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 (18 page)
The meeting launched a three-year crime-fighting offensive against some of the most ruthless and effective gangs in Scotland and it set the agency’s sights squarely on one man – Scotland’s biggest international drugs trafficker, Jamie Stevenson. From that point on, the Operation Folklore team was not gathering intelligence on Stevenson – they were trying to lock him up.
One SCDEA officer, with knowledge of the meeting, said:
There was no fanfare, no great excitement. There would have been a realisation that this was only the beginning of what, in all likelihood, was going to be a long, hard investigation into a criminal who had shown himself capable of avoiding conviction despite operating at a very high level for a very long time.
One of the agency’s intelligence development teams had been working on nailing down the scale of the criminal operations of Stevenson and his close associate, Ayrshire drugs lord John ‘Piddy’ Gorman, since 20 May 2003. Confidential Folklore briefing documents, distributed on that day, could not have been clearer on the agency’s remit. Its stated aim was to ‘investigate the activities of a group of active criminals known to be involved in the large-scale importation of class A controlled drugs from mainland Europe into the UK for distribution throughout Scottish police force areas.’
The Folklore team of fifteen officers used all available methods of gathering intelligence on their targets, from undercover and electronic surveillance to forensic financial analysis of the accounts of front firms suspected of laundering their criminal fortunes. One source said:
They’re not just told to go off and come back in six months. Progress is looked at regularly and there has to be some encouragement, in terms of the inquiries pulling the right triggers.
Of course, the likelihood of success comes into it. We have never not taken on a target because it looks too difficult but we have to be realistic. There are plenty of people with an awareness of Stevenson outside the agency who, if they had known we were looking at him, would have said we were wasting our time.
The SCDEA has a specific remit to target certain categories of serious organised crime groups. But there are so many, we have to apply a bit of science. We might know an individual well – know what they do and what they are capable of doing – but there has to be a system because investigation is an expensive and complicated process. There has to be a scientific approach to choosing targets.
The officers initially assessing Stevenson and Gorman as possible targets were not short of material. The source said:
At that point, Stevenson was already heavily involved in multinational drug trafficking along with the associated money laundering. He was willing to use extreme violence to protect his business.
He was in charge but had a very close relationship to Gorman, who basically had the drugs franchise from the southern edge of Glasgow, out through Paisley and Barrhead and down into Ayrshire. Stevenson dominated the drugs trade in Lanarkshire and south Glasgow but the quantity and range of class A drugs he was bringing in meant they were going all over Scotland.
Gorman had been a dealer for years and was a long-standing associate of Stevenson but their business relationship only started in earnest after Stevenson split from the McGoverns.
Neither of them had any serious form.
The data gathered by the intelligence development teams, month after painstaking month, is eventually put through a computer matrix, a Home Office process with fifteen points designed to grade and select criminal targets. Areas scrutinised include the criminal enterprise, associates, methods, damage inflicted on their communities through drugs or violence and the potential for successfully putting the criminals in the dock.
One officer said:
Basically, if these criminals are operating at a serious enough level of organised crime, we will take them on. If, after intelligence, the targets do not meet the grade for SCDEA, the case will be passed to the relevant local force. That’s if we don’t find what we are expecting to find.
It’s like looking at any fairly substantial business to see what these people do and how they work. We get to understand them, their lifestyle, and develop an intimate knowledge of their habits.
In addition, there is a national flagging system in place. We put a flag on our targets which means that, if any police officer runs their details through the police national computer, we will be immediately notified. We can then go to the officer and ask why they did it and about the circumstances at the time.
After the meeting had rubber-stamped the targeting of Stevenson and Gorman by the Folklore team, another team of officers, led by a detective inspector, took over as Folklore – the codename randomly allocated from a centrally held Home Office register to avoid confusion with other crime-fighting operations – moved from intelligence gathering to evidence gathering.
The source continued:
The intelligence package came to the meeting in spring 2004 and Stevenson and Gorman ticked all of the boxes. It was very clear that they were involved in importation of huge quantities of drugs, including heroin, cocaine, amphetamine and cannabis. The recommendations hit the mark and, from then on, it was a criminal investigation like any other.
But, over the course of the three tortuous years ahead, Operation Folklore would become one of the most significant criminal investigations ever launched in Scotland. It would lead to the first conviction in Scotland of a serious and organised criminal based on the evidence gathered during a huge electronic surveillance offensive. It would signal a new determination and willingness of law enforcers to attack a criminal’s ill-gotten fortune to put him in the dock. And it blazed a trail in the level of international co-operation with other forces as the Folklore team followed their target around the world and back to a nondescript flat in Burnside.
29
Boxed In
The truck carrying the forty kilos of heroin packed in two boxes and stowed in the driver’s cabin had travelled across Europe, across the Channel and across Britain to Scotland – and it had been followed for every mile of its journey. The police swooped on an industrial estate in Dumfries as the boxes were being switched from the truck to a waiting car. They contained drugs that would have sold for almost £6 million on the streets of Scotland’s towns and cities.
It was 27 June 2003 and the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency’s operation codenamed Folklore, still in its intelligence-gathering phase, had been underway for just five weeks.
In October, Robert McDowall, forty-eight, a driver for a Lisburn-based flower importer, and Francis Gallagher, thirty-nine, a career criminal from Springburn, Glasgow, appeared at the High Court in Kilmarnock to admit to being concerned in the supply of class A drugs.
SCDEA officers had trailed the lorry from Holland and tracked it 400 miles north after it was driven through Customs at the Harwich ferry terminal in Essex. They had been watching as McDowall met Gallagher, known as Frank, at a Little Chef restaurant on the M74 at Dumfries. They were watching as the men left and Gallagher drove to the deserted Lochside Industrial Estate with McDowall’s truck following behind. And they were watching as Gallagher reversed up to the lorry trailer and the men started moving boxes from the truck to the car. Then they moved in and both men were arrested at the scene. Officers raiding Gallagher’s house in Springburn found £26,000 in cash and a passport.
The court was told the SCDEA had been tipped off.
On 17 December, they were back in court for sentencing. Gallagher, who had a previous conviction for drug dealing, got twelve years and McDowall, an Irishman living in Ballantrae, Ayrshire, got ten. Jailing the pair, Lord Hardie told them:
You are probably well aware of the consequences to the public and the misery [drugs] cause to addicts, their families and other members of society. It is often said that the drugs trade is an evil trade and I would endorse that sentiment.
To Gallagher, the judge said:
I note you have a previous conviction for being involved in the supply of drugs and that will be reflected in your sentence. I take into account the nature and quantity of drugs with a street value of £5.85 million for which the maximum period I can impose is life imprisonment.
I take into account also you are not at the top of the chain and I reserve a life sentence for those who are if they are ever brought to justice.
The judge was right. Gallagher was not the top man but he was at his right hand. For the first time, the police had got close to Stevenson. They had picked off one of his key lieutenants, a fixer feared for his capacity for violence. And their sights were now fixed squarely on his boss. And they had an ace up their sleeve. Stevenson had made a fundamental error. For once, he had got too close to the drugs. He had met McDowall to arrange the shipment of class A drugs.
And now Robert Henry McDowall was about to talk.
30
Burgers and Drugs
It was a bit early in the year to be sitting outside but the three men enjoying their burgers and chips around a table in the garden of the Queen’s Hotel looked relaxed enough in the cold sunshine of spring 2003. One of them, Robert McDowall, a forty-eight-year-old Ulsterman, ran the small white-painted hotel with his wife Carol. It was sited on the main road running through the picturesque south Ayrshire village of Colmonell.
Much later, Carol would tell the police:
It was a nice day. I was working at the hotel and Robert was there with me when the two guys arrived. It was afternoon time. Robert told me the two guys were lorry drivers. They had arrived together in what, I’m sure now, was a black car. I think it was an Audi – quite fancy looking.
Robert and the two guys sat at a table out the back of the hotel talking. Robert asked if I could make them a couple of chicken burgers to eat. I remember Robert actually saying to me, ‘Can you make Frank and the other guy a couple of chicken burgers?’
I’m not sure what Robert called the other guy but I’m sure it was Jay or a name beginning with the letter J. I made the guys something to eat and they sat outside speaking to Robert.
They had a lot to discuss, McDowall and his new acquaintances from Glasgow. Within months, one of them, Frank Gallagher would be arrested alongside McDowall on a Dumfries industrial estate after taking delivery of two boxes each containing 20 kilos of heroin with an estimated street value of £6 million. The other man visiting Ayrshire that day was Jamie Stevenson.
The three men had met just once before, when they’d had a conversation in a car parked beside a Tesco supermarket, next to Ayr Racecourse, just before Christmas. A mutual associate from Northern Ireland had introduced them. The men discussed the possibility of McDowall earning a bit of extra money by adding drugs to his lorry’s loads as he drove across the continent to Britain. They suggested he might find a job with a Northern Ireland-based flower importer. They told him there would be good money in it. He agreed.
Money had been tight since the McDowalls had taken over the hotel in the scenic village, tucked away in the rolling Ayrshire countryside, fourteen miles south of Girvan, four years earlier. Each month it had been a struggle to make ends meet – a struggle that became all the more difficult when McDowall suffered the stroke that had forced him off the road for a year.
Stevenson was usually too careful to be anywhere near the drugs he was pouring into Scotland. He was usually too careful to discuss those drugs with anyone apart from his tight and loyal inner circle. So why had he taken the risk of meeting a man he hardly knew to discuss, in incriminating detail, how he was regularly bringing class A drugs of every description into Scotland with the help of complicit HGV drivers and their trucks?
One associate remembers:
Stevenson was massively careful, verging on the paranoid. He had a few men whose judgement and abilities he trusted completely and they would usually do any face-to-face stuff. But he had to meet McDowall. The guy was potentially going to be a big, big part of what they were doing – a keystone. Stevenson had to see him for himself – satisfy himself.
And it was almost the biggest mistake he ever made.
Stevenson and his henchmen now believe McDowall was already working for the authorities when they enjoyed their burgers al fresco. They suspect he had already been busted by Customs at Dover as he brought in a load of drugs in January 2003. He had been allowed to drive away after agreeing to help the authorities land the biggest fish in Scotland. They believed it enough to take out a £10,000 contract on the life of the suspected informer after he was jailed, along with Gallagher, following a court case that was notable for being the first time the SCDEA’s Operation Folklore had ever been mentioned in public.