The Iceman: The Rise and Fall of a Crime Lord (33 page)
Read The Iceman: The Rise and Fall of a Crime Lord Online
Authors: Jim Wilson
Murphy went on to give further details of the conversation between the men in the hours after the bag containing drugs cash had been seized in Carbin’s home, saying:
In the course of the meeting at James Stevenson’s house on the afternoon after the police had recovered £204,000 from a holdall in Gerard Carbin’s house, a discussion took place involving both accused in which it was noted that the police had filmed a number of high-value watches within 44 Campsie Road in the course of the search. Thereafter, these were removed from Carbin’s house and passed to Stevenson for safekeeping.
Inquiries were made of the various jewellers who had been involved in the sale of the watches with the result that the police were able to establish that the two accused between them appeared to have purchased a total of fifty-five watches with a total value of £307,087 over the period between December 2003 and September 2006.
In short, Stevenson and Carbin admitted laundering over £1-million profits from drugs trafficking over the four years of Operation Folklore.
The judge told Carbin, ‘It is clear from the Crown narrative that you had a significant role in the money-laundering group in which your stepfather was the head. You are described as one of his senior associates.’
He sentenced Carbin to a total of eleven years and nine months for the three charges that he admitted. Crucially, they were to run concurrently meaning the longest single sentence – five years and six months – would be used to calculate how long he should spend behind bars. With parole, he could hope to be free in just over three. Carbin, fearing a longer sentence, had fittingly just ‘won a watch’, as they say in the West of Scotland.
Stevenson was the biggest criminal to face money-laundering charges since Scots prosecutors began chasing their dirty fortunes; the first to be hemmed into the dock by the weight of thousands of hours of evidence amassed through electronic surveillance and painstakingly transcribed; and the biggest scalp possible for Scotland’s law enforcers.
Stevenson was hoping for seven years, maybe eight. Lord Hodge had other ideas. Sentencing him to nine years and nine months for the charges involving the cash and watches and a further three years for the taxi firm launched with dirty money, the judge said Stevenson had been caught as his criminal operations were ‘developing and expanding’. He said:
It is clear that your illegal activities were developing over time. You had also two large sums of money, which were the proceeds of crime. This also confirms your position at a very high level in the criminal hierarchy. The charges to which you have pleaded guilty represent a high level of criminality This must be reflected in the sentence.
The judge acknowledged the police assault on the underworld’s financial systems because money laundering ‘went hand in hand with the drugs trade and contributed materially to its profitability. Operation Folklore was a big success because, all too frequently, it is the small players who are detected and punished.’
Stevenson, in court the day before his forty-second birthday, listened impassively. He gave a thumbs-up to the gallery as he was taken down to the holding cells below the court to begin his sentence. Despite his bluff show of defiance, the sentence was several years longer than he had prepared for. The Iceman had been frozen out. In Springburn, where the McGoverns were still a force, a few glasses were raised by his enemies to toast Stevenson’s fall.
Afterwards, Detective Superintendent Stephen Ward, the SCDEA’s crime co-ordinator, noted that the capture of Stevenson, the elite agency’s number one target, was a signal to the others. He said:
Stevenson considered himself untouchable. I think today’s outcome very clearly indicates that any individual or group involved in serious organised crime in Scotland cannot consider themselves untouchable.
We’ve worked very closely with colleagues all over the world. Every part of the agency has been touched by this operation from surveillance units to technical support. This type of activity, law enforcement, is the way we conduct our operations. We target the very top people involved in serious organised crime in Scotland and that’s why operations like this can take years. We will use every lawful tool in the box to bring these individuals to the courts. We did use sophisticated listening devices in Stevenson’s home address and that technique is one of the lawful tools in the box.
Organised crime is led by ruthless and dangerous individuals who seek to make profit from the pain and suffering of the most vulnerable people in our communities. The public expect our response to be tough. I promise those involved in this evil organised crime that this agency will remove them from their positions of influence and confiscate their money, jewellery, cars and houses.
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Only the Start
Graeme Pearson enjoyed the moment. Word had come through from the High Court that Scotland’s most serious and organised criminal was going to jail thanks to a four-year operation mounted by the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency. The targeting of Stevenson by the agency almost exactly coincided with Pearson’s arrival as its director and he was quietly satisfied that his team had succeeded in putting the man, who had been their priority target for years, behind bars.
The policeman then in charge of an annual £23-million budget to battle Scotland’s most serious criminals believes Folklore revealed how even self-styled untouchables like Stevenson can be put in the dock and taken off the streets of Scotland. Before Pearson stood down from the SCDEA in late 2007, he sat in his first-floor office at the agency’s fortress-like headquarters minutes from Glasgow Airport and reviewed the tortuous progress of Folklore and the far-reaching consequences of the operation’s success. He said:
Looking back, you see all those years of effort on behalf of hundreds of people in constructing the evidence possible to convict someone like Stevenson. It is amazing the sheer effort and professionalism of so many people across so many specialisms, from the intelligence teams through to investigation and surveillance. It is a remarkable feat. The impact of Stevenson and Carbin is that they made millions of pounds for Organised Crime Plc and it was highly disciplined in the way that it was run.
I think it was a major coup for the agency. It has sent a message to others who may have regarded him as a role model, as someone to emulate. He probably regarded himself as untouchable. Other criminals certainly regarded him as untouchable and were genuinely surprised that he was even arrested, never mind convicted.
People said throughout the period when he was on remand that he would get out. That was the belief so, when he was convicted, it caused a real sensation amongst fellow criminals. They knew that, if we could do Stevenson, then we could do them.
Pearson, fifty-eight, explained that Stevenson had been vigilant and careful and had encouraged his gang to share his caution.
His advice to his group was to stay four or five steps away from the business, from the product. Our job was to close those steps. The closer you get to the main players, the less product you get. It’s the couriers, the minions that get caught. It’s always going to be the worker bees that are connected to seizures. If you are biding your time waiting for their bosses to come into a room with contraband, then you will be waiting for a long time. Someone might be stopped on the motorway at 2 a.m. with 100 kilos of heroin but Stevenson will be miles away, tucked up in bed.
Pearson admits there was some frustration at the agency when news came through that the drugs charges against Stevenson had been dropped but he added:
I think it was realistic. With hindsight, it was a professional decision. In my career, the Stevenson case has probably been the most challenging in terms of organisation and professionalism and how they went about their business but it was never a personal issue for me – if it becomes personal, it’s because they make it personal.
What it’s about is Folklore. There should be more Folklores and whether it’s Stevenson or anyone else does not matter.
It was part of our lives here for almost four years. We remained committed to it. It would have been easy to walk away and just gone after the shipments and the people at the bottom. Personally, I think that is wrong – we need to go for those at the top level of the tree and crush the branches.
It seems that Pearson was destined to take charge of the SCDEA. He even shares his birthday – April Fools’ Day – with the date the agency was inaugurated. When the then SDEA came into being on 1 April 2001, Pearson was an assistant chief constable with Strathclyde Police. In March 2004, he was recruited to take charge of the agency. He led a team of 197 officers and seventy-seven civilians that has, since its launch, arrested 1284 people and seized almost 20 tonnes of drugs with an estimated street value of £206 million.
Even early in his career, the University of Glasgow graduate’s raw enthusiasm for jailing criminals impressed his more experienced colleagues and he never lost his passion for catching wrongdoers. He believes their removal from the streets makes communities better places to live. He questions claims that a ‘war on drugs’ is unwinnable because other gangsters will quickly move in to take over the trade of jailed rivals. He said:
The bottom line is [that] what we did with Stevenson and what we do with others like him is worth it. I was speaking to some prisoners at Polmont Young Offenders Institution a couple of months back not long after we seized the
Squilla
in Spain. They were saying to me as the director general of SCDEA that they could not get cannabis and none of their friends on the outside could either. There was a dearth of cannabis for some time. I don’t think it’s true that there is no impact in what we do. I know that there was a dearth of heroin for some time.There is a constant movement of supply and demand and other people will move in but they won’t replicate Stevenson’s organisation very quickly. Given the complexity of what he was doing, you cannot take part of his organisation and copy it within a week.
Folklore’s other legacy will be a database of priceless intelligence about Stevenson’s wholesaling of drugs to other Scottish gangs. Pearson said:
The impact will continue. There are lots of bits of evidence lying about that will continue to be used – like time-delay explosions, they will keep going off over the months and years to come. A piece of evidence from Folklore could lie dormant and then something else happens and suddenly that matches up with it.
None of these criminal groups operate in isolation. There are other groups in Scotland who are very sensitive just now because they had contact right into the heart of Stevenson’s organisation. They all know that they have been linked to the Stevenson bust and they know this information is lying there waiting to fall into place.
Pearson estimates that Scotland is home to around 150 people, possibly even more, who are millionaires as a result of crime. His greatest fear is that the dirty millions generated from drugs, prostitution, fraud and other organised crime will seep into the fabric of Scottish society. Councillors, MSPs and officials are groomed by mobsters as useful friends with power and influence. Like legitimate businessmen, criminals will attend black-tie charity dinners to entertain powerful guests and make influential contacts. The point where business ends and corruption begins shades into grey.
High-profile examples of the nexus between crime and politics were the three Scottish Labour Party fund-raising Red Rose Dinners staged at Dalziel Park Golf and Country Club in Lanarkshire. The then First Minister, Jack McConnell, the MP, Frank Roy, and the then Northern Ireland Secretary, John Reid, rubbed shoulders with the area’s businessmen.
The events would have gone unnoticed were it not for the fact that, six days after the third dinner in 2002, one of those who attended was shot dead in a drugs war. Following the murder of twenty-eight-year-old Justin McAlroy, it emerged that he and his father Tommy, a co-owner of the country club, had been spotted in Estonia meeting two Scottish heroin smugglers who were under SCDEA surveillance. One of McAlroy Snr’s firms won £9.3 million of work from Labour-controlled North Lanarkshire Council. His building firm had been a financial supporter of the local Labour party.
Pearson declines to discuss specific events or personalities but warns:
If we are complacent it will overcome us. This isn’t the business of cops and robbers any more – the stakes are [very] different. What drives so many of the high-level criminals is not so much wealth – that’s almost a by-product – it is power, influence and stature. In Colombia, the drug barons don’t just want to be drug barons, they want to run the country. In Italy, with the Mafia, it’s exactly the same. US crime gangs wanted to own City Hall and, in fact, did corrupt police forces. We would be so naive to think it’s going to be different in Scotland.
Why do criminals want to sit with politicians? In days gone by, why would a licensing official attend an event with Arthur Thompson? Were his jokes that good? You often just need to look at someone who has paid £2,000 for a football strip in a charity auction to get an idea of what they are.
These businesses need planning permission – they need licences. In days past, the gangsters controlled their own local environment for status, power and control. They’re now taking it to a new level.