by Wilson, Jim
In 1985, one officer arrested Tony over a minor outstanding warrant and he was taken to the city’s Baird Street police station. The former detective said:
He was brought in all cocky so I decided to make up some fake tenner bags of heroin with magazine paper and cling film. They looked just like the real thing. I walked into the interview room and threw the wraps down in front of him and told him he was getting done for them. He was still in his late teens at this point and he just burst into tears. There was a real battle going on at that point because they thought they could do what they wanted. They also thought that a few of us would do anything to jail them so, when I did that, his arse collapsed.
This unofficial but systematic CID campaign of hounding family members as they swaggered between their Springburn pubs, controlled drug dealing and enjoyed their European spoils did not have the desired effect. The officer said:
We were stopping them at every opportunity which began to really disrupt the smooth running of their drugs business. Then one day this delegation of around half a dozen members of the McGovern family, men and women, trooped in to complain about what they described as harassment by two particular cops.
We couldn’t believe it when one of the officers was put back to uniform and the other was stuck away in the warrants office. The troops felt that the bosses should have commended them for making life hard for the McGoverns.
If your kids were growing up in a Springburn awash with McGovern smack, you’d want the police to be harassing them. But the bosses didn’t have the backbone to tell them where to go and the easiest answer was just to cave in.
These recriminations within the ranks were a major coup for the crime clan. Yet again, the McGoverns were getting away with it.
6
Taste for Drugs
The young Scot in the red-and-white football scarf was not the only Liverpool fan heading to Merseyside for the big game. There had even been a few exiled Scousers on the 10 a.m. train from Glasgow Central and, two hours later, hundreds of fans were on the platform at Preston, waiting for a lunchtime connection to Liverpool Lime Street. Jamie Stevenson, who could not have named many of the Anfield team, blended in perfectly.
One associate remembers:
It would have been 1985 or so and the McGoverns had started into the drugs business. They had suppliers in Glasgow but were also dealing with the Liverpool gangs. They were not taking huge amounts from Merseyside so it could easily fit into a wee rucksack or even a jacket pocket. They’d send a courier down to collect the stuff and bring it up the road. It was often Stevenson. He was a pal of Tony’s at that stage but still way down the pecking order in terms of hierarchy. He was more or less a gofer for the brothers – a tea boy.
Whenever a delivery coincided with a Liverpool game, he would time his trip to mix in with all the fans coming and going on the trains. He’d wear the scarf and everything. I think he enjoyed the pantomime.
Of course what the McGoverns didn’t realise was that he was down there meeting the boys in Liverpool and making contacts of his own. The McGoverns thought they were sending the boy down for the messages but all the time he was seeing how the business worked. He learned a lot and, when the time came to go on his own, it showed.
Liverpool was one supply route for the McGovern gang as they realised the profit from drugs could easily outstrip the fortunes they were raking in from their European robbery sprees. But another supplier was far closer to home.
There are many stories about Arthur Thompson – and just as many drink-soaked bores and gangland apologists to tell them. He was the Godfather, the courteous old-school criminal who dominated Glasgow’s underworld for decades. He never spoke to the police. He never hurt civilians. And he would never touch drugs.
If his legend seems to grow each year since his death in 1993, the reality remains unspoken. He was one major criminal among many in the city. He was a hugely violent man who was capable of inflicting terrible pain, injuries and death both on his own and by order. Many innocents were harmed by his awful business. And he did deal drugs. The malignant Godfather was one of the first suppliers of heroin to the Springburn brothers who were wanting to secure a toehold in the trade.
The start of the 1980s witnessed a rapidly changing criminal landscape. Old bank robbers and burglars were the equivalent of office workers with forty years’ service. They had become yesterday’s men. They either adapted to the new drugs scene or became redundant.
At this time, heroin was seeping into the schemes of Scotland. The authorities were far from prepared as the first ripples of what would become a tidal wave of the drug crashed on to Scotland’s cities. In Edinburgh, for example, an official clampdown on the distribution of hypodermic needles was meant to reduce addiction but only helped fuel the spread of HIV and AIDS. The gangsters did not exhibit the paralysis and confusion shown by the authorities. Switched-on mobs like the McGoverns were perfectly placed to stake an early claim on this highly profitable yet poisonous action.
One Thompson family associate recalls how, in the mid 80s, ‘the McGovern boys were taking six ounces of smack each week. That soon went up to nine ounces. Gangsters like Tam Bagan and Paul Ferris were working for Thompson at the time and they were aware of the McGoverns’ rising reputation.’
Today, an ounce of heroin costing £1,000 will produce 160 ‘tenner bags’ – a pea-sized cellophane wrap of brown powder sold as a £10 deal, which is enough for one hit. Once that ounce has been cut with whatever substance comes to hand, a door or street dealer will easily be able to make up 300 tenner bags. That means £3,000 will be recouped for their initial £1,000 outlay. In the 1980s, the profits were even greater because there were fewer competing dealers.
With the McGoverns’ ongoing overseas robbing trips bringing back up to £30,000 each time, bags of heroin were a logical investment choice for criminals. Putting the cash into property, shares or tax-free savings accounts would not land you in prison but it would also never yield instant profits of 200 per cent. Heroin has since plummeted in price due to a glut on the market meaning there were even fatter profits then than today.
At this time, the McGoverns’ HQ was Thomson’s bar which was strategically placed in the middle of their Springburn heartland. It was a comfortable pub and not typical of the more unwelcoming gangland howffs scattered around the city. One former regular said:
Ordinary people drank there because it was well run and they had a football and dominoes team. It was more like the Queen Vic in EastEnders than somewhere like old Arthur Thompson’s Provanmill Inn where strangers dared not enter. Of course, there was rarely any trouble because everyone knew that it was a McGovern pub.
However, one teenage peddler of stolen goods around pubs in those days has mixed feelings about the place. He said:
You would always make money in Thomson’s because, no matter what time you went in, the place was busy. It was a guaranteed pub for a few quid but one time I had this £5 watch and a guy from Thomson’s put it on and said he was keeping it. When I said he could keep it only if he paid me, he reached inside his jacket as if he had a blade. I had to back off.
Those early heroin deals were mainly conducted by twenty-one-year-old Tony and Tommy, then nineteen. In this drugs business, Tony was the MD while Tommy was his number two. Tony was the brains while Tommy was the brawn. Tony could charm while Tommy would growl. Others regarded the less visible eldest brother Joe as a more mature controlling influence, almost like the chairman of the board. Fourth son James was aged fifteen and just months away from being shot while the youngest, thirteen-year-old Paul would murder a man three years later. At this time, Tony and Stevenson, then one of the mob’s key enforcers, were stuck together like glue and people often mistook them for cousins. It was clear that, when it came to business, Tony was the boss.
In the early 1990s, the McGovern mob of brothers Tony and Tommy along with Stevenson were a force to be reckoned with. Before the trendier glass-fronted private health clubs spread
across the city, they used what was then called the Springburn Sports Centre to keep fit. The most successful gangsters usually possess a mental toughness but the Springburn gang understood that physical strength and fitness would give them an extra edge over potential rivals, who could be flabby in mind and body. Stevenson would maintain his enthusiasm for gruelling physical workouts throughout his career.
Often the police would pull up Tony in his red top-of-the-range four-wheel drive outside the municipal gym but they would rarely be able to pin anything on him. There was no chance that the police would ever be able to make him cry again. Even in years to come, when he led a tight team of armed robbers who struck at a series of banks, the charges often failed to stick.
Others in the McGovern gym squad at that time included the powerful figure of Willie Cross, who was around four years older than Tony. In 2007, Cross would be standing in the dock alongside Stevenson. This health-conscious enforcer had previously worked for an older generation of Glasgow gang boss, a security firm owner called Bobby Dempster, nicknamed The Devil, before choosing to join the McGoverns.
Also on the scene at the sports centre was Colin McKay who is just a few months younger than Tommy. Even his friends describe him as a ‘psychopath’ and, almost as an afterthought, a very talented football player. He was later accused of using his particularly large hands to strangle his friend Chris McGrory to death in September 1997 but walked free from that thanks to Scotland’s controversial ‘not proven verdict. McGrory died just after he had returned from his honeymoon. When he got married, McKay had been his best man. In 2005, McKay was to be cleared of a second gangland slaying. This time the victim was twenty-five-year-old Richard Holmes who died after being shot on Halloween 2004 and children out guising witnessed the clinical murder. The gunman, McKay’s co-accused, got eighteen years.
Later, McKay fell out with the McGoverns and did not seem too bothered by their growing reputation. He would deliberately swagger past the windows of Thomson’s bar as an act of provocation. Those inside would race to the door but McKay would gesture with a hand reaching towards the inside of his jacket that he had a knife, causing the mob to slink back into the pub, shouting threats and insults behind them. Some fights were worth the hassle but this one was not.
Along with McKay, the other alleged McGrory killer was robber, dealer and dog fighter Frank McPhie, who, at the age of fifty-one, was himself killed in 2000 by a sniper’s bullet, following a feud with the Daniel family. The audacious hit on McPhie at the entrance of his Maryhill flat remains unsolved.
Tony and Tommy’s brother-in-law is Russell Stirton. People joked that it would take a brave man to go on a date with the McGovern sister, Jackie – can you imagine having those five brothers coming after you if you broke her heart? Enemies say that Stirton climbed up the greasy gangland pole thanks, in no small part, to his in-laws and the reputation of their name but he was also a capable operator.
He later began dealing in the hidden world of mail order boxes, flogging porn and sex aids, allegedly as an early way of trying to launder the profits of drug deals. It is equally possible that this tacky Love Boat business’s presence in Amsterdam could have had as much to do with the availability of drugs as porn.
Many of the McGovern crew could be found at the leisure centre at a time when Stevenson really began to stick out. It seems that he still had not learned to keep his mouth shut. One person, who also attended the gym for several years, said:
Tony was the boss – he was the director of everything. Tommy was always nearby as was Stirton but Tony was the chief. Tony was a fit young man in those days and he was into general keep-fit while Jamie was more into pumping his muscles up. He was more interested in looking the part. He was quite sleekit and never made eye contact. He was a big, cocky, arrogant young guy with a real swagger and had the bad habit of being crude towards some of the women customers. He would say things like ‘I would shag that!’ in a loud voice, certainly loud enough for the girl to hear. He wasn’t exactly Prince Charming.
Some days, Jamie would turn up and batter on the gym door if it wasn’t open and try and intimidate the staff. Tony would then calm it down and most people would be fine with that but there were plenty of boys capable of taking on Stevenson at that time. In the gym, they didn’t talk business but everyone knew they were full-time criminals. They were into drugs, armed robbery and the like and were usually to be found in Thomson’s which is just seconds away.
If it came to a square go between Tony and Stevenson, my money would be on Tony because, despite being smaller, he was a real street fighter.
This was a few years before the 1996 release of the cult movie Trainspotting, a darkly comic look at a group of Edinburgh heroin addicts. The opening credits feature scenes of the film’s anti-heroes Renton, Sick Boy, Spud, Tommy and Begbie waging a particularly dirty game of five-a-side football but even that was a friendly kick-about compared to the weekly battle that took place in Springburn.
Every week, while thousands of boys, youths and men across Scotland enjoy casual games of football with their pals and colleagues for a bit of exercise, the McGoverns played for money and hard men, like Tony and Tommy McGovern, Stevenson, McKay and Cross, would play dirty to win.
One bystander said:
This was like five-a-side fighting rather than football even though they were mostly decent players. They would kick lumps out of each other. To make it even more interesting they would play for money with the winning team pocketing £100. They would sometimes pay £50 to ex-professional players to appear as ringers which only made the game more fierce.
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:
