By then, of course, it was too late. He was a civilian living in another environment in which there were leaders and foot soldiers who were expendable. He tried making a fist of living a form of life that would be termed ‘normal’, but he had left the cocoon of the armed forces, where income was guaranteed every month to provide food, warmth, a roof over his head and sufficient to support his growing family. He had given up this security to seek work in a time of recession. Attempts at getting employment on building sites failed and he resorted to spending his days in the company of his brothers and being on the periphery of their various underworld dealings. All of this was against a background of squabbles between different factions. Everybody was fighting with each other and everyone was paranoid about everybody around them. People could sense this was a really dangerous time. Glasgow was dissected into territories and every one of those areas was having its own problems.
In their fight with the Springburn Mob, the Shannons had been joined by Angie’s brother, Paddy, and his pal, Eddie Kennedy. Because of the relationship, Alex tried keeping a friendly watch over Paddy, but Eddie was a different kettle of fish. He was in the same mould as Lobban – he had no fear and was not someone to mess with. Unlike Lobban, however, Eddie was totally trustworthy and is still a very close friend.
Eddie once spent time in prison with the legendary Rab Carruthers. As a young man, Carruthers had left his native Glasgow and established a fearsome reputation for himself in Manchester, where he ran one of the biggest drugs smuggling enterprises in the United Kingdom – until he was caught and jailed for fifteen years. Rab took Eddie under his wing and gave him the education he needed. One well-known story is that Eddie, after years of being in trouble and being kept in solitary confinement, decided one morning that he had had enough of that existence and went to Rab’s cell. Eddie explained that he wanted to be wiser and needed someone to guide him and give him sound advice on how individuals should work and act at the highest levels in the criminal fraternity.
Rab’s advice was that he should first improve his education and learn two new words every day from the Oxford English Dictionary. Some people may find that a strange piece of advice, but to be educated, intelligent and capable of extreme violence is more of a threat than someone who can’t think further than the next 24 hours and who wants everyone to know he is responsible for certain acts merely to gain notoriety.
Eddie mentioned his conversation with Rab to Alex one day. ‘The mind can play havoc,’ he agreed. ‘If you let your enemy know it is you who has stabbed or shot him, then he knows who to seek payback with. However, if you attack an enemy with your face hidden, it’s not the wound you have caused that creates a problem for him, but his state of mind. Because now the world becomes his enemy. He doesn’t know who has done the deed or even why. So his mind begins running riot and depression and other mental problems begin to set in.’
The sight of his friends sunburned and evidently enjoying themselves in the desert had made Alex realise how big a part of his life he had removed by leaving the army. Now, he was sinking into a trough, swilling with the detritus of gangland Glasgow and in danger of drowning. He recalled the words of his former commanding officer in Germany, who had taken the trouble to watch a football match in which Alex was playing not long before his discharge and sought him out for a private word. ‘Don’t get out,’ the colonel told him. ‘You are going to go far in your career. I know you say you’ve made up your mind, but it takes a good man to realise when he’s made a mistake. If you think you’ve made a mistake when you get out, be tall, stand tall and come back in because we need good soldiers.’ An incident in April made up his mind for him.
* * *
By now, I was really starting to wake up and look at my life, why and where it had all gone wrong. I began to think seriously about joining up again. Angie had announced she was again pregnant with our third child and given me an ultimatum that if I wanted a life with her and the kids I had to make a decision now before it was too late. ‘You are going to end up in prison for murder, or you’re going to get murdered yourself,’ she said. I had to think hard and fast.
Next day, I went to the army careers office to speak about the possibility of re-enlisting. I came away with all the information I needed. Now, it was simply a case of making up my mind and signing all the necessary paperwork. It was the weekend and I decided to go out for a few drinks with an old friend from Posso. We settled on the Barracks bar in Maryhill, not far from his home. It had a bit of a history. A couple of years earlier, Michael Greig had been murdered in the Barracks bar, his body wrapped in a carpet and buried in a shallow lochside grave. Graham Shields went on trial at the High Court in Glasgow charged with the murder. He denied being the killer and blamed another man. The jury found the case against Mr Shields Not Proven. Nobody else was ever charged with the crime.
We had no thoughts of trouble when we started drinking that night. I was chatting with my mate about possibly going back into uniform and the hours passed quickly. The evening was going great and, even better, at the end of the night I was asked if I wanted to stay for a lock-in and have a few drinks after the official closing time.
By now I was on my own, my friend having gone home. Something ought to have warned me that this wasn’t right. I was being bought drink after drink and found myself standing alone at one end of the bar, while in a corner there were about ten other guys who I didn’t recognise. They all kept looking at me. I thought maybe I’d met them before and didn’t remember their faces, but then I became convinced they thought I was Tam. He and I were so alike we were regularly mistaken for one another, and so I told myself it was a case of mistaken identity and was nothing to worry about.
It was simply one of those nights when you’re enjoying yourself and no matter how much you knock back don’t seem to get drunk. When I needed to go to the toilet, I had to pass by them and they all moved to one side, which gave the impression they were being extremely polite, but still they continued to stare at me. It didn’t bother me at the time and eventually, about five in the morning, I said to the guy behind the bar that it was time for me to go and asked if he would open the shutters to let me out. ‘Aye, on you come,’ he said, and I went home.
About four hours later the telephone rang. It was Pawny. He was going mental. He told me word had already spread that I was in the Barracks bar looking for somebody. I said, ‘What are you talking about? I’m lying here with a hangover.’ He told me I had been only minutes away from being murdered. The others in the bar thought I was Tam and it had all developed from there, as these things tend to do. Someone started it all off by saying to somebody else, ‘I think that’s Tam Shannon,’ and by the time it got to the fifth person it had become ‘It is Tam Shannon.’ From there it grew from ‘That’s Tam Shannon and I think he’s carrying something’ to ‘Tam Shannon is here with a gun and he’s looking for somebody to shoot.’ It was all lies, but it shows how easily an innocent situation can become distorted.
The effect of it all, though, was that the others were wondering how to stitch me up so I could be killed.
‘You just don’t realise how close you came to being murdered,’ Pawny said. ‘What the fuck were you doing?’ I told him I was having a few drinks and a good time. He was convinced that what saved my life was the thought that I had been carrying a gun. I will never know what it was all about, but it was the final straw.
‘That’s it, Angie,’ I said. ‘I’m going back into the army.’ As soon as Monday morning came around, I went back to the army careers office, filled in the paperwork and left being told I would be back in within two months. Now, all I had to do was stay out of trouble for a few weeks.
* * *
Angie was happy that Alex was returning to the army. When he finally decided to re-join, she felt relief because if he hadn’t gone back they would have been finished. Re-enlistment meant losing one of his stripes and going back to the rank of lance corporal, and Alex lost a lot in pay, along with co
nsiderable seniority, which would have counted in the next promotional course, but he took it philosophically, believing that you would go up the ranks based on abilities. In reality this wasn’t necessarily the case – it wasn’t what you knew, but who you knew.
Alex had taken the break from the army to see what life was like on the outside; what he had walked into was trouble: murder, threats, drugs and all the rest of it. The day he signed the papers, he headed home telling himself: ‘That’s it. I’m doing this for life now.’
Tam Shannon had never been surprised by his brother’s decision to give up soldiering – and once he was out, he and Pawny wanted him to stay out. As far as Tam was concerned, Alex was really good at soldiering, so when he didn’t advance as far as maybe he should have done, he wondered if he would leave. Tam had always been careful to protect Alex because of his career and there were times when his brothers had been careful to make sure he didn’t walk into situations that could have led to trouble. For instance, the night Tam went to the Talisman, he left Alex because he didn’t want him involved. When he realised Alex was with him, he knew he’d have to be careful. Had Alex not been there, the result could have been very different.
There was one urgent task Alex had to carry out before rejoining the Royal Scots. Late one night he returned to the banks of the River Kelvin, dug up the by now empty pipe hides, slung them into the water and smoothed over the spot where they had lain buried.
He re-enlisted on 18 June 1991, but was retained at Glencorse Barracks to wait for his regiment to return from Iraq and then from Germany before moving to Inverness. He would continue as a training lance corporal at Glencorse.
* * *
I went back into the same job I had been doing before I left and was getting slagged off by the other guys about how I’d made a mistake. But I just had to get my head down and get on with it. It was all good-natured stuff. Nobody wanted to see you fall flat on your face. In a sense, I had to go back to Glencorse with my tail between my legs and admit to everyone that they were right and the outside world was not for me. But none of them had known what my life as a civilian had really been like and I thought they didn’t need to know either. However, any time I came across a soldier who was going off the rails through drink and drugs, I would take him to one side and lecture him on what to do. When I had been out of the army, I had dabbled in recreational drugs, mainly because of peer pressure and the fact that I wanted to fit in and be like the rest of them. In hindsight, it made me a better person – I was now able to relate to recruits in a better way and could understand the pressures they were under.
I rejoined the regiment in Inverness, but it would be August before married quarters were ready and Angie and the children could join me. She was heavily pregnant by then, and I now felt I could look forward to a stable and decent future away from Glasgow. I was about to discover just how wrong I could be.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Fort George, at Ardersier near Inverness, had been built as a base to keep the Highlands under control following the 1745 Jacobite Rising and the defeat at Culloden of Bonnie Prince Charlie a year later. It has been described as the greatest artillery fortification in Europe and after his move to the great fort Alex would frequently wish its mighty walls could also rebuff the consequences of fighting in the Glasgow underworld. About to unfold was a series of events to which he and his brothers had no direct link but into which they would be reluctantly drawn. Any supposition of their involvement was due to their relationship with one individual: William Lobban.
* * *
On the night of 28 July 1991, six weeks after Alex had re-enlisted, a slight man of medium height, wearing a blonde wig, gloves and glasses, walked into the Pipe Rack, a popular and busy bar on Crammond Place in Budhill, Glasgow. He had spent much of the day hanging about watching the comings and goings, and knew the takings would be reasonably good. Otherwise there would be little or no point in doing what he was about to do.
Much as others had done before him following prison escapes, he had made little attempt to go into hiding and went confidently about the Glasgow streets showing a disregard for the tracking abilities of the local police. Gibby was adept at dressing up. He had often disguised himself as a woman since his disappearance from Dungavel, allowing him freedom to wander around. For a time after his escape, he had been holed up in London in a Finsbury Park flat owned by Paul Ferris. Then he had headed back to Scotland to be looked after by the Glovers. While nothing had been said about his continued imposition in their home, others in his company had suggested that maybe it was time for him to move on. And that required money.
Earlier that day, he had told his host’s wife, Eileen, that he was going to ‘get a bit of money’. Now, strolling into the Pipe Rack, he was about to do just that. Lobban produced a gun, handed over a holdall and demanded it was filled with money. When the barman objected, he was bashed over the head with the gun barrel. Fearing more violence, frightened staff handed over £949 and Lobban fled. Where did he go? Back to the home of the Glovers, where, in front of Eileen, he counted out the cash haul.
In early August, a heavily pregnant Angie and the children moved to Inverness. The family started to enjoy life again, as Angie recalls. Friends were around them and they no longer needed to keep looking over their shoulders. Everything was beginning to look up. But if the clouds had seemed to disappear, an ill wind was about to blow them back.
In Glasgow, as the middle of the month approached, Lobban announced to the Glovers that he was moving out. They assumed the money he had made from the Pipe Rack robbery, a fairly mediocre sum though it had turned out to be, had enabled him to buy into some deal or another. They even wondered whether he might have gone to stay with his uncle, William Manson, a close friend of the Godfather, Arthur Thompson, in Provanmill. Where he was going, they really did not care: he was out of their home – that was all that mattered.
Meanwhile, sitting in the Ponderosa watching his favourite television shows, the Godfather too was thinking, just like Alex 200 miles to the north, that life was getting better. Arty’s time for release on licence was drawing nearer; he had been moved to the open prison at Noranside in Angus and to acclimatise him to freedom he was about to be allowed his first weekend home. Arthur was fond of his son, as he was of all his family. He questioned whether his eldest was capable of taking over the various family enterprises, but he believed that with a little coaching, a few long talks and maybe teaming him up with one of the London gangs for a while he would learn sufficient discretion to inherit his business. Arthur knew that while in jail Arty had made enemies. He himself had had to step in on more than one occasion to provide his son with protection and had made a payment here and there to soothe offended pride. On the morning of Friday, 16 August, Arty, along with a dozen others given their weekend of freedom, stepped from a prison service bus taking them from Noranside to Glasgow’s Buchanan Street bus station. The same vehicle would pick them up a couple of days later to return them and they had been firmly warned that to miss it meant a certain return to a closed prison.
Around the time Arty was stepping from the coach, a police inspector’s car was being stolen by a well-known car thief from outside a railway station on the outskirts of Glasgow. The officer had taken a train in to work, so by the time he discovered the vehicle was gone and had reported it, the car was well hidden just outside the city centre.
The following night Arty went into the city for a meal with friends. Tam McGraw had also been dining that night in a well-known Chinese restaurant in Glasgow. His rival, the Godfather, was at home watching television. As Arty, on foot, having paid off a taxi a couple of minutes earlier, neared Provanmill, the stolen car emerged from the darkness. Its door opened and closed quietly. A young man walked towards Arty and shots rang out. Arty staggered into the arms of his younger brother, Billy, blood pouring from his head, body and backside. An ambulance was summoned, but 18 minutes after midnight on 18 August he was pronounced dead. Nobody, espec
ially Arthur Thompson, called the police. That was left to the hospital where Arty had bled to death. The killer and his friends disappeared, maybe into the anonymity of London.
In gangland, Arthur began calling in favours. His many friends included influential and rich businessmen. Money was no object in return for good information. He was a hard, ruthless man who once had one of his debtors nailed to the floor. Those who offended the Godfather feared him more than they did the police.
A couple of weeks after Arty’s murder, with detectives still chasing the killer, Pawny was at home when he heard a knock on his door in the early hours. He demanded to know who was there before opening the door. His shoulders slumped when he heard a low but familiar voice. Lobban looked dishevelled and agitated. His name had cropped up in idle conversation following the Arty shooting, when the brothers had been wondering what would happen next. The Shannons were not involved and, like so many others, were simply guessing at the outcome. Lobban hadn’t been seen or heard since the tragedy, neither had he done anything to help the brothers in their quest to acquire enough handguns to massacre the McIntyre group.
When Pawny asked what Lobban wanted, he was told ‘guns’. ‘You’ve got some guns, I know you have. You told Paul you had a couple. Where are they?’ he demanded. His excitement and nervousness were visibly increasing, and then he suddenly whipped out a pistol from his coat and put it to Pawny’s head. ‘Fucking get me the guns,’ he shouted.
The Underworld Captain: From Gangland Goodfella To Army Officer Page 19