Gangland UK: The Inside Story of Britain's Most Evil Gangsters (15 page)

In 1978, McGraw was arrested for the attempted murder of another policeman. Again, he wasn’t charged. McGraw himself publicly pointed to the general state of lawlessness in Glasgow at the time, but refused to accept the status that many afforded him – that of being one of Glasgow’s foremost gang bosses. ‘Glasgow’s a town called Malice. Everybody’s jealous of everybody else. Nobody likes to see that you are getting on in Glasgow. I’m not one of the controlling influences in the city. I don’t think there’s anyone capable of running this city. I’m not frightened of anybody, but then they aren’t frightened of me.’

In the early 1980s, McGraw started expanding his empire, getting into drugs and buying up pubs and other property. He was now openly bragging to his associates about his connections on the police force and of one of the cops on his payroll. That’s how McGraw came by the nickname ‘The Licensee’, as it seemed to be the case that he had been granted a licence to operate freely by the cops. According to Paul Ferris, another top Glasgow crime figure, and a rival to McGraw at the time, it had been these cop connections that had got him involved in the lucrative heroin trade.

Confiscated drugs were channelled through to McGraw who sold them on. McGraw, at that time, being unfamiliar with the intricacies of the heroin supply business, stupidly sold almost 100 per cent pure heroin directly to the junkies on the streets, who, as a result of over-dosing, were dropping dead like flies.

The drugs trail led from Morocco, through Gibraltar, Spain and Paris to the less salubrious surroundings of a Glasgow garage next to a police depot. The racket netted
£
40 million, and it was claimed that McGraw was the financier, mastermind and director. But, in 1998, a jury declared him innocent, while other suspects were jailed.

Paul Ferris wrote the book
The Ferris Conspiracy
partly as a way of getting revenge on the City of Glasgow police, whom Ferris claims had waged a war of harassment against him for years and had fitted him up on several occasions. Ferris tells how, in his opinion, the force was full of cops getting envelopes stuffed with cash from a chosen few to turn a blind eye.

Worth an estimated
£
10 million, Tam McGraw died of a heart-attack at his Mount Vernon home at 3.00pm, Monday, 30 July 2007.

Born 1963, Paul John Ferris was raised in the
working-class
, north-east Glasgow district of Blackhill, which had been developed as a council estate in the 1930s. Most of it was designated ‘rehousing’, the lowest grade of council housing intended for those families cleared from Glasgow’s 19th-century slums at Garngad, a place where a heavy cloud of polluted air perpetually hung over the place from the many heavy industrial works in the area,
such as St Rollox Chemical Works and the Tharsis Sulphur & Copper Works.

Garngad became heavily industrialised in the 19th century, with the establishment of flax and cotton mills, iron and chemical and railway works. The tenements that were hurriedly built to house incoming workers were of poor quality, with only outside toilets, leading to overcrowding and insanitary conditions. Diseases such as tuberculosis were rife, and the Garngad slums were regarded as some of the worst in Europe. Crime was rife, and the area was the scene of one of Glasgow Corporation’s earliest major slum clearance programmes, beginning in 1933. Many of the residents moved to the new scheme in nearby Blackhill, where the buildings were three-storey, slate-roofed tenements constructed from reclaimed stone, and nearby was a gasworks and a distillery. The fact that Barlinnie Prison was a stone’s throw away did not do much to enhance the area at all.

Ferris was the youngest of four children, with one older brother, Billy, and two sisters, Carol and Cath, sired by a Protestant father and a Catholic mother. As a child, Paul Ferris was bullied for several years by members of a local criminal family called the Welshes and, in 1977, Billy stabbed a man to death in a pub fight and was convicted of murder.

Like Tam McGraw, Ferris began his life of crime as a teenager with a series of revenge knife attacks on the Welshes. Aged 17, he was arrested for assault and robbery and sent to Longriggend Remand Centre. He was bailed after several weeks and, while awaiting trial, fled from the police after a car chase, having every good reason to do so – the car contained a shotgun and knives.
After several weeks on the run, he was captured and returned to Longriggend to await his trial, which culminated in him being sentenced to three months in Glenochil Detention Centre at Tullibody.

Upon his release, Ferris returned to court to face charges relating to the car chase, and was sentenced to a year in Glenochil Young Offenders Institution. Shortly after his release, he was again in serious trouble, having been arrested while attempting to rob a jeweller’s shop, and returned to Longriggend. But prison did nothing to deter this young man from a life of crime; in fact, if the truth were known, life behind bars merely served to stiffen his resolve. Upon his release, he continued to exact his revenge on the Welsh brothers, which brought him to the attention of the Glasgow gang supremo, Arthur Thompson, aka ‘The Godfather’.

According to Ferris, he became involved with Thompson’s crime business when aged 19. He collected debts on behalf of the crime lord, and was linked to stabbings, slashings, blindings and knee-cappings.

In 1983, Ferris was arrested following an incident in which shots were fired at one Willie Gibson and three of his relatives while they travelled home from a night in a pub. Gibson’s father-in-law sustained a bullet wound to his thigh. The three relatives failed to identify Ferris at an identity parade, but Gibson picked him out as the gunman. He was charged with four counts of attempted murder, and was again remanded to Longriggend. Several months later, he was acquitted of all charges, with the Scottish verdict of ‘not proven’.

Now aged 21, Ferris returned to the employment of Thompson, and was soon arrested again and charged
with possession of offensive weapons after a pickaxe handle and knives were found in his car. While he awaited his trial, he was involved in a stabbing, and fled to Thompson’s holiday home in Rothesay on the Isle of Bute. But the police were hot on his trail. Within a day, he was arrested by armed police and charged with various offences, including attempted murder and possession of heroin with intent to supply. This time, he was remanded to HMP Barlinnie, with a panoramic view over his former Blackhill council estate.

Once again, Lady Luck favoured Paul Ferris. The attempted murder charge was almost immediately dropped, but he did receive a paltry 18-month sentence for possession of offensive weapons.

After being released from prison, it seemed that Ferris might have turned over a new leaf. He stopped working for Thompson and started a company named Cottage Conservatories specialising in double-glazing and conservatories, although he still remained active in the criminal underworld.

On Sunday, 18 August 1991, Thompson’s son, Arthur Fat Boy Jr, died after being shot outside his home. Ferris was arrested and charged with murder. On the day of Fat Boy’s funeral, the cortège passed a car containing the bodies of two friends of Ferris’s – Robert Glover and Joe ‘Bananas’ Hanlon, who were also suspected of involvement in his death, and had been killed by gunshots to the head.

Ferris stood trial in 1992. The charges against him were: the murder of Arthur Thompson Jr, with the help of Glover and Hanlon; the attempted murder of Arthur Thompson Sr by repeatedly driving a car at him in May
1990; threatening to murder William Gillen, and shooting him in the legs; conspiracy to assault John ‘Jonah’ Mackenzie on 26 Mar 1991; illegal possession of a firearm; supplying heroin, cocaine and Ecstasy; and the trivial breach of bail.

With over 300 witnesses, the trial lasted 54 days and cost
£
4 million, at the time the longest and most expensive trial in Scottish legal history. Ferris was acquitted of all charges.

According to Paul Ferris’s book, he returned to Glasgow and set up a car dealership named Jagger Autos. He also became a consultant for a security firm called Premier Security, which had a reported turnover of
£
6.2 million. Still he maintained his contacts with the underworld, including Paul Massey and Rab Carruthers in Salford in the north of England.

Salford was once the fiefdom of Paul Massey, also known as Salford’s ‘Mr Big’, whose security company once held a monopoly on the doors of Manchester’s biggest and best-known clubs. He was jailed for 14 years in April 1999, for stabbing a man outside a nightclub. Rab Carruthers was a ruthless Glasgow-born drug-dealer who ran a crime empire in Manchester.

In 1963, Ferris’s brother, Billy, escaped from a prison escort van after being allowed temporary release to visit his sick father, becoming one of the six most wanted men in Britain until being recaptured in Blackpool. In August 1994, Ferris received a
£
250 fine for possession of crack cocaine, and thereafter it appears he was frequently in trouble.

In 1997, Ferris was arrested in London following a two-year surveillance operation by MI5 and Special
Branch. At his trial at the Old Bailey in July 1998, he was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment after being convicted of conspiracy to sell or transfer prohibited weapons, conspiracy to deal in firearms and possessing explosives. In May 1999, the sentence was later reduced to seven years at the Court of Appeal in London.

While in prison, Ferris co-authored his biography
The
Ferris Conspiracy
with Reg McKay, a widely-published investigative journalist and regular crime columnist for the
Daily Record
. The book sold 20,000 copies.

Ferris was released from Frankland Prison, County Durham, in January 2002, pledging to give up his life of crime, and released another book with McKay; this time a novel called
Deadly Divisions
, in April 2002. However, in May of the same year, he was sent back to prison for breaching the terms of his parole. He had been in a knife fight with Tam McGraw, and there was an alleged connection with a
£
900,000 shipment of cannabis. Ferris was released again in June 2002, and returned to Scotland, where he started a new security company named Frontline Security.

In December 2003, his brother, Billy, was convicted for a second time. He had been released in 1999 after serving 22 years of a life sentence but he was convicted of the February 2003 murder of a 15-year-old boy, after mistaking him for the older boy’s brother who had assaulted Billy’s wife.

In 2004, Frontline Security was criticised when it was revealed the company was guarding the Rosepark Nursing Home, Uddingston, near Glasgow, where ten pensioners had died in a fire, and several more suffered from smoke inhalation, three of them critically, which
started on Saturday, 31 January. Relatives demanded to know how it was that a company linked to Ferris had been awarded the security contract.

Throughout his life, Paul has never been far from controversy and, months after the nursing home fire, he became embroiled in more adverse publicity when it emerged that Frontline Security had won a contract to protect speed cameras on the M8, the busiest motorway in Scotland linking Glasgow to Edinburgh. A police source stated, ‘That this firm has been awarded this speed camera contract is just plain ridiculous,’ but not half as ridiculous when it became known that Ferris’s company had been paid a lot of taxpayer’s money to protect a building all too familiar to the former gangster – Dumbarton Sheriff Court. A court spokesman commented, ‘When we found this out, we decided not to use the company again.’

Nevertheless, in terms of managing his public image and maximising his earning opportunities, we are obliged to give this Glasgow-born hard man some credit. He has been filmed by Channel Five for a ‘fly-on-the-wall’ documentary, and TV bosses were accused of glamourising his life of crime, moving one senior detective to say, ‘Now we have Ferris the TV star – it makes you sick,’ adding somewhat spitefully, ‘He can try to become a Z-list celebrity all he wants, but he is a career criminal and no matter how many times he tries to re-invent himself, we will always know the truth.’

In April 2005, Edinburgh police began investigating Ferris over concerns that he was attempting to invest in the city’s taxi trade and, in May of the same year, details of a planned film about his life came to light, starring
actor Robert Carlyle, and Oasis singer Liam Gallagher. He released his third book
Vendetta
in October 2005, and followed that with an appearance at the Festival of Scottish Writing in Edinburgh in May 2006. This was, in turn, followed by the release of his fourth book,
Villains
, in October 2006.

In 2007, the then Scottish Minister for Justice, Cathy Jamieson MSP, announced a planned initiative to prevent convicted criminals from profiting from the publication of their memoirs – a precedent that would have certainly put a stop to the likes of Jeffrey Archer, and pretty well most of the politicians alive today.

Walter Norval was another man marked by destiny to be a career criminal in one of Britain’s hardest cities. As a boy, he grew up in a world of illegal betting, violent, canal-bank, pitch-and-toss schools, sleazy dance halls, brothels and bars where the denizens of the slums on the north side of Glasgow slaked gargantuan thirsts and plotted murder and mayhem. Before he reached his teens, close relatives had died as blood was spilled in the streets.

As a youngster, Norval ran messages for the toughest gangsters in the city and stood guard over pots of cash in illegal gambling schools. It was a remarkable apprenticeship, dangerous and often deadly. It honed a latent toughness and a talent for lawbreaking that saw him emerge in the 1970s as the first of a succession of Glasgow godfathers. Dressed immaculately in pinstripe suits, he controlled his foot soldiers with fearsome fists and he planned robberies with the attention to detail of a military general. He organised various Glasgow fighting
factions into a single gang, which pulled off a spectacular series of robberies. But, unlike his successors, he abhorred drugs and drug-dealing. And, in a remarkable twist, he joined the anti-drug campaign later in life.