The Iceman

At first, the newspaper reporter thought his contact was joking. ‘What do I tell him? I’ve got to phone him in half-an-hour or you will be getting shot.’ But the journalist from the Sunday Mail realised from the sweat across the man’s brow and the tone of his voice that he was deadly serious as he raised the phone, looking for instructions on what he should tell the person waiting for his call. The person awaiting a call from the man in the Counting House pub at Glasgow’s George Square that Thursday afternoon in late January 2004 was Jamie Stevenson who was sitting in an Amsterdam apartment.

Stevenson had learned that the reporter had been sniffing about his affairs. Stevenson accepted that newspapers would take an interest in him – after all, he was the alleged killer of his former best pal Tony McGovern and had now become Scotland’s major drugs smuggler – but, this particular week, for some reason, publicity would be catastrophic.

The contact explained, ‘You can write anything you want about him next week or next month but not this Sunday. Something’s going down and it could damage that.’

The veteran reporter shrugged his shoulders and agreed that nothing would be published that Sunday – not because of Stevenson’s bizarre combination of plea and threat but because he had no story to write. The grateful contact made the call to Stevenson.

The supposed criminal code of honour which protects ‘non-combatants’ from being caught up in gangland violence does not exist and never did. Many criminals do not recognise a dividing line between ‘legitimate’ targets and the rest. Their wrath can be unleashed on anyone that might get in their way, including those in the media.

Eight days after the shooting threat, management at the Sunday Mail were told by the police about non-specific threats against its staff. The threats were understood to have come from Stevenson’s gang. The fact that Stevenson was willing to consider such intimidation may have been the kind of ruthless tactic that he learned from his former partners-in-crime, the McGoverns.

A Daily Record reporter had received a warning that she was a potential target of McGovern violence because of a report she had written about Tony McGovern’s funeral in November 2000.

Four months later, Serious Crime Squad officers summoned another Sunday Mail reporter to Helen Street police office in Govan to warn about a potential plot against him from the McGovern camp for exposing the family’s criminal and business affairs.

But it’s not just the media who are the targets. As far back as 1987, when Tony and Tommy were taking a few ounces of smack from Arthur Thompson, there was niggling between them and local police. The young McGoverns made a bold move – one that truly crossed the line. An officer, who had been giving the young drugs gang on his patch a hard time, arrived home one day to find every single window of his family home in the southside of Glasgow had been smashed. One colleague from those days said:

The McGovern boys were bold and reckless on the way up and didn’t care much for any so-called rules. One police officer was a real thorn in their sides. He was always giving them a hard time. To smash his house windows was a very big statement for them to make. They were saying that they were big enough to take on the police. I’m not saying that it was connected but, within a week, every single window in their HQ at Thomson’s bar had been put in.

Thirteen years after making a personal attack on a police officer’s home, the McGoverns showed their willingness to push the boundaries again. This time the target was the elderly and much-admired parish priest for Springburn. In the view of some family members, Father Noel Murray had failed to properly praise Tony McGovern during his funeral service. At least, on this occasion, windows were spared and the priest just received a direct reproach from disgruntled female McGoverns rather than a warning from the Serious Crime Squad that somebody had been making death threats towards him.