by Jon Frost
A Customs high-speed RHIB came out of the darkness of the sea and roared right up the beach (so far that it got stuck for a couple of days); our cutter slewed alongside the yacht and disgorged further officers who jumped aboard like ninja pirates; and a hundred other officers hit the target address, kicking in doors and slamming startled bad guys to the floor, arresting the gang and seizing a huge haul of Colombia’s finest marching powder worth £90,000,000. As we found out a little later, we had just watched the single biggest cocaine importation on British soil, and we had filmed it and given a full running commentary.
But the job wasn’t over yet. We still had to pull out without being seen (even by our own guys), which was easier said than done with Customs and police officers flying in every direction, looking for someone to nick. Adrenaline was high and night-time visibility was low; I didn’t want to be mistaken for a bad guy and coshed to the ground. But as we pulled back along the coastal path we received a worrying radio call. One of the gang was missing and there was a chance that he was going to be on our route out. I fired up the thermal-imaging camera again and off we went. Within 20 metres, I hit a heat source, only a light one, but it was there. Pete approached it as only an ex-commando like him could – knife first. There was a worrying silence. I watched the eerie white-glowing heat-image of him in the night-vision camera, watching to see if there would be any other similar signs of someone waiting to jump out at him.
Eventually, he re-emerged out of the dark carrying a discarded wetsuit that had still been giving off enough body heat for the camera to pick up. We radioed our find to control and then off we went again. After 20 metres, I found another heat source. Off went Pete again into the dark. With no sounds of murder, Pete returned this time with a fuel can, half full. Pete and I had a quick chat and decided to leave the search for discarded evidence to the uniforms. We set off again with Pete leading. All of a sudden, there was a sharp cry of ‘Fuck it!’ and Pete disappeared. This wasn’t a situation for the camera – nothing for it but for me to bring out a torch.
Pete was on his back, swearing like a trooper and holding his shin. He had gone arse over tit after hitting a bloody great outboard motor in the middle of the path. We radioed in the find. I sat next to Pete as he continued to rub his leg. He sighed and said, ‘Let’s get out of here, Jon, before we trip over Shergar’s body and find Lord bloody Lucan on this sodding path.’
The morning was now bright and we were finishing off cleaning our kit and getting it packed away. News of the job quickly broke and it was already all over the airwaves and TV screens by 8 a.m. There were pictures of the house and of the yacht. The gang’s hideout on the island turned out to be a seafront development bought by Tyrrell and the part of Orchard Bay where they had tried to land was the private beach to the development. The news bulletin also featured all the arrests and details of a drugs haul of huge proportions. The news organizations were used and briefed by law enforcement agencies in order, of course, to broadcast our success and to help scare off anyone thinking about trying the same sort of operation. I’d be surprised if the latter part of that worked on anyone planning a big smuggling job; one thing they had in common was that they all thought they never would get caught.
We all headed off to bed, exhausted by expending large amounts of nervous energy as much as by the physical graft of cliff climbing and gear carrying.
In the end, Operation Eyeful netted the then largest UK cocaine haul – almost half a ton of Colombian cocaine – leading to the gang receiving a total of 145 years of jail time, including the twenty-four years given to Julie Paterson, one of the longest jail sentences ever handed down to a woman drug trafficker. Paterson, who was living with Tyrrell in Parham, Antigua, but was from Norfolk, had not only prepared the Blue Hen yacht for sail but she had also briefed the yacht’s crew on the use of navigational equipment and advised them on landing sites. Michael Tyrrell, husband of Paterson and King Cocaine to her Queen, was sentenced to twenty-six years imprisonment. The American member of the ring, Frederick Fillingham, who was already on the run from the US authorities due to his breaking a fifteen-year parole for earlier drug-smuggling convictions, was also caught, convicted and sentenced. He was the one who had recruited the crew and also used his skills to adapt the yacht for carrying the drugs across the Atlantic.
Tyrrell, Paterson and Fillingham had been part of the gang I’d observed on the beach through my night camera; all three were later found on the island, hiding in the grounds of a local holiday complex and where, in the words of a news report, ‘they were arrested by Customs officers in the early hours . . . Assistant Chief Investigation Officer for Customs and Excise, Jim Fitzpatrick, said: “This gang tried to smuggle a huge quantity of cocaine into the UK and have received jail terms that reflect the seriousness.”’
I was later told by the officer who was handcuffed to Tyrrell in the arrest car that, as they drove him away from the scene and on to the Red Funnel ferry, Tyrrell looked out of the window and said to no one in particular, ‘I guess that this is the last time I’ll get to see the ocean.’
The officer’s reply was a grunted: ‘Not unless you take up fucking tunnelling.’
I was to later find out that this record-breaking drug bust was featured in an article on Wikipedia about Michael Tyrrell, which detailed his organization and his eventual arrest during our own Operation Eyeful. Though there was absolutely no mention, I noticed, of my birthday.
That’s the thing with working undercover – all guts, no bloody glory.
Epilogue: Thrills and Spills . . .
Dealing with a wide range of people on a daily basis, as I had done as a Customs officer in uniform and out, certainly revealed to you the truth of the saying, ‘There’s nowt as funny as folk.’ Too bloody right. From men who filled the lining of their overcoats with smuggled live monkeys to those that had ‘BOLLOCKS! GOOD!’ tattooed on their arse, there was little human weirdness you weren’t regularly exposed to. Sometimes I’d felt less like a Customs officer than a black and gold uniformed gatekeeper to a lunatic asylum that was offering free room and board.
When I’d worked at the airports, I’d sometimes thought, what if, as an experiment, we all just gave up this job and abandoned the idea of any border controls at all? Would there be an even bigger conga line than usual at the airport of passengers wanting to take advantage of their new freedom: walking through holding hands with monkeys and with rucksacks full of snakes, cages of squawking parrots, bags of tarantulas; cases of dodgy medicines, pirated pills, illegal prescriptions and poisoned booze; suitcases of heroin, bags of cocaine, cartloads of cannabis; armfuls of machetes, swords, handguns, rifles, semi-automatic weapons, machine guns, grenades, plastic explosives and ostrich eggs?
And the answer is (obviously): yes. Yes, there would. The queue would be around the block and right up the Blackpool Tower, and the Channel Tunnel would be choked to capacity with everything from Russian gangsters to rabid hamsters.
And that was just what we found in the airports.
Going out undercover and on investigations just exposed you to a whole new level of what we might charitably term ‘advantage-taking’. Or what we could also more accurately call hardened professional criminal activity. Times ten.
So spare a thought for the poor old Customs officer. They’re only trying to stop the country becoming overrun with marauding villains leading gangs of chimpanzees covered in tarantulas riding packs of rabid dogs that are so high on speedballs of cocaine that they can’t shoot straight or remember which suitcase full of heroin on the carousel is theirs. Not that this would really matter too much because the more ambitious ones would be driving convoys of lorries full of the stuff through the ports or landing their own airplanes full of it at Gatwick.
And there are those other villains, possibly much worse even than all of that, coming back from Spain wearing flipflops and a sombrero. Talk about threat to society.
So, from working in airport uniform to then progressing to plai
n-clothes Intelligence work and then on to undercover Investigation, it all gave me a real sense of the scale of things – from the smallest offence to the largest assault; from an incident down the road to an operation planned on the other side of the world.
And it also revealed how much of the world wanted to come to our funny, soggy, foggy little island – and how many of our own citizens who left wanted to come back.
Now, almost all of the people that encounter Customs are perfectly fine and they contribute their own little bit to the whole bigger bit we call society. But some of the other ones that we beckon over to our desk with a finger, or have reason to search the boot of their car, or have evidence that leads to a raid on their flat . . . well, let’s just say that sometimes you really do need someone who’s going to say, ‘Hang on, sunshine. I don’t think you really should be bringing that in here.’
And the parade of these people is never-ending. And I knew there were still many more to come in my career. I went on to become an Anti-Corruption Manager and a National Intelligence Co-ordinator in South Africa, as well as working as an investigation and intelligence specialist for SOCA, the Serious Organised Crime Agency. You see, that’s the thing about serious, organized crime – it is very serious and very organized.
(Note: I did actually put in for a transfer to AMCA – the Amusingly Messy Crime Agency – but they couldn’t accept me because I’ve just made it up.)
As in any job, the thing that often got me through were the laughs, or the ability to laugh even in grim situations; the response to the things we saw was often to develop a kind of gallows humour. A good example of this was when we lost one of our own.
In any profession, you lose loved ones or close friends. In our job, it often came out of the blue: sometimes it was in the line of duty and other times it was the duty that did for them. Both in the police and Customs we had a drinking culture, all part, I think, of coping with the things we had to see. I once asked my doctor why he didn’t have a go at me for smoking, and he said that, with a job like mine, smoking was often safer than going to work. I presume he thought the same about the drink. During my time in Intelligence, we often had to ‘liaise’ with our law enforcement cousins. In our case, we would liaise with the airport Special Branch on an almost daily basis. Both ourselves and the Branch had hidden bars in our respective offices and we certainly used them.
Alan was a very well-liked and respected Special Branch officer. He had served overseas and had been in most departments of the police force. He was on the final lap towards retirement and his life in the Branch was now an easier one, and he’d earned it. Regardless of his policing experience, he was a top-class drinker and had been for a number of years. Alan had recently been feeling a bit off colour and, as such, he had visited his local GP. The doc had performed the normal tests and had discovered that Alan still had some blood in his alcohol stream. His wise but unwanted advice was that Alan should cut down on the booze. Alan, a fighter to the last, decided to take the most extreme of measures and immediately stopped drinking, full-stop. Six days later, he was last seen by his wife, in the living room, watching football on TV and drinking a glass of milk. He never made it to bed: his body just shut down from the of shock his sudden abstinence.
As he was a serving officer, the funeral was a full uniform affair. Those of us from Customs who had known and respected Alan joined the ranks of uniformed police officers making their way from the chapel to the graveside. Alan’s coffin was borne by six officers and the Union flag was draped across the lid.
As they passed us, the coffin route took in a small grassy slope, which was still damp with morning dew. One of the bearers slipped slightly on the slope and a deep voice, belonging to Alan’s best friend and fellow officer, boomed out across the mourners, making even Alan’s wife and daughter laugh as he said, ‘Careful now, lads, we don’t want to spill him.’
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the following people for their help with my first attempt at book writing and for my somewhat strange career:
My agent and the most polite gentleman I have ever met, Andrew Lownie of the Andrew Lownie Literary Agency; Charlotte Macdonald and the wonderful staff at Constable and Robinson; Mike Puddicombe for being a good mate in good and bad times; my parents, Pamela and George for always being there when I needed them and sometimes when I didn’t; Marcus Georgio who had the hardest job of all, making my scribbling readable.
Colin, Robin, Dangerous D. and the Reverend G. who made the madness of surveillance seem so fun.
Geoff Yerbury MBE, a master Customs officer, inspiration for a whole career and friend in South Africa.
Steve Paskin, who kept me sane but drunk in Pretoria and Joburg.
Peter Pinch, the best SIO in the business.
And finally . . .
Ann Cadwallader – who dragged me out of madness, always believed in me, wiped up the tears and joined in with the laughter, but most of all . . . says nice things about my cooking. I will always love you.