Anything to Declare? (14 page)

Now, if we look at the smuggling routes from a smuggler’s point of view, what would we find? Well, at one point in Bali airport you would see a sign before Customs that said ‘Death Penalty for those who carry drugs to Bali’; at Jakarta airport, Indonesia, there was a huge sign in bright orange that said ‘Death Penalty for drugs traffickers’; in Singapore airport, a sign read ‘Warning! DEATH for drugs traffickers under Singapore law’; and in the UK we had ‘Drugs are illegal, talking about them isn’t. So talk to Frank’. I’m not saying we should have a return to capital punishment, but it isn’t difficult to see which countries you would avoid and which you would favour if you were a smuggler. For that reason, British Customs is a lot busier than Bali’s.

The African countries that served as starting points for smugglers did, however, have one apparent power that was lacking in most of the rest of the world – as I was about to find out. I stood and watched as a colleague opened the suitcase of a gentleman from Ghana. Inside there was a single unwashed and unironed shirt spread over the contents of the case. That was it. The officer removed the shirt and revealed that the whole bag was packed solid with herbal cannabis. It was one of the most blatant and badly disguised attempted smuggles we’d ever seen. The gentleman just stood there, smiling.

‘Well?’ asked the officer. ‘What’s all this here?’

He smiled back. ‘Nothing!’

The officer looked down at the big blocks of dope. ‘It doesn’t look like nothing.’

‘It is
nothing.
There is nothing there.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, really.
Nothing.’

‘Well, sunshine, I hate to burst your bubble but it certainly doesn’t look like nothing to me. What do
you
think it is?’

The gentleman’s smile didn’t waver. ‘Oh, you see nothing.’

‘I think I
do
see something.’

‘No. It is the juju!’

‘Right, that’s it, son!’ said the officer, his patience snapping. And with that the gentleman was promptly marched straight into a nice cold cell (tea optional).

It was my first encounter with the ‘juju’, but it wasn’t to be the last. And some of the cover stories that were concocted were also stunning. I stopped a Nigerian man who was very sure of himself. Which is another telltale sign – over-compensating confidence. He had a cash-paid ticket (telltale sign no. 2) and his name had popped up on our computer system as worthy of a closer look. As we talked at my search bench, he told me that he was coming to see the big football match. I was all ears as it happened to be mid-July and off season.

‘So, tell me, who have you come to watch then?’

‘I am here to see the famous Manchester Town . . .’

‘Oh, them.’

‘. . . play at Old Trafalgar stadium.’

‘I see. Interesting.’

Before he could tell me the team manager was Sir Alex Fungal-bum and his favourite player was David Pecker, I started searching his baggage. It was clean, but he also had a video camera with three extra batteries. They were all carrying a charge but two of them were strikingly lighter than the other. I whipped out my faithful lock-knife and started cutting into one of the lighter batteries. At this, the passenger started swearing at me and cursing me with what was clearly the fiercest language in his arsenal (before they moved from Highbury).

The battery case popped open and there inside was the heroin, neatly packed and quite solid. Once this was removed you could see that a smaller battery had been wired in, to give the appearance that it carried a charge. Very clever. Very sly. Very silly.

We soon learned, as officers, what this ‘juju’ actually was. Or what it purported to be. Apparently, at least in our experience of it, juju was a terrible spell that was purchased from the tribal witch doctor and that was supposed to make suspicious officials like me unable to see whatever contraband was being smuggled in the case.

We learned that a whole trade, over many parts of Africa, had set itself up to feed the drug smugglers the lie that the magic spells – which, of course, had to be paid for – would protect them from the evil powers of the Customs officer. At the bottom of the scale was the spell that would see them safely through the green channel without being stopped. Or, for a bit more money, you could have your drugs blessed so that they were supposedly invisible to a European’s eyes. There were hundreds of these juju spells. The traffickers that got caught ended up in prison for fifteen years so perhaps word never got back that the spell didn’t work. Or, on the other hand, those that successfully got through spread the word back at home that the spells were effective and that, indeed, juju made us blind.

We decided, between ourselves, that if the large quantities of beer, cider, whisky and absinthe that Customs officers consumed out-of-hours hadn’t yet made us blind then no voodoo spell on earth would do it either.

Brits can be a very strange bunch when it comes to travelling abroad. We love our cups of tea and warm beer. If things aren’t the same as they are at home (which we’ve come on holiday to get away from), then we talk about complaining . . . but never do. I’m sure that there is a written rule somewhere that says, ‘When two or more Brits are in a foreign country, they shall gather together.’ And one strange thing that was also common and that we used to see on a regular basis was the crap that British holidaymakers returned home with. I think it was partly a desire to spend their last euros on whatever could be found at the nearest souvenir shop and partly the result of sun-stroked brains still waterlogged with cheap beer.

A popular item at one time was the large stuffed souvenir camel from North Africa, often from Egypt. Nothing says you’ve had a good holiday like a stuffed straw animal. And they were as popular with drug smugglers as with travellers. They were also great for the kids – until, that is, you happened to open one. I’ll never forget the first one I opened in order to search it in case it was being used as a miniature Trojan . . . camel. With my trusty old lock-knife, I turned into a HMRC veterinary surgeon and split the camel’s belly open with one slice. I was certainly surprised by what I found, but not in the way I’d expected: the insides of the camel were padded out with what looked like dirty, bloodied, used hospital bandages. And that’s exactly what they were. Apparently, for years these items had been filled with the cheapest things the makers could get their hands on, and this was often local waste. Every camel that I dissected from then on was stuffed with the same thing, bandages, usually from the local hospital and mainly used and unwashed.

From the same area of the holiday globe would come the Fez hat. Tommy Cooper had a lot to answer for. But it did make our job very easy when it came to officers playing a diverting game of Spot the Twat in the incoming holiday parties. The bright-red upstanding fez did show up very well in the white environment of the baggage hall.

Carpets, of course, were very popular from Turkey. But unless you were a carpet expert (and Customs had to be) chances were that as a holidaying punter you would be flogged a third-rate bit of rag for a nice large amount of money. If you did happen to know what you were looking for you could haggle the seller down to a good price. But still the carpet would have to be declared, in the red channel, because it would always be way over the ‘other goods’ allowance. The best Turkish businessmen, though, recognized that the Brits and their money are easily parted if they can avoid paying tax, so the carpet salesmen would offer holidaymakers a second or even third receipt proving that they had only spent a few quid on a double knotted silk carpet instead of the £800 that it really did cost.

We could spot a real, kosher Turkish piece in an instant and the traveller would be pulled over for ‘the chat’ and invited to land their flying carpet on our inspection bench. Some of the faked credit card receipts produced were so good that they were almost believable, as were the travellers’ stories of how they had beaten the trader down in price. Now, because we, as officers, had to learn about anything and everything that might pass before us, we knew that the only way to get a top-notch piece of weaving like that so cheaply wasn’t to beat the seller down on price but to beat him up with a cricket bat. Which, come to think of it, is a pretty good way of bartering . . . and also of getting yourself buried in a Turkish prison for a few years. And anyone who’s seen the film
Midnight Express
knows that is not a good idea. Their prisons make our prisons look like Sunday school missions.

Another thing not in the Brit travellers’ favour is that we will never be able to out-haggle the haggle masters; just as we are not natural complainers (even though we’re bloody good moaners), Brits abroad are also not very good hagglers. Another strange British habit – but one that goes in Customs’ favour – is that we appear to never, ever destroy the original receipt. I don’t know if that’s a consequence of everyone shopping at Marks & Spencer for most of their lives and getting used to the idea that it’s OK to take something back after five years
as long as they’ve got the receipt.
But for us Customs officers, it was just a matter of finding it. Usually a simple baggage search would suffice but, in some situations, a full body search had to be carried out.

My favourite technique was pure mental torture backed up by mean authority. With experience, I could usually estimate a carpet price to the nearest £100 but in this I was just an amateur: some officers could get it within £5. So I would have a punter standing in front of me, swearing blue murder that he only paid £50 for a £800 carpet. Bring forth the guillotine: ‘The estimation of price for revenue purposes.’ I would explain that I disagreed with the proffered receipt and that the carpet was to be detained and would undergo professional, trade pricing, from which I would calculate the evaded duty and VAT. After letting the idea of professional pricing and having the carpet locked away for three months sink in, you would hit them with the ‘Or I can . . .’ option. I would say those three words and pause, and the passenger’s eyes would widen slightly . . . ‘Or I can estimate it myself and work out the duty and tax from what I believe it’s worth.’ This was the clincher. You could almost feel the sigh of relief exhaled at you. Until, that is, I estimated the carpet’s true worth of £800 for tax purposes – and then a sharp intake of breath from the punter would suck the sigh of relief right back out of your face. Ten seconds of quiet swearing later and the correct receipt would magically appear like a genie from a rubbed bottle. Well, come on, we had to have
some
twisted fun when we were working the channels all day!

And this technique worked every time, and not just on Turkish flying carpets but also on imported golf clubs, designer watches, clothes and jewellery of every metal and gem.

The most regrettable things that people brought back always fell under the heading that covered a multitude of holiday sins, namely ‘I Was Drunk at the Time’ (see also: misspelt tattoos on arse; cracked skull from moped crash; sex with travel rep; chlamydia). But my favourite article import was by a young man who appeared in the red channel and honestly declared a very old and tatty copy of
Great Expectations
by Charles Dickens. He said he’d been pissed when he paid £550 for it in an antique book shop in Boston but it was, he said, a very special item as it had been signed by the author himself. I opened up the cover and there was the very valuable signature in all its glory – ‘Charles Dickens’. I had a closer look at it and then passed it over to my senior officer who also studied it carefully before he passed it back to the passenger.

‘On your way, lad,’ I said, and the young man looked surprised and bemused.

‘But what about the VAT?’ he asked.

I thought the news might best be delivered with a straight face. ‘Well, if I were you, mate, I’d try to stay sober the next time you buy an antique book. Because I don’t think Charles Dickens ever signed his name in ballpoint pen.’

An inbound Orlando flight also attracted another buyer whose judgement may well have been clouded by the fog of inebriation. In his travel bag I found a large stuffed cobra coiled up in the folded shirts (it would have been one hell of a surprise to bag thieves if it had been alive). At least, the passenger
thought
it was a cobra. It was, in fact, the worst stuffed snake that any of us had ever seen. It had one eye (the other having fallen off in the bag), one fang (the other one never found) and a large fist-sized lump halfway down its body. On top of this the snake’s corpse was sloughing, that is, shedding its skin. The guy had basically just bought himself a very expensive and tatty draught excluder. That smelled.

Then there were the Mickey Mouse goods – literally. The American tourist version of the Egyptian fez was the Walt Disney store Mickey Mouse ears. These were like a beacon to a baggage officer. And they were very helpfully worn by passengers as they came off the plane. Officers knew how much they cost and knew that the families’ ‘other goods’ allowance would be taken up by the cost of the ears so anything else that they had purchased would be fully taxable. It was like wearing a numbered pound sign on your head.

It was, of course, at the discretion of individual officers whether or not they pursued this matter of adults wearing big black plastic cartoon mouse ears, dependent, often, on how bored or how crappy a day the officer had endured. Contributing circumstances might apply, as they say. So, if, for example, a Customs officer had just found out his wife was shagging someone called Donald, then a Mickey Mouse-eared passenger was also likely to get fucked.

The other goods that everyone else more commonly referred to as ‘Mickey Mouse’ were, of course, all the fake, counterfeit or ‘hooky’ items that we used to find and process. For many years, the UK had very stringent rules on these goods and absolutely tons of counterfeit clothes, watches, perfumes, handbags, designer goods and so on would be destroyed every few months. I was always a bit fifty-fifty on the reasons for detention or seizure of the goods. Sometimes the counterfeit items would be a serious risk to the public, such as – from the lower end of the scale – whisky made from industrial alcohol that may blind people or give them irreparable liver damage, right up to the completely insane knock-off items such as aircraft spares – which may, if they failed, wipe out a few hundred people.