by Wilson, Jim
It was a mob of English boys led by Blink who was capable and had a reputation for slashing people, sometimes they would be near enough scalped. Him and his pals just steamed in which was a pretty bold thing to do given the McGoverns’ reputation at that point. There was a construction site on the street and everyone was grabbing scaffolding poles or anything else that would make a weapon before the blue lights and the sirens put an end to it.
Blink also owned The Talisman pub in Springburn around that time so I think there were ongoing issues about territory as well as personality.
Murders and pitched battles aside, these weekend sessions were a way for the McGovern crew to unwind, much like any other professionals. They regarded themselves as businessmen and anyone looking at their turnover and profit might understand why. While they were clubbing with the beautiful people, just a few miles north and east in the grey housing schemes, they were still earning as tenner bag after tenner bag of poor-quality, heavily cut heroin was injected into yet another arm, leg or groin. Every day or so, the papers would report another drugs death at a time when fatal overdoses were still rare enough to be newsworthy.
In the first half of the 1990s, the McGoverns spread out of Springburn, much like any successful small company expanding into new territories after taking over its home patch. A former detective said:
At this point, they were putting all of their money into drugs. They were spreading from Springburn into areas like Roystonhill, Sighthill and Balornock and the Garngad. Their recruits in these areas were also well capable of violence. They would be the local faces and would become almost like agents or franchisees of McGovern Drugs Plc. Tommy had moved to Maryhill around then and made contacts with some of the older teams. They had piles of cash and what did cash buy them? Heroin. The profits in heroin at that time were huge.
The McGoverns were gradually taking over the schemes and they realised that, once you did that, the money would start pouring in. They also realised that they were good places to operate in because the police found it so difficult to get information from them.
The platform that allowed the McGoverns to make the leap from bossing their own backyard to taking over the heroin trade in the surrounding housing schemes was built on the logistics of the drugs supply chain. Just as the countries that control oil and gas often wield disproportionate global power, so the McGoverns’ new-found heroin supplies from the well-organised Liverpool-based smuggling gangs propelled them into the big league. From pinching wallets to dipping tills and dabbling in drugs, the boys had become serious and organised criminals. Life was to get altogether more serious.
8
Long Live the Kings
His lawyer Sir Nicholas Fairbairn once called him ‘the coolest Godfather Glasgow has ever seen’. He was, according to the flamboyant QC who defended him on a number of occasions, ‘smooth, silken, slow and deadly’. Fairbairn continued:
He had eyes like a cod. He never blinked and he never stopped licking his lips. He had a very spine-chilling presence. Of all the gangsters I have met, he was the most frightening, the most threatening. He was also one of the most mannerly clients I have ever had.
The minister leading the hundreds of mourners at Arthur Thompson’s funeral in March 1993 was slightly less fulsome than the flamboyant Queen’s Counsel. Thompson, he told the congregation gathered in the chill wind and rain at the gangster’s graveside, was a man to whom dignity and pride were important. His widow Rita – once herself jailed for stabbing another wife, from another gang – had to be held back as she tried to hurl herself towards the open lair. But, apart from her hysterical sorrow and the huge floral wreaths spelling out Arthur, Darling, Papa and Pal, there was little overt grief among those assembled. One who was there remembers:
It was meant to be this old-school send-off for an old-school criminal – like the Krays and their black-plumed horses and all that rubbish. His funeral might have been a bit bigger but it was really no different to any other gangster’s – a lot of guys in cheap suits and scars. Most of them only turned up to make sure the old bastard was really dead.
The need for witnesses to Thompson’s certain demise was understandable given the Godfather’s charmed life up until that point. He had survived three known attempts to kill him only to die of cardiac failure, aged sixty-two, in bed around the corner from the cemetery where he was buried. He died at home, the infamous Ponderosa in Provanmill Road, where a row of terraced houses had been knocked through, extended and stone clad and seemed, like him, to belong to an earlier era. But that era was certainly not a more innocent time. The loan-sharking, robbing, gun-wielding Thompson was as vicious as any of the gangsters who followed him. And he knew about drugs, the business and its consequences. His daughter Margaret had died of an overdose in 1989, a death reputedly blamed on her drug-dealing boyfriend of the time, Gerry Carbin Snr. His own son, Arthur Jnr, was jailed for eight years for dealing and would be gunned down on weekend leave from prison in 1991.
The gangster’s death may not, as his eulogists suggested, have marked the end of an era. But it coincided with a new age of criminality as a tidal wave of hard drugs broke over the schemes of Scotland and left thousands of shattered lives in its wake. The scale of the fortunes to be made as the heroin trade pushed into new markets would have been unimaginable even to Thompson. The gangsters who followed him did not even pay lip service to the old-school hokum of dignity, pride and honour among thieves. They were too busy making money.
By 1993, a decade or so since the drug had first appeared in the schemes of Glasgow, Aberdeen and Dundee, heroin use had spread alarmingly. Abuse and addiction were reaching new markets far from the inner city housing estates. Young clubbers, who would have never touched smack ten years before, were smoking the drug – ‘chasing the dragon to come down from Ecstasy and speed. No neighbourhood was a safe haven from it and no family was immune as heroin use soared. The problem persisted in Glasgow but Grampian was suddenly showing the highest official rate of addiction. Government statistics, published in 1997, suggested 57 per cent of drug users admitted taking heroin, compared to 45 per cent in 1995. It was in 1995 that Strathclyde Police confirmed a record 103 drug deaths, most related to heroin, with the annual death toll regularly reaching three figures throughout the decade. The banning of the notorious ‘jellies’ – the gel-filled capsule form of sedative Temazepam – in 1996 did not seem to slow the death rate.
A confidential Scottish Office memo admitted in 1997 that heroin was now the main drug of 49 per cent of users compared to 29 per cent just twelve months earlier. The hugely successful black-marketing campaign waged by the dealers was detailed in a Home Office report the following year. It said that while the perception of heroin users in the 1970s was of hippies pursuing an alternative lifestyle and in the 1980s of society’s losers, by the 1990s dealers were deliberately targeting young people already taking softer, recreational drugs like cannabis and Ecstasy. It was no coincidence that these years saw the emergence of the ‘tenner bag’ of heroin, putting the drug on a par with the price of an Ecstasy tablet.
The Home Office researchers concluded:
The message of course is that heroin is no more expensive and little different from other recreational illicit drugs. The heroin outbreaks spreading across Britain are primarily a product of purposeful supplying and marketing. The precursor to this has been the strong, sustained availability of pure, inexpensive heroin primarily from south-west Asia.
There is little doubt that a second wave of new young heroin users is emerging. With 80 per cent of areas confidently identifying outbreaks within their communities and providing such a consistent picture and profile of new users, it is, unfortunately, reasonable to suggest that we are facing a second heroin epidemic.
In their Springburn stronghold, business had never been better for the McGovern family firm and its junior partner Jamie Stevenson.
9
High Life
All the pretty teenage barmaids were told to
make an extra effort that night by dressing as sexily as possible for the grand opening of Cafe Cini in the town of Greenock, a half-hour drive from Glasgow. It was the summer of 1999 and the onetime shipbuilding hub was buzzing with activity. The sun was shining and the visiting Tall Ships Race gave the rundown town a sophisticated feel-good glow.
That summer saw the arrival in the town of Cini which was the last word in cutting-edge cool with a waterfall cascading down behind the bar and as good a sound system as any London nightclub. The fridges were full of perfectly chilled champagne and cocktails were on the menu. The original Cini was already established in Glasgow city centre and it was a favoured haunt of the Rangers and Celtic footballers with signed jerseys hanging from the walls. One such item was a white Chelsea shirt bearing the autograph of Italian footballer Gianfranco Zola with his hand-written message ‘to all at Cafe Cini’. Years later, when the buzz of that opening night in Greenock had long faded, this shirt was one of many lots disposed of through a liquidation auction caused by the collapse of the pub chain. Many years later, in 2007, pub boss Jim Milligan was still trying to sell Glasgow’s Renfield Street building that houses Cini.
In the 1990s, fast-talking Milligan was on the way up. He owned these two sleek style bars and other less glamorous pubs in Glasgow’s Springburn area – Thomson’s and the New Morven. At least that is the impression that was given by the paperwork for parent company Jimmy Nick’s Properties Ltd which was lodged at Companies House. The people of Springburn knew that, no matter what such documents may have said, these were McGovern pubs.
In 1998, Thomson’s, the family’s pub-cum-HQ, was raided by police as part of a high-profile crackdown on the blatant peddling of drugs that the McGovern crew allowed to go on inside with impunity. The police action did not seem to hurt their business – neither the selling of drink nor their illegal trade in drugs.
Milligan’s business partner was Charlie Nicholas, a former Celtic, Arsenal and Scotland striker whose love of the bright lights of London clubland had earned him the nickname Champagne Charlie. There is nothing, however, to suggest that Nicholas knew of his business partner’s close relationship with the McGovern crime clan. He was known to take a back seat, allowing and trusting the more astute Milligan, who used to date one of Charlie’s female relatives, to get on with running their business. Nicholas, now a Sky Sports football pundit famous for his often-mangled commentary, did not attend the VIP opening night in Greenock.
Cocaine had, by now, entered the mainstream and was no longer a rich man’s drug. One Scottish celebrity’s headline-making enthusiasm for the drug did more than most to reveal coke’s ubiquity on the club scene. He was another ex-footballer of the Nicholas era, the former Celtic and West Ham striker Frank McAvennie. Later re-invented as a caricature of a ladies’ man thanks to a comedy impersonation by Jonathan Watson, McAvennie famously described the cocaine found during a police search as ‘a little bit of personal’. More seriously, Customs and Excise investigators seized £100,000 of McAvennie’s cash in 1995 and a judge agreed that the money was going to be used to finance drug smuggling despite the ex-footballer’s bizarre claim that the money was to fund a hunt for sunken treasure.
Milligan’s plan was to introduce the glamour of the London nightclubs frequented by the likes of McAvennie to Greenock. One ex-worker said:
All the best-looking young girls were hired and told to show off their legs and cleavages. This was to be the sexiest venue for miles around. The money that was spent at the new Cini was completely over the top. The waterfall alone cost an absolute fortune. Milligan was the boss and he would make frequent visits. Sometimes Charlie would be with him but not all the time.
It was a strange decision to pick Greenock but Jim and Charlie had spoken publicly about their ambitious five-year plan to open twenty pubs around the country. They had even registered the name Planet Football for a chain of themed restaurants but that never took off.
Milligan’s appreciation of a pretty pint-puller was revealed a decade later when it emerged that he was being chased for maintenance by a Cini barmaid who claimed he was the father of her child. The despairing mum even accused Milligan of trying to cheat responsibility by getting a pal to take the DNA paternity test.
On that late summer opening night in Greenock, Milligan welcomed the invited guests, most of whom had travelled west along the M8 from Glasgow. They included a young self-made business tycoon called David Moulsdale who had made his fortune through his nationwide chain of optician shops. Moulsdale, an entirely legitimate businessman, was a personal friend of the slightly older Tony McGovern who affectionately nicknamed him Noodles. In 2000, the Sunday Times Rich List estimated Moulsdale’s personal fortune at £100 million. It was no surprise that so many women fell at the feet of this multimillionaire and his gangland boss friend – money and power are eternal aphrodisiacs. At one point, Moulsdale got engaged to the daughter of an assistant chief constable but the relationship ended soon afterwards and the wedding was never to take place. One of his many ex-girlfriends was to later marry drug dealer Justin McAlroy who was shot dead in front of his wife at the age of twenty-eight in 2002.
Staff at Cini in Greenock were gradually beginning to realise that their exciting new workplace was not all that it seemed to be. One manager, later sacked for wrongly thinking the management’s stock of champagne was free, told workers in hushed tones that they should never speak about who owned Cini as secret microphones had been installed to monitor for disloyalty. This warning was either a wind-up or paranoia resulting from his enthusiasm for ‘a little bit of personal’.
As the sweep of stretch limos drew up outside the bustling venue, it soon became apparent what type of guests Cini would be welcoming for the opening night when admittance was strictly by invitation only – bulky men looking awkward in £1,000 Hugo Boss suits, scar-faced guys in their twenties wearing the softest of leather jackets and bleached-blonde women with hardened faces, who were squeezed into slinky size tens and wearing Prada shoes.
One worker said:
It was like an Oscars’ night entrance outside with all these guys and their girlfriends arriving as if they were Hollywood A-listers. But anyone could see them for what they really were – Glasgow gangsters with scars, tattoos and that constant look of being a split second away from turning violent. The men weren’t much better.
Another outwardly respectable figure at the centre of the McGovern circles in the 1990s was a maverick criminal lawyer called James McIntyre who is now a television scriptwriter. Wearing a gold stud earring, he revelled in his abrasive courtroom style and enjoyed antagonising the stuffy legal establishment. Even while studying to become a lawyer, McIntyre found himself on the wrong side of the criminal fence. He would sneak into people’s homes to steal their goods in order to help fund his student lifestyle and he has three convictions for housebreaking to his name from those days.
At an early stage in his legal career, McIntyre forged links with the McGoverns – some say this was through family connections. In 1993, he was stabbed in the leg and thigh at his office near to Glasgow Cross but he told the police that he could not tell them who had attacked him. In 1989, he was convicted of reckless driving while charges of attempting to murder a drugs squad officer at the same time were dropped. Every trainee lawyer knows the importance of maintaining a firm boundary between themselves and their clients but, for men like McIntyre, it seems that the glamorous lure of gangland was irresistible. There was money and excitement in abundance to be had acting as the on-call lawyer for one of the city’s rising organised crime gangs.
He was not the first lawyer to get in too deep and nor would he be the last. In 2006, female solicitor Angela Baillie ended up in jail after ferrying drugs to an organised crime gang in Barlinnie prison.
McIntyre’s own spectacular downfall was for guns not drugs and, when it came, those who knew how close he had got to the McGoverns were not surprised. However, he was not the gang’s solicitor. He appeared at th
e High Court in Glasgow in late 1997 in front of Lord Marnoch after police, armed with Heckler & Koch sub-machine guns, had stormed his home in the respectable small town of Linlithgow, West Lothian, in August 1996.
They recovered a pair of .22 pistols – one loaded – along with ammunition wrapped up in his pyjamas and stashed in his underwear drawer. It is not what a lawyer usually means when he says he is taking some work home with him.
Knowing that his career would be finished if convicted of possessing the weapons, McIntyre pleaded not guilty. He said a client had wanted him to hand them to police during a firearms amnesty but the jury did not believe him and he was sentenced to three years in prison and later struck off from practising as a lawyer. The judge told him, ‘You were, at some stage, in possession of these items in various public streets and, when the firearms were discovered, one of them was found to be loaded.’
What the judge and jury did not hear in evidence or from McIntyre were the details of who exactly he was looking after the guns for. The McGovern family made it known that McIntyre’s loyalty in not mentioning them would be well rewarded. The very least they could do was send a limo to the gates of Edinburgh’s Saughton Prison at the end of his sentence.
One former friend said:
McIntyre took the fall, did the time and not once did he turn on the family. He was eventually struck off from acting as a solicitor by the Law Society of Scotland and, if anyone’s qualified to write TV crime scripts, he is. There can’t be many people with such personal experience on all sides of the law.