Acid Attack Read online

  First published in 2018 by

  Birlinn Limited

  West Newington House

  10 Newington Road

  Edinburgh

  EH9 1QS

  www.birlinn.co.uk

  Copyright © Russell Findlay 2018

  The moral right of Russell Findlay to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN: 978 0 85790 944 2

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Typeset by Initial Typesetting Services, Edinburgh Printed and bound by MBM Print SCS Ltd, East Kilbride

  To my family and friends, thank you for loving and listening

  To those who share their stories, your trust is an immense privilege

  And to all reporters and photographers, don’t ever back down

  CONTENTS

  1 SPECIAL DELIVERY

  2 #FAIL

  3 BASIL FAULTY

  4 GET A HAIRCUT

  5 LIZARD’S TAIL

  6 FRANKIE DONUTS

  7 WEE BARRY

  8 LAST ORDERS

  9 DOMESTIC OMERTÀ

  10 AFFAIR PRICE

  11 MAÑANA, MAÑANA

  12 SLEEPING POLICEMEN

  13 SECURITY WARS

  14 CRIME INC

  15 PR PLOD

  16 THE FILTH

  17 THE FERRET

  18 DIRTY BRIEFS

  19 THE UNTOUCHABLES

  20 DANGER: OLD FIRM

  21 THE WINDOW CLEANER

  22 ‘UNMASKED’

  23 SUNRISE

  24 DEFIANCE AND BETRAYAL

  25 SUNSET

  26 PANTO SEASON

  27 DIRTY DEAL

  28 CALL CRIMESTOPPERS

  29 THE LIE COURT

  30 DEAD GUILTY

  31 NUMBERS GAME

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  1

  SPECIAL DELIVERY

  Two days before Christmas and the red blur of a postman’s jacket could be seen through the frosted glass of my front door. I eased it open slightly and his hand passed through a Royal Mail card and pen, with a mumbled instruction to sign for an unexpected special delivery. As I turned slightly to my left and looked down to scrawl my name, a shock of cold liquid splashed upwards across my face. From my mouth came a scream of terror. A glass bottle flew past my head. Mere milliseconds had passed but my brain calmly informed me that I was under attack – that some kind of toxic liquid had been thrown in my face and that my life was in danger.

  The postman was fake. The card a distraction. His special delivery, I later learned, was a bottle of sulphuric acid. His task was to blind and maim – possibly even murder.

  The empty bottle was instantly followed by the postman himself, who crashed into the hallway and lunged towards me. Fight or flight? repel him and retreat? or meet force with force? Truth is, there was no such choice. I had to get the postman out of my home, where I lived alone with my 10-year-old daughter, who was enjoying a long lie on the first day of the school holidays. With all my strength, I expelled him back into the cold morning air. We fell out through the door in an unorthodox embrace. We tripped, pirouetted and I landed on my back. A rib cracked as the postman’s bulk collapsed on top of me, forcing the air from my lungs.

  My face was burning and the skin felt tight. The taste in my mouth was foul and bitter. My right eye – doused in acid – gave the ordinary suburban street a soft white filter, as if it were a dream. I sank my teeth into his meaty head and frantically gouged at his face and eyes, TV having taught me the importance of getting his DNA under my nails. The postman scrambled to his feet and lumbered towards the road. ‘YOU’RE GOING FUCKING NOWHERE,’ I bellowed, grabbing desperately at his Royal Mail jacket, which came away in my hands like a snake’s skin. He broke free, lurching towards his idling getaway car, but he was too slow and my fingers just managed to regain their grip. We both crashed back down hard onto the monoblock driveway, where we flailed violently. I was wrestling for control – he was fighting to flee. The tables turned. I was now on top of the postman. The getaway driver panicked and drove off, leaving him stranded. I straddled the expanse of his stomach and jabbed him with my fist, hard on the face.

  Over my shoulder, I saw my daughter in pyjama shorts and T-shirt, wide-eyed and frozen. Having heard the doorbell, she had crept out of bed and edged curiously to the top of the stairs to see who was calling – perhaps a friend with an early Christmas gift. Clasping her favourite stuffed toy to her chest, her face was a study of fear and confusion as her mind tried to make sense of this extraordinary scene. Her piercing cry of ‘DAD!’ struck at my heart. I shouted at her to go to a nearby friend’s house. ‘Run, quickly!’ She didn’t pause. Springing out of the doorway, her little bare feet almost tripped over the postman’s boots as she bravely dashed a couple of doors along, fearful that he would give chase to stop her.

  She hammered the door and our friend, a lady in her sixties, opened it to the sight of a tearful and terrified little girl, her urgent plea for help so garbled as to be almost incoherent. The startled neighbour then saw me on top of a postman and I shouted that I had been attacked. I urged her to get the police and ambulance. She phoned 999 and shepherded my daughter inside to safety, where she curled up beside our friend’s pet dogs, who comforted her with gentle familiarity and warmth.

  It was just past 8.30 a.m. and I was wearing only a pair of pyjama bottoms and grey T-shirt. My bare feet were bruised and shredded by the brick driveway but the adrenaline masked any pain.

  Having gained the upper hand and by now utterly consumed by rage and indignation, I took the opportunity to pause, to catch my breath and to examine my attacker. With my teeth set in a clench of anger, I grinned manically at the despicable thug trapped beneath me. As I stared into his piggy eyes, the only emotion on show was bewilderment. This was clearly not how he had seen his day unfolding. He had come to my home to inflict serious damage but had instead become my captive, now as helpless as a beached jellyfish.

  I hammered my fist so hard into his face that his set of dentures flew out of his mouth and broke in two. With an amusing lack of self-awareness, he wailed, ‘MY TEETH!’ Each punch was joyful and satisfactory, instant doses of justice. My only later regret was that I showed too much restraint. More appropriate perhaps would have been to dispense biblical redress by taking his sight as he had intended to take mine – an eye for an eye.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I asked but he was mute. His fight was mostly gone and all he could do was to gob bloody chunks of phlegm at me, which ceased when I reciprocated with a foaming white blob of acidic spit. By now, the street was slowly filling with residents edging out of front doors – good people whose faces were etched with concern and disbelief. This quiet enclave – a haven where children play safely, litter is absent, smiles are exchanged and neighbourly bonds still matter – had seen nothing like it. One neighbour thought that I had caught a burglar and cautioned me to ease off on the punching. I barked at him to go into my house and fetch a basin of water to rinse my face and eye. The vision in my right eye was virtually gone – everyday fine details and vivid colours had been replaced by fuzzy shapes, soft pastel tones and a hazy light.

  The husband of the lady who called 999 was first at my side. He crouched beside the postman, took his wrists and pinned his arms to the ground. With my free hands, I scooped handfuls of icy water on to my face, desperately trying to wash away or dilute the cloying liquid which
was eating my skin and stealing my sight. One neighbour threw the entire basin over my head, which also drenched the postman underneath me, causing him to recoil ridiculously in apparent umbrage. Another basin was filled and the rinsing continued. I could feel the burning sensation sink deeper as the acid intruded behind the orb of my eyeball. I gargled the water to try and clear the bitter phlegm seeping down my throat.

  We maintained this position for at least 10 minutes but it felt much longer as I continually shouted for police and medical help. I fired questions at the postman – ‘What’s your name?’, ‘Who sent you?’, ‘Where are you from?’ and ‘How much were you paid?’ In response, he offered either silence or glib replies such as, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ ‘I’m just a postman,’ and ‘You just attacked me.’ Occasional blows and threatened ones caused him to flinch but not loosen his tongue. This was clearly a man familiar with the criminal’s right of silence. His answers were rendered even more absurd by his whiny and petulant tone, like a toddler protesting innocence despite being caught scribbling on a wall. This was no child or even a youth but a man in his fifties – a lump of grey flesh, the product of a tragic lifetime of poor diet, idleness and incarceration. I viewed him with pure contempt.

  My knees were pressed firmly on his upper arms. On one arm was the tattooed name of Dominique while the other said Lorraine, both in a calligraphy-style script. The tattoos suggested the postman possessed a streak of human decency, but this was at odds with the commission of such a vile and craven act. I asked who these women were – wife? partner? daughter? – and taunted him by suggesting I should pay them a visit later when he would be locked in a police cell.

  My most important question was ‘What did you throw in my face?’ He offered nothing but feigned ignorance. I added, ‘You’d better tell me – if I end up blind, I will fucking kill you!’ but he was in no mood to talk and no amount of threats or blows elicited an answer. All he could do was hold out and pray for the police to rescue him. At one point in the interrogation, I mockingly – albeit sincerely – asked, ‘Why the fuck did they send a fat clown like you? Is that really all I’m worth?’ The playground barbs may have hurt more than his superficial cuts and bruises.

  I must have looked deranged. Dressed in pyjama bottoms on a cold winter morning, face and eye livid and ugly, sitting on top of a postman while bombarding him with questions, insults and punches.

  Eventually, two figures clad in black and neon yellow ran from a police car, its blue lights and sirens adding to the madness that had shattered the pre-Christmas peace. Just as the police officers were approaching, the postman snarled, ‘Wee Jamie sends his regards.’ Who was Jamie? I knew of at least two major criminals of that name. But the postman refused to say any more and was hoisted to his feet and escorted to the safety of a police van which had also appeared, soon to be joined by many more blue lights, reporters, press photographers, well-wishers and gawkers who found a reason to take a drive down a cul-de-sac. Left at the scene were his snapped dentures in a pool of blood and a genuine Royal Mail bag that matched the jacket and delivery card, all of which had to be bagged as evidence and forensically examined.

  One of the young police officers asked me to talk him through exactly what had happened. It was only when I reached my front door that I saw the glint of a steak knife – a black handle with six inches of sharp, serrated steel – lying across the threshold. I suddenly realised that the pristine blade had been meant for me. If the postman had done his job properly, it would have been buried in my guts and I could now be dead. At the moment he came through my door, he had lost control of his weapon. It seems that he had just too many items to carry – acid bottle, pen, delivery card, knife. It certainly didn’t feel like it but it was my lucky day.

  I benefited from another piece of good fortune. Less then a month prior to the attack, in December 2015, my old solid wooden front door had been replaced. Had the old door still been in use I would have seen a ‘postman’ through the peephole and opened it fully, exposing both eyes to the acid and offering a bigger target for the blade. Because I had only been able to see the blur of a red jacket through the new PVC front door’s frosted glass panels, I had opened it cautiously and only partially, which had narrowed his window of attack. The stark reality is that my daughter could have come downstairs to a very different scenario – a dark outcome which is hard even to think about.

  The sight and significance of the knife caused me to flip. I have never before experienced such pure and potent anger. At that moment I could have been capable of killing the postman, making me appreciate how some good people can end up in prison. Had I seen the knife sooner, as we struggled, would it have ended up inside him? I think it is possible.

  I turned back towards the police van, determined to drag the postman out by his head and rip him to pieces. Black uniforms swarmed around me, forming a barrier. One police officer said, ‘Calm down. You need to get to hospital – the ambulance is on its way.’

  2

  #FAIL

  The ambulance screamed and weaved through rush-hour traffic to reach A&E in just six minutes while I lay in the back having saline water poured into my right eye and splashed over my face.

  I told the paramedic what had happened. Luckily, I was not being treated for a knife wound or lying lifeless in the back of a different kind of ambulance – the discreet vans used by undertakers.

  As a 42-year-old journalist I had spent years investigating organised crime. This appeared to be payback. I did not yet know who the postman was but it seemed likely he was just a hired hand, a ‘rocket’, paid to do the dirty work of someone with deep pockets and a deep grudge. Scotland’s criminal underworld is inhabited by inadequate, thin-skinned little men who grow rich and crave status through cowardly violence, drug-dealing and the exploitation of the weakest and most vulnerable souls in society. They hate the truth being told about them. I am universally despised by them, which is just as it should be and just the way I like it.

  The adrenaline was fading and my injuries were beginning to sting. My eye burned furiously and my skin was on fire. The snapped rib was making itself felt. Pain pulsed from cuts and grazes all over my body.

  Shielded by police officers, I was ordered to lie back as the trolley was clattered out of the ambulance and spirited into the cavernous emergency room of Queen Elizabeth University Hospital, where a team of medics in pale blue tunics got to work. A small plastic device was attached directly to my acid-soaked eyeball which allowed sterile water to flow directly on to it – intrusive and unnatural but as welcome as a cool spring fountain on a hot summer day. I fought the instinct to flinch, blink and recoil as my precious sight was at stake. A female A&E doctor gazed into my eyes, inches from my face, and asked, ‘Can you see how beautiful I am?’ The answer was a wavering and bemused ‘Yes,’ as my right eye’s vision was milky and unclear.

  Five litres of water later, I was allowed to sit up. I grabbed my phone and, with two police officers in pursuit, barged through the swing doors into a public area to get a signal. Dispensing with phone etiquette, I delivered a rapid-fire account of what had happened to an agog reporter at The Scottish Sun, where I was the Investigations Editor. I told her about the postman’s ‘Wee Jamie’ remark and speculated that the two most likely candidates were Jamie Daniel and Jamie Stevenson, high-level organised criminals I had pursued in newspapers and books.

  Daniel – who was to die of natural causes six months after my attack – was head of his eponymous family gang which spread from Glasgow’s deprived Possil area to forge links with major UK and international criminal networks. They stayed anonymous for years until my colleagues and I decided to shine a light on their drug-dealing, murdering and money-laundering. The family’s war with the Lyons gang, which continues to rage after more than 17 years, was the subject of my book Caught in the Crossfire, published in 2012.

  Stevenson was also from north Glasgow and subject of another book – The Iceman – which I co-
wrote in 2008. Taking its title from one of Stevenson’s nicknames, it tells how he quietly became one of Scotland’s most active narcotics smugglers until he was jailed for money-laundering. Stevenson was prime suspect in the fatal shooting of his former best friend, drug-dealer Tony McGovern, in 2000, a murder which remains unsolved.

  Call finished, I was met outside A&E by a friend and newspaper colleague. I retold the story but this time my emotions kicked in. Angry tears spilled down my cheeks and my voice cracked as I described how the fake postman had come to my home with absolutely no regard for the safety of my 10-year-old daughter. Even by the low standards of the criminal world, it was contemptible. Next time some washed-up old gangster opines about an underworld code of honour, about ‘non-combatants’ and children being exempt from violence, just remember that it is a myth, invented as a means of trying to justify the unjustifiable and give a veneer of legitimacy to the illegitimate.

  I was discharged from A&E and pushed in a wheelchair through the hospital. With my police guards, I raised eyebrows as we whizzed through waiting areas and eventually found the ophthalmology department, where experts puzzled over what liquid had been used by the postman. More water was flushed through the damaged cornea and the first of many batches of eye drops was issued. Over the following weeks, putting in drops became a full-time occupation. There was Hylo-Forte (16 per day); Dropodex (9 per day); Minims Chloramphenicol 0.5% (4 per day); Cyclopentolate Hydrochloride 1% (1 per day); Xailin (night-time). The ophthalmologist’s prognosis was cautious and mixed. I had scarring on my right cornea and there was a chance the sight could deteriorate until it was gone for good. The harsh news was softened by the overriding caveat that it was too early to know.

  I was then taken by police car to another hospital, the Royal Infirmary, where a consultant plastic surgeon examined the chemical burns on my face. After leaving the second hospital, my phone came alive with missed calls, messages, voicemails and emails from friends, relatives and colleagues as news of the attack spread through newspaper offices and beyond. It was impossible to address them all at once. Sitting in the front passenger seat of a marked police car, I used Twitter to compose a succinct message of defiance: ‘Fat hitman left his teeth in my driveway #fail.’ I figured that people would deduce that if I was well enough to tweet, my injuries were not life-threatening. It served another purpose and that was to tell the postman’s paymasters that their plot to have me stuck like a pig had gone badly wrong. The getaway driver would have already confessed to abandoning the postman. The tweet rubbed it right in. A friend cautioned against it as it could inflame the situation or be twisted and used against me later by a defence lawyer, but I rejected the advice because I wanted people to know that I was fine and had come out on top. If defiance was mistaken for gloating, so be it.