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 (23 page)
The McGovern boys were bold and reckless on the way up and didn’t care much for any so-called rules. One police officer was a real thorn in their sides. He was always giving them a hard time. To smash his house windows was a very big statement for them to make. They were saying that they were big enough to take on the police. I’m not saying that it was connected but, within a week, every single window in their HQ at Thomson’s bar had been put in.
Thirteen years after making a personal attack on a police officer’s home, the McGoverns showed their willingness to push the boundaries again. This time the target was the elderly and much-admired parish priest for Springburn. In the view of some family members, Father Noel Murray had failed to properly praise Tony McGovern during his funeral service. At least, on this occasion, windows were spared and the priest just received a direct reproach from disgruntled female McGoverns rather than a warning from the Serious Crime Squad that somebody had been making death threats towards him.
34
Welcome to The Hague
Stevenson may not have known any language apart from Glaswegian but he could speak cash on delivery, which was the only language that mattered when he was making wholesale purchases of huge quantities of drugs across the northern rim of mainland Europe. Even the Folklore team, who were well aware of his capabilities in pioneering new sources and supply routes into Scotland, were stunned as they uncovered his business associations across Europe and beyond.
The team building their case in the shadow of Glasgow’s international airport suspected Stevenson’s cross-border operations may have already been registered by their colleagues abroad. In 2004, they called on the continent’s biggest bank of criminal intelligence, Europol. The 500 staff and ninety liaison officers based at the European Police Office in The Hague are not a police force. Their agents will not be bursting through traffickers’ doors in early-morning raids. But the information held on their massive databases of intelligence may have helped the forces of the then twenty-five members of the European Union find those doors.
Dr Martin Elvins, of the University of Dundee, has spent years studying the institutions of transnational crime-fighting and is not surprised the Folklore team visited Europol as they followed the chain of Stevenson’s supply routes as it snaked through one country after another. He said:
Today’s organised criminals are using many of the techniques of multinational corporations. The people getting away with a life of crime for the longest periods are demonstrating a high level of strategic thinking. The European Union is designed to encourage trade but, if you want to grow economies, if you want to encourage import/export, then there can be no surprise when ‘bads’ as well as ‘goods’ are also being traded. The law enforcement agencies have had to learn new tricks.
These people are resident in one country but making their money and spending their money in a number of other countries. They are well aware of being watched and well aware that they have to conceal their money. Their methods for doing that are in a constant process of adaptation.
They are aware they need to have access to the legitimate economy. That is the great unspoken truth at the heart of criminal enterprise – to do what they do, to conceal what they conceal, they must have access to corrupt people in the legitimate economy. These men are not islands.
Europol was launched under the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 as the Europol Drugs Unit, a force dedicated to gathering intelligence on the organised criminal trade in narcotics. Its remit was extended through the following decade until, by the start of 2002, the agency was working to combat all serious forms of international crime, from gun-running and human trafficking to terrorism and money laundering. The Europol Computer System (TECS) underpins the agency’s work. Capable of the collection and intricate cross-analysis of huge amounts of intelligence submitted by law enforcement agencies and working twenty-four hours a day, Europol can offer multilingual assistance to officers trailing suspects across borders.
Dr Elvins says police have to overcome a territorial inclination and inherent reluctance to share information so painstakingly amassed if Europol is to help.
It is a fishing expedition, a game of show-and-tell. You offer something – you hope to get something back. Europol is most basically a silo of information based on the new reality of databases increasingly capable of holding and processing complex information. It is a conduit, a way of facilitating the sharing of information.
You’re looking at a man who keeps flying down to Malaga, perhaps the Spanish police have been wondering who this Scots guy is that keeps meeting one of their suspects. You don’t know until you ask.
The liaison officers are crucial. Seconded from forces in the member states, they are the channel of communication between the forces and Europol. Europol can also facilitate joint investigation teams. It provides a platform to set up an operation implemented by local forces in different member states which can have a number of different fronts.
A coordinated response can help ensure that one force is not tugging at a thread that is unravelling a case thousands of miles away. It is common-sense policing.
As Stevenson’s deals stretched across borders, the Folklore team tracking him did not only visit Europol agents. The issues raised by cross-border jurisdiction meant talks at Eurojust were also on their itinerary. Based beside Europol, Eurojust was launched in 2002. Bringing senior prosecutors and judges from the European Union members together, it stages multilingual meetings with law enforcement agencies to discuss individual investigations of serious cross-border crime. The intention is to advise and to ease international legal cooperation although even the EU’s Commissioner for Justice, Freedom and Security Franco Frattini admits it is meeting some resistance from crime-fighters across the continent.
Despite his dream of a single European prosecutor to oversee cross-border investigations into serious and organised crime and despite advising on 1,000 investigations involving the smuggling of arms, drugs, and humans a year, Eurojust remains a marginal influence. In April 2007, Frattini said, ‘Eurojust should be made stronger. Our message to members is to make better use of joint investigation teams and make Eurojust involved.’
Dr Elvins, who researches cross-border police cooperation against transnational organised crime, says the international nature of the drugs trade will increasingly force the partnership of different governments and their law enforcers. He said:
Once you are building a case against these types of criminal, you very quickly hit the problem of cross-border jurisdiction. That is where Eurojust comes in. The drugs trade is a supply chain and it is not vertically integrated. At every level, it is an individual dealing with an individual. They might be dealing in container ships or a few condoms full of cocaine. The question for law enforcers is where to break the link most effectively. If someone linked to someone linked to someone you are looking at is buying a consignment in Morocco, is that going to help you put them away in the UK? Is it going to stick?
Europol and Eurojust are not well-known institutions. The public’s idea that Europol is a police force, for example, is just wrong. It is a knowledge bank. Whatever intelligence, guidance and practical support they can offer, the real nitty-gritty, the building of the case, is still down to the quality of the police work on the ground – the prioritising of targets and resources, the analysis of surveillance, making the connections, the kind of work that police officers do day in and day out.
The police attempts to stop criminals [have] always been a game of cat and mouse. There may be different institutions, different techniques but the game remains the same.
In Europol’s 2005 annual report, director Max-Peter Ratzel was to highlight a dramatic seizure of drugs that illustrated the new way forward for crime-busters co-operating across borders. His report included a Europol bulletin issued on 7 June 2005:
Close cooperation between British and Spanish authorities [has] resulted in the seizure of eight tonnes of cannabis destined for the British market. The crew on board the fishing boat
Squilla
– two Britons, one Estonian and one Spaniard – were taken by surprise when they were confronted and arrested by police officers in open waters off the coast of Spain. The police officers belonged to ‘Grupo de Respuesta Especial contra el Crimen Organizado’ (GRECO) and the ‘Unidad contra la Droga y el Crimen Organizado’ (UDYCO).The drugs traffickers had been under investigation for a longer period and the arrests made on early Sunday morning were the culmination of several months of analysis, investigation, expertise and liaison between the involved Member States and Europol.
At the same time, three more persons suspected of having arranged the shipment of cannabis from Morocco were arrested in Glasgow, Scotland.
As a law enforcement officer, it is always a pleasure when seizures and arrests such as this one are successful since they prove the value of a close and trustful cooperation between several different law enforcement entities.
The investigation is ongoing and more arrests are expected.
35
All at Sea
A storm was looming and the MV
Squilla
was already struggling as it churned north out of the Mediterranean into the deep waters of the Atlantic. Loaded to its limit, with the cargo lashed to the deck, the British-registered trawler was dangerously unstable. Its cargo, transferred ship-to-ship off the coast of Morocco the day before, was not one recorded on any ship’s manifest – a cargo of eight tonnes of cannabis worth £24 million on the streets of Scotland.
Dawn was yet to break on Sunday, 5 June 2005 but, when it did, the police moved in. The four crew on board put up no struggle as the Spanish cutter stopped the
Squilla
dead in the water. One source said:
A decision had been taken that it was too risky to allow the vessel to run with the drugs back to Britain. The trawler was really well down in the water when she was stopped. She was loaded to the absolute limit.
The dramatic raid in international waters, 100 miles west of Lisbon, may have been code-named Operation Bouzas after the Spanish port where the fishing boat had anchored before sailing to its Moroccan rendezvous. It may have involved Spanish police and Customs, the National Crime Squad and Europol. It may have enlisted the Spanish air force and navy to track the boat’s progress across the Med. But the operation had been masterminded and co-ordinated by the detectives leading the Folkore offensive against Jamie Stevenson and his key lieutenant John ‘Piddy’ Gorman.
The
Squilla
was towed to Cadiz by the Spanish authorities and the crew were led in handcuffs down the gangway to face justice. They included Billy Reid, who had, since the 1990s, been a key member of the Tartan Mafia of the Costa del Sol, a fluid coalition of Caledonian gangsters who were making millions smuggling hash from Morocco. Reid had briefly done business with Gerry Carbin Snr, another Scot willing to exploit the criminal opportunities of the Costas and he was close to Walter Douglas. The elusive Douglas, known as the Tartan Pimpernel, was the most notorious of the Costa’s Scots mobsters. Reid was flash – a big-spender who loved the high life – but he retained a reputation for professionalism, for doing his job. One source said, ‘He was a well-organised man and made sure all the bits were fitting together. He was doing it for years and was seen as someone who could be relied on.’
The Folklore police team were delighted to have bagged Glasgow-born Reid, a major international drugs smuggler, but they had set their sights higher. The multimillion-pound drugs operation of Gorman, who, along with long-time cohort Stevenson, had spent £5 million bankrolling the
Squilla
’s drug run, was about to be dismantled as the Folklore team edged ever closer to their number-one target.
Gorman, forty-nine, of Irvine in Ayrshire, was a career criminal who had graduated from street dealing to international drug trafficking. He was responsible for bringing tonnes of hash and class A drugs into Scotland. He was one of the very, very few associates Stevenson trusted and they often worked together. The Ayrshire man had offered Stevenson safe haven in his villas and apartments around the resort of Fuengirola when the Glasgow mobster was lying low after the McGovern murder. They spent much of that year immersed in the mechanics of the hash trade – the boats, cars and adapted trucks bringing cannabis resin from Morocco across the Straits of Gibraltar to the southern coast of Spain and onwards by road to Scotland.
In 2004, the SCDEA surveillance teams, who had been watching Gorman since the launch of Folklore, were looking on as he met Douglas Price, the skipper of the
Squilla
, in the Spanish port of Cadiz where the converted trawler was anchored. When it became clear the men were planning a huge cannabis shipment, the SCDEA alerted colleagues in Spain, who began their own surveillance on Price in March 2005 and monitored the
Squilla
as it was refitted in readiness for its drugs run. The international surveillance operation had also monitored meetings at the luxury apartment block in the millionaires’ playground of Marbella where Stevenson had one of his many homes on the Costa del Sol.