Anything to Declare? (30 page)

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!’

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.

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.