Anything to Declare? (7 page)

‘It’s really quite simple, sir,’ said Mark levelly. ‘For the last thirty seconds, your Crombie has been making its own way to the exit door. I’m afraid you’re nicked.’

We all swivelled our heads as one and saw that Mark was right – one Crombie going walkabout. It turned out that Mr Apeezy was a monkey smuggler. He had drugged the monkey and then sewn it into the lining of his overcoat for the duration of the flight. Unluckily for him, it had awoken in the airport and – the inside of an overcoat not being its natural habitat – it had very understandably made a bid for freedom.

When we later congratulated Mark on a good job, he just shrugged. ‘It was easy really: as he was coming from the baggage belt, I couldn’t help but notice that his Crombie was having a piss . . .’

I hate you, you hate me – let’s get this over with.

You could sometimes get the idea that the line above summed up the Customs officer and the passenger attitude towards each other. There’s a natural antipathy between the two that goes both ways, bred from the demands of the job. But, when you approach the dreaded blue/red/green declare/nothing-to-declare channels, it’s not so much a gauntlet of hate that you have to run, but a gauntlet of immense suspicion. And if there’s an ‘Us and Them’ situation it is only between Customs as the Us and smugglers as the Them. Officers don’t want to waste their time or yours by stopping and searching someone who is bringing nothing more into the country than the tan-lines from their flip-flops. That just helps the ones that should be searched to get through.

In the 1,500 years of Customs’ existence many strange items of interest have passed into the sphere of Customs’ control. One of the major times for new smuggling legislation was during the Napoleonic Wars. The catalyst behind this golden age of smuggling was ole shorty himself – Napoleon. He identified that, as an island nation, Britain’s economy leaned heavily on import and export tax because of our reliance on tax from a huge list of goods such as booze and tobacco but also such things as playing cards, cloth, lace and anything else you could think of. So, Napoleon cleverly reasoned, if he could flood certain markets with untaxed goods, he could damage the English treasury. I could almost suggest that this was one of the first occasions of direct economic warfare.

The French set up warehouses in their Channel ports to supply the ‘free traders’ with everything they needed, from barrels of booze to playing cards. At the start of the war, the drink issued on British naval ships was brandy (a French-produced spirit). The British government identified the potential supply problems and so replaced the ‘brandy tot’ with rum, which became the sailors’ tipple. It was unpopular to start with but tastes soon changed. Another advantage of switching to rum was that it was produced within the growing British Empire. Kipling, the author and not the cake maker, penned a whole poem on the subject called ‘A Smuggler’s Song’: ‘Five and twenty ponies/Trotting through the dark –/Brandy for the Parson, ‘Baccy for the Clerk/Them that asks no questions isn’t told a lie –/Watch the wall my darling while the Gentlemen go by!’

Since then, it’s been the job of Customs officers to
not
watch the wall as the smugglers go by. And in one of those strange historical eccentricities of British law, ten-oared boats are still illegal in this country, believe it or not. It’s because Napoleon’s shipwrights invented smuggler cutter ships that could turn into the wind and use their ten oars to make their escape. And, at this time in history, Customs and Excise officers were heavily armed and also operated armed revenue cutters. In fact, it was the Excise men that ran the press gangs on behalf of the Navy.

Until recently, many of the prohibitions from these days still existed, such as bringing in foreign prison-made goods, badger-haired shaving brushes or Napoleonic coinage – not that there was really any need for them still to be banned; we weren’t exactly overrun with badger-haired shaving-brush smuggling operations. As far as concealments went, sailors used to weave tobacco into ships’ ropes and bottles of brandy would be hidden in barrels of the ship’s tar. And just to prove that some things never go out of fashion – in both crime and detection – almost 200 years later I would be finding 10 kg of cocaine within 200 yards of climbing rope, and packs of drugs hidden in barrels of bitumen. Funny how the modern smugglers think they are up to something new!

One strange Customs law that still exists is one that I came across on duty when I stopped and searched a perfectly respectable-looking gentleman for no reason other than I had a feeling and, as it happened, the feeling turned out to be right. Though I wasn’t at all expecting to find what I did: when I opened his suitcase I saw that it was completely full of human hair, long strands of it bundled together. Now he wasn’t some kind of strange hair fetishist that was sneaking up behind women and snipping off bits of their hair: he was actually a wig maker. His trade, he said, was with the Jewish community in north London. His problem, though, was that he had attempted to avoid paying tax on the stuff and had tried to make it through the ‘nothing-to-declare’ green channel. But we now had him by a different kind of hair – the short and curlies. The duty and tax on hair is higher than that on gold.

Between Stansted, Gatwick and Heathrow airports, I’d see a wide selection of passengers from all walks of life – and some of those walks were pretty funny (you try walking normally with half a kilo of drugs up your jacksy) – and I also worked with fellow Customs officers who were just as varied. Most of them were perfectly normal, ordinary fellas. But don’t panic, I’ll tell you about the other ones instead.

Terry was a strange one, and how he ever got into the uniform branch I shall never know. Because Terry’s particular affliction was that he couldn’t talk to strangers. Now that’s a little bit of a drawback when your job, essentially, is spending all day long stopping, searching and talking to strangers. I suppose if Terry could have just searched passengers that he
knew
then he would have been OK – but then he wouldn’t have had any friends left!

It wasn’t that he didn’t want to talk to people: it was that he really couldn’t do it. So the ideal position was found for him as the keeper at the airport’s Queen’s Warehouse, which, contrary to popular opinion, was not a storage facility for Elton John’s wardrobe. He did the job very well because all he had to talk to all day was himself, the warehouse boxes and the officers he knew. I liked him for the fact that he made the senior officers see red as he always looked like a complete and utter bag of shit. His uniform was always clean but he flatly refused to iron it . . . flat. His excuse was that he didn’t get paid to iron his uniform, though he did get a tax allowance for cleaning it.

Another officer, jockey-hating Patrick from the south of Ireland, was usually an absolute gentleman in every way. He was only about five foot four yet had nerves of steel. He didn’t panic or back away from danger at all. One day, a massive Swedish bodybuilder threw a steroid strop in the airport over some minor inconvenience and physically lifted his whole baggage trolley – complete with suitcases – up over his head and threatened to drop it on Patrick. It would have tonked little Pat into the ground like a tent peg. But, before we could get around the benches and rugby tackle the big Swede, Patrick had gone into his sweetly smiling routine.

‘Now stop it, yer big focker. If you pulled out your ole fella and it was bigger than mine then I may get a bit worried.
OK
?’

The Swede stopped, cracked up laughing and slowly lowered the trolley down. (We later heard that he went on to become a top contender in the World’s Strongest Man. The Swede, that is, not Patrick. Patrick just went on to
eat
a swede . . . in the canteen.)

During his allocated annual break, Patrick decided to take his wife to Rhodes on a surprise holiday. It was a surprise to us as well as we didn’t even realize that he was married. So we decided to pull a prank on his return. Two weeks later, his flight touched down back in England – and at our airport. Bit of a mistake. Pat had forgotten our golden rule – never fly into the airport at which you also work.

Three of us uniformed officers identified Patrick’s large suitcase behind the scenes of the baggage belt. I picked the lock and the other two emptied all of Pat and his wife’s clothes into a large bag. The clothes were then replaced with a large concrete paving slab, so big that it took all three of us, grunting, to heave the bag back on to the baggage carousel. Then we rushed round and stood at the end of the channels. We could see Patrick and his wife, and he gave us a courteous nod as we attempted to do the professional thing and ignore him. Pat then started doing the Baggage Carousel Unlucky Fucker Look – that is, like everyone else, standing there like a lemon, peering at the belt, wondering why on earth your bag always comes out bloody last. But, when the bags started to appear, it was only then that we noticed there was a problem – another bag,
identical
to Patrick’s, was also on the belt. A senior officer, in on the whole thing, sidled up to me and the eight other uniformed officers who were lined up for the floor show and, without taking his eyes off the belt, he whispered, ‘
Please
tell me that you got the right bag . . .’

Luckily, we had identified it not just by how it looked but also by the name and baggage tag number. Pat looked at the tag of the first one and let it pass; it disappeared around the belt and he waited for the one that he now knew was his to reach him. But, as he started to move to grab it, he was suddenly brushed aside by a very annoyed old lady.

‘Excuse
me,
young man, that’s
mine
!’ She had obviously missed the appearance of the first suitcase and was convinced that this one was hers – and, with the determination and sharp elbows of a jumble-sale veteran (and former rugby player, from the looks of things), she made a grab for it with one hand while fending off Pat with the other. Her vice-like grip on the handle was impressive but the staying power of an eighty-pound slab of concrete meant it was not for moving. So, in quick succession: the lady pulled – the bag stood still – the lady heaved – the bag stood still – the belt moved around – the lady clung on, fell over, gave a little yelp and then got dragged along the shiny floor on her backside, knocking over passengers like bowling pins as she held on tightly for dear life. Pat slowly turned to look at us, eyes wide, smiling, with that
you-cheeky-cheeky-fockers
look on his face. But all he saw was the retreating backs and shaking shoulders of ten black uniforms as we all fled back to the channels, crying with laughter. We could still hear the little yelps and cries for help as we slid away.

Why she didn’t let go of the bag, I’ll never know, but that part of the airport floor around the baggage carousel got a bloody good polish.

An officer whom, unfortunately, we didn’t get to play that trick on was Richard. Even we, his fellow Customs officers, hated him, so God knows what everyone else thought of him. He was the world’s most perfect example of why ‘Richard’ should sometimes be shortened to ‘Dick’. And he was another one that we were surprised to find had a wife, but simply because we couldn’t fathom how he’d got another human being to stand him long enough to make it up the aisle. We thought a stun gun must have been involved.

He arrived at the airport as an experienced senior officer but, from day one, he started making enemies. One of his first official acts was the implementation of the red line in our duty-log signing-in book. The two day shifts started at seven and eight o’clock. At seven o’clock, Richard appeared with a ruler and red pen and proceeded to draw a red line in the book, meaning that any one arriving a minute late would have to sign in under the line. He did the same for the eight o’clock shift. Not a good way to make friends with new colleagues.

He carried on not making friends as if it was a sport. Patrick pulled over a young lad who had arrived from Amsterdam. A baggage search revealed that cigarettes weren’t the only thing that he’d been smoking in the Netherlands. Patrick needed the agreement of a senior officer to carry out a further search. Unfortunately, the senior officer was Richard. Pat explained to him why he wanted the search, and, without a moment’s hesitation, Richard replied, ‘Well, he’s black, search him!’ Now, that wasn’t the type of people we were: we didn’t distrust anyone, we distrusted
everyone –
equally. So Patrick immediately turned on his heel, returned to the young lad and said, ‘Right. Don’t do drugs! Now bugger off!’ He didn’t even search him; it was his way of trying to redress the balance. It didn’t take long for word to get around about Richard’s little outburst. His hate rating increased but he seemed to enjoy it even more.

We did some research and found out that he had a history of being about as popular as a turd in a swimming pool (on his good days, he moved up to being as popular as a fart in a space-suit). He had attempted to join the Investigation Division. The ID was strict when it came to your first six months’ service. If you didn’t shine, you were returned to your original post. Richard started rubbing people up the wrong way from the beginning. But they had their own ways of dealing with his type. He was sent on a solo mission to Dover. His instructions: to identify a white Mini (registration not known) that belonged to a known criminal (name not given) arriving on a ferry (which one not known) from France. Richard’s job was to follow it to its final destination in the UK. Easy job, but what Richard didn’t know was that the operation didn’t exist.

His first white Mini took him into Wales, but when he contacted the senior officer with the address he was told, ‘No, that’s not our man. Back to Dover!’ So he returned. The next white Mini took him to Manchester, and he received the same answer from the senior officer. The third white Mini took him to Newcastle, the fourth to Birmingham and the fifth to Cornwall. He was on the road for a total of six days before it dawned on him that this operation was a ‘sickener’ – a job invented to crack him. It worked; he drove back to London and requested a transfer. Good for ID, bad for us.