The Investigator

Drugs, Guns, Gems and Porn: Inside the Secretive World of Customs Investigation

Mike Knox was an elite Customs investigator. He moved in a clandestine world of stakeouts, phone taps and intrigue, working some of the biggest cases, from drugs to large-scale fraud. His targets included the alleged chief of the IRA, some of the first major dope traffickers, the importers of the most notorious porn film of all time, and the man who became Britain’s most famous entrepreneur.

As a young officer, Knox was inspired by a TV series to join the secretive Investigation Branch. He soon uncovered a VAT fraud in a company called Virgin Records and arrested its personable young boss, Richard Branson. He was tasked with stopping a flood of illegal pornography, including the infamous movie Deep Throat. And he went to Warrenpoint in Northern Ireland to probe the IRA’s role in grain smuggling, at a time when 18 British soldiers were killed there by a terrorist bomb.

It was also the start of the so-called War on Drugs and Knox and his team roamed in pursuit of the narcotics barons, living out of suitcases. He visited the cannabis farms of Morocco posing as a buyer, helped run the first ‘boat job’ against a smuggling yacht, and co-led an operation that became famous when his colleague jumped on the wing of an aeroplane to stop it taking off. Knox was eventually awarded the CBE for his work. The Investigator is the first-ever autobiography of a senior Customs detective and a revealing insight into a murky world where everyone’s a suspect and only your colleagues can be trusted.