The Iceman: The Rise and Fall of a Crime Lord

by Wilson, Jim

  This ebook edition published in 2012 by

  Birlinn Limited

  West Newington House

  Newington Road

  Edinburgh

  EH9 1QS

  www.birlinn.co.uk

  Copyright © Jim Wilson and Russell Findlay 2008, 2010

  The moral right of Jim Wilson and Russell Findlay to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-203-0

  Print ISBN: 978-1-84158-871-1

  Version 1.0

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  CONTENTS

  1 Opening Fire

  2 Busted at Dawn

  3 Here’s Jamie

  4 Chips Off the Block

  5 Blackthorn Street to Amsterdam

  6 Taste for Drugs

  7 Takeover

  8 Long Live the Kings

  9 High Life

  10 In the Blood

  11 The McGovernment

  12 Best Men

  13 Name of the Father

  14 It’s War

  15 In the Jungle

  16 Vengeance

  17 Paying Respect

  18 Last Orders

  19 On the Run

  20 Loose Ends

  21 Game On

  22 Breaking In

  23 Foreign Exchange

  24 Open for Business

  25 Friends Across the Water

  26 Chairman of the Board

  27 Our Lost Boy

  28 Folklore Begins

  29 Boxed In

  30 Burgers and Drugs

  31 The J Fella

  32 Identity Crisis

  33 No Limits

  34 Welcome to The Hague

  35 All at Sea

  36 Birdman

  37 On the Run Again

  38 We’re Listening

  39 Talking Business

  40 Doing Time

  41 Laundry Business

  42 The Money Detectives

  43 We Take Cash

  44 Outlaw In-Law

  45 Jamie Soprano

  46 In the Dock

  47 Different Country, Same Story

  48 Frozen Out

  49 Only the Start

  50 Down but Out?

  1

  Opening Fire

  Tony McGovern did not have time to turn off his headlights. The first shot shattered the driver’s window of his black Audi. The dull percussive thuds of three more shots followed instantly. The gunfire brought his friends from inside the New Morven pub where they had been waiting for him. As they emerged, a white car reversed at speed away from the pub, a man was seen sprinting in the opposite direction and McGovern was slumped, dying, in his car.

  He had already visited the pub earlier in the day, drinking sparingly – a beer, possibly two. He was known to just about everyone in the Morven although only a handful of drinkers would say hello, catching his eye fleetingly, giving small nods and mumbled acknowledgements. He had spent some time in the backshop, the office behind the bar, but soon returned out front to the gaggle of drinkers who were splitting their Saturday afternoon between the pub and the bookies.

  McGovern stood at the side of the bar with his arms resting on the counter. Side-on to the main door, partially hidden by the jangling fruit machines, he spoke quietly to a few men, who approached him in turn. His words were only just loud enough to be heard above the growing clamour. When the others spoke, McGovern’s gaze was directed down towards the floor but his eyes would flicker to and from the swing doors whenever they opened.

  The date was 16 September 2000 and it was cold enough outside for McGovern to be wearing a jacket. It helped to conceal the heavy bulk of a £400 Kevlar stab-proof vest that he wore beneath. He had not left his home without strapping on the body armour for weeks – not since June when someone had tried to shoot him dead one Friday afternoon while he showered at his bungalow in nearby Bishopbriggs.

  McGovern, thirty-five, had learned to be a careful man but if he felt safe anywhere it was there, at that rough public house between Springburn and Balornock, north of the M8 motorway that bisects Glasgow. Sited like a fort on a hill at the top of Edgefauld Road, the white-painted pub stands in isolation off the main road. Four stone steps lead up on to the small concrete concourse and surrounding car park while closed-circuit TV cameras, encased in steel mesh, perch high on each of the building’s corners. Tony had not voiced any particular fears that day and had no special plans for the night ahead. He left the bar after an hour or so, arranging to return to the Morven after 10 p.m. to meet some family, some friends, some associates.

  His speeding £30,000 Audi A6 overtook another car on Syriam Street at 10.15 p.m. The driver remembered seeing the car as it headed towards the Morven half a mile away. McGovern phoned his wife Jackie on his mobile while driving. It was to be the last time she would speak to him. There were other men near the Morven making calls. Other arrangements were being made.

  In Hornshill Street, cutting up from the busy Barmulloch Road towards the Morven, a white car was parked with a number of men inside it. As McGovern neared the pub, a white Vauxhall Astra was seen speeding down Boghead Road towards McGovern’s Audi as he drew up in front of the pub at 10.20 p.m.

  The Morven was busy enough but it should have been busier. For every drinker from the surrounding streets buying pints and shorts at the bar, another was spending time and money elsewhere. The New Morven was a McGovern pub. It might not have the names of Tony and his three brothers on the deeds or the licence but their business and reputation might as well have been posted on the glass-fronted noticeboard outside that plugged the acts brave enough to accept a booking. The McGoverns’ business was selling class A drugs in the council estates and high-rises of north Glasgow. Their reputation was for savage, murderous violence.

  McGovern was a regular visitor to the Morven, sometimes for pleasure, sometimes for business, more often a combination of the two. He had already collected his money from the men dealing drugs inside – heroin to the junkies, Ecstasy to the kids heading into town – and he’d checked his tick book, the scrawled record of outstanding debts, for drugs distributed or money lent. He parked his car in Littlehill Street, in front of the Morven, facing away from Edgefauld Road. If he’d faced the other way, he might have seen the car drawing in behind. He might have noticed the well-built man half-walking, half-jogging the twenty yards towards the black Audi. If he had seen his killer approaching, McGovern might have had a chance, an opportunity to flee or to fight. Instead, he was still seated in his car when the first bullet shattered the driver’s window before three more were pumped into his groin.

  His headlights were still glaring in the darkening gloom when his friends ran from the pub. A white car was seen reversing, engine screaming, out of Littlehill Street on to Edgefauld Road and away. A man was seen sprinting through the pub’s small car park towards the council houses of Burnbrae Street before he disappeared into a garden, into the darkness.

  The 999 call was made at 10.22 p.m. and, within minutes, an ambulance, blue lights flashing, drew up at the Morven. Emergency treatment was administered before McGovern was slid on to a stretcher and into the ambulance. The crew sped along Petershill Road, turning left on to the carriageway of Springburn Road to Glasgow’s Royal Infirmary less than a mile and a half away. It was there that Tony
McGovern was pronounced dead at 11.23 p.m.

  At the scene of the shooting, uniformed officers were taping off the streets around the pub. Their colleagues took details from drinkers, from the residents of homes nearby and from taxi drivers ranked on the main road just yards away – details but no information. No one had seen or heard a thing.

  In a few days’ time, Detective Superintendent Jeanette Joyce, leading the murder inquiry, told reporters, ‘At this time, we have no motive. There is no obvious reason why Mr McGovern was murdered.’

  Few of her officers would agree as even those with only a passing knowledge of the bloody feud that was being played out in the northside of Scotland’s biggest city already knew there was only one suspect for this most clinical of gangland hits. He was not always an enemy of McGovern. The two had once been best friends, best men at each other’s weddings, partners in crime, allies in the venal drugs trade laying waste to lives and neighbourhoods in their home city.

  His name was Jamie Stevenson and he was to become better known as The Iceman.

  2

  Busted at Dawn

  It was still dark when officers started arriving at the squat police station in East Kilbride town centre and, by the time the briefing began, 150 officers had assembled. Only fifteen of them knew why.

  The small group of officers from the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency (SCDEA) understood that morning’s work would signal the beginning of the end of an operation stretching back almost four years. The secret offensive against Scotland’s biggest drugs trafficker had taken officers around the world and back again. It had involved months of uncomfortable, nerve-jangling surveillance – months of covert observation and secret recording of some of Scotland’s most dangerous and ruthless men. It had already led to the seizure of twelve tonnes of drugs worth £61 million, nine convictions for drug trafficking and money laundering and disruption to the criminal operation streaming heroin, cocaine, speed and cannabis into the country’s cities, towns and villages. As the sun came up on 20 September 2006, the police operation, code-named Folklore, was about to enter a final, decisive phase.

  Twenty addresses were to be visited that Wednesday morning, in Lanarkshire, Glasgow, and Amsterdam. The Scottish task force were split, briefed and ready to move by 6.15 a.m. Some left by the back door into the station car park where the fleet of marked and unmarked cars and vans was waiting. Colleagues, drafted in from other stations, left by the front door where multicultural messages etched into the glass door panels spell out ‘Welcome’ in twenty-four different languages. There would be no similar greetings at their destinations.

  The SCDEA’s team, led by the elite agency’s crime controller Detective Superintendent Stephen Ward, attended the briefing that detailed officers to each of the target addresses and revealed the identities of the six men and two women to be taken from the houses and flats scattered across the West of Scotland. There would be no surprises or omissions. The agency’s surveillance teams – officers on the ground and the specialist teams of electronic eavesdroppers – had been watching and listening, plotting the location of every target.

  But Ward did not follow any of the units rolling out of the car parks around the station, opposite the district court and council buildings. Instead, he returned to the agency’s headquarters. There, in the control room of the nondescript red-brick Osprey House, hard against Glasgow Airport, he would follow the endgame of Folklore. His attention was focused most on two of the homes whose occupants were about to be abruptly woken.

  Afterwards, Ward would tell reporters:

  Today has seen us target several individuals. This type of operation, which involves painstaking intelligence gathering over many months, is the way forward as far as we are concerned. 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 rightly expect our response to this to be co-ordinated and robust.

  Most of the police teams had headed out of East Kilbride but the vehicles of one of the tasked units drove south, in convoy, along the deserted carriageways of the new town, to one of the modern estates on its southern borders. Lindsayfield is popular with parents looking for a safe haven to raise their children. Good for schools, handy for a Morrisons superstore, it seems no different to the commuter town’s other tidy, new-build estates. It was here, in the scheme where the streets bear the names of famous Scottish mountain ranges, that the police team headed, ghosting slowly over the road bumps deterring speeding drivers and passing the neatly trimmed lawns where kids’ forgotten scooters lay in the dew. They pulled up just before entering the cul-de-sac of Campsie Road, out of sight of number 44.

  Sleeping inside the double-garaged villa, backing on to fields and facing down the streets inspired by the Pentlands, the Cheviots, and the Cairngorms, were Gerry Carbin Jnr, twenty-six, his partner Karen Maxwell, thirty-one, and their two children, aged one and six. They had also been home one Saturday evening eight months earlier when, as detectives listened in, Carbin unwillingly took delivery of a holdall containing £204,000 of drugs money. The bag, unsuccessfully hidden first in a cupboard and then in a study, would provide the breakthrough the Folklore team had been working towards for four years.

  Seven miles away, across East Kilbride and the green fields dividing it from Greater Glasgow, another team had arrived at their destination. It was an equally unlikely setting for the climactic raids of a landmark police investigation into international drugs trafficking and money laundering. Burnside, lying on the south-east rim of the city, is also popular with young families. Many are drawn to the tree-lined sandstone terraces on the edge of Rutherglen, just a few miles from the city centre.

  Fishescoates Gardens is half-hidden in the heart of Burnside. A small development of modern flats, it lies in an L-shaped corner plot, just off the main road to East Kilbride. A funeral home opposite the development’s main entrance strikes the only jarring note. Signs warn that the well-kept communal gardens are private and that dogs are not welcome. The recycling bins are neatly lined up for collection. Strangers are noticed and not particularly welcome. A sign on the rear door of number 21 urges residents of the nine flats to make sure it is locked at night. The officers preparing to visit the couple living quietly in one of the flats on the second floor came through the front.

  Armed response units were nearby. Thousands of hours of taped conversations, recorded by hidden bugs inside their homes, suggested the gang were not reckless or foolish enough to stash guns there but no chances could be taken that morning. The 150-strong force also included the so-called ‘Angry Men’, the Strathclyde officers trained and equipped for forced entries in the face of extreme hostility. Wearing protective clothing, visored and carrying mini-rams, the teams were ferried by van to each of the homes. The synchronised raids began at 6.40 a.m.

  The doors were forced opened and stayed open as officers entered the homes, detained the suspects and mounted inch-by-inch searches. As cupboards were emptied, drawers rifled and carpets lifted, officers found almost £8,000 in Carbin’s home, along with eight luxury watches. A further thirty-six high-value watches were found in the simultaneous raids, some valued at more than £30,000. Those searches already underway even before the suspects had been taken from their homes, would help secure their downfall. One officer involved in the arrest of Carbin and his partner in East Kilbride said:

  It was early. They were still half asleep but they knew who we were and why we were there. We had gone to Carbin’s in January looking for a bag of cash and he had lost the plot, shouting and bawling. This time, he just kept it shut and got dressed.

  In Burnside, Carbin’s stepfather was equally subdued. Like the others, he was driven to the high-security police office in Govan on the southern banks of the Clyde and detained. He called himself a self-employed car valet and a sometimes jewellery trader. According to his tax forms, his business was slowly growing, earning him £38,083 in 2003 risin
g to £80,885 two years later. His returns to the Inland Revenue did not include the dirty millions raked in from his true occupation – being a career criminal commanding Scotland’s biggest-ever drugs importation business.

  By 8 a.m. on 20 September 2006 – six years and four days after the fatal shooting of his former best friend and gangland ally – Jamie Stevenson was behind bars. He had nothing to say.

  3

  Here’s Jamie

  ‘Get yourself tae fuck!’ boomed the dark-haired youth at a nearby policeman.

  The officer was perplexed since, up to that point, he had not even noticed the swaggering teen.

  This was one police officer’s introduction in 1982 to Jamie Stevenson, then a seventeen-year-old with a growing reputation as an aspiring man of violence in an area with no shortage of them.

  The smarter criminals knew better than to fall out with the police, quickly grasping that there was truth in the half joke about Strathclyde Police being the biggest gang in the city – and one with a very long memory. But Stevenson, later a model of understated discretion at the sharp end of a global organised crime network, had yet to learn that it often paid to keep his mouth shut.

  One Scots-Italian crook in his twenties was soon to make Stevenson’s acquaintance in an even more memorable way. It happened while he was hanging around a Springburn petrol station which was a haunt for the street-level drug dealers just when Scotland’s heroin epidemic was first taking hold. Stevenson’s fast, brutal and efficient knife attack left scarlet splashes of his victim’s blood on the diesel-stained forecourt. To most people, it was a cowardly and terrifying slashing but, according to gangland legend, this was the moment when Stevenson had ‘arrived’.

  At the time, the police were certain that this act of violence, deliberately performed in the view of a gaggle of small-time dealers and their desperate customers, was Stevenson’s way of making it clear that he was not to be messed with. One veteran officer said: