a hurry. To get a comrog for Spain could take up to eight months, but one for South Africa could take a couple of weeks. It seemed strange that judges in our courts would never accept that overseas police and Customs could have different priorities or work to a different timescale. I’d even once heard a senior judge state that he would write to the ‘slovenly’ country himself because, in his words, ‘That will get the buggers moving!’ Which was typical of the detached and sometimes delusional thinking of many judges who seemed to still think most of the world was within the British Empire. In the case of this particular judge, his letter worked so well that ‘the buggers’ managed to lose all of our overseas evidence, never to be seen again.
In Mr Shah’s case, I was lucky. All my overseas evidence was in Pakistan and the Pakistan Narcotics Agency was on the ball. I received everything I wanted within weeks, plus more. Shah had been stopped at Islamabad Airport by a Customs officer and his passport had been checked and stamped. His defence was that the drugs must have been placed in his suitcase by some behind-the-scenes baggage handler, and he said that his passport stamp proved that he’d had his baggage searched. His defence counsel demanded that we fly the Pakistani Customs officer to the UK to give his evidence in person. Our barrister – representing the Crown – explained that this was of great expense to the British public and that the case officer, Mr Frost, had thought of another idea. He was right, I had thought of another idea – and one that would only cost £1.50 rather than the cost of a return flight for the officer.
My bright idea was to contact the Narcotics Agency in Islamabad and ask the duty major to bring the airport official to a phone in their office. Within fifteen minutes, the offending Customs officer was on a hands-free telephone, giving his evidence across thousands of miles to an open court in England. Both defence and prosecution barristers questioned him. He admitted that he had stopped, questioned and stamped Shah’s passport but there was, he said, no way that he could have searched his baggage. Shah’s defence rested on his contention that his bag had been searched and the drugs planted then. But the Customs officer insisted he did not conduct a search. Both barristers had their heads in their hands until the judge asked a simple question.
‘So, Officer Minda, how can you be so sure that you didn’t search this man’s baggage?’
‘Simple really, sir,’ stated the Customs officer, his voice sounding distant and echoing slightly over the phone’s loudspeaker. ‘I know because Mr Shah travelled on a Thursday . . . and I never search bags on a Thursday.’ The jury and the judge all fell about laughing.
The following day, the jury was sent out and came back within fifteen minutes with a guilty verdict. Shah got eighteen years.
While I was packing up all the paperwork at the end of the trial, I had a chat with the court usher. ‘That was a quick decision by the jury,’ I said.
The usher winked. ‘Quicker than you may think, sir. They told me it took them only one minute to decide and the next fourteen minutes to have a cup of coffee.’
Three years later, I would receive an upsetting phone call from the Home Office. Could I supply the Immigration Service at Heathrow with Shah’s passport as he was flying back to Pakistan in a week’s time because of ill health? At first, I was furious as I’d always believed that smugglers should always serve their term and not use supposed health problems as an excuse to shorten their time. We’d seen it happen before. But in this case it turned out that Shah did have heart problems that had reoccurred and over the three years it had got to a point that he only had a few months left. Our prison service didn’t want him dying on them, hence the ticket home. His heart finally gave out on the flight home. History doesn’t record whether or not it was a Thursday.
It’s funny how often heart attacks seemed to crop up in our line of work – and I don’t just mean among dog-phobic Customs officers having to deal with large hounds called Chops. An officer friend of mine, Peter Marsh, had been in the Collection Investigation Unit while I was working in the Investigation Division. The unit dealt with smuggling within their own local areas. Peter’s local area was East Anglia, where I would finish my Customs career.
Peter had been given a prestigious VAT job, and we all assisted on the surveillance for a few months. It didn’t take us too long before we had built up quite a case against a Mr Warner and his wife. They were running an illegal computer-supply company and pocketing very large quantities of VAT. After it had come to our attention, the morning finally arrived when it was decided that we would knock the company. Team one would arrest Mr Warner at his business premises and team two would raid his house and arrest his wife. I was in team two.
We arrived at the home address in Harlow at about eight in the morning, which was actually a late start for a raid, but this was hardly a hardened drugs gang – more like a couple of middle-aged fraudsters with hardening arteries. The plan was for both knocks to go in at 8.30 a.m. so that one target couldn’t warn the other. Unfortunately, there was a change in the plan when Mr Warner arrived at his office at 7.45 a.m. and then came out of his office and headed for his car. Peter, not wanting him to get away, instructed his team to start the knock early and immediately raid the business premises and arrest Warner.
Rather than the loud and sometimes violent raids carried out by Customs, this one was a rather sedate affair; Peter calmly walked Mr Warner back to his office, sat him down and explained clearly why he was being arrested. Mr Warner nodded, grimaced, and then had a heart attack and dropped dead on the spot. A few seconds before, he had been a slightly worried-looking man with beads of sweat on his forehead; now the chair contained a slumped corpse with blue lips and skin like wet wax.
Just before myself and team two were due to carry out the knock on the home address, I received a phone call from Peter explaining what had happened. Peter informed me that our raid should be held back until he could arrive and break the bad news to Mrs Warner.
Thirty minutes later, team one arrived at our location and Peter briefed us all that the knock was suspended. He then went into the home address to break the bad news, accompanied by a Police FLO (Family Liaison Officer), who are specially trained to deal with bereaved family members. The liaison officer had limited chance to put their training into practice as, when informed
by Peter of her husband’s death, Mrs Warner burst into tears and then clutched her chest and dropped dead on the spot.
With the sight of Mr Warner dying still so fresh in his mind and with the chances of his wife also having a heart attack seeming so remote, for one weird moment, Peter later said, he thought Mrs Warner might be faking her own heart attack. It sounds extreme but, by this stage in our careers, we had seen people try anything to avoid arrest. However, in this case, Mrs Warner was indeed suffering from a bad dose of death.
It was probably the strangest end to a raid that we’d ever experienced. We concluded that the Grim Reaper must have been having a very slow day on that day and so had decided to speed up the harvest.
* * *
Investigation officers can be great show-offs, sometimes, when it came to successful cases. And I must admit that I was no different from the rest. Just as a footballer might brag about a goal he scored or a boxer might go on about a knockout he delivered, so law enforcers like to do the same. A good place to revel in the acclaim of your peers was the Government Forensic Service (GFS). At some time or another, and usually the sooner the better, you had to get your seized gear to the experts to be examined and officially designated. The GFS was happily housed in the Forensic Service labs and, unlike the unrealistic lab boys on shows like CSI, the real forensic guys barely step outside their ‘office’.
On arrival at the GFS labs, you sat in a large waiting room with other police and Customs officers from all over the country, each of us clutching some vital evidence that needed testing for an official classification so we could proceed with the case.
I was having a pretty good day when it came to bragging rights because I’d turned up carrying forty kilos of pure heroin in see-through seizure bags. Most police officers would never see this amount in their whole careers so the coppers in the room were impressed; the other Customs boys there, less so. But then, they were carrying less than I was today so I was Top of the Pops. There were questions and requests for a closer look, so I sat there and told them about the seizure and that this was actually one of our smaller cases. There followed a number of appreciative ums and ahs from the captive audience. Ten minutes later, I was joined by a couple of Investigation colleagues from a specialist cocaine team and they brought with them fifty kilos of coke. The ums and ahs started all over again.
All of us had arrived early so that we could get our evidence booked in and then shoot back to the office so we were still waiting for the reception team to open up the lab and start work. It was always a little nerve-jangling carrying around a couple of large bags that you knew were worth a few million pounds each. And so we were always quite glad to get them signed over to the labs.
After our little evidence-comparison contest, we started to chat among ourselves. I started to talk to a young copper sitting next to me who was from Manchester and had a large freezer box in his lap.
‘So, what’s in the box? Anything interesting?’
He shrugged and said, ‘Oh, it’s nowt as exciting as yours. It’s just somebody’s arse.’
The room went dead silent. I smiled and nodded and tried not to look too impressed. But I knew I was failing miserably so I just gave in.
‘Did you say “somebody’s arse”?’
‘Well, it’s a buttock, actually. We think it could be a left one, but, if you hold it the other way up, it could be the right. Dunno, really.’
He lifted the freezer-box lid and in seconds every officer in the room was in a scrum around it. Dry ice smoke billowed out of the box and, when it dissipated, there, peeking out of the ice and staring us all in the face, was an actual man’s arse cheek.
‘We came across it after a really big, vicious gangland fight in the city centre last night. It’s a clean cut so we think it was cut off by someone wielding something extremely sharp, like a samurai sword. The trouble is, there was no one left about to reclaim it. We’ve warned all the local hospitals to keep an eye out for anyone who comes in with such an injury. Or –’ he looked up as he closed the lid ‘– anyone who has trouble sitting down.’
Even I had to admit defeat and concede that, in the game of evidence Top Trumps, the Unidentified Arse from Manchester had won the day.
21. Addicted
I’ll let you in on a little secret: busting drug dealers could get very addictive. Sure, you start out on the soft stuff – pulling over a doper coming back from Amsterdam with a spliff in his sock. But before you know it – and despite all the warnings about weed being a gateway drug to the harder gear – you’re itching for something stronger: a cocaine bust, maybe; and then, when you get one of those, you just want another one – and then even more cocaine confiscations. Finally, it gets to the stage where nothing can satisfy your craving for a drug bust except heroin – a nice, big, juicy heroin seizure. It was very true what they said about heroin – and this seemed to be the case whether using it or confiscating it – it was very more-ish.
What most people don’t realize is that, if taken correctly and with no impurities added from bad ‘cutting’, it is possible to live a comparatively normal life on heroin – though that situation is in itself pretty impossible to recreate because it is based on the unattainable ideal of the user getting a constant supply of unadulterated heroin. It is the other substances that are added to it to reduce the purity of the drug that can be a danger in themselves. I had discovered heroin cut with brick dust, baby powder, Vim and even rat poison. The big problem is that, by the time the user has purchased it from their dealer, they have no idea what it is cut with or how many times it has been cut before reaching the streets. Cutting agents such as brick dust are not really designed to be injected into the human body. It will be classed as an invader and as such the body will attempt to defend itself against this alien intrusion; but, in the long run, the invader usually wins and the user gets septicaemia.
So there is a case to be made for the regulation of drugs, or a synthetic substitute, for registered addicts in order to take the power away from drugs gangs and in order to try to stem the tide of criminal activity committed by desperate users.
But it was never my remit to say whether taking drugs was right or wrong – and making that judgement doesn’t really change anything anyway: taking drugs is just something that some people do. My duty was to stop it entering the country and hunt down those that arranged and participated in the commodity’s smuggling. Drugs gangs invariably were involved in other damaging criminality and the damage tended to spread outwards. The only ones who seemed to benefit were the local luxury-car dealerships where the most successful drug dealers laundered some of their profits by turning up with sports bags full of cash bricks and buying Ferraris and Bentleys outright.
One such lucky lad was a guy we’d been tipped off about by the telephone drugs line that had been set up for members of the public to ring with information. We started following the guy in order to glean some information. He was no slow driver and he made sure our tyres were kept warm whenever we followed him. This meant we had to use fast rotations of the ‘55 car’ (the following car) in order for him not to get suspicious about one car being behind him too long, and also judicious use of our 55 bike, as a motorcycle could follow more easily in traffic and was also less likely to be identified as suspicious.
Our target took us all over and we ended up following him around London and up to Birmingham, Leeds and Liverpool. He really did get around for someone on the dole. He was either a very conscientious job hunter or perhaps someone who we should watch further. When we traced him to his own three-bedroom house, which also had another car – a new convertible BMW – parked outside, we thought that we might be on to a good thing. Even though the pattern of his behaviour was familiar to us as that of someone expecting a delivery soon, our original source of the information about him told us that, as far as they knew, the drugs were not due into the country for another month. So we backed off the intense surveillance and installed lighter, local surveillance around Lon
don until nearer the time of the drugs drop.
The first sign that we should have followed our own gut instinct about the timing of the drugs delivery rather than believe the source’s information came in an unusual way. One day, while we were following the guy as he drove around in his BMW with a mate, he turned off into a Ferrari dealership and didn’t emerge for an hour. When he did come out, he was at the wheel of a brand-new red Ferrari. He roared off into the distance and we knew then that the drug delivery he’d been expecting had obviously already successfully arrived and he’d already sold it on. And this new bright-red toy for himself was his way of ‘washing’ some of the cash.
So, again, repeat after me the mantra of not only law enforcement agencies but also the human race: you win some, you lose some, you fuck some up.
I got another sample of the sweet taste of a good drug bust when an investigation of ours involved us sitting on the King drugs gang for about a month, waiting and observing. Members of the gang would regularly take day-trips to Amsterdam but, when we stopped a couple of them on a routine pull at the airport, they were clean. We had the details of Andrew King, the believed boss, and we had put his house under surveillance for a couple of days. It appeared to us that he must have left his wife as he never went near his house and there seemed to be a new man in his wife’s life. There was a slightly worrying aspect to the case in that one of the criminals on the payroll had a private pilot’s licence. Light aircraft were a pain in the arse: they flew low to avoid radar, they could land almost everywhere and, if they didn’t want to touch down, then the gang could fling their drugs importation out of the door at a predetermined place. We had all this at the back of our minds all the time. I didn’t think for one second that King had employed the guy with the pilot’s licence just because he was an amusing conversationalist.