The Iceman: The Rise and Fall of a Crime Lord (6 page)

That summer saw the arrival in the town of Cini which was the last word in cutting-edge cool with a waterfall cascading down behind the bar and as good a sound system as any London nightclub. The fridges were full of perfectly chilled champagne and cocktails were on the menu. The original Cini was already established in Glasgow city centre and it was a favoured haunt of the Rangers and Celtic footballers with signed jerseys hanging from the walls. One such item was a white Chelsea shirt bearing the autograph of Italian footballer Gianfranco Zola with his hand-written message ‘to all at Cafe Cini’. Years later, when the buzz of that opening night in Greenock had long faded, this shirt was one of many lots disposed of through a liquidation auction caused by the collapse of the pub chain. Many years later, in 2007, pub boss Jim Milligan was still trying to sell Glasgow’s Renfield Street building that houses Cini.

In the 1990s, fast-talking Milligan was on the way up. He owned these two sleek style bars and other less glamorous pubs in Glasgow’s Springburn area – Thomson’s and the New Morven. At least that is the impression that was given by the paperwork for parent company Jimmy Nick’s Properties Ltd which was lodged at Companies House. The people of Springburn knew that, no matter what such documents may have said, these were McGovern pubs.

In 1998, Thomson’s, the family’s pub-cum-HQ, was raided by police as part of a high-profile crackdown on the blatant peddling of drugs that the McGovern crew allowed to go on inside with impunity. The police action did not seem to hurt their business – neither the selling of drink nor their illegal trade in drugs.

Milligan’s business partner was Charlie Nicholas, a former Celtic, Arsenal and Scotland striker whose love of the bright lights of London clubland had earned him the nickname Champagne Charlie. There is nothing, however, to suggest that Nicholas knew of his business partner’s close relationship with the McGovern crime clan. He was known to take a back seat, allowing and trusting the more astute Milligan, who used to date one of Charlie’s female relatives, to get on with running their business. Nicholas, now a Sky Sports football pundit famous for his often-mangled commentary, did not attend the VIP opening night in Greenock.

Cocaine had, by now, entered the mainstream and was no longer a rich man’s drug. One Scottish celebrity’s headline-making enthusiasm for the drug did more than most to reveal coke’s ubiquity on the club scene. He was another ex-footballer of the Nicholas era, the former Celtic and West Ham striker Frank McAvennie. Later re-invented as a caricature of a ladies’ man thanks to a comedy impersonation by Jonathan Watson, McAvennie famously described the cocaine found during a police search as ‘a little bit of personal’. More seriously, Customs and Excise investigators seized £100,000 of McAvennie’s cash in 1995 and a judge agreed that the money was going to be used to finance drug smuggling despite the ex-footballer’s bizarre claim that the money was to fund a hunt for sunken treasure.

Milligan’s plan was to introduce the glamour of the London nightclubs frequented by the likes of McAvennie to Greenock. One ex-worker said:

Milligan’s appreciation of a pretty pint-puller was revealed a decade later when it emerged that he was being chased for maintenance by a Cini barmaid who claimed he was the father of her child. The despairing mum even accused Milligan of trying to cheat responsibility by getting a pal to take the DNA paternity test.

On that late summer opening night in Greenock, Milligan welcomed the invited guests, most of whom had travelled west along the M8 from Glasgow. They included a young self-made business tycoon called David Moulsdale who had made his fortune through his nationwide chain of optician shops. Moulsdale, an entirely legitimate businessman, was a personal friend of the slightly older Tony McGovern who affectionately nicknamed him Noodles. In 2000, the
Sunday Times
Rich List estimated Moulsdale’s personal fortune at £100 million. It was no surprise that so many women fell at the feet of this multimillionaire and his gangland boss friend – money and power are eternal aphrodisiacs. At one point, Moulsdale got engaged to the daughter of an assistant chief constable but the relationship ended soon afterwards and the wedding was never to take place. One of his many ex-girlfriends was to later marry drug dealer Justin McAlroy who was shot dead in front of his wife at the age of twenty-eight in 2002.

Staff at Cini in Greenock were gradually beginning to realise that their exciting new workplace was not all that it seemed to be. One manager, later sacked for wrongly thinking the management’s stock of champagne was free, told workers in hushed tones that they should never speak about who owned Cini as secret microphones had been installed to monitor for disloyalty. This warning was either a wind-up or paranoia resulting from his enthusiasm for ‘a little bit of personal’.

As the sweep of stretch limos drew up outside the bustling venue, it soon became apparent what type of guests Cini would be welcoming for the opening night when admittance was strictly by invitation only – bulky men looking awkward in £1,000 Hugo Boss suits, scar-faced guys in their twenties wearing the softest of leather jackets and bleached-blonde women with hardened faces, who were squeezed into slinky size tens and wearing Prada shoes.

One worker said:

Another outwardly respectable figure at the centre of the McGovern circles in the 1990s was a maverick criminal lawyer called James McIntyre who is now a television scriptwriter. Wearing a gold stud earring, he revelled in his abrasive courtroom style and enjoyed antagonising the stuffy legal establishment. Even while studying to become a lawyer, McIntyre found himself on the wrong side of the criminal fence. He would sneak into people’s homes to steal their goods in order to help fund his student lifestyle and he has three convictions for housebreaking to his name from those days.

At an early stage in his legal career, McIntyre forged links with the McGoverns – some say this was through family connections. In 1993, he was stabbed in the leg and thigh at his office near to Glasgow Cross but he told the police that he could not tell them who had attacked him. In 1989, he was convicted of reckless driving while charges of attempting to murder a drugs squad officer at the same time were dropped. Every trainee lawyer knows the importance of maintaining a firm boundary between themselves and their clients but, for men like McIntyre, it seems that the glamorous lure of gangland was irresistible. There was money and excitement in abundance to be had acting as the on-call lawyer for one of the city’s rising organised crime gangs.

He was not the first lawyer to get in too deep and nor would he be the last. In 2006, female solicitor Angela Baillie ended up in jail after ferrying drugs to an organised crime gang in Barlinnie prison.

McIntyre’s own spectacular downfall was for guns not drugs and, when it came, those who knew how close he had got to the McGoverns were not surprised. However, he was not the gang’s solicitor. He appeared at the High Court in Glasgow in late 1997 in front of Lord Marnoch after police, armed with Heckler & Koch sub-machine guns, had stormed his home in the respectable small town of Linlithgow, West Lothian, in August 1996.

They recovered a pair of .22 pistols – one loaded – along with ammunition wrapped up in his pyjamas and stashed in his underwear drawer. It is not what a lawyer usually means when he says he is taking some work home with him.

Knowing that his career would be finished if convicted of possessing the weapons, McIntyre pleaded not guilty. He said a client had wanted him to hand them to police during a firearms amnesty but the jury did not believe him and he was sentenced to three years in prison and later struck off from practising as a lawyer. The judge told him, ‘You were, at some stage, in possession of these items in various public streets and, when the firearms were discovered, one of them was found to be loaded.’

What the judge and jury did not hear in evidence or from McIntyre were the details of who exactly he was looking after the guns for. The McGovern family made it known that McIntyre’s loyalty in not mentioning them would be well rewarded. The very least they could do was send a limo to the gates of Edinburgh’s Saughton Prison at the end of his sentence.

One former friend said:

These were the type of people who joined the McGovern gang at play that night in Greenock. The family had millions pouring in from heroin, cocaine, Ecstasy and cannabis. They had pubs and clubs fronted by what they thought was the trusted figure of Milligan. Recent figures released by the fledgling Serious Organised Crime Agency, described as Britain’s FBI, estimate that proceeds of crime totalling £370 million go through Britain’s licensed trade annually. At least £29-million worth of drugs money and other dirty cash is filtered through pubs and clubs across Scotland, mainly Glasgow. It is an industry that is greased with dirty money.

As the McGovern brothers mixed with footballers, businessmen and other people of high standing in society, they were confident that the police could never catch them. What could go wrong?

While Tony McGovern and Stevenson shared a bottle of Bollinger champagne that night in Greenock, they would have quietly toasted the dirty business on the streets of Springburn that had bought them this status and success. They had been through a lot together and, in the drugs business where loyalty was as fleeting as fashion, they trusted each other like brothers. Little did either of them know then that, the next time Stevenson would have cause to return to Cini in Greenock, he would not be stopping for a drink.

10

In the Blood

An ordinary fifteen-year-old, three years off the legal drinking age and with school the next day, would not have been sitting in a smoky Glasgow pub at 11 p.m. on a Sunday night. On 5 April 1987, in an age of just four TV channels and no internet, most kids that age would have been at home watching
The
Russ Abbot Show
at 7.15 p.m. followed by Esther Rantzen’s
That’s Life!.
But young James McGovern was not an average schoolboy. As a member of the notorious crime family, no one paid much attention to the baby-faced youth drinking alongside his nineteen-year-old brother Tommy and twenty-year-old cousin Stephen McGovern in the corner of the now-demolished Vulcan Bar in Springburn Way.

Young James’s presence may have been of no concern to the groups of men as they drained what was left of their pints and cheap house whisky chasers with one eye on the clock as drinking up time neared an end but, as the barmaid’s piercing order to ‘finish your drinks off’ shook the old drunks into action, a youthful gunman strode soberly through the door. He knew exactly who he was looking for. As he hovered over the three McGovern boys, everyone froze. The spell was broken as his shotgun unleashed its deafening roar and ferocious spray of lead pellets.

The youngest person there took the worst of it. Screaming out, James collapsed on to the pub’s grimy carpet with blood pouring from horrific face wounds. His cousin Stephen was also caught by the blast while Tommy, the boss of the trio, escaped unscathed as glasses shattered, tables toppled and McGovern blood marked the walls. A third man aged thirty-four, with no connections to the family or what was behind this particular feud, also felt the shotgun’s blast. His injuries were not serious.

The gunman, who had fired from point-blank range, fled before anyone could react. Within a few moments, the spring evening was filled with the wail of sirens. Most of the drinkers tried to escape into the night before the CID arrived to lock them in the pub and ask questions they had no intention of answering. Tommy didn’t hang about either. Police would say that the rising hard man had lost his bottle and abandoned his stricken brother but it is perhaps more likely that he went to rally the people and the weapons that would be required for instant retaliation.

James and his cousin were taken to the nearby Royal Infirmary but medics there took one look at their injuries and sent them to the specialist Canniesburn Hospital for emergency plastic surgery. Stephen, from the ‘poor relations’ side of the family, was to die of a drugs overdose in later years. The surgeons did what they could to rebuild James’s badly damaged face but, when he was eventually allowed home to the familiar surroundings of Blackthorn Street, he was scarred for life. From that moment on, James was nicknamed ‘Elephant Man although the cruel jibe was never made to his face. One associate said, ‘He has a nasty scar which distorts one side of his face. For that to happen to a teenage boy must have been very hard to deal with.’