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 (24 page)
One of his neighbours in the apartments on Avenida del Prado, in the heart of the chic Nueva Andalucia neighbourhood, was a millionaire Irish Republican and major cocaine smuggler. Vastly experienced in specially adapting boats to carry drugs and the techniques needed to transfer contraband ship-to-ship while at sea, detectives believe he, along with Stevenson and Gorman, was a key player in the
Squilla
plot.
On 26 April 2006, Gorman, Reid and the rest were jailed at court hearings held simultaneously in Scotland and Spain. At the end of an eight-week trial, Gorman got twelve years at the High Court in Glasgow after being convicted of drug running and money laundering. He was never convicted over the
Squilla
bust but, after Crown prosecutors focused on the Scottish end of his operation, Gorman was jailed over £360,000 worth of drugs and laundering £178,000 of drugs money. Gorman, a self-styled builder who rarely visited a site, had claimed the cash was for trading in tobacco and fireworks – a sideline in pyrotechnics that seemed to surprise his accountant when he was called to give evidence. The judge, Lord Bracadale, told Gorman, ‘The evidence showed you were the likely organiser and manager who arranged deals. The profits were high and so were the risks.’
Money launderers William McDonald, forty-four, from Glasgow, James Lowrie, sixty, from Liverpool, Bradford-based Mushtaq Ahmed, fifty-one, and cannabis dealer Robert Thomson, twenty-seven, from Irvine, shared sentences totalling sixteen and a half years.
Meanwhile, in Madrid, the
Squilla
smugglers were also being sentenced. Douglas Price, fifty, from Kilwinning in Gorman’s Ayrshire heartlands, got four years. Reid, forty-four, Arno Podder, thirty-eight, from Estonia, the boat’s mechanic, and Moroccan fixer Sufian Mohammed Dris, twenty-two, were jailed for three years each.
Afterwards, the SCDEA’s director, Graeme Pearson, told reporters:
There is not a village or town in the West of Scotland that has not been impacted by Gorman and his trade. Thousands of ghosts created by drugs who are today wandering the streets have him to thank for their plight. What astounds me is that he could still manage to live within the very communities that he has blighted.
It must be like the man who invented the iPod walking around and being proud seeing everyone using his product. Gorman must have been the same in some Ayrshire villages.
How does he cope with knowing there is a family down the street whose kids have not been fed because their parents are addicted to his drugs – or knowing that some parents are wondering why they failed their kids because they end up being hooked?
Gorman and his associates funded comfortable lifestyles on the backs of many thousands of people stricken by the scourge of drug abuse.
And Pearson had only one man in mind when he delivered a final and pointed message to Gorman’s associates still at large – ‘We will not forget about you.’
36
Birdman
Coke often causes violence between criminals but usually Colombia’s biggest export is behind it rather than the best-selling cola. However, anyone who was in the visiting room of maximum-security Shotts Prison one evening in July 2005 would have learned that is not always the case.
The niggling had started outside in the car park. Jamie Stevenson and his stepson Gerry Carbin Jnr had been striding to the entrance of the Lanarkshire jail when words were exchanged with another group of visitors. Prison officers quickly extinguished the row.
Wives, partners, mums, dads and kids filed slowly into the large visiting room. Prisoners sat at the bolted-down plastic tables, holding hands with loved ones, under the poker faces of the prison officers. They talked about family, friends, old times – anything that gave a temporary escape from their surroundings. A few children amused themselves in the play area.
Suddenly, the low murmur of conversation was shattered when a full can of Coke was hurled with great force towards the head of Stevenson. The bright red missile rocketed through the air before smashing squarely off his temple. Stevenson barely paused under the blow, hurling himself across the visiting room towards an old adversary four seats along – Robert ‘Birdman’ O’Hara. Bedlam ensued as the pair traded blows. They were joined by Carbin along with another prisoner and O’Hara’s female visitor. Prison officers waded in to break it up and, within moments, peace returned.
For many years, no one in Scotland’s criminal underworld was either brave enough or stupid enough to cross Stevenson. Even people like the members of the Daniel family, who shared his untouchable reputation, would back away from conflict with him. His notoriety was justified. Enemies were dealt with directly and forcefully. It would take a very brave, dangerous or reckless man to have a go. Enter O’Hara.
Then aged just twenty-eight but serving a jail sentence that will not see him freed until at least 2025, his reputation was almost as ugly as Stevenson’s. O’Hara grew up on the tough streets of Possilpark, an area bordering the McGovern family’s Springburn base. From an early age, his ability to dish out violence was noted by the family in much the same way a schoolboy footballer’s skill may catch the eye of a big club’s scout. Indeed, his ‘natural ability’ reminded some of Stevenson when he was a young man.
From 2000 onwards, O’Hara went from a nasty nuisance in Possil to the head of a drugs operation turning over £2 million a year, with direct links to the McGoverns. He drove a £65,000 Audi and lived in a £400,000 penthouse flat in a sophisticated city-centre apartment block. His gang’s drugs profits, mainly from heroin and cannabis, were laundered through a couple of car washes.
His gang was hated and feared in equal measure. During the summer of 2004, O’Hara and his crew were at their most dangerous with a similar reputation for violence as that which had once been carved out by the young McGovern brothers. Paul McDowall, no relation to Robert McDowall, was to become the latest casualty in the city’s drugs wars when O’Hara ordered one of his cronies to kill him. The twenty-five-year-old victim was an associate of a rival dealer and O’Hara wanted to show his power. The price for McDowall’s murder was the £2,000 worth of drugs which the knifeman owed O’Hara.
Killer Colin McKay, who shares his name with another McGovern associate linked to earlier gangland killings, phoned O’Hara afterwards to tell him the job was done. His call was not necessary as CCTV cameras had actually seen O’Hara and his right-hand man, Robert Murray, edging close enough to view the imminent knife attack outside the Saracen pub. They were like two spectators at a sporting event.
In another parallel with the McGoverns, the O’Hara mob knew that all the evidence in the world meant nothing if the witnesses could be got at. When he was arrested after arriving back in Scotland from a luxury holiday in Mexico, he casually insisted that he would get someone else to take the fall but his confidence was misplaced and his next holiday was not going to be as exotic as the last one.
Soon after the murder, police found evidence of attempts to threaten and bribe those who were to give evidence. O’Hara’s girlfriend stood trial for offering £10,000 to the sister of a key witness but the case against her was found not proven. One witness fled Scotland while two others who did give evidence remain under official protection provided by the authorities.
Raids linked to the murder investigation yielded a huge and terrifying arsenal of guns including a MAC-11 sub-machine gun, which spits out ten deadly rounds per second – that is 600 per minute. It was the first time such a weapon had been found in Scotland and O’Hara’s gang were the last people that should have had it.
The trial was switched from Glasgow to a High Court sitting in Dunfermline to give armed police an extra edge in the containment and monitoring of the convoy of thugs making the daily journey from Possil to Fife. On this occasion, despite his bold prediction that he would walk free, the system won and the man who terrorised large areas of north Glasgow was jailed. As he was sent down, his moronic foot soldiers clapped defiantly from the public gallery.
One figure who was occasionally present during the trial was Paul McGovern. Although the McGoverns valued having O’Hara on their side, they knew he was volatile figure who could have turned on them in a flash so, despite losing money tied up in Birdman’s drugs business, there was an almost palpable sense of relief that he had gone. He was a terrifying man with the unpredictable capability of bringing down enemies and allies alike.
He and three associates got a total of fifty-six years in May 2005. Just a few weeks before, the most deadly weapon O’Hara could aim at Stevenson was the can of Coca-Cola. One associate said:
O’Hara was loyal to the McGoverns and had been making it clear for long enough what he thought of Stevenson and what he intended to do to him. If it was a square go, Stevenson would have torn him apart but had they both stayed out of jail with weapons, money and contacts, anything could have happened.
Following the Coke-can attack, Stevenson, who was seething with rage, and Carbin were bundled into a police van and carted off to a cell for the night before appearing the next morning at Hamilton Sheriff Court. The charge against Carbin was later dropped but Stevenson, appearing at the same court in November 2005, admitted a breach of the peace charge. It is the most common non-motoring charge brought in Scotland and one which requires the accused to ‘cause fear and alarm’. He was admonished – the least serious sentence that could have been given and the legal equivalent of a slap on the wrist.
Fiscal Depute Ian McCann told the court:
The whole incident was sparked when Robert O’Hara threw a can of juice at Mr Stevenson. A fight occurred and, by his plea of guilty, Mr Stevenson admits he was involved in it. The police were called and Mr Stevenson was arrested.
For a man linked with a series of murders and who headed an international drugs and money laundering network, it was a bizarre first criminal conviction. The news agency photographer who snapped Stevenson as he left court that day secured the first contemporary image of Scotland’s number one criminal.
As Stevenson emerged into the winter chill from the court, he had no idea the Folklore team were in the process of assembling their own album of secret snapshots.
37
On the Run Again
‘Have you counted it yet? Why not? Well, gonnae do it right now? Every bundle. I want an exact figure. Is it all right where it is? That safe . . . is it big enough to hold all that?’
It was Friday, 26 May 2006 and Jamie Stevenson had a cash problem – he had too much to hide. He unwittingly shared his storage difficulty with the surveillance officers bugging his home but one detective said that the almost-daily collection of thousands of pounds in used notes was a logistical headache for the drugs gang.
Everyone talks about money laundering and all the ways the cash is whitened up but, way before it becomes a line buried in some company’s accounts or a digitised electronic transfer, drugs money is literally dirty – thousands and thousands of used notes, sometimes rolled into £5,000 bundles, sometimes just lying loose like confetti and stuffed into bags and cases. We’re not talking about a cheque that can be slipped into a top pocket. These guys get paid in cash money and lots of it. It’s big and it’s bulky. Every day, they face the problem of hiding it until they can get rid of it safely.
Stevenson could stay away from the drugs but he had to get close to the money. That was his Achilles heel and, in the end, that’s how we got him.
At the premises of one of Stevenson’s taxi firms, in the south-east of Glasgow, not far from his home, there was a large, reinforced-steel safe set into its foundations and, two days after that conversation, on the last Sunday in May, Stevenson headed there. He was tailed by undercover officers, who watched as he entered the building, talked with two associates and left twenty minutes later. The other two men left minutes after their boss.
The police already suspected the capacious under-floor safe was a regular hiding place for Stevenson’s dirty money on the way to the laundry. Months before, when Stevenson had discussed the size, security status and location of a large sum of money, they had been listening. They had heard him tell his associate, ‘No, it’s under the ground . . . in a safe under the ground.’
When the two men left Stevenson’s firm, they were followed by another surveillance team as they drove to a house five minutes away. The officers already knew it was the location for the stash of money because Stevenson had been heard discussing it two days earlier. His associates were only in the house a matter of minutes before they left, wheeling a very large and heavy suitcase behind them. Hefting it into the boot of their car, they drove off. They did not get far before police swooped. Inside the case, they found £389,035 in used notes. Stevenson would at least get an exact figure.
He was back home at Fishescoates Gardens when he took a telephone call fifteen minutes after the police bust. Hanging up, he told his wife, ‘Got taken out. Christ, we’ll need to go intae his house.’
Within minutes, he had driven back to the premises of his taxi firm but, after spotting surveillance teams on the ground, he did not stop. Hours later, he was gone – away from Glasgow and out of Scotland.