The Iceman: The Rise and Fall of a Crime Lord (13 page)

20

Loose Ends

The bodies were found on a Wednesday afternoon. Two elderly men out walking, despite the autumn chill and threatening rain, found them down a Lanarkshire dirt track.

John Hall, forty-five, and his pal David McIntosh, thirty-three, had been gagged and their hands were bound behind their backs. They had been pushed at gunpoint to a nearby scrapyard where they were forced to kneel before being tortured. Petrol was poured over them. Then their killers fired a shotgun into the back of their heads. They were shot again in the back. Their bodies, along with the black Volkswagen Golf that McIntosh had driven to the scene of his death, were set alight.

With some sense of understatement, Detective Superintendent John Carnochan, leading a team of fifty officers hunting the killers, told reporters, ‘It’s reasonable to conclude the way they died was not as the result of some petty argument.’

It was October 2001, just over a year since Tony McGovern had been murdered and just three months since Stevenson had been charged with the fatal shooting of his former friend and ally in one of Scotland’s most clinical gangland coups. In the immediate aftermath of these murders, the theories explaining why Hall, a professional car thief, and McIntosh, a former army marksman, were killed with such calculated barbarity split and multiplied day by day. Some said they had quickly got out of their depth after making a tentative and ill-fated entry into the drugs trade. Some said they were innocent pawns in a gangland power struggle and sacrificed in a merciless show of strength. Others, particularly some detectives still trying to build a case against the assassin of Tony McGovern, wondered if Hall and McIntosh had simply known too much? If they were potential witnesses to be silenced? Loose ends to be tied up?

One detective, who had investigated Stevenson’s involvement, said:

Another who knew Hall well said:

On the first anniversary of his death, Hall’s widow Moira, forty-nine, begged for information and appealed for someone, anyone, to reveal why her husband died. ‘I pray that someone will open up. Our lives are ruined and someone out there knows something. I just hope that someone can find it in their heart to come forward.’

On the same day, his eldest daughter Clare, twenty, said, ‘The one question we have is why?’

A year after the killings, police seemed little nearer to finding the answer. By then, officers had interviewed hundreds of people and looked at thousands more. They had scoured hours of CCTV film. They had even spoken to the residents of tower blocks on a Motherwell estate a mile and a half away from the crime scene, just in case anyone with exceptional eyesight had a bird’s-eye view of murder. They were getting nowhere.

On the anniversary of the murders, Detective Superintendent Carnochan insisted that just one person could unlock the investigation. He said:

In the years since that double shooting, Stevenson has been relentlessly linked to the killings in his Lanarkshire heartland and newspaper reports also suggested that Paisley drugs baron Grant McIntosh may have had some involvement. Like the dead men, he had an enthusiasm for greyhound racing and, like them, he had graduated from car crime to drugs. Unlike them, he was, and is, a gangland survivor capable of doing whatever is necessary to protect his business. He went to their funerals.

The last sighting of the men was at the Halcrow Stadium, a greyhound track in Gretna, the night before their bodies were found. Police believe they met their regular drugs supplier there. Sources suggest the deaths of Hall and McIntosh in the disused scrapyard near Larkhall may have been linked to the £120,000 they owed their supplier for five kilos of cocaine. The drugs had been seized by police before they could sell them on, leaving them dangerously in debt and with no means of settlement.

Whatever the motive, the double murder had clear and, for detectives, disturbing similarities to another gangland shooting almost exactly two years before. The charred bodies of robber-turned-dealer John Nisbet and his pal William Lindsay were found in 1999. Like Hall and McIntosh, they had been tortured and shot several times before being set alight. They were found up a farm track at Elphinstone, East Lothian, but police believe the men had been murdered over forty miles away in a field near Chapelhall – in the same scattering of North Lanarkshire villages where Hall and McIntosh would be found two years later.

Nisbet was just twenty-five when he died but he was already a hardened criminal. In 1994, he had been cleared of an attempted murder in his home estate of Craigneuk, Wishaw. The victim was paralysed after being shot in the street. Nisbet got lucky again three years later when he escaped jail after being charged with a bank robbery in Torquay when his co-accused pleaded guilty.

The year before, in 1996, he had been prime suspect in an audacious £1-million heist on a security van. Nicknamed the ‘Blondie and Clyde’ robbers, the gang held up the cash couriers after a blonde woman, possibly a man in drag, crashed a stolen car into the Securicor van in Kilwinning, Ayrshire. She pretended to be hurt but, when a guard went to her aid, four hooded robbers grabbed him and his colleague, threw petrol over them and warned them they would be set alight if the van was not opened. No one was ever convicted of the robbery but Nisbet reputedly used his share to secure a lucrative foothold in the drugs trade.

The hair-trigger thug had survived two attempted hits in the months before his death and was armed at all times. Detectives believe he must have known his killers to have been lured to the scene of his death. They shot him and his driver Lindsay, twenty-six, once in the head and three times in the body with a powerful handgun. The prime suspect was one of Nisbet’s underworld cronies, another young gangster with a fearsome reputation for violence.

Nisbet had been a guest when Lee Smith had married his wife Claire at a lavish wedding at Chatelherault, the spectacular hunting lodge set in a 500-acre country park, near Hamilton. Police scouring mobile phone records discovered the last call made by Nisbet before his death was to Smith on one of the eight mobile phones the young gangster had in use.

Smith, a car-thief-turned-drug-dealer, was twenty-five at the time and had already been jailed for two years for a machete attack that left a stranger scarred for life. He got another two years for a knuckleduster assault. He and an associate, Andrew Cairns, were questioned by police hunting the perpetrators of the double killing and theirs were the only names to appear in a report to the procurator fiscal but neither were ever charged.

Five years after her son William Lindsay was murdered for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, his mum Elizabeth said, ‘I’ve great faith in the man above. I hope something will snap into place.’

In August 2006, Smith, thirty-two, was found dead in a caravan at the Craig Tara holiday park, near Ayr. He died of a suspected drugs overdose linked to a severe cocaine addiction. He had been forced to hand over assets worth £750,000 – including his home, three flats and a Jaguar car – to underworld asset strippers before his death. The Civil Recovery Unit said their investigation into his criminal wealth would continue.

Stevenson was never charged, questioned or formally named as a suspect by officers investigating either of the double killings. His business could continue without interruption.

21

Game On

The City Inn on the northern banks of the Clyde at the end of Glasgow’s Broomielaw is in the vanguard of the riverside development that is intended to transform the derelict docks and shipbuilding basins of the waterfront. Popular with businessmen, conference delegates and overnighters in town to see a show at the nearby Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre, the hotel is a sleek and airy testament to the developers’ dreams of creating an upwardly mobile affluent neighbourhood where the city’s shipyards once stood. It was an unusual venue for the very public pronouncement of the end of a gangland dynasty.

The one-time McGovern associate and erstwhile business partner of Charlie Nicholas, Jim Milligan, had disappeared in the wake of Tony McGovern’s murder. He remained disappeared while the hunt for the mobster’s fortune raged in vain. He had holed up in Ireland for a while but, by June 2005, he had returned to Scotland and was enjoying lunch in the City Inn’s popular restaurant.

He was just having coffee on the wooden decking overlooking the river when he was confronted by a reporter from the
Sunday Mail
, Scotland’s biggest-selling newspaper. The hotel is just a few hundred yards from the newspaper’s offices. Milligan did not welcome the attention but, as he made his hurried departure clutching the property schedules he had been discussing over lunch, he insisted he had nothing to fear from the McGoverns. Indeed, he went further, saying no one should be scared of the Springburn brothers, once the most feared crime gang in the city. Fumbling for his car keys, he blurted out, ‘The McGoverns are finished.’

It seemed a bold statement by a man seemingly unconcerned by possible reprisals for his outspoken assessment of the power shifts in Glasgow’s underworld but it was only a public acknowledgement of what detectives had realised months before. The McGoverns’ dominance across tracts of the city was over. The brothers were continuing the battle to hold on to their drug-dealing heartlands just north of the M8 but they had lost the war.

Two years earlier, Stevenson had stepped up the scale and pace of his operations, leaving the McGoverns and every organised crime gang in Scotland in his wake. With the threat of prosecution over Tony’s murder lifted and the dead man’s family hemmed in by the need to protect what was left of their business, Stevenson had made his move. He stayed in Glasgow, buying a flat in the southside before moving to East Kilbride. In a characteristically arrogant gesture of absolute confidence in his own abilities, he is said to have sent the McGoverns change of address cards. He did not expect them to visit.

He was working out again. Tall and well built, physical strength had always signalled his authority but he now stepped up his exercise regime. Daily workouts on the weights and running belts at the gym in East Kilbride’s Hilton Hotel, where he was a member, were augmented by regular runs around the nearby man-made loch at Stewartfield. He was never short of running partners with three or four heavy-set associates often joining him in their shorts. The burly joggers often did not seem to be enjoying the exercise as much as their boss but, even given his apparent gangland dominance, Stevenson was not foolhardy enough to go out running alone.

He started trading in gems to hide his earnings from drugs and his big plans, shared only with his wife and a clutch of trusted associates, would see those profits escalating dramatically in the months ahead. His intention was not only to take charge of the drugs trade in Glasgow but also to cement his position as the biggest trafficker Scotland had ever seen. His confidence, contacts and operational knowledge acquired during his months in exile had encouraged his belief that one man could effectively become Scotland’s drugs wholesaler – a one-stop shop selling to the dealer gangs from Dumfries to Peterhead.

His strategy was, in theory, simple and one often adopted by businessmen pursuing a bigger share of the profit. He intended to cut out the middlemen. Drugs have traditionally travelled into Scotland from England. After being sold by English gang bosses to their Scottish counterparts, they are taken over the Border by train or, far more usually, driven up the M6. But, under Stevenson’s ambitious business plan, heroin, cocaine, speed, hash and the rest would arrive in Scotland by the same route except the English gangsters would have no involvement, no responsibility and no cut. Stevenson would deal directly with the international organised crime gangs. From now on, he alone would take the risk of transporting the drugs into Britain, arranging the transport, finding the drivers, coordinating the deliveries, distributing the consignment and making the millions.

Of course, other Scots had smuggled drugs without the involvement of the gang bosses of London, Manchester and Liverpool. Gerry Carbin Snr, the father of Stevenson’s stepson, had led one of the first and most innovative methods with his Costas-based ‘hash-in-a-can’ supply route shipping cannabis directly from Spain to the streets of Glasgow. People such as Tam McGraw, Brian Doran and Les Brown had all been linked to direct smuggling routes into Scotland. It was the sheer scale of Stevensons’ ambition that set him apart. He was about to bring in more drugs more often than any Scotland-based criminal had done before. The scale of his operations would eventually reverse the traditional north-south transport of drugs in Britain as addicts in England’s northern towns and cities were soon buying drugs sourced and transported by a Scots gangster.