On 2 February 1992, the Observer went on duty with a Customs & Excise team at Stansted: veteran officer Frank Weston, Barron the black labrador and Cedric (the Customs & Excise computer). Their work had proved its worth: 40% of seizures came from ‘cold pulls’ (speculative stops, with no prior intelligence).
Some seizures were eye-opening: the report of one man apprehended with 33,000 doses of LSD ‘taped to the soles of his feet and his nether regions’. Others – the ‘stuffers and swallowers’ – were eye-watering.
Couriers practised swallowing oil-covered grapes intact, travelled with ‘a supply of condoms that exceeded any normal sexual capacities’ and might, if caught, be forced to use the loo in the ‘throne room’. ‘You have everything you want in here – a probe, jets of water to wash it and a glove to squeeze and extract,’ an officer enthusiastically explained (an improvement on low-tech methods involving a colander).
Over in Styal prison, the human cost of the drug trade was all too apparent. Nigerian single mother Elizabeth was serving four years for smuggling cocaine for a moneylender in her daughter Emilia’s baby milk. Emilia was still with Elizabeth in the mother and baby unit, but soon she would have to be fostered out or returned to Nigeria. Elizabeth’s three other children were left with her Lagos neighbours.
Maria Gonzales de Arango, ‘an elegant woman… in a black and white suit’ was serving 14 years. She had been arrested on arrival from Bogota with 4 kg of cocaine sandwiched in albums and book covers – an acquaintance had asked her to deliver this ‘present’ to a friend in Switzerland in return for a free holiday.
She wept as she told her story: her two sons, 20 and seven years old, were growing up without their mother; she got one phone call every three months. ‘All the time I keep smiling and smiling, but sometimes I feel very down.’
