Asset-stripping legislation designed to identify gangland fortunes had become an expensive and tortuous game of pass the parcel with the authorities painstakingly peeling off the wrappers of deceit surrounding their targets’ wealth but rarely reaching the prize.
The fate of the luxury watch collection amassed by Stevenson and Carbin, for example, reveals how the authorities struggle to pin down criminal fortunes. During their trial, the pair admitted to spending £307,000 of dirty money on 55 watches seized by the police. However, during the assets stripping process, the 55 watches that featured in the criminal charges were first reduced to 48 – 38 belonging to Stevenson, 10 to Carbin – and then valued by the Crown at a fraction of their true cost. In Stevenson’s case, his collection of 38 watches was valued at just £60,000. Experts say just one of the watches – an Audemars Piguet Mens Royal Oak Offshore Juan Pablo Montoya chronograph – could have fetched a rock-bottom minimum of £30,000 at auction, never mind the 37 others. They were all returned to Stevenson, who merely had to pay the £60,000 valuation while his collection continues to grow in value year after year.
He had already given up the £204,510 of cash found in the suitcase at Carbin’s home, and, in October 2008, he was ordered to give up another £747,080 of realiseable assets. The biggest part of that was the £389,035 in cash that had been seized by police after being taken from the underground safe in his taxi office. Peter Smith – one of Stevenson’s eight co-accused who had the charges against them dropped at his trial – was eventually convicted in May 2008 and jailed for three years after being convicted of laundering the money found in the boot of his Mitsubishi Shogun.
The rest of the amount demanded from Stevenson by the Crown was made up from the watches; £25,000 in bank accounts; the 12 Skoda Octavias bought for CS Cars; £8000 in share dividends; £13,500 of jewellery; a £16,600 caravan; £142,000 worth of equity in Stevenson’s Campsie Road property, in which Carbin lived; and a £52,000 of equity in a Troon flat. However, a year after the court order, he still owed the authorities £203,104 with his legal advisers insisting that he would not pay a penny more. Meanwhile, his step-son Carbin had been ordered to hand over £44,341, a sum based on the contents of two bank accounts, a Yamaha and Piagio motorcycle, jewellery and ten watches. More than two years later, he still owed £13,039.
In short, two men at the very centre of Scotland’s biggest ever drugs importation and distribution network lost a headline figure of £995,000. Of that, £595,000 was dirty cash seized by police during the raids and Stevenson and Carbin, who was released from jail in February 2010, have actually stumped up about £200,000 between them with a similar amount still outstanding. To the detectives familiar with Stevenson’s criminal empire, the sums involved were ludicrously low, a pittance compared to the many, many millions reputedly ploughed into property and front firms at home and abroad. The amount he paid to the Crown is almost certainly less than the cost of the long-running process designed to leave him penniless. A process, incidentally, which Scotland’s biggest millionaire drugs baron had been awarded Legal Aid to contest.
Back in 2007, Stevenson and Carbin were again side by side in the dock as the Crown launched the drive to identify and seize their hidden fortunes. At that point, the authorities were targeting
£2
million of criminal assets, but Stevenson’s counsel Jane Farquharson told the High Court in Edinburgh that the Scottish Legal Aid Board had drawn the line at funding a forensic accountant to test the Crown’s assessment of his fortune. After protracted negotiation, she told the court the publicly-funded SLAB had finally agreed to pay the accountant’s fee.
As the men were being brought upstairs from the cells, Carbin burst briefly into song, his voice clearly heard in the court above. Stevenson just laughed.
List of Plates
The New Morven pub in Glasgow. Gang boss Tony McGovern was gunned down in the pub’s car park on 16 September 2000.
McGovern pictured in a leaked police mugshot. His family refused to release a picture to the police to help them in the hunt for his killer.
McGovern’s wife, Jackie, right, leaves St Aloysius Church in Springburn, Glasgow, after her husband’s funeral on 20 November 2000.
Jim Milligan, centre and wearing glasses, a McGovern business associate and the owner of the New Morven pub leaves the funeral. He would soon go into hiding as McGovern’s brothers tried to track down a missing fortune.
Football-star-turned-TV-pundit Charlie Nicholas was formerly Milligan’s business partner. Nicholas did not attend the funeral and would later accuse his former partner of forging his signature on legal documents.
Jamie ‘The Iceman’ Stevenson and his wife Caroline pictured before they married in 1998.
The McGoverns’ brother-in-law, Russell Stirton, front, and Stirton’s business partner Alexander Anderson leave the Court of Session in Edinburgh in 2004. Official asset-strippers claimed their business empire was built on dirty money.
The garage in Springburn, Glasgow, that Stirton and Anderson owned. Although it sold the cheapest petrol in Scotland, investigators found it hard to believe that the large sums it was banking every day in 2004 all came from fuel sales.
In October 2001, car thief John Hall was found shot dead in Lanarkshire. He had been bound, killed and then set alight.
The body of Hall’s friend David McIntosh was found beside him. Detectives believe the double murder may have been linked to the killing of Tony McGovern thirteen months before.
The double murder bore striking similarities to the death of drug dealer John Nisbet, who had been shot and killed in 1999.
Nisbet’s friend William Lindsay was murdered at the same time. The men had been tortured, shot and then set alight in Lanarkshire before their bodies were dumped over thirty miles away in East Lothian.
Some of the 8 tonnes of cannabis found on board the
Squilla
are unloaded on the dockside at Cadiz by Spanish police in June 2005. The converted trawler was seized at sea as part of Operation Folklore as it was sailing to Scotland.
In April 2006, the
Squilla
ringleader and long-time Stevenson associate John ‘Piddy’ Gorman (top left) was jailed for twelve years. His gang included (clockwise from Gorman) William McDonald, Mushtaq Ahmed, James Lowrie, Sufian Mohammed Dris, Arno Podder, William Reid and Douglas Prince. Those in the top row were jailed in the UK while, in Madrid, the gang members pictured in the bottom row were also given prison terms.
Lorry driver Robert McDowall leaving the High Court in Edinburgh in February 2005 after having just £637 of his estimated £1 million assets seized. Politicians who criticised the deal were unaware that McDowall was to be the star witness against Stevenson.
This modest block of flats in Fishescoates Gardens, Burnside, near Glasgow, is where Jamie Stevenson lived quietly with his wife. From here, he ran Scotland’s biggest international drugs trafficking operation.
The apartment block in Nieuw Sloten, on the outskirts of Amsterdam, where Stevenson bolted in the summer of 2006. He and his wife Caroline lived in a flat, detached from the main block, on the bottom right.
Stevenson leaving Hamilton Sheriff Court in November 2005 after admitting a breach of the peace charge linked to his brawl with Robert ‘Birdman’ O’Hara in Shotts Prison. Until his conviction, this was the only contemporary picture of the gang leader.
Some of the fifty-five luxury watches that Stevenson had paid £307,087 for between 2003 and 2006. They included a Rolex Daytona worth £10,340 and a £30,000 Audemars Piguet.
Stevenson’s wife, Caroline, leaves the High Court in Glasgow after an Operation Folklore hearing in February 2007.
Carbin’s partner, Karen Maxwell, leaves the court after the same hearing. The charges against both women would later be dropped as part of the deal struck with the Crown.
Jamie Stevenson was jailed for twelve years and nine months in April 2007 after being arrested in the Operation Folklore raids and admitting laundering more than £1 million of drugs money.
At the same time, Stevenson’s stepson Gerry Carbin Jnr was jailed for a total of eleven years and nine months. His three sentences will run concurrently with the longest being five years and six months.
Derek Ogg, QC acted for Stevenson as his client reached agreement with the Crown to admit money laundering in return for the drugs charges against him disappearing.
Carbin’s QC, Paul McBride, struck the deal that led to trafficking charges against his client being dropped at the High Court in Glasgow.
Plates
The New Morven pub in Glasgow. Gang boss Tony McGovern was gunned down in the pub’s car park on 16 September 2000.
McGovern pictured in a leaked police mugshot. His family refused to release a picture to the police to help them in the hunt for his killer.
McGovern’s wife, Jackie, right, leaves St Aloysius Church in Springburn, Glasgow, after her husband’s funeral on 20 November 2000.
Jim Milligan, centre and wearing glasses, a McGovern business associate and the owner of the New Morven pub leaves the funeral. He would soon go into hiding as McGovern’s brothers tried to track down a missing fortune.
