The Iceman: The Rise and Fall of a Crime Lord (31 page)
Read The Iceman: The Rise and Fall of a Crime Lord Online
Authors: Jim Wilson
In the latter half of the twentieth century, the term ‘psychopath’ fell out of favour. ‘Antisocial personality disorder’ became the preferred diagnostic label for corrupt people who had no regard for the laws of civilisation. This terminology has been widely criticised, however, because it casts too broad a net. Because of these criticisms, the term ‘psychopath’ is currently making a comeback. It now refers to a person prone to criminal behaviour who has a sadomasochistic style of interacting with others based on power and a total absence of remorse for any harm he does. In fact, a psychopath enjoys the suffering. He is not capable of loyalty and loving emotional attachments.
Only their own needs matter to them. They are profoundly detached from all human relationships and from emotional experience in general. A psychopath would not do well in Tony Soprano’s Mob family. Loyalty to others and a deep bond of attachment are absolutely necessary to survive in that family.
46
In the Dock
The day after the Folklore raids, on 21 September 2006, Stevenson and Carbin joined six others in the dock of Glasgow Sheriff Court to face charges including accusations of heroin trafficking and money laundering. They included Stevenson’s wife Caroline, forty-eight, Carbin’s partner Karen Maxwell, thirty, William Cross, forty-five, and three others. All would eventually be granted bail apart from Stevenson, who was held on remand at Edinburgh’s Saughton Prison.
By the time the indictment was formally heard at a preliminary hearing in January 2007, now at the High Court in Glasgow, the eight accused had been joined by two others and they faced a total of twenty-two charges. The most serious alleged they plotted to import heroin and cocaine and tried to launder the proceeds of crime. Additional charges alleged that Stevenson had a forged passport and that Carbin had had small amounts of cocaine and cannabis in his home when it was raided a year earlier.
Stevenson and his nine alleged accomplices arrived for the next hearing in February knowing that his legal team had all but secured a deal. Both sides, for different but equally compelling reasons, wanted to avoid what was certain to become one of the longest and most expensive trials ever staged in a Scottish court.
The Crown, faced with a trial lasting months, a large number of accused, a complex mass of evidence and an unpredictable jury, were keen to settle – provided a deal could be forged that would seem like a fitting end to a flagship police operation. In addition, the public airing of the covert techniques used to amass the piles of secretly recorded transcripts was to be avoided if possible.
Meanwhile, Stevenson’s legal team were privately acknowledging the welter of evidence that their client was a major drugs trafficker and so were equally keen to prevent a jury hearing the damning, secretly taped conversations. Stevenson and Carbin were insistent that any deal would rest on the dropping of all charges against their partners, Caroline and Karen. Putting the women in the dock had been a priority for the Folklore team. The police knew that, according to the rules of underworld chivalry, the men would never allow their partners to be convicted. It was a powerful bargaining chip for the prosecutors.
Just before Christmas, Derek Ogg QC for Stevenson and Carbin’s counsel Paul McBride had opened talks with experienced Crown prosecutor Sean Murphy to propose a package deal for both men. They suggested that, in return for dropping all the drugs charges and the allegations against their partners, the pair would admit the money-laundering charges. To their surprise, the leading lawyers were told within days that the offer, their first, was broadly acceptable.
One senior source at the High Court said:
There seems to have been no fight, no bluffing and very little negotiation. The offer was made and it was more or less accepted straight off the bat. Given what the Crown had in terms of evidence, that was surprising. If you were representing those two you would not be looking forward to taking them in front of a jury.
Exactly where do you start trying to explain where they got these huge sums of money from? Where they got £400,000 of luxury watches? Why they were all over the world meeting criminals? And, most of all, why they were on tape, in their own homes, talking about importing tonnes and tonnes of class A drugs? Good luck.
At more meetings through January the detailed wording of the charges to be admitted was ground out and, by the end of the month, Murphy, an experienced advocate depute, was confident of striking a settlement capable of being justified to his bosses and the public. Convincing the detectives, who had spent four years building a case against Scotland’s biggest-ever drugs cartel, would prove more difficult.
Another lawyer with knowledge of the case said Murphy made the right decision to drop the drugs in return for making the jailing of Stevenson and Carbin a certainty. He said:
There was definitely evidence the defence teams would have struggled to explain. The case that these guys were major drugs traffickers was there but it was a way off being bombproof. They weren’t caught next to drugs. And nobody could place them next to drugs. That’s a problem.
The lorry driver Robert McDowall was a big part of it and, even if he hadn’t had his memory problem at the line-up, he would have been a gamble for the Crown. You’ve got problems when your star witness is a drugs smuggler, a gunrunner and whatever else.
There would have been a lot of questions about who was pulling his strings, about when and how the police got involved with him, about whether he was an agent provocateur. It would have been a long, complicated trial and juries get tired. Good defence lawyers – and these guys had
very
good defence lawyers – would undoubtedly have done some serious damage but whether they would manage to get them off . . . Who knows?It definitely wasn’t a certainty for the prosecution and Sean Murphy knew that. He was happy to get them on the money, leave the drugs and put them away for a stretch.
A pretrial hearing on Monday, 12 February saw the gang arrive, two and three at a time, at the High Court in Glasgow, a modern, marbled complex cut into a sandstone spur off the city’s Briggait. Caroline Stevenson, sunbed brown, bleached blonde and dressed in black apart from her purple high heels, arrived at court with her son, Stevenson’s co-accused Gerry Carbin Jnr. He was dressed in a fur-trimmed leather jacket and designer jeans and was accompanied by another blonde, his partner Karen Maxwell. Her family were no strangers to the High Court complex. Her father Robert Maxwell had appeared there a year earlier to receive a five-year jail sentence for dealing in heroin. It was his third long-term sentence for drugs. A drug-dealing dad was something she and her partner had in common. Carbin peered at the electronic information board designating the courts where the different cases were to be heard before heading to the canteen to wait. The co-accused, apart from one, joined them there.
Stevenson, himself, was the only one not to come through the court’s airport-style security gates shortly before 10 a.m. He was the sole suspect of the ten now charged to remain in custody awaiting trial and, shortly after 11 a.m., he was led from a holding cell beneath the North Court flanked by a male and female security guard. They remained silent and straight-faced – in contrast to their prisoner. A deal had been struck and Stevenson, wearing black trousers and a black zipped cardigan, had every reason to smile. He knew the drugs charges had disappeared. He would not be tried for smuggling heroin and cocaine. He was no longer facing the threat of spending decades behind bars.
One source, aware of the legal negotiations, said:
Stevenson was happy enough. If the drugs charges had stood up, he’d have been looking at twenty-five to thirty years. With them gone, it was down to the money laundering and a maximum of fourteen years and the hope of seven or eight.
The number of suspects meant the court’s dock was too small to accommodate them all and they would need to take their place in the benched box usually used by the jury. As he was led to the back row of the jury box, Stevenson, recognising familiar faces in the gallery, pointed and smiled. After being ushered into the back row of the jury box, Stevenson, leaning backwards, sat with his legs splayed and mouthed jokes to his supporters. As his guards sat staring straight ahead, Stevenson, ostensibly in the dock to face charges that could propel him behind bars for the next thirty years, was enjoying himself – he was, quite literally, playing to the gallery. Pulling faces and grinning while miming making a call on a mobile phone, he told one supporter that he’d call later – presumably from his cell in the remand wing of Edinburgh’s Saughton jail.
When the rest of his gang were called and led to the two benches in front of him, he acknowledged each with a smile and a nod, as if they had just bumped into each other in the street. He grinned at his wife and stepson as they edged into the row directly in front. And, as he leaned over to whisper to them both in turn, the smile never left his face.
Outside in the air-conditioned, black-and-white tiled hallway beside the North Court, the mood seemed equally relaxed, as the defence teams chatted in groups before entering the courtroom through a side door. There was no sense of urgency or of last-minute negotiation. When the QCs crammed around the table before the bench with the ten accused packing the jury box, the court was about to hear public confirmation of what was already clear – a deal was all but done.
When asked if their clients were ready for trial, each QC, in turn, referred to McBride, who was acting for Carbin. Eventually, he rose to his feet to inform the court that his client was very close to reaching an agreement with the Crown. Ogg, representing Stevenson, stood next and he stated that the man accused of leading such a brutally effective and massively lucrative criminal enterprise had already reached an agreement with the Crown. That agreement, Ogg revealed, was capable of ‘radically transforming’ the indictment facing his client and the rest of the accused but, he insisted, that agreement would collapse if Carbin’s legal team failed to find common ground with prosecutors as they edged towards agreement. No one in court – from the QCs to the alleged drug traffickers and money launderers looking bored in the dock – seemed to think that was likely.
After a hearing lasting no more than ten minutes, another was set for three weeks and one thing seemed certain – Stevenson would never face a jury. There would be no trial.
When they returned to court on Friday, 9 March, the men’s lawyers had sealed the plea deal with prosecutors. Stevenson sat at the end of the dock, Carbin on his right, then Caroline and Karen. The other six men accused with them filled the row. At 2.30 p.m., the judge, Lord Hodge, formerly Patrick Hodge, a graduate of the Universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh, was told that Stevenson was pleading guilty to five charges of money laundering while Carbin admitted three charges.
As agreed, the two women were allowed to walk free while the six other men were also released but warned that they faced possible future prosecution. Even though Carbin was now facing a jail term, he was allowed to remain on bail to enjoy thirty precious days of freedom. His QC McBride stated:
He’s twenty-seven with no previous convictions of any kind. He’s never served any time in custody. He must sign in at a police station every day which he has done without fail. He has a fixed address, a partner of ten years and two young children, aged six years old and twenty months.
He and Stevenson were back in court on Thursday, 5 April, sitting together in the dock while their eight former co-accused sat in separate groups in the public gallery.
Murphy presented the Crown’s case against the men, summarising the evidence that led to their guilty pleas. They were due to be sentenced that day but background reports to be presented to the judge were still not ready.
During this hearing, Carbin’s QC McBride urged the judge to be lenient when sentencing his client in five days’ time. He highlighted the recent seven-year sentence of Terry Adams – ‘described in the popular press as a Godfather figure for what that is worth’. He also reminded the judge that the early guilty pleas had avoided a trial lasting several months, which would have cost ‘millions of pounds’.
At the end of the short hearing, Stevenson hugged Carbin and smiled and winked at his wife and friends in the gallery before being led downstairs to the holding cells beneath the court.
When Stevenson left court after being sentenced five days later, on Tuesday, 10 April, the grin had been wiped from his face.
47
Different Country, Same Story
There was only a clutch of British gangsters whose operation and ambition outstripped Jamie Stevenson’s. Terry Adams was undoubtedly one. It was coincidence that, in the spring of 2007, their falls coincided but the similarity in techniques deployed by the forces pursuing them was no accident. While the Met in London launched a covert, electronic surveillance offensive against Adams in a determined bid to follow his dirty money and find a weakness in his defences, their colleagues 400 miles north in Glasgow were using identical tactics against Stevenson.
The almost simultaneous convictions of two of Britain’s biggest gangsters, who had, up until then, avoided serious prosecution, defined the modern battleground where police are waging war against the country’s organised criminals.