by Wilson, Jim
Parts of the west of Scotland are like the old Wild West. In the cowboy films, everyone wants to take on the fastest gunslinger and if you’re the local hard man, in Govan, the Gorbals or Greenock, people want to have a pop.
In those early days, as the crime gangs bullied, stabbed and slashed their way around their streets, Stevenson’s menacing confidence was just the kind of thing the gangsters ruling his area were looking for in new recruits. And the police say that, even at such a young age, he already had a reputation as being willing and able to use a knife to hold up shopkeepers on the orders of two older criminals. In fact, even back then, many recall how older, cooler criminals were needed to rein in the reckless bravado of Stevenson. One police officer said:
Stevenson became an enforcer and a chib man but he wasn’t very smart with the police as he had a big mouth. Clever criminals didn’t stand there sneering at you and drawing attention to themselves for no reason. He got noticed by behaving like that and it wasn’t clever because all it does is harm business.
James Stevenson, always known as Jamie, was born in 1965 to Emma and James Snr, a general labourer who was not around during his son’s upbringing. By 1969, Emma and her toddler son were living with her new partner who she would later have a daughter with and marry in 1984. Stevenson’s first home at 37 Monkland Street in the Townhead area of Glasgow has long gone. In fact, not only is the family’s tenement flat away, the entire street has been wiped off the map, long buried underneath developer’s concrete.
Most of Stevenson’s childhood was spent in the Red Road high flats in the Barmulloch area in north Glasgow. His Petershill Drive tower-block home was built in 1969. Futuristic looking for its time, it was amongst the tallest buildings in the city. To a child in the late 60s, these new concrete monoliths would have been every bit as exciting as the Empire State Building in Manhattan.
He wasn’t exactly a model pupil at All Saints Secondary School – a school which hit the headlines in 2004 when an eleven-year-old refugee boy from East Africa died after a scuffle in the canteen.
Another ex-detective remembers arresting fifteen-year-old Stevenson following one of his first brushes with the law. He said:
In those days, Stevenson was just a skinny wee boy who lived for a spell near Maxwell Road in Pollokshields in the southside of Glasgow. He broke into a car and was spotted by a security guard who was ex-military. We arrested him and he appeared in court for that. I suspect that it does not appear on his record because a lot of the old paper records were routinely binned when the system became computerised. In future years I knew him as part of a serious criminal gang with a rising reputation. I was amazed that it was the same boy.
The petrol station slashing earned Stevenson a place in a Springburn gang led by the feared McGovern brothers. One of them, Anthony, had followed Stevenson’s arrival into the world eleven days later, at the same maternity ward, at Robroyston Hospital. By the time Jamie and Tony were teenagers, they were already as close as brothers and would remain inseparable for years to come. Only death would divide them.
4
Chips Off the Block
On light summer evenings, the queue of customers would snake out the door of Santi’s fish-and-chip shop in Springburn Way. Much of the business was local but the lure of Santi’s suppers was enough to draw passing trade from the type of people who would not normally have cause to stop in Springburn. These hungry middle classes would head back to comfortable homes in the more affluent suburb of Bishopbriggs via the A803 dual carriageway – an ugly scar cutting through the centre of Springburn. They would warily sidestep the youths who clearly regarded the patch of pavement outside Santi’s as belonging to them.
It was 1980, long before the shell suit and baseball cap became the uniform of the Glasgow schemes, these teens were wearing the latest skin-tight stonewashed jeans and jackets and colourful Kickers on their feet. The sharp-faced, streetwise kids would stand outside Santi’s sharing cigarettes, joking with each other and making their presence felt as they eyeballed the well-to-do outsiders waiting in line for their chips.
Amongst this gang of around twenty boys and girls were the teenage McGovern brothers who had already gained notoriety, not least because previous generations of their family had also been steeped in crime. Their parents Joe Snr, a taxi driver, and Elizabeth Mitchell, a sewing machinist, tied the knot at St Aloysius Church in October 1962. Their Catholic wedding was perhaps prompted by the arrival five months later of their first son Joe Jnr.
In 1980, their eldest boy was seventeen and already an unmarried dad to a son also called Joe. His brothers were Tony, fifteen, Tommy, thirteen, James, nine, and Paul, seven. At this time, the family, including sixteen-year-old sister Jackie, lived in a cramped council flat at 42 Blackthorn Street in Springburn, in the north-east of the city.
Springburn in the nineteenth century had been an industrial powerhouse where thousands of men and four great works – Cowlairs, St Rollox, Hyde Park and Atlas – produced most of the steam engines, carriages and wagons that connected Britain with her global empire. By the 1970s, that industrial past was a ghost and much of the area had sunk into a pit of crime, grime, despair and violence although many good people were proud to call Springburn home.
The area’s most famous face is Michael Martin who in 2000 became the first Roman Catholic Speaker of the House of Commons having been the local MP since 1979. His nickname of ‘Gorbals Mick’ reveals only the geographical ignorance of the sneering London commentators who coined it since he has no connection to that part of Glasgow. The pomp, ceremony and grandeur of the Houses of Parliament must seem like a different planet compared to the streets where the people who vote for him live.
Today much of Glasgow is booming and the city has enjoyed a cultural renaissance and ongoing improvements. But, no matter how much cash is spent, pockets of inner city deprivation stubbornly remain – some of them amongst the worst in Britain. A National Health Service study in 2004 revealed the extent of Springburn’s appalling health problems. On average, men could expect to live to sixty-six-and-a-half years against a UK average of seventy-seven. In the whole of the UK, Springburn was only beaten by Glasgow’s Shettleston area which had an average male life expectancy of sixty-three – the same as India and Iraq. Taking third place in this unenviable league table was neighbouring Maryhill. This report prompted eminent public health expert Professor Ken Judge of the University of Glasgow to remark, ‘There are parts of Glasgow that should be thought of as Third World communities.’
Two years earlier, another study, this time by the Child Poverty Action Group, also exposed the neighbourhood’s despair. Measuring life expectancy, unemployment, income levels and illiteracy, it found the same three parts of Glasgow – Shettleston, Springburn and Maryhill – to be the three most deprived areas in Britain. Poor diet, smoking, excess alcohol, lack of exercise, poor housing and amenities, not to mention drugs and violence, still shape much of modern Glasgow.
It is little surprise that the ruthlessness, greed and casual violence required for the life of a drug dealer should be nurtured in places like these. The McGoverns’ extended family was scattered around the same area but, when people quietly spoke in tones of respect, fear or hatred about the ‘McGovern family’, they now usually meant Joe, Tommy, Tony, James and Paul.
One former neighbour remembers Tony as being a bright boy who, even in his schooldays, had an eye for making money. He said:
He obviously became heavily involved in drugs but, like a lot of these guys, he was great on a personal level – he could be kind to his pals. When he was a kid, he had a go-cart and would charge other boys ten pence to have a shot on it.
Such fond childhood moments may not have been typical for this family but even those who knew of the McGoverns’ reputation back then would have been unlikely to predict the sheer scale of violence that would cling to the family, their friends and their enemies in later years. As the late 1980s and 1990s exploded into a perpetual chain of s
hootings, slashings, beatings and fire attacks, those teenage days of bragging and joking outside Santi’s must have seemed like a more innocent age.
It was outside the popular chip shop that the McGovern boys first discovered that crime did pay. They also realised that, in a city where it is estimated that one in three adults receive state benefits, they would never join the respectable ranks of the commuting chip shop customers. These middle-aged customers were not the most street-smart and the McGovern boys were adept at clocking a wallet carelessly poking out of a back pocket. The kids would take it in turn to try to remove the wallet by stealth and, even if their victims caught them in the act, they would rarely be quick enough to do much about it. Once safely in the back lanes of nearby tenements, the thief would count the spoils which would be used to pay for that night’s carry-out of cheap cider, vodka and 64p packs of cigarettes.
For one police officer, who was to have many encounters with the McGoverns throughout his career, the radio call to attend a pickpocketing outside Santi’s soon became routine. As usual, when he and his colleague pulled up to deal with the irate victim, all potential witnesses claimed to have seen nothing. Anyone in Springburn who was seen to be helping the police would land themselves with the potentially dangerous tag of ‘grass’.
The police knew that their light-fingered suspects would almost always include the young McGovern boys but there was rarely anything they could do about it and, from an early age, the McGovern boys enjoyed getting away with it.
5
Blackthorn Street to Amsterdam
Police officers sometimes claim that those who are born into the McGovern family learn to steal before they can speak. But that dig does not do justice to the sheer scale of the family’s long-running love affair with shoplifting, pickpocketing, till dipping, distraction thefts and however many other ways there are to say the word ‘stealing’.
One retail crime expert said, ‘It’s almost like a mental illness or genetic fault where they just cannot help themselves. Even with thousands of pounds in their pockets, they would still instinctively want to take a Mars Bar without paying.’
To the present day, the brothers’ cousin Jean McGovern – born between Tommy and Tony – along with her partner-in-crime Annette Daniel, from an equally notorious Glasgow crime family, ran the most professional team of shoplifters in Scotland. Despairing defence lawyers would look sheriffs in the eye and offer mumbled pleas in mitigation that it is just the way they are made as they try to talk their clients out of a stint inside Cornton Vale Prison.
The McGovern and Daniel teams routinely get away with helping themselves to entire rails of expensive garments from some of the finest designer stores in Glasgow’s Buchanan Street, Edinburgh’s Princes Street and London’s Oxford Street. In seconds, thousands of pounds’ worth of stock from Birmingham to Braehead and Dundee to Darlington can disappear only to be later eagerly snapped up for half-price around the pubs and bingo halls of Glasgow or more anonymously disposed of on eBay.
Long before these brazen shopping molls became the scourge of security guards and retailers the length and breadth of the land, it was the boys who were making piles of cash – simply by taking it out of shop tills. Nabbing wallets from outside a local chippy was one thing but their daring till-dipping trips were soon to attract the attention of the now defunct Scottish Crime Squad and even Interpol. The McGoverns were about to enter the big league.
One police officer said:
They started out by going round big stores in Scotland like Marks & Spencer and staging what appeared to be a real fight between a couple of kids who had been brought along for the purpose. When the woman leapt out from behind the till to try and stop the boys from killing each other, one of the gang would calmly lean over and clean out the till. The McGoverns made this scam their own. They then started to get their hands on till keys. It was usually the case that the same keys fitted every till in every store in a UK-wide chain. It was a free for all.
The boys were dabbling in drug dealing at this point as well and the money from the stealing helped to finance their first bulk purchases. Such was the scale of their till dipping that they soon became known to police forces across Scotland. That led to the former Scottish Crime Squad taking an interest and, as the heat increased on them here, they would travel into England but that was even more serious as it was cross-border crime. Before long they were travelling to Europe and hitting places like Amsterdam, Paris and Brussels.
These brash young men with their pockets stuffed with cash were well suited to the late 1980s environment of yuppies and excess in which they operated. It was coming to the end of Margaret Thatcher’s era and, at the time, the biggest comedy character was Harry Enfield’s yobbish Loadsamoney who taunted people with his own wad of banknotes.
An ex-police officer said:
The problem was that we were always a step behind them. I remember being part of a Scottish Crime Squad team that followed them by car to the ferry at Hull. As they got on the ferry, they had a right laugh by waving at us as we stood watching, unable to do anything.
They often used Hull but were smart enough to use various English ports. They would drive south and hit stores in all the big English cities along the way – you could follow their progress from the trail of crime reports.
Sometimes they would use a stolen car to travel. There was no shortage of people in Springburn willing to sell them their driving licence for as little as £30. That way, they could just dump the car which had been hired in the other person’s name at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport and fly back to Glasgow. The sergeant at Glasgow Airport was told to look out for them and he must have pulled them a hundred times. This was before the Euro was introduced in 2002 so they would have piles of different European currencies like Dutch guilders or French francs. It was also before the Proceeds of Crime Act came along so there was nothing they could do about all this cash even though it was obviously stolen.
One former McGovern family ally said:
They always worked in teams of four in a car and Tony was the boss. He made sure the best boys came with him and, if they weren’t up to scratch, they would be put on the sidelines for a spell.
They had a rule that they would not return home until they each had £5,000 in their pockets. They could turn over up to £30,000 from a trip to Europe which, even today, is a staggering amount of money. They had passports planked over there in case they had to flee in a hurry.
They would put on different accents, such as Irish, French or English, to confuse any witnesses who would have no idea they were actually Scottish. If they got cornered by a store guard, there was always one of them able to knock him out as they were capable and fit. On some occasions, they even wore disguises like fake moustaches or beards and would put on hats and coats that old men would wear. They might have looked odd but it served their purpose well.
It was clever and well executed and they continued doing it long after they started dealing in drugs at a serious level. They would come back from these trips like some kind of Elizabethan explorers decked out in top-quality designer clothes that we had never seen before. They also had booze and piles of cash. In fact, the money from these robberies helped them buy their way into the higher level of dealing.
Another former police officer, who had previously arrested Stevenson in south Glasgow over the car break-in, despaired at the lack of police reaction to this well-planned criminality at a time when the force did not even acknowledge the existence of ‘organised crime’. He said:
Stevenson was involved with the McGovern teams at that time and I was surprised because I had last dealt with him over the car incident a couple of years earlier and this was a different ball game.
The problem was that we had masses of intelligence on the overseas operations – who they were, their methods and a very accurate level of how much money they were making which was at least £500,000 a year. But the senior officers didn’t act. They didn’t know what to do about it
because they had never come across it before. Whether someone is making half a million quid from drugs or any other type of crime, we should have still pursued them. It was ignored and the chance was missed.
In the mid 80s, on one trip, Tony and two of his team escaped alive from a car crash in central Europe when the driver died after falling asleep at the wheel and hitting a tree. A former Strathclyde Police intelligence officer said:
The driver was a McGovern associate and he had £6,000 in his pocket despite being unemployed.
The problem got so bad that we put together a book of mugshots and details on all the travelling thieves which was circulated across Scotland. The sheer numbers that originated from north-east Glasgow, in particular Springburn and Possilpark, were unbelievable. Before long, the UK police forces all had a copy of the booklet and then Interpol distributed it around Europe.
Every other week, we took calls from police officers in Europe asking us to look at CCTV of suspected Scottish store thieves. We knew it was going to be the McGovern gang before we even looked at it.
One thing such trips did was to expand the criminal horizons of the McGovern boys and take them to places such as Amsterdam which, as one of Europe’s illegal drug industry hubs, would later become crucial in their operation.
But the hard-bitten Glasgow CID men who tried to keep a lid on the gangs of youths in places like Springburn and Possilpark, known as Possil, were not impressed by this upstart gang of cocky, cash-rich criminals. A handful of these officers were also the type who did not always follow the rules when it came to dealing with crooks who revelled in getting away with it.
