The Iceman: The Rise and Fall of a Crime Lord

by Wilson, Jim

  The trial was switched from Glasgow to a High Court sitting in Dunfermline to give armed police an extra edge in the containment and monitoring of the convoy of thugs making the daily journey from Possil to Fife. On this occasion, despite his bold prediction that he would walk free, the system won and the man who terrorised large areas of north Glasgow was jailed. As he was sent down, his moronic foot soldiers clapped defiantly from the public gallery.

  One figure who was occasionally present during the trial was Paul McGovern. Although the McGoverns valued having O’Hara on their side, they knew he was volatile figure who could have turned on them in a flash so, despite losing money tied up in Birdman’s drugs business, there was an almost palpable sense of relief that he had gone. He was a terrifying man with the unpredictable capability of bringing down enemies and allies alike.

  He and three associates got a total of fifty-six years in May 2005. Just a few weeks before, the most deadly weapon O’Hara could aim at Stevenson was the can of Coca-Cola. One associate said:

  O’Hara was loyal to the McGoverns and had been making it clear for long enough what he thought of Stevenson and what he intended to do to him. If it was a square go, Stevenson would have torn him apart but had they both stayed out of jail with weapons, money and contacts, anything could have happened.

  Following the Coke-can attack, Stevenson, who was seething with rage, and Carbin were bundled into a police van and carted off to a cell for the night before appearing the next morning at Hamilton Sheriff Court. The charge against Carbin was later dropped but Stevenson, appearing at the same court in November 2005, admitted a breach of the peace charge. It is the most common non-motoring charge brought in Scotland and one which requires the accused to ‘cause fear and alarm’. He was admonished – the least serious sentence that could have been given and the legal equivalent of a slap on the wrist.

  Fiscal Depute Ian McCann told the court:

  The whole incident was sparked when Robert O’Hara threw a can of juice at Mr Stevenson. A fight occurred and, by his plea of guilty, Mr Stevenson admits he was involved in it. The police were called and Mr Stevenson was arrested.

  For a man linked with a series of murders and who headed an international drugs and money laundering network, it was a bizarre first criminal conviction. The news agency photographer who snapped Stevenson as he left court that day secured the first contemporary image of Scotland’s number one criminal.

  As Stevenson emerged into the winter chill from the court, he had no idea the Folklore team were in the process of assembling their own album of secret snapshots.

  37

  On the Run Again

  ‘Have you counted it yet? Why not? Well, gonnae do it right now? Every bundle. I want an exact figure. Is it all right where it is? That safe . . . is it big enough to hold all that?’

  It was Friday, 26 May 2006 and Jamie Stevenson had a cash problem – he had too much to hide. He unwittingly shared his storage difficulty with the surveillance officers bugging his home but one detective said that the almost-daily collection of thousands of pounds in used notes was a logistical headache for the drugs gang.

  Everyone talks about money laundering and all the ways the cash is whitened up but, way before it becomes a line buried in some company’s accounts or a digitised electronic transfer, drugs money is literally dirty – thousands and thousands of used notes, sometimes rolled into £5,000 bundles, sometimes just lying loose like confetti and stuffed into bags and cases. We’re not talking about a cheque that can be slipped into a top pocket. These guys get paid in cash money and lots of it. It’s big and it’s bulky. Every day, they face the problem of hiding it until they can get rid of it safely.

  Stevenson could stay away from the drugs but he had to get close to the money. That was his Achilles heel and, in the end, that’s how we got him.

  At the premises of one of Stevenson’s taxi firms, in the south-east of Glasgow, not far from his home, there was a large, reinforced-steel safe set into its foundations and, two days after that conversation, on the last Sunday in May, Stevenson headed there. He was tailed by undercover officers, who watched as he entered the building, talked with two associates and left twenty minutes later. The other two men left minutes after their boss.

  The police already suspected the capacious under-floor safe was a regular hiding place for Stevenson’s dirty money on the way to the laundry. Months before, when Stevenson had discussed the size, security status and location of a large sum of money, they had been listening. They had heard him tell his associate, ‘No, it’s under the ground . . . in a safe under the ground.’

  When the two men left Stevenson’s firm, they were followed by another surveillance team as they drove to a house five minutes away. The officers already knew it was the location for the stash of money because Stevenson had been heard discussing it two days earlier. His associates were only in the house a matter of minutes before they left, wheeling a very large and heavy suitcase behind them. Hefting it into the boot of their car, they drove off. They did not get far before police swooped. Inside the case, they found £389,035 in used notes. Stevenson would at least get an exact figure.

  He was back home at Fishescoates Gardens when he took a telephone call fifteen minutes after the police bust. Hanging up, he told his wife, ‘Got taken out. Christ, we’ll need to go intae his house.’

  Within minutes, he had driven back to the premises of his taxi firm but, after spotting surveillance teams on the ground, he did not stop. Hours later, he was gone – away from Glasgow and out of Scotland.

  The Folklore tapes recorded his fears that the men caught with the money might talk and forge a deal where his arrest would be exchanged for their freedom. He was not prepared to take that chance. Like he had done after Tony McGovern was murdered, like he did whenever police attention seemed to be drawing uncomfortably close, Stevenson simply vanished.

  Reaching for his passport, possibly his own or perhaps his counterfeit documents in the name of Jeremiah Dooley, Stevenson left for the airport.

  This time, though, the police were ready.

  38

  We’re Listening

  The halogen glare of a street light outside the apartment complex at 133 Berlaarstraat looks like any other. The lamp post in the suburb of Nieuw Sloten on the outskirts of Amsterdam lights a quiet patch of street outside the entrance to a nondescript block but this was the block where Jamie Stevenson lived for three months during the summer of 2006.

  The light illuminated the visitors arriving at the Iceman’s Dutch bolthole after dark and it improved the quality of the video being shot by the tiny camera hidden inside the casing of the lamp post. For months, the Amsterdam police had been secretly recording everyone coming and going from Stevenson’s apartment, which was tucked in behind the main block.

  One criminal justice source in Holland said:

  On any job like this, you study the location, the terrain, and use what is there. There was a streetlight outside his flat and the police simply took the whole thing away and put in a replacement – identical apart from the small camera filming everybody coming and going. They bugged his phone too. He got a lawyer to apply for the transcripts through the courts here but, by then, it was all too late for Mr Stevenson.

  The Dutch authorities had been alerted to Stevenson’s presence in the city by SCDEA detectives who had covertly followed the criminal as he fled Scotland in the wake of the cash seizure in May 2006. He would not return to Scotland until August of that year.

  Even if Stevenson did not have a history of fleeing Scotland for extended periods whenever his finely tuned antenna for police interest began to twitch, the agency would have been watching him anyway. The officers who tailed him and his wife to Glasgow Airport were unaware of his secret Dutch bolthole until he flew to Amsterdam where the couple were immediately picked up and followed.

  One Scot who visited the couple recalls:

  I don’t know if it was their flat or if it belonged to someone
else – one of Jamie’s friends or business contacts. He always hated being away from home but he quite liked the hustle and bustle in Amsterdam. It was no luxury penthouse or anything. You can see the flats from the train going through the outskirts. To be honest, the neighbourhood reminded me of Springburn. Maybe that’s why Jamie liked it.

  He had people there to do business with but he just did his thing – no great fuss. And, unlike when he went on the run after the McGovern murder, Caroline was with him which made him happier. They lived the same kind of life that they were living in Burnside – quiet, going for a drink, a meal.

  Folk would go out and see them. They had visitors. Obviously, they didn’t know they were appearing on Candid Camera.

  The techniques deployed to gather intelligence on Stevenson’s Dutch-based friends and business associates may have been particularly ingenious but they were only an extension of the massive surveillance offensive already underway against Stevenson and his gang by the police trailing him around the world.

  The arsenal of covert and electronic surveillance techniques available to modern law-enforcers was targeted on Stevenson. For very obvious reasons, the SCDEA refuse to discuss any operational aspects of their surveillance campaign against Stevenson but sources describe the phenomenal array of methods used to gather intelligence on the gang, their operations and their associates.

  Across the West of Scotland, covert surveillance was taking place as officers, hidden from view, passing in cars, cleaning windows, repairing potholes and mending phone lines, watched and listened. They monitored the homes of Stevenson, Carbin, and the other gang leaders. They followed them on foot, on the road, in the air. They trailed them to the gym, to the shops, to their meetings.

  Six months before his arrest, detectives became aware of an imminent sit-down with Stevenson and two key associates, Anthony Burnette and Willie Cross. At lunchtime on Wednesday, 15 March 2006, plainclothes officers followed Stevenson to the Holiday Inn, in Stewartfield, East Kilbride. According to one source:

  They basically tailed him there and the three of them are sitting down in the hotel, discussing deals or whatever and never even look twice at a couple at the next table who are all lovey-dovey, hugging and winching. They were cops and they sat listening as the three of them talked about buying this, buying that, pulling out architectural plans, moving money about, the lot.

  That’s how tight they were on him and they were on him for months and months.

  But the physical surveillance teams of officers on the ground were only a small part of the monitoring operation that would ultimately pull Stevenson’s operation apart. Electronic bugs and tags were being used in the coordinated intelligence-gathering onslaught, certainly the biggest ever launched by a Scots police force. The SCDEA began intrusive surveillance against Stevenson and his gang at the launch of Folklore in May 2003. Intrusive surveillance, giving police powers to break into private homes and cars and use undercover officers as spies, can only be authorised if a subsequent conviction could carry a sentence of at least three years. The police later requested, and received, authority to plant hidden listening devices capable of monitoring conversations in the homes of both Stevenson and Carbin.

  One legal source, with knowledge of the evidence ultimately ranged against Stevenson and his cohorts, said the electronic surveillance operation was huge.

  They had bugs in their homes, in their cars. Their phones were being tracked. They were basically in the cross hairs all day, every day, for years. The bugs at the homes were absolutely the latest technology – fibre-optic stuff I was told NASA had helped develop them. They were remote control and would be turned on and off depending on what was happening. Basically, if the police saw somebody interesting arriving at the houses or if somebody’s phone rang, the tapes were on and every word was recorded then transcribed. When the bug’s off, it won’t show even if the rooms are being swept. I don’t know where the bugs were hidden but the police don’t even have to get into the house they’re targeting. They can come in through the walls, through the ceiling, below the floor, wherever.

  God knows how many thousands of hours were recorded. I know they put about 3,500 hours in as evidence and that was only a small part of it. They will still be picking the bones out of the transcripts. The intelligence picked up by those mics could be the starting gun for all sorts of investigations.

  The cost of the four-year operation is huge but, so far, undisclosed with the thousands and thousands of hours of surveillance driving costs ever upward. One officer, who was not involved in Folklore but has years of experience in surveillance work, said:

  The cost would have been huge but electronics used with a bit of gumption can cut down the number of officers you need on the ground and the number of times you need them. You can track their cars. You can track their mobile phones as they pass different masts and you can track their associates’ cars and phones in the same way. Before, you would need big teams on the ground watching all these guys every minute, every day. Now, you can watch them moving about, see where they’re going, see who they’re meeting and send the teams straight there.

  You just need to be nimble – to move quickly when you have to.

  The SCDEA were certainly nimble just before 7 p.m. on the night of Saturday, 21 January 2006, when they listened in as a man delivered a holdall to Gerry Carbin’s home in East Kilbride. The figure ‘two-oh-four’ was mentioned before Carbin tried to stash the bulging bag in various hiding places around the house. At 5 a.m. the next morning, the police were at his door. ‘You would think the penny might drop at that point, wouldn’t you?’ asks one observer. He continued:

  The cops come in, go straight to the bag filled with £204,000 and Gerry doesn’t twig that they might have had a wee clue. He gets taken to Hamilton police station and, as soon as he gets out that morning, hotfoots it over to Stevenson’s flat in Burnside to have a blether about it. Of course, the cops are sitting listening into all of this as well. These guys are wide but not always smart.

  Some associates say Stevenson was aware that he was being watched by police for most of the duration of Folklore. They said he even used to go out of his home to wave at suspected surveillance teams but he didn’t realise the extent of the intelligence-gathering operation. One said:

  Jamie and his senior people have been around the block a million times. He was careful. I know that, at one meeting, he told the guys there to get their shirts off to make sure they were not wearing wires and these were his own men not strangers. They were obviously super-careful about talking on their phones. It’s all throwaway, pay-as-you-go phones and they’ll have umpteen on the go at once. It’s all in code. They’ll say to someone, ‘I’ll take fifty engines off you.’ And ‘Have you got oil for them?’ Or it’ll be ‘Have you got two hits on the thingwy?’ Hits will be kilos and the thingwy could be a car, a truck, anything. They speak it and the cops know they’re speaking it but the hard bit is deciphering it to put them close to specific shipments. They’re cute. It’s not easy.

  There was a lot of that kind of talk in the tapes from Stevenson’s house but not nearly as much as you would expect. He can say what he likes now but he clearly did not know he was being bugged. Really unguarded and clearly talking about drugs, about business, about property deals, about money, about millions and millions of pounds. The transcripts are astonishing – really astonishing.

  39

  Talking Business

  A transcript of a conversation between Jamie Stevenson and his business associate Anthony Burnette at Stevenson’s home in Fishescoates Gardens reveals the astonishing extent of the business empire he’d designed to launder his criminal fortune. During the discussion, secretly being recorded by the police, the pair discuss deals worth millions. They casually discuss buying and selling land, homes and businesses as if they were playing Monopoly. However, the money was real. They talk about merging three firms into a single business worth £1 million to increase their leverage with mortgage lend
ers. They discuss shares, property portfolios and new business opportunities in their conversation beginning at 9.29 p.m. on Thursday, 2 March 2006, and ending twenty-four minutes later. The transcript offers a unique insight into how Stevenson legitimised his dirty fortune.

  Anthony Burnette: They were supposed to come to you the following day to report progress.

  Jamie Stevenson: They didn’t. He’s still to get back to me on that one.

  This is followed by the sound of a telephone keypad being pressed and then Stevenson begins talking on the phone.

  JS: Willie, I’m with Tony the now. Did we ever get any thingwy on the site in Motherwell? Did it not? All right, no bother. I’m at the other place tomorrow. What time do you want to go down at? Aye, OK. No bother. Cheerio.

  Here, Stevenson terminates the call and addresses Burnette again.

  JS: No, nothing came of it. But what he says to me there . . . do you want to take a run? There’s a place down near Helensburgh where Walter Smith . . . it’s a hotel but it went into liquidation and Walter says to Willie it would be ideal for youse to get in and build flats in it, he says.

  AB: Walter Smith, the football manager?

  JS: Aye.

  AB: Willie knows him, does he?

  JS: Aye.

  AB: I didn’t know that.

  JS: It’s his partner Paul, aye. He’s known him for thirteen years on and off. I don’t know how close he is but he’s pally with him anyway because he goes to Willie’s house and that for fireworks and things like that. They’re pals – put it that way. Paul is friendly with Willie, very friendly with Willie. Willie’s sister runs one of Walter’s and his partner’s pubs and has done for five, six years and they pay her for holidays and all that because she doesn’t steal. She’s just a straight goer. Obviously that’s why they’ve got in tow with Willie through his sister.