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 (5 page)
A member of another crime gang said:
They were making a hell of a lot of money but Stevenson was actually not their most dangerous member. They had one other guy doing their dirty work who had a slight lisp and had a much worse reputation for violence than Stevenson. All these types of guys do the damage on behalf of who they think are their pals and end up getting the jail for it. Very rarely do any of them realise they are getting a using to make other people money.
Sometimes old Arthur would need to send a couple of boys to remind Tommy to get his money paid by the end of the week so they were by no way the kingpins at that point. They knew their place in the pecking order.
But, by the early 90s, this cocky, fit and streetwise mob were effectively running their Springburn heartlands inspiring a taste for power as well as money. Their swaggering sense of command was such that they sometimes walked into the council-run gym without paying despite having pockets stuffed with cash. They did it because they could.
7
Takeover
By 1990, pumping dance music and glassy-eyed smiling faces were no longer limited to the rave generation as Ecstasy swept the mainstream nightclubs of Britain’s cities. In Glasgow, clubbers aware of their identity would be disconcerted to see men known for violence – men like Stevenson and Tony McGovern – grinning like Cheshire cats and embracing while high on the little white Doves that, in those days, cost around £25 each. Nowadays a pill can cost £2, less than a packet of cigarettes, which only underlines how the large-scale importation of class A drugs has driven down prices on the streets.
The venue for much of the McGoverns’ partying was a club that was to later burn down. Called Peggy Sue’s, it was in West George Street in the centre of Glasgow, just along from Queen Street Station. The boys wore the best designer gear, they swigged bottles of trendy foreign lager or, if they wanted to show off, bottles of champagne would be casually summoned with the click of a finger, with one round often costing more than some people earned in a week.
They would rub shoulders with the footballers and pretty girls in the VIP section of venues like Peggy Sue’s, Hollywood Studios and the
Tuxedo Princess
, a rusting former ferry docked in the shadow of the Kingston Bridge on the River Clyde that was the height of cool when it opened in 1988.
Tony and his crew would consider themselves a cut above and those wanting Ecstasy or a little bit of cocaine – then still a preserve of the rich – knew they would always be able to provide.
It went without saying that the McGovern crew would stroll past the nightclub queue and be ushered inside by bouncers who rarely showed the same respect towards the paying customers standing patiently in line. Not that such hedonistic evenings were completely without incident and nor did the wave of Ecstasy-induced happiness mean an end to the occasional slashing, beating or even murder.
One night in October 1989, a Peggy Sue’s bouncer called Mick Kane, from Possil, died in an ambulance after being found in a pool of blood having been stabbed at the club. It was a twenty-seven-year-old McGovern associate who was to be arrested shortly afterwards and charged over the murder of the thirty-five-year-old doorman.
One associate said:
The charges were eventually reduced to culpable homicide and the McGoverns liked to make out that they pulled strokes with people in authority to get it dropped from murder. The truth is that his lawyer got the deal based on the facts of what happened and not because of string-pulling by the McGoverns.
At the time, he was actually unhappy because he felt the McGoverns had abandoned him. He ended up getting seven years jail.
One Strathclyde Police detective said:
This type of claim is often made by organised crime gangs. To brag that they can pull strings with the police or the procurator fiscal may be rubbish but, by doing so, it simply adds an extra dimension to their perceived power.
In another Peggy Sue’s flashpoint, the McGoverns scrapped in the street with a rival gang led by Ian ‘Blink’ McDonald. Associates put this feud down to an old argument over a firearm provided to the McGoverns by Arthur Thompson. The gun was handed over through Blink – reputedly nicknamed because he’d slash you in the blink of an eye – but a major fall-out ensued when the McGoverns, perhaps unwilling to relinquish the weapon, claimed to have lost it. One clubber recalls the battle well. He said:
It was a mob of English boys led by Blink who was capable and had a reputation for slashing people, sometimes they would be near enough scalped. Him and his pals just steamed in which was a pretty bold thing to do given the McGoverns’ reputation at that point. There was a construction site on the street and everyone was grabbing scaffolding poles or anything else that would make a weapon before the blue lights and the sirens put an end to it.
Blink also owned The Talisman pub in Springburn around that time so I think there were ongoing issues about territory as well as personality.
Murders and pitched battles aside, these weekend sessions were a way for the McGovern crew to unwind, much like any other professionals. They regarded themselves as businessmen and anyone looking at their turnover and profit might understand why. While they were clubbing with the beautiful people, just a few miles north and east in the grey housing schemes, they were still earning as tenner bag after tenner bag of poor-quality, heavily cut heroin was injected into yet another arm, leg or groin. Every day or so, the papers would report another drugs death at a time when fatal overdoses were still rare enough to be newsworthy.
In the first half of the 1990s, the McGoverns spread out of Springburn, much like any successful small company expanding into new territories after taking over its home patch. A former detective said:
At this point, they were putting all of their money into drugs. They were spreading from Springburn into areas like Roystonhill, Sighthill and Balornock and the Garngad. Their recruits in these areas were also well capable of violence. They would be the local faces and would become almost like agents or franchisees of McGovern Drugs Plc. Tommy had moved to Maryhill around then and made contacts with some of the older teams. They had piles of cash and what did cash buy them? Heroin. The profits in heroin at that time were huge.
The McGoverns were gradually taking over the schemes and they realised that, once you did that, the money would start pouring in. They also realised that they were good places to operate in because the police found it so difficult to get information from them.
The platform that allowed the McGoverns to make the leap from bossing their own backyard to taking over the heroin trade in the surrounding housing schemes was built on the logistics of the drugs supply chain. Just as the countries that control oil and gas often wield disproportionate global power, so the McGoverns’ new-found heroin supplies from the well-organised Liverpool-based smuggling gangs propelled them into the big league. From pinching wallets to dipping tills and dabbling in drugs, the boys had become serious and organised criminals. Life was to get altogether more serious.
8
Long Live the Kings
His lawyer Sir Nicholas Fairbairn once called him ‘the coolest Godfather Glasgow has ever seen’. He was, according to the flamboyant QC who defended him on a number of occasions, ‘smooth, silken, slow and deadly’. Fairbairn continued:
He had eyes like a cod. He never blinked and he never stopped licking his lips. He had a very spine-chilling presence. Of all the gangsters I have met, he was the most frightening, the most threatening. He was also one of the most mannerly clients I have ever had.
The minister leading the hundreds of mourners at Arthur Thompson’s funeral in March 1993 was slightly less fulsome than the flamboyant Queen’s Counsel. Thompson, he told the congregation gathered in the chill wind and rain at the gangster’s graveside, was a man to whom dignity and pride were important. His widow Rita – once herself jailed for stabbing another wife, from another gang – had to be held back as she tried to hurl herself towards the open lair. But, apart from her hysterical sorrow and the huge floral wreaths spelling out Arthur, Darling, Papa and Pal, there was little overt grief among those assembled. One who was there remembers:
It was meant to be this old-school send-off for an old-school criminal – like the Krays and their black-plumed horses and all that rubbish. His funeral might have been a bit bigger but it was really no different to any other gangster’s – a lot of guys in cheap suits and scars. Most of them only turned up to make sure the old bastard was really dead.
The need for witnesses to Thompson’s certain demise was understandable given the Godfather’s charmed life up until that point. He had survived three known attempts to kill him only to die of cardiac failure, aged sixty-two, in bed around the corner from the cemetery where he was buried. He died at home, the infamous Ponderosa in Provanmill Road, where a row of terraced houses had been knocked through, extended and stone clad and seemed, like him, to belong to an earlier era. But that era was certainly not a more innocent time. The loan-sharking, robbing, gun-wielding Thompson was as vicious as any of the gangsters who followed him. And he knew about drugs, the business and its consequences. His daughter Margaret had died of an overdose in 1989, a death reputedly blamed on her drug-dealing boyfriend of the time, Gerry Carbin Snr. His own son, Arthur Jnr, was jailed for eight years for dealing and would be gunned down on weekend leave from prison in 1991.
The gangster’s death may not, as his eulogists suggested, have marked the end of an era. But it coincided with a new age of criminality as a tidal wave of hard drugs broke over the schemes of Scotland and left thousands of shattered lives in its wake. The scale of the fortunes to be made as the heroin trade pushed into new markets would have been unimaginable even to Thompson. The gangsters who followed him did not even pay lip service to the old-school hokum of dignity, pride and honour among thieves. They were too busy making money.
By 1993, a decade or so since the drug had first appeared in the schemes of Glasgow, Aberdeen and Dundee, heroin use had spread alarmingly. Abuse and addiction were reaching new markets far from the inner city housing estates. Young clubbers, who would have never touched smack ten years before, were smoking the drug – ‘chasing the dragon to come down from Ecstasy and speed. No neighbourhood was a safe haven from it and no family was immune as heroin use soared. The problem persisted in Glasgow but Grampian was suddenly showing the highest official rate of addiction. Government statistics, published in 1997, suggested 57 per cent of drug users admitted taking heroin, compared to 45 per cent in 1995. It was in 1995 that Strathclyde Police confirmed a record 103 drug deaths, most related to heroin, with the annual death toll regularly reaching three figures throughout the decade. The banning of the notorious ‘jellies’ – the gel-filled capsule form of sedative Temazepam – in 1996 did not seem to slow the death rate.
A confidential Scottish Office memo admitted in 1997 that heroin was now the main drug of 49 per cent of users compared to 29 per cent just twelve months earlier. The hugely successful black-marketing campaign waged by the dealers was detailed in a Home Office report the following year. It said that while the perception of heroin users in the 1970s was of hippies pursuing an alternative lifestyle and in the 1980s of society’s losers, by the 1990s dealers were deliberately targeting young people already taking softer, recreational drugs like cannabis and Ecstasy. It was no coincidence that these years saw the emergence of the ‘tenner bag’ of heroin, putting the drug on a par with the price of an Ecstasy tablet.
The Home Office researchers concluded:
The message of course is that heroin is no more expensive and little different from other recreational illicit drugs. The heroin outbreaks spreading across Britain are primarily a product of purposeful supplying and marketing. The precursor to this has been the strong, sustained availability of pure, inexpensive heroin primarily from south-west Asia.
There is little doubt that a second wave of new young heroin users is emerging. With 80 per cent of areas confidently identifying outbreaks within their communities and providing such a consistent picture and profile of new users, it is, unfortunately, reasonable to suggest that we are facing a second heroin epidemic.
In their Springburn stronghold, business had never been better for the McGovern family firm and its junior partner Jamie Stevenson.
9
High Life
All the pretty teenage barmaids were told to make an extra effort that night by dressing as sexily as possible for the grand opening of Cafe Cini in the town of Greenock, a half-hour drive from Glasgow. It was the summer of 1999 and the onetime shipbuilding hub was buzzing with activity. The sun was shining and the visiting Tall Ships Race gave the rundown town a sophisticated feel-good glow.