Little did I know that another Labour scandal, in the party’s dominant power base of Glasgow, was just over the horizon and was about to come my way. The Sunday Mail news editor Jim Wilson called a conference with me and two of my colleagues – the paper’s chief reporter, Charles Lavery, and news reporter Derek Alexander. Wilson wanted the paper to run a series on crime and was open to ideas about what it should be about. I suggested that it was time to focus on the numerous extremely wealthy organised crime gangs who had never been named by the press. Having already shone a spotlight on the McGoverns following Tony’s murder, we should now look at some of the others.
The small team got to work and produced a groundbreaking series entitled ‘Crime Inc’, the name illustrating how crime had evolved to become slick and professional, like any other type of business involving massive profits. Our team included two photographers who possessed the skill, discretion and vast reserves of patience needed to execute ‘snatch photos’ of unsuspecting targets, even the type of edgy people who were permanently paranoid about police surveillance and getting photographed. One of the snappers was so adept at taking pictures unseen he nicknamed himself ‘the Washington sniper’ after the guman who picked off innocent people in the US capital in 2002.
Crime Inc was all about the money. Top of our rich list was the Daniel family, headed by Jamie Daniel. We told how ‘as teenagers, they terrorised the streets of Possilpark in Glasgow’ but had graduated to run ‘the sharpest criminal operation in the country’. The series ran in January 2003 and gave a host of high-level criminals the novel and unsettling experience of having their faces on public display and their assets exposed. Some went running to their lawyers to complain, but we swatted away the irritating and groundless letters of complaint. Almost immediately, the team regretted certain omissions from the rich list but, as long as they were on our radar, their time would come.
By happenstance, at exactly the same time as Crime Inc was running, the Daniels were involved in a drugs war with another criminal family called the Lyons, who had not made our list. One week after exposing the Daniels, we told how they and the Lyons were fighting for control of the drugs trade in north Glasgow, causing a spate of shootings and slashings. That story prompted an approach to me by a vocal, plucky and respected community activist called Johnny McLean, who lived in the Milton housing estate where the Lyons were causing mayhem through bullying decent people. McLean told me the head of the family, Eddie Lyons Sr, had successfully inveigled himself into the affections of local police officers and Labour politicians, including Councillor Ellen Hurcombe. Lyons posed as an industrious community leader who only had the best interests of underprivileged young folk at heart. With the support of the police and Labour, he was given the keys to run Glasgow City Council-owned Chirnsyde community centre, ostensibly to help Milton’s youth. In reality, Lyons was a Faginesque figure and Chirnsyde was a gang hut for his sons and their thuggish cohorts, who styled themselves the Club Boys. Glasgow is not short of weasel-faced, territorial teen gangs, but they were the first to have the tacit backing of the authorities.
McLean put me in touch with a handful of other brave residents who had suffered threats and intimidation for having the guts to oppose this obscenity in their community. The residents told me how Lyons had been foisted on Milton after he was stabbed in a previous feud in nearby Cadder and forced to flee after giving evidence against his attacker in court. I listened in disbelief as they explained how an innocent dad had gone to Chirnsyde to plead with Lyons to stop the Club Boys from terrorising and attacking his sons. The man was ambushed and stabbed by a mob. He alleged that Lyons shouted, ‘Get the bastard!’ during the frenzied and cowardly pack attack. The victim and his decent and hard-working family were forced to abandon their homes as the criminal case was marred by witness intimidation.
I was told that community police officer PC John Cameron was a friend and supporter of Lyons and even used Chirnsyde as an unofficial police station, to the astonishment of the CID officers investigating the stabbing of the dad there.
And finally I was told that all pleas to the area’s Labour politicians – MPs, MSPs, councillors – had fallen on deaf ears. The residents explained that Chirnsyde was under the control of Glasgow Life, a council arm’s-length body whose chief executive is Bridget McConnell – wife of Jack. The campaigners believed that was why the Labour politicians were unwilling to resolve the perverse situation of Lyons being allowed to groom a teen crime gang while posing as a pillar of the community. Johnny and the other residents explained that attempts to generate publicity had failed because whichever newspapers they spoke to had their initial interest quickly extinguished by Labour, the police and the Labour-run council. I told them that I would give it a go. The plan was to keep it simple. The Washington Sniper captured a photo of Lyons standing in the Chirnsyde car park while staring open-mouthed.
The resultant story and snatch picture appeared in February 2003 under the rhetorical headline ‘Would you let this man look after your children?’ It made public how Chirnsyde was bankrolled with £120,000 a year of taxpayers’ money while the Lyons family quarrelled with the Daniels. It was the first of hundreds of stories about what became the country’s longest running gang war. As the McConnells were friendly with senior executives in my company, I was unsurprised when Bridget’s name was excised from the story. Councillor Hurcombe robustly defended Lyons with a diatribe which culminated with her saying, ‘This is a vendetta against one person [Lyons]. There’s no violence in Chirnsyde.’ It was quite clear that Lyons was going nowhere – not when he had the backing of Labour and the police. It would take a series of extraordinary events and almost four years of stoic determination by the residents before good finally prevailed.
My attention was beginning to annoy the Lyons. On one occasion, the entire gable end of a tenement block in Possil was spray-painted in foot-high yellow letters with a charming message, with reference to female anatomy, which is too explicit to repeat here.
During that long slog, a council press officer sneeringly branded the residents who were standing up to organised crime as ‘the four bampots’. One of these residents, Alex O’Kane, has more integrity in his little finger than the entire sorry shower who protected Lyons. I charted every move of the Chirnsyde scandal and the associated Daniel versus Lyons drug war, which has escalated and continues to this day. The feud led to unprecedented atrocities being committed by both sides: the desecration of a child’s gravestone; stolen British Army guns being used in a shooting spree; an assassination at Asda in front of terrified shoppers; the shootings of dads picking up kids at primary school gates; and countless other despicable acts.
Throughout this period the same old gangland names cropped up, as they drifted from one shocking episode to the next. If Scotland’s media and political scene resembles a small town, then the underworld is a village.
Having already written extensively about security wars and Tony McGovern’s murder, I was becoming synonymous with crime reporting. Crime Inc, Chirnsyde and the Daniel versus Lyons drug war cranked it up further and cemented my name with the genre.
Writing about organised crime was just one of my many areas of interest, and I did not appreciate being pigeonholed, but I could understand why it happened. Unlike some other journalists, I did not treat criminals as celebrities, nor would I allow myself to be used by them. I joyfully went for the jugular and relentlessly exposed new faces to readers. In particular, I doggedly pursued gangster links to legitimate spheres such as politics and the law. And every time we served up a freshly landed crook, it would generate yet more information about other gangsters in need of some attention.
15
PR PLOD
As Sir Robert Peel gazed upon Glasgow’s George Square from the granite plinth where he has stood since 1859, he could have been forgiven for shaking his bronze head in bemusement at events below.
The statue of the father of British policing remained still as Deputy Chief Const
able Campbell Corrigan posed, his arms folded and looking quite pleased with himself, alongside 13 luxury cars sporting registrations shouting ‘Seized!’ The press and TV crews were told the array of gleaming Range Rovers, BMWs, Audis and Mercedes worth £350,000 had been taken from gangsters using Proceeds of Crime laws and would be sold to help communities scarred by drug dealing. Corrigan announced, ‘The good thing is that, at the end of this process, the money that’s recovered from the sale of these things will go back into those communities, and they’ll fund not only law enforcement but some of the good things that are on the go there.’
Smelling a rat – and being cynically familiar with police and Crown Office spin – I decided to investigate. It took months of journalistic chipping to prove that the police chief and his PR advisers sold the public a pup that day in 2012. I discovered the cars had actually been borrowed from a car showroom. They were ‘representative’ of the ones which had been sequestered. This minor deception was fair enough. Many weeks later, an uglier fib was exposed. Not one of the cars was sold under Proceeds of Crime laws and not a single penny was recovered for the public. At least two were just stolen property and most were returned to corporate owners such as dealerships and loan companies. The event had been a sham and the TV and press coverage was fake news. The duping of the public lay entirely with the police because the media had taken their word on trust. If only it was a one-off. Some news editors still ask, ‘Have the cops confirmed it?’ – as if they only ever tell the truth.
My upbringing was more net-curtain suburbia than No Mean City but I had developed an early wariness of the police or, more specifically, the hierarchy’s willingness to be not entirely truthful. This view was shaped partly by the teenage experience of my car windscreen exploding in a shower of glass while driving under a bridge only for the thrower’s police chief father to make the problem disappear. On another occasion, my father received a call from a senior traffic policeman who told him a recently issued speeding ticket would vanish because his son was a school friend of mine. When I became a journalist, these suspicions crystallised as I began to see a broader and more vivid picture of police corruption – some minor, some pathetic and some downright chilling. Let’s look at the lighter stuff first.
In 2001 a contact offered me a tip that seemed ridiculous. A senior police officer was supposedly driving around Fife displaying some kind of Nazi registration plate on his car. Chief Inspector Robin Lumsden was an avid collector of Gestapo daggers, SS death’s head badges, Hitler Youth uniforms and other vile Third Reich paraphernalia. While the tip about the registration sounded implausible, it needed to be checked out.
Edging slowly through Glenrothes police station car park, there it was – an ordinary car bearing the registration of N5 DAP. The plate represented NSDAP, the initials of Hitler’s Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, more commonly known as the Nazi Party. Upon being challenged in his driveway at home, Lumsden dismissed the plate as a ‘private joke’ and a ‘humorous thing’. Whether Fife veterans who fought the Nazis or the families of those who never came home from the Second World War shared Lumsden’s mirth was moot. The police decided to back Lumsden, despite criticism and concern from Jewish groups and antiracism campaigners, who branded it ‘grossly offensive’. Nothing to see here, the top brass sniffed; it was ‘a personal matter’. I refused to let it drop and continually asked for the outcome of an investigation into the Lumsden affair. More than a year later, the police grudgingly told me that he ‘has disposed of the plate’. End of story, they bristled. So it seemed, and so they hoped.
But five years after I got a second tip that Lumsden had not ‘disposed’ of his prized registration as the public had been explicitly told. To my incredulity, he was hinting online that the plate would be rightfully returned to him following his imminent retirement from the police. He was also using the seller name of N5 DAP to flog Nazi tat on eBay. When questioned, he defiantly admitted his intent, prompting the Dad’s Army-inspired headline ‘WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE KIDDING, MR LUMSDEN?’
Lumsden’s act of apparent provocation was enough for the DVLA to remove the plate from circulation after being lobbied by Michael Matheson, an SNP MSP who later became justice secretary. The DVLA’s bold action made a mockery of Fife police’s ‘personal matter’ hand-washing six years earlier. Since Police Scotland’s inception in 2013, there have been concerns about the centralisation of local policing, but the N5 DAP debacle illustrates how a small and insular force like Fife could close ranks, dodge accountability and stubbornly defy common sense.
Even more bizarre than the Nazi tip-off was a call I got telling me that a male police officer from Maryhill was a prostitute in his spare time – one of the benefits of shift work, I suppose. My contact directed me to a website where Master Rajj, wearing crotchless leather trousers and a studded cap, advertised his services to other men for £100 an hour. His advert stated, ‘The leather pictures are all I have at the moment so if you’re not into leathers don’t just ignore me, send a message to me, I don’t bite!!! Aarrr.’ I phoned Master Rajj, who agreed to bring another male escort chum for a three-way session at an Ayrshire farmhouse. He offered to dress as a doctor, soldier or priest. This couldn’t really be a cop, could it? But it was. Master Rajj was the nom de guerre of a married police officer who was a poster boy for ethnic diversity in the ranks. I chose not to keep my appointment at the Ayrshire farmhouse and phoned Master Rajj to explain who I was and that a story about his sordid sideline was to be published. It took more than four years for his case to be investigated and then limp through the tortuous and secretive disciplinary process, by which point he was no longer a police officer.
As well as a Nazi car registration and the fake seized car stunt, stories about boats and the police provided entertainment. One tale involved daring acts of ocean-going adventure on the high seas, or so one police chief wanted the public to believe.
Chief Constable Willie Rae gazed wistfully into the middle distance for press photographers as he stood at the bow of his new toy, a 60-foot vessel called Gantock. According to Rae, the boat would be used to fight the scourge of people-trafficking and drug-smuggling apparently plaguing the River Clyde. He didn’t go as far as mentioning Somali pirates. Cutting through the spin, I learned that the Gantock was an ageing rust-bucket offloaded by her previous owners because of crippling repair bills, and that the crew was actually targeting al fresco alcoholics and naughty children, not Pablo Escobar and Osama bin Laden. One source said, ‘They’ve lifted around a dozen kids playing truant from school and some OAPs on a riverside drinking session. The main occupation seems to be recovering lifebelts chucked into the Clyde by vandals.’ The boat problems continued. A year later, they attempted to silence the critics by replacing Gantock with a former RNLI lifeboat at a cost of £150,000. But eight months later I discovered that the replacement boat was still in dry dock on the Isle of Wight, where she was undergoing £40,000 worth of repairs.
Another amusing episode was the decision by the SCDEA to issue officers with brass shields, of the type used by the FBI. I first saw one being worn on the hip of an SCDEA PR dude who seemed to think he was starring in his own private episode of The Wire, not sending out dreary press releases from an airport business park. An SCDEA annual report stated, ‘This is the new logo of the SCDEA. All members of staff are issued with a shield, which reflects the logo, on starting work at the agency.’ I spoke to agency boss Graeme Pearson, holder of badge #1, who told me, ‘It’s an American-style shield. It was a desire to have something that was professional, self evident and something the public would recognise.’ Great, I thought, let’s publish a picture of one of these snazzy shields for the public to see the unusual new ID being used by undercover officers. After all, some burly bloke in a hoodie and Adidas Sambas flashing a golden FBI badge at a drug-dealer in Possil may not be taken entirely seriously. Perhaps through embarrassment, the SCDEA point blank refused my request. This decision invited obvious criticism, with Li
b Dem justice spokesman Robert Brown saying, ‘The idea of this badge being kept secret from the public is utterly ridiculous. This seems to be a waste of public money. It sounds like the SCDEA had some kind of Starsky & Hutch aspirations.’
Some journalists make a safe living by lapping up sanitised spin from police PR departments. A stock technique is to take a local paper youngster out on a drugs raid which usually secures a front-page headline about the smashing of a major cartel and locking up dozens of its members. These are illustrated with a photo of a half-dressed junkie, milk-white face pixelated, being huckled in handcuffs from his council house. It’s low-level nonsense. Most of those arrested are never prosecuted, but the local press don’t seem interested in reporting the anticlimactic outcomes. One former ‘crime reporter’ made a career of passing off police PR as news. Just like ‘political journalists’ who end up on the payroll of their party masters, he eventually took up employment with the police.
Today, the culture of silly spin is worse than ever. Many journalists have the ability and desire to challenge police spin but they no longer have the time do so as their numbers have been decimated due to the death by a thousand cuts of newspapers.
Exceptional journalists like Chris Musson of The Scottish Sun still take the hard route of chiselling away. His valiant quest for truth and transparency often results in police PR departments making groundless complaints about Musson to his bosses. This, thankfully, only serves to make him redouble his efforts. If only these PR Plods took heed of Sir Robert Peel’s famous principles of law enforcement, one of which states, ‘To recognise always that the power of the police to fulfil their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.’
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