The Iceman: The Rise and Fall of a Crime Lord

by Wilson, Jim

  The hair-trigger thug had survived two attempted hits in the months before his death and was armed at all times. Detectives believe he must have known his killers to have been lured to the scene of his death. They shot him and his driver Lindsay, twenty-six, once in the head and three times in the body with a powerful handgun. The prime suspect was one of Nisbet’s underworld cronies, another young gangster with a fearsome reputation for violence.

  Nisbet had been a guest when Lee Smith had married his wife Claire at a lavish wedding at Chatelherault, the spectacular hunting lodge set in a 500-acre country park, near Hamilton. Police scouring mobile phone records discovered the last call made by Nisbet before his death was to Smith on one of the eight mobile phones the young gangster had in use.

  Smith, a car-thief-turned-drug-dealer, was twenty-five at the time and had already been jailed for two years for a machete attack that left a stranger scarred for life. He got another two years for a knuckleduster assault. He and an associate, Andrew Cairns, were questioned by police hunting the perpetrators of the double killing and theirs were the only names to appear in a report to the procurator fiscal but neither were ever charged.

  Five years after her son William Lindsay was murdered for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, his mum Elizabeth said, ‘I’ve great faith in the man above. I hope something will snap into place.’

  In August 2006, Smith, thirty-two, was found dead in a caravan at the Craig Tara holiday park, near Ayr. He died of a suspected drugs overdose linked to a severe cocaine addiction. He had been forced to hand over assets worth £750,000 – including his home, three flats and a Jaguar car – to underworld asset strippers before his death. The Civil Recovery Unit said their investigation into his criminal wealth would continue.

  Stevenson was never charged, questioned or formally named as a suspect by officers investigating either of the double killings. His business could continue without interruption.

  21

  Game On

  The City Inn on the northern banks of the Clyde at the end of Glasgow’s Broomielaw is in the vanguard of the riverside development that is intended to transform the derelict docks and shipbuilding basins of the waterfront. Popular with businessmen, conference delegates and overnighters in town to see a show at the nearby Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre, the hotel is a sleek and airy testament to the developers’ dreams of creating an upwardly mobile affluent neighbourhood where the city’s shipyards once stood. It was an unusual venue for the very public pronouncement of the end of a gangland dynasty.

  The one-time McGovern associate and erstwhile business partner of Charlie Nicholas, Jim Milligan, had disappeared in the wake of Tony McGovern’s murder. He remained disappeared while the hunt for the mobster’s fortune raged in vain. He had holed up in Ireland for a while but, by June 2005, he had returned to Scotland and was enjoying lunch in the City Inn’s popular restaurant.

  He was just having coffee on the wooden decking overlooking the river when he was confronted by a reporter from the Sunday Mail, Scotland’s biggest-selling newspaper. The hotel is just a few hundred yards from the newspaper’s offices. Milligan did not welcome the attention but, as he made his hurried departure clutching the property schedules he had been discussing over lunch, he insisted he had nothing to fear from the McGoverns. Indeed, he went further, saying no one should be scared of the Springburn brothers, once the most feared crime gang in the city. Fumbling for his car keys, he blurted out, ‘The McGoverns are finished.’

  It seemed a bold statement by a man seemingly unconcerned by possible reprisals for his outspoken assessment of the power shifts in Glasgow’s underworld but it was only a public acknowledgement of what detectives had realised months before. The McGoverns’ dominance across tracts of the city was over. The brothers were continuing the battle to hold on to their drug-dealing heartlands just north of the M8 but they had lost the war.

  Two years earlier, Stevenson had stepped up the scale and pace of his operations, leaving the McGoverns and every organised crime gang in Scotland in his wake. With the threat of prosecution over Tony’s murder lifted and the dead man’s family hemmed in by the need to protect what was left of their business, Stevenson had made his move. He stayed in Glasgow, buying a flat in the southside before moving to East Kilbride. In a characteristically arrogant gesture of absolute confidence in his own abilities, he is said to have sent the McGoverns change of address cards. He did not expect them to visit.

  He was working out again. Tall and well built, physical strength had always signalled his authority but he now stepped up his exercise regime. Daily workouts on the weights and running belts at the gym in East Kilbride’s Hilton Hotel, where he was a member, were augmented by regular runs around the nearby man-made loch at Stewartfield. He was never short of running partners with three or four heavy-set associates often joining him in their shorts. The burly joggers often did not seem to be enjoying the exercise as much as their boss but, even given his apparent gangland dominance, Stevenson was not foolhardy enough to go out running alone.

  He started trading in gems to hide his earnings from drugs and his big plans, shared only with his wife and a clutch of trusted associates, would see those profits escalating dramatically in the months ahead. His intention was not only to take charge of the drugs trade in Glasgow but also to cement his position as the biggest trafficker Scotland had ever seen. His confidence, contacts and operational knowledge acquired during his months in exile had encouraged his belief that one man could effectively become Scotland’s drugs wholesaler – a one-stop shop selling to the dealer gangs from Dumfries to Peterhead.

  His strategy was, in theory, simple and one often adopted by businessmen pursuing a bigger share of the profit. He intended to cut out the middlemen. Drugs have traditionally travelled into Scotland from England. After being sold by English gang bosses to their Scottish counterparts, they are taken over the Border by train or, far more usually, driven up the M6. But, under Stevenson’s ambitious business plan, heroin, cocaine, speed, hash and the rest would arrive in Scotland by the same route except the English gangsters would have no involvement, no responsibility and no cut. Stevenson would deal directly with the international organised crime gangs. From now on, he alone would take the risk of transporting the drugs into Britain, arranging the transport, finding the drivers, coordinating the deliveries, distributing the consignment and making the millions.

  Of course, other Scots had smuggled drugs without the involvement of the gang bosses of London, Manchester and Liverpool. Gerry Carbin Snr, the father of Stevenson’s stepson, had led one of the first and most innovative methods with his Costas-based ‘hash-in-a-can’ supply route shipping cannabis directly from Spain to the streets of Glasgow. People such as Tam McGraw, Brian Doran and Les Brown had all been linked to direct smuggling routes into Scotland. It was the sheer scale of Stevensons’ ambition that set him apart. He was about to bring in more drugs more often than any Scotland-based criminal had done before. The scale of his operations would eventually reverse the traditional north-south transport of drugs in Britain as addicts in England’s northern towns and cities were soon buying drugs sourced and transported by a Scots gangster.

  One senior detective, who has tracked Stevenson’s criminal career from the gangster’s teenage years, says:

  After the McGovern murder, he took it up a level and the money he was raking in was absolutely phenomenal. You cut out the middlemen and your risk goes up but so do the profits. In the year he was away after McGovern, he was making contacts. When he came back, he thought he was absolutely bombproof. It was game on.

  Stevenson’s business strategy of making key contacts and forming makeshift alliances on a deal-by-deal basis put him in the vanguard of a trend that had been noted by crime analysts – the rise of powerful individuals in an international underworld traditionally dominated by organised, ethnically-based gangs. The Organised Crime Threat Assessment, produced by the crime-fighting agency Europol in 2006, d
escribed the rise of ‘one-man armies’ like Stevenson and the commercial tactics of this new breed of entrepreneurial drugs baron. It concluded:

  Modern research is increasingly shifting its focus from criminal collectives . . . to the individual ‘organised criminal’. Studies have revealed very flexible and fluid patterns of association between individual criminals. The existence of criminal organisations or networks should not be taken for granted.

  One observer, with his expert knowledge of Stevenson’s deals in the crucial months following his full-time return to Scotland, was stunned by his audacity and ambition. He said:

  Stevenson spoke no languages but that did not deter him from seeking out the contacts that could deliver a foothold with the foreign gangs. He made it clear that he had the funds to purchase very large shipments and had the organisation to move the product efficiently. He paid when he was meant to and caused suppliers no problems.

  Stevenson is personable and has a good manner with people. They liked him and they liked doing business with him. You cannot do what Stevenson has been doing for so many years without making enemies but he has made fewer than most men in his position. Generally speaking, he did what he said he was going to do when he said he was going to do it and that is appreciated whatever business you’re in.

  But he can turn the charm off and on like a tap. People can think they’re his pal and only find out they’re not when it’s too late.

  22

  Breaking In

  They are Stevenson’s kind of people, the expat Turkish fixers of Glasgow. They live quietly, modestly, stay close to home, keep their own counsel and are loyal, secretive and ruthless. The criminal gangs of Turkey have forged a fierce allegiance of their members scattered across Europe through a sinister amplification of the wider codes of their society – codes of loyalty, respect and family.

  It is no surprise that Stevenson, keen to bring in huge quantities of heroin, sought out the men who quietly frequented the cafes and gambling clubs of Britain’s Turkish communities. He knew that, amongst them, were those who were capable of opening a channel of communication with their countrymen who ferried opiates across the continent. His reputation and personality ensured he found them. One informed police source said:

  In 2001, he started to search out the people who could help him. He was good at building relationships. He was very good at that – just by talking to the right people and winning confidence. He’s physically a big man and, within Glasgow’s underworld, absolutely feared. He made contacts with Turks and Asians that would be fundamental to his business.

  Turkey is at the crossroads of Europe, Asia and the Middle East and the country’s crime syndicates ruthlessly exploit their geographical good fortune to traffic lucrative contraband, from drugs to guns to humans. Most of the heroin – 75 per cent, according to official estimates – streaming into the towns and cities of Europe passes through Turkey and most of it is destined for Britain.

  Opium poppies grown in two areas are used to produce most of the world’s heroin – the Golden Triangle of Myanmar (formerly Burma), Thailand and Laos and the Golden Crescent of Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan. Myanmar and Afghanistan are the biggest producers of poppies with an estimated 70 per cent of the 135 tonnes of heroin sold in Europe each year originating in Afghanistan.

  The harvested poppy heads harden and dry before the malleable raw opium is rolled into balls. A gram will be sold by the farmers of Afghanistan for three pence. The criminal wholesalers might pay £27 for it and an addict in Scotland will need £50 to buy the same gram. Raw opium is usually transported to Turkish labs through Pakistan or Iran where the opium base is processed to produce heroin. The drug shipments are bought and sold by different gangs along the route.

  In 2001, as Stevenson was building bridgeheads to mainland Europe and beyond, the international trafficking network was stabilising after years of flux provoked by the civil war raging in the former Yugoslavia through the late 1990s and the rolling reverberations from the collapse of the Berlin Wall. A clampdown by the Iranian authorities had seen more heroin leave Afghanistan to the north through central Asia to Russia along the Silk Road, an ancient network of trading routes stretching from the Far East to Europe. Tajikistan was emerging as a new and popular transit point but, further down the line, the various branches of the traditional Balkan Route had been disrupted but not closed by the ethnic conflict.

  Starting in Turkey, the principal overland connection between Asia and Europe, the 3500-mile-long Balkan Route, was once used by more than one and a half million lorries and four million cars each year. The highway through the former Yugoslavia was the principal conduit for the heroin smugglers until the bloody civil wars of the late 1990s forced the forging of a new road map. The collapse of the Berlin Wall made that easier.

  Typically, battered trucks had carried heroin consignments from Turkey to Greece and on to Macedonia before a fleet of small boats ferried the drugs north to the Dalmatian Coast or across to Italy. After the Iron Curtain was raised, some drug shipments continued through Croatia and Macedonia but far more were detoured north through the Czech Republic, Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria. A smaller number of shipments went through Hungary and Slovakia to Austria. In recent years, the McGoverns have often claimed Vienna’s burgeoning wholesale drugs market had made it ‘the new Amsterdam’.

  Some opiates are smuggled by train, by plane (one estimate suggests 25 per cent of Britain’s heroin is flown in from Pakistan) or by post but most is driven to Holland, Belgium and Germany for distribution hidden in buses, cars and, most often, container trucks.

  As Stevenson prepared to launch himself into the marketplace, a secret report by the US Drug Enforcement Administration in 2000 revealed America’s fears that the new European era of trade cooperation and open borders had kicked open the door for drugs traffickers. They said, ‘Although this agreement is advantageous for trade, it is also attractive to drug traffickers.’ The DEA warned that stocks of class A drugs were already being amassed in holding depots at key distribution points to ensure a constant flow of narcotics at stable prices. The agency said:

  In the last few years, heroin has been increasingly stockpiled in some western and eastern European locations, enabling west European travellers to take delivery of the drug closer to home. Turkish heroin-trafficking organisations work in collusion with nationals from Eastern Europe who have established heroin depots to store large quantities of heroin and release it on demand. These storage facilities ensure a steady, uninterrupted drug supply to west European consumers.

  The drugs are ferried north to staging posts and holding depots on the northern coast of mainland Europe, particularly in Holland and Belgium, awaiting collection by anyone with the cash and contacts to make the deal – someone like Jamie Stevenson.

  The Turks do not have the monopoly as the Albanian gangs, in particular, show themselves capable of quickly drilling into the narrowest of openings to carve out new opportunities in drugs and human trafficking. But the Turks do continue to command the routes. Their countrymen living in Holland, Belgium and Britain control the importation and wholesale distribution of heroin and Stevenson knew they would hold the key to unlocking his own supply routes into Scotland.

  In May 2006, Abdullah Baybasin was convicted in London for conspiracy to supply 2.23kg of heroin. His conviction showed what influence the British-based Turkish gangsters had with their countrymen abroad. While being sentenced at Woolwich Crown Court to twenty-two years behind bars, the Turkish Godfather smiled as Judge Gregory Stone told him, ‘You used the application of violence and threats of violence and fostered a well-founded reputation for serious violence.’

  Detectives had launched a five-year electronic surveillance operation against the crime boss, who arrived in Britain ten years before his conviction. They believe he was involved in arranging massive heroin consignments to come into the country. Asylum-seeking Baybasin was confined to a wheelchair after being shot in an Amsterdam bar thirty year
s ago. He ran his drugs and protection-racket empire from the Green Lanes neighbourhood in Haringey, North London – a business police link to twenty-five murders.

  The Turks offered Stevenson the contacts to begin the wholesale importation of heroin in Scotland but he had other avenues to explore, other international contacts to be forged. The Balkan Route, or modern variations of it, is still used to transport most of the heroin eventually polluting the veins of Europe’s addicts but some estimates suggest that around a quarter of the opiates arriving in Britain now passes through Pakistan. The international drugs brokers of Islamabad, next to the poppy fields of Afghanistan, are a force in the global marketplace. And for a Scottish smuggler with more money than he knew what to do with, Pakistan seemed like a nice place to spend a fortune.

  A small, unassuming travel agency in the southside of Glasgow was about to become Stevenson’s favourite shop.

  23

  Foreign Exchange

  The tiny travel agency in Glasgow’s southside seemed no different to any of the others specialising in low-cost air deals to Pakistan in the Pollokshields neighbourhood which is home to most of Scotland’s Asians. The peeling green paint on the shabby shopfront of Makkah Travel concealed the tiny bucket shop’s status as a multi-million pound business laundering Scotland’s gangland millions.

  Suitcases and holdalls with zips bulging would be delivered to the shop on the junction of Kenmure Street and Albert Drive next to the Spice Garden supermarket. The bags would be left there and returned on the next visit after being emptied of the dirty money of Jamie Stevenson and other millionaire criminals – grubby tenners and twenties bound into £5,000 rolls amassed from Scotland’s addicts and users.