by Wilson, Jim
When he was eighteen, I had to give him three months notice to find somewhere else to live because he was going totally against what we as a family were prepared to accept. He was old enough to run his own affairs and we had to protect the other members of the family.
David moved out to stay with his then girlfriend and their parents in nearby Johnstone. His family don’t know exactly when David first took heroin but, by the time he was twenty, they were certain he was doing so. June said:
Two of the counsellors who do voluntary work with Teen Challenge were round for supper and I was worried because I had heard nothing from David for five weeks, which was not like him. That night he appeared and, just from looking at him, I knew for sure that he was on heroin. We can’t be certain when it started because, like all addicts, he became a very good liar. They develop a smokescreen.
Before their son became hooked, Donald and June helped set up The Haven, a residential centre in Kilmacolm which caters for up to a dozen people with drink and drugs problems. It was a place where David was to make some of his nine ultimately failed attempts at rehabilitation. The most successful of those was at a centre in Preston, in Lancashire, around three years before his death. He returned to the family home drug-free, confident and began attending a college course that would qualify him to help other addicts.
In Preston, he wrote and starred in a screenplay which was to be used to warn kids about the dangers of drugs. His mum occasionally watches the DVD to remember her son when he was happy. June said, ‘He was doing so well but he then got involved with an old girlfriend and went back to Glasgow to live and that was it. It was the beginning of the end.’
After a spell at a London rehab clinic, he returned to Scotland at Christmas 2006, hoping to stay off the heroin, but it was yet another false dawn. June said:
After he died, one of the counsellors from London wrote to me to say how he had told her that he wished he could be more like his brothers. He was striving to turn his back on it. He told me he wanted a normal life as he was almost forty. The desire to break free was there. He waited four months to get on that course in London, such was the high demand for places there but it didn’t work out.
He had been off drugs since Christmas 2006 but he had been gradually getting back into it.
David drifted between flats and partners in areas including Paisley, Gourock, Port Glasgow, Kilmacolm, Dumbarton and Glasgow’s Pollok district. During much of that time, Stevenson’s drugs network spread into many of those communities. His imported drugs were sold by his people to the massed ranks of faceless addicts. What is certain is that, if Stevenson’s drugs business were a supermarket, people like David would be valued customers to be rewarded for their loyalty.
An addict can reasonably be expected to consume three tenner bags of heroin each day. Multiply this by David’s sixteen years of addiction and those tenner bags would add up to a spend of £175,000. Over the years, David’s various jobs included tyre-fitting and insurance sales but he never stayed at them for any length of time as, every time he seemed to be cleaning up, he would slide back into the chaotic, dangerous and dirty world of full-time heroin addiction.
He stole from shops to feed his habit and, before long, the mounting petty convictions resulted in a sheriff sending him to prison for the first of many times. June said:
He appeared at various courts including Paisley, Greenock and Glasgow and was sent to Greenock and Low Moss Prisons several times. I went to visit him a few times and it was a whole new ball game. I just felt so sad and helpless.
One time, while living in Paisley, he was attacked with a golf club in an incident that his parents suspect may have been caused because he was then selling heroin to feed his own habit. Donald said:
One night, someone kicked his car to set off the alarm and, when he ran out, he was smashed in the face with a golf club. It was serious – he had a plate put in his face, his jaw was broken and the whites of his eyes were red. The doctors thought he could lose his sight.
Throughout all these years, there was the hassle that goes with it. We would be woken at 2 a.m. with phone calls from him asking for money or by the police telling us he was in custody. His girlfriend once phoned to ask me to come and help put the door back on as the police had raided the place. We only saw a fraction of what went on.
In the thirteen years between 1992 and 2005, a total of 3,945 drugs-related deaths were recorded in Scotland. In comparison, during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, between 1969 and 1999, bullets and bombs claimed around 3,500 lives and the 9/11 terrorist attacks of 2001 on America killed 3,016 people.
A report by the UK Drug Policy Commission published in April 2007, revealed that Scotland has 50,000 heroin addicts. The figure for England, with a population around ten times that of Scotland’s, is 281,000 addicts. Experts fear for the 50,000 Scottish children currently being raised in homes where there are drug problems.
David’s story is not unusual but it reminds people whose sense of shock and anger has been blunted by decades of drugs-death statistics about the human cost wreaked by heroin.
Donald understands that, with the money to be had in the drugs trade, there will always be willing criminals like Stevenson but June believes that those who make millions of pounds from dealing in death should face tougher justice. Donald said:
If you take one out and shoot him, someone else will step into his place. They see the opportunity to make easy money and just go for it. There’s no easy solution. Society can’t even deal with the massive alcohol problem so what chance does it have with drugs?
June said, ‘I know that David made the wrong choices in life but the big drug dealers should be put in jail and they should throw away the key. That’s the way I see it.’
28
Folklore Begins
In the end, the decision was taken quickly. The meeting at the headquarters of the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency (SCDEA) in March 2004 was, in itself, nothing special. The tasking and co-ordination committee met every month to review the progress of ongoing operations, to allocate resources and to choose the serious and organised criminals most deserving of the agency’s special attention. The handful of senior detectives gathered around the conference table at the SCDEA’s headquarters had read the intelligence dossier in front of them and the authors’ analysis and recommendations were swiftly approved. They moved on to other business but the decision, taken in minutes but based on ten months of painstaking police work, was the most significant to be taken so far in the agency’s short history.
The meeting launched a three-year crime-fighting offensive against some of the most ruthless and effective gangs in Scotland and it set the agency’s sights squarely on one man – Scotland’s biggest international drugs trafficker, Jamie Stevenson. From that point on, the Operation Folklore team was not gathering intelligence on Stevenson – they were trying to lock him up.
One SCDEA officer, with knowledge of the meeting, said:
There was no fanfare, no great excitement. There would have been a realisation that this was only the beginning of what, in all likelihood, was going to be a long, hard investigation into a criminal who had shown himself capable of avoiding conviction despite operating at a very high level for a very long time.
One of the agency’s intelligence development teams had been working on nailing down the scale of the criminal operations of Stevenson and his close associate, Ayrshire drugs lord John ‘Piddy’ Gorman, since 20 May 2003. Confidential Folklore briefing documents, distributed on that day, could not have been clearer on the agency’s remit. Its stated aim was to ‘investigate the activities of a group of active criminals known to be involved in the large-scale importation of class A controlled drugs from mainland Europe into the UK for distribution throughout Scottish police force areas.’
The Folklore team of fifteen officers used all available methods of gathering intelligence on their targets, from undercover and electronic surveillance to forensic financial
analysis of the accounts of front firms suspected of laundering their criminal fortunes. One source said:
They’re not just told to go off and come back in six months. Progress is looked at regularly and there has to be some encouragement, in terms of the inquiries pulling the right triggers.
Of course, the likelihood of success comes into it. We have never not taken on a target because it looks too difficult but we have to be realistic. There are plenty of people with an awareness of Stevenson outside the agency who, if they had known we were looking at him, would have said we were wasting our time.
The SCDEA has a specific remit to target certain categories of serious organised crime groups. But there are so many, we have to apply a bit of science. We might know an individual well – know what they do and what they are capable of doing – but there has to be a system because investigation is an expensive and complicated process. There has to be a scientific approach to choosing targets.
The officers initially assessing Stevenson and Gorman as possible targets were not short of material. The source said:
At that point, Stevenson was already heavily involved in multinational drug trafficking along with the associated money laundering. He was willing to use extreme violence to protect his business.
He was in charge but had a very close relationship to Gorman, who basically had the drugs franchise from the southern edge of Glasgow, out through Paisley and Barrhead and down into Ayrshire. Stevenson dominated the drugs trade in Lanarkshire and south Glasgow but the quantity and range of class A drugs he was bringing in meant they were going all over Scotland.
Gorman had been a dealer for years and was a long-standing associate of Stevenson but their business relationship only started in earnest after Stevenson split from the McGoverns.
Neither of them had any serious form.
The data gathered by the intelligence development teams, month after painstaking month, is eventually put through a computer matrix, a Home Office process with fifteen points designed to grade and select criminal targets. Areas scrutinised include the criminal enterprise, associates, methods, damage inflicted on their communities through drugs or violence and the potential for successfully putting the criminals in the dock.
One officer said:
Basically, if these criminals are operating at a serious enough level of organised crime, we will take them on. If, after intelligence, the targets do not meet the grade for SCDEA, the case will be passed to the relevant local force. That’s if we don’t find what we are expecting to find.
It’s like looking at any fairly substantial business to see what these people do and how they work. We get to understand them, their lifestyle, and develop an intimate knowledge of their habits.
In addition, there is a national flagging system in place. We put a flag on our targets which means that, if any police officer runs their details through the police national computer, we will be immediately notified. We can then go to the officer and ask why they did it and about the circumstances at the time.
After the meeting had rubber-stamped the targeting of Stevenson and Gorman by the Folklore team, another team of officers, led by a detective inspector, took over as Folklore – the codename randomly allocated from a centrally held Home Office register to avoid confusion with other crime-fighting operations – moved from intelligence gathering to evidence gathering.
The source continued:
The intelligence package came to the meeting in spring 2004 and Stevenson and Gorman ticked all of the boxes. It was very clear that they were involved in importation of huge quantities of drugs, including heroin, cocaine, amphetamine and cannabis. The recommendations hit the mark and, from then on, it was a criminal investigation like any other.
But, over the course of the three tortuous years ahead, Operation Folklore would become one of the most significant criminal investigations ever launched in Scotland. It would lead to the first conviction in Scotland of a serious and organised criminal based on the evidence gathered during a huge electronic surveillance offensive. It would signal a new determination and willingness of law enforcers to attack a criminal’s ill-gotten fortune to put him in the dock. And it blazed a trail in the level of international co-operation with other forces as the Folklore team followed their target around the world and back to a nondescript flat in Burnside.
29
Boxed In
The truck carrying the forty kilos of heroin packed in two boxes and stowed in the driver’s cabin had travelled across Europe, across the Channel and across Britain to Scotland – and it had been followed for every mile of its journey. The police swooped on an industrial estate in Dumfries as the boxes were being switched from the truck to a waiting car. They contained drugs that would have sold for almost £6 million on the streets of Scotland’s towns and cities.
It was 27 June 2003 and the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency’s operation codenamed Folklore, still in its intelligence-gathering phase, had been underway for just five weeks.
In October, Robert McDowall, forty-eight, a driver for a Lisburn-based flower importer, and Francis Gallagher, thirty-nine, a career criminal from Springburn, Glasgow, appeared at the High Court in Kilmarnock to admit to being concerned in the supply of class A drugs.
SCDEA officers had trailed the lorry from Holland and tracked it 400 miles north after it was driven through Customs at the Harwich ferry terminal in Essex. They had been watching as McDowall met Gallagher, known as Frank, at a Little Chef restaurant on the M74 at Dumfries. They were watching as the men left and Gallagher drove to the deserted Lochside Industrial Estate with McDowall’s truck following behind. And they were watching as Gallagher reversed up to the lorry trailer and the men started moving boxes from the truck to the car. Then they moved in and both men were arrested at the scene. Officers raiding Gallagher’s house in Springburn found £26,000 in cash and a passport.
The court was told the SCDEA had been tipped off.
On 17 December, they were back in court for sentencing. Gallagher, who had a previous conviction for drug dealing, got twelve years and McDowall, an Irishman living in Ballantrae, Ayrshire, got ten. Jailing the pair, Lord Hardie told them:
You are probably well aware of the consequences to the public and the misery [drugs] cause to addicts, their families and other members of society. It is often said that the drugs trade is an evil trade and I would endorse that sentiment.
To Gallagher, the judge said:
I note you have a previous conviction for being involved in the supply of drugs and that will be reflected in your sentence. I take into account the nature and quantity of drugs with a street value of £5.85 million for which the maximum period I can impose is life imprisonment.
I take into account also you are not at the top of the chain and I reserve a life sentence for those who are if they are ever brought to justice.
The judge was right. Gallagher was not the top man but he was at his right hand. For the first time, the police had got close to Stevenson. They had picked off one of his key lieutenants, a fixer feared for his capacity for violence. And their sights were now fixed squarely on his boss. And they had an ace up their sleeve. Stevenson had made a fundamental error. For once, he had got too close to the drugs. He had met McDowall to arrange the shipment of class A drugs.
And now Robert Henry McDowall was about to talk.
30
Burgers and Drugs
It was a bit early in the year to be sitting outside but the three men enjoying their burgers and chips around a table in the garden of the Queen’s Hotel looked relaxed enough in the cold sunshine of spring 2003. One of them, Robert McDowall, a forty-eight-year-old Ulsterman, ran the small white-painted hotel with his wife Carol. It was sited on the main road running through the picturesque south Ayrshire village of Colmonell.
Much later, Carol would tell the police:
It was a nice day. I was working at the hotel and Robert was there with me when the two guys arrived. It was afternoon time. R
obert told me the two guys were lorry drivers. They had arrived together in what, I’m sure now, was a black car. I think it was an Audi – quite fancy looking.
Robert and the two guys sat at a table out the back of the hotel talking. Robert asked if I could make them a couple of chicken burgers to eat. I remember Robert actually saying to me, ‘Can you make Frank and the other guy a couple of chicken burgers?’
I’m not sure what Robert called the other guy but I’m sure it was Jay or a name beginning with the letter J. I made the guys something to eat and they sat outside speaking to Robert.
They had a lot to discuss, McDowall and his new acquaintances from Glasgow. Within months, one of them, Frank Gallagher would be arrested alongside McDowall on a Dumfries industrial estate after taking delivery of two boxes each containing 20 kilos of heroin with an estimated street value of £6 million. The other man visiting Ayrshire that day was Jamie Stevenson.
The three men had met just once before, when they’d had a conversation in a car parked beside a Tesco supermarket, next to Ayr Racecourse, just before Christmas. A mutual associate from Northern Ireland had introduced them. The men discussed the possibility of McDowall earning a bit of extra money by adding drugs to his lorry’s loads as he drove across the continent to Britain. They suggested he might find a job with a Northern Ireland-based flower importer. They told him there would be good money in it. He agreed.