The Iceman: The Rise and Fall of a Crime Lord by Jim Wilson Read Free Book Online Page A

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:
    It was like an Oscars’ night entrance outside with all these guys and their girlfriends arriving as if they were Hollywood A-listers. But anyone could see them for what they really were – Glasgow gangsters with scars, tattoos and that constant look of being a split second away from turning violent. The men weren’t much better.
     
    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