Frost - Anything to Declare?: The Searching Tales of an HM Customs Officer

Jon Frost is an experienced Customs officer of over twenty years standing. He has served as a HM Customs Preventive Officer in London airports, an Operational Intelligence Specialist, an Investigation/Surveillance Specialist (Drugs), an Anti-Corruption Manager (Overseas) and National Intelligence Coordinator, and an Investigation Specialist for SOCA (Serious Organised Crime Agency). He is also experienced in army-trained covert surveillance (CROPs) for the long-term observation of criminal gangs and operations.

Anything to Declare? is the first book of a planned series of Jon Frost memoirs.

Jon Frost

CONSTABLE LONDON

In memory of

Vera Elsie Clack
8.9.275.8.2013

The gentlest of women, who put Mark and I on the right path for adult life.

Constable & Robinson Ltd.
5556 Russell Square
London WC1B 4HP
www.constablerobinson.com

First published in the UK by Constable,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd., 2014

Copyright Jon Frost, 2014

The right of Jon Frost to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in
Publication Data is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-47210-942-2 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-1-47210-944-6 (ebook)

Printed and bound in the UK

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You know when youve just come back from holiday and, as you stagger knackered through the cold airport, in shorts and flip-flops, with your wonky-wheeled luggage trolley, and you get to the red/green/blue Customs channels and even though you know youre not bringing anything back from abroad other than burned feet, hotel shower gel and a souvenir hangover you still get that uneasy feeling walking through nothing to declare?

Well, sorry for putting you through that but were kind of glad you feel that way. Because it means weve created the right environment to ensure that the uneasy feeling will be much, much worse for the people that we really want to catch the criminals and smugglers bringing in contraband that may seriously harm you and yours. We want them to get that horrible feeling: sweaty palms and nervous gulping is an easily spotted dead giveaway. And, if you saw the things that we would regularly find hidden on and in people, youd probably agree.

Oscar Wilde, when going through New York Customs, made the most famous remark ever uttered to a Customs officer when he said that he had nothing to declare but his genius. Its a great line, but Im surprised that the undoubted genius of Wilde didnt alert him to the fact that thats exactly the kind of smartarse remark thats going to have any Customs officer snapping on the old rubber glove with relish and saying, Right, sonny Jim, lets see exactly where youve hidden that genius...

Anyway, like they say, as is the custom, Ill introduce myself: I served over twenty years in Her Majestys Customs and Excise (HMCE), initially as a uniformed officer at London airports, then moving on to a role as a preventive Intelligence officer before promotion into the plain-clothes and undercover Customs Investigation Division. Later still, I moved to the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA). Most of what I have seen and done has never been made public except for some of the larger drugs jobs, and even then very few people knew what occurred before the arrests took place. Between uniform, investigation work, overseas postings and covert operations, only the names have been changed to protect those involved.

Some of what we did should have never have happened and some things should never have been seen by anyone, but someone had to do the job and that was us.

Prior to the formation of the admittedly less effective SOCA, HM Customs Preventive & Investigation counted for more than 70 per cent of all UK drug, gun and porn seizures. Just one Customs Investigation heroin team would seize more heroin in a year than the whole of the UKs police forces (and there were six Customs heroin teams).

In more than twenty years, I have worked with the mad, the bad, the brave, the stupid, the spectacular and the heroic. The Customs officers I have known came from all kinds of backgrounds. It was quite rare for the department to recruit directly from school and it was unknown for a person to join the Investigation Division without having a good grounding in Customs, Excise or VAT. I have served with former policemen, engineers, soldiers, sailors, airmen, council gardeners, bouncers and even double-glazing salesmen. It was never the pay that drew these people in. Sometimes it was the glory or the power of wearing a uniform. For the ex-military guys, it was the worry of not wearing a uniform. Every officer had their own reason for joining. Mine was luck.

The work of Customs officers at ports and airports was and is essential. HMCE was regarded as the best Customs service in the world and, having worked around the world in many countries, I learned that it was true. Customs has always stated that it protects society and, take my word for it, some of what Customs seizes on its way into this country would make your hair stand up and scream. In my time as a uniformed officer I seized many weird and wonderful things: passengers, aircraft, presidential aircraft, a working tank, cars, lorries, boats and coffins; and I uncovered wild animals, killer snakes, bush meat, animal porn, poisonous vodka, dodgy medicine, bootleg prescriptions, pirated pills, toxic alcohol, firearms, sidearms, swords, explosives, stolen gold, dirty money, blood diamonds, child pornography, dead parrots and every drug known to man (and a few as yet unknown). And that was all just from searching the living. The dead? Well, we searched them, too. We had to. Its amazing what you can hide in a coffin.

There were many aspects of the job that made you think twice about ever again putting your fingers anywhere near your mouth. Every single hiding place and hole in the human body has at one time been used by smugglers, and Im afraid the poor old Customs officer has to sometimes look inside them. And, yes, even the dead ones. In fact, we sometimes preferred the corpses especially on a Monday morning or when suffering from a hangover as the dead dont argue, swear or spit at you.

When youve confiscated everything from a suitcase full of human hair to a live, urinating monkey hidden in the lining of a passengers overcoat, you know you can never return to a normal line of work. And from being a uniformed officer I then went into plain-clothes and undercover Customs work and things really got... even less normal.

Over the years, there have been many so-called detection methods for criminals and criminal activity, from the low-tech reading the bumps on a human head to the high-tech airport Sniffer Arch (more of that later); from the lie detector test to actually using fruit flies to try to identify drugs (yes, its true). But I dont think any method has yet been found that beats the knowledge, the experience, the suspicion, the gut instinct, the skill, the bloody-mindedness and the ever-twitching antennae of that uniformed human radar detector the good old-fashioned Customs officer.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, this trusting no one technique usually pays off. When I was at work in the airports, in front of me would be a long queue of incoming passengers (including smugglers), and behind me there were 88,000 square miles of Great Britain. We were all that stood between the two. So, when you next step off a plane, the Customs officer may be the first unfriendly face you see, but they are actually the last border defence that we have.