The Iceman: The Rise and Fall of a Crime Lord (9 page)

Witnessing the ceremony, as Stevenson and his new bride tied the knot, were divorcée Caroline’s two children from her first marriage, son Gerry, then nineteen, and daughter Carrie, twenty. Her first husband, who she had divorced seven years earlier, was not there to see Caroline remarry although he had only very recently returned to Scotland after years spent on the Costa del Sol. Days before his former wife remarried, Gerry Carbin Snr had strolled through the arrivals hall of Edinburgh Airport wearing a T-shirt bearing the legend ‘Bad Boy’. As police in Scotland and Spain would testify, the logo across his chest was no understatement.

13

Name of the Father

He may have become Jamie Stevenson’s stepson but Gerry Carbin Jnr’s pursuit of a life of crime was in his genes. His father Gerry Snr was a career criminal. A small-time thief and thug, he had become an audacious international drug smuggler and suspected killer.

Some said his Cyclops nickname stemmed from a bungled cataract operation that left him blind in one eye. Others blamed a gangland fight. Whatever the truth, wide boy Carbin’s good eye was always on the main chance. Emerging from the Castlemilk housing scheme which sprawls over the southern edge of Glasgow, he quickly realised the profits from drugs would far outstrip what could be made by robbery.

He married Caroline Adam, a bottle blonde with a pretty face, in 1977. Two years later, the couple had a son, Gerry, named after his dad. In the years that followed, his father’s reputation for having a violent raging temper had enabled him to move to a higher level of drug dealing but this had strained his relationship with Caroline to breaking point. The couple split, divorcing in February 1991.

One friend of the couple said:

Meanwhile, after splitting from Caroline, Carbin Snr briefly hooked up with Margaret Thompson, daughter of Glasgow Godfather Arthur, but the door into the gangster’s inner circle slammed shut after Margaret’s death from a heroin overdose was blamed on her dealer boyfriend. He left Scotland soon after for the Costas to join a McMafia who were already enjoying the sun while jemmying open entry points into the cannabis-smuggling operations that were streaming drugs from Morocco to the southern Spanish coasts and onwards to Britain.

Carbin, no stranger to Her Majesty’s prisons, was not there long before he discovered what the inside of a Spanish jail looked like. He spent fifteen months in custody over the murder of a Norwegian disco owner in 1990. He was arrested after Torbjorn Heia disappeared and bloodstains were found at his villa. His body was discovered months later at the bottom of the property’s 120ft well and police blamed his death on a row over a drugs consignment.

Carbin was eventually cleared but then he was immediately extradited to face cocaine charges in Scotland. He was again acquitted. He had also walked from drugs charges in 1988 when he was caught in a car with 40 kilos of cannabis. He was arrested again after leading an audacious hash-in-a-can operation based in the Costa del Sol. This involved smuggling cannabis hidden in food and drink cans into Scotland. Carbin, then thirty-eight, was held along with a fellow Scot, Mick McKay from Govan in Glasgow, after a raid on a luxury villa at Benalmadena, near Malaga, in October 1994.

A makeshift canning factory was concealing kilos of cannabis in tins of olives and tomatoes that were being driven to Glasgow in a fleet of vans. Hours before the raid, Carbin had been spotted buying sixty-five wholesale-size tins of food from a cash-and-carry six miles from the villa. The raid uncovered hashish worth £1.6 million and equipment used to cut open the cans, insert the drugs in waterproof wrapping and reseal them. Each run to Glasgow netted the smugglers £100,000. The bust at the villa came after the four-month Operation Lata – Spanish for ‘tin can’ – led by the Spanish Civil Guard and involving Scottish Customs officers. Investigators believed the hash was being brought into Spain by speedboat from Morocco before Carbin’s gang stashed it in the cans to be driven to Glasgow.

Just days before the bust, the brass-necked Carbin said, ‘The police think I’m Public Enemy Number One. They’ll do anything to put me behind bars but I’ve been in jail enough. Now I just want to live quietly in Spain.’

The operation was first uncovered when French police stopped a van load of Stella Artois cans in transit. An officer opened one of the cans and became suspicious when the lager did not fizz. He ordered the cargo to be opened and the drugs stash was exposed. Carbin’s gangster pals would enjoy Spanish holidays before driving the vans back to Glasgow for £1,000. Speaking from behind the bars of Alhaurín de la Torre prison, near Malaga, in January 1995, Carbin said, ‘I have admitted the lot. It was my operation.’

He left Alhaurín de la Torre jail in a black Mercedes after being released in 1998, having served two thirds of his six-year sentence. He was then charged with dealing heroin during his time behind bars and fled to Scotland while on bail. After strolling through Customs at Edinburgh Airport, wearing the ‘Bad Boy’ T-shirt, the fugitive went into hiding. He came home to Scotland for the last time with nothing but a heroin habit – an addiction that was to lead to his death from the flesh-eating bug, necrotising fasciitis, in December 2003.

By then his son, who shared his father’s facial features and build, had followed him into the family business of international drug smuggling. Carbin Snr may have been unable to show his boy the ropes but, in his stepfather Jamie Stevenson, he had an equally capable mentor.

14

It’s War

The phone call from Liverpool was short and to the point. ‘We don’t give a fuck whose fault it is. We want our money. He used your name so it is your problem.’

For Jamie Stevenson it was a very big problem. One of his trusted Merseyside wholesalers was owed £80,000 for a consignment of cocaine. The person who had taken delivery was Tommy McGovern but he was refusing to pay. Tommy had got the drugs on credit by using Stevenson’s name as a reference. Therefore, it was Stevenson who had to come up with the cash – or deal with the defaulter.

A former family associate said:

Long-running brotherly squabbles between Tony and Tommy, separated in age by only two years, had long been a feature of the McGovern household but this sibling rivalry was about to reach a new low. Tony and Stevenson had begun to do more side deals of their own. Tommy resented being cut out. He was often called upon to do the dirty work but increasingly suspected that he was not getting his fair share of the money.

The McGovern mob bought large quantities of heroin, coke, cannabis, Ecstasy and speed, mainly from Liverpool, sometimes London and occasionally directly from Europe. This was cut and distributed – tenner bags to junkies, pills to clubbers, dope to students and coke to the professionals. The profits were fantastic so to squabble over one batch of coke was just stupid. Tommy’s non-payment was seen by Stevenson and Tony as a deliberate act of provocation and neither was the type of person to back down. It was war but, in this particular conflict, one of the generals was to change sides in mid battle.

In the early summer of 1998, the opening salvo, however, was directed at Tommy after Tony and Stevenson were blamed for Tommy being run over by an ice-cream van and suffering leg injuries. Later that month when Tony was best man at Stevenson’s wedding, Tommy did not even get a bit of wedding cake, let alone an invitation.

Throughout that summer, police received intelligence of other minor skirmishes between the sides and, when they arrested Tommy for attempted murder, possession of firearms and perverting the course of justice, it neatly put a lid on the brotherly battle. His conviction also pleased the police for other reasons – they had been infuriated at the witness intimidation that had seen Tommy’s 1995 trial for murder collapse.

Tommy was sentenced to four years in prison at the High Court in Greenock for the various charges in March 1999, although the attempted murder charge had by then been reduced to assault. With Tommy out of the way, Tony and Stevenson could get on with business without distraction and were able to appease the Liverpool contact. Meanwhile, Tommy had time to plot his next move following his eventual release from his cell in the newly built private prison in Kilmarnock, Ayrshire.

It was during his time behind bars that the McGovern family intervened in the dispute. With so many genuine enemies, they could not afford to fight amongst themselves. Eldest brother Joe is credited with forcing Tony and Tommy to form a peace pact but Tommy could only accept this deal on one condition – Stevenson must be killed.

It will never be known when Tony made the conscious decision to sacrifice his best friend for the sake of peace with his brother, in effect signing his friend’s death warrant, but, by early 2000, the bonds of friendship had lost out to family loyalty. Blood was, after all, thicker than water.

For those in the police and the underworld tracking the feud, a High Court case in March 2000 revealed exactly how the McGoverns would use any means necessary to score points.

Joseph Carbin, a relative of Gerry Snr and Jnr, who stands at six foot four, was sentenced to nine years for a knife attack on five-foot-tall John Callaghan, a cousin of the second-division Lyons crime family. As Carbin, fuelled by alcohol and drugs, stood over his victim holding two razor-sharp boning knives above his head, he told Callaghan, ‘Your lungs are getting it.’ It was no idle threat. Carbin plunged the blades into Callaghan thirteen times, leaving him disabled. It was a miracle that Carbin was not facing a murder charge.

What seemed most relevant to those monitoring the feud between the McGoverns and Stevenson was that Callaghan co-operated with police and, had Carbin not pleaded guilty, he would have been willing to give evidence against him. It was widely held that the McGoverns sanctioned their associate Callaghan to do so. The reason? Stevenson was married to Gerry Carbin’s ex-wife and he had a good relationship with his stepson Gerry Jnr. This meant that Stevenson and Joseph Carbin were natural allies which, in turn, meant Carbin became an enemy of the McGoverns. Callaghan’s co-operation helped to land Carbin in jail for nine years.

A court observer said:

The play in court was only one weapon in the gangland foes’ armoury, however, and there were far less subtle mechanisms for securing success. On the afternoon of Friday, 30 June, Tony McGovern was showering in his comfortable house in Bishopbriggs – the type of house that the pickpocket victims of his youth might have lived in – when someone walked in and shot him. The gunman, who had entered through the unlocked back door, fired at least twice, possibly three times, in the steamy tile-lined bathroom, shattering the glass shower cubicle door. At least one shot hit Tony before he ran, injured, naked and shouting, into the street.

The gangland figure was rushed to hospital but his injuries were not life threatening. Police were quick to suspect Stevenson. Tony refused to co-operate with detectives but forensic experts recovered some of the rounds used in the shooting. The ammunition was of poor quality. Investigators believed the bullets were home-made and had probably been fired from a converted replica firearm. The amateurish ammunition suggested that whoever shot Tony either lacked the contacts capable of supplying a better gun or was in a hurry and had grabbed whatever weapon was immediately at hand.

One newspaper the following day devoted fifty-six words to the incident but mistakenly reported that Tommy McGovern, rather than Tony, was the shooting victim who was recovering in hospital.