The Iceman: The Rise and Fall of a Crime Lord

by Wilson, Jim

  Despite disliking foreign travel, he visited many of these countries. Much of his business could only be conducted face to face. Sometimes he travelled on his own passport. Sometimes he was Jeremiah Dooley, the identity on a counterfeit British passport the police found in one of his homes as they moved to dismantle his operation. The passport had been supplied by a contact in Northern Ireland – a former Loyalist terrorist who was a skilled counterfeiter and one of the most important links in the international supply chain streaming Stevenson’s drugs on to Scotland’s streets.

  Given his deal-making abilities, it was no surprise that his associates came from both sides of the sectarian divide. ‘He would do business with whoever was sat on the other side of the table,’ one source remembers, ‘green, orange, or purple.’ He continued:

  I don’t know how common that is – not very, probably – but he did it. It was just business to him. He could be one thing for somebody, another for somebody else. His reputation in Scotland was always going to help. There’s so much coming and going over the sea that the people he was dealing with knew what he was all about. He didn’t need a lot of introduction.

  Stevenson was born a Protestant but, after his mother remarried, a lot of the time when he was growing up was spent with Catholic relatives – particularly a favourite uncle, who died while he was on remand after the Folklore busts. One acquaintance from Glasgow said:

  Religion was not a big part of his life, in any sense. He used to go to the Celtic games but it was more about being seen and seeing people. He was a businessman not a football fan. He had some decent pals in Ulster – men he trusted and there weren’t many of them in Scotland, Ireland or anywhere else.

  He was close to one guy in particular. He never mentioned his name but just called him ‘The Musician’. He seemed to be right at the top of the tree – a serious criminal. He seemed to be one of the very few that Jamie would listen to, take a bit of advice from.

  His friends across the Irish Sea had been Stevenson’s first port of call after the McGovern murder. He travelled first to Belfast and then on to a safe house in the Republic before heading to warmer climes with his crony John Gorman on the Costa del Sol. Irish gangsters, from both the north and south of the island, also enjoyed the bars and clubs around the Fuengirola resort and many were to become the two Scots’ partners in drinking and crime.

  After his return to Britain and the eventual collapse of the McGovern murder charge, the terror-gangs-turned-drugs-runners of Ulster remained a key part of Stevenson’s business. For years, all through the Troubles, there has been an exchange of money and goods between the criminal gangs of the West of Scotland and their counterparts in Northern Ireland. The ferry routes offered easy access and escape for visitors to do special favours for their friends before quietly returning home, unsuspected and untraceable. The favours often left men unable to walk . . . or breathe.

  The terror groups of Northern Ireland had enjoyed a peace dividend when their guns fell temporarily and then permanently silent in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. The paramilitaries of all shades no longer had to divide their attention between crime and terror. In any case, crime was more profitable. When the Northern Ireland Select Affairs Committee investigated Northern Ireland’s criminal underworld in 2006, the thirteen members concluded that the terror gangs from both sides of the religious divide were running rampant. Their report revealed IRA Republican, Loyalist UDA and UVF and all related splinter groups were attempting to outstrip each other in their enthusiasm for drugs, armed robbery, protection rackets and smuggling. And Stevenson had already bought in.

  One associate said:

  He had his own lorries coming and going to Scotland but all the Irish trucks heading through Dumfries to the ferries at Stranraer and Larne fitted perfectly. He knew guys who could get one of his drivers a job. He knew guys who knew guys in Holland. He knew guys all over the place in exactly the same line of work as his. For a time, Northern Ireland was a big part of Stevenson’s operation.

  By the time Stevenson was arrested, the government’s Organised Crime Task Force estimated that Northern Ireland’s gangsters were raking in £600 million a year as police chiefs warned of increasing evidence of international links and the involvement of criminals from the British mainland. The elite agency revealed a master plan to target thirty outfits and these were only the most dangerous and profitable in the Province. An estimated 230 criminal groups have been identified by police.

  The huge wealth generated by the sectarian gunmen-turned-drug-runners was only emphasised in November 2004 when the rural retreat of one of Ulster’s most feared terrorists was put on the market by criminal asset strippers. The mansion, complete with its own stable block, belonged to Jim ‘Jonty’ Johnston, a leading member of the Red Hand Commando, after he was shot dead while going to feed his two pet donkeys. He had controlled the drugs trade in County Down, raking in an estimated £1.5 million, and been questioned over five drugs-related murders. The authorities were to seize £1.2 million after his death, including a property portfolio, investments and a tidy pension plan.

  Former members of the Red Hand Commando had been among Stevenson’s best contacts in the Province.

  A source said:

  The Loyalists seemed far more deeply involved in drugs running than the other side – the actual process of getting stuff from there to here. So that’s who Stevenson dealt with. But I know for a fact he did stuff with Republicans as well. If it suited him, if he trusted the others and if it paid, he would go in with anyone. That was how he worked – always.

  26

  Chairman of the Board

  To the detectives tracking Jamie Stevenson through his labyrinth of international money transfers, supply network and freight deliveries, he was the chairman of the board. One officer, involved in the massive offensive against Stevenson, said:

  Drugs trafficking is a huge, international business and men like Stevenson are the chief executives. They might never see their product but they are the men with the overall sense of the business. They are forging relationships with contacts, making the deals, organising supply routes, arranging recruitment.

  Stevenson was as capable as any we have seen in Scotland in terms of the skills and talents that he brought to his work. He was very organised, personable, a risk-taker and proactive in dealing with threats to his business. He was, in effect, a very successful businessman. His business was the large-scale importation and sale of class A drugs and he was good at it. He knew about supply and demand. He knew about product, price, his place in the market and strategy.

  Like most of these men, Stevenson surrounded himself with a very, very small group of people he trusted completely. They were his operational directors and he would deal with them on a need to know basis. One would handle one bit of business for him, another would handle another. In turn, they’re busy organising the level below them. The management structure was a classic pyramid, fanning out from Stevenson at the very top down through a tight group of key associates, down to the gangsters buying wholesale from them, down to the street dealers selling tenner bags up some close.

  He was doing the import stuff, the supply chain stuff, and working out the franchise arrangements. Some of the gangs he would be supplying were selling his drugs in his areas, largely the southside of Glasgow spreading east out to Lanarkshire, for his profits, others were buying the stuff wholesale and going away and doing their own thing. Either way, he was making money.

  If, as the business textbooks insist, good management is about planning, organising, and controlling, Stevenson was a good manager. He was also, according to at least one source who has known him for years, a natural leader. As academic and leadership guru Fred Fiedler says, ‘There is no one ideal leader personality. However, effective leaders tend to have a high need to influence others, to achieve, and they tend to be bright, competent and socially adept, rather than stupid, incompetent and social disasters.’

  One source, a lon
g-term acquaintance of Stevenson, said:

  He’s physically a big, imposing man – good looking, well built, broad shoulders, clearly fit. He was usually in casual gear – sweatshirts, trackies – but it was always very clean, very neat. He had a feeling of sharpness about him. In person, he could be really amenable. It was like he knew the buttons to press to make people like him – like a conscious thing – but he could turn it off just as quickly.

  One of his things is that, when he’s talking to you, he locks right on to your eyes and stays there. He never looks away. It’s like he’s absolutely involved with your conversation. It can be disconcerting and intimidating but it’s kind of flattering as well – that he seems so intent on what you’ve got to say. Of course, all the time that brain of his is taking what you’re saying, computing it and working out all his angles.

  He’s certainly smart but then it wouldn’t take much to be smarter than the halfwits and liabilities he started out in competition with. What he did show for those five years or so was that he was capable of taking his game up a league to do business with major criminals who were just as cute and just as ruthless.

  But one criminologist, based at a Scottish university where he has studied the mechanics of organised crime, said it would be wrong to exaggerate the business skills of gangsters like Stevenson.

  On one level, they are operating a multinational import business and making a huge amount of money. On another, they are criminals, operating outside of the law, paying no taxes, using violence to consolidate their position. They clearly have some of the skills of legitimate businessmen but it is dangerous to encourage this idea that, if they had only chosen another fork in the road, they would be Richard Branson. It’s rubbish.

  Most of these men – and they are invariably men – prosper in a life of crime because they are good at things abhorrent in the rest of society. They steal things and kill people. They should not be considered nominees for entrepreneur of the year.

  Another investigator, with knowledge of the Folklore operation, agrees, saying:

  Stevenson certainly had some attributes that might have secured a successful career in legitimate business but he enjoyed the game too much. He liked the excitement, the control, the reputation, the money. He’s bright but not as clever as the guys like him who know when to step off the merry-go-round. They make their millions, launder their money and buy into legitimate business. They have made more money than they know how to spend and the choice is open to them to turn legit, to become businessmen instead of ‘businessmen’.

  A few manage to do it – the brightest ones – and it becomes harder to prove that drugs money helped launch their legit firms with every month that passes. Given their past, they may spend the rest of their lives looking over their shoulders but it won’t be for the police.

  The level Stevenson was operating at meant he had that choice and he decided to continue doing what he was doing. He enjoyed the life. He enjoyed being a criminal. He enjoyed the buzz. And he enjoyed taking on the police. He is an arrogant man. That arrogance was a big part of his character and a big part in what he achieved but it was to help bring him down.

  27

  Our Lost Boy

  June Ross was talking on the phone with David, the eldest of her five children, around 9 p.m. on Friday, 16 March 2007, when an overdose of heroin killed him. She was sitting in the comfortable family home in the affluent village of Kilmacolm, Renfrewshire, where she and her husband Donald had raised David and his two brothers and two sisters.

  David lived just along the road in the flat he shared with his girlfriend, who was away visiting her sister that weekend. When he was found two days later, his phone was still gripped in his lifeless hand.

  June said:

  He had signed for a flat the Wednesday before he died and he started a job laying turf that week. Because he was paid cash at the end of each day, he was able to buy heroin. I had been speaking to him on the phone that Friday night and his speech was gradually getting slower and slower. I asked if he had taken Valium and he said he had so I just put it down to that. He then just stopped talking but the line was still open – he hadn’t ended the call. I am now sure that was his last breath I heard on the phone.

  I work with heroin addicts and one of them said to me that what I heard on the phone was his death rattle. I at least knew that he wasn’t on his own when he died even though I was on the other end of the phone. Who wants to die alone?

  At the time, June thought that the heroin or the tranquillising qualities of the Valium had taken effect and David, thirty-six, was too out of it to continue the call. But, when Saturday morning came, June’s maternal instincts began to gnaw away at her. Later that day, David had failed to keep separate appointments – one with one of his brothers and the other with a ‘mentor’ who was trying to help him break his addiction.

  On the Sunday, David’s girlfriend phoned June to say that she too was worried. It was unusual that David hadn’t answered any of her many phone calls or replied to the text messages she’d sent him. She voiced her fears to June, saying, ‘He might be lying blue-lipped in the flat.’

  June said:

  That just clarified in my mind that something was wrong and, by the Sunday afternoon, I was sure he was lying up there. I was feeling really uptight. Donald got hold of my middle son who is very tall, over six foot four, to get him to look in the window but the blinds were closed tight.

  The key was on the inside of the lock so Donald and my son went to get a wire coat hanger which they used to unlock the door. When they got in, Donald went straight through to the bedroom thinking that David would be there.

  My middle son went into the kitchen and found David lying dead on the floor. He knew straight away that his brother was dead and just closed the door.

  Almost forty-eight hours after that final conversation with his mum, David’s phone remained in his hand, the many texts and messages from his partner never to be answered. When he died, he had been about to make a cup of tea as his mug, containing a teabag and sugar, was sitting beside the kettle.

  Donald phoned the police and then returned home in order to confirm to his wife what she already sensed. June said:

  I knew anyway. I had a wee cry and said that I had to go and see him but the police could not let me in and said it was best to try and remember him as he was. I think that was good advice.

  June finds solace in her Christian faith and believes that her troubled son is no longer suffering and that the torture that he and his family suffered for so many years is at an end. She also draws comfort in the fact that she was with him when he died, albeit at the end of the phone. She said, ‘At least we know he is at peace now. We do have a faith in God and we believe that he is in heaven which is better than being here trying to get money for heroin.’

  The couple carry themselves with great dignity in the wake of such a bitter loss which was compounded by an agonising wait for the release of his body by the authorities. On 8 May, more than seven weeks after his premature death, many hundreds of mourners crammed into a Port Glasgow church to celebrate David’s troubled life. Those attending the service were given copies of a moving tribute about David which had been written by June. It read:

  My son David was the eldest of five children brought up in a Christian family, going to church as a baby then Sunday School as a young boy. Growing up, he was full of mischief, loved life, was always trying something exciting – skateboarding, BMX and skiing.

  As time went on, David got involved with friends who experimented with drugs and, like many young people, experimented himself. This eventually led to a serious addiction to heroin.

  David grew up in a time and place where most parents had a limited knowledge of drugs. Stories about cannabis being smoked in school playgrounds were enough to cause sleepless nights for many mums and dads. But, as the cancer of hard drugs began to creep across Scotland, Donald and June were well placed to understand it as they worked with a charity calle
d Teen Challenge. This Christian group, founded in late 1950s New York and now operating in more than seventy countries, helps many young Scots battling with drug problems.

  David was born nine days before Christmas in 1970 and over the next fourteen years his four siblings arrived into a loving family home filled with happiness. The first sign of a flirtation with any kind of substance came when David was thirteen years old. June had arrived home from a cash-and-carry with bulk supplies for her large family, including deodorant and hairspray. Donald said:

  I remember hearing this aerosol noise in the bathroom and wondered what on earth he was up to in there. I shouted on him a couple of times but he didn’t reply so I climbed in through the bathroom window. I found him lying semiconscious in the bath having inhaled this stuff. I dragged him out the bath and carried him outside to the fresh air where I made him walk round and round the fields to try and get it out of his system. It was only when I realised that he was OK that I got angry at him. It later came out that he had first done this on a school trip to Switzerland.

  He was a bit of a character and a tearaway. He liked to be the class comedian at school and was very much a people person. From that moment, we began to get suspicious of everything that he got up to. At the age of fifteen or sixteen, he was away at a church summer camp and we think he was caught smoking hash which he was warned about but not sent home. When he was a bit older he was drinking and hanging around in bad company and we were suspicious of other things.