Foreign News: Smuggler’s Delight

The Hong Kong -Calcutta -Karachi BOAC route was inevitably a temptation to smugglers. Hong Kong, for example, makes no check of outgoing baggage. And India, with its stable rupee and a middle class that likes to convert its savings into solid-gold jewelry for safekeeping (and dowries), has been the world’s best market for contraband gold for centuries.

BOAC’s crews in Asia, carrying only overnight cases, enjoying the semiofficial aura of their familiar dark blue uniforms, making frequent comings and goings, usually got casual treatment from customs officials. But last May Indian customs at Calcutta’s Dum Dum airport found a 7-oz. gold bar in Chinese Stewardess Jenny Wang’s handbag. (Her explanation: Hong Kong residents “customarily” carry gold as “mad money” in case the Chinese Communists should suddenly overrun the city.) A fellow steward, David Furlonger, seeing her being searched, was overheard by an Indian customs official as he remarked, “You can’t trust these Asiatics.” Infuriated, the customs official ordered Furlonger searched too—and found 4½ Ibs. of gold, worth $4.300, strapped under his clothes.

Tipped off by the Dum Dum arrests and by Hong Kong police, who discovered the names of BOAC employees among the records of a suspect Hong Kong “businessman,” BOAC moved in its security chief, a former Scotland Yard detective named Donald (“Flying”) Fish. He discovered that some crew members carried jewels, jade, but chiefly easily disposable gold, netted $600 to $700 a trip. Fish spent six weeks investigating, interviewing scores of BOAC staffers, often surprising them at such odd points along their routes as BOAC rest rooms, even (with permission) examining employee bank balances. Last week BOAC announced that 52 employees on its Far East run, all but two of them stewards and stewardesses, had been dismissed, with more firings to come.