The Iceman: The Rise and Fall of a Crime Lord (4 page)

This unofficial but systematic CID campaign of hounding family members as they swaggered between their Springburn pubs, controlled drug dealing and enjoyed their European spoils did not have the desired effect. The officer said:

These recriminations within the ranks were a major coup for the crime clan. Yet again, the McGoverns were getting away with it.

6

Taste for Drugs

The young Scot in the red-and-white football scarf was not the only Liverpool fan heading to Merseyside for the big game. There had even been a few exiled Scousers on the 10 a.m. train from Glasgow Central and, two hours later, hundreds of fans were on the platform at Preston, waiting for a lunchtime connection to Liverpool Lime Street. Jamie Stevenson, who could not have named many of the Anfield team, blended in perfectly.

One associate remembers:

Liverpool was one supply route for the McGovern gang as they realised the profit from drugs could easily outstrip the fortunes they were raking in from their European robbery sprees. But another supplier was far closer to home.

There are many stories about Arthur Thompson – and just as many drink-soaked bores and gangland apologists to tell them. He was the Godfather, the courteous old-school criminal who dominated Glasgow’s underworld for decades. He never spoke to the police. He never hurt civilians. And he would never touch drugs.

If his legend seems to grow each year since his death in 1993, the reality remains unspoken. He was one major criminal among many in the city. He was a hugely violent man who was capable of inflicting terrible pain, injuries and death both on his own and by order. Many innocents were harmed by his awful business. And he
did
deal drugs. The malignant Godfather was one of the first suppliers of heroin to the Springburn brothers who were wanting to secure a toehold in the trade.

The start of the 1980s witnessed a rapidly changing criminal landscape. Old bank robbers and burglars were the equivalent of office workers with forty years’ service. They had become yesterday’s men. They either adapted to the new drugs scene or became redundant.

At this time, heroin was seeping into the schemes of Scotland. The authorities were far from prepared as the first ripples of what would become a tidal wave of the drug crashed on to Scotland’s cities. In Edinburgh, for example, an official clampdown on the distribution of hypodermic needles was meant to reduce addiction but only helped fuel the spread of HIV and AIDS. The gangsters did not exhibit the paralysis and confusion shown by the authorities. Switched-on mobs like the McGoverns were perfectly placed to stake an early claim on this highly profitable yet poisonous action.

One Thompson family associate recalls how, in the mid 80s, ‘the McGovern boys were taking six ounces of smack each week. That soon went up to nine ounces. Gangsters like Tam Bagan and Paul Ferris were working for Thompson at the time and they were aware of the McGoverns’ rising reputation.’

Today, an ounce of heroin costing £1,000 will produce 160 ‘tenner bags’ – a pea-sized cellophane wrap of brown powder sold as a £10 deal, which is enough for one hit. Once that ounce has been cut with whatever substance comes to hand, a door or street dealer will easily be able to make up 300 tenner bags. That means £3,000 will be recouped for their initial £1,000 outlay. In the 1980s, the profits were even greater because there were fewer competing dealers.

With the McGoverns’ ongoing overseas robbing trips bringing back up to £30,000 each time, bags of heroin were a logical investment choice for criminals. Putting the cash into property, shares or tax-free savings accounts would not land you in prison but it would also never yield instant profits of 200 per cent. Heroin has since plummeted in price due to a glut on the market meaning there were even fatter profits then than today.

At this time, the McGoverns’ HQ was Thomson’s bar which was strategically placed in the middle of their Springburn heartland. It was a comfortable pub and not typical of the more unwelcoming gangland howffs scattered around the city. One former regular said:

However, one teenage peddler of stolen goods around pubs in those days has mixed feelings about the place. He said:

Those early heroin deals were mainly conducted by twenty-one-year-old Tony and Tommy, then nineteen. In this drugs business, Tony was the MD while Tommy was his number two. Tony was the brains while Tommy was the brawn. Tony could charm while Tommy would growl. Others regarded the less visible eldest brother Joe as a more mature controlling influence, almost like the chairman of the board. Fourth son James was aged fifteen and just months away from being shot while the youngest, thirteen-year-old Paul would murder a man three years later. At this time, Tony and Stevenson, then one of the mob’s key enforcers, were stuck together like glue and people often mistook them for cousins. It was clear that, when it came to business, Tony was the boss.

In the early 1990s, the McGovern mob of brothers Tony and Tommy along with Stevenson were a force to be reckoned with. Before the trendier glass-fronted private health clubs spread across the city, they used what was then called the Springburn Sports Centre to keep fit. The most successful gangsters usually possess a mental toughness but the Springburn gang understood that physical strength and fitness would give them an extra edge over potential rivals, who could be flabby in mind and body. Stevenson would maintain his enthusiasm for gruelling physical workouts throughout his career.

Often the police would pull up Tony in his red top-of-the-range four-wheel drive outside the municipal gym but they would rarely be able to pin anything on him. There was no chance that the police would ever be able to make him cry again. Even in years to come, when he led a tight team of armed robbers who struck at a series of banks, the charges often failed to stick.

Others in the McGovern gym squad at that time included the powerful figure of Willie Cross, who was around four years older than Tony. In 2007, Cross would be standing in the dock alongside Stevenson. This health-conscious enforcer had previously worked for an older generation of Glasgow gang boss, a security firm owner called Bobby Dempster, nicknamed The Devil, before choosing to join the McGoverns.

Also on the scene at the sports centre was Colin McKay who is just a few months younger than Tommy. Even his friends describe him as a ‘psychopath’ and, almost as an afterthought, a very talented football player. He was later accused of using his particularly large hands to strangle his friend Chris McGrory to death in September 1997 but walked free from that thanks to Scotland’s controversial ‘not proven verdict. McGrory died just after he had returned from his honeymoon. When he got married, McKay had been his best man. In 2005, McKay was to be cleared of a second gangland slaying. This time the victim was twenty-five-year-old Richard Holmes who died after being shot on Halloween 2004 and children out guising witnessed the clinical murder. The gunman, McKay’s co-accused, got eighteen years.

Later, McKay fell out with the McGoverns and did not seem too bothered by their growing reputation. He would deliberately swagger past the windows of Thomson’s bar as an act of provocation. Those inside would race to the door but McKay would gesture with a hand reaching towards the inside of his jacket that he had a knife, causing the mob to slink back into the pub, shouting threats and insults behind them. Some fights were worth the hassle but this one was not.

Along with McKay, the other alleged McGrory killer was robber, dealer and dog fighter Frank McPhie, who, at the age of fifty-one, was himself killed in 2000 by a sniper’s bullet, following a feud with the Daniel family. The audacious hit on McPhie at the entrance of his Maryhill flat remains unsolved.

Tony and Tommy’s brother-in-law is Russell Stirton. People joked that it would take a brave man to go on a date with the McGovern sister, Jackie – can you imagine having those five brothers coming after you if you broke her heart? Enemies say that Stirton climbed up the greasy gangland pole thanks, in no small part, to his in-laws and the reputation of their name but he was also a capable operator.

He later began dealing in the hidden world of mail order boxes, flogging porn and sex aids, allegedly as an early way of trying to launder the profits of drug deals. It is equally possible that this tacky Love Boat business’s presence in Amsterdam could have had as much to do with the availability of drugs as porn.

Many of the McGovern crew could be found at the leisure centre at a time when Stevenson really began to stick out. It seems that he still had not learned to keep his mouth shut. One person, who also attended the gym for several years, said:

This was a few years before the 1996 release of the cult movie
Trainspotting
, a darkly comic look at a group of Edinburgh heroin addicts. The opening credits feature scenes of the film’s anti-heroes Renton, Sick Boy, Spud, Tommy and Begbie waging a particularly dirty game of five-a-side football but even that was a friendly kick-about compared to the weekly battle that took place in Springburn.

Every week, while thousands of boys, youths and men across Scotland enjoy casual games of football with their pals and colleagues for a bit of exercise, the McGoverns played for money and hard men, like Tony and Tommy McGovern, Stevenson, McKay and Cross, would play dirty to win.

One bystander said: