by Wilson, Jim
A couple of years ago, they knew he was coming and going and would have done him on sight. They reckon they are owed £1 million of Tony’s money and there will be no room for negotiation. He was well trusted.
Following the company collapse, it was not just the McGoverns who were out of pocket. Brewery company Interbrew UK Ltd, later renamed Inbev, was owed £318,000 from two loans that it had made to Jimmy Nick’s in 1999 and 2000. The scrawled name of the person underwriting these loans was apparently that of Nicholas but he denied ever having signed them. Undeterred, the brewers attempted to freeze the Sky Sports TV pundit’s wages, forcing Champagne Charlie to go to court where he scored a pleasing victory.
Nicholas told the court that he had invested ‘about £60,000 or £70,000’ in Milligan’s business in the late 1980s when it bought its first pub but had no paperwork of any kind to prove this – no contract or agreement. Nicholas said he had previously been forced to raise legal action against his pal Milligan in the 1990s after discovering that the older man had forged his signature, personally guaranteeing a loan from another brewery. However, this ‘very unpleasant experience’ was not enough for Nicholas to end their personal and business relationship.
This time around, Nicholas again had to prove that he had not signed the two loan guarantees. His lawyer conjured up a written confession from fugitive Milligan in which he admitted faking his old business partner’s signature. Milligan said that he first signed his pal’s name during a meeting at a Glasgow law firm while Nicholas was distracted on the phone and a lawyer had briefly popped out of the room.
The second time, Milligan apparently told a lawyer that he would take the document through to another room for Nicholas to sign. He then claims to have signed it himself. Nicholas denied ever being at that meeting. Despite Milligan’s courtroom confessions of fraud, no prosecution was ever undertaken.
Milligan could not be cross-examined, explained Nicholas’s QC Heriot Currie, because he feared being arrested if he turned up and ‘there are also people who wish to find him whom he does not wish to be found by’.
The company’s accountant Richard Cleary told the court that, in the aftermath of the collapse, he feared for his own safety. ‘It was scary stuff,’ he said.
Not that Milligan was the only person surrounding the pub chain’s collapse who was to disappear. Lawyers for Inbev pointed out that the other people who they had been unable to find were Jimmy Nick’s company secretary Frank Boyle, a solicitor who had acted for Nicholas called Frank Collins and Nicholas’s personal accountant Jim Murphy.
Several months after hearing the evidence, Lord Menzies had come to a decision and he ruled in favour of Nicholas.
His written judgement said:
I am satisfied that, on the balance of probabilities, the pursuer was not the author of the two questioned signatures on the personal guarantees dated 20 January 1999 and 17 May 2000 and that these signatures are forgeries. Although strictly it is not necessary for me to express a view as to who was the author of these signatures, taking all the evidence together, I am of the view that it is probable that Mr Jim Milligan forged these signatures.
Interbev’s lawyers were ‘surprised and disappointed’. Nicholas no longer faced having his wages seized and Interbev would need to think again about how to get their money back.
The fact that Nicholas had any kind of contact with Milligan was enough to raise hackles in Springburn. One family associate said:
The McGoverns didn’t like the fact that Milligan could be traced and they had known nothing about it. The only good thing about it was that it kept Milligan’s face in the papers and reminded people that he was still a wanted man.
19
On the Run
Even as police investigating Tony McGovern’s murder sited a caravan outside the New Morven, hoping witnesses might wander in with case-breaking information, they knew the prime suspect was in the wind.
In the incident room at Baird Street police station, Stevenson had been recognised as their number one target for the gunning down of Tony McGovern within hours of his former friend’s clinical execution. For a very few days, some of the forty detectives working on the investigation looked at the possibility that his own brother Tommy might have ordered the hit, even if he had not pulled the trigger himself. But, although there had been a history of violent conflict between the brothers in the past, detectives knew this shooting was no family affair.
By the Tuesday, just three days after the murder, Stevenson was identified as the prime suspect in press reports. However, journalists were unable to reveal his name and, instead, used his nickname ‘The Iceman’ which, some say, dated from his time running ice-cream vans. He was also known as ‘The Bull’, but both nicknames had more currency in the media than in the tight circle of family, friends and associates that surrounded him. Certainly, The Iceman seemed most appropriate in the wake of the cold-blooded execution. The stories detailed his long criminal alliance with Tony McGovern, how his former friend had sided with his brothers against him and the bloody consequences.
As the Strathclyde force waited in vain for someone, anyone, to enter their caravan, Stevenson went on the run and murder squad detectives designated him a TIE – a suspect to be Traced, Interviewed and Eliminated.
A month after the murder, the caravan had yet to receive a single visitor. By this time, Detective Superintendent Jeanette Joyce, the officer initially in charge of the case, had been moved to lead her force’s complaints unit and Detective Superintendent Alex McAllister took charge.
Stevenson, meanwhile, stayed out of Scotland, first in a safe house in the Republic of Ireland that had been arranged by his friends in Belfast and then in Spain. He disappeared in the holiday resort of Fuengirola on the Costa del Sol, twenty minutes from Malaga airport where his old pal John ‘Piddy’ Gorman, an Ayrshire dealer, had a home. Like exiled royalty, Stevenson would receive visitors from Scotland while he continued to keep busy, smuggling boatloads of cannabis from Morocco to the Costas’ secluded beaches.
One former associate said:
There was a tremendous amount of loyalty towards Stevenson. People clearly knew what he was capable of but, even above that, he had a knack for getting people on side and keeping them there. Of course, that loyalty was not tested because the McGoverns had been broken and everyone likes a winner.
People knew he had come through the ranks and they knew he wasn’t a liberty-taker.
He showed up in Glasgow sporadically in the months following the New Morven shooting but no one except a few trusted lieutenants knew of his imminent arrival and even they only knew he was leaving after he was gone. After receiving a rare tip-off, the police pursuing him came close to catching him but, in a late-night raid on a house in Glasgow’s Croftfoot neighbourhood, they missed him by minutes. His wife Caroline would remain in their home in East Kilbride while Stevenson hid. Her son Gerry Carbin also stayed in Scotland to the surprise of many aware of the McGovern brothers’ vocal insistence that there would be a bloody settling of scores.
One associate said:
Carbin kept very low to the ground. He would have been a fool not to. Stevenson was fairly confident that the McGoverns had got the message but, if they still had any appetite for revenge, Carbin would have done in his stepdad’s absence. In fact, Stevenson would have rather been attacked himself than have anything happen to Carbin.
The McGoverns put on a public show of defiance after their brother’s humiliating assassination in their own heartlands. Approaches were made to the city’s most influential mobsters demanding they declare themselves friends or foes in their feud with their former ally. They received some words of comfort but not the truth. As ever, the gang bosses had loyalty to nothing but the next pound. They were content to wait until the gun smoke cleared and then deal with whoever survived. And few were now betting against Stevenson being the last man standing.
If the warning that was implicit in the sinister snapshots delivered to the
McGoverns in the days after Tony was murdered had not been clear, a series of late-night calls in the months that followed spelled it out. The caller, instantly recognised by Tommy McGovern, would taunt him during his brief but brutal telephone conversations, saying, ‘I know where you are but you don’t know where I am. I’ll shoot you just like Tony.’
The McGoverns had plenty to think about – their brother’s killer, their missing pub boss Milligan and the black hole in their drugs fortune.
Meanwhile, police hunted Stevenson. For eleven months, he remained elusive. That was about to change with Blackpool, the Lancashire resort popular with generations of holidaying Scots, providing an unlikely backdrop. As August edged towards September, the Scots had returned home for the season but the English schools were still on holiday and Blackpool remained busy although a little less raucous. The summer season was nearly over at the resort but the Tower and the famous Pleasure Beach were still bustling with tourists. The seaside town, traditionally a holiday magnet for Scots on a budget for generations, had attracted a less likely visitor. Mingling among the crowds as he went shopping in the clutter of streets at the foot of the Tower was Stevenson.
He was unaware of the plain-clothes officers, watching and waiting, as he strolled around the shops among the tourists and office workers looking to grab a sandwich just after noon. Glasgow detectives had arrived in the town two days earlier after following a trail from London where Stevenson’s stepson Carbin had used a credit card to hire a car. Bolstered by detectives from the Lancashire force and with an armed response unit on standby, they had finally caught up with Scotland’s most wanted man.
At a co-ordinated signal, the net closed. Stevenson tried to run but officers on foot chased him down as colleagues jumped from pursuit cars before the wheels had even stopped turning.
One witness told reporters, ‘We were walking along the road with the kids when we heard shouting and running feet. They finally grabbed a guy and wrestled him to the ground before throwing him into the back of one of the motors.’
After eleven months of movement, of fleeting homes, of living on the run, Stevenson had finally been captured and was immediately driven north to Glasgow in an unmarked car. The next day, Thursday, 23 August 2001, he stood in the dock charged with murdering McGovern. Giving his address as Macdonald Avenue, East Kilbride, Stevenson made no plea or declaration and was remanded in custody until another appearance scheduled for Glasgow Sheriff Court in eight days time. But, by then, he was out, having been released from the remand wing of the city’s Barlinnie jail in a move that did not surprise anyone aware of the paucity of evidence against him. Publicly, police and prosecutors insisted the case was live. Privately, they confessed that, in the absence of forensic evidence or a single witness placing Stevenson at the murder scene, they needed a miracle. They did not get it.
Despite being charged with the country’s most notorious gangland assassination, he stayed free and, eleven months later, in July 2002, prosecutors confirmed what was already clear – Stevenson would not stand trial.
In a terse statement, the Crown Office said, ‘Counsel have concluded the evidence presently available is not sufficient to indict anyone for the murder of Anthony McGovern at this stage.’
With the threat of charges lifted, Stevenson stopped running – and went to work.
20
Loose Ends
The bodies were found on a Wednesday afternoon. Two elderly men out walking, despite the autumn chill and threatening rain, found them down a Lanarkshire dirt track.
John Hall, forty-five, and his pal David McIntosh, thirty-three, had been gagged and their hands were bound behind their backs. They had been pushed at gunpoint to a nearby scrapyard where they were forced to kneel before being tortured. Petrol was poured over them. Then their killers fired a shotgun into the back of their heads. They were shot again in the back. Their bodies, along with the black Volkswagen Golf that McIntosh had driven to the scene of his death, were set alight.
With some sense of understatement, Detective Superintendent John Carnochan, leading a team of fifty officers hunting the killers, told reporters, ‘It’s reasonable to conclude the way they died was not as the result of some petty argument.’
It was October 2001, just over a year since Tony McGovern had been murdered and just three months since Stevenson had been charged with the fatal shooting of his former friend and ally in one of Scotland’s most clinical gangland coups. In the immediate aftermath of these murders, the theories explaining why Hall, a professional car thief, and McIntosh, a former army marksman, were killed with such calculated barbarity split and multiplied day by day. Some said they had quickly got out of their depth after making a tentative and ill-fated entry into the drugs trade. Some said they were innocent pawns in a gangland power struggle and sacrificed in a merciless show of strength. Others, particularly some detectives still trying to build a case against the assassin of Tony McGovern, wondered if Hall and McIntosh had simply known too much? If they were potential witnesses to be silenced? Loose ends to be tied up?
One detective, who had investigated Stevenson’s involvement, said:
There was certainly speculation that Hall and McIntosh not only knew about the McGovern murder but had actually been at the scene. Men were seen in a car nearby who were never identified. It was only speculation and their murders were never formally linked with McGovern’s but that was a suggestion and one that was taken seriously.
Another who knew Hall well said:
He was a professional car thief who stole a handful of expensive models each week. He stole them and sold them as they were. He wasn’t involved in ringing. He used to say that he could earn £10,000 a week from this and was happy for that to fund his bets and a drink. I was amazed when I heard what had happened to him – he had clearly got out of his depth.
Frankly, I don’t think he would have had the bottle to be at the scene of the McGovern murder but it’s possible he could have supplied a stolen vehicle for the killer’s getaway car.
On the first anniversary of his death, Hall’s widow Moira, forty-nine, begged for information and appealed for someone, anyone, to reveal why her husband died. ‘I pray that someone will open up. Our lives are ruined and someone out there knows something. I just hope that someone can find it in their heart to come forward.’
On the same day, his eldest daughter Clare, twenty, said, ‘The one question we have is why?’
A year after the killings, police seemed little nearer to finding the answer. By then, officers had interviewed hundreds of people and looked at thousands more. They had scoured hours of CCTV film. They had even spoken to the residents of tower blocks on a Motherwell estate a mile and a half away from the crime scene, just in case anyone with exceptional eyesight had a bird’s-eye view of murder. They were getting nowhere.
On the anniversary of the murders, Detective Superintendent Carnochan insisted that just one person could unlock the investigation. He said:
I have spoken to people who, if not there on the night, know who was and the reason it was done. I don’t have any doubt about that. I have evidence that will help to prosecute, if we get the help. If someone walks out of the darkness, I’m confident I have enough evidence. All we need is the final piece of the jigsaw.
In the years since that double shooting, Stevenson has been relentlessly linked to the killings in his Lanarkshire heartland and newspaper reports also suggested that Paisley drugs baron Grant McIntosh may have had some involvement. Like the dead men, he had an enthusiasm for greyhound racing and, like them, he had graduated from car crime to drugs. Unlike them, he was, and is, a gangland survivor capable of doing whatever is necessary to protect his business. He went to their funerals.
The last sighting of the men was at the Halcrow Stadium, a greyhound track in Gretna, the night before their bodies were found. Police believe they met their regular drugs supplier there. Sources suggest the deaths of Hall and McIntosh in the disused scrapyard near Larkhall
may have been linked to the £120,000 they owed their supplier for five kilos of cocaine. The drugs had been seized by police before they could sell them on, leaving them dangerously in debt and with no means of settlement.
Whatever the motive, the double murder had clear and, for detectives, disturbing similarities to another gangland shooting almost exactly two years before. The charred bodies of robber-turned-dealer John Nisbet and his pal William Lindsay were found in 1999. Like Hall and McIntosh, they had been tortured and shot several times before being set alight. They were found up a farm track at Elphinstone, East Lothian, but police believe the men had been murdered over forty miles away in a field near Chapelhall – in the same scattering of North Lanarkshire villages where Hall and McIntosh would be found two years later.
Nisbet was just twenty-five when he died but he was already a hardened criminal. In 1994, he had been cleared of an attempted murder in his home estate of Craigneuk, Wishaw. The victim was paralysed after being shot in the street. Nisbet got lucky again three years later when he escaped jail after being charged with a bank robbery in Torquay when his co-accused pleaded guilty.
The year before, in 1996, he had been prime suspect in an audacious £1-million heist on a security van. Nicknamed the ‘Blondie and Clyde’ robbers, the gang held up the cash couriers after a blonde woman, possibly a man in drag, crashed a stolen car into the Securicor van in Kilwinning, Ayrshire. She pretended to be hurt but, when a guard went to her aid, four hooded robbers grabbed him and his colleague, threw petrol over them and warned them they would be set alight if the van was not opened. No one was ever convicted of the robbery but Nisbet reputedly used his share to secure a lucrative foothold in the drugs trade.