Acid Attack Page 4

  Donaldson claimed that he had received phone calls from a Sunday Mail reporter, supposedly me, asking questions about his business interests. It was a mystifying claim. These calls, if they even existed, did not come from me or any of my colleagues. The most likely explanation was that a gangland rival or mischievous police officer had used my name to wind him up. I had heard of such bogus calls being made in my name before, which was hugely worrying because it meant there might be other occasions where I had no knowledge of them. That he thought the phantom caller was me was concerning as it’s bad enough when criminals take exception to things that you are actually responsible for. In his plea to the court, Donaldson said previous articles caused him ‘distress and embarrassment’. After hearing around two hours of arguments, the sheriff took minutes to reject Donaldson’s groundless case. It was a humiliation which he took badly. The resultant story, again, not written by me but a colleague, told how ‘paranoid Donaldson’ had failed to censor the paper.

  Two years after Donaldson’s hubris-driven court farce came the murder of his sister’s husband, George ‘Goofy’ Docherty, who was run over then stabbed to death in Tollcross, Glasgow. The killer has never been caught but his identity is an open secret in the underworld, where getting away with murder is the ultimate accolade. Many years later, I exposed the suspected perpetrator as a highly dangerous hitman. For Donaldson, losing his main ally was a major blow as it made him vulnerable, and I wrote a story for the Sunday Mail headlined ‘DONUTS: THEY’LL PUT A HOLE IN ME’. The story began: ‘Mobster Frankie “Donuts” Donaldson fears for his life after one of his henchmen was murdered last week.’

  But there was something else within the same story which latterly was of significant interest. It was a brief account of my first and only encounter with William ‘Basil’ Burns before he turned up at my front door, a decade later, dressed as a postman and wielding acid. The story stated:

  Another former ally of Docherty, William ‘Basil’ Burns, 44, is keeping a low profile in Perth Prison where he is serving 15 years for gunning down a female security guard.

  But, we can reveal, he is using a mobile phone to run a drugs operation from his cell. The Sunday Mail obtained the number of Burns’ mobile and called him in jail on Thursday. During the 35-second late-night phone call Burns confirmed who he was but refused to talk, then hung up.

  When told the call was from us, he said: ‘What are you phoning me for? Don’t phone me again.’

  The source who gave the Sunday Mail the mobile number used by Burns said: ‘Basil uses the phone to keep in touch with his outside interests. He also uses it to discuss matters that can’t be said during official prison calls, which are monitored.’

  The fact Burns confirmed his identity to an unknown cold caller while using an illicit phone in prison is a pretty good indicator of his mental agility. What is remarkable is that, even following the acid attack, I had no recollection of this fleeting exchange with Burns. It was so inconsequential that I forgot all about it for more than 10 years. I only remembered it four weeks after the attack when Paul Hutcheon, the Sunday Herald’s tenacious Investigations Editor, discovered it in a newspaper cuttings database and told me about it. I later recovered the recording of my late-night call to Burns, which was strange to hear, knowing what happened the next time our paths crossed. He was as talkative during the phone call as he had been while lying on my driveway.

  From the summary of newspaper stories published about Donaldson, it may sound like he was of particular interest to me and my colleagues, but that is not the case. He is just one of the many swaggering, self-styled ‘businessmen’ who taint Glasgow and who seem to think they are above the law. Writing about him is not a personal crusade but merely a journalist doing his job of informing the public about people deserving attention.

  Many journalists do not attempt to expose men like Donaldson. They prefer a quiet life. It is much easier to report only on the criminals who are delivered, neatly prepacked, into their email inboxes, having been processed through the criminal justice system. The serious criminals, those who routinely beat the system, would therefore evade any public scrutiny were it not for journalists with the guts to dig deep, to join the dots, to build a case that will satisfy newspaper lawyers and allow the truth to be told.

  Donaldson was the subject of five stories in a six-year period from 2001, three of which I wrote – hardly a vendetta. But that’s exactly what he appeared to think. Over those years and beyond, I received occasional whispers from sources about Donaldson’s deep-seated hatred of me, which grew like a weed. They did not cause me any sleepless nights but I was perplexed as to why he would take it so personally and so badly. If he possessed any self-awareness, he would have realised that his own actions were the sole cause of newspaper attention.

  Donaldson, however, was more than just a typical hypersensitive hood with a bad dose of misplaced umbrage. He meant business. In 2014 a trusted colleague told me that during that period when I had written about Donaldson, a car had been set alight on his orders. The car was supposed to belong to me, but given that I knew nothing of any torching, it seems that some random and unfortunate person’s vehicle was destroyed by mistake. Given the sparsity of detail, there was nothing I could do with the tip. This story was later corroborated by an impeccable source who also confirmed that Donaldson turned puce and spat bile at the mention of my name.

  7

  WEE BARRY

  Each year, weary journalists traipse to the HQ of the Crown Office in Edinburgh where they are told about major criminals being targeted with Proceeds of Crime laws. They politely nod their heads at the PR people and dutifully scribble lots of zeros in their notepads to represent the many, many millions of pounds supposedly seized. They then write down reheated soundbites – ‘crime doesn’t pay’, ‘hitting criminals in the pocket’, ‘bankrupting the Mr Bigs’ – which duly receive blanket TV, radio and newspaper coverage.

  This annual public relations exercise stems from the 1996 murder of investigative journalist Veronica Guerin, who was shot dead in Dublin at the age of 37 for telling the truth. Within a week of her death, the Irish government enacted the Proceeds of Crime Act which was eventually emulated in countries around the world, including Scotland. The purpose was to go after organised crime bosses who cheat conventional justice by seizing their illicit wealth, unless they can prove it legitimate. It was a game changer, we were told.

  Sadly, this has evolved to become little more than a police and Crown PR exercise – a retrospective tax on low- to mid-level crooks and a generous new revenue stream for the legal profession. Yes, large sums have been recovered, but far too many of the most dangerous men at the pinnacle of organised crime remain entirely unruffled and their vast, laundered fortunes are as secure as Fort Knox. The Crown’s biggest scalps have been scamming Shetland fishermen and a sanction-busting engineering firm – not quite Al Capone.

  Russell Stirton, a north Glasgow criminal who had married into the McGovern family, was the first serious Scottish target. He had foolishly drawn attention to himself by selling the UK’s cheapest fuel from his Springburn filling station. After Stirton’s cut-price petrol became subject of a news story I’d written in 2003, the police went for him.

  At the outset of the saga, when Stirton’s £1 million rural pad was raided by detectives with the media in tow, the name of Barry Hughes came to my attention. Hughes is no ordinary street thug. The pint-sized, preening showman sometimes drives a Rolls-Royce and seeks fame more hungrily than a talentless teen YouTuber. He manipulates useful idiots in the media to shape his false image more effectively than Lenin.

  He seems to have persuaded himself that he is a successful and legitimate businessman, which he is not. Hughes is not stupid so must be either too vain or too arrogant to realise that police chiefs and Crown lawyers like nothing less than cocky criminals who draw attention to themselves. In the early 2000s he was an average young boxer whose toothy grin occasionally featured on the sports p
ages. But his stock was rising in the underworld, where some spoke in awe of ‘Wee Barry’. His risible ring nickname ‘Braveheart’ was adopted by his security company, a favoured business sector of gangsters. When his name cropped up in the Stirton case, I learned that the suburban Bishopbriggs home of his father, Donald Hughes, was one of 11 other addresses visited during investigations.

  Strangely, the police press office steadfastly and repeatedly denied that this was the case. I told them they were being misled by senior officers and, eventually, once I named the officers who attended the Hughes address, a high-ranking police chief backed down and, in a call to the editor of the Sunday Mail, admitted that my information was spot on. It was an unnecessary falsehood from the police, but why? One explanation was they may have been trying to do Hughes a turn by attempting to keep him out of the public spotlight, while at the same time allowing Stirton to believe his young friend was getting some heat. This would certainly explain Stirton’s later mistrust of Hughes, which almost resulted in serious violence with one flashpoint at a favoured hangout, an upmarket Italian restaurant.

  With confirmation of the Hughes address serving as a green light, we were able to put him on the news pages where he belonged. We told how Hughes, then aged 25, was at the centre of the Stirton Proceeds of Crime case and that police were examining links between the two. The story laid bare expensive properties at prestigious addresses, five-star hotel trips, flash cars worth more then the average house and public shows of wealth at charity auctions. It later emerged that Hughes once had £15,000 of cash in a Sugar Puffs cereal box to buy private hire cars for Stirton.

  Following my obligatory attempt to contact Hughes prior to publication, he sought an immediate meeting with me through a middleman, a former CID officer. I was not in the habit of making my face known to criminals and declined, knowing that whatever he wanted to say could be done by phone, email or lawyer. Perhaps too, Hughes reckoned there could be some kind of deal, a trade-off, which would see us go gently on him. No deal. Undeterred by my rejection and confirming my suspicion of intended manipulation, a close associate spent the next few years passing me information about Hughes and major organised criminals. I used the information if it was valid and it checked out, but simultaneously embraced, investigated and published any tip-offs from elsewhere about Hughes. If the apparent proxy thought that drip-feeding me intelligence about other criminals would deter me from pursuing Hughes, they were mistaken. No punches were pulled.

  As my refusal to meet this unspoken expectation became apparent, Hughes sought out other journalists who proved more receptive to deals. The essence of the dynamic was that Hughes would tip off the journalists with stories about himself. The journalist would then publish it. Many of these stories fuelled a false portrayal of Hughes as a pseudo-celebrity in a country where real ones are thin on the ground. As part of the sweetheart deal, the journalists airbrushed the uglier aspects of Hughes’s life, creating a more palatable persona of cheeky-chappie business ‘tycoon’.

  Our initial exposé of Hughes was followed up with the revelation that he had been a prison visitor to Jamie ‘The Iceman’ Stevenson, the major drugs boss who was suspected of murdering Stirton’s brother-in-law, Tony McGovern. Whispered high-security jail sit-downs with one of the country’s biggest gangsters hardly fitted the image of a squeaky-clean young hotshot. Hughes was stung by The Iceman story but it did nothing to diminish his appetite for media attention and manipulation. As well as his covert channels to the news press, he sought overt coverage too, and where better than the less sceptical environs of the sports pages? He spent years telling anyone prepared to listen that he was an upright citizen. It was jealousy, he explained. They were all jealous of his ‘success’. He told the Daily Record sports pages in 2006, ‘People in Scotland will forgive you anything except success. What they don’t know about you, they make up.’ The following year he told The Herald that ‘here, they forgive anything but success’, and the Daily Express that ‘people in Scotland will forgive you anything but success, and that attitude is increasingly frustrating’.

  The most nauseating example of his self-serving prattle was published in the sports pages of Edinburgh-based newspaper Scotland on Sunday in 2008, which contained his obligatory mantra: ‘Scotland will forgive you anything but success. That’s a true saying.’ It then hailed him as ‘the most positive man in Glasgow’ and empathised with his press woes thus: ‘It’s all there in the tabloids, truth and fiction.’ The article continued:

  His theory on Glasgow is that some people want to believe the worst. They look at him driving around in his £350,000 Rolls-Royce Phantom Drophead and they think he can’t be legit. They read stories linking him with imprisoned crooks like Jamie ‘Iceman’ Stevenson and they see him as one of them. They never look any deeper than surface level and it makes him sick.

  They ask, ‘Where’d you get your money from?’ and he tells them. But do they listen? He says if they stopped being consumed by jealousy and hate for a minute they’d be better off. Not that that is ever likely to happen.

  Hughes then gave the paper’s readers a flash of raw conceit, expressing the view that ‘Glasgow should be honoured I still live here’. With no abatement of its breathless admiration, the article finally concluded:

  He sees it [a possible return to boxing] as his last hurrah before Braveheart goes global, before it crosses the border and travels the Atlantic, before the name Barry Hughes is up there with his ally, Frank Warren.

  And the begrudgers? He’ll wave at them out the window of his Rolls-Royce or his Ferrari. Let them alone with their suspicion, he says. Meanwhile, he’s got places to go, people to meet, mountains to climb.

  The article – longer than this entire chapter – made a brief reference to Hughes being charged with carrying a knife in a nightclub but he swatted away this sticky issue by saying that ‘he feels he’s been wrongly accused’. Within weeks, a sheriff in Glasgow found him guilty. Presumably the sheriff did not take Scotland on Sunday over breakfast. Hughes tried to beat the rap by concocting what the prosecutor called an ‘utterly incredible’ story. A crony – who happened to be another Iceman associate – lied to the court by saying the blade belonged to him.

  A year later and Hughes was convicted of punching, kicking and stamping on a man’s head and body in the VIP room of another Glasgow nightclub. He was part of a mob who swarmed around the lone victim, who suffered stab and slash wounds and was struck with a metal pole. Not quite Queensberry Rules.

  These two convictions may have KO’d lesser men but Hughes, like a deluded, punch-drunk pugilist, staggered back to his feet and dealt with his critics head on the only way he knew how – with his favourite soundbite. He told the Daily Express: ‘Scotland will forgive you anything but success. That’s a true saying.’

  Now a convicted thug and knife-carrier with proven gangland connections, his definition of success had proved to be resilient and elastic. It would soon become even more distorted. Wee Barry was addicted to the limelight, no matter the cost.

  8

  LAST ORDERS

  Just audible over the babble of thirsty newspaper journalists came the Nokia ringtone from the inside pocket of my shiny, double-breasted suit. I pulled out the half-brick handset, extended its aerial and stepped from the smoky fug of the Copy Cat pub onto the Clydeside pavement. The caller, American-accented, introduced himself. I grabbed a pen and urgently scribbled his every word on to the small white areas of a pack of Marlboro Lights, hoping the shorthand scrawl would never be needed in court. Texan billionaire and two-time US presidential candidate Ross Perot had called to talk about his funding of a medical research project in Scotland. Having phoned his office earlier, I had gone for a Friday-night pint, expecting to hear nothing. His surprise call was a lesson learned: always take the direct approach. Whether hitting a hostile door in a Gorbals high-rise or making a nuisance of yourself with the rich and powerful, even in today’s era of digital communication and PR ubiquity, going dir
ect remains an effective means of getting the information you need.

  I moved from The Glaswegian to the Sunday Mail in 1995, when newspapers were strong, confident and still read by just about everyone, although sales were heading in one direction. Managing editor Malcolm Speed, an old- school newspaper gent and as sharp as a tack, imparted the staccato advice that if I came up with exclusive stories I would keep my job. The Sunday Mail – from its office in the towering Daily Record building at Anderston Quay – was a journalistic powerhouse read by half the population of Scotland. Editor Jim Cassidy used its massive sales as a force for good by loyally fighting for its readers, poking politicians in the ribs and sticking its nose where it was not welcome.

  The Copy Cat, a smoke-filled shoebox of a pub in the shadow of the office and directly underneath the Kingston Bridge, was a hive of life despite the lack of natural light within. Finger-jabbing arguments fizzled out as quickly as they flared up between journalists standing around a podium which was a trading post for outrageous stories and filthy jokes, shared under a haze of cigarette smoke. There was nowhere to hide from cruel, razor-sharp West of Scotland wit. To refuse a drink was taken as a personal slight. Anyone attempting to duck their round was publicly called out. A payphone in the corner rang frequently – bosses hunting AWOL employees, wives on the warpath for wayward husbands. The calls often resulted in rosy-cheeked subs scurrying from their stools, blinking into the daylight and weaving back to their desks or homes.

  Junkie shoplifters would discreetly open Berghaus jackets to magically reveal pilfered wares – dayglo orange blocks of cheese, prescription glasses from opticians’ displays, chilled bottles of champagne.