Christmas Day had been quieter and slower than the previous 48 hours but still did not feel anything like normal. I was absolutely exhausted.
My feet had been neglected because the immediate focus had been my burnt eye and face but, after my flip-flop hike, I accepted they would not heal through willpower and fresh air alone. I attended another hospital’s out-of-hours GP service where they were cleaned, soaked with iodine and wrapped in bandages. To walk back outside with my feet cocooned in bandages, socks and loose-fitting trainers was blissful.
Later that day, my daughter and I escaped jabbing umbrellas of dreich city streets for the inky comfort of a cinema where she chuckled at an animated movie while I mostly dozed. With my aching, tired eyes rested shut and my phone turned off, the peace and quiet allowed me time to clear my head and think. It had been exactly a week since the attack and I was becoming increasingly puzzled.
My immediate statement to the CID and the photographing of my injuries the following day had been the full extent of my involvement with the police. There had been no subsequent questions from them about who William ‘Basil’ Burns may have been working for. There had been no questions about which organised crime bosses I had recently written about. Nor were there any questions about which criminals might harbour a particular grudge towards me. Most curious of all was the complete lack of police curiosity about whether any potentially significant information about the attack might have reached my ears, which it had and continued to do.
I assumed that Partick CID officers were busy dealing with Burns. Despite his capture at the scene being a Christmas gift for them, Detective Sergeant Craig Warren would still have plenty to do with checking phone records and CCTV, building evidence against the getaway driver and chasing down potential witnesses. But surely someone in Police Scotland was looking beyond the bungling hitman? Surely they were as keen as me to establish who had sent him?
I appreciated that no one had been killed – thanks mainly to luck and the hitman’s incompetence – but this was a highly unusual case. Not only had there been meticulous planning involved, but the use of sulphuric acid as a weapon, while still a relative rarity, was extreme and disgusting. What truly set it apart was that I was not some two-bob Glasgow hood involved in a feud and who would not co-operate with the police but an honest, fair-minded journalist, targeted simply for doing my job. A bold and audacious attempt on a journalist’s life at a family home should have set alarm bells ringing in the minds not just of senior police officers but of politicians too.
For the police to shrug their shoulders, as they appeared to be doing, would be to send a message to Organised Crime PLC that going after the press is no big deal. The moment gangland hits on the media are treated just like everyday incidents, anyone who cares about what type of society we live in should worry. I didn’t want any kind of special treatment but, in the darkened cinema, I concluded that attacking journalists should be seen as a clear red line by crime bosses, no matter how slighted they may feel about media attention.
Yes, Veronica Guerin had been murdered by Dublin criminals, and five years later in Northern Ireland a Loyalist gang shot dead the brave investigative journalist Martin O’Hagan, but these types of attacks are mercifully rare in Western Europe. This is Scotland, not some basket case ex-Soviet republic – the type of gangster state where life is cheap and journalists are fair game.
The next morning was the last day of 2015 and I was keenly aware the police were not intending to come to me, so I would need to go to them. Unable to get hold of Warren, I put a call in to the press office, whose diligent staff field all types of media enquiries from the banal to the extraordinary. I asked them if they could get a message to whoever was dealing with the investigation about who was behind the attack – that is if there even was such an investigation. Within an hour, an anonymous call flashed up. It was Detective Superintendent Stevie Grant, head of CID for Greater Glasgow, a sprawling beat serving a population of 770,000.
After I’d explained my concerns, he invited me round for a chat. No time like the present, he suggested. Half an hour later I was sitting opposite Grant in his office in Govan. Gruff and to the point but listening and alert, he was the embodiment of a tough CID man. With a nose seemingly flattened by a shovel, there was no doubt that he could put the frighteners on any snivelling wide-boy with an aspiration to gangsterism.
I told him all about my journalistic jousts with Frankie Donaldson and Barry Hughes – the news stories, the legal threats, the odd incident in Sainsbury’s and other detailed information, including the revelation that Donaldson wrongly believed I was in a relationship with his battered ex-partner Jane Clarke. I explained why the ‘Wee Jamie’ comment by Burns was a red herring. I provided Grant with the names of people who knew about the specific incidents and issues which I had just described in the impromptu meeting. Grant asked the occasional question but mostly just leaned back in his chair and listened, deadpan, to what I had to say.
When I hobbled back outside and up Paisley Road West towards the city, I felt slightly better at having been listened to, but I was far from reassured, not least because Grant had not taken a single note of what I told him. Surely my information should be taken as a formal statement if there was any intention of broadening the investigation beyond Burns?
When the sun came up on the first day of 2016, I did not expect an immediate response from my previous day’s visit to the CID chief. But, as more days passed and people shook off their festive lethargy and returned to the routine of work, there was still nothing. The only significant development was a very interesting message I received on 2 January. It did not come from the police, but it was exactly the kind of intelligence that should have been of interest to them. A trusted contact had picked up information from the streets of Paisley, where Burns was widely despised for his bully-boy behaviour. Just weeks earlier, he had been accused of taking a knife across the face of a small-time dealer who was struggling to pay ‘tax’ on his earnings. When I read the text message from my contact I burst out laughing, utterly stunned at the madness of it. It said, ‘That clown Basil has been saying he knows you. He’s been saying you phoned him up and started slagging his wife and challenged him to come over. That’s doing the rounds in Paisley.’
An embellished version of the same story then came via a phone call. The crazy account being told to Burns’s fellow guests in HMP Barlinnie was that not only had I invited him round to my home at 8.30 a.m. two days before Christmas but that I was also blackmailing him, and when he innocently arrived expecting a friendly chat about my evil plot, I ambushed him in my pyjamas with the help of my neighbours. While this baying mob of retired teachers and accountants were supposedly beating Burns to a pulp, I went back inside and put on a pair of sturdy boots that I then used to inflict even greater damage. Burns had been humiliated at being overpowered and detained by a mere journalist he had been sent to maim or kill. Maybe the hitman was guilty of hubris, fuelled by believing stories about his fearsome reputation.
He had to come up with something – and this was it. His fantastical story, surely gold-star material in a prison creative writing group, provided me with some light relief. The thought of me blackmailing him was as laughable as the notion that I would want someone like him within a hundred miles of my home. His story did not address why he had turned up dressed as a postman, armed with a bottle of acid and a knife, just £3.05 in his pocket and no keys of any type. I assumed that Burns’s face-saving yarn would stay behind bars, as a harmless bedtime story for gullible Bar-L junkies. Surely, there was no chance that his sober and sensible legal team would swallow it and air it in the High Court when the trial began? Well, you would have thought so . . .
Following my sit-down with Grant, a full week passed with zero communication from anyone in the police. Having spent a long time writing about the police and other public bodies, I knew that the most effective way of jolting them into action is to put something in writing. There is nothing authorit
y figures like less than a clear, sober and polite letter which puts them on the spot and becomes a matter of indisputable record. When the letter is addressed personally to a senior officer or public servant, it gives them no room to wriggle and deny knowledge at a later date. My letter began by sincerely thanking Grant for his time, then reminded him what my overarching concerns were. I wrote, ‘My 10-year-old daughter could have witnessed me being murdered and I am determined to see justice done. It is vital Police Scotland and the Crown Office endeavour to prosecute the person(s) responsible for sending William Burns to attack me.’ It went on to explain that Donaldson was due to stand trial on multiple charges of domestic violence and that victims and witnesses had suffered an appalling campaign of intimidation. I reminded Grant that I had written extensively and exclusively about both Donaldson’s domestic violence criminal cases, which at that stage had been churned for two years, and his £1-million shakedown of his ex-partner Jane.
My letter explained:
Throughout these proceedings, Ms Clarke and other witnesses have suffered an ongoing campaign of intimidation, thought to be directed by Mr Donaldson, using criminal associates such as Mr Burns. The campaign includes a threat to shoot dead a teenage witness if he testifies and a text threat to throw acid in Ms Clarke’s face.
In the weeks prior to the attack on me, Ms Clarke was surprised to be told that Mr Donaldson had formed the false belief that she had developed a personal relationship with me. I have never met Ms Clarke. A reason that Mr Donaldson may have come to his belief is that over the past 18 months I often visited my partner who, coincidentally, lives near Ms Clarke.
On the day prior to the attack, the civil case between Mr Donaldson and Ms Clarke was called at Glasgow Sheriff Court. A reporter, whose identity I don’t know, was present. It is Ms Clarke’s view that Mr Donaldson wrongly believed this reporter was there on my behalf.
I also told Grant about an investigation I had conducted into a tyre-recycling business called Guinea Enviro in the city’s Maryhill. My story, published nine months earlier, exposed the company’s boss Steven Scott as a criminal linked to a major drug-smuggling gang. A police operation had resulted in the seizure of £7-million worth of cocaine and cannabis and 17 of the gang’s members being jailed for a total of 63 years. Scott, jailed for 12 months for having a gun, was of great interest because of a recent trend of major organised criminals moving into environmental businesses such as recycling, often being attracted by obscenely generous state subsidies. The story included a picture of Scott’s partner, who was also his business partner, pouting with a bottle of Dom Pérignon champagne, and compared him to US TV Mafia boss Tony Soprano, who ran a ‘waste management’ business. The story quoted an anonymous source who said, ‘He [Scott] owns the tyre business which is clearly very lucrative but he had a fall-out with his main associate and has been looking over his shoulder recently.’ I explained to Grant that the story had been unable to identify Scott’s associate as Donaldson. This was due to Donaldson’s ongoing domestic violence case, which protected him by preventing us from publishing any potentially prejudicial details such as his involvement with Scott. It was another example of contempt laws serving to protect a criminal from legitimate and responsible media coverage.
The letter went on to explain that I had also written extensively about Donaldson’s associate Hughes – including the ‘GIRL POWER’ story about him and his wife Jackie which had triggered the 45-minute phone rant to my editor. I also gave details of Hughes coming into Sainsbury’s and eyeballing me a year before.
Finally, I provided the names of two witnesses who had each agreed to provide a statement to the CID, and signed off by offering to provide any assistance that might be needed.
I also sent a copy of the letter to Police Scotland’s chief constable, Phil Gormley, and to Lesley Thomson QC, the Solicitor General, who had taken the time to email me her good wishes immediately after the attack. The letters were sent on 7 January and signed for on delivery the following day. Their arrival at the police and Crown appeared to have an instant effect. When I had passed on the information verbally to Grant a week earlier, nothing appeared to have been done with it. But the very day the three copies of the letter arrived, the police sprang into action and made immediate contact with me and the two witnesses who were willing to talk.
13
SECURITY WARS
Journalists gawped in disbelief, their eyes transfixed on TVs dotted around the silenced newsroom. America was under attack – the Twin Towers had fallen. As I watched intently with Sunday Mail colleagues, the news editor interrupted with an order to fetch my passport and get to New York. I only got as far as London. When photographer Henry McInnes and I landed at Heathrow, all US airspace was shut down and every passing hour brought more flightless passengers into the increasingly chaotic airport. By the time the skies reopened two days later, we would have reached Manhattan too late for a Sunday newspaper deadline. Back home, drained and frustrated, I took consolation from an exclusive phone interview with a Glaswegian woman who made a dramatic escape from her 60th-floor South Tower office.
I was in my twenties when I returned to the Sunday Mail on the cusp of the new millennium, and every week was different. One Saturday, I was dispatched on a ‘death knock’ to the home of a pilot who had been killed in a plane crash. I left with a tear in my eye and a notepad full of loving eulogy from the pilot’s widow, delivered while her young children played obliviously at her feet. I returned to the office with a framed photo of the wife alongside her husband in a cockpit. My news editor exclaimed, ‘Phwoooaarrr! She’s alright, eh?’ I mumbled that his comment was somewhat inappropriate, but this was met with the indignant response, ‘What? She’s single, isn’t she?
There were rare showbiz forays, such as when the mother of actor Robert Carlyle spoke to me about their 30-year estrangement. Following publication of her plea to repair their relationship, he told FHM magazine: ‘Any journalist does that to me again, I’ll have them. And I’ll go to jail for it.’ Once he had calmed down, he would hopefully have accepted his mum was entitled to speak and only did so after his public statement that he ‘considered her dead’.
Young journalists may aspire to the perceived glamour of showbiz or reporting big global events like 9/11, but my real job was to get my hands dirty by unearthing stories that people would rather stayed buried. There is some received wisdom in Scottish newspaper management that ‘crime sells’. Apparently, readers have a limitless appetite for tales about drugs gangs, underworld hits and so-called ‘Mr Bigs’. For many years, many of Scotland’s newspapers peddled a romanticised fairytale of Arthur ‘The Godfather’ Thompson as an omnipotent Mr Big with an iron rule over Glasgow’s mean streets. On one occasion, Thompson granted an interview to a wide-eyed Evening Times pup to announce his ‘retirement’ as if he were a football manager or MP instead of a common criminal with a few quid and bent detectives in his pocket. After Thompson’s death in 1993, much subsequent reporting offered no meaningful insight into the rapidly changing and increasingly sophisticated criminal landscape. The phrase ‘organised crime’ was not in common use. There was little public awareness of the staggering sums of money being generated by large numbers of smart, ruthless and anonymous gangs leeching the lifeblood of society.
For decades, every single penny made from drugs, vice, fraud, robbery and other crimes was effectively already ‘clean’, without today’s need for laundering. As late as 2003, following the acquittal of a lawyer who had offloaded a drug-dealer client’s assets, I reported that there had still not been a single conviction in Scotland for money laundering. Criminals built fortunes with impunity thanks to the failings of the police and complacency of the Crown Office. It was institutionalised incompetence.
You did not need to be an eagle-eyed journalist to realise what was going on. Growing up in middle-class suburbia where drug money was hidden behind gated driveways, it was evident to me that things had moved on from the 1990s and hoary ol
d tales about ‘The Godfather’. I did not seek out organised crime. But someone had to do it.
One of the first stories I did of this type featured self-styled gangster Frank Carberry, who ran a security firm which was essentially a protection racket with some letterhead paper and vans. Carberry was feuding with former police officer-turned-fraudster Paul Johnston, who ran a rival firm that used other gangsters to win contracts by making offers that could not be refused. In early 2000, Carberry’s secretary allegedly swiped some of his money and sold his company behind his back to arch-rival Johnston. Their dispute became newsworthy when the secretary did a runner to the USA with her new love, Steve ‘The Crocodile’ Fitch – a convicted killer and minder to rapist boxer Mike Tyson when he was in Glasgow for a farcical bout that lasted 38 seconds. This story resulted in Johnston threatening to slash me when we came face to face in a court. After making the threat, he immediately scuttled over to nearby police officers to falsely allege that I was harassing him.
I later learned that Carberry was not only a security industry bully but a predatory sex criminal with a taste for boys and young men. A story written by me in 2003 revealed that he had fled from Spain, where he was accused of a sex attack on a 14-year-old boy. Two years after that, I told how he was on the run from police in Scotland. They eventually caught up with him and he was convicted of sex attacks on males aged 16, 18 and 20, for which he was jailed for five years.
Little did I know that the story involving Tyson’s minder marked the beginning of my coverage of Scotland’s ‘security wars’, which featured a cast of major criminals and would run for over a decade. I was also unaware that the Tyson story would become a gateway to much wider organised crime reporting.
Acid Attack Page 8