by Wilson, Jim
These people are resident in one country but making their money and spending their money in a number of other countries. They are well aware of being watched and well aware that they have to conceal their money. Their methods for doing that are in a constant process of adaptation.
They are aware they need to have access to the legitimate economy. That is the great unspoken truth at the heart of criminal enterprise – to do what they do, to conceal what they conceal, they must have access to corrupt people in the legitimate economy. These men are not islands.
Europol was launched under the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 as the Europol Drugs Unit, a force dedicated to gathering intelligence on the organised criminal trade in narcotics. Its remit was extended through the following decade until, by the start of 2002, the agency was working to combat all serious forms of international crime, from gun-running and human trafficking to terrorism and money laundering. The Europol Computer System (TECS) underpins the agency’s work. Capable of the collection and intricate cross-analysis of huge amounts of intelligence submitted by law enforcement agencies and working twenty-four hours a day, Europol can offer multilingual assistance to officers trailing suspects across borders.
Dr Elvins says police have to overcome a territorial inclination and inherent reluctance to share information so painstakingly amassed if Europol is to help.
It is a fishing expedition, a game of show-and-tell. You offer something – you hope to get something back. Europol is most basically a silo of information based on the new reality of databases increasingly capable of holding and processing complex information. It is a conduit, a way of facilitating the sharing of information.
You’re looking at a man who keeps flying down to Malaga, perhaps the Spanish police have been wondering who this Scots guy is that keeps meeting one of their suspects. You don’t know until you ask.
The liaison officers are crucial. Seconded from forces in the member states, they are the channel of communication between the forces and Europol. Europol can also facilitate joint investigation teams. It provides a platform to set up an operation implemented by local forces in different member states which can have a number of different fronts.
A coordinated response can help ensure that one force is not tugging at a thread that is unravelling a case thousands of miles away. It is common-sense policing.
As Stevenson’s deals stretched across borders, the Folklore team tracking him did not only visit Europol agents. The issues raised by cross-border jurisdiction meant talks at Eurojust were also on their itinerary. Based beside Europol, Eurojust was launched in 2002. Bringing senior prosecutors and judges from the European Union members together, it stages multilingual meetings with law enforcement agencies to discuss individual investigations of serious cross-border crime. The intention is to advise and to ease international legal cooperation although even the EU’s Commissioner for Justice, Freedom and Security Franco Frattini admits it is meeting some resistance from crime-fighters across the continent.
Despite his dream of a single European prosecutor to oversee cross-border investigations into serious and organised crime and despite advising on 1,000 investigations involving the smuggling of arms, drugs, and humans a year, Eurojust remains a marginal influence. In April 2007, Frattini said, ‘Eurojust should be made stronger. Our message to members is to make better use of joint investigation teams and make Eurojust involved.’
Dr Elvins, who researches cross-border police cooperation against transnational organised crime, says the international nature of the drugs trade will increasingly force the partnership of different governments and their law enforcers. He said:
Once you are building a case against these types of criminal, you very quickly hit the problem of cross-border jurisdiction. That is where Eurojust comes in. The drugs trade is a supply chain and it is not vertically integrated. At every level, it is an individual dealing with an individual. They might be dealing in container ships or a few condoms full of cocaine. The question for law enforcers is where to break the link most effectively. If someone linked to someone linked to someone you are looking at is buying a consignment in Morocco, is that going to help you put them away in the UK? Is it going to stick?
Europol and Eurojust are not well-known institutions. The public’s idea that Europol is a police force, for example, is just wrong. It is a knowledge bank. Whatever intelligence, guidance and practical support they can offer, the real nitty-gritty, the building of the case, is still down to the quality of the police work on the ground – the prioritising of targets and resources, the analysis of surveillance, making the connections, the kind of work that police officers do day in and day out.
The police attempts to stop criminals [have] always been a game of cat and mouse. There may be different institutions, different techniques but the game remains the same.
In Europol’s 2005 annual report, director Max-Peter Ratzel was to highlight a dramatic seizure of drugs that illustrated the new way forward for crime-busters co-operating across borders. His report included a Europol bulletin issued on 7 June 2005:
Close cooperation between British and Spanish authorities [has] resulted in the seizure of eight tonnes of cannabis destined for the British market. The crew on board the fishing boat Squilla – two Britons, one Estonian and one Spaniard – were taken by surprise when they were confronted and arrested by police officers in open waters off the coast of Spain. The police officers belonged to ‘Grupo de Respuesta Especial contra el Crimen Organizado’ (GRECO) and the ‘Unidad contra la Droga y el Crimen Organizado’ (UDYCO).
The drugs traffickers had been under investigation for a longer period and the arrests made on early Sunday morning were the culmination of several months of analysis, investigation, expertise and liaison between the involved Member States and Europol.
At the same time, three more persons suspected of having arranged the shipment of cannabis from Morocco were arrested in Glasgow, Scotland.
As a law enforcement officer, it is always a pleasure when seizures and arrests such as this one are successful since they prove the value of a close and trustful cooperation between several different law enforcement entities.
The investigation is ongoing and more arrests are expected.
35
All at Sea
A storm was looming and the MV Squilla was already struggling as it churned north out of the Mediterranean into the deep waters of the Atlantic. Loaded to its limit, with the cargo lashed to the deck, the British-registered trawler was dangerously unstable. Its cargo, transferred ship-to-ship off the coast of Morocco the day before, was not one recorded on any ship’s manifest – a cargo of eight tonnes of cannabis worth £24 million on the streets of Scotland.
Dawn was yet to break on Sunday, 5 June 2005 but, when it did, the police moved in. The four crew on board put up no struggle as the Spanish cutter stopped the Squilla dead in the water. One source said:
A decision had been taken that it was too risky to allow the vessel to run with the drugs back to Britain. The trawler was really well down in the water when she was stopped. She was loaded to the absolute limit.
The dramatic raid in international waters, 100 miles west of Lisbon, may have been code-named Operation Bouzas after the Spanish port where the fishing boat had anchored before sailing to its Moroccan rendezvous. It may have involved Spanish police and Customs, the National Crime Squad and Europol. It may have enlisted the Spanish air force and navy to track the boat’s progress across the Med. But the operation had been masterminded and co-ordinated by the detectives leading the Folkore offensive against Jamie Stevenson and his key lieutenant John ‘Piddy’ Gorman.
The Squilla was towed to Cadiz by the Spanish authorities and the crew were led in handcuffs down the gangway to face justice. They included Billy Reid, who had, since the 1990s, been a key member of the Tartan Mafia of the Costa del Sol, a fluid coalition of Caledonian gangsters who were making millions smuggling hash from Morocco. Reid had briefly done business wi
th Gerry Carbin Snr, another Scot willing to exploit the criminal opportunities of the Costas and he was close to Walter Douglas. The elusive Douglas, known as the Tartan Pimpernel, was the most notorious of the Costa’s Scots mobsters. Reid was flash – a big-spender who loved the high life – but he retained a reputation for professionalism, for doing his job. One source said, ‘He was a well-organised man and made sure all the bits were fitting together. He was doing it for years and was seen as someone who could be relied on.’
The Folklore police team were delighted to have bagged Glasgow-born Reid, a major international drugs smuggler, but they had set their sights higher. The multimillion-pound drugs operation of Gorman, who, along with long-time cohort Stevenson, had spent £5 million bankrolling the Squilla’s drug run, was about to be dismantled as the Folklore team edged ever closer to their number-one target.
Gorman, forty-nine, of Irvine in Ayrshire, was a career criminal who had graduated from street dealing to international drug trafficking. He was responsible for bringing tonnes of hash and class A drugs into Scotland. He was one of the very, very few associates Stevenson trusted and they often worked together. The Ayrshire man had offered Stevenson safe haven in his villas and apartments around the resort of Fuengirola when the Glasgow mobster was lying low after the McGovern murder. They spent much of that year immersed in the mechanics of the hash trade – the boats, cars and adapted trucks bringing cannabis resin from Morocco across the Straits of Gibraltar to the southern coast of Spain and onwards by road to Scotland.
In 2004, the SCDEA surveillance teams, who had been watching Gorman since the launch of Folklore, were looking on as he met Douglas Price, the skipper of the Squilla, in the Spanish port of Cadiz where the converted trawler was anchored. When it became clear the men were planning a huge cannabis shipment, the SCDEA alerted colleagues in Spain, who began their own surveillance on Price in March 2005 and monitored the Squilla as it was refitted in readiness for its drugs run. The international surveillance operation had also monitored meetings at the luxury apartment block in the millionaires’ playground of Marbella where Stevenson had one of his many homes on the Costa del Sol.
One of his neighbours in the apartments on Avenida del Prado, in the heart of the chic Nueva Andalucia neighbourhood, was a millionaire Irish Republican and major cocaine smuggler. Vastly experienced in specially adapting boats to carry drugs and the techniques needed to transfer contraband ship-to-ship while at sea, detectives believe he, along with Stevenson and Gorman, was a key player in the Squilla plot.
On 26 April 2006, Gorman, Reid and the rest were jailed at court hearings held simultaneously in Scotland and Spain. At the end of an eight-week trial, Gorman got twelve years at the High Court in Glasgow after being convicted of drug running and money laundering. He was never convicted over the Squilla bust but, after Crown prosecutors focused on the Scottish end of his operation, Gorman was jailed over £360,000 worth of drugs and laundering £178,000 of drugs money. Gorman, a self-styled builder who rarely visited a site, had claimed the cash was for trading in tobacco and fireworks – a sideline in pyrotechnics that seemed to surprise his accountant when he was called to give evidence. The judge, Lord Bracadale, told Gorman, ‘The evidence showed you were the likely organiser and manager who arranged deals. The profits were high and so were the risks.’
Money launderers William McDonald, forty-four, from Glasgow, James Lowrie, sixty, from Liverpool, Bradford-based Mushtaq Ahmed, fifty-one, and cannabis dealer Robert Thomson, twenty-seven, from Irvine, shared sentences totalling sixteen and a half years.
Meanwhile, in Madrid, the Squilla smugglers were also being sentenced. Douglas Price, fifty, from Kilwinning in Gorman’s Ayrshire heartlands, got four years. Reid, forty-four, Arno Podder, thirty-eight, from Estonia, the boat’s mechanic, and Moroccan fixer Sufian Mohammed Dris, twenty-two, were jailed for three years each.
Afterwards, the SCDEA’s director, Graeme Pearson, told reporters:
There is not a village or town in the West of Scotland that has not been impacted by Gorman and his trade. Thousands of ghosts created by drugs who are today wandering the streets have him to thank for their plight. What astounds me is that he could still manage to live within the very communities that he has blighted.
It must be like the man who invented the iPod walking around and being proud seeing everyone using his product. Gorman must have been the same in some Ayrshire villages.
How does he cope with knowing there is a family down the street whose kids have not been fed because their parents are addicted to his drugs – or knowing that some parents are wondering why they failed their kids because they end up being hooked?
Gorman and his associates funded comfortable lifestyles on the backs of many thousands of people stricken by the scourge of drug abuse.
And Pearson had only one man in mind when he delivered a final and pointed message to Gorman’s associates still at large – ‘We will not forget about you.’
36
Birdman
Coke often causes violence between criminals but usually Colombia’s biggest export is behind it rather than the best-selling cola. However, anyone who was in the visiting room of maximum-security Shotts Prison one evening in July 2005 would have learned that is not always the case.
The niggling had started outside in the car park. Jamie Stevenson and his stepson Gerry Carbin Jnr had been striding to the entrance of the Lanarkshire jail when words were exchanged with another group of visitors. Prison officers quickly extinguished the row.
Wives, partners, mums, dads and kids filed slowly into the large visiting room. Prisoners sat at the bolted-down plastic tables, holding hands with loved ones, under the poker faces of the prison officers. They talked about family, friends, old times – anything that gave a temporary escape from their surroundings. A few children amused themselves in the play area.
Suddenly, the low murmur of conversation was shattered when a full can of Coke was hurled with great force towards the head of Stevenson. The bright red missile rocketed through the air before smashing squarely off his temple. Stevenson barely paused under the blow, hurling himself across the visiting room towards an old adversary four seats along – Robert ‘Birdman’ O’Hara. Bedlam ensued as the pair traded blows. They were joined by Carbin along with another prisoner and O’Hara’s female visitor. Prison officers waded in to break it up and, within moments, peace returned.
For many years, no one in Scotland’s criminal underworld was either brave enough or stupid enough to cross Stevenson. Even people like the members of the Daniel family, who shared his untouchable reputation, would back away from conflict with him. His notoriety was justified. Enemies were dealt with directly and forcefully. It would take a very brave, dangerous or reckless man to have a go. Enter O’Hara.
Then aged just twenty-eight but serving a jail sentence that will not see him freed until at least 2025, his reputation was almost as ugly as Stevenson’s. O’Hara grew up on the tough streets of Possilpark, an area bordering the McGovern family’s Springburn base. From an early age, his ability to dish out violence was noted by the family in much the same way a schoolboy footballer’s skill may catch the eye of a big club’s scout. Indeed, his ‘natural ability’ reminded some of Stevenson when he was a young man.
From 2000 onwards, O’Hara went from a nasty nuisance in Possil to the head of a drugs operation turning over £2 million a year, with direct links to the McGoverns. He drove a £65,000 Audi and lived in a £400,000 penthouse flat in a sophisticated city-centre apartment block. His gang’s drugs profits, mainly from heroin and cannabis, were laundered through a couple of car washes.
His gang was hated and feared in equal measure. During the summer of 2004, O’Hara and his crew were at their most dangerous with a similar reputation for violence as that which had once been carved out by the young McGovern brothers. Paul McDowall, no relation to Robert McDowall, was to become the latest casualty in the city’s drugs wars when O’Hara ordered one of his cr
onies to kill him. The twenty-five-year-old victim was an associate of a rival dealer and O’Hara wanted to show his power. The price for McDowall’s murder was the £2,000 worth of drugs which the knifeman owed O’Hara.
Killer Colin McKay, who shares his name with another McGovern associate linked to earlier gangland killings, phoned O’Hara afterwards to tell him the job was done. His call was not necessary as CCTV cameras had actually seen O’Hara and his right-hand man, Robert Murray, edging close enough to view the imminent knife attack outside the Saracen pub. They were like two spectators at a sporting event.
In another parallel with the McGoverns, the O’Hara mob knew that all the evidence in the world meant nothing if the witnesses could be got at. When he was arrested after arriving back in Scotland from a luxury holiday in Mexico, he casually insisted that he would get someone else to take the fall but his confidence was misplaced and his next holiday was not going to be as exotic as the last one.
Soon after the murder, police found evidence of attempts to threaten and bribe those who were to give evidence. O’Hara’s girlfriend stood trial for offering £10,000 to the sister of a key witness but the case against her was found not proven. One witness fled Scotland while two others who did give evidence remain under official protection provided by the authorities.
Raids linked to the murder investigation yielded a huge and terrifying arsenal of guns including a MAC-11 sub-machine gun, which spits out ten deadly rounds per second – that is 600 per minute. It was the first time such a weapon had been found in Scotland and O’Hara’s gang were the last people that should have had it.
