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 (16 page)
Another report, this time written by the US Drug Enforcement Administration, underlined the importance of Amsterdam as the must-go destination for major international drugs traffickers. They said the city is ‘rather unique in that every type of drug-smuggling and distribution organisation is represented for strategic and logistical purposes’. They also described the city as ‘an organisational centre, a central brokerage point and a safe haven where ‘Dutch hashish traffickers are increasingly distributing heroin, cocaine and amphetamine to other countries. This polydrug activity is being encountered more and more frequently.’
Cocaine from South America, heroin from Afghanistan, amphetamine and Ecstasy made in the industrial drugs labs of Holland and Belgium were all available in the criminal wholesale market of Amsterdam and Stevenson, with a growing reputation built on regular hassle-free deals, was a welcome buyer.
‘That’s maybe the one thing that would still surprise people – the sheer scale of what he was bringing in and the millions and millions he was making,’ says one police officer. He added:
It wasn’t just heroin. He’d have a truck carrying one box of smack, another of cocaine, some amphetamine in there, Ecstasy . . . he was bringing in everything all the time – whatever was available. He’d be told such and such was available. He’d send the money, a bagman carrying cash to Amsterdam or a money transfer to Pakistan or wherever. The money goes out and the drugs come back.
Basically, for those five years, Stevenson was the drugs market in Scotland. He was the wholesaler to smaller dealers across the Central Belt and up and down the country. He was the one-stop shop for these guys.
He was Drugs ’R’ Us.
25
Friends Across the Water
After his arrest, Jamie Stevenson was told police were still struggling to identify and target all of his international business contacts. He just smiled before saying, ‘I hope they’re collecting their Air Miles.’
The network that Stevenson used to bring thousands of tonnes of class A drugs into Scotland stretched around the globe. His dealings with traffickers trailed from the poppy fields of Afghanistan through Pakistan and Turkey, to cocaine from Colombia and hash from Morocco and through Spain. Domestically produced Ecstasy and speed from Holland joined wholesale consignments of heroin and cocaine from the holding depots near Amsterdam, Rotterdam and along the coast of Belgium. Sweden, France and Portugal were all weigh stations for Stevenson’s loads.
Despite disliking foreign travel, he visited many of these countries. Much of his business could only be conducted face to face. Sometimes he travelled on his own passport. Sometimes he was Jeremiah Dooley, the identity on a counterfeit British passport the police found in one of his homes as they moved to dismantle his operation. The passport had been supplied by a contact in Northern Ireland – a former Loyalist terrorist who was a skilled counterfeiter and one of the most important links in the international supply chain streaming Stevenson’s drugs on to Scotland’s streets.
Given his deal-making abilities, it was no surprise that his associates came from both sides of the sectarian divide. ‘He would do business with whoever was sat on the other side of the table,’ one source remembers, ‘green, orange, or purple.’ He continued:
I don’t know how common that is – not very, probably – but he did it. It was just business to him. He could be one thing for somebody, another for somebody else. His reputation in Scotland was always going to help. There’s so much coming and going over the sea that the people he was dealing with knew what he was all about. He didn’t need a lot of introduction.
Stevenson was born a Protestant but, after his mother remarried, a lot of the time when he was growing up was spent with Catholic relatives – particularly a favourite uncle, who died while he was on remand after the Folklore busts. One acquaintance from Glasgow said:
Religion was not a big part of his life, in any sense. He used to go to the Celtic games but it was more about being seen and seeing people. He was a businessman not a football fan. He had some decent pals in Ulster – men he trusted and there weren’t many of them in Scotland, Ireland or anywhere else.
He was close to one guy in particular. He never mentioned his name but just called him ‘The Musician’. He seemed to be right at the top of the tree – a serious criminal. He seemed to be one of the very few that Jamie would listen to, take a bit of advice from.
His friends across the Irish Sea had been Stevenson’s first port of call after the McGovern murder. He travelled first to Belfast and then on to a safe house in the Republic before heading to warmer climes with his crony John Gorman on the Costa del Sol. Irish gangsters, from both the north and south of the island, also enjoyed the bars and clubs around the Fuengirola resort and many were to become the two Scots’ partners in drinking and crime.
After his return to Britain and the eventual collapse of the McGovern murder charge, the terror-gangs-turned-drugs-runners of Ulster remained a key part of Stevenson’s business. For years, all through the Troubles, there has been an exchange of money and goods between the criminal gangs of the West of Scotland and their counterparts in Northern Ireland. The ferry routes offered easy access and escape for visitors to do special favours for their friends before quietly returning home, unsuspected and untraceable. The favours often left men unable to walk . . . or breathe.
The terror groups of Northern Ireland had enjoyed a peace dividend when their guns fell temporarily and then permanently silent in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. The paramilitaries of all shades no longer had to divide their attention between crime and terror. In any case, crime was more profitable. When the Northern Ireland Select Affairs Committee investigated Northern Ireland’s criminal underworld in 2006, the thirteen members concluded that the terror gangs from both sides of the religious divide were running rampant. Their report revealed IRA Republican, Loyalist UDA and UVF and all related splinter groups were attempting to outstrip each other in their enthusiasm for drugs, armed robbery, protection rackets and smuggling. And Stevenson had already bought in.
One associate said:
He had his own lorries coming and going to Scotland but all the Irish trucks heading through Dumfries to the ferries at Stranraer and Larne fitted perfectly. He knew guys who could get one of his drivers a job. He knew guys who knew guys in Holland. He knew guys all over the place in exactly the same line of work as his. For a time, Northern Ireland was a big part of Stevenson’s operation.
By the time Stevenson was arrested, the government’s Organised Crime Task Force estimated that Northern Ireland’s gangsters were raking in £600 million a year as police chiefs warned of increasing evidence of international links and the involvement of criminals from the British mainland. The elite agency revealed a master plan to target thirty outfits and these were only the most dangerous and profitable in the Province. An estimated 230 criminal groups have been identified by police.
The huge wealth generated by the sectarian gunmen-turned-drug-runners was only emphasised in November 2004 when the rural retreat of one of Ulster’s most feared terrorists was put on the market by criminal asset strippers. The mansion, complete with its own stable block, belonged to Jim ‘Jonty’ Johnston, a leading member of the Red Hand Commando, after he was shot dead while going to feed his two pet donkeys. He had controlled the drugs trade in County Down, raking in an estimated £1.5 million, and been questioned over five drugs-related murders. The authorities were to seize £1.2 million after his death, including a property portfolio, investments and a tidy pension plan.
Former members of the Red Hand Commando had been among Stevenson’s best contacts in the Province.
A source said:
The Loyalists seemed far more deeply involved in drugs running than the other side – the actual process of getting stuff from there to here. So that’s who Stevenson dealt with. But I know for a fact he did stuff with Republicans as well. If it suited him, if he trusted the others and if it paid, he would go in with anyone. That was how he worked – always.
26
Chairman of the Board
To the detectives tracking Jamie Stevenson through his labyrinth of international money transfers, supply network and freight deliveries, he was the chairman of the board. One officer, involved in the massive offensive against Stevenson, said:
Drugs trafficking is a huge, international business and men like Stevenson are the chief executives. They might never see their product but they are the men with the overall sense of the business. They are forging relationships with contacts, making the deals, organising supply routes, arranging recruitment.
Stevenson was as capable as any we have seen in Scotland in terms of the skills and talents that he brought to his work. He was very organised, personable, a risk-taker and proactive in dealing with threats to his business. He was, in effect, a very successful businessman. His business was the large-scale importation and sale of class A drugs and he was good at it. He knew about supply and demand. He knew about product, price, his place in the market and strategy.
Like most of these men, Stevenson surrounded himself with a very, very small group of people he trusted completely. They were his operational directors and he would deal with them on a need to know basis. One would handle one bit of business for him, another would handle another. In turn, they’re busy organising the level below them. The management structure was a classic pyramid, fanning out from Stevenson at the very top down through a tight group of key associates, down to the gangsters buying wholesale from them, down to the street dealers selling tenner bags up some close.
He was doing the import stuff, the supply chain stuff, and working out the franchise arrangements. Some of the gangs he would be supplying were selling his drugs in his areas, largely the southside of Glasgow spreading east out to Lanarkshire, for his profits, others were buying the stuff wholesale and going away and doing their own thing. Either way, he was making money.
If, as the business textbooks insist, good management is about planning, organising, and controlling, Stevenson was a good manager. He was also, according to at least one source who has known him for years, a natural leader. As academic and leadership guru Fred Fiedler says, ‘There is no one ideal leader personality. However, effective leaders tend to have a high need to influence others, to achieve, and they tend to be bright, competent and socially adept, rather than stupid, incompetent and social disasters.’
One source, a long-term acquaintance of Stevenson, said:
He’s physically a big, imposing man – good looking, well built, broad shoulders, clearly fit. He was usually in casual gear – sweatshirts, trackies – but it was always very clean, very neat. He had a feeling of sharpness about him. In person, he could be really amenable. It was like he knew the buttons to press to make people like him – like a conscious thing – but he could turn it off just as quickly.
One of his things is that, when he’s talking to you, he locks right on to your eyes and stays there. He never looks away. It’s like he’s absolutely involved with your conversation. It can be disconcerting and intimidating but it’s kind of flattering as well – that he seems so intent on what you’ve got to say. Of course, all the time that brain of his is taking what you’re saying, computing it and working out all his angles.
He’s certainly smart but then it wouldn’t take much to be smarter than the halfwits and liabilities he started out in competition with. What he did show for those five years or so was that he was capable of taking his game up a league to do business with major criminals who were just as cute and just as ruthless.
But one criminologist, based at a Scottish university where he has studied the mechanics of organised crime, said it would be wrong to exaggerate the business skills of gangsters like Stevenson.
On one level, they are operating a multinational import business and making a huge amount of money. On another, they are criminals, operating outside of the law, paying no taxes, using violence to consolidate their position. They clearly have some of the skills of legitimate businessmen but it is dangerous to encourage this idea that, if they had only chosen another fork in the road, they would be Richard Branson. It’s rubbish.
Most of these men – and they are invariably men – prosper in a life of crime because they are good at things abhorrent in the rest of society. They steal things and kill people. They should not be considered nominees for entrepreneur of the year.
Another investigator, with knowledge of the Folklore operation, agrees, saying:
Stevenson certainly had some attributes that might have secured a successful career in legitimate business but he enjoyed the game too much. He liked the excitement, the control, the reputation, the money. He’s bright but not as clever as the guys like him who know when to step off the merry-go-round. They make their millions, launder their money and buy into legitimate business. They have made more money than they know how to spend and the choice is open to them to turn legit, to become businessmen instead of ‘businessmen’.
A few manage to do it – the brightest ones – and it becomes harder to prove that drugs money helped launch their legit firms with every month that passes. Given their past, they may spend the rest of their lives looking over their shoulders but it won’t be for the police.
The level Stevenson was operating at meant he had that choice and he decided to continue doing what he was doing. He enjoyed the life. He enjoyed being a criminal. He enjoyed the buzz. And he enjoyed taking on the police. He is an arrogant man. That arrogance was a big part of his character and a big part in what he achieved but it was to help bring him down.