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 (32 page)
Adams, fifty-two, was sentenced to seven years for laundering £1million – ‘the tip of the iceberg’, according to prosecutors – at the Old Bailey on 9 March 2007 almost exactly a month before Stevenson appeared in the dock at the High Court in Glasgow.
Both men had been the top-priority targets of detectives dedicated to investigating serious and organised criminals. Both believed themselves to be untouchable. Both would finally face justice over money-laundering charges after protracted police investigations – inquiries that, in Adams’ case, had lasted ten years and, in Stevenson’s, almost four. Both were convicted largely on the evidence contained in hundreds of hours of secretly recorded conversations. Both their wives were originally charged alongside them. Both wives were to walk free as part of their husbands’ deals with prosecutors.
The Londoner was the leader of the Adams family, the managing director of a family crime firm known as the A Team and linked to more than thirty gangland murders. He and his brothers, Tommy and Patsy, had amassed an estimated fortune of £100 million in lifelong criminal careers that were founded on extortion, armed robbery, drugs trafficking and violence.
In 1998, Tommy was convicted of arranging an £8-million hash-smuggling operation and sentenced to seven years. At his sentencing, after being told he would face another five years if he did not hand over some of his dirty money, his wife turned up at court with a suitcase holding £1 million in cash. Four years later, and out of jail, Tommy was to bizarrely accompany ex-footballer Kenny Dalglish to a meeting when one of the Scotland legend’s business associates would dispute the future contract of rising star Wayne Rooney with a rival agent. Dalglish has never explained Tommy Adams’ invitation to the business meeting. Following Tommy’s release, Patsy and Tommy moved to southern Spain where they both now live.
The police investigating their big brother Terry called on the surveillance expertise of MI5 and, for two years, sophisticated listening devices, including one buried deep in a sofa, transmitted conversations from Terry’s cars and inside his fortified mansion in Finchley, north London, where he lived with his wife Ruth. They were able to pick up conversations that revealed Adams’ capacity for violence and the problems he had in justifying his massive criminal fortune. In one conversation, he tells an associate of an encounter over a disputed debt.
A hundred grand it was, Dan, or eighty grand. And I went ‘crack’. On my baby’s life, Dan, his kneecap came right out there . . . all white, Dan, all bone and white.
When I hit someone I do them damage.
After the Inland Revenue begin asking difficult questions of the millionaire, who was apparently jobless and paid no tax or National Insurance, his financial adviser Solly Nahome is heard telling him that the priority is to legitimise his fortune. ‘We’ve got to think of a way of koshering you up,’ says Nahome, who was shot dead outside his home in the same street as Terry Adams’ mansion in a gangland hit in 1998. The method of execution, a motorcycle drive-by, had been adopted by a rival crime gang after it had been pioneered by Patsy Adams.
Like Stevenson, Adams created sham businesses to justify his income and used jewellery to launder some of his money through Nahome, who also traded in London’s diamond quarter, Hatton Garden.
Like the car-valeting, jewellery-trading Stevenson, he had various attempts at convincing the authorities of his occupation. In another covertly taped conversation, Adams told a pal, ‘I’m a consultant, Tone. I consult about anything you want me to consult about.’
When police finally raided the Adams’ home, they found £500,000 of antiques and paintings – many of them stolen – £48,000 of jewellery and a shoebox in the attic stuffed with £60,000 ‘spending money’.
Adams was originally charged in 2003 but dragged the proceedings out for four more years. One delaying tactic was to sack his legal team. Another was to demand that twenty-one months of largely irrelevant bugged conversations should be transcribed at a cost to taxpayers of £2.7 million.
Sentencing him, Judge Timothy Pontius said he had ‘a fertile, cunning and imaginative mind, capable of sophisticated complex and dishonest financial manipulation’.
Andrew Mitchell QC for the prosecution told the Old Bailey, ‘It is suggested that Terence Adams was one of the country’s most feared and revered organised criminals. He comes with pedigree, as one of a family whose name had a currency all of its own in the underworld.’
In spring 2007, the conviction of a third major criminal, Brian Wright, secured more headlines as law enforcers took on the underworld’s untouchables. Within weeks of Adams and Stevenson appearing in the dock, Wright, reputedly Britain’s richest criminal, was convicted after police dismantled one of the world’s biggest cocaine-trafficking operations. Nicknamed ‘The Milkman’ because he always delivered, Wright amassed a £500-million fortune through using luxury yachts to ferry tonnes of drugs to Europe from Venezuela through the Caribbean.
Irish-born Wright, sixty, a notorious punter and fixer of horse races, had escaped justice in 2003 when he fled to Turkish northern Cyprus, where he was safe from extradition. But, in 2005, he returned to his villa – called ‘El Lechero’ – in Malaga, on the Costa del Sol, where he was arrested by British Customs officers who were armed with one of the recently introduced European warrants.
The arrogant Godfather told one officer, ‘I bet you £1 of your money against £1 million of mine that I will never stand trial.’
He lost his bet at Woolwich Crown Court in early April 2007 when he was jailed for thirty years.
As his lawyer was pleading for a lighter sentence, Wright interrupted him and addressed Judge Peter Moss, saying, ‘Excuse me, your honour, there is no mitigation.’
Stevenson was the next to fall. It was to complete a remarkable hat-trick for Britain’s law enforcers.
48
Frozen Out
Almost four years after Operation Folklore was launched, under the strictest secrecy, against him, Jamie Stevenson faced a very public day of reckoning. He stood in the dock of the High Court in Glasgow on Tuesday, 10 April 2007, waiting to be sentenced. Looking smart in a blue pinstripe suit and open-necked pink shirt, he appeared ready for business. Worryingly for him, so did the judge, Lord Hodge. He listened intently as Crown prosecutor Sean Murphy summarised the evidence against Stevenson and his stepson Carbin, who was wearing a grey suit and white shirt.
The lawyers had done the deal. Stevenson and Carbin admitted laundering more than £1 million of drugs money. In return, the charges detailing their cocaine and heroin smuggling and Stevenson’s false passport would be dropped. Their partners, Caroline and Karen, had already walked free.
The judge was told how Stevenson and Carbin were in court to admit ‘laundering substantial proceeds from drugs trafficking, including trafficking in class A drugs’. He heard how the surveillance operation against the pair was authorised in May 2003 as part of the SCDEA’s ‘extensive undercover operation’ and how, by autumn 2005, electronic listening devices had been hidden in both their homes. Much of the case against them, the judge heard, rested on conversations recorded by those bugs.
The prosecutor took the judge through each of the five charges that had been brought under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 and which one or both of the men were admitting. Most related to Section 327 of the Act, which makes it illegal to hide, disguise, transfer or remove criminal assets.
They both admitted the first charge of hiding £204,510 of dirty money. This sum had been found by police searching Carbin’s house in Campsie Road, East Kilbride. Murphy told how a man, identified only as ‘Kevin’, came to the home of Carbin and his partner Karen Maxwell looking for Stevenson on Saturday, 21 January 2006. He arrived at 6.40 p.m. carrying a large holdall and he was heard being told that Stevenson was out for a meal with his wife. He was only there for ten minutes but, in that time, he mentioned a figure ‘two-o-four’ and, when he departed, he left behind the bag. Murphy said:
Once he had gone, it is apparent from the conversation that Gerard Carbin attempted unsuccessfully to place the holdall within a cupboard in the house, after which he placed it in the corner of a room and pushed a chair up against it.
Police officers suspected that a large quantity of cash had been delivered and a warrant to search the house was obtained. Officers attended in the early hours of Sunday, 22 January 2006, and were admitted by Gerard Carbin. On being asked if there was any money in the house, Carbin replied, ‘£10,000 or something like that. Aye, let’s go.’
He led officers to a white polythene bag in a kitchen cupboard. It held £9,550 and the bundles of cash were secured by elastic bands. In the study next to the kitchen, the recently delivered holdall was found and it contained £204,510. Murphy continued:
Carbin was asked to whom it belonged and he answered, ‘No comment.’ He then became agitated and shouted and swore at the officers. A further £400 was found in the pocket of a jacket in an upstairs cupboard and Carbin directed the police to a second bundle of notes making up another £400 in a bedroom unit. It was noted that there were a number of high-value watches within a bedroom but these were not seized at that time.
At the conclusion of the search, Gerard Carbin was taken to Hamilton police station where he was interviewed on tape. He made no comment throughout the interview.
After being released without charge, Carbin went to Stevenson’s home in Burnside. During Carbin’s visit, his stepfather described the cash as ‘our money’ and repeatedly said that he would tell the police it was his profits from selling cars and jewellery. He told Carbin, as police eavesdroppers listened in, ‘I never have any money in the house.’
Stevenson alone admitted the second charge of using £98,605 of drugs money to buy ten Skoda Octavias for a taxi business called CS Cars. The firm was licensed in the name of his wife Caroline Stevenson and registered at the couple’s home in Burnside. The prosecutor said Stevenson had bought the Octavia saloons from a Hamilton showroom in February 2006, paying for them with four cheques and a £10,105 cash payment.
Glasgow City Council awarded taxi licences to the firm meant to be run by Caroline but Murphy added: ‘It is clear from overheard and monitored conversations that [Stevenson] himself was the guiding hand behind the operation. It is equally clear that the entire operation was designed to launder criminal proceeds.’
The third charge involved the attempted concealment of £389,035 of drugs money and this too was admitted by Stevenson alone. He had been recorded in conversation at his home on 16 May 2006 discussing a ‘large and bulky’ stash of money in a safe at another house. He asked his associate if it had been counted and ‘if the safe had been big enough to contain it all’. Two days after the conversation, two men were followed by surveillance officers to the house where the money was hidden. The men came out carrying a large suitcase that they put in their boot. Stopped by police, the case was opened and £389,035 was found inside. Within fifteen minutes, a call to Burnside had delivered the bad news to Stevenson. Murphy told the court, ‘Later that night, the police monitored a conversation at James Stevenson’s home in which he expressed concern over the possibility of those who had been stopped talking to the police about his involvement.’ He would be on his way to Amsterdam within hours.
Carbin admitted the fourth and penultimate charge summarised by the prosecutor that he was holding £7,820 of drugs money found by officers raiding his home in the Folklore busts. The prosecutor explained:
On 20 September 2006, police officers moved to detain and arrest a number of persons to draw the operation to a conclusion. Officers in possession of a search warrant attended at Gerard Carbin’s home address where entry was forced when no one answered the door. On searching the premises, the officers found cash within a box and two envelopes which were beside each other in a cupboard in the kitchen. The amounts were subsequently found to total £7,820. Gerard Carbin and his wife were detained and removed to Govan police station.
Finally, Stevenson and Carbin jointly admitted a fifth charge of spending £307,087 of dirty money on fifty-five luxury watches between December 2003 and September 2006. Forty-four of the watches – all of them luxury brands, including Rolex, Cartier, Dior and a £30,000 Audemars Piguet – had been found in the homes searched by police in the early morning raids that brought Folklore to its conclusion.
The prosecutor said:
It became clear to the police, from a number of the monitored conversations, that the accused had disposed of cash assets by purchasing a number of watches of very high value. The police learned that Carbin and Stevenson had bought these principally through Mappin & Webb, jewellers in Glasgow, and Strang’s, a jewellers in Newton Mearns, on the southern outskirts of Glasgow. Stevenson, in particular had bought a number of watches for cash. Other rare examples and collectors’ items had been ordered by him and some very high-price examples had been reserved and paid for in cash instalments over periods of months.
On 17 December 2005, officers overheard Carbin discussing his stepfather’s Christmas present, a £3,500 Breitling watch. He had bought him a £9,000 Rolex Daytona the year before. He, in turn, had received a handsome Jacobs watch as a festive token from his stepfather.