Anything to Declare? by Jon Frost

for the first time, can make you wonder how you got here. We could usually tell how long they’d been on holiday by how tanned the corpse was – faint tan lines, probably died in the first few days; back and shoulders like a lobster’s arse, probably died at the end of a two-weeker. Any smuggler who thinks a coffin is less likely to be searched doesn’t know UK Customs – we’d unwrap the body of Tutankhamun or machine-wash the Turin Shroud if we thought it held iffy gear. Our old friend ‘Jaws of Death’ Arthur was a great drugs dog but we had to make sure he was kept on a short leash near any dead bodies we were searching so he couldn’t bite off one of the hands and make it his new chew toy. I didn’t fancy having to chase him up the runway, shouting, ‘Drop the hand, boy! DROP it!’
    It’s all in a day’s work when you don’t know what’s coming out of the blue above. Such as a potentially drugs-laden shit bowser full of excrement off a jumbo jet. Happy days.
    After that type of thing, it was a blessed relief to get back to searching members of the clergy. I pulled aside a mild-looking Church of England vicar who seemed very nervous. Maybe he’d been given a heads-up by the nuns I’d searched. Whatever it was, he looked rattled. He pleaded that he needed the toilet, which just aroused more suspicion, and I soon discovered why when, in an attempt to hide his contraband, we found him stuffing into his underpants a stash of what turned out to be child pornography. Heavenly wings weren’t much in evidence, even though his feet didn’t touch the ground as he was whisked off to the nearest police station. No one was off limits, not even a pilot of God.
    And not even the real pilots, aircraft cabin crews and, at the ports, the ship captains and seamen – they are always kept under a wary eye. For obvious reasons: as you can easily guess, with their frequent trips abroad, smuggling is always a possibility. It’s not that the people who work for airlines are likely to smuggle but that it is what you would class as a temptingly opportunistic crime: their privileged position provides the opportunity and therefore the temptation. Another potential strength of the aircraft-staff-as-smugglers (and, therefore, a weakness of ours) is that they always know the workings of ports and airports as well as the workings of the Customs staff, security and the police.
    As far as normal allowances go, the aircrew have reduced fag and booze allowances due to the amount of times they can travel in a day (short hauls over to Europe, for example). But you might well think, well, that pretty looking trolley-dolly or that snappily dressed captain would never smuggle, would they? To which myself and every other Customs officer in the country would reply –
my arse.
    So, at the larger airports, the aircraft crew have to clear Customs at a different location to that of the passengers. For example, Gatwick Airport puts the aircrew through a totally different building called Concord House; there is no need for a full Customs mob to attend so it can all be handled by a couple of officers. ‘Crew Clearance’, as it is called, was often referred to by us all as the Penal Colony because it was such an unattractive and unwanted duty. Mess up big time in the channels or piss off your senior officer and you would be reassigned to the Colony.
    At smaller airports like the old Stansted, the crew would clear through the ‘Declare’ red channel and so they were as vulnerable for a check as much as any other passenger. I’d seen half bottles of Scotch hidden in pilots’ underwear, body-packed hand-rolling tobacco wrapped around a stewardess and cigarette packets concealing cannabis on co-pilots.
    Sometimes the evidence trail we found led to things that were completely unexpected – and unwanted. One day late on in the channels, I stopped one of the incoming male cabin crew members who seemed ill at ease. When he was undressed for the strip