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

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:
    McIntyre took the fall, did the time and not once did he turn on the family. He was eventually struck off from acting as a solicitor by the Law Society of Scotland and, if anyone’s qualified to write TV crime scripts, he is. There can’t be many people with such personal experience on all sides of the law.
     
    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