London - Stopped by Customs officers, Oscar Wilde notoriously said he had nothing to declare but his genius. Other passengers, as Jon Frost hilariously recounts, try to sneak through the red and green channels considerably more heavily laden.
During his long career as a Customs specialist at London airports, Frost has had ‘to politely listen to people lying through their teeth at you’ as they attempt to smuggle in snakes, bush meat (zebra, lion, gorilla), combs that double as flick-knives, a monkey sewn into the lining of a coat, another monkey ‘disguised as a hairy child’, corpses ‘propped up in a wheelchair wearing wonky sunglasses’ and a box of dry ice containing a man’s buttock, apparently sliced off by a Samurai sword.
Hospitals were put on the alert to look out for ‘anyone who had trouble sitting down’.
As they riffle through travellers’ bags, Frost and his team frequently detect drugs: socks impregnated with heroin, cannabis resin in shoes, soup cans or barrels of bitumen.
Drugs are often hidden in hollowed-out disposable lighters, AA batteries that unscrew to reveal a stash inside and shaving cream aerosols cleverly made to still squirt real foam out of the top.
Once, Frost found a pack of 12 brightly coloured lipsticks, ‘where every lipstick was actually moulded from cocaine paste. Very clever’.
The cardboard lining of suitcases or sports bags, originating in Amsterdam, often contained 20 compressed sheets of LSD tabs, worth £10 000 (R178 910) on the street. To deter the Customs inspections, smugglers sometimes litter their luggage with hypodermic needles or razor blades.
What Frost looks out for are people whose passports show frequent trips being made to drug-source countries.
Flights paid for in bundles of cash can be suspicious. Also don’t stroll around too flashily dressed: ‘It is better to look scruffily right than too smartly wrong,’ he says. It’s amazing how many drug-dealers try to behave like drug-dealers in a film.
By and large, the Customs officers would sooner ‘nab some nob on a private plane who thinks it allows him to sneak in a suitcase of cocaine than some kid from the Netherlands with a spliff in his sock’ - though don’t let that make you feel over-confident.
One of the hallmarks of a tip-top inspector is that he ‘wouldn’t trust a nun with a crutch’ - and no wonder. They are always confronting nuns smuggling in gin disguised as litre bottles of Holy water - ‘Another miracle!’
The worst part of the job, however, is the strip-search. ‘Every single hiding place and hole in the human body has, at one time, been used by smugglers.’
Frost has to snap on his Marigolds and wait for the ‘swallowers’ and ‘stuffers’ to void condoms filled with drugs into the lavatory pan.
‘It becomes a waiting game,’ he says, philosophically. Yet such criminals are easy to spot. ‘You try walking normally with half-a-kilo of drugs up your jacksy.’ There’s me thinking everyone arriving from South America had piles.
It is not only narcotics, of course. Frost’s job is to detect and confiscate weapons, child porn videos, pirated medicines and counterfeit art.
He has seen mobile phones containing tiny pistols and stun guns, and straw camels and donkeys from Spain and Tunisia crammed with used hospital bandages. He has to collect the duty due on imported diamonds, fur coats and Rolex watches. Contraband is destroyed, valuables handed to the Crown and booze poured away. ‘The airport drains probably had the only alcoholic rats in the country.’ On one occasion, Frost had to board a Hercules aircraft from Nigeria, where a rat the size of a Shetland pony had been glimpsed in the hold.
Though the police went in with their Heckler & Koch MP5 automatic rifles, it was Frost who did the deed, bashing the monster with a B&Q garden spade. As ‘death by rabies is a nasty way to go’, our quarantine rules are strict.
Frost often has to do battle with rich folks in private Gulfstream jets who think their pets are exempt - one lot even had the gall to suggest they were on their way to Balmoral to shoot grouse with the Queen. If their dog mixed with the corgis, Frost patiently explained, then the corgis also would have to be destroyed.
Horses, incidentally, are tricky animals to ship. They get so nervous and frightened, it is not unknown for them to bite their trainer’s fingers clean off at the knuckle.
Corpses aren’t given much peace, either. Did you know that if you croak abroad, it can cost £4 500 (R80 509) to repatriate the body, which has to be embalmed and secured in a zinc coffin? (Hence the wheelchair and sunglasses gambit - cheaper.)
As coffins are ‘a good vehicle for contraband importation’, these have to be rigorously searched - a ghoulish task, especially if the deceased’s arm shoots up and its wig falls off.
A nd it is also not unknown for stowaways in the hold to be crushed by the retracting undercarriage - and to drop onto the runway at Stansted several hours later as a block of ice.
No wonder, to ease the tension, Customs officers play wicked pranks on each other. ‘Never fly into the airport where you also work’ is the strong advice.
Otherwise, you can come back from Tenerife and your luggage will have been replaced on the carousel with concrete blocks.
Eventually, Frost was upgraded from the rubber gloves to work in undercover surveillance.
This meant the painstaking study of airline computer systems, which give details of ticket payments and full details of a passenger’s travel. (Privacy and freedom of movement? Forget it. They know where we are, where we’ve been and where we are all going.)
The Customs Investigation Division, which follows international drugs cartels and involves ‘info gathering and smuggling ops’, is based in a Georgian building near Tower Bridge, built in the days of old-fashioned pirates and ships flying the Jolly Roger flag. Here, Frost had to serve alongside MI5 and MI6.
The doings of the Serious Organised Crime Agency sound like the plot of a Guy Ritchie movie - with traces of Breaking Bad thrown in. Further jaunty volumes of reminiscence are promised.
Daily Mail