Even worse, Ferris was using the book to hint about getting away with murdering Thompson Jr. He and McKay claimed that a mystery figure called ‘The Apprentice’ did it. They then revealed details only the killer would know – his state of mind when he shot Thompson and the position of the victim when the bullets struck. And not only was The Apprentice the same age and height as Ferris and from the same part of Glasgow, he was also friends with Hanlon and Glover. To ram home the unsubtle point, the book identifies two other shootings committed by The Apprentice – for which Ferris was also charged but cleared.
The return of Ferris as a literary equaliser was treated seriously by some newspaper executives who were deaf to criticism about their facilitation of gangster lit. Thankfully there were people like Allan Brown, who wrote in The Sunday Times about the release of the pair’s second book:
It will supplement his already published memoir The Ferris Conspiracy, perhaps the first book ever to mug its readers, promising to name names, then thinking better of it once the money had been handed over.
Perhaps, though, the real villains are the brokers and the middle-men: the publishers, ghostwriters and critics who regard this literary compost as challenging and instructive. They are salaried cynics, pandering to the literary equivalents of car accident ghouls, perpetuating a cultural practical joke that stopped being funny long ago.
Following his freedom, Ferris became involved in the security industry, just as it was descending into a battleground between gangsters. I wrote a spate of stories – perhaps a subconscious seeking of penance for creating the Ferris and McKay double act – about Ferris’s involvement. These stories included one about his recruitment of a thug with 666 tattooed on his neck whose role was to cover the Dundee end of the expanding Ferris operation. Another told how a dormant feud had reignited due to a turf-dispute and another dusted down his nickname of ‘The Ferret’, acquired due to his sneakiness, and told how he had been kicked off a site by a bigger, badder criminal who did not sing to newspapers. Yet another revealed that his company was providing security for a new court being built in Dumbarton, all paid for, of course, with taxpayers’ money. All of this was set against McKay parroting the line that Ferris was going straight; that he had turned his back on crime.
In 2003 I suggested that the BBC should take a look at security sharks. This resulted in Sam Poling’s BAFTA-winning documentary Security Wars, which investigated Ferris and others. Poling proved that Ferris was the true owner of a security firm, which he had long attempted to deny.
McKay was now using the sobriquet ‘Gutter Sniper’ to write a column in The Big Issue, whose bosses didn’t see the irony in a publication serving the homeless, many the victims of the drugs trade, and giving a platform to an apologist for those involved in organised crime. Beneath a moody photo of himself wreathed in cigarette smoke, McKay described the BBC investigation as ‘shabby journalism’.
Beyond his obligatory references to ‘street players’, ‘heavy merchants’ and ‘faces’, McKay expanded on his criticism, which amounted to how terribly unfair Poling’s documentary was. McKay also made a few veiled digs at my exposures of rogue security firms in the Sunday Mail, which prompted the paper’s assistant editor Jim Wilson to write to The Big Issue:
Good crime writing is not easy and I have always tried to defend Mr McKay against persistent criticism that he is merely a ‘useful idiot’ for a number of gangland figures, most notably Paul Ferris.
However, his posturing as the smoke-wreathed chronicler of the underworld, which has always been faintly risible, is fast becoming offensive. And for the Big Issue to allow him space to defend the reputation of Ferris and his cohorts in the security industry is lamentable.
Unlike Mr McKay’s books and columns, our reports are written by professional investigative journalists prepared to risk their own safety to expose violent and dangerous criminals.
Then a very strange thing happened – McKay was hired to bring his ‘Gutter Sniper’ column to our sister paper the Daily Record, where Bruce Waddell had become editor. Thereafter, the Record became a temporary conduit for a malodorous slurry of offensive half-truths, lies and threats. This prompted an excoriating attack by Tom Brown, the paper’s recently retired political editor and columnist, who commands widespread respect in the newspaper industry. Brown wrote:
How sad it is when you find an old friend rolling around in the gutter with low-life vermin. Even more depressing when they know exactly what they are doing and glorify the scum who make other folks’ lives miserable. That is exactly the case with my old paper, the Daily Record.
About the Record’s decision to serialise the pair’s latest book and put Ferris in a TV ad to plug it, he added:
Ferris is a self-styled gangland enforcer, self-confessed junkie, self-pitying long-time jailbird and self-publicising hypocrite, now seeking to make money from his tales of viciousness and violence.
There was a time when no self-respecting newspaper would have given the likes of Paul Ferris a by-line (far less used him in a TV commercial) without thoroughly de-lousing, disinfecting and fumigating the office and all who came in contact with him.
For the Record not only to publish Ferris’s drivelling self-justification and give it a sympathetic treatment was a gross error of judgement. To use his scarred visage on peak-time Sunday night TV as the face of the Daily Record was grotesque.
Even more sickening was the publisher’s poster on bus shelters throughout Glasgow, depicting Ferris squinting at passers-by down the barrels of a shotgun. What message does that send?
I read Brown’s words with a smile. Our paths had never crossed while working for sister papers but I was moved to express my gratitude. Did Brown’s broadside knock some sense into the Record? Unfortunately not. For even as I was writing my email to Brown, the paper gave three pages to a Hello-style, soft-focus interview with a heroin-dealing Ferris crony. I raised my concerns with a senior Record executive who ridiculously replied, ‘Hey, big man, it sells papers!’ – as if that was our sole purpose. McKay’s ‘Gutter Sniper’ column also remained. One snippet revealed an interesting festive tableau. He wrote:
Over Christmas we had a wee party at our house. Just some family and friends. In one quiet corner sat Tommy Sheridan and Paul Ferris blethering for Scotland. About what?
How to persuade our kids not to carry blades. The feel-good factor will last me to next Christmas.
Hard-left egomaniac Sheridan is the political equivalent of Ferris – a manipulator of the truth who will use anyone to further his own agenda.
The Record snapped out of its hypnosis when McKay died of cancer in 2009, leaving Ferris to find a new sympathetic outlet for his wisdom at The Scottish Sun.
A year later, I discovered that police attempts to clean up the security industry had failed after courts rejected intelligence reports as grounds to strip licences from those suspected of being puppets for crooks. Detective Superintendent John McSporran alleged that Ferris controlled three firms and told the Security Industry Authority (SIA): ‘Ferris is a prominent Strathclyde-based criminal who has attempted to present himself as a reformed individual and legitimate businessman. However, intelligence indicates that he is still involved in serious and organised crime.’
Ferris was obsessed with shaping publicity about himself and I became suspicious of a ‘true crime’ website because of its pro-Ferris tone and justification of criminality. According to the public record, the site was anonymously owned but I looked deeper to find that a previous owner was a Paisley car valeter living in a Derbyshire spa town. Intrigued, I called the valeter to ask if Ferris was the owner. His garbled response told me everything. He said, ‘You want to know who did the site, like, but it’s not a big secret. I’ll see the lad and see if he wants to, but you’re off the ball there – it’s not Paul, no. I know Paul, yeah. It’s not meant to be secretive – it’s just the way it is.’
When the Sunday Mail published a story about the website, I immediately beca
me the subject of defamatory comments from internet trolls on another website which did not hide its Ferris connection. Unlike journalists, these people hide behind fake names.
If anyone thought the deification of Ferris couldn’t get any worse, they were mistaken. A long-touted film somehow became a reality. Prior to release of The Wee Man, which was based on The Ferris Conspiracy, I suggested the Sunday Mail should revisit his life and crimes to dig out the truth buried under his skyscrapers of fiction.
I tracked down Georgina Russell, the widow of a low-level criminal, Paul Hamilton, who was shot dead in 1993. Hamilton went to his death after taking a phone call from his supposed pal Ferris, whose book peddled a sensationalist and untrue version of the unsolved crime. The widow said, ‘Paul’s not here to defend any of these lies. No one can justify the killing of someone else. Ferris doesn’t know the meaning of truth. It’s all the other people who are left behind who pay the price. I don’t hate him – I loathe him.’
I also tracked down John Hogg, an innocent man who was accidentally shot in 1984 while walking home from a night out with his wife and friend. The jittery young gunman blasted the wrong man. Ferris stood trial but got a not proven verdict. Hogg welcomed the right to put the record straight after I showed him The Ferris Conspiracy, which claimed the masked gunman ‘compensated’ him for being unintentionally shot and praised his ‘honourable’ behaviour during the trial. Hogg said, ‘That’s a pure fairytale. As far as I’ve heard about the book, it’s mostly fiction anyway. There wasn’t any compensation or apology. It’s a piece of nonsense. The book said the gunman respected my evidence but I went into court and told them everything I knew. I held nothing back.’
Another untruth in the book related to the Paul Hamilton murder. Ferris gloated that the police had questioned him and an associate called Stephen McLaren about the murder, ‘before releasing us, never to bother us again’. He added, ‘I’m pleased to say that Stephen avoided all bitterness and has gone on to make an honest, trouble-free life for himself.’ I established that McLaren had actually been jailed for five years for heroin dealing. The Ferris definitions of ‘honest’ and ‘trouble-free’ clearly differ from the dictionary versions.
For good measure, we torpedoed another whopper about Ferris’s gangland ‘code of honour’. He wrote, ‘We don’t grass, we don’t hurt non-combatants, we do time rather than put our comrades down.’ Yet, during his trial for the murder of Thompson, Ferris deployed the defence of pointing the finger at three other men who he named.
When the film premiered in 2013, Ferris basked in the backslapping bonhomie of low-wattage celebrity, but a few bold journalists failed to show the required respect towards this 21st-century warrior poet. Mike Wade of The Times captured the tone with his succinct report which began:
Movie press conferences are rarely as disturbing as the one held yesterday by a notorious Glasgow gangster.
The poisonous atmosphere surrounding Paul Ferris, The Wee Man of a new biopic of that name, was established early when he took exception to the critic who suggested that the film showed that children who are bullied – like Ferris, supposedly – will grow up to be bullies themselves.
Ferris, gazing at his questioner with dead-fish eyes, answered in an ‘unnervingly quiet voice’ that ‘I actually take that as quite an insult’.
When Ferris was asked whether he would tell his young daughter about his criminality, he responded, ‘When she is at an appropriate age, of course I would – as much as someone in the Armed Forces. Would they want to talk about their role in Afghanistan or Iraq? Or elderly people talking about the Second World War?’
Marc Deanie of The Scottish Sun homed in on this offensive comparison between criminality and armed service for your country. Deanie obtained a damning response from a wounded veteran and the father of a soldier killed in Afghanistan.
Glasgow, like any city, is not short of fizzing little human volcanoes, so what black magic transformed this one into a celebrity? Firstly, in Scotland, real stars are thin on the ground as they tend to escape domestic drizzle for London’s bright lights or LA’s sunshine at the first opportunity. Into the vacuum step thugs like Ferris and Barry Hughes. Their shtick – bling, fast cars, doe-eyed molls – is not quite stellar but could just about pass for Heat magazine fare, if you squinted your eyes a bit.
Another reason is that many west of Scotland men are afflicted with a condition which we will call ‘hard-manitis’. Symptoms include being gripped by an irrational and fevered fascination, admiration even, for criminals. The sufferers, otherwise law-abiding and sane, view those like Ferris as cult heroes. Several newspaper executives – they know who they are – have caught extreme doses of this disease. The condition’s name comes from the media’s description of them as ‘hard men’ which makes no sense whatsoever because they are, in fact, the complete opposite – weaklings, cowards, sneaks and bullies.
18
DIRTY BRIEFS
A hitman frantically and ferociously ripped his blade into the face and body of Law Society of Scotland Deputy Chief Executive Les Cumming and left him for dead on the pavement in a pool of blood.
Cumming was knifed a dozen times in 2006 outside his home in one of Edinburgh’s smarter postcodes. His attacker fled to Australia but was brought back to Scotland and jailed for 11 years in 2011. They got the hitman, but what about the man in the BMW who paid him £10,000 cash?
Cumming’s job was to investigate crooked solicitors, and it seems he was a bit too good at it. The Cumming attack was of interest to me because of its extreme and unusual nature. In the immediate aftermath, a whispering campaign was conducted against the naysayers, outsiders who question the sanctity of the precious profession. Arch-critic and legal blogger Peter Cherbi was stunned to learn that a Law Society official was suggesting his possible culpability to disbelieving journalists at The Scotsman newspaper. It was a groundless smear against an unsung hero for those fighting against crooked lawyers – someone who has single-handedly brought about judicial reform. The Law Society should have been looking closer to home – to one of their own.
Nine years after the attack, I was told the name of a wealthy lawyer who was supposedly the prime suspect – the mystery man in the BMW. In addition, the same Edinburgh solicitor had been linked to the unsolved murder of Nairn banker Alistair Wilson, who was shot dead on his doorstep 14 months before the Cumming attack.
I tracked Cumming down by phone in January 2015 and, upon putting the name of the lawyer to him, he said, ‘He’s a name I know. There were two solicitors who were well connected with criminals and he was one of them at the time who was looked at, but obviously nothing more happened from it.’ Cumming also revealed to me the hitman had been offered a deal to identify his paymaster but opted to keep his mouth shut. I wrote a story which, for the first time, linked the lawyer to both the Cumming and Wilson hits, although we were legally prevented from naming him. Frustratingly, the story was not published. Just 19 days after my 10-minute conversation with Cumming, he died of cancer. I floated the story again, but there was still no appetite and it was spiked, a decision that still baffles me.
While underworld snakes and naughty police officers are plentiful enough, limitless sleaze and scandal can be found in the teeming swamp of Scotland’s legal profession. I have investigated innumerable cases of lawyers causing chaos and blighting lives, leaving bewildered, broke and broken clients. I have sat with poor souls, vast folders stuffed with carefully indexed documents, whose suffering at the hands of a lawyer is exacerbated by the rigged system that protects them. Members of the public need patience, tenacity, brains and possibly divine powers to negotiate the labyrinthine, lawyer-friendly complaints process.
The biggest problem is of solicitors remaining self-regulated. While Cumming was clearly an effective investigator, his employers – the Law Society of Scotland – play a trick on the public. As the Police Federation backs police officers and British Medical Association (BMA) supports doctors, so the Law So
ciety of Scotland protects solicitors. No one would suggest the Police Federation or BMA should investigate public complaints against their members, but that is exactly what the Law Society does regarding lawyers. They somehow continue to get away with this poacher-and-gamekeeper dual role years after the Law Society in England and Wales was stripped of its regulatory powers. You might think the majority of honest and decent lawyers would recognise how damaging the status quo is to their reputations.
The public has no right to know how many complaints are lodged against solicitors or law firms, which works to allow the worst offenders to trade with a clean image when the entire profession knows they are rotten. Rogue solicitors go running to the shadowy Legal Defence Union (LDU), whose website states that ‘Lawyers sometimes need lawyers!’ The LDU holds closed-door meetings with the Society to discuss how complaints can be ‘resolved’. Polite deals result in lesser punishments being imposed, allowing reprobates to keep preying on unwitting clients. Again, the public are not informed of the outcomes. Only the worst cases are ‘prosecuted’ by the Scottish Solicitors’ Discipline Tribunal (SSDT) but the Society’s pseudo-court resembles an in-house HR department and adds more years to the tortuous process.
I pursued serial shyster John O’Donnell for more than a decade as he repeatedly dodged being struck off despite £1 million of insurance claims for negligence and multiple findings of misconduct. When this one-man wrecking ball was finally stopped, he flouted the ban by posing as a colleague.
I urged Sam Poling of the BBC to investigate the self-regulation racket, my motive partly being a press aversion to examining the murkier aspects of the legal profession. Like politics, showbiz and sports hacks, journalists who rely on lawyers do not bite the hand that feeds them. Poling assembled a panel of eminent English legal experts to examine SSDT verdicts where solicitors had simply had their knuckles rapped despite findings of dishonesty. Viewers of Lawyers Behaving Badly heard them express surprise that miscreants, including O’Donnell, had not been banished as would happen south of the border.
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