29
THE LIE COURT
With the gaze of 15 fresh jurors directed towards me, I reminded myself that the criminal justice system is often seen as a game, and those who play it are sometimes willing to distort the truth in order to get the right result.
Life had been on resentful pause for six months following the collapse of the first trial due to the non-attendance at court of shooting victim and Daniel gang associate Ross Sherlock. When the second trial finally began at Glasgow’s High Court in June 2017, I was again first up and Crown prosecutor Richard Goddard, moving at a quick pace, zipped through my account of the festive morning when the bogus postman came calling with a bottle of sulphuric acid. The same formulaic process followed. Point at William ‘Basil’ Burns in the dock. Examine items of evidence, including knife, acid bottle, Royal Mail jacket and bag. Describe photos of the scene as they appeared on big screens. When a gruesome image of my wounded feet was displayed for all to see, I grimaced. Poor jurors. ‘Not your best side,’ deadpanned the prosecutor. As before, I described my injuries, but this time just happened to recall that a small amount of acid splashed into my mouth, causing me to seek dental treatment days after the attack.
I steeled myself for another bout of verbal sparring with Thomas Ross, the lawyer hired to get Burns off the hook. The only positive from a re-match was the diminished likelihood of being ambushed. Gone was the initial shock-value as Ross served up the reheated defence centred on a fictional blackmail plot. While the accusations were just as nasty, they no longer had the sharp edge of surprise.
Ross also challenged the ‘Wee Jamie sends his regards’ comment muttered by Burns while being led away by police and suggested that I had orchestrated my neighbours’ recollections of this being said. When I attempted to say that the ‘Wee Jamie’ comment was actually a red herring designed to throw me off the trail of the real puppet-master who paid Burns, I was steered back on track. The court was not interested in what facts I had since established and expected me to stay rigidly within the parameters of first-hand events.
During the first trial I had been asked by Ross about my 2006 phone call to Burns. In the second trial, the lawyer returned to the subject. On this occasion I was ready. I again admitted calling his client but this time explained why – Burns was in prison and I wanted to prove that he had an illicit mobile. I elaborated further, stating that the call featured in a Sunday Mail report about Frankie ‘Donuts’ Donaldson being vulnerable to gangland vultures due to the murder of his henchman George ‘Goofy’ Docherty and the long-term incarceration of Burns. However, my telling of this relevant and simple truth – that Burns had been in prison – was deemed unacceptable, possibly even unfair, to the grey man in the dock, and the jury was instructed to ignore it. The court wanted me to admit calling Burns but with no other context. By doing so, it would allow the defence to peddle the nonsense that my call was some kind of shakedown, an attempt to squeeze information from him against his will. This would then feed the bigger lie that I phoned Burns the night before the acid attack and threatened to blackmail him unless he told me about a particular murder.
Ross also put it to me that only Burns and I could know what had been said during the prison phone call 11 years earlier. Not so, I replied. Ross presumably did not expect me to reveal that I had retained the digital recording of the brief conversation which proved every single word of my version to be true. One imagines that in a US TV courtroom drama this would have elicited booms of ‘Objection!’ and heated debate about whether the tape could be introduced as evidence. But at the High Court it was as if I were speaking to myself and we ambled forwards without pause.
Prior to giving evidence, I had not learned the identity of the presiding judge and only afterwards discovered him to be Lord Matthews. The name rang a bell. I realised that I had written about him just a month before the acid attack. My light-hearted story told how he had accused police officers of being ‘disrespectful’ in their slovenly attire while giving evidence, with one being compared to Prohibition-era Chicago gangster Al Capone. While I was confident that the judge would not be unduly ruffled by our prior connection, thank goodness I had not turned up in a chalk-stripe suit and fedora.
The following day I scanned coverage of the trial on the BBC News website. With pleasing happenstance, the court report was placed immediately beside news of Donaldson’s long overdue imprisonment for the campaign of violence and terror against Jane Clarke and her sister. The significance of this coincidence was understood by a handful of friends, journalist colleagues and, presumably, underworld inhabitants.
By day four of the trial, proceedings had reached the same point as day ten of the first one when they had come to an abrupt halt due to the AWOL Sherlock, who claimed to have fled Glasgow for London, apparently because the Lyons mob kept trying to shoot him. For his no-show, Sherlock was sent to prison. He argued that he should get bail but the Crown was having none of it. After his first disappearing act, there was no chance of them taking a risk. As it turned out, keeping him behind bars to guarantee his attendance almost backfired. Veteran Daily Record reporter Paul O’Hare revealed that Sherlock was slashed in the neck with a makeshift plastic blade following attendance at a church service inside Low Moss prison. According to gangland pundits, it was the sixth attempt on his life.
Sherlock’s previous failure to turn up illustrated that he was completely unconcerned about justice being done and had absolutely no intention of implicating Burns. During his forced testimony, to no one’s surprise, he crucially failed to identify Burns as the primary school shooter and neither, indeed, did any other Crown witness. As a consequence and also to no one’s surprise – other than perhaps the Crown’s – the judge ruled there was insufficient evidence to convict either Burns or Porter for the shooting, so they were duly acquitted.
Therefore, after 18 months of oppressive legal tedium and inaction, we were back to square one. It gave me no satisfaction to see the charge dropped but it supported my belief that running the acid attack and school shooting trials in tandem was cynical, opportunistic and destined to be fruitless. If anything, it put the acid attack prosecution at risk of failure by dragging out proceedings and forcing Burns and his lawyer to cook up their wild defence, which they might not have done had they faced the single acid attack charge – one to which they could have discreetly wangled a favourable guilty plea deal.
There were two questions I kept asking myself. Why did the Crown not prosecute Burns for the acid attack alone, given his overwhelmingly obvious guilt? Why risk jeopardising that slam-dunk conviction by hitching it to a seedy Daniel versus Lyons gangland shooting for which there was virtually zero evidence? As I put it in my plea to the Lord Advocate following the collapse of the first trial: ‘The non-attendance of Mr Sherlock in itself should be reason enough to prosecute my crime separately, and to do so timeously.’
Burns, a veteran of lying under oath in his own defence, was up next. I braced myself. He did not disappoint, and it was perhaps a blessing that I was not present as I would have caused a distraction either by uncontrollable chuckling or steam coming from my ears.
Burns began by telling the jurors that I was ‘incapable of telling the truth about anything’ before he spun them a very carefully constructed web of lies. As anticipated, he claimed that I had phoned him the night before the attack to demand information about a murder victim, with me threatening to share compromising photos of him with ‘a young blonde woman’. According to his script, Burns then signed off with a threat to pay me a visit – to which I laughingly responded that he did not know where I lived. Undeterred, Burns claimed he left Paisley at 7 a.m., took two buses to the west end of Glasgow and then walked along random streets hunting for my car. Miraculously, he discovered it on the fourth street he tried. What are the chances?
He also had an explanation for his unorthodox Royal Mail garb. The postman’s uniform was worn in order to disguise himself from me as I knew what he looked like – e
ven though I did not. As the yarn continued, it did not get any less bold. Burns claimed that he barged through my front door with the intention of assaulting me but, from the shadows, a mystery man appeared and knocked him unconscious. When Burns came round, I was on top of him with a knife levelled at his throat. With a straight face, he told the jurors, ‘Russell Findlay was scraping a knife across my face. He said, “Don’t fucking move, Basil boy, or you’re getting it right through your neck.”’ I then stabbed his chin, hence the four stitches he received – although that injury was actually caused by me punching him. With a dash of mystery, he added, ‘I think they were waiting for me.’ The ‘Wee Jamie sends his regards’ comment was denied by Burns. He explained that this was not the kind of fancy talk used on the mean streets of Paisley. This was labelled the ‘Ferguslie Park defence’ by one bemused observer.
Then came his climactic pièce de résistance. Bidding a final farewell to the last shred of his reputation as one of Scotland’s most feared underworld hitmen, Burns denied throwing the sulphuric acid in my face. Therefore I must have done so myself. Goddard said, ‘What you are saying is absolutely preposterous’ – to which Burns mumbled, ‘No it’s not.’
In his closing speech, Ross told the jurors to be wary of my evidence, saying, ‘He said that acid actually went into his mouth. That was a barefaced lie. A doctor who examined him checked his mouth and said there was zero evidence of damage.’
When I read these words, I was outraged. Medical evidence of the acid going into my mouth was available to the police and the prosecution. My dental appointment to examine the acid damage to the enamel on my teeth was a matter of indisputable record. The prosecution had not led this evidence, simply because it was not considered to be of any great significance. But the innocent omission of it from the prosecution case most certainly did not prove, as Ross contested, that I had told a ‘barefaced lie’.
Another claim Ross made during his closing speech caused me to bristle. He said, ‘Mr Findlay is a journalist and an author and is likely making money out of this.’ Did I understand that correctly? A dangerous criminal had invaded my family home in order to maim or kill me, yet his lawyer was suggesting that this was actually a golden opportunity for me to make a quick buck.
A quick scan of the accounts of the Scottish Legal Aid Board told me that only one person was getting rich on the back of this crime, and it certainly was not me. Over the last five-year period, Ross received £932,000 for representing accused criminals. The most recently available accounts state that he relieved £239,000 from taxpayers in a single year (almost enough to pay the salaries of ten new police officers). I later established that Ross received more than £19,000 to defend Burns. The cost to the public purse is another reminder of the reality of legal aid largesse, despite the profession’s incessant protestations to the contrary.
After just over three weeks, the trial drew to a close on 26 June 2017. I had gone on holiday two days earlier, with the lies and smears crowding my thoughts. All I could do was hope that the good Glaswegian jurors did not believe in conspiracy theories.
30
DEAD GUILTY
The prisoner put on a suit and a shirt and tie before being handcuffed and escorted by guards into a high-security van for the short rush-hour commute to court. Then, as William ‘Basil’ Burns took his seat in the dock beside co-accused Alex Porter, the cuffs were removed, and by the time the jurors filed in for another day of civic duty he had become a study of unremarkable neutrality, a grey man who did not merit a second glance.
Human alchemy, from snarling Paisley gangster Basil who glories in amoral violence to Mr Burns, ‘the accused’ with a right of presumed innocence, took place every morning for three weeks. The jury of ten women and five men sat in respectful silence as the prosecution of Burns and Porter played out. It was simple truth versus towering lies. In the end, Burns could drop his act. The game was up. Not a single juror was taken in by his practised routine, his ludicrous testimony of fictitious blackmail plots or his defence lawyer’s calculated tactic of smearing me, the innocent victim.
Once the jury delivered their unanimous guilty verdict, Burns could stop pretending, regress to his persona of Basil, go back to jail and remove his crumpled suit. It would be another month before Lord Matthews was ready to pass sentence.
It took the criminal justice system 18 months to arrive at this point, for Burns to be convicted of throwing sulphuric acid in my face ‘to the endangerment’ of my life. A great deal of time, huge financial cost and immeasurable disruption to many people’s lives, in order to secure this, the easiest of convictions – of a ludicrous hitman in fancy dress caught red-handed at the scene of the crime. No wonder the Crown Office flaps, flails and surrenders in the pursuit of cases considered complex or challenging. When I heard the outcome, the sensation of relief was overwhelming. Logic told me that the jury could not possibly be hoodwinked, but at the back of my mind had been a tiny, incessant whisper of uneasy doubt.
While I viewed his co-accused Porter as being equally guilty, the evidence was so thin I was unsurprised when he walked free, his charges not proven. Prior to the second trial I had established that Porter had obtained from an unwitting Paisley postie the Royal Mail uniform used by Burns. He also acquired the steak knife which carried his DNA. Police found five out of a set of six in his partner’s home. I was certain Porter was the getaway driver and fully cognisant of the dark nature of the mission to my home. When he was found dead 12 days later, I shrugged. It was suggested that Porter took his own life because he could no longer cope with the unbearable pressure to say and do what was ordered by his crime masters.
It was just before noon in Scotland when the verdict came and I was on holiday in Tokyo, where it was nearing 8 p.m. During the evening and into the night I remained wide-eyed in the darkness as a slew of messages arrived from daytime Scotland, travelling over 9,000 miles in a digital heartbeat. I mischievously tweeted a cartoon I had drawn of a ruddy-faced lawyer, a puppet of organised crime, studying a book titled Fairy Tales for Defence Spivs.
Reports of the outcome generated a fresh deluge of goodwill and voices from the past, just as had happened when news of the attack first circulated.
The police released a mugshot of Burns. He should be grateful they withheld the photo taken after his arrest when his face was battered, bruised, swollen and stitched. Detective Sergeant Craig Warren issued a statement, describing Burns as a ‘career criminal’ with links to serious organised crime. He added, ‘This was a vicious assault which took place in broad daylight, and shows the sheer contempt that he had for Mr Findlay and his young daughter.’
If any of the jurors had any lingering doubt about their decision, they would surely have been dispelled when they heard Burns’s sordid record, not least shooting an innocent woman during an armed robbery and the theft of a birthday cake at gunpoint. They would not have been told about his acquittal for the 1994 gun murder of 23-year-old Raymond McCafferty in Carnwadric, Glasgow – the £2,000 hit that sealed his reputation as a go-to thug for hire.
Also passing unnoticed was the interesting alibi Burns had come up with for the shooting of Ross Sherlock. At the moment Sherlock was gunned down outside a primary school, Burns claimed he was working at sprawling tyre-recycling plant Guinea Enviro in Glasgow’s Maryhill. Two years previously, I had investigated this business and found that it was run by gangster Steven Scott, who had just served time for gun possession. The published story stated that Scott had links to a ‘multi-millionaire Mr Big’. What could not be stated was that Scott’s mystery associate was gangland’s bad penny, Frankie ‘Donuts’ Donaldson. Donaldson’s name had been omitted from my newspaper story because of the contempt of court law which inadvertently shielded him while he spent years churning his domestic violence case.
The acid attack verdict came during an explosive revival of the long-running feud between the Daniel and Lyons families, with their various fluid factions and offshoots reaching out from nor
th Glasgow housing estates to communities across the country, from Greenock in the west and Edinburgh in the east. The most recent re-ignition happened in January 2017, when the Lyons clan member Ross Monaghan was shot outside a south Glasgow primary school. This became the first of seven high-profile attacks that year, although many more went unreported by the newspapers.
The following month, the home of Francis ‘Fraggle’ Green, a son of late crime boss Jamie Daniel, was hit with gunfire. Soon after came the blade attack on Sherlock while he was leaving a prison chapel.
Within a few more weeks, another senior Daniel figure was targeted in a drive-by shooting. Robert Daniel was in a car outside his home in Stepps, near Glasgow, when a volley of shots was unleashed from a vehicle. He was hit but survived.
Next was Steven ‘Bonzo’ Daniel, who was driving a discreet private hire taxi, which was chased at high speed by two other vehicles, then rammed off the road. So severe were the subsequent knife wounds to Bonzo’s face that his teeth and jawbone were exposed and the police initially mistook his injuries for a shooting.
It was then the turn of Craig ‘Rob Roy’ Gallagher, who has flipped between both sides and who I had first unmasked five years earlier. Gallagher was a partner in crime of Daniel enforcer Kevin ‘Gerbil’ Carroll – his ‘alien abduction’ sidekick – and he was arrested, albeit not prosecuted, for his murder. In July 2017 Gallagher was stabbed and tortured and, somehow, ended up being set on fire before managing to flee from a disused house in New Stevenston, Lanarkshire. It is unclear whether his captors torched him or whether he did it himself.
The most recent reported incident in this fresh bloodletting had a direct connection to Burns. As the suspected shooter of Sherlock, Burns was a prominent name on the Daniels’ hit list. While in prison, Jamie Daniel Jr, a brother of Robert Daniel, had been trying to elicit information about Burns – where he was, who could get close to him, how best he could be harmed – but he must have asked the wrong people. The result of Jamie Jr’s clumsy intelligence gathering efforts was that the tables were turned and he became the target. A Lyons mob thug is one of four men considered responsible for the subsequent, non-fatal blade attack on Jamie Jr, who was stabbed and slashed in Milton, Glasgow.
Acid Attack Page 21