Gangland UK

by Christopher Berry-Dee

  The Crown’s case was that Campbell was a man with a record of violence, having already served several years in prison in the 1970s, and having been back behind bars from 1982 to 1983. Upon his release, he had entered the ice cream van business, and had been keen to protect his ‘patch’ against the rival Marchetti family. Steele was Campbell’s henchman, a sidekick recruited to help with the dirty work in his boss’s campaign of violence against Marchetti’s vans and drivers.

  Campbell had been brought up in a cramped flat in Glasgow’s Cowcaddens during the 1950s. The youngest of ten children, his father was a safe-breaker. When the family moved to Carntyne, he soon became embroiled in the gang warfare that characterised Glasgow in the 1960s. Like everyone else, he carried a knife and he was never slow in using it. He was first stabbed when he was 13 and, aged 17, he was hit over the head three times by someone wielding a hammer. People who witnessed the attack thought they were watching a murder.

  Both men claimed that the police had fitted them up. Campbell said that he had been at home with his wife, Liz, when the fire broke out. There wasn’t really any dispute about this, nevertheless the Crown maintained that, in any event, Campbell was the mastermind behind the arson attack. Steele also gave an alibi for the time in question and, in 1989, they tried unsuccessfully to have their conviction overturned.

  It was the evidence given by one William Love which was crucial to the case. Love had told police that he had overheard Campbell and Steele, and others, discussing in a bar how they would teach Fat Boy a lesson by setting fire to his house. But Love was no Mr Goody Two-Shoes. He was a known criminal who was facing ten years for armed robbery and who had three times previously perverted the course of justice.

  The police also stated that Campbell had made a statement, recorded by no less than four officers, that ‘I only wanted the van windows shot up. The fire at Fat Boy’s was only meant to be a frightener which went too far.’

  The third piece of evidence was a map, allegedly found in Campbell’s house, of the Ruchazie district with the Doyle house marked with an ‘X’.

  In 1992, two journalists, Douglas Skelton and Lisa Brownlie, wrote a book, Frightener, about the conflicts and the trial. They interviewed Love, who later signed affidavits attesting that he had lied under oath ‘for my own selfish purposes’, and because the police had pressurised him.

  As a result, both Campbell and Steele engaged in campaigns of protest to attempt to publicise their cases. Steele escaped from prison several times, in order to make high-profile demonstrations, including a rooftop protest and supergluing himself to the railings at Buckingham Palace. Campbell protested while remaining in Barlinnie Prison, going on hunger strike, refusing to cut his hair and making a documentary.

  On Saturday, 27 April 2002, while both men were on bail pending an appeal, Campbell was seriously stabbed while he visited a community centre in Hallhill Road, not far from his home. One of the two assailants was also stabbed with a fish knife during the attack. Campbell was allowed home after treatment at Glasgow’s Royal Infirmary.

  A week earlier, in what DS Allan McFadyen described as a linked attack, Tam McGraw had been stabbed on Friday, 19 April. He survived because he had been wearing a bullet-proof vest. He received 20 blows, but suffered only minor injuries to his arms and wrists and slightly more serious wounds to his buttocks.

  In March 2004, Campbell and Steele’s convictions were quashed by the Court of Criminal Appeal in Edinburgh.

  Campbell called for a fresh investigation into the murder of the Doyle family, accusing Tam McGraw both of the murders and also of instigating a campaign over 20 years to ensure that Campbell remained in jail and was silenced, with several attempts being made on his life.

  While Campbell and Steele were locked away, McGraw continued to sell ice cream by day, while at night he formed and led the infamous Barlanark Team, a gang of robbers who wrought havoc in central Scotland for some fifteen years. Their exploits were both daring and comical, but when police discovered that hash was being hidden in buses taking young footballers and deprived Glasgow families on free holidays abroad, McGraw was put under surveillance for two years.

  With his Bar-I gang, McGraw was involved in post office raids all over Scotland. The raids were so successful that the police ran a national campaign trying to catch them. After every job, the proceeds were hidden and collected at a later date, which meant if they were pulled over on their way back from a raid by the cops, none of their haul would be found on them.

  The gang were very security conscious, taking a lot of pride in planning the operations with almost military precision, yet, despite all of their meticulous preparations, all of the gang members were arrested and charged at one time or another. In one particular nighttime raid on a large social club on the outskirts of Glasgow, things went disastrously wrong. A recce of the club’s security system failed to register an important element of the layout; once the outer alarm systems had been dismantled and the pulsar neutralised for entry to the internal system, the entire area surrounding the club would light up with heavy-duty spotlights, illuminating the general surroundings like the stage of a West End theatre. This was an add-on to the particular system the normally efficient gangsters hadn’t foreseen.

  The job took place as planned. When the spotlights fired up, instead of abandoning the job, the crew decided to take hurried measures to counteract the lighting system for long enough to get in and out with the goods.

  The spotlights on the ground were adjusted to point face down on to the grass, while the ones on the roof were tilted down to focus on the tar and asphalt surface of the roof. With the surroundings now in darkness, the gang continued with the job in hand, relieving the club of all takings, alcohol and cigarettes.

  While the team were busy loading up the vans with the swag, a crackling and popping sound could be heard from the roof.

  ‘Fuck’s sake… Fire!’

  The high-powered spotlights had set fire to the asphalt and the whole roof was ablaze, lighting up the area once again, brighter than before. Everyone ran, just as the blue lights of the fire brigade and police could be seen in the distance. However, despite several of the men shouting at McGraw to run for it, he stayed and kept loading the van.

  It was insane. Greed had kept him there, as he tried to get a few more crates of booze on board before the police arrived. But too late. Graw, in the van, smashed straight through a police car, ramming it against an iron fence. He accelerated to about 80mph and hit another police vehicle that had blocked his way back to the street. He then lost control and overturned the van while trying to negotiate a sharp bend. He half-crawled, half-ran from the scene but was soon captured.

  This crazy incident throws some light on the reason why McGraw is now suspected by many of Glasgow’s underworld fraternity as being a police informer, giving information on fellow crooks in exchange for a green light to operate his own illegal activities almost unhindered by police investigations. He was a very wealthy man, even back then, and he knew that he wouldn’t be charged even if caught red-handed, as he indeed was. He should have been charged with conspiracy and organised crime, theft of the van, driving while banned, breaking and entering, and attempted murder of police officers. But he wasn’t. The following morning, he walked free without the case ever going to court.

  In 1978, McGraw was arrested for the attempted murder of another policeman. Again, he wasn’t charged. McGraw himself publicly pointed to the general state of lawlessness in Glasgow at the time, but refused to accept the status that many afforded him – that of being one of Glasgow’s foremost gang bosses. ‘Glasgow’s a town called Malice. Everybody’s jealous of everybody else. Nobody likes to see that you are getting on in Glasgow. I’m not one of the controlling influences in the city. I don’t think there’s anyone capable of running this city. I’m not frightened of anybody, but then they aren’t frightened of me.’

  In the early 1980s, McGraw started expanding his empire, getting into drugs and b
uying up pubs and other property. He was now openly bragging to his associates about his connections on the police force and of one of the cops on his payroll. That’s how McGraw came by the nickname ‘The Licensee’, as it seemed to be the case that he had been granted a licence to operate freely by the cops. According to Paul Ferris, another top Glasgow crime figure, and a rival to McGraw at the time, it had been these cop connections that had got him involved in the lucrative heroin trade.

  Confiscated drugs were channelled through to McGraw who sold them on. McGraw, at that time, being unfamiliar with the intricacies of the heroin supply business, stupidly sold almost 100 per cent pure heroin directly to the junkies on the streets, who, as a result of over-dosing, were dropping dead like flies.

  The drugs trail led from Morocco, through Gibraltar, Spain and Paris to the less salubrious surroundings of a Glasgow garage next to a police depot. The racket netted £40 million, and it was claimed that McGraw was the financier, mastermind and director. But, in 1998, a jury declared him innocent, while other suspects were jailed.

  Paul Ferris wrote the book The Ferris Conspiracy partly as a way of getting revenge on the City of Glasgow police, whom Ferris claims had waged a war of harassment against him for years and had fitted him up on several occasions. Ferris tells how, in his opinion, the force was full of cops getting envelopes stuffed with cash from a chosen few to turn a blind eye.

  Worth an estimated £10 million, Tam McGraw died of a heart-attack at his Mount Vernon home at 3.00pm, Monday, 30 July 2007.

  Paul Ferris

  Born 1963, Paul John Ferris was raised in the working-class, north-east Glasgow district of Blackhill, which had been developed as a council estate in the 1930s. Most of it was designated ‘rehousing’, the lowest grade of council housing intended for those families cleared from Glasgow’s 19th-century slums at Garngad, a place where a heavy cloud of polluted air perpetually hung over the place from the many heavy industrial works in the area, such as St Rollox Chemical Works and the Tharsis Sulphur & Copper Works.

  Garngad became heavily industrialised in the 19th century, with the establishment of flax and cotton mills, iron and chemical and railway works. The tenements that were hurriedly built to house incoming workers were of poor quality, with only outside toilets, leading to overcrowding and insanitary conditions. Diseases such as tuberculosis were rife, and the Garngad slums were regarded as some of the worst in Europe. Crime was rife, and the area was the scene of one of Glasgow Corporation’s earliest major slum clearance programmes, beginning in 1933. Many of the residents moved to the new scheme in nearby Blackhill, where the buildings were three-storey, slate-roofed tenements constructed from reclaimed stone, and nearby was a gasworks and a distillery. The fact that Barlinnie Prison was a stone’s throw away did not do much to enhance the area at all.

  Ferris was the youngest of four children, with one older brother, Billy, and two sisters, Carol and Cath, sired by a Protestant father and a Catholic mother. As a child, Paul Ferris was bullied for several years by members of a local criminal family called the Welshes and, in 1977, Billy stabbed a man to death in a pub fight and was convicted of murder.

  Like Tam McGraw, Ferris began his life of crime as a teenager with a series of revenge knife attacks on the Welshes. Aged 17, he was arrested for assault and robbery and sent to Longriggend Remand Centre. He was bailed after several weeks and, while awaiting trial, fled from the police after a car chase, having every good reason to do so – the car contained a shotgun and knives. After several weeks on the run, he was captured and returned to Longriggend to await his trial, which culminated in him being sentenced to three months in Glenochil Detention Centre at Tullibody.

  Upon his release, Ferris returned to court to face charges relating to the car chase, and was sentenced to a year in Glenochil Young Offenders Institution. Shortly after his release, he was again in serious trouble, having been arrested while attempting to rob a jeweller’s shop, and returned to Longriggend. But prison did nothing to deter this young man from a life of crime; in fact, if the truth were known, life behind bars merely served to stiffen his resolve. Upon his release, he continued to exact his revenge on the Welsh brothers, which brought him to the attention of the Glasgow gang supremo, Arthur Thompson, aka ‘The Godfather’.

  According to Ferris, he became involved with Thompson’s crime business when aged 19. He collected debts on behalf of the crime lord, and was linked to stabbings, slashings, blindings and knee-cappings.

  In 1983, Ferris was arrested following an incident in which shots were fired at one Willie Gibson and three of his relatives while they travelled home from a night in a pub. Gibson’s father-in-law sustained a bullet wound to his thigh. The three relatives failed to identify Ferris at an identity parade, but Gibson picked him out as the gunman. He was charged with four counts of attempted murder, and was again remanded to Longriggend. Several months later, he was acquitted of all charges, with the Scottish verdict of ‘not proven’.

  Now aged 21, Ferris returned to the employment of Thompson, and was soon arrested again and charged with possession of offensive weapons after a pickaxe handle and knives were found in his car. While he awaited his trial, he was involved in a stabbing, and fled to Thompson’s holiday home in Rothesay on the Isle of Bute. But the police were hot on his trail. Within a day, he was arrested by armed police and charged with various offences, including attempted murder and possession of heroin with intent to supply. This time, he was remanded to HMP Barlinnie, with a panoramic view over his former Blackhill council estate.

  Once again, Lady Luck favoured Paul Ferris. The attempted murder charge was almost immediately dropped, but he did receive a paltry 18-month sentence for possession of offensive weapons.

  After being released from prison, it seemed that Ferris might have turned over a new leaf. He stopped working for Thompson and started a company named Cottage Conservatories specialising in double-glazing and conservatories, although he still remained active in the criminal underworld.

  On Sunday, 18 August 1991, Thompson’s son, Arthur Fat Boy Jr, died after being shot outside his home. Ferris was arrested and charged with murder. On the day of Fat Boy’s funeral, the cortège passed a car containing the bodies of two friends of Ferris’s – Robert Glover and Joe ‘Bananas’ Hanlon, who were also suspected of involvement in his death, and had been killed by gunshots to the head.

  Ferris stood trial in 1992. The charges against him were: the murder of Arthur Thompson Jr, with the help of Glover and Hanlon; the attempted murder of Arthur Thompson Sr by repeatedly driving a car at him in May 1990; threatening to murder William Gillen, and shooting him in the legs; conspiracy to assault John ‘Jonah’ Mackenzie on 26 Mar 1991; illegal possession of a firearm; supplying heroin, cocaine and Ecstasy; and the trivial breach of bail.

  With over 300 witnesses, the trial lasted 54 days and cost £4 million, at the time the longest and most expensive trial in Scottish legal history. Ferris was acquitted of all charges.

  According to Paul Ferris’s book, he returned to Glasgow and set up a car dealership named Jagger Autos. He also became a consultant for a security firm called Premier Security, which had a reported turnover of £6.2 million. Still he maintained his contacts with the underworld, including Paul Massey and Rab Carruthers in Salford in the north of England.

  Salford was once the fiefdom of Paul Massey, also known as Salford’s ‘Mr Big’, whose security company once held a monopoly on the doors of Manchester’s biggest and best-known clubs. He was jailed for 14 years in April 1999, for stabbing a man outside a nightclub. Rab Carruthers was a ruthless Glasgow-born drug-dealer who ran a crime empire in Manchester.

  In 1963, Ferris’s brother, Billy, escaped from a prison escort van after being allowed temporary release to visit his sick father, becoming one of the six most wanted men in Britain until being recaptured in Blackpool. In August 1994, Ferris received a £250 fine for possession of crack cocaine, and thereafter it appears he was frequently in trouble. />
  In 1997, Ferris was arrested in London following a two-year surveillance operation by MI5 and Special Branch. At his trial at the Old Bailey in July 1998, he was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment after being convicted of conspiracy to sell or transfer prohibited weapons, conspiracy to deal in firearms and possessing explosives. In May 1999, the sentence was later reduced to seven years at the Court of Appeal in London.

  While in prison, Ferris co-authored his biography The Ferris Conspiracy with Reg McKay, a widely-published investigative journalist and regular crime columnist for the Daily Record. The book sold 20,000 copies.

  Ferris was released from Frankland Prison, County Durham, in January 2002, pledging to give up his life of crime, and released another book with McKay; this time a novel called Deadly Divisions, in April 2002. However, in May of the same year, he was sent back to prison for breaching the terms of his parole. He had been in a knife fight with Tam McGraw, and there was an alleged connection with a £900,000 shipment of cannabis. Ferris was released again in June 2002, and returned to Scotland, where he started a new security company named Frontline Security.

  In December 2003, his brother, Billy, was convicted for a second time. He had been released in 1999 after serving 22 years of a life sentence but he was convicted of the February 2003 murder of a 15-year-old boy, after mistaking him for the older boy’s brother who had assaulted Billy’s wife.

  In 2004, Frontline Security was criticised when it was revealed the company was guarding the Rosepark Nursing Home, Uddingston, near Glasgow, where ten pensioners had died in a fire, and several more suffered from smoke inhalation, three of them critically, which started on Saturday, 31 January. Relatives demanded to know how it was that a company linked to Ferris had been awarded the security contract.