The Iceman: The Rise and Fall of a Crime Lord (8 page)
Read The Iceman: The Rise and Fall of a Crime Lord Online
Authors: Jim Wilson
The officer said:
I was sitting in the crowd and, just after the game kicked off, this McGovern team led by Tony swaggered out of the executive lounge. Everyone looked as they made their way past the directors’ box towards their expensive seats. They were like the Mafia. There is no doubt in my mind that this was intended as a statement. They were clearly saying, ‘Look at us. We’re here and we’re number one.’
Had they sat down before kick-off like everyone else, no one would have noticed them but it was not just the timing, it was the way in which they carried themselves.
Tony and Tommy were there as was Stevenson and a handful of other key members. They were letting people know that they were the top men and there were several other well-known Glasgow villains watching this. They would have got the message.
In the second part of the 1990s, the McGoverns were to emerge as the number-one wholesalers of drugs in Scotland. Every small town would have a dealer who was aware through the underworld drums that hash, pills and almost anything else was available from the boys in Springburn. They had taken over vast tracts of the heroin trade in north Glasgow and had standing with the gangs of Liverpool and London. They were seen as good people to do business with. They could be trusted. Most important of all, they had the cash.
Some drug dealers make a moral decision not to deal in heroin because of the fatalities and misery that it creates. Others are repelled by the clientele and opt out because of the headaches involved in dealing in the meanest of streets. But, to the McGoverns, it seemed to come naturally.
Another veteran drugs squad detective said:
They had made millions of pounds by the mid 1990s and they ended up running Scotland in the years that followed. It’s always the same story – whoever controls the supply into the country becomes the kingpin and, as soon as they lose that, someone else steps in.
The family had put money into pubs, property and other businesses like taxis, car washes, petrol stations and even a laundry business. At this stage, they were on the receiving end of very serious attention from not just the police but also Customs and the Inland Revenue. Generating millions of pounds was futile unless you could put it through the books of a legitimate business in order to make it clean and they had in place the advisers and infrastructure to do that.
They also learned some golden rules such as never lay your hands on the ‘product’ and never have anything incriminating in your home.
With henchmen like Stevenson ready and willing to dish out violence to late-payers and rivals, few mobs would look to upset the McGoverns who had begun to call themselves The McGovernment. This arrogant self-regard would later contribute to their dramatic decline but, at that time, they seemed to view themselves as true lords of crime.
Each icy Guy Fawkes’ night, on 5 November, they would stage a massive bonfire and fireworks display for the locals on a patch of waste ground near to their former Blackthorn Street home which, in recent years, has been demolished. It was said that, on one occasion, the colourful rockets and deafening bangers going up in smoke had been stolen from a delivery truck destined for a DIY warehouse. The McGoverns even laid on a couple of ice-cream vans for the spectators. Some of the drugs money was going into such vans and, a decade after the gangland atrocities of the Ice-Cream Wars had gripped Glasgow, many of the vans touring the city’s streets were still run by those involved in organised crime.
Many people could be forgiven for not expressing unconditional gratitude for this apparent generosity. Just how many people died through their dealing is impossible to say. Others would have experienced the bullying and beatings dished out by the McGoverns. The shooting out of house windows was their trademark warning and they would do this with no apparent thought as to who might be behind them at the time. Some would also have been repulsed at the mob’s flashing of dirty cash while they struggled to feed their families and heat their homes.
One said:
There were a lot of atrocities done in their name. One guy who had a bit of debt with them was stabbed in the throat. It was over the top. You can’t show any sign of weakness but the smarter mobs know that you don’t do things that will alienate you amongst your own people.
By now, the McGoverns had taken over a local private-hire taxi firm. It had the second biggest fleet of cars in Glasgow and, on paper, this profitable business was owned by a former Glasgow private-hire car inspector. Along with some colleagues, he had been driven out of his job because of gangland threats – the gamekeeper had become the poacher. Many private-hire car firms in the city and in places like Lanarkshire, Renfrewshire and increasingly further afield have succumbed to an offer that could not be refused from Glasgow-based organised crime gangs. Usually the drug-dealing owners find a respectable front man to put on the Companies House paperwork.
The brothers’ involvement meant that their elderly parents enjoyed a round-the-clock free chauffeur service. One driver suffered a serious beating in the street when, having failed to recognise that his passenger was one of the senior McGoverns, he made the mistake of not showing him the customary deference.
The McGoverns also dealt in cocaine. No longer the preserve of the very rich, it had become a hugely profitable drug for a mass market. Like Ecstasy and heroin, cocaine is yet another substance to have dramatically dropped in price thanks to the volumes of it pouring through the country’s ports and airports. Comedian Robin Williams’ old gag that cocaine is ‘God’s way of saying you’re making too much money’ is redundant in an age where teenagers can afford a few lines and crack cocaine’s grip tightens on Scotland’s cities much like heroin’s two decades before.
And, in the mid 90s, it was the cocaine market that was next to be targeted by the McGovern outfit and, in Brian Doran, they saw an opportunity to break in. This bespectacled Glaswegian hairdresser and linguist was a key figure in a major cocaine smuggling gang that dealt directly with the Colombian cartels. He was a most unlikely but hugely effective drugs baron. In the months leading up to a massive two-year Customs operation that tore Doran’s gang apart in 1995, he was the man in the UK to speak to about the supply of large quantities of coke.
One such meeting was arranged between the McGoverns’ brother-in-law Russell Stirton, acting for the McGovern family, and a middleman who had direct access to Doran’s crew. Strathclyde Police drugs squad knew about the meeting which was due to take place in a cafe on Glasgow’s Great Western Road.
If Doran could be persuaded and terms agreed, the McGoverns could become major distributors of a drug that was beginning to appear not just in nightclubs but also at the dinner parties of smart, middle-class professionals. Glasgow city centre’s drugs market for Ecstasy and cocaine was a cash cow and the first step towards success was to secure the supply lines. The next was to take over the doors on the clubs and that way you controlled who sold what, where they sold it and how much for.
Stirton immediately realised that the meeting was compromised. His instincts told him that almost every table was occupied by undercover officers. To anyone else, it would have looked like a normal café. There was a mixture of single customers with their noses in newspapers and chatting couples but Stirton could smell the police a mile off – he even spotted the pair in the corner who were apparently staring love-struck into each other’s eyes. Had he done business that day, he may also have taken a heavy fall when Customs swooped on Doran shortly afterwards.
One officer said:
Stirton was treble wide. He seemed to have a sixth sense when he was being watched or followed and he made it very, very obvious that he had clocked all the cops. The meeting was off. It was a shambles.
Three years after their bold entrance at Celtic Park, the McGoverns were to have their first experience of media attention. It was prompted by their own knack of fighting with each other. This was a trait that had surfaced during their rise, continued during their successful years and was kept going through to their eventual fall – a demise that was precipitated by a man joining them that bright August day to enjoy the football.
The
Sunday Times
newspaper cast a light on the family’s rapidly expanding drugs empire in August 1998, referring to them only as the mysterious ‘M Family’. The article told how two unnamed brothers (Tony and Tommy) had clashed following a bitter fall-out. The newspaper predicted bloodshed but it omitted to mention one non-family member who would be central to the murderous drama that was to unfold in the months ahead.
While the McGovern name was now being talked about by police, reporters, nightclub crowds and amongst the Glasgow underworld, Stevenson was staying firmly in the shadows. The teenage wide boy with the big mouth had grown up and had learned the value of keeping quiet.
12
Best Men
The senior policeman in charge of the Friday afternoon operation did not find the joke funny. He led a small surveillance unit whose job on 31 July 1992 was to discreetly monitor the wedding and reception of drug dealer Tony McGovern. The officer’s blood pressure began to rise when some in the team half-jokingly suggested getting closer to the action by joining the wedding party for a pint in the hotel’s public bar. That idea was firmly rejected.
McGovern, then aged twenty-seven, was to marry Jackie Craig, a publican’s daughter, who was one year younger than her husband-to-be. To an outsider, it was a romantic but otherwise unremarkable exchanging of vows between a groom, who described himself as a ‘recovery vehicle driver’ on his wedding certificate, and his shop-assistant bride.
The ceremony at St Aloysius Church in Springburn was conducted by Father Noel Murray – the priest would also perform the groom’s funeral service eight years later. Best man on that summer’s day was Tony’s closest pal and business partner, Jamie Stevenson. They were as close as brothers. Also witnessing the exchanging of vows was Tony’s sister Jackie who was, by then, the wife of Russell Stirton.
After the happy couple tied the knot, the wedding party crossed the River Clyde to a hotel in Shawlands on the southside of Glasgow for the reception. The choice of this rather modest venue was all about Tony being smart enough to keep it discreet. By now, his prominence in the city’s drugs trade was enough to merit the police surveillance operation. The team from Strathclyde Police’s Pitt Street headquarters created their own album of wedding snaps although they were never to be seen by the happy couple.
This was the police’s chance to see who Tony was friendly with and, just as tellingly, which criminals had not received an invitation through the post. Car registrations were clocked, names noted and faces photographed – all scraps to be stored away for future reference in the intelligence files.
Six years later, on a Saturday in August 1998, it was Stevenson’s turn to leave single life behind. Tony McGovern was the obvious and only choice to reciprocate the best-man duties for the ceremony at King’s Park Church in the southside of Glasgow.
Stevenson’s mother was not there to see her only son getting married, having died just a few months earlier at the age of fifty-four. Stevenson, then aged thirty-three, was to marry Caroline Adam, who was just four days away from turning forty. Their wedding certificate has both of their occupations down as ‘ice-cream van salesperson.’
The couple had recently moved into a comfortable detached home in the Glasgow commuter town of East Kilbride. Up until that point, Stevenson had lived in a flat in Aberfoyle Street, in the Dennistoun area of Glasgow’s east end.
One guest at the 1998 wedding was New York construction firm owner Anthony Sarcona, whose wife, a relative of Caroline, moved to the US at the age of twelve. He has only just learned about the groom’s more recent drug-smuggling activities. Anthony said:
This is a big surprise to me. As far as I knew it was just a regular wedding. I talked to Jamie when I was there. He wasn’t a big guy or anything like that. In fact, he was smaller than me and had a regular build. You really wouldn’t think he was involved in anything like this. I had no clue what he did other than have some candy trucks or something like that. My wife says to me that, in Scotland, you’re either a criminal or you’re poor. Everyone has a hard time making a living.
Two years later when best man Tony was gunned down and Stevenson, the groom, emerged as the prime suspect, Strathclyde Police were to take an even keener interest in this 1998 wedding day. Detectives probing the murder of Tony in September 2000 obtained a copy of the video taken at the wedding. They watched happy faces full of life and the two best pals clowning with each other for the camera. Police trawled through the tape, identified all the guests, tracked them down and interviewed them.
One police source said, ‘This illustrates better than words just what kind of people we are dealing with. Tony is dead and Jamie is the only real suspect yet, not so long ago, they were best men at each other’s weddings.’
However, by the time of Jamie’s marriage, the seeds of destruction had been sown as simmering resentments and petty niggles over drugs had caused an irreparable split in the McGovern camp. Tony’s brother Tommy was not at Stevenson’s wedding – he had been frozen out. Increasingly, Tony and Stevenson were becoming more of ‘a gang within a gang’ as rows over territories and money took their toll. On that wedding day, Tony and Stevenson were happy to look into a future without what they saw as family baggage but that was before Tony had a very dramatic, and ultimately fatal, change of heart.