That same year came the exposure of Ian Donaldson in a story carefully vetted by lawyers which could not say much beyond that he had once been accused of a gangland kidnapping and was a wannabe racing driver who drove a £150,000 Lamborghini Gallardo against souped-up Fords and Hondas. Years later we could be more expansive after Donaldson – no relation to Frankie ‘Donuts’ Donaldson – stood trial on major drug-trafficking and money-laundering charges in Spain. A Madrid court heard how this 32-year-old had somehow acquired a £1-million villa in Tenerife and a fleet of luxury cars that included a Ferrari F430 Spider, a Ferrari 599 GTB Fiorano, two Hummers, a Porsche Cayenne Turbo, an Audi Q7, a Mercedes 63 AMG and a couple of BMWs.
Another gangland thug to feel some heat was Craig ‘Rob Roy’ Gallagher, a one-time crony of Carroll, who I learned had been arrested in connection with his murder. In happier times, the pair were suspected of leading the ‘alien abduction gang’ who kidnapped and tortured street-dealers in order to extort money and drugs from them. The gang’s name came from the traumatised victims being found abandoned half-dressed in the street and claiming not to know what had happened to them. I exposed the gang’s terrorising of the criminal underworlds in Glasgow and Edinburgh in 2009.
Perhaps the most bonkers, albeit strangely sinister, crook I dealt with was Giovanni di Stefano, a bogus lawyer who styled himself ‘the Devil’s Advocate’. With a supposed £450-million fortune, di Stefano claimed to have a bewildering mix of clients including major London organised criminals, serial-killer Dr Harold Shipman, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Usefully for him, some of these are not checkable – just like his alleged wealth.
In 1999 he emerged as a ‘businessman’ poised to come to the rescue of financially stricken Dundee FC – his interest apparently stemming from his son, who attended Gordonstoun School, the alma mater of Prince Charles. Like Barry Hughes and Paul Ferris, he deployed PR smoke and mirrors but on a global scale, observing Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels’ maxim that, ‘the bigger the lie, the more it will be believed’.
He had first appeared on the public stage in 1992 as part of a bid for Hollywood’s MGM Studios which was never taken seriously and resulted in him being forced to leave the US while two associates were jailed. If only we in the Scottish press had seen the comment from studio spokesman Craig Parsons, who told the Los Angeles Times: ‘We’re getting a good chuckle out of all this.’ The Dundee bid eventually fell apart in much the same way as his Tinseltown adventure.
Journalist Martin Hannan of Scotland on Sunday discovered that di Stefano had been jailed for five years by a court in London in 1986 over a £25-million fraud. The judge said di Stefano was ‘one of nature’s fraudsters . . . a swindler without scruple or conscience’. Hannan was then subjected to false smears by di Stefano and hollow threats of a €19-million legal action.
The following year I came across two truly startling revelations about di Stefano. The first was an accusation he was bankrolling a savage paramilitary group responsible for 25,000 deaths during the Bosnian war in the 1990s. I unearthed transcripts of evidence from the United Nations war crimes tribunal at The Hague of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milošević, who died five years into the proceedings, which were never concluded. A protected witness told the court that di Stefano financed his friend Ƶeljko ‘Arkan’ Raƶnatović’s Serbian Volunteer Guard, known as the Tigers, which slaughtered men, women and children. The Sunday Mail reported, ‘The revelations put di Stefano at the heart of a regime responsible for some of the worst ethnic cleansing since the Nazis. He has already spoken out in defence of Adolf Hitler – last week he said there was “no evidence” to link him with the Holocaust.’
When I contacted di Stefano, he denied financing the murderous Tigers but then said he would have done so if only Arkan had asked him! The following week, I came across the second revelation – that di Stefano had allegedly attended a high-level summit of the Calabrian Mafia, known as the ’Ndrangheta, in southern Italy. Magistrates accused him of being a ‘colletto bianco’ or ‘white collar’ member at the meeting, which attracted international Mafioso and two other Mafia groups – Cosa Nostra and Sacra Corona Unita. Discussions centred around using terror to seize control of the Italian democratic process.
The highly detailed revelations were made by two Palermo-based journalists whose book stated, ‘This “colletto bianco” was identified by the magistrates in Palermo as Giovanni di Stefano, originally from Petrella Tifernina, Campobasso, who earned the friendship of ex-Serbian leader Milošević and Ƶeljko Raƶnatović, better known as Arkan.’
When I contacted di Stefano for the second time, he was not very pleased to hear from me and blustered that it was all ‘a hundred-per-cent untrue’. A few days later I received a call from the police in Glasgow. A detective explained that di Stefano had made a formal complaint that I had tried to extort money from him. The gist of di Stefano’s nonsensical claim was that I was in cahoots with some bank with which he had a dispute, and we had plotted some kind of shakedown. I told the policeman my revelations about di Stefano, the Serbian murder squads and an Italian Mafia summit. The bemused officer did not need much persuading that di Stefano’s allegation was utter nonsense and did not trouble me again. He should have gone after di Stefano for wasting police time.
Allegations of bankrolling war crimes and terror in Italian politics put di Stefano’s fraud conviction into perspective, but these two stories got lost and forgotten as he continued peddling his fiction in newspapers all over the world. But as ancient Chinese general Sun Tƶu may have said, ‘If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.’
Sure enough, nine years later di Stefano was jailed in London for 14 years for fraud, deception and money-laundering. As he was carted off to his cell, I discovered that he had cooked up a real whopper – that his dad was murdered by British spies – in a desperate bid to cheat justice.
Detective Constable Jerry Walters of City of London Police told me, ‘There are no depths he wouldn’t have sunk to in order to get off. He said the British security services had murdered his dad with an ice pick because of his own [never proven] involvement with Saddam Hussein. We discovered that his dad did die in Italy, but it was of natural causes. It also emerged that di Stefano only reported the murder allegation in Italy four days before his trial was due to start. So he waited six years after his dad’s death, then made a false allegation that he had been murdered to try and get off.’
Exposing gangsters like di Stefano was only a part of what I did as a procession of lawyers, police officers, politicians and businessmen received a short, sharp journalistic shock. If white-collar crooks or rogue cops are not properly dealt with by their chums in authority or benefit from cover-up and collusion, then it falls to journalists to provide their victims and the public with answers and redress.
I was fully aware that many of these people were highly dangerous. When friends and colleagues asked if I was ever worried about being attacked, I would laugh it off and say that I was far too pretty to harm, but behind the jokey dismissal of such fears I was extremely mindful of my personal safety.
23
SUNRISE
First week in a new job and a £250,000 writ lands on my desk. I suppose that’s one way to get noticed. It was a load of cobblers, a vexatious attack from a criminal turned self-styled legal expert called James McDonald – a pound-shop Giovanni di Stefano from Stirling.
Just like di Stefano, this garrulous crook dispenses his own loopy brand of wisdom to a raft of gangster cronies, mostly in connection with Proceeds of Crime cases, and shares the delusion that his ravings are credible. McDonald craves publicity but only on his terms, with a pet reporter recounting respectful tales which airbrush his previous prison sentences dating back to 1965, including a seven-year stretch for handling counterfeit cash.
I had discovered that he was helping paedophile John McCallum, a wealthy member of the traveller community in Edinburgh, to try to overturn
a conviction and 10-year jail sentence for abusing two children. My revelations are not the type of publicity that McDonald approves of, so he decided to sue me personally and my new employer, The Scottish Sun, for £250,000. A great deal of time and effort were wasted dealing with the matter. My initial memo was almost 700 words long with seven attachments, while the subsequent court defence to McDonald’s writ ran to around 1,400 words. He abandoned his claim but we had no hope of recovering costs from a three-time bankrupt. All this for a story with a word count of 187.
I joined The Scottish Sun as Investigations Editor in 2014 after taking redundancy from the Sunday Mail in order to pay off a personal legal bill that would otherwise have forced me from my home. For all that McDonald’s writ was arrant nonsense, its arrival in my first week fed a perception by some that my journalism was risky or cavalier, a magnet for legal problems. Far from it – not a single crook has successfully sued over a single word that I have written. Everything was subjected to suffocating scrutiny. While the US constitution’s First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech, in this country the starting point tends to be working out what cannot be reported. Much of my time is spent arguing with media lawyers who are as skittish as thoroughbred racehorses, only more expensive and less predictable.
In my new job I was expected to go after gangsters, politicians, police officers and the inhabitants of Scotland’s legal swamp, but the post-Leveson environment has stifled the press and the winners are those with the cash to tie journalism in legal knots. Increasingly, editors are forced to choose the easy path.
My attempt to arrange a straightforward crack cocaine purchase from a Lyons family member became asphyxiated by red tape, forcing its abandonment. Gone were the days when we just went out and did these jobs, such as the heroin buy from the house displaying Coca-Cola festive lights.
There was scope for good old-fashioned gangster unmasking. James ‘Jasper’ McCann was a nasty piece of work from Glasgow’s east end, and I wanted to call him ‘Scotland’s most dangerous man’. The lawyer allowed ‘branded Scotland’s most dangerous man’. McCann had walked free from two horrific knife attacks in two years, the justice system having been frustrated when terrified witnesses and victims failed to speak up. I pulled together all the information and approached the victims while a brave photographer secured a pin-sharp picture of McCann’s scowling face.
Scottish Labour’s murky gangland links remained fruitful. Wide-boy councillor George Redmond bragged in a BBC documentary about his ‘big influence’ over £1 billion of public spending for the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. Others who featured in the show were members of the Faulds family, who have heaped misery on poor residents of Dalmarnock in the city’s east end for generations. Brian ‘Nightmare’ Faulds, murdered prior to broadcast, posthumously showed off bullet and blade scars and bragged about shooting someone. His ‘local entrepreneur’ brother Darren crowed about getting £65,000 compensation for his three shops being demolished to make way for the Games. Our investigation helpfully pointed out that the billion-pound councillor was related to the Faulds family, this fact having been omitted from the broadcast programme.
Fly-on-the-wall shows about gypsy lifestyles are ubiquitous, but the darker side of the traveller community is out of bounds to TV cameras. I investigated Scotland’s largest traveller family, the McPhees, as they waged a cross-border feud with an English group, like The Dandy classic comic strip ‘The Jocks and the Geordies’, although not quite as innocently rib-tickling. The travellers record YouTube videos in which they detail the horrors they intend to inflict on each other. One edgy production, filmed on location in a Lanarkshire scrapyard, sees a crazed McPhee threaten to ‘slaughter half of England’. A member of the English family, wearing a Nazi swastika armband, responds, ‘You think Adolf Hitler was a bad man, a really, really bad man. My word on it – I’m a worser man than Adolf Hitler.’
I knew I had strayed into serious territory when The Digger news magazine tweeted a warning to me about criminal travellers being more dangerous than gangsters. The Digger is a plucky, street-fighting publication despised by criminals and with a bravely admirable disregard for those it upsets.
The Daniel versus Lyons drugs war came back on the agenda with the return of Scotland’s unofficial hide-and-seek champion Billy ‘Buff’ Paterson after almost five years on the run in Spain. While Ross Monaghan had been earlier acquitted of the Asda assassination of Kevin ‘Gerbil’ Carroll, fugitive Paterson was less fortunate and was jailed for at least 22 years. I revealed that he only stopped hiding because he had fathered a baby while on the run and believed he would beat the rap, just like Monaghan. That both these men and other Lyons mobsters are graduates of the police-, Labour- and council-backed Chirnsyde remains a scandal which has never provoked the outrage or explanation that it merits.
When Carroll was killed in a hail of 13 bullets, the police and witnesses spoke of there being three men involved in the murder – two gunmen and a getaway driver. It occurred to me that no one had ever identified the driver. I learned that the mystery man was suspected of being Victor Gallagher, a Lyons relative. Gallagher’s off-radar criminal lifestyle meant that pinning down his whereabouts was not easy, but I got a break with a possible address in Cumbernauld, found buried in a court record. Several tedious days of discretion and patience outside the property eventually paid off and we surreptitiously captured the first image of the suspected third member of the Asda hit squad.
As a bonus, I was delighted and surprised when Gallagher received a visitor. It was my first sighting of Steven Lyons since he and Monaghan ran away from me outside the High Court a decade earlier. Lyons had also spent many years in Spain and remains number one target in the Daniels’ hit list. He was oblivious to our presence but should have been grateful for being caught in a camera’s crosshairs instead of a gunman’s.
The legal environment in my new post at The Scottish Sun was often stifling. Veteran freelance journalist Eamon O Connor came to me with staggering revelations about the unsolved murder of Glasgow prostitute Emma Caldwell. The police had doggedly pursued a group of Turkish men but they were innocent. Some detectives were more interested in another man. O Connor discovered that my former Sunday Mail colleagues were on to the story, which meant that I had less than eight hours to do what should have taken several days, if not weeks. As O Connor drove up from Manchester, I urgently went looking for the other suspect and eventually got him on the phone that Friday afternoon.
I asked if he knew Caldwell and he replied, ‘Nope.’ I told him that was a lie and that we knew he had used her for sex and had taken police officers to the remote spot where her body was discovered. He said, ‘I don’t know where you’re getting your information from but it’s totally wrong. I never was of interest at all. I was told from day one by the police I was never a suspect.’
Our story was written at breakneck speed and put in front of lawyers and various backroom journalists. The lawyers gave us the green light. The story was on the front page, ready to go. But the green light turned amber. Then red. The story was spiked, leaving O Connor and me cursing and deflated. The next day’s Sunday Mail ran the revelations on page one and another eight inside, which landed them a shiny award, led to a major review of the murder enquiry and triggered a clumsy police attempt to illegally unearth the paper’s source.
I suffered similar frustration with a story about bent Edinburgh lawyer Christopher Hales, who had been struck off over 13 dodgy mortgage deals involving an unnamed client, which were worth over £1 million and breached money-laundering regulations. It was written in August 2014 but, despite there being no legal impediment, it was never used. A year later, The Sunday Times published the Hales story, with the added ingredient of identifying the mystery client as Michelle Thomson, who had just become an SNP MP. For this, the paper also won a shiny gong.
The failure to publish the Caldwell and Hales stories was hugely frustrating but not unusual – many others I wrote were met with int
ernal resistance, for no apparent good reason.
Another major bugbear I had was the tendency to treat some criminals favourably, or as celebrities, especially those they were on friendly terms with. Paul Ferris received fawning coverage, as did the exiled Loyalist terrorist Johnny ‘Mad Dog’ Adair, who was portrayed like a reality TV star, not an indiscriminate murderer of people for being Catholic.
Perhaps even worse was the coverage of Barry Hughes, which went against everything I stood for and made me queasy. The first wave of nausea came in June 2014, weeks after I started my new job. A simpering story appeared in which a ‘friend‘ of Hughes told that he had become a dad and revealed the newborn’s ‘wacky’ name. The ‘friend’ informed concerned readers that ‘it’s been a tough few months and this is some great news at last’ – the ‘tough few months’ being a sympathetic reference to his convictions for fraud and money-laundering. I muttered about how objectionable it was to treat a criminal like a celebrity, to empathise with the ‘tough’ ordeal of his chosen path of criminality, but no one was keen to debate my ethical concerns.
A few months later, I ran the story about Hughes and his wife Jackie getting £176,000 of legal aid, then enjoying an opulent Dubai holiday. When bankruptcy quickly followed – with almost £10 million cheated from HMRC – I was surprised to learn that Hughes had been allowed to pick his own trustee.
In February 2015 I produced an investigation into organised crime in Scotland. Run over five days, the subjects included major feuds, the big bosses, the influx of foreign groups and the roles of women. The one dealing with women referred to Hughes and his wife Jackie securing the deal which saw him plead guilty while she walked free, charges dropped. The story explained how the Crown Office was increasingly using this tactic as leverage against men. This was the story that had resulted in the ‘45 minutes of fury’ call from Hughes to my editor, Gordon Smart, and was quickly followed by a lawyer’s letter.
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