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

  To give Tommy his due, I walked right to the end of Galloway Street with him and his team, by which stage the older guys had gone and I was on my own. At any time he could have turned and waved his team in, but he didn’t. Neither did he say a single bad word about me. I respected Tommy for that. He was brand new.

  Despite the skirmishing, we were still good mates and I remained friends with his brothers. I could see their point of view. They were looking up to our end, seeing a family making a reputation and money. It was a case of them feeling they had to show their authority and let everybody know they were running the scheme.

  There were conflicts like ours all over Glasgow, disputes over who controlled which area, but the tensions between us and the McGoverns never got out of hand. A lot of that was due to John Storrie being at our end of the street. He often acted as peacekeeper between us and his cousins. I don’t know whether it was a case of John thinking, ‘Well, I’m stuck up here with all of them. If I don’t watch what I’m doing, I’ll be on the receiving end.’ John was well respected even then, so I’m sure nothing would have happened to him. John tended to make sure things remained happy between all of us, although there were instances when they were in danger of getting out of hand because I had a terrible temper. If I’m honest, every one of us did. I would just do things without thinking. If ever I was arguing with somebody and they said something to me that I regarded as confrontational, I’d flare up. This continued into my army days until there came a time when I knew I had to control my rages.

  I suppose when we were younger we were all quite confrontational. We threw bottles and cans and attacked each other. There were no stabbings in those days, no shootings. Now and again somebody might get coshed over the head with a pole, drawing blood, but most of us looked on it mainly as fun. At least I did. Certainly, I was never scared.

  The fight with Tommy seemed to clear the air and resolving the problem allowed me to go back to making money and developing another aspect of crime in which I was becoming increasingly adept. By the time I was 12, I was an accomplished car thief. I looked on this as a sort of hobby and could steal and drive just about every make of car on the road even though I was only just over four feet tall.

  I also set about expanding my sphere of operations. Having started my first year at Albert secondary school, where Tam and Jamie were in classes ahead of me and had made their names and reputations, my area for good turns – good turns in the sense of thieving – now extended to Balornock and Barmulloch. I was able to do this because the local hoods from these parts of Glasgow attended the school as well. I made lots of new friends, including the Marr family from Balornock and a few other guys from Barmulloch. Everybody seemed to already know of the Shannons and our exploits, so we could now move about the north of Glasgow without any problems, almost doing as we wished.

  As for stealing cars, I loved driving up and down Wallacewell Road and Galloway Street at speed. To be honest, I’m surprised I didn’t have an accident or kill someone; in retrospect, I realise just how stupid this was. I wouldn’t advise anybody to follow me in this because innocent people – non-combatants, some might say – can easily die or be maimed.

  Eventually, the time arrived for the Shannon team to split up. Tam was locked up on a theft charge, along with Jamie and Mairdo, and our friends the Dempseys, who had run with us, had moved to Maryhill while another family of our pals, the Mulgrews, moved to Rutherglen. Roseanne had emotional issues and left home to stay in a halfway house catering for young girls with problems. So it was Pawny and me, left to fend for ourselves and to make enough money to feed Mum. Things were about to change, however.

  A few months earlier, Mum had gone to a party in Possilpark, where she was introduced to a merchant seaman named Jim Brannan. Almost from their first meeting, he fell head over heels in love with her. She brought him home and he quickly became part of the family. Initially, none of us took it well, as he was not much older than Jamie, my brother, but he provided us with some form of stability in our lives just at the period when we needed it. In what seemed no time at all, he and Mum had gone off to the registry office in Bath Street and married.

  As it would turn out, Jim was good for us – but he had a fiery temper and was not scared of the established crew in Springburn, or any crew elsewhere in Glasgow, for that matter. I suppose he was just a regular guy whose attitude was live and let live.

  The trouble started when Jim and Mum went off to Glasgow Green to watch the Orange Walk. At the walk that day was a man we’ll call ‘Charlie Davis’ and his crew, who all lived up our way. They were the old school and thought they had the right to stop anybody moving into their area without first asking permission. Frankly speaking, they were the area bullies. When they met Jim for the first time that day, they tried to bully him. To their surprise – and fury – he was not having it and fought with them. The result was terrifying.

  That night after the local bar, the Spring Inn on Springburn Road, emptied at closing time, Davis and his team came to our door tooled up with machetes, knives, bats and anything else that came to hand. They were looking for Jim. He and my mum had anticipated reprisals and were waiting. Immediately our door was kicked in, Jim began fighting with them all. As the intensity of the battle increased, somebody threw a knife down the corridor close to where I was standing; it thudded into the door about three inches above my head.

  Like most bullies, however, Davis and his crew were cowards. Jim managed to get hold of a machete, coshed a few of them and then chased them down the stairs and back to where they came from. Of course we knew the matter would not end there. The police had been called and we were all taken to Baird Street police station and advised to stay there overnight. Initially, Jim was charged with attempted murder, as there had been a couple of serious injuries, but once all the facts became known this was soon dropped. Sadly, we could no longer go back to our home in Galloway Street, as there would certainly have been further reprisal attacks on Jim – attacks that would inevitably end in his murder. So, through no fault of our own and on police advice, we were forced to abandon our home. It meant losing everything – our clothing, furniture, personal papers, even keepsakes, including childhood photographs and family mementos. This is the reason why to this day there is only one photograph of me aged eleven, taken by a school photographer at Albert school. It might be the worst photograph you can imagine (the jumper I’m wearing is orange, the same colour as my hair, which is 1970s style, meaning it’s a mess). In fact the photograph is so embarrassing that every time my youngest daughter, Nicole, brought her friends into the house, she would hide it in a drawer. It’s all I have of my childhood, though.

  The crew that turned up at my door that night would get payback in later years when I was in my mid-teens living in Possilpark. But that is for the future.

  No longer having anywhere to stay, we were sent to a bed and breakfast for homeless people at Charing Cross. It went by the name of McLays and was run by a lovely Asian family. While Mum and Jim tried to come to terms with what had happened to them, Pawny and I had work to do. I needed clothes and money and knew how to get both.

  McLays was handily situated for me, as it meant I did not have to hop on a bus into town to do my shoplifting because there were scores of shops around the guest house. It meant I could steal something for myself at every opportunity, and there were very many of them. Once we had found our way around, Pawny and I embarked on a mini crime wave, stretching from Charing Cross to the Kelvin Halls. The sun shone and we made hay.

  Moving house also meant going to another school. This time it was Woodside secondary, the high school for Anderston primary. To my delight, I discovered I already knew many of the pupils from earlier days, including some I’d met at Dunclutha. I was also reunited with one of the girls with whom I used to play Doctors and Nurses. She had two brothers, who became firm friends. I also became great mates with Robert Taylor. Robert and his family lived in the west of the city and our friendship lasted ma
ny years. Tragically, Robert was jailed for 25 years in 1996 after admitting attempted murder. Charles Ballantyne was shot in the head and back during a football match, and while he survived, shots had been fired at some spectators. It turned out the intended target was somebody else, resulting in the wrong man almost being killed.

  My main difficulty during this period was that I was being bullied by some of those who could remember the Shannons from years before. The family had been broken up, with the three eldest being in care or detention of some sort, and so old associates now decided they had a golden opportunity to pick on me. Just as Paul Ferris, when he was about my age, used to get terrible beatings from a local family, I too always got a good hiding. But, just like Paul, I would not let them see me cry and would keep going back for more. Of course, none of them had the balls to fight me one-on-one, irrespective of the outcome, which is typical of bullies.

  A few years later I came across two of the main offenders when I was in the home of my future sister-in-law. Now the boot was on the other foot. I had my team of mates from Possilpark around me, along with my best mate Mick Kenna. Mick was right up for stabbing the pair of rats, but I thought, no. Instead I’d let them know who I was in case they had forgotten. Mind games can have a devastating effect – more devastating even than physical violence, and it’s certainly longer lasting. I determined to leave both of them with the knowledge that they had messed up – being a bully in your youth will always come back to haunt you one day. They were quaking and didn’t know what was going to happen to them. I escorted them out the house, shook them both by the hand and said, ‘Bye, bye. Just don’t ever come back.’

  After staying in McLays for about four months, we were moved on to a house in Finlass Street, in Possilpark, an area known as the Jungle. Going to a new district could be difficult if you knew nobody, but I was fortunate because a lot of my relations lived in the Jungle, from both my mother’s side and my father’s.

  I started attending Possilpark secondary, where I fitted in and made some good friends. However, it was not to last. Mum and Jim went through a rough patch in their relationship where she began having second thoughts about the marriage. Her dilemma increased when she met up with Jim Corrigan again. Now she had to make a choice between the two men. In January 1980, Mum disappeared, leaving Pawny and me with Jim Brannan. One day, he just dropped us off at a social services office next to the Kelvin Halls, with a note explaining who we were, what had happened and that he could not cope. He told staff that we were now their responsibility. I knew yet another move was on the cards.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Pawny and I had done nothing wrong, or at least we hadn’t been caught breaking the law. We had just been abandoned, almost like the proverbial newborn baby dumped on a doorstep. The social workers were largely sympathetic and begged us not to worry, that they were arranging for us to go somewhere nice, but soon we were put in a car and driven off to Falkland in Fife. There we were enrolled in St Ninian’s Orphanage. Officially, it was termed a List D school, but in effect it was an approved school, with 50 pupils, many of whom had been sent there from children’s hearings or court. I thought this was unfair. We seemed to be being punished because our mum had deserted us, while the man left to take care of us had opted out of that responsibility.

  ‘Hey, what happened to the cushy home?’ I asked the social worker with us.

  ‘We were looking to put you into a care home under a Care Order in the future anyway, because of your criminal convictions and general behaviour,’ she replied. It was no use protesting that it was over two years since the attempted housebreaking accusation.

  In fact, St Ninian’s would turn out to be the best move of my life. I was there for a year from 1980 and it gave me the stability I needed, while influencing key personal character traits, instilling in me values such as honesty, respect for others and loyalty. I’m not saying that I suddenly turned into an angel or ceased misbehaving, but as I grew older the attributes I picked up at the orphanage served me well.

  My first impression on arriving at St Ninian’s had been one of shock and horror. During the time I stayed there, I learned that the locals called it the Big House and many believed those who were kept there were animals – thieves, glue-sniffers and troublemakers. I am sorry to say that they were 100 per cent correct. As a result, Pawny and I fitted in perfectly! I was in my teens by then and it was filled with young boys like me from all over Scotland who came from similarly deprived backgrounds. But if I had any preconceived dreads about what to expect from a school run by a religious Order, these soon evaporated. I was able to play football, rugby and every other sport you could think of. The rural location of the orphanage meant I was breathing fresh, clean air into my lungs every day. There were hills, trees and fields to admire, no congested dirty streets with broken glass littering pavements and rubbish strewn in gardens. The daily routine suited my simple and basic lifestyle. There were three square meals a day, plus supper before bed. I had my own single bed with what I now know to be a duvet to keep me warm.

  The Congregation of Christian Brothers in Scotland had opened the orphanage in 1951. The Brothers ran orphanages and homes all over the world, but not all the members of the Order had genuine Christian motives for joining, as I was to discover. During the time I was at St Ninian’s and later, boys like me in similar orphanages from Australia to the United States to Ireland were being subjected to the most appalling sexual abuse by members of the Order. When these abuses came to light, the Order was forced to apologise for the sins of those who had done terrible wrongs and pay out huge sums of money in compensation to the victims. In many cases, the boys would never be able to forget what was done to them. The abuse they endured would affect them for the rest of their lives.

  One experience at the orphanage left a very unpleasant memory. For a few months after arriving, I continued to bedwet. Back at home I’d often blamed Pawny for the state of the bedding in the morning, but he was in another room so I could no longer point the finger at him. After a time, though, I stopped, the turning point being a strange event that even now I find hard to describe. Nevertheless, here we go.

  Each morning the bedwetters – we used to call each other ‘piss the beds’ – would take a shower watched by one of the Brothers for any signs of infection caused by lying all night in urine. One morning, a Brother noticed spots and a rash on my behind and, as was his duty, reported it to one of his superiors – I’ll simply call him ‘P’; the man is long dead.

  Now, there was considerable talk in the orphanage of sexual abuse; in fact, it was rife. We pupils obviously talked a lot to each other about what went on and there wasn’t much that we missed. We realised some individuals were being victimised by the older men – even at that age we knew from the demeanour and behaviour of some boys that they were being bullied and taken advantage of. Remember, a lot of us were streetwise. We were, in a way, old beyond our years. We had known wrong, had often been without the comfort and protection of parents, and I suppose some of the boys there had already been victims of abuse at home. Maybe that was the reason why some were already at the orphanage. So it went on. At this stage, I believed my first duty was to my own – that meant looking after Pawny first, never mind anyone else.

  My experience at the hands of P, however, would confirm that my suspicions and those of others were correct. I was one of the main altar boys at mass this particular morning and when it was over was taken to one side by P and told to report to his room that evening. He explained he wanted to see what he could do to sort out the rash on my behind. Now, that could, at a stretch, have sounded above board, but then he told me not to say anything to the other boys. When I asked him what time I had to go to his room, he said, ‘Don’t worry. Just go to sleep tonight as normal and I will come and wake you up when choir practice for the other Brothers is over.’

  True to his word, at around eleven, he came quietly into my bedroom, woke me up and asked me to come to his room. It was just him a
nd me, and on arrival at his room he told me to undress completely and turn round so my back was to him. I was very sceptical and suspicious, but did as he said, all the time keeping my hands over my private parts. I sensed him come up beside me and then felt him starting to touch my behind where the spots were. Then he noticed my bum cheeks were as tight as I could get them, so he suggested I lie face down on the bed. This might relax me, he said, and allow him to put on the cream that he said would clear up the rash. I lay on the bed, but could not relax. I was scared and cold, wondering what was going to happen next. There was no way I was going to relax my bum cheeks. Nevertheless he spent about 20 minutes rubbing on cream, his hands moving over me very slowly, and all the time he was telling me to loosen up. ‘There’s no need to be so tense,’ he said. ‘Relax.’ But I was too nervous and kept asking him if I could go back to bed.

  Eventually, he gave in and asked me to stand up and get dressed. I did as he instructed, while all the time he watched. Then, just as I was about to leave, he told me to sit on his knee. I was too scared to disobey, and once on his knee he began moving me to the centre of his body between his legs. Now I could feel his erection with the sides of my legs. There was nothing else for me to do but to demand to be allowed to go back to bed. Reluctantly, he agreed.

  Under the safety of my duvet I found it difficult to get warm. I lay awake throughout the night, all the time wondering if I would hear the door open and his steps come to the side of my bed. And I had another motive for desperately wanting to avoid falling off to sleep – by staying awake, I could make sure I did not wet the bed, so that come morning there would be no need for the dreaded shower with the watching Brother and the prospect of another cream-rubbing session in the privacy of P’s room.