Anything to Declare? (36 page)

That’s the thing with working undercover – all guts, no bloody glory.

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 plain-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.’

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.