Anything to Declare? (6 page)

The other unpredictable, sometimes nasty things we came across other than the horses were the little devils that rode them – the jockeys. Now, Patrick, our own little Irish short-arse Customs officer, had a pathological hatred of jockeys. Especially those from nearby Newmarket. We never did find out why. But, if it was because of anything like the encounter we were to have with a famous jockey, then it was perfectly understandable. Now, I’ve got nothing against a dwarf who dresses like a jester and spends his working life bouncing up and down on horses, really I haven’t (unlike Patrick – and why
was
that?). But if the guy behaves like an evil little twerp then all bets are off and, even though I’m a six-footer, don’t throw a ladder against me and send a jockey up it to tell me to pick on someone my own size. Some of these guys punch way above their height.

The worst by far was a famous jockey named Leonard (the name has been changed to protect my life savings). He really was – and was well known for being – a total shit. Or, to give him his full title, as we called him, the World’s Shortest, Biggest Bastard. He had his own driver and a very large Mercedes limo that one day we found parked up in our staff-only car park. We approached the driver. He was a really nice bloke and he explained that, if he parked in the expensive short-stay car park, his boss, the millionaire Leonard, made him pay all the charges. In fact, he had to pay all the parking charges at all the race grounds and airports, and Mr Little Big Jockey would never recompense him. Over a couple of crafty fags, he told us more.

He said that his boss, Leonard, made it a rule that any hitch-hiker had to be picked up. Not bad, I thought, maybe I’d misjudged him. But, the driver went on, the hitch-hiker was made to sit in the front, was not spoken to by Leonard and, after driving for a while, the driver would be instructed to head for the next petrol station. The Merc would be filled up and the hitch-hiker then told to pay for the fuel or face the wrath, threats and tantrums of the world-famous jockey – not to mention being kicked out of the car. The driver hated himself for putting up with all this crap and for needing the job, but not as much as we now hated Leonard. More stories followed of his appallingly aggressive behaviour to others. He really was a nasty piece of work. The fact that he was an un-disputedly great jockey in no way excused him being a total arse. It just allowed him to get away with it. Well, we thought, not on our patch, shorty.

Two weeks later, on his way back from a meet in France, Leonard came through Customs. Oh, happy day! With exquisite coincidence, it was Patrick, our own softly spoken, jockey-hating, little Irish bloodhound, who had the pleasure of exacting the revenge. Pat immediately buried himself in Leonard’s suitcase, burrowing in like a mole and throwing clothes and underwear every which way. With his little legs practically kicking out of the case and his head muffled by clothing, we could just about hear Pat’s gentle Irish lilt saying, ‘No, no, nooo . . . can’t find it . . . nope. . . seems
not
to be here!’

Leonard, twitching with outrage and embarrassment, launched into a foul-mouthed tirade at Pat, but our Pat simply carried on with the search, more clothes flying out of the case as though it was being ransacked by a hungry badger. Leonard finally snapped, ‘Don’t you know who the fuck I am?! I’m Leonard
Pinner
!’

At this, Pat stopped dead, looked down at the bag and the clothes, which were now spread all over the floor and the examination bench, looked back up at Leonard and smiled enigmatically. Then he turned, walked over to our office, whose door was open, and shouted in, ‘Has anyone here heard of some jockey shithead by der name o’ Leonard
Pinnenr
?’

He was greeted by howls of laughter from all the staff within the office and cheers and applause from passengers without.

Pat walked calmly back to the bench.

‘I’m terribly sorry, Mr Pinner, der answer is “No”!’ And with that he disappeared back into the suitcase. Then, with a nice piece of sleight of hand, Pat re-emerged from the bag with a loud ‘Ah ha!’ and held aloft an envelope in his hand. We all now appeared from the office and, with the passengers, made a sizable audience. We genuinely didn’t know what ole Pat was planning here. Even Leonard stopped in the middle of his stream of verbal abuse.

Pat ripped open the envelope and from inside produced a sheet of folded A4 paper. We all looked at each other. He unfolded the sheet and on it, for all to see, were large letters spelling ‘I AM LEONARD PINNER AND I REALLY AM A SHITHEAD!’ That was for all the ‘little’ guys who had for many years been shat on by one of the world’s shortest, biggest bastards.

We left Leonard to pack his own bag and scurry away. Not one of his best performances. You could say he fell at the first.

Sometimes animals even attempted to enter the country of their own volition, without human help. An Omega Air flight from Nigeria was a good example. Even though the flight was from Nigeria – one of the number-one target countries in the world because of the amount of illegal seizures – not many officers wanted to enter the hell that was this African aircraft’s cargo flight hold. Many of us would quite happily wait until the aircraft had unloaded before going anywhere near it. It was on such an occasion that I sat in the boarding car and watched an Omega aircraft being emptied. But about halfway through the unloading we heard a scream from the interior of the craft and two cargo men came barrelling out the rear of the Hercules aeroplane. I quickly stood up and stopped one of them to ask what was up.

‘
Fucking
enormous rat, Jon, is what’s up,’ he said. At first, I swear, I thought it was a small dog.’ Apparently, this ‘king of rats’ had actually attempted to attack them as they searched the hold.

Within minutes, the whole aircraft had been abandoned, even the Nigerian crew quickly bailed out. The airport police were notified, as were a couple of chaps from the Environmental Agency. They all arrived minutes later in a flurry of flashing blue lights and screaming sirens, which I thought was a bit over the top, but the rat must have been pretty impressed. So here was the situation: we had an abandoned Nigerian cargo Hercules aircraft with one very angry resident rat, six police officers (two of which, believe it or not, were armed with Heckler & Koch MP5 automatic rifles), two environmental health officers (who didn’t want to get out of the car) and little ole me. So we had the police with their Kochs out and health officers who wouldn’t even
get
out.

There was an emergency runway meeting in which we all put forward potential solutions. The armed police decided on the initial action to take place. Their idea was a simple but effective one, I thought: to blow the rat into kebabs with the aid of their rifles. And it did seem a shame not to make use of them. So they duly cocked their weapons and strode purposefully towards the rear ramp of the plane. But I suddenly realized what the now obvious error was with this plan; so I ran after them and managed to stop them before they entered the plane’s hold. I explained that firing live ammunition within the confines of a high-altitude aircraft was perhaps not the smartest idea that had ever been had – the chance of an unlucky ricochet, for one thing, was too great, as was the possibility of causing some unknown damage to the aircraft. This seemed to piss them off somewhat. ‘OK, smart arse,’ one of them said, ‘you come up with a better idea!’

I thought for a second and then walked over to the police Land Rover, reached in and took a large spade from inside. Trying not to look too afraid – which would have been easier carrying one of their guns rather than a police-issue garden implement – I disappeared into the rear of the Hercules. Everything got very dark, very quickly. I waited for my eyes to adjust. By following the sound of it, I quite quickly found it – it was what the African crew would have called a ‘bush cutter’ but what one of us had already quite accurately described as a fucking enormous rat. It was hiding behind two large cargo pallets. I took a deep breath, tried not to gag on the disgusting stench in there, and luckily managed to hit it with the first swing of the spade. I don’t know if rats can get into heaven but this one would’ve had to knock twice because the spade had split it in two.

It was with a feeling of small victory that I walked back down the ramp into the sunlight and out to the tarmac and passed the shovel, with the last remains of The Beast of Flight OA-172 on the scoop, back to the police officers. They turned a little green at the sight of it, which, I have to admit, was understandable. The officers looked at each other, then the spade, then me. One of them said I was a mad dog for going in the plane like that – and the nickname stuck: Mad Dog was what I had to live with for quite a while.

Animals (and their riders) weren’t always there just to give us trouble. Sometimes we actually used them in our duty. Drugs dogs, for example, were a vital tool. The two we had at the airport were both legendary – Finn and the aforementioned Arthur. Finn looked like a giant, mean poodle but was actually an Irish water spaniel and was as tough as a gypsy bare-knuckle fighter. He also had a smell that could KO you in the first round; true to his breed’s name, he loved water, any water, no matter how filthy, and took to flinging himself in it whenever he could. And, if it wasn’t water, then it would be shit that he was rolling himself around in or the rotting carcass of a dead animal. What made it more unbearable was that over the years his handler, John, had become immune to the smell, so he’d appear for duty with slavering, stinking Finn and wonder why we all jumped out the windows.

Arthur, on the other hand, was . . . worse. He was a German short-haired pointer with a large snout and a docked tail that, for some reason, was bald and pink, so it just looked like an erect, waggling penis. He also had his breed’s trait for ‘scenting’, meaning that every night Arthur would take a dump in his kennel, then take his beanbag bed in his mouth and wipe it around all the walls, before falling contentedly to sleep. His poor handler had to hose it out very day, with Arthur sat behind him with a kind of dopey, doggy smile on his face.

Arthur had a great nose attached to very large jaws full of very large and sharp teeth. He’d started his life as an RAF explosives dog until they discovered that he had Jaws of Death and would rip open a suitcase with one bite, snap up the offending target item and then shake the crap out of it – not good in an explosive-seeking situation as both dog and handler could quickly end up as a mixed kebab. So he was put on the doggy transfer list – or, as we liked to think of it, a promotion – and moved to HM Customs, where I had the pleasure of watching him rip open suitcases with a single, savage bite. I even got to see those big teeth closer than I ever would have really liked.

One summer afternoon, I was behind the baggage hall waiting for the Jamaica flight bags to arrive. Arthur and his handler Mickey soon appeared as this flight was a good hit for cocaine and cannabis. Mick pointed to some Paris bags that had just arrived. ‘Do you mind if I warm Arthur up on those bags before the Jamaica flight arrives?’

‘Go ahead,’ I said – watching a drugs dog do its stuff is amazing, and they didn’t come any better or bigger than Arthur.

‘OK. And can you pop this in your pocket while I go get the beast out of the van?’ he said and handed me one of the dog’s training aids, a small plastic tube containing a rag scented with cannabis. I put it into my pocket and wandered over to the belt as the Jamaica bags started to trundle through. As I watched all the bags being lined up for Arthur’s sniff test, I saw Mickey walking over with a strange smile on his face. ‘Whatever you do,’ he said, ‘don’t make any fast movements.’

I looked down and saw Arthur, jaws open, inches away from my crotch. Mickey grabbed him just as the dog was about to lunge at my lunchbox and make a messy meal out of it. Even from the other side of the loading bay, he had caught a whiff of the training aid and he was determined to get to it whether my balls were in the way or not.

In the end, it was not Arthur who got them both into trouble but Mickey. One day, he boarded a Korean Airlines jumbo jet with the dog and jokingly announced that the takeaway they’d ordered had arrived. Oops.

We had more than a few good officers at the airport. Mark was a cracking officer. He seemed naturally to have as strong a nose for smuggled gear as either Finn or Arthur. He had been in uniform for twenty years and he took me under his gold-braided wing. He was a real officer’s officer with more airport drugs seizures than he could remember and a stack of commendations up to his chin.

Once when a flight from Ghana arrived, Mark decided to give it his once-over. Many people think that we have radar for smugglers, and in some cases it’s true (and it serves us well to have people think that), but Mark genuinely did have sensitively twitching and very accurate antennae. So, while most of us had pulled passengers aside who looked good for carrying drugs, I noticed that Mark had pulled a Ghanaian businessman in a suit with an attaché case and Crombie overcoat. Mark had a short chat with him and the passenger placed his case on the examination bench. I was right next to them, so I could hear the exchange.

‘So, Mr Apeezy,’ Mark smiled, ‘you have nothing to declare today? You’re not smuggling anything?’

Mr Apeezy was quite loud, but friendly, in his denial. ‘No, no, no, sir. I
never
smuggle. It is against my God.’

I saw Mark smile his lopsided smile and his brows drawbridge in sympathy, as if to say, ‘I
see
.’ We all knew what this meant: another Mark seizure about to be made. But what could it be? He hadn’t even opened the suitcase yet. Mark sighed with the kind of weary resignation that comes from over twenty years of having to politely listen to people lying through their teeth to you.

‘Mr Apeezy, I am arresting you for the attempted importation of what I assume is . . .’ Mark raised an eyebrow and cocked his head ‘. . . a
monkey
of some kind?’

Mr Apeezy’s demeanour changed rapidly and he suddenly screamed, ‘But how do you know this?’