The Iceman: The Rise and Fall of a Crime Lord (14 page)

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

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, described the rise of ‘one-man armies’ like Stevenson and the commercial tactics of this new breed of entrepreneurial drugs baron. It concluded:

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:

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:

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:

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 years 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.

Once handed over by couriers, the money would be transferred to Pakistan under
hawala
, an informal worldwide banking network used by families and firms throughout Asia for centuries. Of Arabic origin,
hawala
, also known as
hundi
– commonly accepted as meaning ‘transfer’ – is a cash pipeline used by millions of expat Pakistanis to send money home to their families or to give monetary gifts to friends. Built on trust and an international network of unofficial money-movers, its attraction to Stevenson and other Scots gangsters is obvious. There is little or no paper trail left by the millions being sent abroad and no official records at its destination. The recipients, named in the sparse paperwork, remain untraceable and uncheckable. It is fast, reliable and based entirely on trust. Money promised by a
hawaladar
in Scotland will be delivered by another, thousands of miles away without any physical movement of cash. The debt will be settled in time. Often the money owed will be sent out of Britain later in apparent settlement of an invoice for goods imported from Pakistan. The invoice will have been falsely inflated to incorporate the debt.

Money transfers by anyone other than official banks remain illegal in Pakistan, but foreign bankers estimate up to £4 billion a year floods through the
hawala
system every year. International law enforcers fear that this includes millions being laundered by organised crime gangs and terrorist groups. Most transfers are conducted by phone, fax or e-mail.

Neil Livingstone, of the Washington-based international financial investigators GlobalOptions, said, ‘It’s a great way to move a lot of money around while preserving anonymity.’ And anonymity is just what Stevenson and his associates in Pakistan wanted.

Professor Nikos Passas, in a 2004 article in the
Journal of Financial Crime
, explained the potential problems facing investigators following the trail abroad from a British-based
hawaladar.
He wrote: