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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
An eye-opening account from inside an ultra-secret Customs unit Mark Perlstrom is no stranger to money laundering, drug smuggling and crooked firms. In the late 1980s he started working for HM Customs and was quickly thrown in the deep end, joining Operation C-Chase, an undercover investigation that penetrated Pablo Escobar's mighty Medellin cartel, brought down the corrupt BCCI bank and stopped London's gangs from moving their ill-gotten gains around the capital. As part of the Uniforms - the new, secret, anti-money-laundering squad - high-speed car chases, bugging homes and spying on targets was day-to-day business. Told by a true insider and revealing never-before-told-secrets of the industry, India Uniform Nine lays bare the intense rivalry between crime-fighting organisations and how that leads to corruption, chaos and some scarcely believable antics in the covert world. And how Mark's own operation was nearly scuppered by a US Customs bungle.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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For Sara,
who saved and transformed my life.
CONTENTS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This book is written in honour of all frontline Customs officers and is dedicated to the memory of investigator Peter Bennett QGM, who, on 19 October 1979, was shot and killed in London while on an anti-smuggling operation.
Throughout the book, in order to protect the identities of certain individuals, some names have been changed and background details altered where necessary. Cases that exist on public record, however, are reported in their original detail.
Ten per cent of Mark Perlstrom’s income generated by the book will be donated to Leukaemia UK.
PROLOGUE
Sunday 9 October 1988
I was woken by the noise of the phone ringing.
It was 3am. Something wasn’t right.
‘India Uniform Nine?’
It was Control. Who else called at 3am?
‘Operation C-Chase has been knocked. We’ll ring back in ten.’
Shit. I knew it. Bloody Americans. They must’ve gone early. I jumped out of bed and got dressed as quickly as I could.
I assumed US Customs jumped the gun. They had spent the last two years conducting one of the biggest, most expensive undercover operations of all time, involving agencies around the world in Panama, Paris, London and Pakistan. It was a takedown organised with military precision. The agents had their orders, everyone was primed. What had gone wrong at the eleventh hour?
It was one hell of a sting. In Tampa, Florida, dozens of the world’s most notorious drug smugglers and their bag men – the money launderers – were attending a lavish wedding. Some were bringing along their wives and families; others were flying solo, hoping for a weekend of fun and some action. They were going to see some of that all right. They had no idea what was waiting for them. The whole wedding was a sham. A very elaborate sham. The happy couple? Two American undercover Customs agents. The groom? The crooks knew him as Bob Musella, a money mover with Mob connections. In reality he was Robert Mazur. Like me, he was a Customs agent, but one who for the last two years had been deep undercover working his way higher and higher up the tree until he was in a position to bring down those closest to the very top of the feared Medellín cocaine-smuggling cartel, run by the most notorious criminal in the world, Pablo Escobar. One wrong move could have blown his cover and brought the whole operation crashing down.
My role in all of this was as part of a team set to arrest the UK target, known as Tango One. Asif Baakza, an official with the Bank of Credit and Commerce International London (BCCI), knowingly laundered thousands of dollars of drug money. At least he thought he had. What he didn’t know was that the money he moved was actually US taxpayers’ cash. That wouldn’t save him though. The cartel member he was knowingly dealing with was Mazur himself. And Mazur claimed he had been up front and told Baakza it was drugs money. It was a classic case of mens rea – a guilty mind. His intention to commit the crime would be enough to convict.
For months my unit, the Uniforms – a newly-formed Customs team set up to combat money laundering – monitored his house and place of work, looked at his financial status and tax returns and checked his passport applications for any aliases. Colleagues had also been investigating Tango Two, Ziauddin Ali Akbar, and his colleague Nazir Chinoy, who flitted between London and Paris.
We were a crime-fighting agency formed to act on new anti-money laundering legislation to target major drug smugglers at home and abroad, utilising far-reaching investigative tools for evidence gathering, to obtain convictions in court and to seize cash and assets.
We worked with Alpha – one of the most powerful civil service units in the country, who were able to intercept suspects’ phone calls – a unit with so much muscle the police were jealous.
You might think the police were the UK’s number-one law enforcement agency. You’d be wrong. Part of Her Majesty’s Treasury, we were driven by a far higher motivational force than just fighting crime … we went after the money.
There had been a high-speed car chase and even a break-in to an empty office block so we could keep better surveillance on specific targets during the investigation. Now that we were at the point of arrest though, the last thing we needed was any kind of complication.
There was always a suspicion that the Americans would jump the gun with their arrests and not bother telling us. We never took anything for granted. All I could think was what if Baakza was spooked and had fled his house? Could you imagine the fall-out? A massive international operation and we lost one of Pablo Escobar’s bankers? It didn’t bear thinking about.
This was why I had asked Steve Berry, a senior officer and one of our most experienced operatives, to spend the night outside the target’s house. If the target tried to flee, Steve was waiting for him.
But he was on his own. What if the target had spotted him and escaped by a back route? Should I have been there? This would be a colossal cock-up. I could see the headlines. ‘Massive Sting Operation – Brits Lose Drugs Banker’.
I wouldn’t know what happened, if anything, until Control phoned me back. I got ready to leave then waited impatiently, pacing the floor.
The phone rang again. At least I was more awake than I was ten minutes ago.
‘Tango One has been arrested. Proceed to his HA.’
I could breathe more easily. That was code for Baakza’s home address, a modest semi-detached house in Brent Cross, north London. He must have made a run for it. Probably thought he had a chance. I could picture Steve pouncing the moment he stepped out the front door. He’d be on his way to Bishopsgate Police Station where my boss and I would begin questioning him about what he knew about his nefarious clients. Who else did the BCCI bank do business with? From what we’d discovered they were not fussy about who opened an account with them.
I was still very much in the dark though about what had happened that night. With the Uniforms information was only passed on a need-to-know basis. We kept phone calls brief. Who knew who could be listening? We knew all too well how easy it was to bug a line.
What I did know was that for Baakza to flee he must have got a call. That could only mean the US takedown had been to some degree successful.
I left my digs in Tottenham. The streets were practically deserted. At that time on a Sunday morning, I expected nothing else. It was probably what Baakza was praying for, that he could have slipped away into the night.
In twenty minutes, I arrived at the banker’s house. If everything had gone to plan I’d have been there at 6 for the knock at 7.30am. Joining me would’ve been my immediate boss Bruce Letheran. He’d been the link with the Americans. A nice little number, as it meant he’d been back and forth to Florida making sure everything ran smoothly for Mazur. Now, with the Tango arrested, it was a waste of time him meeting me there.
Steve was long gone with the suspect. The Americans claimed he was already bang to rights. Mazur got him on tape and had his own receipt from the cash transfer, but we wanted to find more evidence of the transaction so there was less room for his lawyer to claim it was a stitch up.
As I arrived, the house was a hive of quiet industry. A couple of officers stood outside, while I suspected others were inside beginning their search. I stepped into what was an otherwise unremarkable semi in a London suburb. It was handy for the Tube. Brent Cross Shopping Centre was visible from the window. I was not sure what I expected from a criminal banker. Ostentatious furniture? Some garish artworks? The house was probably rented as there were few signs of a personal touch; no picture frames or bookshelves.
I briefed the team on what to look for. Any computers, diaries, Filofaxes, personal files, we’d take all that. If there was $100,000 in notes stuffed under the mattress we’d take that too. But from what we’d seen from watching Baakza for the past few months there would be none of that. He looked like the meticulous sort. A creature of habit. He left home at the same time every day, returned at the same time. Hardly had a social life. Any family must have been back home in Pakistan. He was a nothing-to-see-here sort of bloke. If Mazur hadn’t been tipped his name, we’d have been none the wiser.
After briefing the team there was nothing for me to do, so I headed into the office at Custom House. It was still early, but technically the clock was ticking, as now Baakza had been arrested we only had 24 hours to question before we had to charge or release him. He’d have called his lawyer and we wouldn’t begin our questioning until early afternoon. That gave us time to see what we could find at his house – and what we could unearth when we raided the offices of BCCI.
I arrived at the office in Custom House, by the River Thames, to find our chief, Walter Smith, ‘Uniform One’, the Senior Investigating Officer, kicking off.
‘They’ve fucked us,’ he said, the vein on his bald head looking like it was about to burst. ‘Fucking Yanks have done it again.’
Geoff Heslop, our big boss, was in America for the planned press conference following the arrests. Given the time difference, he must have been sleeping.
Bruce arrived and, while I looked to him for explanation, I was not expecting much from the usually taciturn Cornishman.
‘Von Raab, the US Customs Director, did a deal with one of the big TV networks,’ he said. ‘They went early.’
‘And didn’t think to tell Heslop?’ I asked.
‘We’ve been had over…’
‘It’s a good job Steve was there,’ Walt said.
‘So, he made a run for it then?’ I still didn’t have the full story of what happened in the early hours.
‘Didn’t half,’ Walt said. ‘Steve got him on the front lawn.’
‘Where do you think he was heading?’
‘Who knows? To the bank to start shredding, or to Heathrow?’ replied Walt. ‘You can ask him when you interview him. Before you do that, though, there’s another bloody issue.’
‘What’s that?’ Bruce said.
‘We need a new search warrant,’ Walt shook his head in disbelief. ‘We’ve got the wrong bloody bank address.’
Bruce shot me a look as though it was my fault. Was it? I was sure I double and triple checked it.
‘Steve noticed it when he got the banker to confirm his address. Turns out BCCI has two buildings next door to each other in Leadenhall Street and they’re linked.’
To be fair, Customs didn’t usually have this issue. Normally, when we were searching for goods subject to seizure, like drugs or booze where the tax has not been paid, Customs had a power called the Writ of Assistance. Dating back hundreds of years and signed by the monarch when he or she takes office, it is essentially a universal search warrant that is in place until said monarch dies. No other law enforcement agency in the world had it and the police hated us for it. Unfortunately, on that Sunday morning we were simply searching for documents, so the Writ of Assistance didn’t extend to that.
Luckily, we had a friendly duty magistrate we could access 24 hours a day, who lived in a penthouse in the Barbican with a £37,000-a-year service charge, so Bruce and I headed there and up the twenty floors to her flat. Raising an eyebrow at the reason for our early-morning call, she signed the warrant and we headed back to the office.
‘Right, let’s get to the bank,’ Walt said.
It was time to raid the offices of BCCI. We had been through our respective roles the day before. My job was to search Baakza’s desk and cabinets.
As we prepared to leave, I saw another group of agents heading out with us, led by another very senior officer, a Scottish guy called Ian Stewart. The team had been involved in the operation up till now, but I’d never seen someone so senior on the ground before.
‘What the hell is he doing here?’ I asked.
‘You’ll see in due course,’ Trevor Jardine, another senior officer, replied.
‘What?’
He put a finger to his lips.
As we made the short journey by foot, our echoing steps the only noise in the city at that hour on a Sunday, I realised we were two teams on two distinct missions. There were about 30 of us, evenly split.
We descended on the main entrance of BCCI, at 100 Leadenhall Street. It was all shut up and, save for a couple of security guards at the desk inside, the place was deserted. In we piled.
‘UK Customs,’ Walt announced. ‘We have a warrant to search the offices of Asif Baakza.’
One of the guards took the form and entered some details into his computer.
‘His office is next door. You can access the building that way,’ the guard said, pointing to a connecting door.
We strode though the door, into a plush, mustard-coloured, open-plan workspace, admiring the extensive smoked-glass windows through which the morning light was starting to seep in. I couldn’t help compare it to the asbestos-riddled shithole we called home.
We found Baakza’s desk. Nothing fancy, just one of dozens that all looked the same. There were no pictures of children, no funny ornaments or corporate tat, just a functioning workspace. Either the guy was a robot, or he knew he might have to ditch this desk in a hurry one day.
I tasked the team to look for evidence of the Mazur/Musella transaction, any ledgers, or paperwork referring to $10,000.
Ian Stewart and his team focused on the desk and cabinets next to Baakza’s. What did he know? There was no point asking. As with all Uniform activity it was on a need-to-know basis.
It didn’t take us long to find what we were looking for – a yellow ledger card, clearly for the right transaction. It wasn’t crucial, but it would be helpful when we came to question the banker.
I got the impression Ian also found what he was looking for, as there were satisfied nods all round on his team. What could it have been? Over the past months we’d realised that BCCI was no ordinary bank, but Ian’s presence suggested something on a whole new level. Who else did they bank for? Was there anyone they wouldn’t do business with?
I left the team to finish the search, as it was time Bruce and I headed to Bishopsgate to finally meet Baakza. It was funny. During all the time we had kept this man under surveillance, monitoring his movements, who he met, where he shopped, where he ate, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. He struck me as any ordinary Joe. Mazur could have chosen any banker in the City to launder his cash to show how corrupt the system was. But then, as I made my way to the interview room, my head was back to spinning. Why was such a senior officer on the raiding party?
If the focus was really on something else, something much bigger, then what was my team doing there? All that time I thought we were targeting Escobar’s money, hitting the world’s biggest cocaine empire where it hurt, joining forces with our US counterparts to fight the good fight. I now feared it had nothing to do with that. That we were all a by-product of something bigger.
Bruce gave me a nod. Baakza’s lawyer had arrived, and they were waiting for us. It was time to find out what he knew.
I had a horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach. I had joined this unit to clean up the money launderers. Why then did I feel so dirty all of a sudden?
CHAPTER 1
Spirit of adventure
Don’t take anything at face value. That’s what I’ve always believed, and it was a mindset instilled in me by my father.
Our family was a case in point. On the face of it, ours was an average northern, working-class household. My dad worked in the steel industry, my mother was a carer in an old people’s home and we lived in a typically modest two-up, two-down house, but that doesn’t tell the whole story.
A bitter family argument in a small town near Stockholm a century ago dramatically shaped the course of our history. The row was enough to prompt teenager Carl Frederick Perlstrom to walk out, head straight to the nearest port and stow away on a trawler bound for Grimsby.
A local woman and her teenage daughter, enjoying a traditional prom walk at the seaside in Cleethorpes, found the young lad wandering the streets and, because he had nowhere to go, took him in. He fell in love with the teenage girl and they married a few years later, moving to Sheffield to find work.
Sadly, I never met my runaway grandfather, as he died before I was born, but the story of how he arrived on these shores has become enshrined in our family folklore. My dad inherited his father’s spirit of adventure, but also discovered his Swedish heritage had unintended consequences. He wanted to join the Royal Navy, but they wouldn’t let him because of his father’s nationality, so he opted for the Merchant Navy instead.
When the Second World War broke out, and Britain depended on vital supplies from overseas territories and North America to survive, my dad was regularly on-board merchant ships which were vulnerable to attack by German submarines, or U-boats. As the Navy couldn’t protect individual ships, they grouped them into large convoys with military escorts, the idea being they would be harder to find and more difficult to attack.
Try telling that to my dad. Twice he was on ships torpedoed by U-boats, and each time he found himself in the Atlantic, swimming for his life. I can’t even imagine how frightening that would be, but it didn’t put him off. After the war he stayed in the Merchant Navy and travelled all over the world. Wherever I’ve visited he’s been. For instance, when I went to South Africa he casually remarked: ‘I’ve sailed from Durban many times, round the Cape of Good Hope.’ He told stories of hundred-metre waves and mistaking whales for submarines.
Such was his wanderlust he emigrated to New Zealand and worked in a steel factory there, but my grandmother pined so much for him that he came home to Sheffield.
Experiencing what it was like to be under attack and having an immigrant background shaped my dad’s views. ‘Never let anyone tell you Britain or America won the war,’ he told me, when I went to school. His view was that we owed the Russians for victory. ‘They lost 20 million men,’ he said. ‘Ordinary Russians fought the Germans with broomsticks and anything they could lay their hands on.’
He might not have a had a higher education, but he was an intelligent man and his words stuck with me, particularly when faced with a largely jingoistic narrative from my history teachers. Who’s right, I thought, the history books, or my dad who experienced it?
That healthy scepticism, a distrust for authority and an instinct to question everything has remained with me. I always try to work out if the propaganda or indoctrination is correct or not. You could say anti-establishmentarianism is in my DNA.
There was, however, an element of my grandfather’s heritage I could care less about. When I was born in 1961, my dad wanted to call me Carl Frederick too. My mother Maureen hated it and put her foot down. The compromise was to name me Frederick Mark Perlstrom, but call me by my middle name. This suited me fine.
My younger brother was named Carl. We have a younger sister, Jill, and, growing up, the five of us shared two bedrooms in a house with no inside toilet or bathroom in the inner-city district of Walkley. Again, that doesn’t quite tell the whole story.
We have an elder sibling, Gail, who lived in the house before we were born and then went to live with our maternal grandmother, as we didn’t have enough space in the tiny terrace. I would go over to my grandparents on a Sunday to visit them. Living in a council flat, she had a proper bath, which was the height of luxury back then, especially when we had to make do with a tin tub otherwise.
My paternal grandmother ran a chip shop, and for years that was the focal point of the family, with all members living nearby helping out, including Gail. Unfortunately, eating a lot of fried food from the shop was one of the reasons I was overweight.
My dad needed an English breakfast every morning because he was on his feet all day in the factory, where he worked as a turner for a steel company. It was a small, family firm that produced blades and utensils for Stanley Tools, and he turned the lathe to a fraction of a millimetre accuracy.
Those big breakfasts were the first of our four meals each day. When I started at Myers Grove School, we’d have lunch there, then a fry-up for dinner at 5pm. Mum would then go off to work at the old people’s home or as a service assistant in the canteen in the children’s hospital, and not return home until 10pm, by which time we’d be starving and go to the chip shop for a big supper.
When, in a biology lesson, the teacher decided to weigh the class and it emerged I was a good four-to-six stones heavier than my classmates, it hit home. I felt humiliated. No wonder I struggled to attract a girlfriend. At least I wasn’t the target of bullies, but this might have been because I was the one picking on people. I received a thrashing for one ill-judged comment and my behaviour was raised in my report card.
As a result, I was a bit of a loner at school. What saved me was my love of sport. I played football, rugby and cricket at school. I enjoyed being at the stumps, until someone said I was good but not too fast between the wickets. That brought me down a little. I had a cousin who was a professional golfer, so Dad bought me a set of clubs. I didn’t join a private club, as I couldn’t stand the culture in such places, but there were two municipal courses in Sheffield so, on a Saturday, I’d pay £2 and play a round on my own.
Although I quite liked other sports, football was my real passion. I attended Hillsborough Boys Club, as did the few friends I had. There was a floodlit five-a-side pitch, and we’d play there until 10pm every night. A lot of kids our age went off the rails when they hit their teens and got into drinking and loitering or went joyriding, but football kept me on the straight and narrow, and I earned the nickname Pele.
One of my fondest memories was seeing my legendary namesake playing, when his team Santos played Sheffield Wednesday in 1973. It was the second time the world’s greatest player appeared in Sheffield after a previous visit five years earlier. My mates and I wagged off school to go to the game, which kicked off at 2pm on a Tuesday afternoon, because the country was on a three-day week at the time and the lights were switched off to save electricity, as coal was short due to a miners’ strike.
Dad used to take me to watch both Sheffield teams, Wednesday and United, which was the done thing in those days. He even took me to London to watch United play Chelsea. He was a keen ornithologist and the real reason for the visit was to take me to an RSPB sanctuary on the Norfolk coast to go birdwatching. Afterwards we drove into London and slept in the back of our Ford Cortina estate as he wouldn’t pay for a bed and breakfast. It wasn’t long, however, before I focused solely on Wednesday and the Owls became something of an obsession. And all the family were Blue through and through.
When I wasn’t playing football, I used to go off to the local Carnegie or Central libraries to do research, and endlessly read the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I loved geography and history, and would study a different American city each visit. I retained all sorts of trivial information, like that Cleveland used to be the third-biggest city in the United States, is situated in the Rust Belt, was called the ‘mistake on the lake’ after the decline of its steel industry and used to have a population of 4.6 million people.
I also read biographies of famous people from history, and books on sport. My parents weren’t great readers, in fact I can’t recall ever seeing a book in the house, until my dad picked up a 1936, gold-leafed edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica from a church jumble sale for £5.
I think, like a lot of men in his line of work, Dad was exhausted when he came home from work and, after being on his feet all day, just wanted to slouch in front of the television in the evening.
When I was fourteen, we moved to a bigger house in Hillsborough, near Wednesday’s football ground. For the first time we had an indoor bathroom and three bedrooms, so my sister had a room of her own. However, once the utility bills started coming in my dad realised he couldn’t afford to heat it. They were on low wages and had 40-a-day cigarette habits to fund. After a year we moved again, this time to a smaller house in Rivelin, but the council gave Dad a grant to install an indoor bathroom. There was only central heating downstairs, heating the kitchen and the front room. This meant the bedrooms were freezing, literally. There were often icicles hanging inside the windows. We were now a little further out from the city centre, but for Dad it was ideal as our small garden led to the bottom of the valley and the River Rivelin, where he could walk for miles trying to spot kingfishers and woodpeckers.
Growing up in such a frugal atmosphere had a profound effect on me. I craved financial security and was determined to earn enough, so I’d never go back to a house without a bathroom.
However, my first attempts to forge a career weren’t too successful. Without any help from our chronically bad careers service at school I decided I would join the military, thinking the public sector might be an opportunity to continue my education as well as having a job. Each of the armed forces had a recruiting office in Sheffield, so I tried the Navy. They told me I needed to lose eight stone before they’d consider me. It was probably a blessing, as I get seasick on the ferry to Calais and wouldn’t have lasted five minutes.
In 1978, I landed a job as a clerk for Niloc Tools, earning £25 a week. As soon as I got my first pay packet, I bought a £100 share in Sheffield Wednesday. I only stayed there for two months before moving to a furniture-making company on £5-a-week more as a stock auditor. For this job, I travelled the country visiting retailers in company cars, as part of a team reconciling the physical stock with the computer record. For the first time in my life, I got to stay in a hotel. Saying overnight in places like Coventry and Carlisle never felt so exciting.
I was there nearly a year when I travelled to London mid-week to take in Wednesday’s match against Brentford and find a job in the capital, where I’d always wanted to live. I found a vacancy at the St Ermin’s Hotel, in St James’s Park, as an accounts clerk on £55 a week. Not only that but they owned their own hostels, and to stay in one only cost a fiver a week. I applied, got the job and moved to London to begin work on 2 January 1980.
The hotel was like nowhere else I’d ever been. Its location, with a division bell of Westminster, meant it was very popular with politicians who, on hearing the signal that a vote was occurring, had eight minutes to get to the Houses of Parliament to cast them.
It is where the Cambridge spy Kim Philby was recruited into MI6, and its connection to espionage literally runs deep, with underground rooms and tunnels linked to 55 Broadway, the former headquarters of the intelligence services during the war and now London Transport’s HQ.
My hostel was in Earl’s Court. When I arrived, I exited the Tube station and walked past shops selling kebabs and falafels and other seemingly exotic foods I’d never seen before. Even my first sight of a McDonald’s felt other-worldly.
I couldn’t have wished for a more wonderful introduction to London. The atmosphere in the hostel was fantastic, with dozens of hotel workers from all over the world, particularly Australia and the Philippines. The social scene was buzzing. We regularly went to a gay bar called the Copacabana, and I remember David Bowie walking in with Gary Numan and giving an impromptu concert on the tabletops. Pink Floyd played The Wall at the exhibition centre at the end of our road; the punks were in their element. If you took a walk down Earl’s Court Road you might easily have seen Freddie Mercury, Terence Stamp or big television personalities of the day, like Russell Harty and Willie Rushton.
I joined the Sheffield Wednesday London Supporters Club, whose president then was Roy Hattersley MP, a senior Labour politician. If the Owls played in the south, I’d go along to watch, or take in the Saturday night motor bike racing over Battersea Bridge.
It felt like a different planet to Sheffield. There, I hadn’t even known of an openly gay person. Now I counted many of them as friends and met so many wonderful people from all over the world, as the hotel attracted a diverse staff.
I’d been there for a year when the hotel chain began selling off its staff hostels. I moved from Earl’s Court to Maida Vale, another beautiful area, where I counted Joan Collins and Richard Branson, on a houseboat, as neighbours. We had a tennis court at the back, next to Warwick Avenue Tube station. The vibe was gentile, less eclectic and very English.
❘ ❘ ❘
My job was simply to reconcile the hotel’s purchases and make sure suppliers were paid, but I started to discover there were other careers out there. We had several oil companies as clients, but when I inquired about job opportunities with them I realised I didn’t have the right qualifications for many roles. One oil contact advised me to consider the civil service. ‘You can get in at a lower level and in the public sector there are no such things as budget constraints, so you can pretty much do what you want,’ he told me. ‘If you want to go on a training course, you can. If you want to study accountancy, they’ll pay for it. Time management, human relations? They’ll put you on a course. You never have to leave and when you retire at 60 it will be on a full final salary pension.’
At the back of my mind was still that longing for security. As much fun as I was having, I was determined not to return to an ice-cold house in Sheffield. I saw a job in the Evening Standard for a clerical assistant, applied and, to my surprise, got it. Little did I know that as the civil service paid so little, they were desperate for staff.
The job itself sounded grand – in the procurement executive for the Ministry of Defence (MoD). The top minister at the time was Michael Heseltine, and we were essentially buying ejector seats and other equipment for the RAF. The reality was there was very little work to do, however, it was an insightful introduction to the public sector. I was told we had a massive fictitious department that only existed on paper, with a mega budget and thousands of staff, and of course everything was so sensitive and secret no auditors were allowed near it. When the Treasury imposed cuts, it was only this ghost outfit that was reduced.
My colleagues were mainly retired RAF and Naval staff who had served in the war. Instead of pushing them out, the MoD gave them civil service jobs. They had grand titles, like Wing Commander Smith, retired, and many were suffering from what now would be diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder.
I loved hearing their stories from the war and the Battle of Britain. My immediate boss had been a ‘Tail End Charlie’, the rear gunner in a bomber, and he had lost half of his face and had to have his features reconstructed. Guys like him were phenomenally intelligent and obviously highly courageous. It was amazing just being in their company. There were also people who had worked at Porton Down, the top-secret and controversial military facilities, where they researched biological weapons.
Although I was promoted quite quickly in my MoD career, after nearly two years I had a hankering to head back north. I’d tried to buy property in London but would have to move out as far as Hastings, in Sussex, to afford a flat that even then would set me back £6,000.
Ideally I wanted to return to Sheffield, but there were no suitable vacancies there. However, in Salford, near Manchester, there was an opening that caught my eye. It was in Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise, just a clerical job, but it was in the regional headquarters, or ‘collection’, as they called it. This was the outfit that tackled drug smugglers and big tax fraud cases.
I was into James Bond. Drug trafficking and tax investigations sounded far more interesting than the clerical work I was doing for the MoD. It was only an hour away from Sheffield, so I could go home on Friday nights and spend the weekend at home.
I didn’t have to think twice. And so, in April 1985, I prepared to move to Salford. Although I was heading home, it felt like a new life was waiting.
CHAPTER 2
The Customs’ philosophy
‘Everybody’s bent, remember that. Everyone is at it. Everyone is on the make. Everyone is trying to fiddle taxes. And our job is to protect the revenue as best we can.’
Two weeks into my new job in Salford and I had joined half a dozen other new recruits for a Revenue Awareness Course. Essentially it was an indoctrination. The message? That we now worked for Customs, which was a department of Her Majesty’s Treasury. The main thing we needed to be concerned about was money. Over two days, we listened to talks from representatives from the four divisions of Customs, including the VAT office, which dealt with revenue from the sales tax, and those that dealt with excise duty, the tax dating back hundreds of years primarily on alcohol and tobacco.
But it was the arrival of a senior investigator that had the biggest impact. He was from the team that occupied the top floor, the operational unit that had already achieved mythical status in my young eyes. Not only were these the guys that tackled drug traffickers, made huge seizures, caught crooks and generated big headlines for the department, but they looked a cut above everyone else.
From the host of our training session through each of the specialist speakers, the mantra was the same: ‘Think revenue all the time.’
‘People are basically dishonest,’ the investigator said. ‘You’ve just got to prove it. If not, that’s fine, move on, but basically most people are and we can get money off them.’
The senior VAT officer, from their office a short walk away, told us to be mindful of scams 24 hours a day. ‘Be aware of anything,’ he said. ‘If for instance you see someone selling counterfeit products, question whether they have registered for VAT.’
He explained that the easiest way to attack people in those situations was to go after them for VAT. With the cap set at £20,000, anyone earning above that should be registered.
‘Is your local cricket club bar taking that amount of money?’ he said. ‘If so, they should be VAT registered.’
No one was safe, it seemed.
Each speaker explained to us the laws that affected each common fiddle. The biggest source of tip-offs, the VAT officer explained, was any business’s main competitor.
‘If you’re doing a fiddle that puts you at an advantage over your rivals,’ he went on, ‘then they are going to contact us.’
The second most common source was bitter ex-spouses in acrimonious divorces.
‘I can’t tell you how many times we take calls from a recently divorced woman who says, “We had a shop down the road and my ex doesn’t pay all the VAT. He’s got an account in Jersey.”’
The chap from the Excise office, situated a mile away, explained how the smugglers selling contraband booze and cigarettes off the back of lorries were so costly to the exchequer. We were to tip them off about anyone we saw or heard doing this.
Another issue I previously knew nothing about was red diesel. Only certain vehicles, mostly tractors and other farm equipment, were permitted to run on rebated fuel, which was coloured red, so it was easily identifiable, but a black market existed because it was cheaper. The excise investigators had just blown a big case in the Manchester area.
Equally fascinating was an officer from TIVLO, the Temporary Imported Vehicle Licensing Office.
‘If you see a foreign car on the street, make a note of the registration number and the address where it is parked,’ he said, ‘and we will check if the owner has paid the proper import tax or road tax.’ He handed out forms. ‘Just fill them in, we’ll do the rest.’
For a new recruit it was a startling insight. Before that course, I had considered my job to be mind-numbingly boring. All I did was buy furniture for our office and other Customs teams in Manchester collection. The office was depressing. Everything was what I called municipal mustard and green. Years later, when I visited the former headquarters of the East German Stasi secret police in Berlin, I was struck by how much it reminded me of civil service offices in the mid-eighties.
Where we were was a bit of a wasteland. The docks had closed years before, and our six-storey office block had no real amenities. It was an administrative base for the Manchester area, housing our various departments.
Suddenly, though, it felt like there was an edge to the job. I wasn’t required to know any of this stuff for my role, but they were preparing us in case we transferred to investigations, and they clearly wanted to motivate the staff to do so. For the first time there was a career path I wanted to follow.
