One Saturday evening last October, a young woman called Tara Hanlon arrived at Heathrow airport with five suitcases. When a customs officer asked why she had so much luggage, she explained that she was going to Dubai with friends and didn’t know what she might want to wear. Hanlon’s long hair, plump lips and sculpted eyebrows gave her a passing resemblance to Kim Kardashian, but her diva-ish explanation didn’t satisfy the customs officer. Her bags were searched.
Inside were stack upon stack of banknotes – £1,940,120 ($2.7m) in total – strewn with coffee in an apparent attempt to confuse the sniffer dogs. Britain’s National Crime Agency later released a picture of the bundled piles of money, spread out across a table, the Queen’s face reproduced at different angles. It was Britain’s biggest cash seizure of the year.