The Iceman: The Rise and Fall of a Crime Lord (2 page)

Twenty addresses were to be visited that Wednesday morning, in Lanarkshire, Glasgow, and Amsterdam. The Scottish task force were split, briefed and ready to move by 6.15 a.m. Some left by the back door into the station car park where the fleet of marked and unmarked cars and vans was waiting. Colleagues, drafted in from other stations, left by the front door where multicultural messages etched into the glass door panels spell out ‘Welcome’ in twenty-four different languages. There would be no similar greetings at their destinations.

The SCDEA’s team, led by the elite agency’s crime controller Detective Superintendent Stephen Ward, attended the briefing that detailed officers to each of the target addresses and revealed the identities of the six men and two women to be taken from the houses and flats scattered across the West of Scotland. There would be no surprises or omissions. The agency’s surveillance teams – officers on the ground and the specialist teams of electronic eavesdroppers – had been watching and listening, plotting the location of every target.

But Ward did not follow any of the units rolling out of the car parks around the station, opposite the district court and council buildings. Instead, he returned to the agency’s headquarters. There, in the control room of the nondescript red-brick Osprey House, hard against Glasgow Airport, he would follow the endgame of Folklore. His attention was focused most on two of the homes whose occupants were about to be abruptly woken.

Afterwards, Ward would tell reporters:

Most of the police teams had headed out of East Kilbride but the vehicles of one of the tasked units drove south, in convoy, along the deserted carriageways of the new town, to one of the modern estates on its southern borders. Lindsayfield is popular with parents looking for a safe haven to raise their children. Good for schools, handy for a Morrisons superstore, it seems no different to the commuter town’s other tidy, new-build estates. It was here, in the scheme where the streets bear the names of famous Scottish mountain ranges, that the police team headed, ghosting slowly over the road bumps deterring speeding drivers and passing the neatly trimmed lawns where kids’ forgotten scooters lay in the dew. They pulled up just before entering the cul-de-sac of Campsie Road, out of sight of number 44.

Sleeping inside the double-garaged villa, backing on to fields and facing down the streets inspired by the Pentlands, the Cheviots, and the Cairngorms, were Gerry Carbin Jnr, twenty-six, his partner Karen Maxwell, thirty-one, and their two children, aged one and six. They had also been home one Saturday evening eight months earlier when, as detectives listened in, Carbin unwillingly took delivery of a holdall containing £204,000 of drugs money. The bag, unsuccessfully hidden first in a cupboard and then in a study, would provide the breakthrough the Folklore team had been working towards for four years.

Seven miles away, across East Kilbride and the green fields dividing it from Greater Glasgow, another team had arrived at their destination. It was an equally unlikely setting for the climactic raids of a landmark police investigation into international drugs trafficking and money laundering. Burnside, lying on the south-east rim of the city, is also popular with young families. Many are drawn to the tree-lined sandstone terraces on the edge of Rutherglen, just a few miles from the city centre.

Fishescoates Gardens is half-hidden in the heart of Burnside. A small development of modern flats, it lies in an L-shaped corner plot, just off the main road to East Kilbride. A funeral home opposite the development’s main entrance strikes the only jarring note. Signs warn that the well-kept communal gardens are private and that dogs are not welcome. The recycling bins are neatly lined up for collection. Strangers are noticed and not particularly welcome. A sign on the rear door of number 21 urges residents of the nine flats to make sure it is locked at night. The officers preparing to visit the couple living quietly in one of the flats on the second floor came through the front.

Armed response units were nearby. Thousands of hours of taped conversations, recorded by hidden bugs inside their homes, suggested the gang were not reckless or foolish enough to stash guns there but no chances could be taken that morning. The 150-strong force also included the so-called ‘Angry Men’, the Strathclyde officers trained and equipped for forced entries in the face of extreme hostility. Wearing protective clothing, visored and carrying mini-rams, the teams were ferried by van to each of the homes. The synchronised raids began at 6.40 a.m.

The doors were forced opened and stayed open as officers entered the homes, detained the suspects and mounted inch-by-inch searches. As cupboards were emptied, drawers rifled and carpets lifted, officers found almost £8,000 in Carbin’s home, along with eight luxury watches. A further thirty-six high-value watches were found in the simultaneous raids, some valued at more than £30,000. Those searches already underway even before the suspects had been taken from their homes, would help secure their downfall. One officer involved in the arrest of Carbin and his partner in East Kilbride said:

In Burnside, Carbin’s stepfather was equally subdued. Like the others, he was driven to the high-security police office in Govan on the southern banks of the Clyde and detained. He called himself a self-employed car valet and a sometimes jewellery trader. According to his tax forms, his business was slowly growing, earning him £38,083 in 2003 rising to £80,885 two years later. His returns to the Inland Revenue did not include the dirty millions raked in from his true occupation – being a career criminal commanding Scotland’s biggest-ever drugs importation business.

By 8 a.m. on 20 September 2006 – six years and four days after the fatal shooting of his former best friend and gangland ally – Jamie Stevenson was behind bars. He had nothing to say.

3

Here’s Jamie

‘Get yourself tae fuck!’ boomed the dark-haired youth at a nearby policeman.

The officer was perplexed since, up to that point, he had not even noticed the swaggering teen.

This was one police officer’s introduction in 1982 to Jamie Stevenson, then a seventeen-year-old with a growing reputation as an aspiring man of violence in an area with no shortage of them.

The smarter criminals knew better than to fall out with the police, quickly grasping that there was truth in the half joke about Strathclyde Police being the biggest gang in the city – and one with a very long memory. But Stevenson, later a model of understated discretion at the sharp end of a global organised crime network, had yet to learn that it often paid to keep his mouth shut.

One Scots-Italian crook in his twenties was soon to make Stevenson’s acquaintance in an even more memorable way. It happened while he was hanging around a Springburn petrol station which was a haunt for the street-level drug dealers just when Scotland’s heroin epidemic was first taking hold. Stevenson’s fast, brutal and efficient knife attack left scarlet splashes of his victim’s blood on the diesel-stained forecourt. To most people, it was a cowardly and terrifying slashing but, according to gangland legend, this was the moment when Stevenson had ‘arrived’.

At the time, the police were certain that this act of violence, deliberately performed in the view of a gaggle of small-time dealers and their desperate customers, was Stevenson’s way of making it clear that he was not to be messed with. One veteran officer said:

In those early days, as the crime gangs bullied, stabbed and slashed their way around their streets, Stevenson’s menacing confidence was just the kind of thing the gangsters ruling his area were looking for in new recruits. And the police say that, even at such a young age, he already had a reputation as being willing and able to use a knife to hold up shopkeepers on the orders of two older criminals. In fact, even back then, many recall how older, cooler criminals were needed to rein in the reckless bravado of Stevenson. One police officer said:

James Stevenson, always known as Jamie, was born in 1965 to Emma and James Snr, a general labourer who was not around during his son’s upbringing. By 1969, Emma and her toddler son were living with her new partner who she would later have a daughter with and marry in 1984. Stevenson’s first home at 37 Monkland Street in the Townhead area of Glasgow has long gone. In fact, not only is the family’s tenement flat away, the entire street has been wiped off the map, long buried underneath developer’s concrete.

Most of Stevenson’s childhood was spent in the Red Road high flats in the Barmulloch area in north Glasgow. His Petershill Drive tower-block home was built in 1969. Futuristic looking for its time, it was amongst the tallest buildings in the city. To a child in the late 60s, these new concrete monoliths would have been every bit as exciting as the Empire State Building in Manhattan.

He wasn’t exactly a model pupil at All Saints Secondary School – a school which hit the headlines in 2004 when an eleven-year-old refugee boy from East Africa died after a scuffle in the canteen.

Another ex-detective remembers arresting fifteen-year-old Stevenson following one of his first brushes with the law. He said:

The petrol station slashing earned Stevenson a place in a Springburn gang led by the feared McGovern brothers. One of them, Anthony, had followed Stevenson’s arrival into the world eleven days later, at the same maternity ward, at Robroyston Hospital. By the time Jamie and Tony were teenagers, they were already as close as brothers and would remain inseparable for years to come. Only death would divide them.

4

Chips Off the Block

On light summer evenings, the queue of customers would snake out the door of Santi’s fish-and-chip shop in Springburn Way. Much of the business was local but the lure of Santi’s suppers was enough to draw passing trade from the type of people who would not normally have cause to stop in Springburn. These hungry middle classes would head back to comfortable homes in the more affluent suburb of Bishopbriggs via the A803 dual carriageway – an ugly scar cutting through the centre of Springburn. They would warily sidestep the youths who clearly regarded the patch of pavement outside Santi’s as belonging to them.

It was 1980, long before the shell suit and baseball cap became the uniform of the Glasgow schemes, these teens were wearing the latest skin-tight stonewashed jeans and jackets and colourful Kickers on their feet. The sharp-faced, streetwise kids would stand outside Santi’s sharing cigarettes, joking with each other and making their presence felt as they eyeballed the well-to-do outsiders waiting in line for their chips.

Amongst this gang of around twenty boys and girls were the teenage McGovern brothers who had already gained notoriety, not least because previous generations of their family had also been steeped in crime. Their parents Joe Snr, a taxi driver, and Elizabeth Mitchell, a sewing machinist, tied the knot at St Aloysius Church in October 1962. Their Catholic wedding was perhaps prompted by the arrival five months later of their first son Joe Jnr.

In 1980, their eldest boy was seventeen and already an unmarried dad to a son also called Joe. His brothers were Tony, fifteen, Tommy, thirteen, James, nine, and Paul, seven. At this time, the family, including sixteen-year-old sister Jackie, lived in a cramped council flat at 42 Blackthorn Street in Springburn, in the north-east of the city.

Springburn in the nineteenth century had been an industrial powerhouse where thousands of men and four great works – Cowlairs, St Rollox, Hyde Park and Atlas – produced most of the steam engines, carriages and wagons that connected Britain with her global empire. By the 1970s, that industrial past was a ghost and much of the area had sunk into a pit of crime, grime, despair and violence although many good people were proud to call Springburn home.