by Wilson, Jim
It definitely wasn’t a certainty for the prosecution and Sean Murphy knew that. He was happy to get them on the money, leave the drugs and put them away for a stretch.
A pretrial hearing on Monday, 12 February saw the gang arrive, two and three at a time, at the High Court in Glasgow, a modern, marbled complex cut into a sandstone spur off the city’s Briggait. Caroline Stevenson, sunbed brown, bleached blonde and dressed in black apart from her purple high heels, arrived at court with her son, Stevenson’s co-accused Gerry Carbin Jnr. He was dressed in a fur-trimmed leather jacket and designer jeans and was accompanied by another blonde, his partner Karen Maxwell. Her family were no strangers to the High Court complex. Her father Robert Maxwell had appeared there a year earlier to receive a five-year jail sentence for dealing in heroin. It was his third long-term sentence for drugs. A drug-dealing dad was something she and her partner had in common. Carbin peered at the electronic information board designating the courts where the different cases were to be heard before heading to the canteen to wait. The co-accused, apart from one, joined them there.
Stevenson, himself, was the only one not to come through the court’s airport-style security gates shortly before 10 a.m. He was the sole suspect of the ten now charged to remain in custody awaiting trial and, shortly after 11 a.m., he was led from a holding cell beneath the North Court flanked by a male and female security guard. They remained silent and straight-faced – in contrast to their prisoner. A deal had been struck and Stevenson, wearing black trousers and a black zipped cardigan, had every reason to smile. He knew the drugs charges had disappeared. He would not be tried for smuggling heroin and cocaine. He was no longer facing the threat of spending decades behind bars.
One source, aware of the legal negotiations, said:
Stevenson was happy enough. If the drugs charges had stood up, he’d have been looking at twenty-five to thirty years. With them gone, it was down to the money laundering and a maximum of fourteen years and the hope of seven or eight.
The number of suspects meant the court’s dock was too small to accommodate them all and they would need to take their place in the benched box usually used by the jury. As he was led to the back row of the jury box, Stevenson, recognising familiar faces in the gallery, pointed and smiled. After being ushered into the back row of the jury box, Stevenson, leaning backwards, sat with his legs splayed and mouthed jokes to his supporters. As his guards sat staring straight ahead, Stevenson, ostensibly in the dock to face charges that could propel him behind bars for the next thirty years, was enjoying himself – he was, quite literally, playing to the gallery. Pulling faces and grinning while miming making a call on a mobile phone, he told one supporter that he’d call later – presumably from his cell in the remand wing of Edinburgh’s Saughton jail.
When the rest of his gang were called and led to the two benches in front of him, he acknowledged each with a smile and a nod, as if they had just bumped into each other in the street. He grinned at his wife and stepson as they edged into the row directly in front. And, as he leaned over to whisper to them both in turn, the smile never left his face.
Outside in the air-conditioned, black-and-white tiled hallway beside the North Court, the mood seemed equally relaxed, as the defence teams chatted in groups before entering the courtroom through a side door. There was no sense of urgency or of last-minute negotiation. When the QCs crammed around the table before the bench with the ten accused packing the jury box, the court was about to hear public confirmation of what was already clear – a deal was all but done.
When asked if their clients were ready for trial, each QC, in turn, referred to McBride, who was acting for Carbin. Eventually, he rose to his feet to inform the court that his client was very close to reaching an agreement with the Crown. Ogg, representing Stevenson, stood next and he stated that the man accused of leading such a brutally effective and massively lucrative criminal enterprise had already reached an agreement with the Crown. That agreement, Ogg revealed, was capable of ‘radically transforming’ the indictment facing his client and the rest of the accused but, he insisted, that agreement would collapse if Carbin’s legal team failed to find common ground with prosecutors as they edged towards agreement. No one in court – from the QCs to the alleged drug traffickers and money launderers looking bored in the dock – seemed to think that was likely.
After a hearing lasting no more than ten minutes, another was set for three weeks and one thing seemed certain – Stevenson would never face a jury. There would be no trial.
When they returned to court on Friday, 9 March, the men’s lawyers had sealed the plea deal with prosecutors. Stevenson sat at the end of the dock, Carbin on his right, then Caroline and Karen. The other six men accused with them filled the row. At 2.30 p.m., the judge, Lord Hodge, formerly Patrick Hodge, a graduate of the Universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh, was told that Stevenson was pleading guilty to five charges of money laundering while Carbin admitted three charges.
As agreed, the two women were allowed to walk free while the six other men were also released but warned that they faced possible future prosecution. Even though Carbin was now facing a jail term, he was allowed to remain on bail to enjoy thirty precious days of freedom. His QC McBride stated:
He’s twenty-seven with no previous convictions of any kind. He’s never served any time in custody. He must sign in at a police station every day which he has done without fail. He has a fixed address, a partner of ten years and two young children, aged six years old and twenty months.
He and Stevenson were back in court on Thursday, 5 April, sitting together in the dock while their eight former co-accused sat in separate groups in the public gallery.
Murphy presented the Crown’s case against the men, summarising the evidence that led to their guilty pleas. They were due to be sentenced that day but background reports to be presented to the judge were still not ready.
During this hearing, Carbin’s QC McBride urged the judge to be lenient when sentencing his client in five days’ time. He highlighted the recent seven-year sentence of Terry Adams – ‘described in the popular press as a Godfather figure for what that is worth’. He also reminded the judge that the early guilty pleas had avoided a trial lasting several months, which would have cost ‘millions of pounds’.
At the end of the short hearing, Stevenson hugged Carbin and smiled and winked at his wife and friends in the gallery before being led downstairs to the holding cells beneath the court.
When Stevenson left court after being sentenced five days later, on Tuesday, 10 April, the grin had been wiped from his face.
47
Different Country, Same Story
There was only a clutch of British gangsters whose operation and ambition outstripped Jamie Stevenson’s. Terry Adams was undoubtedly one. It was coincidence that, in the spring of 2007, their falls coincided but the similarity in techniques deployed by the forces pursuing them was no accident. While the Met in London launched a covert, electronic surveillance offensive against Adams in a determined bid to follow his dirty money and find a weakness in his defences, their colleagues 400 miles north in Glasgow were using identical tactics against Stevenson.
The almost simultaneous convictions of two of Britain’s biggest gangsters, who had, up until then, avoided serious prosecution, defined the modern battleground where police are waging war against the country’s organised criminals.
Adams, fifty-two, was sentenced to seven years for laundering £1million – ‘the tip of the iceberg’, according to prosecutors – at the Old Bailey on 9 March 2007 almost exactly a month before Stevenson appeared in the dock at the High Court in Glasgow.
Both men had been the top-priority targets of detectives dedicated to investigating serious and organised criminals. Both believed themselves to be untouchable. Both would finally face justice over money-laundering charges after protracted police investigations – inquiries that, in Adams’ case, had lasted ten years and, in Stevenson’s, almost four. Both
were convicted largely on the evidence contained in hundreds of hours of secretly recorded conversations. Both their wives were originally charged alongside them. Both wives were to walk free as part of their husbands’ deals with prosecutors.
The Londoner was the leader of the Adams family, the managing director of a family crime firm known as the A Team and linked to more than thirty gangland murders. He and his brothers, Tommy and Patsy, had amassed an estimated fortune of £100 million in lifelong criminal careers that were founded on extortion, armed robbery, drugs trafficking and violence.
In 1998, Tommy was convicted of arranging an £8-million hash-smuggling operation and sentenced to seven years. At his sentencing, after being told he would face another five years if he did not hand over some of his dirty money, his wife turned up at court with a suitcase holding £1 million in cash. Four years later, and out of jail, Tommy was to bizarrely accompany ex-footballer Kenny Dalglish to a meeting when one of the Scotland legend’s business associates would dispute the future contract of rising star Wayne Rooney with a rival agent. Dalglish has never explained Tommy Adams’ invitation to the business meeting. Following Tommy’s release, Patsy and Tommy moved to southern Spain where they both now live.
The police investigating their big brother Terry called on the surveillance expertise of MI5 and, for two years, sophisticated listening devices, including one buried deep in a sofa, transmitted conversations from Terry’s cars and inside his fortified mansion in Finchley, north London, where he lived with his wife Ruth. They were able to pick up conversations that revealed Adams’ capacity for violence and the problems he had in justifying his massive criminal fortune. In one conversation, he tells an associate of an encounter over a disputed debt.
A hundred grand it was, Dan, or eighty grand. And I went ‘crack’. On my baby’s life, Dan, his kneecap came right out there . . . all white, Dan, all bone and white.
When I hit someone I do them damage.
After the Inland Revenue begin asking difficult questions of the millionaire, who was apparently jobless and paid no tax or National Insurance, his financial adviser Solly Nahome is heard telling him that the priority is to legitimise his fortune. ‘We’ve got to think of a way of koshering you up,’ says Nahome, who was shot dead outside his home in the same street as Terry Adams’ mansion in a gangland hit in 1998. The method of execution, a motorcycle drive-by, had been adopted by a rival crime gang after it had been pioneered by Patsy Adams.
Like Stevenson, Adams created sham businesses to justify his income and used jewellery to launder some of his money through Nahome, who also traded in London’s diamond quarter, Hatton Garden.
Like the car-valeting, jewellery-trading Stevenson, he had various attempts at convincing the authorities of his occupation. In another covertly taped conversation, Adams told a pal, ‘I’m a consultant, Tone. I consult about anything you want me to consult about.’
When police finally raided the Adams’ home, they found £500,000 of antiques and paintings – many of them stolen – £48,000 of jewellery and a shoebox in the attic stuffed with £60,000 ‘spending money’.
Adams was originally charged in 2003 but dragged the proceedings out for four more years. One delaying tactic was to sack his legal team. Another was to demand that twenty-one months of largely irrelevant bugged conversations should be transcribed at a cost to taxpayers of £2.7 million.
Sentencing him, Judge Timothy Pontius said he had ‘a fertile, cunning and imaginative mind, capable of sophisticated complex and dishonest financial manipulation’.
Andrew Mitchell QC for the prosecution told the Old Bailey, ‘It is suggested that Terence Adams was one of the country’s most feared and revered organised criminals. He comes with pedigree, as one of a family whose name had a currency all of its own in the underworld.’
In spring 2007, the conviction of a third major criminal, Brian Wright, secured more headlines as law enforcers took on the underworld’s untouchables. Within weeks of Adams and Stevenson appearing in the dock, Wright, reputedly Britain’s richest criminal, was convicted after police dismantled one of the world’s biggest cocaine-trafficking operations. Nicknamed ‘The Milkman’ because he always delivered, Wright amassed a £500-million fortune through using luxury yachts to ferry tonnes of drugs to Europe from Venezuela through the Caribbean.
Irish-born Wright, sixty, a notorious punter and fixer of horse races, had escaped justice in 2003 when he fled to Turkish northern Cyprus, where he was safe from extradition. But, in 2005, he returned to his villa – called ‘El Lechero’ – in Malaga, on the Costa del Sol, where he was arrested by British Customs officers who were armed with one of the recently introduced European warrants.
The arrogant Godfather told one officer, ‘I bet you £1 of your money against £1 million of mine that I will never stand trial.’
He lost his bet at Woolwich Crown Court in early April 2007 when he was jailed for thirty years.
As his lawyer was pleading for a lighter sentence, Wright interrupted him and addressed Judge Peter Moss, saying, ‘Excuse me, your honour, there is no mitigation.’
Stevenson was the next to fall. It was to complete a remarkable hat-trick for Britain’s law enforcers.
48
Frozen Out
Almost four years after Operation Folklore was launched, under the strictest secrecy, against him, Jamie Stevenson faced a very public day of reckoning. He stood in the dock of the High Court in Glasgow on Tuesday, 10 April 2007, waiting to be sentenced. Looking smart in a blue pinstripe suit and open-necked pink shirt, he appeared ready for business. Worryingly for him, so did the judge, Lord Hodge. He listened intently as Crown prosecutor Sean Murphy summarised the evidence against Stevenson and his stepson Carbin, who was wearing a grey suit and white shirt.
The lawyers had done the deal. Stevenson and Carbin admitted laundering more than £1 million of drugs money. In return, the charges detailing their cocaine and heroin smuggling and Stevenson’s false passport would be dropped. Their partners, Caroline and Karen, had already walked free.
The judge was told how Stevenson and Carbin were in court to admit ‘laundering substantial proceeds from drugs trafficking, including trafficking in class A drugs’. He heard how the surveillance operation against the pair was authorised in May 2003 as part of the SCDEA’s ‘extensive undercover operation’ and how, by autumn 2005, electronic listening devices had been hidden in both their homes. Much of the case against them, the judge heard, rested on conversations recorded by those bugs.
The prosecutor took the judge through each of the five charges that had been brought under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 and which one or both of the men were admitting. Most related to Section 327 of the Act, which makes it illegal to hide, disguise, transfer or remove criminal assets.
They both admitted the first charge of hiding £204,510 of dirty money. This sum had been found by police searching Carbin’s house in Campsie Road, East Kilbride. Murphy told how a man, identified only as ‘Kevin’, came to the home of Carbin and his partner Karen Maxwell looking for Stevenson on Saturday, 21 January 2006. He arrived at 6.40 p.m. carrying a large holdall and he was heard being told that Stevenson was out for a meal with his wife. He was only there for ten minutes but, in that time, he mentioned a figure ‘two-o-four’ and, when he departed, he left behind the bag. Murphy said:
Once he had gone, it is apparent from the conversation that Gerard Carbin attempted unsuccessfully to place the holdall within a cupboard in the house, after which he placed it in the corner of a room and pushed a chair up against it.
Police officers suspected that a large quantity of cash had been delivered and a warrant to search the house was obtained. Officers attended in the early hours of Sunday, 22 January 2006, and were admitted by Gerard Carbin. On being asked if there was any money in the house, Carbin replied, ‘£10,000 or something like that. Aye, let’s go.’
He led officers to a white polythene bag in a kitchen cupboard. It held £9,550 and the bun
dles of cash were secured by elastic bands. In the study next to the kitchen, the recently delivered holdall was found and it contained £204,510. Murphy continued:
Carbin was asked to whom it belonged and he answered, ‘No comment.’ He then became agitated and shouted and swore at the officers. A further £400 was found in the pocket of a jacket in an upstairs cupboard and Carbin directed the police to a second bundle of notes making up another £400 in a bedroom unit. It was noted that there were a number of high-value watches within a bedroom but these were not seized at that time.
At the conclusion of the search, Gerard Carbin was taken to Hamilton police station where he was interviewed on tape. He made no comment throughout the interview.
After being released without charge, Carbin went to Stevenson’s home in Burnside. During Carbin’s visit, his stepfather described the cash as ‘our money’ and repeatedly said that he would tell the police it was his profits from selling cars and jewellery. He told Carbin, as police eavesdroppers listened in, ‘I never have any money in the house.’
Stevenson alone admitted the second charge of using £98,605 of drugs money to buy ten Skoda Octavias for a taxi business called CS Cars. The firm was licensed in the name of his wife Caroline Stevenson and registered at the couple’s home in Burnside. The prosecutor said Stevenson had bought the Octavia saloons from a Hamilton showroom in February 2006, paying for them with four cheques and a £10,105 cash payment.
Glasgow City Council awarded taxi licences to the firm meant to be run by Caroline but Murphy added: ‘It is clear from overheard and monitored conversations that [Stevenson] himself was the guiding hand behind the operation. It is equally clear that the entire operation was designed to launder criminal proceeds.’
