I exposed numerous firms which were nothing but fronts for drug dealing and money-laundering. They used shootings and other forms of violence to force terrified construction firms to buy ‘protection’. Thugs on the payroll forced clean rivals to quit by terrorising them. The legitimate firms had no way of competing with crooks who failed to pay taxes or the minimum wage. Exploited guards earned less per hour than a city-centre parking meter charge and would be left to shiver in unheated building- site cabins for 72-hour shifts, kept awake by the local young team trying to set fire to it.
The security wars made the 1980s ‘Ice Cream Wars’ – in which drug gangs fought over Glasgow’s ice-cream van routes – look like child’s play. It was organised crime on a large scale involving the who’s who of the underworld, yet most of the press were not interested. The mentality appeared to be that if something was not handed out in a police press release, then covering it was too much like hard work. More difficult to understand was why the police remained aloof and uninterested in what was going on while MSPs at Holyrood just gazed at the pretty views from their thinking pods.
Frustrated at ploughing this lonely furrow, I contacted fearless BBC reporter Sam Poling, who went undercover to produce a compelling investigation into the security wars. It finally forced the police and politicians to shake off their lethargy and start getting tough on the seedy protection rackets that had been allowed to thrive unchecked across central Scotland for too long. Real action was only taken when firebombing became commonplace, putting innocent lives at risk, and one mob crossed a line by offering ‘security’ to residents of a housing estate hours after it suffered a mysterious spate of vandalism.
Late in 2000 I went to meet a contact in the Off the Record pub which was close to the old Daily Record building and, like the other nearby newspaper drinking den The Copy Cat, is now demolished. A buff A4 envelope was pushed across the small round table. Inside was a police mugshot of Tony McGovern. I smiled with gratitude and made my way back to the office.
McGovern was a drug-dealer whose family operated from the city’s Springburn area, where they styled themselves the ‘McGovernment’ – not that many outsiders would know it because of the lack of any press coverage of their activities. That changed in September 2000, when McGovern, aged 35, was shot dead outside the New Morven pub. His bulletproof vest was not enough to save him from five close-range rounds.
A contact with a deep knowledge of the McGoverns told me an incredible account involving the murder victim, his best friend Jamie ‘The Iceman’ Stevenson, a family feud and a host of other colourful characters. I published a story explaining how Stevenson and McGovern had fallen out with Tony’s brother Tommy but that a peace deal was then struck between the siblings – on condition that Stevenson should be killed. When Stevenson learned of this betrayal, he was not best pleased and a number of tit-for-tat shootings ensued until it was game over for Tony McGovern. Stevenson was arrested and charged but the case was dropped by prosecutors due to lack of evidence and remains unsolved to this day.
I got a phone call from what was then called the Serious Crime Squad, who asked me in for a meeting. Once there, I was surrounded by serious men in Ralph Slater suits who explained that they had intelligence that my life was in danger. I’d upset the McGoverns and I should heed this as an official warning. ‘Any advice?’ I asked. ‘Er, look in your rear-view mirror and go round roundabouts a couple of times.’ My boss was less than reassured by the police’s safety tips and insisted that I check myself in a hotel for the night.
I was already becoming increasingly aware of protecting my personal information and stayed off the electoral register for years, willing to sacrifice my right to vote in order to make it harder for people to find me. The hotel stay and my own measures were something, but it was obvious that they would do nothing to stop anyone with serious intent.
The incredible McGovern blood feud and Stevenson’s subsequent rise, then demise, which saw him jailed for almost 13 years for money-laundering, became the subject of my first book, The Iceman, which I co-wrote with then Sunday Mail deputy editor Jim Wilson.
The McGovern murder was fascinating for many reasons. One of the most interesting aspects was the drug-dealer’s unlikely bond with David Moulsdale, who built the Optical Express retail chain from scratch to become one of Scotland’s richest men. I was staggered when Moulsdale’s PR man admitted that Moulsdale planned to attend the forthcoming funeral. He told me, ‘If David can move his diary about he will be at the funeral. He’s known Tony McGovern for many years.’ I also found out that another intended funeral attendee was ex-Scotland and Celtic footballer Charlie Nicholas, also a surprising associate of McGovern. As it turned out, Moulsdale and Nicholas did not show face at St Aloysius Church, Springburn.
The Daily Record struck a tough tone for its funeral coverage with the headline ‘HOODS WEEP FOR SCUMBAG DRUG PUSHER’. That and the biting intro, ‘Gangsters crawled from the sewers into the sunshine yesterday to honour a drug-peddling scumbag who blighted a generation’, generated death threats for the paper’s chief reporter, Anna Smith.
As the friendship between McGovern and Moulsdale was revealed, the businessman won a prize at a charity event – to edit the Sunday Mail for a day. In its ‘Media Diary’, the Observer newspaper reported:
Fear stalks Glasgow’s Sunday Mail. The paper ran a top scoop last week revealing that David Moulsdale, founder of the Optical Express spectacles chain, who is worth an estimated £100 million, was to attend the funeral of murdered Glasgow gangster Tony McGovern.
The night before the story appeared Moulsdale won top prize at a charity dinner: ‘Be the editor of the Sunday Mail for a day’. Does Moulsdale really intend to edit the Sunday Mail for a day? He insists he does, although no date has yet been set.
Mail staff, including reporter Russell Findlay, who wrote the McGovern story, are anxiously awaiting his arrival. ‘Maybe he could be the editor on Monday – that’s our day off,’ one staffer said. ‘I’ll be calling in sick that day,’ another added.
Moulsdale, not being accustomed to such lurid publicity, never did take his seat in the editor’s chair and stuck to selling spectacles and laser treatments.
One unusual aspect to the McGovern case was that not a single photo of him had been published by any newspaper. The family had ordered the police not to release one, as is standard in high-profile cases where public pleas for information and witnesses are sought. It was two months later that I received the call telling me to attend Off the Record, where the colour shot of McGovern was handed over.
Writing about the security industry continued to yield information about other criminals. They included Paul McGovern, a younger brother of Tony and Tommy, who set up his own firm after being released from prison where he did time for murder. Another security firm villain was Robert Wright, from Blackburn, West Lothian, who I revealed was wanted in connection with a multimillion-pound heroin bust in Estonia. He spent five years fighting to avoid extradition to the Baltic state but was eventually jailed – despite the best efforts of one freelance journalist who planted stories in newspapers about the supposed unfair treatment of Wright and his drug-smuggling sidekick Les Brown. When Wright later came home, almost inevitably he returned to the security game and, despite his heroin-smuggling conviction, his firm managed to win contracts with an English police force and large, respectable businesses.
Yet another crook involved in security was Lewis ‘Scooby’ Rodden, who first came to public notice in 2001 when he was shot in a strip club in Amsterdam while in the city to watch Celtic play. The non-fatal shooting was allegedly ordered by a wealthy industry rival who had done very well for himself, helped along by being a police informant, according to his enemies. The most astonishing aspect of the Amsterdam shooting was that photographer Alan Simpson and I were dispatched there by the Sunday Mail while our sister title, the Daily Record, also sent a two-man team. The same newspaper company flew four employees to Amsterdam, put them up
in nice hotels and paid their expenses when two could have done the job for both titles. The accountants would have twisted a few paperclips in fury that day.
While the Record duo careered around the city trying to find the shooting victim, we did the same, ending up staking out a hospital where he was ensconced as a stream of stern-faced Glasgow ‘businessmen’ came and went. That night, as the four of us compared notes over Amstel and Heineken, we knew that the days of editors being allowed to spend so freely were coming to an end. Today, to the delight of the accountants, it is almost certain that the Amsterdam shooting would be reported from inside the newspaper office with desk-bound staff expected to get their information and images online and via phone calls. A few clicks of a mouse – cheap, sterile, all nice and safe.
14
CRIME INC
Some Scottish Labour politicians happily supped with organised criminals for decades but they did not use a long spoon. It took more than a generation but they eventually paid the price. As political science students theorise on the proud party’s sudden and extreme demise, rarely do they seem to dwell on the corrosive effect of the close proximity to gangsters.
In March 2002 perma-tanned, Porsche-driving drug-dealer Justin McAlroy was shot dead in the driveway of his home in front of his pregnant wife. Two Sunday Mail colleagues and I wrote a report which explained that McAlroy, aged only 30, had became a high-level dealer with links to the Russian Mafia. Our story stated that ‘his list of associates reads like a who’s who of the criminal underworld’ and listed Stewart ‘Specky’ Boyd, Jamie Daniel, the McGovern mob, Paisley crook Grant Mackintosh and, of course, the bad penny that is Frankie ‘Donuts’ Donaldson.
Five days later, veteran journalist Mark Howarth revealed that McAlroy not only chummed about with mafiosi from Moscow but also courted the Labour variety. Howarth’s exclusive story told how First Minister Jack McConnell, the country’s most powerful politician, ‘partied with notorious gangster’ McAlroy at a party fundraising event. McAlroy was shot dead six days after the Red Rose dinner held at a golf and country club, which was then co-owned by his Labour-supporting businessman father, Tommy McAlroy.
McConnell and his wife Bridget posed for pictures with supporters as large sums of money sloshed around. McAlroy Sr paid £500 for a table and £1,200 for a case of whisky. Also in attendance at the Red Rose event were MSP Frank Roy and MP John Reid, who was Northern Ireland Secretary at the time. Reid’s Special Branch minders were surely curious about the company being kept.
Howarth’s bombshell was buried on page 35 of his newspaper but it released the organised crime genie from the Labour lamp, sparking a slew of over a hundred stories by multiple papers. There can be a tendency in tribal newsrooms to ignore a rival’s scoop, which is often short-sighted, as there are occasions where collaboration and unity is the only way to effectively tell a difficult story and maintain pressure on wrongdoers.
I got a tip that McAlroy had been under surveillance by a specialist team of drugs squad officers days before his murder. My story, coming two days after Howarth’s, told how the drug squad surveillance op was ordered by another police faction, the Scottish Drug Enforcement Agency (SDEA) but had been called off days before the shooting. A police source told me, ‘The SDEA wanted to know why our surveillance guys had been called off the job and why they were not told about it. There’s nothing sinister about it because the surveillance teams are very much in demand.’ The story also divulged that McAlroy had been questioned by police over the previous year’s murders of two other dealers, David Macintosh and John Hall. That double murder remains unsolved.
Information continued to emerge as the dark, conjoined underbellies of Lanarkshire politics and gangsterism became exposed to daylight. A few weeks later, I reported details of one possible motive for the murder, which was that McAlroy had been caught in the middle of a feud between Donaldson and Boyd, who had fallen out. Such was Donaldson’s closeness to McAlroy that they had even been planning to build adjacent houses on country club land owned by McAlroy’s father. Donaldson, who never settles at a fixed abode for long, eventually did move there for a spell. The story stated that ‘Donaldson is so alarmed at the murder of his gangland ally he is trying to forge new links with other underworld figures’.
A source close to Donaldson told me, ‘Justin was killed because of who he was connected to just as much as what he was responsible for. He was out of his depth, a name dropper and an easy target. Getting to him will have shaken his associates, including Donaldson.’ It had been a year since the court case over the foiled ‘plot to put a hole in Donuts’ and here he was again, cropping up at the heart of an extraordinary tale of drugs, murder, money and power. Who’d have thought it? But there was still more. I discovered that McAlroy Sr and his son had been watched during a joint surveillance operation between the SDEA and their counterparts in Estonia. Father and son met security firm boss Robert Wright and his business partner Les Brown who, by the time of the murder, were two years into an epic five-year battle to avoid being extradited back to the Baltic country, where they were eventually jailed for heroin smuggling. Also spotted at the pow-wow was another Scottish drug smuggler. Perhaps it was a traffickers’ convention.
An unexpectedly talkative source at KaPo, the Estonian Internal Security Service, told me, ‘McAlroy Sr was seen with Wright and Brown on several occasions. His son was seen on one occasion.’ When I sought an explanation from McAlroy Sr, his lawyer said he had been in Tallinn discussing a bakery business with Brown.
Political journalists also joined the Red Rose fray, although their interest lay mainly in anomalies involving the money raised by the black-tie event. Many firms who attended the fundraiser secured contracts from Labour-controlled North Lanarkshire Council, with McAlroy Sr’s building company winning work worth £9.3 million.
William ‘Tiler’ Gage had convictions for violence and firearms and was out on licence when he allegedly gunned McAlroy down in cold blood. He was found guilty two years later and will serve at least 20 years, although he continues to wage a noisy campaign protesting his innocence. During Gage’s trial, more details emerged of McAlroy’s connection to other high-profile criminals – including my acid attack postman William ‘Basil’ Burns. The court heard that on the day of McAlroy’s murder Gage had travelled to Perth Prison, where he had business to discuss. He visited George ‘Goofy’ Docherty and Burns, who was then at the beginning of his ‘15-year’ sentence for shooting the innocent female security guard during a robbery.
Nine months after the Red Rose dinner, McConnell admitted that he had also been gifted membership of the golf and country club near Motherwell.
The former treasurer of McConnell’s local Labour Party was eventually convicted of embezzling £11,000 from party funds while the First Minister was cleared of any wrongdoing, but the stench was not easy to banish. For anyone living in rotten borough heartlands such as Glasgow, Lanarkshire and Renfrewshire, Labour’s red rose long exuded a less than sweet scent.
The Red Rose dinner was of keen interest to police chief Graeme Pearson, who later headed the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency (SCDEA), formerly the SDEA. Pearson later became a Labour MSP and was exactly the sort of clean and straight-talking individual the party needed in Scotland as their best talent refused to swap Westminster for Holyrood.
In his autobiography The Enforcer: A Life Fighting Crime, Pearson warned of the dangers of gangsters attempting to groom politicians and public bodies. In it, he writes, ‘His [McAlroy’s] murder revealed the close proximity between the legitimate and criminal worlds in Scotland. Had McAlroy not been murdered a few days later, many people at the event might still be unaware that organised crime was using the event to assess what value this attending could bring to their organised crime activities.’ While Pearson is correct to say that the saga only became public due to McAlroy’s murder, it still needed Mark Howarth’s journalism to unearth the connection, prove it and push it into the public domain. Fo
r it to gain traction and widespread public awareness, the story then needed the continued, dogged pursuit by Howarth and other journalists who know a scandal when they smell one.
One difficulty journalists had with trying to effectively investigate Red Rose was that the power of Labour reached deep into the newspaper industry, way above my pay grade. Pre- and post-millennium, Labour held absolute power in virtually every corner of Scotland. The political map was almost entirely red. Many editors were too close to the leading politicians who, in turn, were too close to the newspaper proprietors, while political journalists peddled party spin so effectively that they often ended up jumping ship to join their PR teams.
As leading media commentator Roy Greenslade describes it on a UK level, getting too close to politicians creates ‘a relationship corrupted by mutual suspicion and cynicism in which the public have been the chief losers’. When this analysis is applied to small and incestuous Scotland, the clubby nexus between politics and the media becomes even more acute, even more cloying. Any journalist you ask will have anecdotes about valid stories being mysteriously spiked or the most incriminating details neutered by the hidden hands of political meddling. It used to be Labour, now it is SNP.
By any measure, Red Rose was astonishing. An all-powerful political cabal including the country’s leader supping with a drug-dealer linked to major domestic cartels and the Russian Mafia. In the US, it would merit a series on Netflix.
But it would be wrong to think that Red Rose was unique. The previous decade had seen Paisley’s drugs war featuring senior Labour politicians and the murderous mob of ‘Specky’, ‘Goofy’, ‘Piggy’ and ‘Basil’. Paisley North MP Irene Adams had accused a taxpayer-funded security firm, which was staffed by those gangsters and fronted by Labour officials, of involvement in drug-dealing and money laundering. This poisoned the local Labour Party and plunged it into a toxic civil war which led to the suicide of Paisley South MP Gordon McMaster in 1997. He left a note accusing neighbouring Labour MP Tommy Graham of smearing him over an alleged but denied gay relationship. The Labour fiefdom of Renfrewshire had been the setting of a drugs war, numerous murders and an MP’s death. Lessons would be learned, the party insisted. Yet a few years later, the stronghold of Lanarkshire had produced the Red Rose scandal which illustrated the real and present danger of civic Scotland becoming corrupted by criminals. This time, lessons would be learned, the party insisted.
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