Brits can be a very strange bunch when it comes to travelling abroad. We love our cups of tea and warm beer. If things aren’t the same as they are at home (which we’ve come on holiday to get away from), then we talk about complaining . . . but never do. I’m sure that there is a written rule somewhere that says, ‘When two or more Brits are in a foreign country, they shall gather together.’ And one strange thing that was also common and that we used to see on a regular basis was the crap that British holidaymakers returned home with. I think it was partly a desire to spend their last euros on whatever could be found at the nearest souvenir shop and partly the result of sun-stroked brains still waterlogged with cheap beer.
A popular item at one time was the large stuffed souvenir camel from North Africa, often from Egypt. Nothing says you’ve had a good holiday like a stuffed straw animal. And they were as popular with drug smugglers as with travellers. They were also great for the kids – until, that is, you happened to open one. I’ll never forget the first one I opened in order to search it in case it was being used as a miniature Trojan . . . camel. With my trusty old lock-knife, I turned into a HMRC veterinary surgeon and split the camel’s belly open with one slice. I was certainly surprised by what I found, but not in the way I’d expected: the insides of the camel were padded out with what looked like dirty, bloodied, used hospital bandages. And that’s exactly what they were. Apparently, for years these items had been filled with the cheapest things the makers could get their hands on, and this was often local waste. Every camel that I dissected from then on was stuffed with the same thing, bandages, usually from the local hospital and mainly used and unwashed.
From the same area of the holiday globe would come the Fez hat. Tommy Cooper had a lot to answer for. But it did make our job very easy when it came to officers playing a diverting game of Spot the Twat in the incoming holiday parties. The bright-red upstanding fez did show up very well in the white environment of the baggage hall.
Carpets, of course, were very popular from Turkey. But unless you were a carpet expert (and Customs had to be) chances were that as a holidaying punter you would be flogged a third-rate bit of rag for a nice large amount of money. If you did happen to know what you were looking for you could haggle the seller down to a good price. But still the carpet would have to be declared, in the red channel, because it would always be way over the ‘other goods’ allowance. The best Turkish businessmen, though, recognized that the Brits and their money are easily parted if they can avoid paying tax, so the carpet salesmen would offer holidaymakers a second or even third receipt proving that they had only spent a few quid on a double knotted silk carpet instead of the £800 that it really did cost.
We could spot a real, kosher Turkish piece in an instant and the traveller would be pulled over for ‘the chat’ and invited to land their flying carpet on our inspection bench. Some of the faked credit card receipts produced were so good that they were almost believable, as were the travellers’ stories of how they had beaten the trader down in price. Now, because we, as officers, had to learn about anything and everything that might pass before us, we knew that the only way to get a top-notch piece of weaving like that so cheaply wasn’t to beat the seller down on price but to beat him up with a cricket bat. Which, come to think of it, is a pretty good way of bartering . . . and also of getting yourself buried in a Turkish prison for a few years. And anyone who’s seen the film Midnight Express knows that is not a good idea. Their prisons make our prisons look like Sunday school missions.
Another thing not in the Brit travellers’ favour is that we will never be able to out-haggle the haggle masters; just as we are not natural complainers (even though we’re bloody good moaners), Brits abroad are also not very good hagglers. Another strange British habit – but one that goes in Customs’ favour – is that we appear to never, ever destroy the original receipt. I don’t know if that’s a consequence of everyone shopping at Marks & Spencer for most of their lives and getting used to the idea that it’s OK to take something back after five years as long as they’ve got the receipt. But for us Customs officers, it was just a matter of finding it. Usually a simple baggage search would suffice but, in some situations, a full body search had to be carried out.
My favourite technique was pure mental torture backed up by mean authority. With experience, I could usually estimate a carpet price to the nearest £100 but in this I was just an amateur: some officers could get it within £5. So I would have a punter standing in front of me, swearing blue murder that he only paid £50 for a £800 carpet. Bring forth the guillotine: ‘The estimation of price for revenue purposes.’ I would explain that I disagreed with the proffered receipt and that the carpet was to be detained and would undergo professional, trade pricing, from which I would calculate the evaded duty and VAT. After letting the idea of professional pricing and having the carpet locked away for three months sink in, you would hit them with the ‘Or I can . . .’ option. I would say those three words and pause, and the passenger’s eyes would widen slightly . . . ‘Or I can estimate it myself and work out the duty and tax from what I believe it’s worth.’ This was the clincher. You could almost feel the sigh of relief exhaled at you. Until, that is, I estimated the carpet’s true worth of £800 for tax purposes – and then a sharp intake of breath from the punter would suck the sigh of relief right back out of your face. Ten seconds of quiet swearing later and the correct receipt would magically appear like a genie from a rubbed bottle. Well, come on, we had to have some twisted fun when we were working the channels all day!
And this technique worked every time, and not just on Turkish flying carpets but also on imported golf clubs, designer watches, clothes and jewellery of every metal and gem.
The most regrettable things that people brought back always fell under the heading that covered a multitude of holiday sins, namely ‘I Was Drunk at the Time’ (see also: misspelt tattoos on arse; cracked skull from moped crash; sex with travel rep; chlamydia). But my favourite article import was by a young man who appeared in the red channel and honestly declared a very old and tatty copy of Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. He said he’d been pissed when he paid £550 for it in an antique book shop in Boston but it was, he said, a very special item as it had been signed by the author himself. I opened up the cover and there was the very valuable signature in all its glory – ‘Charles Dickens’. I had a closer look at it and then passed it over to my senior officer who also studied it carefully before he passed it back to the passenger.
‘On your way, lad,’ I said, and the young man looked surprised and bemused.
‘But what about the VAT?’ he asked.
I thought the news might best be delivered with a straight face. ‘Well, if I were you, mate, I’d try to stay sober the next time you buy an antique book. Because I don’t think Charles Dickens ever signed his name in ballpoint pen.’
An inbound Orlando flight also attracted another buyer whose judgement may well have been clouded by the fog of inebriation. In his travel bag I found a large stuffed cobra coiled up in the folded shirts (it would have been one hell of a surprise to bag thieves if it had been alive). At least, the passenger thought it was a cobra. It was, in fact, the worst stuffed snake that any of us had ever seen. It had one eye (the other having fallen off in the bag), one fang (the other one never found) and a large fist-sized lump halfway down its body. On top of this the snake’s corpse was sloughing, that is, shedding its skin. The guy had basically just bought himself a very expensive and tatty draught excluder. That smelled.
Then there were the Mickey Mouse goods – literally. The American tourist version of the Egyptian fez was the Walt Disney store Mickey Mouse ears. These were like a beacon to a baggage officer. And they were very helpfully worn by passengers as they came off the plane. Officers knew how much they cost and knew that the families’ ‘other goods’ allowance would be taken up by the cost of the ears so anything else that they had purchased would be fully taxable. It was like wearing a numbered pound sign on your head.
It was, of course, at the discretion of individual officers whether or not they pursued this matter of adults wearing big black plastic cartoon mouse ears, dependent, often, on how bored or how crappy a day the officer had endured. Contributing circumstances might apply, as they say. So, if, for example, a Customs officer had just found out his wife was shagging someone called Donald, then a Mickey Mouse-eared passenger was also likely to get fucked.
The other goods that everyone else more commonly referred to as ‘Mickey Mouse’ were, of course, all the fake, counterfeit or ‘hooky’ items that we used to find and process. For many years, the UK had very stringent rules on these goods and absolutely tons of counterfeit clothes, watches, perfumes, handbags, designer goods and so on would be destroyed every few months. I was always a bit fifty-fifty on the reasons for detention or seizure of the goods. Sometimes the counterfeit items would be a serious risk to the public, such as – from the lower end of the scale – whisky made from industrial alcohol that may blind people or give them irreparable liver damage, right up to the completely insane knock-off items such as aircraft spares – which may, if they failed, wipe out a few hundred people.
While at the airport one day, I assisted the local investigation team in searching the hangars of a well-known UK-based aircraft repair company (I won’t name them in case you’re flying this week . . . or reading this on one of their planes!). This company ran fleets of enormous long-haul passenger airliners. And in their service bays at the airport we found millions of pounds’ worth of counterfeit, non-authentic aircraft parts. We checked each part on a serial number database against the purchasing company and, surprise surprise, none of the parts existed.
What didn’t come as a surprise was that we didn’t put out any form of press release. The job was hushed up, with the company being fined millions behind the scenes. Why was it hushed up? you might reasonably ask. Well, we had no idea which aircraft had which dodgy parts. And, on top of that, the company had also been supplying these parts to other airline repair companies. It was decided that for the ‘public’s own good’ the job was to be kept secret, which made the company in question very happy.
You could see all type of counterfeit goods being brought into the country from watches to skateboards, from cigarettes to cheese. But the only home market counterfeiting seemed to be pirating DVDs. And sometimes we didn’t even have to be on duty to see this stuff. On many days off-duty, while sitting in a pub in north London with a Customs colleague, I’d been approached by blokes offering every type of DVD from porn films to Disney films to ‘Disney’ porn films (Snow White Does the Seven Dwarfs, for example, and, in this version, I think they were all Happy).
It seemed that the high-speed world of home computing was inhibiting the multimillion-pound film industry and its companies from ripping us off for themselves, which was a shame for them.
Another area of Mickey Mouse goods where I felt a little sorry for the smuggler was that of hooky watches. Major companies spend millions of pounds hunting down the makers and distributors of these fake designer watches. It was only the fashion companies that did this, though, as the normal watch companies don’t seem to be that worried about it. So Chanel, for a purely hypothetical example, might bring out some black and gold watch for £10,000; but Chanel are not a watchmaker, so it’s just possible, if you are a cynical old bastard, to believe that all they have done is buy some middle-market £100 watch, glued a Chanel logo on to it and then added an extra two ‘0’s to the price. Now that would seem to me to be more criminal than somebody copying the watch and selling it for a price much nearer to what it was actually worth. Yet the designer companies go berserk at a cheap copy being sold to someone who would never have the money to buy the original anyway. As I said, I was sort of fifty-fifty on the issue of counterfeiting.
The strangest thing was when we discovered people being ripped off and conned not by strangers but by the people closest to them.
Mr and Mrs Robinson looked like an upstanding couple. Both were well dressed and with expensive luggage. They had arrived on a flight from Los Angeles and appeared to be very much in love. The couple had been married for ten years and owned a number of successful hairdressing salons in north London. However, a year before I met them, they had split up when Mr Robinson’s gambling addiction had started to eat away at the businesses profits. Mrs Robinson had thrown him out and had taken control of all their bank accounts. Mr Robinson managed to shake the gambling habit and the two had got back together three weeks before their tenth wedding anniversary. To mark the event, the couple had decided on a second honeymoon in the States and off they went. And now they were back.
I stopped the Robinsons in the green channel as they looked quite affluent – it was our experience that it was the big spenders who would buy lots of nice goodies and not declare them. So I asked the standard questions as I started to search their baggage. A little polite conversation followed and then the couple told me the whole marriage story. It didn’t take long before I found a small washbag full of Gucci watches. I could see straight away that they were counterfeit: they looked and felt cheap. They were gold and white with scissors for hands.
‘They’re for the hair stylists in our salon. Just a little gift from us,’ said Mrs Robinson.
I informed the couple that the watches would have to be seized. Mr Robinson took it badly. He started to shout about how he knew that they were fake and they weren’t even trying to be the real thing. I had to agree with him on that, and I would have turned a blind eye and let him through with them, but the trouble was that, while I’d been checking the watches, a senior officer had walked passed and mouthed ‘good job’. So, that was that, the fate of the fake watches was sealed. But just then I spotted Mrs Robinson’s brand-new Gucci watch on her wrist.
‘Do you mind if I have a look at your Gucci, madam?’ I asked Mrs Robinson.
She looked a little embarrassed as she removed it.
‘Oh dear,’ she said in a not very convincing way. ‘I forgot all about this one. I think we should have gone in the red channel to declare it.’
‘Well . . . actually . . . I don’t think the red channel officer would have been too worried by this one,’ I said as I examined the watch and then slid it into the seizure bag with the other fake Guccis. There were a few seconds of surprise while this information sank in, then a few seconds more while it was processed, then a look of dawning realization on Mrs Robinson’s face as she suddenly sussed what had happened – and then turned to her husband and she released one of the greatest right hooks I have ever seen. Mr Robinson flew backwards with a small cry and met the floor, unconscious with a cracked jaw. Mrs Robinson followed up her punch with an equally perfectly timed cry of ‘Bastard!’ But by then Mr Robinson was already in the land of nod. So what had changed Mrs Robinson into Sugar Ray Robinson?
Apparently, Mr Robinson, with a nice piece of persuasive pillow talk, had convinced his wife to give him £2,000 from their account so that he could, he said, buy Mrs Robinson a nice present, e.g. a real Gucci watch. Which he had apparently done in LA. But, when I’d slipped it into the bag with the other fakes, the penny had dropped and she realized that her dear husband’s addiction had returned. He had clearly gambled away the two grand and then bought her a Mickey Mouse Gucci watch.
By the time I had finished the paperwork with his wife, Mr Robinson had been whisked away to hospital for treatment to his socked jaw. Here’s to you, Mrs Robinson, indeed.
It wasn’t only wives that could do for you – kids could be a self-inflicted lethal weapon, too. Most people have had the experience of travelling with young children and all the joy and fun that brings – the moaning, the crying, the constant toilet breaks and the annoying kicking of the back of the seat in front. And that’s just the behaviour of the parents. But as Customs officers we could be extra evil and use the children as willing intelligence sources against their parents. It’s one of the dangers of travelling with a little mobile truth-telling machine.
One day, I was working the green channel at Gatwick when a flight came in from Jamaica. The Jamaica flights were always a good shot for cannabis, coke and bottles of Wray & Nephew rum, which, at 62.8 per cent alcohol, was like flavoured rocket fuel (normal whisky being 40 per cent). I stopped a large woman and her nine-year-old son who came through the channels. Coming from outside of the European Union, the lady was allowed one litre of the W&N firewater but, on examination of her large quantity of baggage, I discovered she was carrying another fifteen litres. It was the sound of sloshing that gave her away. This kind of rum running was a never-ending conveyor belt; and everybody seemed to try their hand at it (even the West Indies cricket team). But once a ‘find’ is discovered it has to be acted on. During the interview, the lady said she had never done this before and she was very sorry and she’d never do it again; to calm her down, I asked her how she was planning on getting home. She said she was really afraid that her husband, who was due to pick her up, would think that he’d missed them and go home.
It took me another twenty minutes to process the case but I tried to do it as quickly as I could so at least she and her son could get their lift home. In the end, she coughed up about £600 in duty tax and the fine. During all this time, the young lad had not said a word, just watched and taken everything in.
As she was leaving the channels, I asked where her husband might be waiting for her. ‘I’ve no idea,’ she said, ‘but I’m sure he’s been waiting too long and has gone home.’
Then, perfectly on cue, the young lad looked up and very clearly and loudly said, ‘Won’t Daddy be waiting in the same place that he waited last time you were arrested here?’
Bollocks. I’d forgotten to check if she had previous. Feeling a bit embarrassed that I’d not done a background check, I let her and her son on their way. When I thought about it, I really should have questioned the brains of the operation – the nine-year-old.