The Underworld Captain: From Gangland Goodfella To Army Officer Read online

  When the telephone rang and I picked it up, Pawny was going mental about the fight. By now, word had shot around Glasgow about the struggle in the chippy and how the shop and street outside had run with blood.

  I could hardly speak for a few weeks and thought my jaw had been broken. At one stage, as part of the peacemaking process, I had to go to a telephone meeting in Posso with Pawny in which the phone was put on loudspeaker. At the other end were the Scouser and the guy who headed the mob from Blackhill. The idea of the meeting was basically to come to an agreement to leave things as they were and for both sides to agree not to retaliate any further. The Scouser said, ‘Yes, I have a few cuts or stab wounds to my arse and legs, but I’m happy with that since I’ve broken your brother’s jaw.’ Pawny cut in, ‘Sorry, but you haven’t. He’s sitting here now. Do you want a word?’ Clearly, the guy at the other end of the line was too astonished to ask me to speak. I was glad because I would have struggled to get a word out.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Ian ‘Blink’ McDonald was well known and liked in the Glasgow underworld. Some said his nickname was the result of a temporary childhood eye affliction; others that it had stuck because he could slash a rival faster than a victim could blink. He had carried out his share of slashings – Mars Bars, they were known in some circles, caused by deft use of a razor, a Hugh Fraser. Tall and impressive, he had at one time teamed up with Paul Ferris to raid jewellery shops and had been jailed for the theft of expensive clothing in Carlisle. He was a friend of the Thompsons and an admirer of young Arty’s ability with guns, and he was trusted by the Shannons.

  His mum and his wife Sheila had taken over a bar in the north end of Glasgow that had previously been the base from which a leading crime family ran their operations. The women were standing for no nonsense. It was their place now, and they made the rules, and the gang had effectively been kicked out.

  The business was built up and then Sheila decided to run a place of her own. She talked it over with Blink and the decision was made to move into the Talisman bar on Balgrayhill Road, Springburn. It was a rough, tough joint that had been going downhill fast, but Sheila and Blink turned it round and good drinkers, the half and half men who were the bread and butter of any bar business, began returning.

  As, of course, did men from the heart of gangland.

  Tam Bagan and Paul Ferris would occasionally visit Blink and Sheila. The McGovern family sometimes called in for a drink or two, along with their friend Jamie Stevenson, who was rapidly becoming a man to be reckoned with. One of his closest friends was Tony McGovern. Although not the eldest of the family, he was regarded by most as the brains and mastermind of their operations. The McIntyres, Duncan and Joe, were also customers. They ran with the McGoverns and Jamie Stevenson. The McIntyres knew the Shannons well, having lived in the same area of Springburn as youngsters, but for reasons best known to themselves allied themselves with the McGovern faction. The feeling at the time was that if you took on the McIntyres, you took on their army of associates as well.

  Notorious hard man Frank Ward, a bodybuilding fanatic and thug, decided to use the Tally as his drinking hole when he was released from a stretch in prison, and sometimes the door would open and in would stride George ‘Goofy’ Docherty, a small-time hoodlum who liked to play the part of a gangster by wearing dark glasses and gloves that he said were necessary to prevent his hands sweating up in case he was needed to use a weapon at short notice. Most thought his antics over the top, but nobody said so to his face.

  Then there were the Shannons: Tam, with his disregard for danger and notorious for his quick temper; Pawny, known to run one of, if not the most, thriving drugs rackets in the city; and Alex, cloaked in mystery.

  One day at the Tally, Duncan McIntyre wandered over and asked about Alex’s position within the army. At the mention of ‘weapons instructor’ in Alex’s reply, McIntyre’s eyes lit up. ‘Is that so? God’s sake.’ He wandered off, evidently deep in thought.

  The McGoverns tended to be wary of bars as a result of a particularly nasty incident when Steven had been alive. As was so often the case, silly words led to bullets. Someone close to the family had got into an argument in another pub in the district with a punter over a woman. A casual aside had become a full-scale shouting match and the woman’s escort had left feeling insulted. Not long afterwards, Steven and his brother James were in the same pub, Thomson’s Bar in Springburn, when a man entered by a side door and blasted them in the face. The odd thing was that he wasn’t a regular street player, just someone who wasn’t prepared to lie down and be walked over. The McGovern family would later own that same pub.

  There were all sorts of customers at the Talisman bar. Sheila ran the place and made no bones about her being the boss. Generally, if she issued an instruction, it was obeyed. One thing that seemed to worry Blink, though, was the number of people who smoked hash inside. Eventually, it got so bad that some of the older regulars began complaining, joking it was a deliberate move to make sure their throats were always dry so they’d keep on drinking. Something had to be done. The solution was that a pool table was installed in one of the side rooms and the hash smokers were told, ‘If you want to smoke that stuff, do it in the pool room where you won’t be seen. But nowhere else.’ They thought this was great and there was never any trouble after that.

  Blink had been friends with the Shannons, Pawny and Tam in particular, for a long time. He would very occasionally see Alex coming in with his brothers and knew people wondered about him. Apart from the fact he was a soldier, no one was sure what he did in the army. A lot of rumours would float around the Tally, especially about his ability with and access to weapons, and because of the mystery surrounding him people tended to be wary of him. Blink kept a shotgun stashed away at the bar in case of bother, and the Shannon brothers knew where it was. No one else.

  About this time, the McGoverns were making a real name for themselves. When Frank Ward was released, he looked up Blink and asked who the McGoverns were. Blink told him to stay away, but Frank was having none of it. He was determined to show them who ran the east end. He had been used to having things his own way and failed to realise that while he was in jail the balance of power in the east end, and Springburn especially, where he lived, had shifted in the McGoverns’ favour.

  Frank had an argument with Tony McGovern and was not the type to let a matter like that end there. Tony and his family were asleep in their home when it was firebombed. It was a cowardly attack that could have led to a major tragedy and even Tony was shaken. Some weeks later Ward was shot in both legs. He was recovering in hospital when Blink visited him. Ward evidently listened to Blink’s good sense – there was no way Frank was going to win the fight. Neither side took the dispute further. While Ward remained a feared presence, he would never be a match for the McGovern family.

  Alex was worried about his brothers. When Tam was locked up, it had left Pawny on his own, running his drugs trade, his success fetching jealous looks from others who fancied a hostile takeover. Major crews were selling at opposite ends of Springburn. These were allied but not averse to doing deals behind the back of the other. Neither was aware that they bought their gear from the same third party nor that he relied for his supplies on Pawny, who in addition to being a type of wholesaler had his own network of dealers. The two crews knew he was operating as a freelance but were reluctant to try chasing him out of a territory that they regarded as their own. But to have rivals coming at you from two sides could be dangerous. One of the McIntyre allies was a man we are calling ‘Michael McKay’, with whom Alex had already had a series of run-ins.

  * * *

  I never liked Michael McKay. I’d attacked him a couple of times while I was in the army and put a bottle over his head. I don’t know why I had no time for him; there was just something about him I hated. I loathed him with a passion. He thought he was smart, possibly because his brother worked in the police force. He ended up especially close to the McIntyres, and
as a result of their association with the McGoverns, plus the fact Tam had been doing a prison sentence, I couldn’t really get to him. I had been waiting for Tam to be released in order to have back-up. Now, he was finally out.

  McKay had at one time gone about with Jackie, who would become Pawny’s wife. She had obviously decided she preferred Pawny and so this caused friction between the men. On top of that was the fact that I’d battered him with a bottle, while all the time there was the simmering anger by him and his cronies over our disregard for any territorial claims the McIntyres might have. It was a slap in the face to them that we just went about and did our own thing. Even Tam would punt whatever he wanted and they just wouldn’t have a say in it. They found that quite annoying, plus they felt we were intimidating. They must have asked themselves time after time, ‘How can they get away with all of this?’ but nobody said anything to us, not even the McGoverns, and that must have riled the McIntyres even more. The attitude of the McGoverns was that we were pals. It was more ‘Let them do what they want – unless something happens.’

  So, the McIntyres and McKay decided to test which way the McGoverns would jump if it came to the crunch. They needed a flashpoint so that they could turn to the McGoverns and ask them to enter on their side. But trouble would not begin of its own accord; it had to be instigated. They needed to set off the fighting between us and once it began would put the onus on the McGoverns to intervene by simply saying: ‘Look, they are fighting us, and you and we are all the one firm here.’ It was a highly dangerous situation.

  They decided the trigger would be McKay.

  While training recruits at Glencorse, I continued to play football for army sides and after taking part in a match in Germany one weekend arrived home to disturbing news from Angie. She told me she had been in the Talisman on the Saturday night with a crowd that included Pawny and Tam when McKay walked in. It was busy, people were enjoying themselves and having a good time, but without warning he suddenly pulled out a big machete and began waving it about. This had been brewing for some time. It seemed they had deliberately planned an argument with Pawny that night. They had come all tooled up with knives and had attacked Pawny and Tam.

  Blink was caught between a rock and a hard place. It was his wife’s bar and now he would have to step in and sort things. He was a very close friend of ours, but he had to think of his other customers. We had always promised ourselves that if anything kicked off in the Talisman, then we’d be backing him, and we knew he would never let us down. He also knew our family would not take any rubbish from these clowns. McKay didn’t hit anyone, but Tam pulled out a knife, then other knives were produced, and everybody was trying to stab each other. The fight then spilled out onto the main road, stopping traffic, while Pawny and Tam went ahead and took on McKay and the McIntyres.

  Next day, it flared up again. Tam had lots of friends, among them Jamie Daniel and Derek ‘Deco’ Ferguson, two men with plenty of gangland pull, but he preferred not to involve anyone outside the family circle. Tam chased the McIntyres and their hangers-on all the way down Galloway Street and even tried to shoot a few of them. Pawny drove the car round to collect Tam halfway down the street and as Tam jumped in, he pulled the trigger again and took off the top of his shoes. He was very lucky not to have lost his toes. Now, the gloves were off. This was the start of a long feud that would go on for years.

  When Angie told me the news, I knew it had been deliberately kicked off to bring in the McGoverns, so I began trying to get to them to ask whom they were backing. Reaching them would prove not as easy as it sounded, and a good deal of unpleasantness and danger followed.

  While this was kicking off, William Lobban had been moved to Dungavel open prison on the outskirts of Glasgow to serve the remainder of his six-year sentence. Previously the Duke of Hamilton’s hunting lodge, it was the spot where Adolf Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess was heading in 1941 when he made his astonishing flight from Germany seeking to end the Second World War.

  After the battle at the Tally, we all went up to see Lobban to let him know what had been going on. Prison staff had to keep a detailed record of all visitors and who they met. It turned out to be sheer good fortune that Tam and I were down to visit one of Tam’s mates from Govan who was doing a lifer. Pawny and a pal called Ronnie Curry were on the visiting order to see Lobban, but we all took the opportunity to brief him on our problems.

  We had a long conversation with Gibby and it turned out following the chat that he had decided he was going on the run so he could help us out. One thing I will say for him, he had no fear.

  He might have been offering to do us a good turn then, but in later years we would come to hate him and he us. Some say he is the devil personified and I would now tend to agree with this. When he asked to be interviewed by the News of the World in 2005, Lobban said the reason he had absconded from Dungavel was because of his mother’s illness. He said he had been a model prisoner, but after a couple of weekend leaves he got a pass to visit a hospital to have tattoos removed and did not go back. He also said Arthur Thompson had offered him work. But I know it was because of us, we who had knocked around with him through his adolescence, that he did a runner.

  Lobban didn’t tell us how he was escaping or when he would do it. After the prison realised he was gone, and apparently wasn’t coming back, the police were contacted and asked to find him. People went missing from open prisons regularly and there was a routine to be followed. The police visited his family first and, discovering he was clearly not there, looked up who his latest visitors had been. As a result, they called at and searched the homes of Pawny and Ronnie, but found nothing. They would continue occasional searches of this sort for some considerable time afterwards and I would have very special cause to be thankful that I had been down as visiting someone else that night in Dungavel.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, my days as a soldier were rapidly coming to an end and I felt my discharge could not come quickly enough. Too many things were going on in Glasgow and I felt I needed to be there. Much as I had been exhilarated by my spell in Northern Ireland, I had been unable to shake off the feeling that I needed a change. Because I had been in the army from such a young age, I had done the entire career course and yet people kept commenting that I was still young. At times, my youth made others believe I was a recruit, so I felt a bit of a burnout. Maybe I peaked too soon and needed a complete break, something totally different to recharge the batteries. I had believed you rose up the promotion ladder depending on your abilities, but I found that wasn’t the case. I had reached the rank of corporal but was effectively living the life of a civilian. Anyway, I simply made up my mind to get out and I did.

  We had a beautiful home and I thought a job would be guaranteed. Friends tried talking me out of it, and a lot of high-ranking officers told me I was on a fast career path and I would definitely go to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, the elite British Army officers’ training centre, but the truth was I was living a double life. During the working week, I was a soldier. The rest of the time I was going about with gangsters.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I gave up the army at the beginning of 1991. While I was attempting to get full-time work on building sites as a mechanical digger driver, I was also running around with my brothers, trying not to worry Angie and the children. Diplomacy, I knew, was needed in my continued efforts to try to soothe the McGoverns into sitting out the fight, but Lobban seemed hell-bent on keeping the pot of hatred boiling. In leaving the army, I had given up killings and bombings on the streets of Belfast for a Glasgow riddled with the problems of drink and drugs. If you were on the happy drugs like cocaine, fine and well; if not, then the chances were you were out trying to kill somebody. As events just around the corner would prove, it was as dangerous a time as there had been in gangland Glasgow.

  For people in that environment, it was really worrying. Not for those on the outside, but for the families of whoever was involved. I know Mum was worried
sick all the time about us, but the foolish thing about Tam and me was that once we had a few drinks in us our inhibitions went. We just didn’t care.

  * * *

  Those close to Alex wondered if there was an additional reason behind his choice of career change: his concern for his brothers. Had that helped fan the decision to quit the army? Certainly there were those who believed that his entry full-time into gangland with his skills and knowledge of weapons could tip the balance of power away from the McIntyre faction. Or did he sense there was someone on the loose who couldn’t be trusted?

  William Lobban had never been a shrinking violet. Most inmates fleeing prison lay low, hoping not to attract attention. Not so Gibby. His actions would leave a legacy of deceit, hatred and desire for revenge that remains in Glasgow to this day.

  A few days after going on the run, like a substitute coming off the bench in a football final to score with his first touch, he immediately made his presence felt. In the knowledge that the feud between the Shannons and McIntyres was likely to turn into a full-scale war in which the strong McGovern faction might enter on the side of the latter, Lobban took a hand. It was not necessarily one that Alex appreciated. His army experience in Belfast had taught him about the morale-sapping effect of surprise attacks. In Glasgow, he found himself in a not dissimilar situation, being directly involved in a battle on the streets. His side could effectively be taking on the rest of Springburn gangland, a perilous and potentially deadly action. In Ireland, there had at least been the army to play piggy in the middle; there, the police only showed once there were bodies to pick up.