Dimwit brother
A few years ago my brother and I had to fly to the US to resolve my fathers estate following his death.

After going through all his belongings and sorting out what should be kept and what we could palm off on his friends as momentos of him, my brother announced that he'd kept a few things back that he wanted.
A cavalry sabre, a couple of huge bowie knives, and a few other smaller blades which you concealed in a wrist sheath. Bugger!

I phoned the US airport, and they confirmed that if all the weapons were secure and handed in with our luggage there would be no problem, I omitted to mention the slightly illegal ones that were making the trip with us.
To disguise the smaller knives he taped them to the larger ones so that if they were x-rayed the smaller blades wouldn't show up (hopefully).

My brother is a frequent flier due to belonging to a re-enactment group and has appeared in re-enactments all over europe, so despite my telling him that there was a duty free limit when returning from the US, went to town in the DF shop and bought way over the limit to bring back. I decided that I would as well, realising we were going to have to go through the goods to declare line on landing.

We collect our baggage and off we go, without thinking my brother went into autopilot and follwed the rest of the herd into "Nothing to declare". Since he is deaf in one ear, he didn't hear the customs officer asking him to step over, and just before he was about to be leapt upon by several of her majesty's employees I had another officer call him back saying that he didn't realise that my stuff was on the trolley and I had to declare some of it.

We wander into the declare section and look around for someone, apparently very few people go into the declare line so it's often unmanned, or the guy is sat in the office drinking coffee and reading. Just as we were about to walk off, this guy sticks his head out and asks what we have to declare.
I go for sympathy and start with "The remains of our fathers estate...", cunningly slipping the sword and knives into the list first and hoping he'd forget them as I added my new watch, clothes, several bottle of booze and cigarettes over the limit, but no, the first thing he asks is
"Are the sword and knives the genuine article?"
"No, replicas" say I,
"Don't worry about it then. On your way lads".
And that was how my brother became the proud owner of what we later discovered was a genuine American Civil War cavalry sabre, and narrowly avoided the invasion of his anal cavity by a customs officer.

Later, speaking to a friend who is a customs officer, I was told that since you were willing to declare it they really can't be bothered, and nine times out of ten you'll get told to carry on without even being checked.

Apologies for length, but it was a sword.

*Pop*
(Le Grenouille, Wed 8 Mar 2006, 20:34, Reply)