Reports

BRIAN TOPPING “Life as a Customs Officer part 2” 17th September

“A World of Mules and Minders”
We had a really interesting talk this week when Brian Topping joined us again to tell us more about his life as a customs officer. Subtitled “a world of mules and minders” he began by taking us through the history of customs and excise in the UK from AD 743 when the first taxes were introduced, via King John’s reign, the 1600’s when excise duty was created because of the amount of smuggling going on to 2005 when customs and excise was split into Border Force, HM Revenue & Customs and the National Crime agency.
With this background Brian then told us tales from his old job dealing with the ‘minders’ who controlled the smuggling process and the ‘mules’ who did the actual smuggling. We heard of the various hiding places used to bring drugs into the country including in platform shoes, false pregnancy pads, false legs and strange looking wigs.
He talked about the signals that the officers looked for and the use of sniffer dogs (84 of them at the moment) including Oscar who was able to sniff out smuggled money; he then brought us up to date with the smuggling taking place using container ships and the use of underwater drones by his ex colleagues in their fight to stop them.
Everyone really enjoyed Brian’s talk and slides and the afternoon finished with lots of questions from his audience.