The Iceman: The Rise and Fall of a Crime Lord

by Wilson, Jim

  In case something happened.

  Did somebody tell you to do that?

  No. It was just a thing I done and, on the way up, I rang Frank. I had taken a note of Frank’s number from him ringing me. I rang Frank to say I was through Customs and I was on my way up the road. Little did I know I was getting followed by the Regional Crime. And I told him roughly what time I’d be at Dumfries. So I drove up and stopped at Ferry-bridge Services [near Leeds], had a bite to eat and a cup of tea. I then rang Frank and I said it’s usually about three hours from here to Dumfries. We got in touch back and forward. He rang me and I rang him.

  So most of the communication that day was just you and Frank?

  Yeah. I pulled into the services, the Shell services at Dumfries. He said he would come down there to meet me and take me to the industrial estate ’cos I’d never been there before. At the roundabout at the services, I went in convoy with him into the industrial estate and then we handed over. Then all hell broke loose.

  It’s fair to say to those who will be listening to this tape that that’s the stage when you and Francis Gallagher were apprehended?

  Yeah.

  So have they ever asked you to bring anything else into the country?

  Yes. At one time I took a lorry up to Kilsyth. It was just a unit, no cab and left it up there. Frank picked me up to run me back to Ayr. He dropped me back at Ayr.

  Can you remember what date?

  Mid June. Shortly before I got arrested. Maybe two weeks before that on a Friday about lunchtime. There was a wee burger van outside and I was starving. I had a wee burger while I was waiting on him coming.

  What vehicle did he pick you up in?

  An Audi – a black Audi.

  What happened after that?

  He asked me would I be interested in bringing some guns in, handguns. Just one box. He mentioned the figure £10,000 for bringing the box in.

  Was this for him?

  For him and J. He said J asked me to ask you would you be interested in bringing some guns in?

  What was your response to that?

  An Irishman with guns just doesn’t really mix. If I was caught with guns, it’s immediately regarded as a terrorist offence rather than a civil offence. But I said I would probably have a think about it.

  Did he say this to you in the vehicle?

  Yeah – in the car.

  Did he say if he was going back to report to anybody?

  He said he’d get back to J and let him know what the score is and we could talk about it again. Maybe up the price if I was prepared to do it.

  Is it your understanding that he was acting as a go-between for J?

  From what I can gather, Frank and J were more or less on a par with each other.

  Did he say they grew up together?

  No. He just said they’d been friends for quite a while. He said J is the man with the overall power but he’s his lieutenant type of thing – his right-hand man. He said they were like brothers.

  So it was not only drugs they asked you to bring in? They also asked you to bring in firearms?

  Firearms, also. I mean that’s a dodgy deal.

  Is there anything else you can think of? We were here earlier on today and I think you mentioned that Jamie was involved with the McGoverns?

  Yeah. I’ve heard the name McGovern mentioned by Gallagher a couple of times.

  What do you know about that?

  Very little. I know the McGoverns are big-time criminals from Glasgow and I’ve a feeling that they are directly or indirectly involved with them. One thing I do know is that most of the drugs in Glasgow and the Central Belt are controlled by this Jamie.

  What makes you say that?

  It’s what Frank told me when we were on remand.

  Did he say that as a generalisation?

  Aye. We were talking about different things and he said anything that comes into Glasgow or the Central Belt has to go through him first . . .

  This interview was instigated by whom?

  By myself.

  You’re quite happy there was no lawyer present?

  No problem. Quite happy.

  And your reasons for providing us with this information are what?

  The J guy has authorised a contract on me. I’ve already been stabbed in the prison here.

  When?

  Third of March this year.

  Has that been investigated?

  The police interviewed me and took a brief statement and that’s the last I heard about it.

  How do you know it’s this J guy that’s taken out this contract?

  In January, I was supposed to go to the National Induction Centre in Shotts [Prison], Frank Gallagher and myself were supposed to go there the same day. I was over in A-Wing at the prison here. I’d everything packed up and ready to go and a guy from the wing who I’d never spoken to before said to me, ‘Do you know there’s a contract out on you?’ I was amazed. He said, ‘Frank Gallagher has taken a contract out on you ’cos you set the whole lot up with Customs and Excise for him to get arrested.’

  I said it’d be pretty poor to get myself ten years as well.

  32

  Identity Crisis

  No one is eager to talk about Robert McDowall, whose current whereabouts are unknown, or the murky nexus where informers and law enforcers meet. This is for the most obvious reason – police waging war against serious and organised crime will not discuss their methods in detail. They do not disclose the day-to-day work that edges them closer to their targets – the surveillance, the bugs, the undercover agents . . . and their criminal informers.

  When McDowall started working for the police may never be admitted. What can be established is that, within seventeen months of being sentenced to ten years in prison for smuggling £6 million of heroin into Scotland, McDowall was a free man. What can be said is that the police swoop to arrest McDowall and Frank Gallagher on the industrial estate on the outskirts of Dumfries in June 2003 was part of Operation Folklore. What can be noted is that Jamie Stevenson and his thuggish henchmen believe McDowall was a supergrass who was secretly working with the police.

  In January 2005, McDowall had his sentence cut from ten years to five on appeal. The following month, a bid to seize around £1 million of his assets ended with the Crown recovering just £637. At the High Court in Edinburgh, the judge, Lord Penrose, said the cost of McDowall’s legal aid would have ‘far exceeded’ what was recovered by the Crown while the SNP’s then Shadow Justice Minister, now the Cabinet Secretary for Justice, Kenny MacAskill, voiced his disappointment saying:

  The whole point of the Proceeds of Crime Act was to demonstrate that crime does not pay. This paltry figure does little to reinforce this message. I think the Crown should review what has taken place in this case to ensure it does not happen again.

  But sources close to Stevenson say the Crown already knew exactly what happened and that is why McDowall was freed so early with a ludicrously light financial sanction. One said:

  Dumfries was a set-up and McDowall had to be involved. Nothing else makes sense. Stevenson believes McDowall had been turned in the January after getting caught coming through Dover in an apparently empty truck that was actually carrying heroin, speed, Ecstasy and cocaine. From there, he’s allowed to go on condition he passes on information about big runs to Scotland. You’ll never get any admission of that. The first acknowledged discussions between McDowall and the SCDEA come in Kilmarnock jail, after his conviction, when he’s in fear for his life.

  McDowall had his sentence halved on appeal. His co-accused Gallagher went down from twelve to ten. So the big question remains – how did McDowall, a drugs smuggler caught with forty kilos of heroin and originally sentenced to ten years, get out in seventeen months? That’s the question. But there’ll be no answers.

  Whatever McDowall’s status within Folklore, the Ulsterman was out of jail by August 2006 as the SCDEA command were plotting the raids that it was hoped would end Stevenson’s underworld re
ign. Interviewed again, McDowall told detectives that he could identify the man he knew as Jamie – the man who had asked him to ferry drugs and guns across Europe to the Central Belt of Scotland.

  On 27 September, exactly a week after the Folklore busts, an identity parade at the high-security police station in Govan’s Helen Street gave McDowall the chance. And, in the viewing room of the station’s parade suite, looking carefully at the seven innocent men and Jamie Stevenson lined up on the other side of the one-way glass, McDowall’s memory failed him.

  He picked Number Three. Jamie Stevenson stood at position Number Five. In the parade suite’s dismissal room, McDowall suggested he might have made a mistake – that perhaps Number One was a familiar face. He told officers that he had been trying to recognise another member of the gang, not Stevenson. He said maybe Number Five looked like a man he remembered. It was all too late.

  The one witness capable of placing the gang boss known as The Iceman at the very heart of Scotland’s biggest drugs trafficking operation had failed to identify him. One source remembers:

  The cops were in a stone-cold fury but what could they do? They had placed huge reliance on McDowall. During the interviews, he had picked Stevenson out from a bunch of pictures. McDowall told them he could definitely identify him again. And then, after all those months, they get Stevenson into a line-up and their number one witness suffers a memory lapse. It happens of course but it can’t help when you and your wife are living in some safe house in Ireland in a state of abject terror. Your memory might falter when you’ve already been stabbed in jail, heard there’s £10,000 on offer for your life and know the man you are going to help put away for life is said to have shot men for a lot less. I guess that kind of pressure can help your memory play tricks.

  In August 2009, McDowall confirmed his memory lapse had provoked police fury after he broke cover for the first time since being freed from jail. He told the Sunday Mail how he had no choice but to co-operate with the Scottish Crime and Drugs Enforcement Agency because Stevenson had already put a price on his head in jail. But detectives’ goodwill towards the one-time lorry driver turned to ice when McDowall failed to pick Stevenson out of the ID parade. McDowall said: ‘I genuinely wasn’t looking for Stevenson at the parade. I thought I was being asked to ID another guy. It was just a complete and utter misunderstanding. The police were absolutely furious with me. The cop was like, “What have you done?”’

  Weeks before McDowall broke his silence, reporters from the newspaper had tracked down Frank Gallagher, Stevenson’s right-hand man, who had been arrested with him at the Little Chef in Dumfriesshire. The man, whose arrest was the first breakthrough in Operation Folkore, was working as a mechanic at a BMW dealership in Glasgow after his release from jail.

  Meanwhile, McDowall, by then 54, was still living under police protection at a secret location – one of 23 police informants placed under the watchful eye of Scottish Witness Liaison Unit in 2008 – and admitting that he may never be free of the threat of reprisals after the drugs gang accused him of working with the authorities before the run. He said:

  Stevenson and Gallagher will never admit they got it wrong about me tipping off the police about the run but I’m now fair game because I did co-operate later on and that’s a threat I’ve learned to live with.

  The feedback from Glasgow is that activity is low just now. If the police hear of an imminent threat, they would move me. I’ve got a 24-hour phone number if I’ve got any concerns. I would never have spoken if it wasn’t for the fact they wanted to fuck me so I had to fuck them back.

  I messed up. I’m paying the price and I will be doing so for the rest of my days. You think drugs money is easy money but it’s actually very, very hard. When I signed up to SCDEA protection, I realised that I had to disappear from view.

  They told me I could never return to anywhere that I was known, including Scotland and Ireland. I haven’t seen my partner Carol or my son for almost four years. Carol was willing to come with me but I said no. I could never have asked her to turn her back on her family.

  My son was also given the choice and he decided to stay. He’s now 22 and I last saw him as a teenager. I’ve got a wee dog and we sit together and have Christmas dinner. I can get sentimental, especially at Hogmanay, but can still make phone calls. I don’t even blame Stevenson. I blame myself for being an idiot. Greed sometimes takes over from need.

  33

  No Limits

  At first, the newspaper reporter thought his contact was joking. ‘What do I tell him? I’ve got to phone him in half-an-hour or you will be getting shot.’ But the journalist from the Sunday Mail realised from the sweat across the man’s brow and the tone of his voice that he was deadly serious as he raised the phone, looking for instructions on what he should tell the person waiting for his call. The person awaiting a call from the man in the Counting House pub at Glasgow’s George Square that Thursday afternoon in late January 2004 was Jamie Stevenson who was sitting in an Amsterdam apartment.

  Stevenson had learned that the reporter had been sniffing about his affairs. Stevenson accepted that newspapers would take an interest in him – after all, he was the alleged killer of his former best pal Tony McGovern and had now become Scotland’s major drugs smuggler – but, this particular week, for some reason, publicity would be catastrophic.

  The contact explained, ‘You can write anything you want about him next week or next month but not this Sunday. Something’s going down and it could damage that.’

  The veteran reporter shrugged his shoulders and agreed that nothing would be published that Sunday – not because of Stevenson’s bizarre combination of plea and threat but because he had no story to write. The grateful contact made the call to Stevenson.

  The supposed criminal code of honour which protects ‘non-combatants’ from being caught up in gangland violence does not exist and never did. Many criminals do not recognise a dividing line between ‘legitimate’ targets and the rest. Their wrath can be unleashed on anyone that might get in their way, including those in the media.

  Eight days after the shooting threat, management at the Sunday Mail were told by the police about non-specific threats against its staff. The threats were understood to have come from Stevenson’s gang. The fact that Stevenson was willing to consider such intimidation may have been the kind of ruthless tactic that he learned from his former partners-in-crime, the McGoverns.

  A Daily Record reporter had received a warning that she was a potential target of McGovern violence because of a report she had written about Tony McGovern’s funeral in November 2000.

  Four months later, Serious Crime Squad officers summoned another Sunday Mail reporter to Helen Street police office in Govan to warn about a potential plot against him from the McGovern camp for exposing the family’s criminal and business affairs.

  But it’s not just the media who are the targets. As far back as 1987, when Tony and Tommy were taking a few ounces of smack from Arthur Thompson, there was niggling between them and local police. The young McGoverns made a bold move – one that truly crossed the line. An officer, who had been giving the young drugs gang on his patch a hard time, arrived home one day to find every single window of his family home in the southside of Glasgow had been smashed. One colleague from those days said:

  The McGovern boys were bold and reckless on the way up and didn’t care much for any so-called rules. One police officer was a real thorn in their sides. He was always giving them a hard time. To smash his house windows was a very big statement for them to make. They were saying that they were big enough to take on the police. I’m not saying that it was connected but, within a week, every single window in their HQ at Thomson’s bar had been put in.

  Thirteen years after making a personal attack on a police officer’s home, the McGoverns showed their willingness to push the boundaries again. This time the target was the elderly and much-admired parish priest for Springburn. In the view of some family members, Father Noel Murray
had failed to properly praise Tony McGovern during his funeral service. At least, on this occasion, windows were spared and the priest just received a direct reproach from disgruntled female McGoverns rather than a warning from the Serious Crime Squad that somebody had been making death threats towards him.

  34

  Welcome to The Hague

  Stevenson may not have known any language apart from Glaswegian but he could speak cash on delivery, which was the only language that mattered when he was making wholesale purchases of huge quantities of drugs across the northern rim of mainland Europe. Even the Folklore team, who were well aware of his capabilities in pioneering new sources and supply routes into Scotland, were stunned as they uncovered his business associations across Europe and beyond.

  The team building their case in the shadow of Glasgow’s international airport suspected Stevenson’s cross-border operations may have already been registered by their colleagues abroad. In 2004, they called on the continent’s biggest bank of criminal intelligence, Europol. The 500 staff and ninety liaison officers based at the European Police Office in The Hague are not a police force. Their agents will not be bursting through traffickers’ doors in early-morning raids. But the information held on their massive databases of intelligence may have helped the forces of the then twenty-five members of the European Union find those doors.

  Dr Martin Elvins, of the University of Dundee, has spent years studying the institutions of transnational crime-fighting and is not surprised the Folklore team visited Europol as they followed the chain of Stevenson’s supply routes as it snaked through one country after another. He said:

  Today’s organised criminals are using many of the techniques of multinational corporations. The people getting away with a life of crime for the longest periods are demonstrating a high level of strategic thinking. The European Union is designed to encourage trade but, if you want to grow economies, if you want to encourage import/export, then there can be no surprise when ‘bads’ as well as ‘goods’ are also being traded. The law enforcement agencies have had to learn new tricks.