I made the rendezvous outside a chippie on Dumbarton Rd thirty minutes before I needed to. It was a habit back then — turning up early — it let me suss out if there was going to be nonsense. The meet was short and I was given another envelope.
The gig was a new one on me. Kidnapping. The letter gave me a name and an address. The objective of the exercise was a warning to a businessman who was not paying up on the protection front. Normally this was a knee cap job but London wanted to make a different mark this time and I was told to lift the business man’s six year old, and not to hand the kid back until the protection money started flowing.
For the record I added in ten grand to the demands — strictly for my back pocket.
I lifted the kid from school and took him to a flat that I had rented for the month.
To say I was an amateur at this was as big an understatement as could be made about me back then. For a start I had no food or drink in the flat. Naively I had assumed that the businessman would come up with the goods in hours and I would be out of there post haste. What I hadn’t banked on was that he was currently in Spain, banging his heart out with his private secretary.
I contacted his wife and she was hysterical but hardly in a place to stump up the readies. She wasn’t aware that her husband was in the protection paying business, Spain or his secretary.
It took two days to get the message to Spain and for him to return. Meanwhile I had a six year old with the appetite of King Kong and the attention span of a newt. On half a dozen occasions I considered throwing the wee shit in the Clyde and being done with it.
When I eventually handed him over to his dad at Kelvingrove Park — it didn’t matter that he saw us, he knew who we were and we knew who he was — I was so glad to get rid of the wee gobshite that I failed to count the cash. It was a grand light but by then I didn’t give a rat’s arse and I was well rid of the horror child.
The next year took on a turbo charged feel. The ‘errands’ grew in length, complexity and risk but I was up for the challenge. I shifted office after less than six months, as my needs outgrew the space, and took up residence in an old townhouse on Argyle Street.
I hit a new problem that I hadn’t had to deal with to date: what to do with the mounting pile of cash I was building. Now that might sound like a good problem but it wasn’t. Opening a bank account back then was a lot less rigorous than it is now but it was still folly to advertise a sudden rise in income. The Inland Revenue would take more than a passing interest in the discrepancy between what I declared and what I was bringing in. A discrepancy of enormous proportions, may I add.
The solution came in the form of Terry Usher; a disgraced banker who knew the ins and outs of the complexities of offshore banking, portfolio investment and tax avoidance. He managed a number of ‘clients’ and as far as I knew he hadn’t rolled over on anyone yet. Still it nagged at the back of my head that he was in control of my assets and as a precaution I took to hiding some of my cash in the most obscure places.
Even now I can guarantee that there are still a few wedges lying around in my old haunts. For all I know there could be thousands.
Probably more.
Eleven twenty eight and ten seconds.
Got to keep my foot down.
Success bred success and I was on a serious roll. Job after job was thrown at me and I met each one head on and delivered. My staff grew and before the year was out we had twenty-seven on the payroll. By year two we were up to sixty and I was no longer involved in the small jobs.
During all this time the chain of command from London didn’t change. We still received the ‘errands’ and we had little direct contact with our masters.
Our next big move was Edinburgh.
I had been told to stay clear of the Scottish capital for a number of reasons — not least that the place was as alien to me as the Amazon rain forest. London had never given me a job in Edinburgh and I was grateful as it meant staying clear of one Malcolm Morrison, known as the Major to his friends.
The Major was a well-heeled ex-financial genius who had grabbed Edinburgh the way London had grabbed Glasgow. He was highly territorial and renowned for his retribution should someone step out of line. He had the bizarre trait of wearing military gear and, as the years had progressed, so had his rank.
As far as anyone knew he had no background in the forces but there was a rumour that he had been rejected from the TA early in his life and this sat as a scar. He was never seen in public short of a uniform or insignia. It was testament to his status that he got away with it for so long.
The message came up from London that the Major was now surplus to requirements and Edinburgh was to join the empire. There was no subtlety involved in the plan of action. Exterminate with extreme prejudice. From the Major down take out the command structure and move in.
We hit in late November of 1981. The world had gone New Romantic and Martin had taken to wearing frilly cuffs on all his shirts. Twenty of us rolled into Edinburgh at midnight on the fifteenth.
We split up and played trash and burn with the Major’s property before taking out everyone from the Major, down to his lieutenants. Twelve dead — all made to look like accidents. The police went ape but back then we had brave pills by the dozen and alibis as solid as the Forth Rail Bridge. Even so I spent the best part of four months being escorted from my house to the Glasgow police head office almost daily.
The police knew I was involved. I knew they knew and they knew that I knew that they knew but it made not a hill of beans without evidence and evidence was thin on the ground.
Even while I was sitting in the interview room I had arranged for two of my more trusted compadres to scope out Edinburgh and start moving in.
It wasn’t easy. Chopping off the head was simple but the hydra had many more heads waiting to take charge. It took six months to whip the city into shape and even then we only had partial control, but it was enough to keep London happy and, when the police eventually backed off, I could get on with the business of making Edinburgh profitable.
Aberdeen was next, then Dundee and then the sticks. Four years it took us and an industrial amount of pain and effort.
However on the first of January 1986 I sent a message to London. It read:
‘ Scotland now ours — what next?’
We hadn’t really conquered Scotland. Any fool could see that but we had our fingers in most pies and the major jobs didn’t happen without our say.
Incredible as it might seem I was still none the wiser as to who in London was pulling the strings. I knew a lot more than I had at the outset and had been on frequent trips to meet my opposite numbers elsewhere in the country but, as to the boss, I was clueless. When I tried to discuss it with Martin, he didn’t seem interested and spent increasing amounts of time on holiday or just AWOL
By then I had more money than I could reasonably spend in the rest of my life. I had banked three houses in Scotland and was an early bird in the Spanish property market.
My car had progressed from a Ford Escort 1100 Mk1 to an Aston Martin DB4 — the one James Bond uses in Goldfinger. Women littered my path but no one had tied me down yet and the job was getting easier not harder.
I distanced myself from the day to day and if things went tits up I was six or seven people away from the pain. The police would still call but apart from enjoying a cup of tea and a Bourbon biscuit there was little else they could do. It didn’t stop them from trying but the better things got for business, the further from the action I flew.
Chapter 15
When the phone call came it was hardly a surprise.
‘Be in London tomorrow, you’ve a room booked tonight in the Hilton on Park Lane. You’ll be away for a while — make arrangements.’