Acid Attack Read online

  It was early afternoon when I arrived back home in the police car, but it felt already like one of the longest days of my life. The circus had been and gone, the police tape removed. Neighbours told how the street had been filled with blue-light vehicles, including fire engines due to the use of a chemical substance. One mum who popped out for her Christmas turkey before the attack was unable to get home as the street was in lockdown.

  Stepping through the front door, the attack felt distant and unreal, as if it had all been imagined. Then I saw the hallway’s freshly painted white walls streaked with the viscous brown fluid which had been thrown upwards into my face from close range. The powerful acid was eating into the plaster and corroding the enamel paint on the radiator. Drops of it defaced the glass surface of a mirror and permanently marked a wooden table. Also splattered was a festive holly wreath set for the front door, and a singing Christmas tree. Drops of acid were dotted on my daughter’s shoes. These and other items were bagged and binned. It would take more than six coats of white emulsion to finally obliterate all traces of acid from the walls.

  I returned to the police car which took me to Partick police station, where the CID were waiting for a statement. Sitting in a drab little room, I recounted the day’s events in painstaking, chronological detail. When it came to the question of whether I had seen the knife in the postman’s hand, there were two ways of answering. I could have said yes, knowing that this might help bolster the police and prosecution case. But that answer would have been untrue. To lie would be foolish as it would serve only to help the postman by giving his lawyer something to unpick and challenge – ammunition to cast doubt on my evidence. Anyway, such embellishment was unnecessary as the postman had been caught at the scene of the crime, in a fancy-dress costume, and the police had numerous independent and credible witnesses. The only thing that would make his prosecution more of a gift would have been for me to wrap him in Christmas paper, stick a bow on his head and leave him under the tree.

  More than an hour into the interminable interview, I found my concentration beginning to lapse. I realised that I had not eaten a single thing since waking. The incredible day had been fuelled entirely on adrenaline and one cup of tea, which I had been drinking in bed while reading on my Kindle when the postman rang. Having awoken before 8 a.m., it was now around 3 p.m. I could hardly think straight. A jarring thought occurred – the postman would, no doubt, have had a nice hot lunch, courtesy of the police. They know their rights. A CID officer went to fetch me one of the most satisfying meals I have ever experienced – a can of Diet Coke, a bag of crisps and a Bounty bar. Having devoured them, I got back on track to finish the statement.

  When I finally got home, the house was dark, silent and cold. Unable to drive because of my injured eye, a friend took me to another house where my daughter was and it was deemed sensible to spend the night. A storm raged outside as I lay awake until the early hours, exhausted but unable to switch off my racing thoughts.

  One of my daughter’s favourite Christmas movies is Home Alone, in which two bungling criminals are carted off by the police. That our Christmas scrape had a similar Hollywood-style ending with the postman locked up made my job of reassuring her that all was well much easier. It would have been a hard task if the postman had still been at large. What would that uncertainty have done to a child? Even worse was the thought of him managing to use his knife on me.

  The overwhelming torrent of messages intensified, arriving more quickly than they could be responded to. That evening I needed to get out to clear my head. I stood alone in an unfamiliar pub in an unfamiliar town. Other patrons presumably gave me a wide berth – an odd stranger, face covered with scarlet patches and one puffy red eye virtually swollen shut.

  I thought deeply about who might have ordered such an audacious, extraordinary and carefully planned attack – an acid attack as punishment for acid words. Really, how sensitive and delicate would someone need to be? I was also still trying to figure out who the postman was. The next morning, I would find out.

  3

  BASIL FAULTY

  William Burns stood handcuffed and silent in the familiar comfort of a court dock with his bowed head resembling a misshapen lump of raw steak mince. Much of his existence has been spent in prison cells due to an unfortunate and unshakeable habit of dealing drugs, waving guns around and, on at least one occasion, shooting people.

  The court heard that Burns was charged with assaulting me by pretending to be a postman and throwing sulphuric acid in my face. As Burns slouched in the dock, his name came to me by text. It chimed but vaguely. He had never merited significant journalistic attention, largely due to his being off the radar through spells in prison. Brief proceedings over, Burns was carted off to jail, where he would awaken the next morning – Christmas Day – without so much as a selection box. Perhaps his HMP Barlinnie brethren had a whip round for a 55th birthday gift two days later. Bail was not on the agenda because Burns had been out on licence when he attacked me, having been released early from a prison sentence for the shooting of an unarmed female security guard, who had only been trying to do her job. He fired a pistol at her from point-blank range during a Post Office robbery which netted him the princely sum of £15,500. Thankfully, his innocent victim survived. For that, a judge called Lord Penrose sentenced Burns to 15 years in prison but, this being Scotland, it could mean just about anything.

  The Crown Office and judiciary make loud noises when lengthy sentences are imposed on bad men. These are hailed unquestioningly on TV news, but many people have grown astute enough to know these numbers are virtually meaningless. The reality is that the length of time served is typically a fraction of what is stated. Clarity only applies to life sentences for which judges are required to set a minimum prison term. Not only are the lengths of sentences a sham, the public have no right to know when criminals are freed. Nor are they entitled to know if and when they are sent back to prison for breaching early release terms. All of these decisions are made behind closed doors by the Parole Board for Scotland.

  Burns is a classic case in point of dishonest and secretive sentencing. Despite being jailed for 15 years in 2001, it was decided to put him back on the streets of Paisley after 10 years. We only know this because he became involved in a violent feud – stabbings all round – with a drug-dealing murderer and former crony called Stewart Gillespie. It was decided, again entirely in secret, that both Burns and Gillespie should be sent back to jail to serve the rest of their respective prison sentences. This hokey-cokey routine only reached the public domain thanks to journalist Derek Alexander, whose underworld contacts are unmatched. It was his story that alerted the shooting victim that Burns had even been freed in the first place.

  The secret decision to return Burns to prison was clearly sensible. The only problem being, it was again decreed – yes, in secret – that Burns should be let out early for a second time. We only know this because I sat on him in my driveway in December 2015 when he was supposedly serving the 15-year sentence which should have run until July 2016.

  Burns first came to public attention in 1994 as a participant in a drugs war that poisoned the proud town of Paisley and its bordering south Glasgow housing estates of Nitshill and Pollok. He was in a craven gang controlled by a man called Stewart ‘Specky’ Boyd. The gang was linked to at least nine murders, most of them still unsolved. They were the closest that Scotland has ever had to the cartels of Mexico and Colombia, where killing is done on an industrial scale. One wonders what the body count would have been had they not been impeded by our strict gun laws.

  The 1990s Paisley drugs war didn’t receive anything like the media scrutiny it merited at the time. Most of the attention was focused on the then Paisley North MP Irene Adams, who suffered death threats for speaking out against the mob. The Labour politician’s sister, who died of a suspected drugs overdose in 2001, had two children with the brother of Burns.

  Other prominent members of the gang included Gillespie, Rob
ert ‘Piggy’ Pickett and George ‘Goofy’ Docherty. Dumb nicknames appear to be coincidental not conditional. Burns also has one – Basil. This came not from any fondness of the fragrant herb nor the madcap hotelier of 1970s sitcom Fawlty Towers nor, sadly, the kids’ TV fox Basil Brush with the ‘Boom Boom!’ catchphrase. Rather, Basil was a violent old crook who Burns idolised to the extent that he took his name as a nickname, like a rock band tribute act.

  In 1994 Burns stood trial for the fatal shooting of another rival dealer called Raymond McCafferty in Glasgow – a kneecapping gone wrong, apparently – but was cleared. The police firmly believe that Burns got away with murder. A relative of the murdered man declined my offer to talk. Underworld sources suggest Burns got paid just £2,000 for the ‘job’.

  Two years later, in August 1996, a different jury found Burns guilty of stealing a Lion King birthday cake from a Marks & Spencer store . . . at gunpoint. When a security guard caught Burns trying to purloin the novelty Disney confection in November 1994, he stuck a Browning 9mm handgun in his face, threatened to shoot him and then ran away.

  Police and prosecutors signally failed to deal with this toxic quintet during their long and depraved reign of murder and mayhem in Paisley. The people of the town and surrounding areas were let down badly. The lack of a media spotlight almost certainly contributed to the police and Crown’s indifference.

  Natural selection and street justice eventually did the authorities’ job for them. Boyd died in a car crash in Spain in 2003. Tragically, five innocent lives were also lost. Docherty was run over and stabbed to death in Glasgow in 2006. His murder is unsolved. Pickett was shot in Glasgow in 2006 but survived. He still skulks around Paisley and is a close ally of Burns. Gillespie was stabbed to death in Paisley in 2013. His killer was jailed. Burns is due to spend at least the next few years in prison and will be a spent force once released. Other than throwing acid, shooting an innocent woman and the birthday cake heist, he has convictions involving assault, robbery, guns, knives and bail breach. As one of life’s great leeches, goodness knows what the cost, borne by society, must be for his prison time and legal aid lawyers.

  Once I learned of his identity, I hoped that it would become the first piece of a jigsaw which would eventually build a clear picture of the entire attack plot and everyone involved in it. But something was not right. In the hours after the attack, amidst the whirlwind of police officers and medics, I believed it most likely emanated from the Daniel mob, in part due to the snarled parting shot that ‘Wee Jamie sends his regards’. I had quickly discounted the paymaster being Jamie Stevenson, aka ‘The Iceman’, partly because he is a big man who Burns would not describe as ‘wee’. Furthermore, despite his presumed animus towards me, I doubted that Stevenson would be so reckless as to target a journalist because of the serious heat and backlash it could generate.

  In the days before the attack, I had been working on an investigation centred on the Daniels. A family member was suspected of deliberately driving a car at Roy Wolfin, a multimillionaire with interests in private hire taxis, property and payday loans, and a known associate of the Daniels. It did not appear to be the driver’s intention but Wolfin lost both his legs in the sickening hit-and-run. My story about this was published on 20 December, three days before the acid attack. But now, on hearing that Burns was in the dock, the immediate Daniel theory made no sense whatsoever. Burns and his close friend Pickett are closely allied to the Lyons gang who, in turn, are both sworn enemies of the Daniel mob.

  My book Caught in the Crossfire charts how the Lyons and Pickett’s Paisley contingent joined forces to fight the Daniels, on the basis of ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’. The 2006 shooting of Pickett was carried out by two Daniel hitmen, using stolen British army guns. In that Daniel atrocity, one Lyons family member was killed and another was wounded.

  The only conclusion was that the ‘Wee Jamie’ comment had been a deliberate act of misinformation from Burns – a smokescreen to temporarily confuse me and send me in the wrong direction, which it did.

  Another aspect of the attack was beginning to take on growing significance. Scanning through old newspaper cuttings, I saw that Burns had spent a lifetime using guns on people. That was his comfort zone. Yet he came to my door wielding a bottle of acid. The intent of his paymaster was to destroy my face, to blind me, disfigure me, maim me for life. Just type ‘acid attack’ into Google Images for a graphic depiction of what they were hoping for me.

  Puzzled London journalist Andy Lines, chief reporter of the Daily Mirror, asked a Glasgow colleague, ‘Why didn’t ’e just shoot ’im?’ A gun would have denoted business. Acid was personal. It was not the Daniel mob, so who was it? My suspicions were growing, but I was keeping an open mind.

  4

  GET A HAIRCUT

  The year after William ‘Basil’ Burns committed his birthday-cake heist, I was offered my first job as a journalist.

  Peering through thick glasses across a vast expanse of desk, Daily Record editor-in-chief Endell Laird told me in clipped tones the annual salary was £9,500 and that my hair was too long – welcome aboard but get a haircut. My flowing golden locks, a legacy of a summer job in a Californian fairground, did not impress the traditional newspaper man, but he was willing to take a chance on me not being a moron. Aged 20, I felt like a big shot landing the job of reporter at The Glaswegian, a bright and punchy but now defunct free title which was then delivered to most homes in the city. Although quite how many ended up turning the River Clyde into papier mâché will never be known.

  From childhood, I only ever wanted to be a journalist. Sitting at the kitchen table, I devoured newspapers with an insatiable zeal. As a teenage schoolboy, I made myself busy at the suburban local paper with work experience and unpaid rugby and football match reports. I quit school halfway through sixth year, figuring I needed experience rather than qualifications, and took a job in a petrol station while trying to learn about my intended profession. Stuart Barr, a veteran Daily Record journalist who lived nearby, kindly agreed to give me a grounding in the basics. Off we went to cover junior football for the Evening Times. Having just 60 words to describe the bloodshed and drama of a typical clash – fists and feet flying, red cards, crowd trouble, a 5–4 scoreline – was great discipline. When I proudly acquired my first press card, it showed an 18-year-old with floppy hair.

  Sport had been my only real interest at school but I managed to scrape a B in Higher English to study journalism at Napier University in Edinburgh, where shorthand was by far the most useful lesson. Student life gave me a brief foray into politics. Using the nom de guerre Dr Freelove and Lager, I stood for student union president, to the disgust of genuine candidates. I hastily withdrew after early voting suggested I was romping towards an unwanted victory.

  At The Glaswegian I was expected to do every job and filled countless empty white boxes with news and sports exclusives, lifestyle features, motors and even movie reviews (quite a feat without having seen the films). One insightful job was typing up a freelance’s nuggets of scandal and gossip from the Labour-dominated council. ‘The Backbencher’ column’s tales of back-stabbing, bullying and bungs were a prime example of journalism being the telling of stories that some people didn’t want told. In an ever-changing world, it has provided some comfort that the ‘cooncil’ has so valiantly preserved its proud tradition of sleaze and corruption.

  A colleague, a member of the Catholic Church’s strict Opus Dei sect, caused mirth with a weekly act of sabotage – jumbling up the star signs before they were published. So an unwitting Aries would end up reading the Virgo horoscope. It was a one-man stand against astrology.

  With an empty back page to fill, the boss dispatched me to Celtic Park to ask captain Paul McStay about the likelihood of a testimonial match. Unimpressed by my line of questioning, the veteran footballer sent me packing. Later that day McStay phoned the office to apologise to me – a mere green young hack – for his offhand demeanour. It was an astonishing act of court
esy from a decent man.

  I sourced two police scandals that were pinched by the national press. One was about an Asian officer who suffered racist bullying by colleagues and the other was about sexism inflicted on a female officer. These would not be my last clashes with irate police chiefs. Despite a middle-class upbringing, I had developed a healthy suspicion of the police. When I was 17, the son of a high-ranking police chief hurled a brick through my windscreen as I drove under a pedestrian bridge. He and his pals had spent months antagonising my friends and me. Hidden hands got to work. To my astonishment, a few days later, two police officers turned up at the petrol station where I worked and publicly charged me with chasing the brick-thrower many months earlier. Yes, I had pursued him one night after he had shouted threats at me but he got away. It was a complete non-incident but enough to dig out and use as a counterweight against the brick-throwing, which could have killed me. Both cases entered the opaque corridors of the Crown Office and disappeared.