Read The Iceman: The Rise and Fall of a Crime Lord Online
Authors: Jim Wilson
The Iceman: The Rise and Fall of a Crime Lord (15 page)
At the other end of the money chain,
benami
or false name accounts will also camouflage where the money has been sent. Professor Passas continued:
In some cases, accounts may be held by a lawyer, accountant, friend or even persons unaware that someone else is using their name. Sometimes the owner of the
benami
account may be simply fictional, making the tracing of the beneficial owner impossible.
One of Stevenson’s associates said:
It worked like a dream for him but everybody was into it. You basically gave the shop the money and they sent it out to the Pakistani equivalent of Mr Mickey Mouse. It’s picked up the next day in Islamabad or wherever and there is absolutely no way of anyone discovering who really sent the money or who really received it. You’re easily talking about millions and millions of pounds every year.
Some of Stevenson’s money streamed out of Scotland to Islamabad to be cleaned and hidden in legitimate accounts or property deals. Some went to the United Arab Emirates and some to China. Huge sums would also be steered to the money-changing shops lining the streets of Peshawar and Quetta, along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan – the cities where opium brokers do business. Brokers were happy to trade with Stevenson – delighted to make the deals that pumped heroin on to the streets of Scotland.
The Home Office estimates that £2 billion of dirty money remains in Britain each year while £3.3 billion is sent abroad. Many of the millions flooding out of Scotland in a stream of electronic transfers were being delivered to Makkah Travel by underworld bagmen. Customs investigators who eventually shut down the money-laundering pipeline suspect that Zohaib Assad, twenty-six, and his accomplice Mohammad Ahmad, fifty-three, transferred £10 million of drugs money in just fourteen months.
Investigators staked out the shop in April 2003 after the National Westminster Bank raised the alarm over the massive sums being sent abroad by the tiny travel agency. Bankers had even advised the shop to hire a security firm to transport the fortunes in cash being handed over their counter. Launching an inquiry, codenamed Seraph, Customs monitored Makkah for months as expert financial investigators discovered £2.2 million had been moved by the tiny travel agency in one seven-month period.
After a five-week trial that ended in March 2006, Assad and Ahmad, who, like his co-accused, had no criminal record, were convicted of seven charges under the Proceeds of Crime Act. It was the first trial in Scotland based on the 2002 legislation. More were to follow, although legal teams for Assad and Ahman immediately appealed their convictions. After being freed pending a hearing, the men were due to return to court to attempt to overturn the guilty verdicts in summer 2008.
As the men allegedly behind Makkah’s money laundering were being convicted, another travel agent was also being jailed in a case only underlining the astonishing scale of the cleansing operation run through the
hawala
system.
Shahid Nazir Bhatti, owner of the Bradford Travel Agency, was sentenced to three years. Customs investigators believe that his shop helped launder £42 million in just two years but suspect that, in just over four years, a total of £500 million of drugs money had been laundered through the cash pipeline from West Yorkshire to Pakistan. Bhatti, forty-five, was the last of eleven accused to be sentenced since the huge cash-cleansing racket was uncovered in 2001. Scots gangsters were among those around Britain sending their millions to Yorkshire to be laundered.
After uncovering the identical kind of money-laundering operation in Glasgow, Customs investigators recovered a total of £2,442,318 which had been received by Makkah and placed in Glasgow holding accounts ready to be sent abroad.
Sentencing the pair at the High Court in Edinburgh, the judge, Lord Dawson, told them:
Over the weeks this trial lasted, it became clear to me that, without the services of people like you, serious organised crime could not exist. It is also clear to me . . . that both of you knew full well what you were involved in. It may well be that someone else was pulling the strings and taking the lion’s share of the money, but that in no way absolves you of responsibility for your own actions. It is my public duty to punish you and to attempt to discourage others who may be tempted to get themselves involved in this very nasty line of work.
Gordon Miller, the head of Customs’ investigations in Scotland welcomed the verdict, hailing it as the country’s first successful money-laundering prosecution under the Proceeds of Crime Act. He said: ‘This investigation and trial demonstrates the success of the legislation. The act was specifically designed to take action against money launderers and take the proceeds out of crime, thereby depriving criminals of their illicit wealth.’
Money-laundering investigations, along with asset tracing and confiscation, are at the heart of HM Revenue and Customs’ national criminal investigation strategy.
A third man had been accused over the money-laundering operation. Suspected underworld bagman William Gurie, thirty-nine, was accused of delivering massive amounts of cash to Makkah. One witness, James McDonald, a convicted counterfeiter, told the court that he had paid Gurie, described as an installation engineer, to deliver between £750,000 and £800,000 to the shop. McDonald, who is fifty-eight and from Stirling, is a self-styled legal adviser to some of Scotland’s wealthiest organised crime figures. His portfolio of specialisms includes the identification of possible loopholes in both the proceeds of crime legislation and motoring law. McDonald often courts publicity for his legal coups and has few friends in Scotland’s police and prosecution services. He is also one of Stevenson’s legal advisers.
Customs had been watching Gurie as he arrived at Makkah on 23 September 2003 and switched a bulging holdall from his car to Assad’s. Three days later, in a series of synchronised raids, officers found £384,720 in Assad’s home in Darnley, Glasgow. The bundled-up cash was to be evidence at the trial and it took court staff two and a half days to count it. After being seized, the £5, £10 and £20 notes were analysed and 80 per cent were found to be ‘saturated’ with heroin as forensic scientists found the highest reading of drugs contamination on notes ever recorded in Britain.
Gurie, whose prints were on the cash and the holdall, walked free, smiling broadly after the jury found charges of money laundering not proven. McDonald is now trying to reclaim the money. He says he handed over the bags stuffed with cash to Gurie at Little Chef car parks and at the Showcase Cinema, near Coatbridge, Lanarkshire, but claims the money was to finance a call centre in Pakistan and to fund an invention allowing cars to run on water. He said the cash belonged to Abdul Gahfoor, a director of the defunct Alphascot Ltd, based in Sauchie, Clackmannanshire. In 2004, Gahfoor had been exposed for using Alphascot to launder money for multimillionaire VAT fraudster Michael Voudouri.
Asked why he had not delivered the money to Makkah himself or used a more conventional method to transfer such huge sums, McDonald replied, ‘As I have convictions for counterfeit money offences, I used someone else. I could have been compromised with large sums of money. I had sent $14.57 million to the USA and someone managed to steal $14.1 million.’
He insisted the notes must have been contaminated with heroin after being seized by Customs saying, ‘The jury must have accepted my evidence that £384,000 was legitimate. Why else was I not in the dock?’
Before Assad was sentenced, his lawyer, Donald Findlay QC, told the court that it ‘is not for the first time that it is the soldiers, not the officers, who end up in the dock’.
24
Open for Business
It is only a guess, no more than a hunch, but law enforcers in Britain, like their colleagues on mainland Europe, estimate that they stop only one in ten of the drugs consignments being trafficked across the continent.
In 2005, police in Scotland seized drugs that would have sold for £48 million in the country’s villages, towns and cities. If that is multiplied by ten, it amounts to a drugs trade worth £480 million and that is assuming that as much as one-tenth of drugs are stopped in transit. Many, in the police and outside, fear that figure is hopelessly optimistic. No one knows but a criminal economy worth £2 billion a year in Scotland, possibly even double that, is easily possible. It’s a tide of billions of pounds washing through the blackest of economies, most of it founded on drugs. During 2005, the majority of those tonnes and tonnes of drugs was brought into Scotland by one man – a man living quietly in a small flat on the outskirts of Glasgow with an import business stretching across the globe.
One Strathclyde officer believes Jamie Stevenson’s preeminent position in Scotland’s drugs trade cannot be doubted. He said:
He was a force before the McGovern murder but, when the case collapsed and he came back to Scotland, he took his thing into a wholly different league. He was doing more, more frequently than anyone we’ve ever seen. Basically, for those five years or so, there would have been few major consignments of drugs coming into Scotland that he was not responsible for – very few.
Armed with contacts in Turkey and Pakistan who were capable of delivering drugs to the gateway towns of northern Holland and Belgium, Stevenson was ready to make his transport arrangements. He turned to the truckers. He was not the first Scots crime boss to use the HGV drivers criss-crossing the continent, picking up and delivering legitimate cargo, as cover for his drug runs. Some had a few drivers, doing a few runs, for a few thousand pounds but the scale of Stevenson’s ambition required far more. He became a haulage boss.
Sometimes he bought lorries for drivers and set them up on their own. Sometimes he liked a haulage firm so much he bought the company. Apparently legitimate transport firms and depots scattered to the north of Glasgow, complete with warehouses and mechanics tuning their fleet of container trucks, were, in fact, fronts for Iceman Inc. In addition, his associates in Ulster, the one-time terrorists now turned organised criminals, had their own haulage arrangements already in place and this offered another option to the Scots crime boss.
The route north from mainland Europe to the southwest of Scotland and the ferry ports serving Belfast offered convenient and inconspicuous drop-off points. A quick cup of tea in a Dumfries service station, ten minutes swapping a few innocent looking boxes from cab to car and the trucker was back on the road heading home to Northern Ireland while one of Stevenson’s cohorts was heading up the M74 to Glasgow with another load of drugs, another few million pounds.
The drugs could be hidden in loads of fruit, fish or whatever else was on the driver’s manifest. It did not matter to Stevenson although the flower markets of northern Holland offered some of the most convenient camouflage for drugs runs. Demanding frequent pick-ups and based in the heart of Europe’s clearing house for class A narcotics, Holland’s flower markets were a regular destination for the drivers being paid up to £20,000 a trip for making a small detour to meet one of Stevenson’s friends on the Continent.
One source with expert knowledge of Stevenson’s drugs runs said:
The drugs would be hidden in the walls of the truck, in the panels, in the silencers, in among the loads, among the flowers. Sometimes, in a bit of bluffology, the boxes were sitting all wrapped up in the driver’s cab. It didn’t matter – they were coming in.
The drivers had to be of a type – men capable of taking some strain. There had to be some confidence that they would hold it together if stopped at the ports. Some bam skidding through Customs in a cold sweat is not required. Stuff did get stopped but there was so much coming in that a load here and there could easily be written off. And these are loads that Stevenson had paid £300,000 or £400,000 for.
Stevenson would want to make sure there was no comeback from it. He’d want to be sure the drivers were squared off, with money, with threats or with both. But they were cannon fodder. The business never stopped. He never stopped making money.
A kilo of coke in Holland cost him £22,000. Selling that to some gang in Scotland would clear £35,000. That’s £13,000 profit per kilo without the risks of street dealing. If, like Stevenson, you’re bringing in fifty, sixty, a hundred kilos a run, you’re talking a lot of money – an awful lot of money.
Stevenson smuggled heroin but was one of a new type of criminal highlighted by a Europol drugs bulletin in 2006 – the so-called ‘polydrug’ smuggler. They did not limit themselves to specialist traffic in heroin, cocaine or Ecstasy – they did the lot, usually with the help of contacts and operational outposts in or around Amsterdam. The agency said:
The Netherlands plays a vital role in Europe as a centre for the transportation, facilitation and preparation of polydrug consignments. Non-Dutch criminals are basing themselves in the Netherlands to conduct polydrug trafficking business. They work closely with Dutch brokers to facilitate the supply of cocaine and other drugs to the United Kingdom and Ireland. Drugs are often professionally secreted in purpose-built concealments within the framework of vehicles or within the legitimate consignment of goods being carried. Special concealments either in the packaging or within the goods themselves have also been found.