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

have the desired effect. The officer said:
    We were stopping them at every opportunity which began to really disrupt the smooth running of their drugs business. Then one day this delegation of around half a dozen members of the McGovern family, men and women, trooped in to complain about what they described as harassment by two particular cops.
    We couldn’t believe it when one of the officers was put back to uniform and the other was stuck away in the warrants office. The troops felt that the bosses should have commended them for making life hard for the McGoverns.
    If your kids were growing up in a Springburn awash with McGovern smack, you’d want the police to be harassing them. But the bosses didn’t have the backbone to tell them where to go and the easiest answer was just to cave in.
     
    These recriminations within the ranks were a major coup for the crime clan. Yet again, the McGoverns were getting away with it.

6
    Taste for Drugs
     
    The young Scot in the red-and-white football scarf was not the only Liverpool fan heading to Merseyside for the big game. There had even been a few exiled Scousers on the 10 a.m. train from Glasgow Central and, two hours later, hundreds of fans were on the platform at Preston, waiting for a lunchtime connection to Liverpool Lime Street. Jamie Stevenson, who could not have named many of the Anfield team, blended in perfectly.
    One associate remembers:
    It would have been 1985 or so and the McGoverns had started into the drugs business. They had suppliers in Glasgow but were also dealing with the Liverpool gangs. They were not taking huge amounts from Merseyside so it could easily fit into a wee rucksack or even a jacket pocket. They’d send a courier down to collect the stuff and bring it up the road. It was often Stevenson. He was a pal of Tony’s at that stage but still way down the pecking order in terms of hierarchy. He was more or less a gofer for the brothers – a tea boy.
    Whenever a delivery coincided with a Liverpool game, he would time his trip to mix in with all the fans coming and going on the trains. He’d wear the scarf and everything. I think he enjoyed the pantomime.
    Of course what the McGoverns didn’t realise was that he was down there meeting the boys in Liverpool and making contacts of his own. The McGoverns thought they were sending the boy down for the messages but all the time he was seeing how the business worked. He learned a lot and, when the time came to go on his own, it showed.
     
    Liverpool was one supply route for the McGovern gang as they realised the profit from drugs could easily outstrip the fortunes they were raking in from their European robbery sprees. But another supplier was far closer to home.
    There are many stories about Arthur Thompson – and just as many drink-soaked bores and gangland apologists to tell them. He was the Godfather, the courteous old-school criminal who dominated Glasgow’s underworld for decades. He never spoke to the police. He never hurt civilians. And he would never touch drugs.
    If his legend seems to grow each year since his death in 1993, the reality remains unspoken. He was one major criminal among many in the city. He was a hugely violent man who was capable of inflicting terrible pain, injuries and death both on his own and by order. Many innocents were harmed by his awful business. And he did deal drugs. The malignant Godfather was one of the first suppliers of heroin to the Springburn brothers who were wanting to secure a toehold in the trade.
    The start of the 1980s witnessed a rapidly changing criminal landscape. Old bank robbers and burglars were the equivalent of office workers with forty years’ service. They had become yesterday’s men. They either adapted to the new drugs scene or became redundant.
    At this time, heroin was seeping into the schemes of Scotland. The authorities were far from prepared as the first ripples of what would become a tidal wave of the drug crashed on to Scotland’s