The Iceman: The Rise and Fall of a Crime Lord (27 page)
Read The Iceman: The Rise and Fall of a Crime Lord Online
Authors: Jim Wilson
Doing Time
‘Anyone with money can appreciate jewels and gemstones; it takes someone with refinement to appreciate a fine timepiece.’ This is an old saying of Asian watch collectors. While the refinement of gang boss Stevenson is arguable, there can be no debate that, for a few years, he was among Scotland’s most extravagant and discerning horologists. Officers searching his home and the homes of others that were raided in the Folklore busts of September 2006 found more than forty luxury watches. In fact, he had bought a dozen more and his collection, which included many of the rarest and most prestigious models on the market, was scattered around his safe houses. In total, they would be valued at more than £307,000.
One detective recalling the scramble of organised criminals to clamber through loopholes in the Proceeds of Crime Act (PoCA) says many invested in high-end jewellery and watches as a way of hiding and washing their dirty money.
For a time, it was thought to be one way of doing it. Going into a jewellers and buying watches that would maintain or increase in value over the years seemed a relatively safe and straightforward way of getting rid of the banknotes while keeping the investment.
Stevenson was already trading in jewels and watches through Amsterdam to help clean his money but you have to remember that, when the Proceeds of Crime Act came in, these guys basically went out and got a copy. They knew what it was meant to do but knew laws have loopholes and they were going to find them. The run on luxury watches was part of that process.
These men have not managed to do what they do over a sustained period of time without adapting to changing circumstances. It is part of their business, part of what they do. They are constantly aware of new opportunities, new ways of sourcing their drugs, new ways of hiding their money. PoCA meant there was an urgency but most of them were confident there would be ways around it and made it their priority to find them. They did not believe for a moment, the game was up.
Criminals at Stevenson’s level will never go near their drugs. You wouldn’t expect the chief executive of Nike to be loading trainers on to the back of a van. But, while they can stay at arm’s length from the product, they have to get close to the profit – literally piles and piles of notes. Their big challenge is how to spend that money safely. And that’s where PoCA comes in.
The millionaire gangsters, who were splashing out £23.60 for a copy of the act from Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, also had expert help in locating possible loopholes from their legal and financial advisers. A senior police officer, with years of experience investigating organised crime, said:
They have lawyers and accountants who are aware of what they are and where their money is coming from. They don’t ask because they don’t need to and don’t want to hear the answer. But they will also have been asked to look at PoCA and offer their hypothetical advice to a hypothetical client who may or may not have an interest in concealing the proceeds of crime.
They have tried a number of things to wash their money. Cash businesses with a high turnover of small cash transactions is one. The watches were another.
The market in luxury watches has boomed in the last two decades. In 2006, a rose gold Patek Philippe sold at Sotheby’s in New York for £500,000. The world record was set at the same auction house in 1999 when a Patek Philippe watch, commissioned by financier Henry Graves Jnr, went for £6 million.
For decades, pocket watches were the only ones worth collecting but the auction houses and dealers have seen prices climb dramatically for post-war wristwatches made by the world’s most famous brands. The big three – Audemars Piguet, Patek Philippe and Vacheron Constantin – continue to command the highest prices but buyers of Breguet, Rolex, and Cartier have also seen their investment in chronometry soar in value.
Stevenson and Carbin showed good taste or had good advice in amassing a collection that featured watches made by Audemars Piguet, Rolex, Dior and Cartier. Often buying from their favourite jewellers, Mappin & Webb in Glasgow’s Buchanan Street and Strang’s, in the affluent southside suburb of Newton Mearns, their shopping spree between December 2003 and September 2006 would include some of the most famous and expensive timepieces ever made.
The Rolex Daytona, one of the models seized by officers in Stevenson’s home, is one of the world’s most sought-after watches. Worn by Hollywood celebrities and racing drivers, the watch is one of the ultimate and hard-to-find status symbols. Stevenson paid £10,340 but the Daytona’s value, in the soaring market in watches, was unlikely to decrease.
An Audemars Piguet watch, also found in Fishescoates Gardens, was valued at £30,000. The model had been painstakingly constructed in the company’s workshops in the village of Le Brassus in the Jura region of Switzerland where the watchmakers Jules-Louis Audemars and Edward-Auguste Piguet had founded their prestigious business in 1875.
Fine watches were not the only jewellery bought and sold by Stevenson as he cleaned his fortune. Officers in the Folklore busts recovered diamond-encrusted rings, bracelets and pendants and police familiar with his career say Stevenson had long-standing links with diamond merchants in Amsterdam. One said:
When he came back to Glasgow full-time after the McGovern charges were dropped, he started trading in jewellery on the back of his drugs money. It was an easy way of churning his money around while also offering convenient cover for dealing with some very important business associates in Holland.
Stevenson had a very close relationship with one particular diamond merchant, as an associate revealed:
There was a businessman in Amsterdam, a Serb who runs a diamond firm, who Stevenson had a lot of dealing with. He is a serious man involved in many different businesses with a very interesting contacts book. He doesn’t waste his time doing business with anyone apart from Europe’s wealthiest criminals.
41
Laundry Business
Legend has it that American mob bosses, who were raking in a fortune during Prohibition in the 1920s, literally invented money laundering. Keen to conceal and legitimise the takings from their illegal trade in outlawed alcohol, they are said to have filtered the cash through apparently legitimate businesses with a high turnover in cash. Laundromats were a favourite.
Whether this is true or not, the downfall of Al Capone, who was jailed for tax evasion in 1931, sharpened gangsters’ focus on the need for financial finesse. Over seventy-five years later, the process of money laundering remains the same – only the sums involved are very different. George P. Schultz, the former United States Secretary of State, was not mistaken when he noted, ‘Today’s criminals make the Capone crowd and the old Mafia look like small-time crooks.’
Money laundering, like the crime that feeds it, is now a global business. Dirty money floods out of Scotland every day and, on its way, it crosses paths with the millions of recycled and rinsed pounds returning to the country’s criminals.
The fortune made and laundered by Stevenson in his years as the biggest drugs trafficker Scotland has ever seen will never be quantified. Even he probably could not put a figure on the many, many millions that have been sent abroad or cleansed through front businesses and property deals in Scotland. One source, with an awareness of the scale of his operation, says the sums involved are almost unimaginable. He commented:
Nobody knows basically but you can start with the Home Office saying criminal profits in Britain are a little over £5 billion a year – that’s profit, not turnover. The usual rule of thumb would make that £500 million of profits being shared by gangsters in Scotland every year – most of it drugs money. Add in that, for at least five years, Stevenson was bringing in the vast majority of those drugs and you’re in the ballpark.
A cop I know told me that, over the twenty years Stevenson was doing it and particularly in the last five, he could have brought in drugs worth £2 billion on the street. He was selling wholesale but was still making £15,000 or so for every kilo of heroin or coke. Given that one of his shipments could be 100, 150 kilos and he was bringing in hundreds and hundreds of kilos every year, then he’s not going to be short for a pint of milk. That’s about all he could openly buy, though – anything bigger and the cops would be all over it.
And he did not discount the claims of Frank Gallagher, one of Stevenson’s key men, that his boss spent £36 million on a property spree on the Costa del Sol.
It sounds high even for a guy like Stevenson but, for people with no knowledge of the money being made from drugs, the sums involved are unimaginable. Put it this way, I would be very surprised if Stevenson does not have at least £20 million in clean cash and assets.
The process of turning Stevenson’s dirty millions into an apparently legitimate fortune involved a morass of cash transfers, dubious import/export activity, property deals and front firms. But the aim of obscuring his wealth and its source remained constant. Like the Mafia’s laundries, businesses dealing in a large number of transactions each involving a small amount of cash are a popular way of rinsing money for Stevenson and other Scots gangsters. Legitimate front men, ideally with no serious criminal record and of no particular interest to the police, would be installed to run the firms. Some of the businesses may have been bought with dirty money but operated legitimately. Others were relentlessly used to launder drugs profits.
Pubs, security firms, scrapyards, sunbed parlours, nail bars and hairdressers have all got their fans among Scottish criminals but taxi firms have remained the enduring favourite. Fleets of minicabs each making a series of short trips are an almost impossible target for official scrutiny. Many, if not most, of the taxi firms advertising for business in the West of Scotland and through West Lothian to Edinburgh are fronts for organised crime clans. Thousands of phantom fares inflate the accounts covering for the injection of drugs money while drivers can make special tips from their bosses by crisscrossing the city carrying contraband. Some firms have been bought by gangsters while others have been specially created. Stevenson did both and, at the time of his arrest, had a controlling interest in one medium-sized firm, was in the process of setting up another and was busy taking over a third.
The Folklore tapes were running as Stevenson discussed the launch of a new firm, CS Cars – named after and ostensibly run by his wife Caroline. The couple spent almost £100,000 on a fleet of ten Skoda Octavias but, on 29 March 2006, Stevenson was secretly recorded detailing exactly how the cars would help launder his money. He was heard telling his wife:
This is what we’re gonnae do with the taxis. There’ll be twelve hundred pound going in your bank but I’m going to put twenty-four hundred [£2,400] in every week and say I double shift the motors . . . over a year that will be £100,000 minus tax.
Taxi drivers were frequent customers at a service station near Stevenson’s home in Burnside where the fuel prices were usually the lowest around. Stevenson would also fill up at the garage but he might not even have paid the bargain prices since he was its secret owner. The garage was one of several Stevenson enterprises to be looked after by one of his key business associates, Anthony Burnette, the business fixer who appeared on the Folklore tapes discussing commercial opportunities with Stevenson, including the purchase of other forecourt garages.
But taxis and petrol stations were not Stevenson’s only involvement in the motor trade. Unlike many gangsters, he did not buy and sell cars frequently to wash some cash. Instead of selling cars, Stevenson cleaned them.
One officer said:
A lot of these guys started car washes to launder their money but then the latest trend became mobile valets. Stevenson was one of the first. He had some guy running about in a van cleaning cars. He must have done a right good job because, to make what he was meant to be earning, he would have needed to have been polishing every car in the southside.
He also had put money in car showrooms and haulage firms. The gang boss, nicknamed The Iceman, was not known for his sense of irony but he also had a stake in a fleet of ice-cream vans selling sweets around the schemes of Glasgow. Dirty money launched each of his businesses but many were not subsequently used to launder drugs cash. Rather, they were straightforward investments gaining a layer of legitimacy with every year that passed. The service stations, for example, would be rented to leaseholders who were often unaware of the true identity or business of the owner.
Stevenson also had extensive property interests. He bought scores of flats and houses in Scotland and around the world, with a portfolio that included homes in Spain, Holland and Eastern Europe. He leased out many, some were bought at the development stage and off – loaded when built and others would simply lie empty until it was a convenient time to sell them.
Of course, Stevenson’s sideline of trading in gems and luxury watches was another convenient cover for moving his money. A £10,000 watch or jewel-encrusted necklace bought in Scotland could be sold to an amenable Amsterdam gem trader for a tenth of that before being sold again for the full market value and the proceeds returned to Stevenson fully cleansed minus a cut for his contact.