The Iceman: The Rise and Fall of a Crime Lord (12 page)
Read The Iceman: The Rise and Fall of a Crime Lord Online
Authors: Jim Wilson
For Milligan, the morning after the night of Tony’s murder must have been more painful than the worst hangover in his pub chain’s history. The game was up. His complex creative accounting was set to unravel. Behind the smoke and mirrors, the McGoverns were to discover a seven-figure black hole in their fortune. Milligan would have a lot of explaining to do or he would have done if the McGoverns were the type of people who were in any way interested in explanations.
He attended Tony’s funeral a worried man but, by the time the Clydesdale Bank pulled the plug on Jimmy Nick’s Properties Ltd, he had fled Scotland. In February 2001, the chain of companies went spectacularly bust, owing up to £1 million.
Milligan’s large and luxurious family home overlooking a golf course near Gartcosh in Lanarkshire had been hurriedly emptied of personal effects before being abandoned. When the McGovern team arrived at the house, there was no sign of Milligan so they trashed his home, making it uninhabitable – not that its occupant planned to return.
Rumours of the McGovern family threatening Nicholas were never substantiated but they did put word out through contacts. ‘If you know where Milligan is, let us know immediately. If you don’t, then you’ll get it as well.’
It was no surprise that Milligan drifted towards the protective sanctuary of Stevenson. For several years, he dared not risk returning home. There was an endless list of countries in which this Glasgow gangland fugitive was supposedly holed up.
Years after Milligan’s hasty departure, the McGovern anger has still not abated. One former associate said:
A couple of years ago, they knew he was coming and going and would have done him on sight. They reckon they are owed £1 million of Tony’s money and there will be no room for negotiation. He was well trusted.
Following the company collapse, it was not just the McGoverns who were out of pocket. Brewery company Interbrew UK Ltd, later renamed Inbev, was owed £318,000 from two loans that it had made to Jimmy Nick’s in 1999 and 2000. The scrawled name of the person underwriting these loans was apparently that of Nicholas but he denied ever having signed them. Undeterred, the brewers attempted to freeze the Sky Sports TV pundit’s wages, forcing Champagne Charlie to go to court where he scored a pleasing victory.
Nicholas told the court that he had invested ‘about £60,000 or £70,000’ in Milligan’s business in the late 1980s when it bought its first pub but had no paperwork of any kind to prove this – no contract or agreement. Nicholas said he had previously been forced to raise legal action against his pal Milligan in the 1990s after discovering that the older man had forged his signature, personally guaranteeing a loan from another brewery. However, this ‘very unpleasant experience’ was not enough for Nicholas to end their personal and business relationship.
This time around, Nicholas again had to prove that he had not signed the two loan guarantees. His lawyer conjured up a written confession from fugitive Milligan in which he admitted faking his old business partner’s signature. Milligan said that he first signed his pal’s name during a meeting at a Glasgow law firm while Nicholas was distracted on the phone and a lawyer had briefly popped out of the room.
The second time, Milligan apparently told a lawyer that he would take the document through to another room for Nicholas to sign. He then claims to have signed it himself. Nicholas denied ever being at that meeting. Despite Milligan’s courtroom confessions of fraud, no prosecution was ever undertaken.
Milligan could not be cross-examined, explained Nicholas’s QC Heriot Currie, because he feared being arrested if he turned up and ‘there are also people who wish to find him whom he does not wish to be found by’.
The company’s accountant Richard Cleary told the court that, in the aftermath of the collapse, he feared for his own safety. ‘It was scary stuff,’ he said.
Not that Milligan was the only person surrounding the pub chain’s collapse who was to disappear. Lawyers for Inbev pointed out that the other people who they had been unable to find were Jimmy Nick’s company secretary Frank Boyle, a solicitor who had acted for Nicholas called Frank Collins and Nicholas’s personal accountant Jim Murphy.
Several months after hearing the evidence, Lord Menzies had come to a decision and he ruled in favour of Nicholas.
His written judgement said:
I am satisfied that, on the balance of probabilities, the pursuer was not the author of the two questioned signatures on the personal guarantees dated 20 January 1999 and 17 May 2000 and that these signatures are forgeries. Although strictly it is not necessary for me to express a view as to who was the author of these signatures, taking all the evidence together, I am of the view that it is probable that Mr Jim Milligan forged these signatures.
Interbev’s lawyers were ‘surprised and disappointed’. Nicholas no longer faced having his wages seized and Interbev would need to think again about how to get their money back.
The fact that Nicholas had any kind of contact with Milligan was enough to raise hackles in Springburn. One family associate said:
The McGoverns didn’t like the fact that Milligan could be traced and they had known nothing about it. The only good thing about it was that it kept Milligan’s face in the papers and reminded people that he was still a wanted man.
19
On the Run
Even as police investigating Tony McGovern’s murder sited a caravan outside the New Morven, hoping witnesses might wander in with case-breaking information, they knew the prime suspect was in the wind.
In the incident room at Baird Street police station, Stevenson had been recognised as their number one target for the gunning down of Tony McGovern within hours of his former friend’s clinical execution. For a very few days, some of the forty detectives working on the investigation looked at the possibility that his own brother Tommy might have ordered the hit, even if he had not pulled the trigger himself. But, although there had been a history of violent conflict between the brothers in the past, detectives knew this shooting was no family affair.
By the Tuesday, just three days after the murder, Stevenson was identified as the prime suspect in press reports. However, journalists were unable to reveal his name and, instead, used his nickname ‘The Iceman’ which, some say, dated from his time running ice-cream vans. He was also known as ‘The Bull’, but both nicknames had more currency in the media than in the tight circle of family, friends and associates that surrounded him. Certainly, The Iceman seemed most appropriate in the wake of the cold-blooded execution. The stories detailed his long criminal alliance with Tony McGovern, how his former friend had sided with his brothers against him and the bloody consequences.
As the Strathclyde force waited in vain for someone, anyone, to enter their caravan, Stevenson went on the run and murder squad detectives designated him a TIE – a suspect to be Traced, Interviewed and Eliminated.
A month after the murder, the caravan had yet to receive a single visitor. By this time, Detective Superintendent Jeanette Joyce, the officer initially in charge of the case, had been moved to lead her force’s complaints unit and Detective Superintendent Alex McAllister took charge.
Stevenson, meanwhile, stayed out of Scotland, first in a safe house in the Republic of Ireland that had been arranged by his friends in Belfast and then in Spain. He disappeared in the holiday resort of Fuengirola on the Costa del Sol, twenty minutes from Malaga airport where his old pal John ‘Piddy’ Gorman, an Ayrshire dealer, had a home. Like exiled royalty, Stevenson would receive visitors from Scotland while he continued to keep busy, smuggling boatloads of cannabis from Morocco to the Costas’ secluded beaches.
One former associate said:
There was a tremendous amount of loyalty towards Stevenson. People clearly knew what he was capable of but, even above that, he had a knack for getting people on side and keeping them there. Of course, that loyalty was not tested because the McGoverns had been broken and everyone likes a winner.
People knew he had come through the ranks and they knew he wasn’t a liberty-taker.
He showed up in Glasgow sporadically in the months following the New Morven shooting but no one except a few trusted lieutenants knew of his imminent arrival and even they only knew he was leaving after he was gone. After receiving a rare tip-off, the police pursuing him came close to catching him but, in a late-night raid on a house in Glasgow’s Croftfoot neighbourhood, they missed him by minutes. His wife Caroline would remain in their home in East Kilbride while Stevenson hid. Her son Gerry Carbin also stayed in Scotland to the surprise of many aware of the McGovern brothers’ vocal insistence that there would be a bloody settling of scores.
One associate said:
Carbin kept very low to the ground. He would have been a fool not to. Stevenson was fairly confident that the McGoverns had got the message but, if they still had any appetite for revenge, Carbin would have done in his stepdad’s absence. In fact, Stevenson would have rather been attacked himself than have anything happen to Carbin.
The McGoverns put on a public show of defiance after their brother’s humiliating assassination in their own heartlands. Approaches were made to the city’s most influential mobsters demanding they declare themselves friends or foes in their feud with their former ally. They received some words of comfort but not the truth. As ever, the gang bosses had loyalty to nothing but the next pound. They were content to wait until the gun smoke cleared and then deal with whoever survived. And few were now betting against Stevenson being the last man standing.
If the warning that was implicit in the sinister snapshots delivered to the McGoverns in the days after Tony was murdered had not been clear, a series of late-night calls in the months that followed spelled it out. The caller, instantly recognised by Tommy McGovern, would taunt him during his brief but brutal telephone conversations, saying, ‘I know where you are but you don’t know where I am. I’ll shoot you just like Tony.’
The McGoverns had plenty to think about – their brother’s killer, their missing pub boss Milligan and the black hole in their drugs fortune.
Meanwhile, police hunted Stevenson. For eleven months, he remained elusive. That was about to change with Blackpool, the Lancashire resort popular with generations of holidaying Scots, providing an unlikely backdrop. As August edged towards September, the Scots had returned home for the season but the English schools were still on holiday and Blackpool remained busy although a little less raucous. The summer season was nearly over at the resort but the Tower and the famous Pleasure Beach were still bustling with tourists. The seaside town, traditionally a holiday magnet for Scots on a budget for generations, had attracted a less likely visitor. Mingling among the crowds as he went shopping in the clutter of streets at the foot of the Tower was Stevenson.
He was unaware of the plain-clothes officers, watching and waiting, as he strolled around the shops among the tourists and office workers looking to grab a sandwich just after noon. Glasgow detectives had arrived in the town two days earlier after following a trail from London where Stevenson’s stepson Carbin had used a credit card to hire a car. Bolstered by detectives from the Lancashire force and with an armed response unit on standby, they had finally caught up with Scotland’s most wanted man.
At a co-ordinated signal, the net closed. Stevenson tried to run but officers on foot chased him down as colleagues jumped from pursuit cars before the wheels had even stopped turning.
One witness told reporters, ‘We were walking along the road with the kids when we heard shouting and running feet. They finally grabbed a guy and wrestled him to the ground before throwing him into the back of one of the motors.’
After eleven months of movement, of fleeting homes, of living on the run, Stevenson had finally been captured and was immediately driven north to Glasgow in an unmarked car. The next day, Thursday, 23 August 2001, he stood in the dock charged with murdering McGovern. Giving his address as Macdonald Avenue, East Kilbride, Stevenson made no plea or declaration and was remanded in custody until another appearance scheduled for Glasgow Sheriff Court in eight days time. But, by then, he was out, having been released from the remand wing of the city’s Barlinnie jail in a move that did not surprise anyone aware of the paucity of evidence against him. Publicly, police and prosecutors insisted the case was live. Privately, they confessed that, in the absence of forensic evidence or a single witness placing Stevenson at the murder scene, they needed a miracle. They did not get it.
Despite being charged with the country’s most notorious gangland assassination, he stayed free and, eleven months later, in July 2002, prosecutors confirmed what was already clear – Stevenson would not stand trial.
In a terse statement, the Crown Office said, ‘Counsel have concluded the evidence presently available is not sufficient to indict anyone for the murder of Anthony McGovern at this stage.’
With the threat of charges lifted, Stevenson stopped running – and went to work.
