The Iceman: The Rise and Fall of a Crime Lord Read Online Free Page A

occasions, they even wore disguises like fake moustaches or beards and would put on hats and coats that old men would wear. They might have looked odd but it served their purpose well.
    It was clever and well executed and they continued doing it long after they started dealing in drugs at a serious level. They would come back from these trips like some kind of Elizabethan explorers decked out in top-quality designer clothes that we had never seen before. They also had booze and piles of cash. In fact, the money from these robberies helped them buy their way into the higher level of dealing.
     
    Another former police officer, who had previously arrested Stevenson in south Glasgow over the car break-in, despaired at the lack of police reaction to this well-planned criminality at a time when the force did not even acknowledge the existence of ‘organised crime’. He said:
    Stevenson was involved with the McGovern teams at that time and I was surprised because I had last dealt with him over the car incident a couple of years earlier and this was a different ball game.
    The problem was that we had masses of intelligence on the overseas operations – who they were, their methods and a very accurate level of how much money they were making which was at least £500,000 a year. But the senior officers didn’t act. They didn’t know what to do about it because they had never come across it before. Whether someone is making half a million quid from drugs or any other type of crime, we should have still pursued them. It was ignored and the chance was missed.
     
    In the mid 80s, on one trip, Tony and two of his team escaped alive from a car crash in central Europe when the driver died after falling asleep at the wheel and hitting a tree. A former Strathclyde Police intelligence officer said:
    The driver was a McGovern associate and he had £6,000 in his pocket despite being unemployed.
    The problem got so bad that we put together a book of mugshots and details on all the travelling thieves which was circulated across Scotland. The sheer numbers that originated from north-east Glasgow, in particular Springburn and Possilpark, were unbelievable. Before long, the UK police forces all had a copy of the booklet and then Interpol distributed it around Europe.
    Every other week, we took calls from police officers in Europe asking us to look at CCTV of suspected Scottish store thieves. We knew it was going to be the McGovern gang before we even looked at it.
     
    One thing such trips did was to expand the criminal horizons of the McGovern boys and take them to places such as Amsterdam which, as one of Europe’s illegal drug industry hubs, would later become crucial in their operation.
    But the hard-bitten Glasgow CID men who tried to keep a lid on the gangs of youths in places like Springburn and Possilpark, known as Possil, were not impressed by this upstart gang of cocky, cash-rich criminals. A handful of these officers were also the type who did not always follow the rules when it came to dealing with crooks who revelled in getting away with it.
    In 1985, one officer arrested Tony over a minor outstanding warrant and he was taken to the city’s Baird Street police station. The former detective said:
    He was brought in all cocky so I decided to make up some fake tenner bags of heroin with magazine paper and cling film. They looked just like the real thing. I walked into the interview room and threw the wraps down in front of him and told him he was getting done for them. He was still in his late teens at this point and he just burst into tears. There was a real battle going on at that point because they thought they could do what they wanted. They also thought that a few of us would do anything to jail them so, when I did that, his arse collapsed.
     
    This unofficial but systematic CID campaign of hounding family members as they swaggered between their Springburn pubs, controlled drug dealing and enjoyed their European spoils did not