The Iceman: The Rise and Fall of a Crime Lord

by Wilson, Jim

  These were the type of people who joined the McGovern gang at play that night in Greenock. The family had millions pouring in from heroin, cocaine, Ecstasy and cannabis. They had pubs and clubs fronted by what they thought was the trusted figure of Milligan. Recent figures released by the fledgling Serious Organised Crime Agency, described as Britain’s FBI, estimate that proceeds of crime totalling £370 million go through Britain’s licensed trade annually. At least £29-million worth of drugs money and other dirty cash is filtered through pubs and clubs across Scotland, mainly Glasgow. It is an industry that is greased with dirty money.

  As the McGovern brothers mixed with footballers, businessmen and other people of high standing in society, they were confident that the police could never catch them. What could go wrong?

  While Tony McGovern and Stevenson shared a bottle of Bollinger champagne that night in Greenock, they would have quietly toasted the dirty business on the streets of Springburn that had bought them this status and success. They had been through a lot together and, in the drugs business where loyalty was as fleeting as fashion, they trusted each other like brothers. Little did either of them know then that, the next time Stevenson would have cause to return to Cini in Greenock, he would not be stopping for a drink.

  10

  In the Blood

  An ordinary fifteen-year-old, three years off the legal drinking age and with school the next day, would not have been sitting in a smoky Glasgow pub at 11 p.m. on a Sunday night. On 5 April 1987, in an age of just four TV channels and no internet, most kids that age would have been at home watching The Russ Abbot Show at 7.15 p.m. followed by Esther Rantzen’s That’s Life!. But young James McGovern was not an average schoolboy. As a member of the notorious crime family, no one paid much attention to the baby-faced youth drinking alongside his nineteen-year-old brother Tommy and twenty-year-old cousin Stephen McGovern in the corner of the now-demolished Vulcan Bar in Springburn Way.

  Young James’s presence may have been of no concern to the groups of men as they drained what was left of their pints and cheap house whisky chasers with one eye on the clock as drinking up time neared an end but, as the barmaid’s piercing order to ‘finish your drinks off’ shook the old drunks into action, a youthful gunman strode soberly through the door. He knew exactly who he was looking for. As he hovered over the three McGovern boys, everyone froze. The spell was broken as his shotgun unleashed its deafening roar and ferocious spray of lead pellets.

  The youngest person there took the worst of it. Screaming out, James collapsed on to the pub’s grimy carpet with blood pouring from horrific face wounds. His cousin Stephen was also caught by the blast while Tommy, the boss of the trio, escaped unscathed as glasses shattered, tables toppled and McGovern blood marked the walls. A third man aged thirty-four, with no connections to the family or what was behind this particular feud, also felt the shotgun’s blast. His injuries were not serious.

  The gunman, who had fired from point-blank range, fled before anyone could react. Within a few moments, the spring evening was filled with the wail of sirens. Most of the drinkers tried to escape into the night before the CID arrived to lock them in the pub and ask questions they had no intention of answering. Tommy didn’t hang about either. Police would say that the rising hard man had lost his bottle and abandoned his stricken brother but it is perhaps more likely that he went to rally the people and the weapons that would be required for instant retaliation.

  James and his cousin were taken to the nearby Royal Infirmary but medics there took one look at their injuries and sent them to the specialist Canniesburn Hospital for emergency plastic surgery. Stephen, from the ‘poor relations’ side of the family, was to die of a drugs overdose in later years. The surgeons did what they could to rebuild James’s badly damaged face but, when he was eventually allowed home to the familiar surroundings of Blackthorn Street, he was scarred for life. From that moment on, James was nicknamed ‘Elephant Man although the cruel jibe was never made to his face. One associate said, ‘He has a nasty scar which distorts one side of his face. For that to happen to a teenage boy must have been very hard to deal with.’

  In the higher levels of Strathclyde Police, a decision was made to put a lot of time and effort into investigating who was behind the pub shooting. The motivation was partly as a way of finding out as much as they could about the increasingly powerful McGoverns. One officer said:

  We decided to throw everything into the shooting enquiry because we wanted to get into the family and gather as much knowledge as we could. It turned out that the person who did it was in his late teens and unknown to the police yet he had got hold of a weapon and had done the business. He acted after Stephen had threatened or assaulted his brother over something to do with drugs. He intended to shoot Stephen but James got the worst of it.

  This crime would have been remarkable had it been inflicted on almost any other family but, for the McGoverns, the shooting of James and Stephen was just one incident in a maelstrom of serious violence. Sometimes they are the victims but more usually the perpetrators.

  In the lawless Balkan state of Albania, blood feuds are an ancient custom whereby families avenge previous murders with murder. This lawless approach causes a perpetual chain of violence. In parts of Glasgow, families like the McGoverns seem to have adopted the same tribal blood-feud mentality.

  One officer said:

  If you want to get to the top and stay at the top of the Glasgow drugs trade you cannot afford to lose face. You must always come out on top. For many years, the McGoverns would attack anyone who crossed them or got in their way but often they were far too extreme in their reaction which bred a lot of hatred towards them.

  The boy who did the Vulcan Bar shooting was charged but it never got to court as the McGoverns refused to cooperate. The intelligence at the time was that the gunman left the country shortly afterwards because it was certain the family would seek revenge.

  Less than two years later, on 5 November 1989, James’s younger brother Paul McGovern inflicted a frenzied fatal knife attack on popular and hard-working forty-seven-year-old school janitor Thomas Cushley. Thomas was heading to Santi’s chip shop that afternoon when he was jostled outside Springburn Sports Centre by McGovern and two of his pals but it was more serious than that and Thomas shouted to passers-by that he had been stabbed. He then shouted at McGovern and punched him.

  This punch caused sixteen-year-old McGovern to run back towards his victim and attack him with a knife. As unarmed Thomas lay stricken on the ground, McGovern knelt on him and slashed his face over and over again. Pathologists found eighteen stab wounds on his body, with the two fatal blows landing in his lower back. On Springburn Way, McGovern was quickly arrested for the murder.

  What drove the feral sixteen-year-old McGovern boy to steal the life of this father of two has never been explained but what is certain is that the Cushley family’s suffering was only just beginning.

  The McGoverns simply did not get convicted and to this end, like many of the bullying Glasgow crime clans that terrorise their own neighbourhoods, they used witness intimidation as a first resort. One Cushley family member, recalling the lead-up the to the 1990 trial which, against all the odds, resulted in Paul being jailed for life for murder, said:

  During the trial, the McGovern family intimidated the witnesses and members of our family. Paul McGovern would even snigger and laugh at us when we walked past. He showed no remorse.

  There was one male witness who could hardly speak because they had got at him. One young mum with two kids identified Paul McGovern as did a couple of others. They were the crucial reason that justice was done for Thomas.

  After the trial, Thomas’s widow Mary and their kids Thomas and Carol had to move away from the area. It is repellent that ordinary people should have their husband and father murdered for no reason and then be forced to abandon their homes. People should remember that when they even think about making excuses for the McGoverns.

  Woman j
urors had wept after the guilty verdict against this baby-faced killer was delivered, their maternal sympathies unclouded by the facts.

  A decade later in 2000, the Cushley family’s pain returned when it was revealed that Paul McGovern had been freed from prison and was the owner of the security company that was guarding the construction site of the new Springburn Academy – the same school where Thomas used to collect his wages.

  Glasgow City Council blamed the contractors for the indefensible decision to employ his company. The Sunday Mail had spent years unmasking the organised crime gangs behind the flourishing so-called security industry in Scotland. The firms were actually drug gangs with business cards and they were running glorified protection rackets. Construction firms were offered security and refusal meant that their sites would be mysteriously targeted by vandals and fire-raisers. Such attacks would eat into their profit so they had little choice but to grudgingly pay up. Some of the security firms were also fronts for money laundering.

  Shortly after being released, Paul had formed M&M Security along with the other ‘M’ in the company name – George ‘Geo’ Madden who himself had been shot while drinking in the Spring Inn in 1996. Madden’s shooting was in revenge for a pub fight but, after being told that major surgery would be required to remove the .22 rounds from his leg, he walked out of the hospital. His brother Charlie had been stabbed to death in 1985 not long after he had fathered a son with shoplifting boss Jean McGovern, a cousin of Paul and the brothers.

  M&M courted further controversy when it was revealed that North Glasgow Housing Association had hired the security firm at least twice – once to patrol the streets like some kind of pseudo police force.

  In 1991, a police officer on routine patrol spotted a dark blue Ford Transit van parked outside the Highland Fling pub. Another known haunt of the McGoverns, it is located in an isolated spot in Springburn. The officer parked up, stepped out of his car and walked up to the driver’s side window where a man was doing his best to pretend he was invisible.

  ‘What are you doing, Abie?’ asked the officer.

  Once the window was wound down, all Abie Monaghan could do was shrug.

  The officer told the one-time promising footballer, then involved with his brother Terry in a Possil pub, to get out of the van.

  The officer recalls:

  The van had a bench-style seat in the front and, when we looked behind it, we recovered this very long, very sharp and very lethal samurai sword.

  Monaghan, desperately trying to talk his way out of a tight spot, confided that he was there to kill ‘that McGovern bastard’ but refused to say which one.

  After some back-up had arrived, the officer strolled into the pub where two McGoverns were in attendance – Tony and Tommy. They gave the lone policeman a bit of cheek, asking him if he wanted a pint and jeering him out of the door. He left, still unsure as to which of the two had escaped a potential beheading.

  It was a close thing because Abie had links with prominent Glasgow gangsters like Arthur Thompson and Bobby Dempster. He was more than capable. He later said he could have used a crossbow but that he took the sword because he wanted to see the whites of his victim’s eyes as he chopped his head off.

  Whether it was Tony or Tommy, they had a narrow escape but, at the time, they didn’t even realise it. We later found out that he was working for a major criminal figure who had sent him to do it.

  During the early 1990s, Tony McGovern and his by-now best pal Stevenson were running ice-cream vans out of Possil. This cash business was one of gangland Glasgow’s first forms of money laundering but it had been tainted by the so-called ‘Ice-Cream Wars’ of a decade earlier. The battle between rival ice-cream van operators resulted in the 1984 murder of six people including an eighteen-month-old baby in a cowardly arson attack on a flat in Ruchazie.

  Two men who had been convicted of the killings were later cleared after one of modern Scotland’s most infamous miscarriages of justice. Not that the atrocity meant that icecream wars were over. In 1992, Tony McGovern was accused of stabbing a rival operator. However, the man failed to pick Tony out of a police identity parade. But it is unclear whether this was because the victim was genuinely unsure or because the McGovern intimidation tactics had been successfully deployed.

  By the following year, Tony and Jackie, then his wife of just a year, had moved into a smart new-build home near to Hogganfield Loch around three miles east of Springburn. In the early hours of the morning, the fire brigade were called to their home after a petrol bomb was hurled through the livingroom window as the couple slept upstairs. One policeman turned up at 5 a.m. to see Tony and brother-in-law Russell Stirton on the pavement at the front of the house. In his opinion, they seemed to be having a serious conversation and possibly plotting something.

  One detective said, ‘There was so much going on with the McGoverns at that point that I don’t think we ever got to the bottom of the petrol bomb attack.’

  In 1995, another McGovern brother was to be accused of murder. On 9 April, a forty-five-year-old taxi driver called Jimmy McHugh was shot three times at the entrance to the packed Ashfield Club in Possil. Karen Kennedy, the sobbing girlfriend of Celtic-supporting Jimmy, branded the killer a coward who had executed the wrong man. Jimmy’s stepdaughter Michelle, then just sixteen, urged people with information to speak out while her mum refuted claims that the victim was a drugs war casualty. She said, ‘Jimmy was a kind, caring man. There is no way he was involved in drugs.’

  A teenage boy standing in a takeaway shop that Sunday night witnessed the gunman run from the scene and jump into a waiting getaway car. Before long, the street drums started beating a familiar rhythm – the hit was down to the McGoverns. It was suggested that Jimmy was shot dead simply because he had come off better the previous night in a pub fight with one of the family and this had wounded their pride. If so, it was an extreme way of saving face. Police appealed for information about a taxi driver who may have taken the gunman to the club after picking him up at the Spring Inn, another family haunt.

  Tommy McGovern was eventually arrested for the murder and stood trial at the High Court in Glasgow where he was represented by Donald Findlay QC, one of the finest criminal defence lawyers of his generation.

  One police officer recalls having to phone Findlay, then vice chairman of Rangers Football Club, as he was about to board a club flight to Romania for a European Champions League match against Steaua Bucharest. The detective told the lawyer that the police had information to suggest that the McGoverns were ‘up to their necks’ in serious and concerted attempts to locate and intimidate witnesses.

  The prosecution eventually threw in the towel and the case against then twenty-eight-year-old Tommy was dropped due to lack of evidence. Jubilant Tommy had been identified as the gunman by one witness but another told the court that he had lied about seeing him at the scene. This witness, Raymond Bainbridge, then twenty-four, also revealed that his life and the lives of his family were in danger because of what he had seen. He had been got at.

  It was also claimed that one potentially damaging witness was given cash to go on an exotic holiday but had actually spent the lot on heroin. Whatever the reason, he was a no-show at court.

  By helping to secure Tommy’s freedom through the intimidation of witnesses, the family’s rule of fear had grown even stronger over a decade when their name had become a byword for extreme violence. From a tactical point of view, such behaviour also helped keep any predatory rivals from circling their territory.

  One detective said:

  The one thing about the McGovern team is they didn’t make idle threats. If someone crossed them, they just came down on them hard without any warning – unlike some crooks who sat around all day saying what they were going to do. Over those years, you would come into work in the morning and, every other day, there would be something that had happened that was to do with them, whether it was a beating, slashing, fire or shooting.

  As the 1990s drew to
a close, the dawn of a new millennium was greeted with worldwide optimism for a brighter more peaceful tomorrow. Few in Springburn could share that hope.

  11

  The McGovernment

  If their entrance was intended to make a statement, then it worked. The venue was the home of Celtic Football Club in Glasgow’s East End. The occasion was the unveiling of the club’s new £17-million north stand. The guests were Newcastle United and their Toon Army. With rock star Rod Stewart opening the new section of the stadium and Celtic manager Tommy Burns fielding debut German midfielder Andreas Thom, there ought to have been no distractions for the tens of thousands of pairs of eyes. Yet one Celtic-supporting police officer remembers the pre-season occasion that was to end in a 1–1 draw for a very different reason.

  Several minutes after this late summer afternoon game kicked off amid a burst of colour and deafening noise, a group of well-dressed young men slowly picked their way to their seats in the new stand. It was 5 August 1995 and Jamie Stevenson and the McGovern brothers had arrived.

  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.