Everyone, as they say, has to start somewhere. My starting place in Customs was at Stansted Airport on the ‘old’ side of the runway, that is, on the other side of the runway to the new high-tech ‘greenhouse’ terminal designed by Norman Foster at a cost of £100 million. What would become known as the old Stansted (but which was at the time new to me) was a pretty simple creation from the 1970s with single-storey buildings and Portakabins. The passengers, believe it or not, actually had to walk from the plane to the terminal. And the staff canteen was really no more than a glorified prefab Nissen hut from the time when Stansted was in the hands of the 8th Air Force of the USAAF (United States Army Air Force) during the Second World War. From looking at the regular canteen menu, I think they left some of their food behind as well.
But, having already served in the regular Army, I was used to food that wasn’t exactly haute cuisine. After I had left the regulars, I’d joined the Territorial Army, which also allowed me to return to college in Cambridge. Near exam time, I was on TA duty in the officer’s mess of the Royal Anglians when I’d been approached by an ageing captain who was a little drunk. He was apparently worried that I was heading for the dole in the next couple of weeks and informed me that Customs at Stansted Airport was looking for bench officers. For some reason, even though I’d never considered it before, the idea immediately grabbed me. And I wrote and posted a letter of interest within the next twenty-four hours.
As new recruits, our training consisted of three intensive months: first month, we were at our home airport of Stansted and we covered all the basics: law, rules and regulations (you needed to know the different Customs Acts of Parliament inside out), spotting potential targets, etc. Month two was spent on a residential training course, in my case held at a hotel in Eastbourne, away from our station, and here officers from all over the country were brought together for role-play training, advanced training in interviews and paperwork (notebooks and witness statements), training in passenger stops and advanced lessons based on the first month’s teaching. Our third month was at a different port or airport – Gatwick was my temporary posting – to the one where we were mentored all the time. Then a probation period continued for nine more months at the home station where we were assessed on how we carried out our duties with any cock-ups noted – strip searching the Queen, letting through a live monkey disguised as a hairy child, detaining someone for being in possession of a concealed banana . . . that kind of thing.
Our exams were an ongoing thing, structured very much like the military – explanation, demonstration, imitation, test. There was no computer-based training. In fact, we only had one computer and that was a secure Customs and Excise Departmental Reference & Information Computer (CEDRIC) terminal in the Intelligence office.
The failure rate was low for preventive training Customs officers because, although the uniform service was an attractive option to many people, when they discovered the hours and the exacting work required, most dropped out even before their training started. On top of this, the interview stage we’d been through to get there was tough. You had to show you had the right stuff to progress any further.
Like Judge Dredd, we had to know the laws inside out and back to front. I knew that, when I was operational, I wouldn’t get time to sit and flick through the law books. The important front-line laws were: the Customs and Excise Management Act (CEMA, which was our bible), the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE), the VAT Act, the Customs Consolidation Act 1876, the Misuse of Drugs Act, the Customs and Excise Tariff, the Firearms Act, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), the Counterfeit Act and the Misdescription of Goods Act amongst others. So you can see that my bedtime reading at this time wasn’t exactly a barrel of laughs. There aren’t many chuckles to be had in the VAT Act.
The training was hard and intense and we were expected to learn quickly. There is a reason for this: HMCE was regarded as the best Customs service in the world. I trained with all sorts, from the mad and the bad to the whip-smart and disciplined – drawn from all walks of life for all kinds of reasons. The training hammers us all into shape and then nails us into a stiff black (though officially ‘Customs Blue’) uniform with bright gold braid and scary peaked cap (ominous X-ray stare, officer’s own).
After the first month’s book and theory training, my tutor, Mick, decided to let me loose to have a go on the general public, just to see if I had what it takes. Mick was a very experienced, long-in-the-tooth former Excise officer who had moved over to Customs. He knew that all the theory in the world won’t tell you whether or not you’re ready for harsh reality – at some point, you’ve got to get stuck in and hit ‘the channels’ (as we called the red/green declare/nothing-to-declare exits). As I walked in uniform down the shining concourse of a London airport for the first time, the polished floor reflecting the strip lights above, I knew that I’d found the right job and the right place to be. I was now officially a HMCE Airport Preventive Officer (APO) working the bench (search table) on incoming channels and airplane searches at Stansted Airport.
On this particular day, an Amsterdam flight had just landed and so I positioned myself behind a bench and tried to look like I knew what I was doing, helped by the fact I was wearing my evil-looking HMCE-issue cap with its white cover and steep shiny black peak and my black APO uniform decorated with gold braid – the passengers didn’t know that single gold band on my sleeve meant I was only a newly appointed APO. (They probably also didn’t know that the historical reason why the gold braid doesn’t go all around the arm on a Customs officer uniform is because we donated the inside half of the braid to the military in the First World War.)
I stood there watching everyone file past knowing that, like when it comes to spiders, they’re more afraid of you than you are of them. I remembered from my training that they said that spotting potential targets is like trying to find Willy Wonka’s Golden Ticket. Although the training gave us guidelines in the area, in the end it quite often came down to experience. But, until you got that experience, you needed something to go on, so it was broken down into categories of suspicion:
a) Paperwork: Passports that showed trips to drug-source countries; flight tickets paid in cash; and diaries (some people are actually stupid enough to write down everything that they have been up to, including the illegal acts).
b) Dress: Are they wearing the right type of dress for the place from which they have just arrived? For example, wearing a business suit on a package flight from Ibiza is going to stand out. People mistakenly think that simply looking smart is enough to avoid suspicion. But it is better to look scruffily right than too smartly wrong.
c) Drug paraphernalia: Cannabis T-shirts, golden razorblade necklaces, etc. seem almost too obvious – but they aren’t.
d) General appearance: Many drugs users are employed as mules because they are cheap and can be paid in the product that they are smuggling, so telltale signs of a user are often the signs of a carrier.
e) Nervousness: Again, this seems obvious but it is more difficult to read because it is only a certain kind of nervousness that rings our alarm bells; mostly we expect people to be a little bit nervous when stopped by Customs.
f) Amsterdam: Just because it’s Amsterdam. Nuff said.
On top of this, we would be supplied by our Intelligence teams with what we called ‘Trend Alerts’, that is, specific areas of suspicion that occurred during certain times and for certain reasons. For example, as I was beginning my training, there was a fashion for smuggling gangs to give British pensioners free holidays to Spain – and all the little grey-haired old ladies and gentlemen had to do in return was to bring back a package. It was based on the understandable idea that little old ladies seem more trustworthy. Unless, of course, you’re a big, bad Customs officer who wouldn’t trust a nun on a crutch.
Sometimes I knew that passengers made things easier for you by being . . . well, let’s not beat around the bush . . . by being idiots. T-shirts with a big cannabis leaf on the front tended to get noticed, as did ones with ‘Free The Weed’ written across them. No sign is too obvious, so don’t think that these passengers got a pass on the basis that you wouldn’t wear a cannabis leaf T-shirt and still have a travel bag full of weed. Unsurprisingly, often the two went together. So walking through Customs in that kind of attire meant that you may as well have done it with your pants already around your ankles – it would have certainly saved time.
Contents of baggage also gave away massive clues, and clues so obvious you would think the passenger would see it themselves. Often they didn’t. So packets of Jumbo Rizlas with some of the cardboard missing (torn off to make a homemade filter – a roach) on someone coming back from Amsterdam was enough to earn them a pull on the grounds of stupidity alone. And burnt spoons in the luggage may have been taken out, but the track marks up the arms could not be hidden – both obvious signs of heroin use. But one of the favourite giveaways was photographs showing the traveller toking on a big spliff.
Unfortunately, none of these obvious signs were present and none of the usual alarm bells were being rung by the passengers off the Amsterdam flight, so, on the basis that I had to stop someone, I eventually motioned to a young Dutchman to come over to me so I could conduct my first ever search. The passenger was a chap called Van der Mons who, it turned out, was a glasshouse erector working in Lincolnshire. Which was sort of appropriate as the Dutch were among the first to heat larger greenhouses, using charcoal braziers – and we all know what is often grown in greenhouses in Holland.
I rummaged through his bag as if every single item hid a terrible secret – remote control exploding underpants? Socks impregnated with heroin (or was that just skin flakes)? Comb that doubled up as a flick-knife? Well, I didn’t know; during training it was drilled into us to trust no one, be suspicious of everyone and search everything. What I found was an excess amount of tobacco and a telltale packet of Jumbo Rizla. With Mr Van der Mons’s passport in hand, I wandered over to Mick and told him what I had found.
‘So then,’ he said, ‘do you want an SOP?’
That was Search of Person. I didn’t really know: did I really want to look up a stranger’s arse this early in my career? But I knew that I did want a good result so . . . in for a penny. Mick took me over to the senior officer. By the book, I had to officially request an SOP, giving my reasons. This I did, and Mick and I escorted our Dutchman into a search room.
Now, I’m not a lover of the naked male form – I don’t even like my own – but I didn’t know then that over the next few years I was to see more naked men than the choreographer of the Chippendales. In the case of Mr Van der Mons, we politely asked him if he would strip down and Mick asked him to lift his bollocks.
‘Boll-locks? Boll-locks? What are “boll-locks”?’ he said, laughing.
‘Er . . . them things,’ said Mick, pointing to our Dutchman’s testicles.
He happily complied, laughing all the time and occasionally shouting out, ‘Bollocks! Good! I like! Bollocks. Ha!’
We found about 9 grams of cannabis resin . . . but in his trainers, under the tongue – so all along all we’d needed to do was ask his shoes to open up and say ‘argh’.
He was fined and sent on his way and, as for me, well I was the golden boy for having got a successful ‘find’ on my first pull – albeit a small find and albeit more by luck than judgement. Though, having said that, often on certain flights from Amsterdam, it would sometimes have been difficult not to pick someone who was carrying.
After this time on practical experience, I left the airport to join my friend and fellow trainee, Brian, and resume my uniform training until I was ready to hit the channels full time.
By the time Brian and I were at stage three of training a few months later, we were at Gatwick Airport and about to learn that there was truth in the old saying that there was more than one way to skin a cat . . . and smuggle a cat . . . and hide a cat in your luggage . . . and smuggle drugs in a cat, etc. You could also say that, if you worked at an airport long enough (or, if you were unlucky, even for just one day), you would eventually see everything. Twice.
So on a Monday morning, in summer, Brian and I entered the fray at Gatwick. There happened to be airport strikes all over Europe, so, on the way to our new office, we had to negotiate the large maze of bodies of all the delayed, sleeping passengers, trying to literally not step on anyone’s toes . . . or fingers.
We had, it turned out, arrived at work half-an-hour after the arrival of a flight from America’s West Coast and the passengers were just starting to wander through the channels after picking up their luggage from the ring of hell (i.e. baggage carousel), where it had been very carefully sorted by the airport’s bag smashers (i.e. highly trained luggage handling personnel).
As we were being welcomed and briefed by the duty senior officer, I couldn’t help but notice that Brian was staring hard over the officer’s shoulder. I followed his gaze and there, standing at one of the exam desks, being ‘chatted to’ by one of our boys, was a vision of absolute loveliness: six foot two, long blonde hair, even longer legs, stiletto shoes and silk stockings with a seam running all the way up the back towards a short, figure-hugging silver lamé dress. A few seconds drifted by and the senior officer eventually shut up and turned around to see what had drawn our eyes. We remained at attention for a few seconds . . . until the passenger turned around to pick up her bag and we saw that she had a big, black, hairy walrus moustache; and, now that we looked closer, enormous hands and a large, bobbing Adam’s apple.
Our senior duty officer smiled broadly and turned back to address us: ‘I guess the San Francisco flight is in then. Welcome to Gatwick, boys.’
We soon got into the swing of things. I bagged a couple of small drugs jobs and Brian was spending his time sitting on a stuffer. That isn’t as much fun as it sounds, by the way: ‘swallowers’ were the mules (smugglers) who swallowed their drugs packages and ‘stuffers’ . . . well, you can probably guess where they put theirs. With both swallowers and stuffers, it becomes a waiting game – that is, waiting for nature to take its course and the hidden contraband to come out.
And that’s one thing they didn’t put on the recruitment poster – ‘Join Customs! Watch People Crap!’ You know how they say ‘shit happens’? Well it’s true, it does, and, when it did, we had to sift through it looking for drug-filled condoms by hand.
A week later, we were not only still tiptoeing over abandoned passengers again but we also had to fend off the advances of some religious sect’s followers who had invaded the airport terminal and wanted to give us flowers and bless our aura-something. Brian, who was nearly twenty years older than me and an ex-hippy, said, ‘Blimey! The sixties have reappeared overnight – I feel like I’m having some kind of strange flashback.’ And then he went off to see if anything interesting had come out of his latest stuffer’s . . . aura.
The airport staff and security were both in a flustered state about the religious sect invasion; even our lot – a bunch of usually unflappable Customs officers – were moved to lift an interested eyebrow at the goings-on. We got into our offices and were then dragged back out and into a team meeting that was being held by a very senior officer and some bloke from the Foreign Office. It appeared that within the hour some religious guru was arriving from India with about a hundred of his followers. Add that to the followers already in the airport and we had quite an impromptu religious festival on our hands. The briefing stated that we were to perform our normal duties as far as the arriving followers were concerned but it might be diplomatic to avoid the Big Guru. We didn’t like this at first as it went against our professional nature and natural instinct to pull someone, especially if they expected special treatment; but then we were told that his hold bags on the plane would be scanned and searched, that he had no hand luggage and that he would be wearing not a lot more than a yellow sheet. So it would be pretty unlikely for him to get anything through.
Sat at the back of the meeting with his arms crossed like pirate swords was Officer Billy, nicknamed The Beast, so-called because of his undeniably mean and evil nature. We loved him. And throughout the briefing we could hear his constant and hilarious mumbling: ‘Bloody God-botherer and his bloody Bible bashers and this bloody jumped-up Foreign Office toady coming in here trying to tell us our job . . .’ It went on and on but nobody took any notice except us and the senior officer.
The meeting ended and we all wandered out to the channels to see the arrival of ‘the enlightened one’. All, that is, except Billy. The senior officer had decided that it was too much of a risk having Bill anywhere near our incoming Big Guru and so had sent him off on some task in the stores. Soon we could hear the chanting from all the arriving followers and this chant was then taken up by the followers behind us. The first to arrive in the channels were the guru’s flower girls with large baskets of rose petals, spreading them on the ground. We had been told of this ritual – the Holy One’s feet should not touch the floor, apparently. Fair enough. And then he finally appeared: a little chubby chap with a big grey beard and glasses and wearing what looked like cheap flip-flops. Surely, I thought, an impressive flip-flop is an essential part of any religious guru’s outfit? Apparently not. He floated past us with a genial wave and headed for the automatic exit doors. I noticed our senior officer give a visible sigh of relief that the spectacle of Billy the Beast versus Big Guru had been averted.
Then, as the flower girls disappeared, throwing flowers behind them, there was a really loud bang as the storeroom door, which was right next to the exit, suddenly flew open – and there, in full uniform, including hat (black peak pulled down like a knight’s visor), was Billy . . . with the biggest fuck-off broom I had ever seen. It was about six feet wide. He looked like a cross between the Terminator and Norah Batty. Cue very sharp intake of breath from one senior officer and several sharp intakes of breath from all attending Customs personnel. In a flash, Billy was out of the storeroom and following the flower girls, who had no idea that he was using his mega-brush to sweep a beautiful clean swathe right through the rose-petal pathway. As Billy disappeared from view, brushing vigorously in front of His now-quite-baffled Holiness, under the chiming of the followers ‘peace bells’ we could hear the low rumble of Billy’s muttering: ‘Frigging holy man my arse well learn what it’s like for us lowly ones down here on earth you short-sighted beardy bastard oh yes you’re in the real world now old son . . .’
The Amsterdam flights were always quite fruitful and the constant work was a good way for a newly qualified officer to put training into practice and, it turns out, to accidentally run into people you hadn’t seen since school.
On this particular day, I had just arrested a Dutchman for smuggling 6 kg of cannabis resin concealed within large soup cans. Which is pretty clever. But we knew that there were numerous places in the Netherlands where you could get this illegal canning professionally done. The one flaw in the plan is that people don’t often travel with large jumbo catering cans of soup – it’s not exactly essential travelling gear and it’s heavy – so their presence alone is a bit of a giveaway.
This passenger had on him six large cans of so-called vegetable soup. I had already opened one and X-rayed the other five so I had no doubt that we had six kilos. The guy was arrested and put into custody, and he asked for the on-call solicitor. Luckily for him, the solicitor arrived within twenty minutes, which broke the average time by about an hour. I couldn’t believe my eyes when an old school colleague, Terry Davis, walked through the door as the on-call solicitor. We played on the same school and county rugby teams but that was as close as we got – we had never been friends. In fact, he hadn’t liked me and the feeling had been mutual.
I greeted him pleasantly enough but his first words to me were: ‘I think you can drop the Terry bit and call me Mr Davis. I am a solicitor, you know.’
Martin, our duty officer, who was well known for his dislike of solicitors, looked up from his paperwork. Now he was interested. I knew I couldn’t lose face here so I replied, ‘In which case, you call me Officer Frost. After all, I am a Crown-commissioned officer.’ Martin smiled and went back to his paperwork.
Things didn’t really get better from then on. Davis got his client to go ‘no comment’, so the interview was very short. To finish off the job, we just needed to open the remaining cans and confirm the contents weren’t exactly the kind of stuff approved by Heinz – even in Amsterdam. I brought all five cans into the interview room so that we could open them in front of the Dutchman. I opened the second can and pulled the cannabis blocks out from the soup. As I was drying the blocks on some kitchen paper, I casually passed the can opener to Davis and asked, ‘Would you mind popping that one open for me, Mr Davis?’ After a moment’s hesitation, he opened the can in a few seconds and then lifted out the cannabis on to some more kitchen paper on the table. As he passed me back the can opener, I handed him a blank witness statement form.
‘What is this for?’ he asked in a snotty tone.
‘It’s for your witness statement for the prosecution, Mr Davis,’ I replied. ‘It has to go on the record exactly who opened which cans . . .’
I left the interview room and he stormed out after me, his face now burning red. ‘You bastard!’ he shouted, his nose only two inches from mine. ‘I can’t represent him now. You fucking set this up! Where’s your duty officer? I want to complain. This means big trouble for you!’
I pointed in the direction of the venomous, solicitor-hating Martin.
Once I had cleaned up all the soup off the drug blocks, I wandered into the main office just in time to hear Martin’s response to the complaint against me.
‘Well then, Terry!’ he said. ‘It sounds like my officer carried out his duty as he should and you, son, are a bit of a twat for opening the can. Now, sir, could you sit over there and write out your statement?’
Davis’s final words to us on his way out were that this was not the last we would hear of it. The duty officer told me not to sweat about it. I was still a touch worried, though, and tried to explain that it hadn’t been a deliberate ploy to get him to open the can, just a genuine request for help.
‘Course it was, son,’ he said with a smile and a wink. ‘Of course it was.’
Benjamin was never the smartest of scholars when we were at school together. He had spent the last two years of school in a cannabis stupor before just managing to get into college to study an ‘ology’. It was there that he got involved in the new and expanding rave culture. His drugs usage moved from the downer cannabis to the hallucinogenic LSD. I hadn’t seen him in a while but what I didn’t expect to see was him being escorted into the green channel by a couple of policemen a few years after our last meeting. Luckily, I was in a position to avoid being involved, yet still be available for advice.
Apparently, Ben had been given the usual security pat down at departures by BAA security. During the pat down, the security officer had felt a body pack on Ben and had got him to lift up his jumper, so revealing a few thousand ecstasy and LSD tablets. He was on his way to Tenerife to make his fortune as a dealer. By the time Ben was delivered to us, he was screaming threats left and right. What surprised me was Ben’s supposed defence that he was shouting out to anyone who would listen: ‘But I’m going out of the country, you fuckers! I’m not bringing the stuff in!’
The illegality of the exportation of controlled drugs is exactly the same as the importation of them. I don’t know whether years on drugs from a young age had affected his powers of reasoning but he did genuinely believe that because he was taking the consignment out of the country he shouldn’t be in any trouble. As if he was doing everyone a favour by taking the gear out. He was so sure of his legal position that he refused a solicitor and later defended himself in court. And, as the old saying goes, the man who defends himself in court has a fool for a client. Ben got three years.
One person I wasn’t particularly surprised to see again was our Mr Van der Mons, as he came through the airport off another flight from Amsterdam, but I was very surprised by his reaction and by what he proceeded to do. While standing in the passport line, he spotted Mick and me. Now, I didn’t know it at the time, but I was about to get the best and most unusual reception I could ever get from a passenger whose arse I had once looked up – he started smiling broadly at us and waving wildly. Then, at the top of his voice, he started shouting, ‘Bollocks! Good! Ha-ha. Bollocks! Good!’
Mick and I looked at each other, a little puzzled. Well, quite a lot puzzled, actually. All the other passengers in the queue shared our bafflement – they looked at each other, then looked at Mr Van der Mons, then looked back at us. It was like a mass breakout of synchronized frowning. I assumed they were wondering how brave, or foolish, you’d have to be to start shouting ‘Bollocks!’ at a Customs officer.
But that wasn’t all our flying Dutchman had in store. As he came through the green channel, he bounded over to where Mick and I were standing, undoing his belt and unzipping his trousers as he approached. Then he spun round and Mick and I – like a couple of astronomers looking at the night sky at a certain time of the month – were bathed in the unmistakable glare of a full moon.
By this time, the rest of the passengers were split between a mixture of hysterics and horror. But all of them might have wondered why Mick and I were just chuckling. What they couldn’t see was that on his bared right cheek there was a brand new tattoo – a British bulldog smoking a large joint and, needled in irreversible ink underneath, were the words ‘BOLLOCKS! GOOD!’ I actually thought, ‘Good lad – fair play to you, son.’ He returned to the queue to a smattering of applause and with a cheery double thumbs-up back to us.
I suppose, if nothing else, it did prove that our Mr Van der Mons must have smoked a shitload more weed than we ever actually caught him with.