Acid Attack Page 5

  Anyone drunk enough to give backchat to the Copy Cat’s terrifyingly formidable barmaid, Anna Houston, would feel the sting of her leather strap on their backside, administered to jeers from greasy-haired men in crumpled raincoats. Her son Billy took cheques from trusted regulars in exchange for cash from the till as there was no ATM in this dark corner of the city. No one ever passed a rubber cheque. At closing time, those heading to a party could stock up with a case of beer or a bottle of spirits – the deal being that the free carryout must be replaced the next day. And it wasn’t just a place for old men – the misty-eyed ‘When I . . .’ tribe who could talk incessantly about the good old days. Thriving newspapers drew a healthy intake of young staff.

  Outside the pub was an endless procession of Croft private hire cars. Most journalists had a pocketful of yellow chits which gave free rides, paid by the company. One journalist found himself dispatched to Dornoch to cover Madonna’s wedding after a colleague had been ordered home for getting into a scrape in a local pub. Without a driving licence and with only a clinking carrier bag in the footwell to keep him occupied, the substitute was taken 210 miles in a Croft car. The taxi chits were abused on an industrial scale and the bean counters eventually put paid to them. Widespread expenses abuses would also be curtailed. Three football hacks once submitted claims that they had each lunched with Partick Thistle manager John Lambie. The only puzzle was how they had all done so on the same day and in different places.

  The howff’s other clientele resided in the adjacent homeless hostel. It was not always easy to tell the two groups apart. Long-term hostel resident Old Howard beamed a toothless grin while collecting empties in exchange for a drink. When he passed away, a blue tin of Tennent’s Super Lager was placed respectfully atop his coffin.

  Newspapers were on a cusp. Ever-downward sales would eventually neuter strong editors like Cassidy, who were often replaced by plastic company men, subordinated to accountants. Cassidy once told a gormless but ambitious executive from the West Midlands: ‘I thought that Benny from Crossroads was the stupidest person from Birmingham – until I met you.’ Benny ended up running the company. Future editors would learn their place. Journalists became expected, then required, to stay at their desks rather than disappear in pursuit of a story.

  On the brink of the millennium, the landmark red Daily Record monolith was reduced to rubble with its replacement seemingly inspired by a soulless car showroom. The old building’s printing press, its loud beating heart, was transplanted to a grey motorway business park.

  The Copy Cat fought to stay alive after the new building opened but, year after year, staff numbers were decimated. When the hostel closed, the pub clung to life but it was just a question of time. A tipping point came when greater numbers of youthful journalists went for a lunchtime jog than a pint – to the open-mouthed disgust of the diminishing old guard.

  Society, as well as newspapers, was changing. In the decade after Ross Perot called me in 1998, the lunchtime pint went from being nearly compulsory to an occasional exercise in nostalgia and then highly unusual – a suspicion of possible alcoholism. Now it’s a sackable offence.

  After joining Scotland’s biggest-selling paper at the age of 22, I regaled friends who worked in boring, normal jobs about the crazy merry-go-round. I joked that the Sunday Mail was a pub that produced a newspaper. I was still little more than a kid with a lot to learn, but there was no better place to do so. I had a plastic bag in the boot of my car, ever expanding with little blue Nicolson maps of towns and villages in every corner of Scotland.

  One day the boss sent me into Ravenscraig, the massive former steelworks in Motherwell which had closed four years earlier in 1992. A 16-year-old boy had fallen to his death while scavenging for copper. We breached security to join teams of grimy-faced men harvesting scrap from the dirty and dangerous site, dotted with fires, which resembled a scene from the post-apocalyptic movie Mad Max. We investigated claims that security guards were taking payments from scavengers to drive their heavy hauls of metal off the site. The job resulted in me having to give evidence to a fatal accident enquiry into the boy’s death. When asked to name the rogue guards, I could only squirm while offering the hushed court their nicknames – ‘Shagger 1’ and ‘Shagger 2’ – as this was how they were referred to by the scavengers.

  One early investigation centred on a flamboyant developer flogging plots of land to build dream homes. The plots were worthless and the businessman was a bankrupt thug with convictions for violence and extortion. He thought it was a good idea to name one of his companies Semper Ebrius Ltd (Latin for ‘always drunk’).

  A contact told me about a 15-year-old criminal, a baby-faced ‘one-boy crime wave’ in Glasgow’s deprived Castlemilk housing estate. He had shot his social worker, committed armed robbery, dealt drugs, burgled and set fire to houses, but the authorities seemed powerless to rein him in. The feral boy’s home was unlike any I have ever been in – bare, filthy and cold. His family were utterly dysfunctional and the poverty oppressive. The newspaper starkly warned that worse was to come. A year later he was jailed for murder, having stamped and kicked an innocent man to death in the street for no apparent reason.

  The Sunday Mail was big on unmasking the kind of ‘businessmen’ who make money by ripping off decent, hard-working people. A photographer captured me rummaging in a giant industrial wheelie bin, trying to find an address for a crook who had stiffed our readers for their savings. One of my first such targets was Andrew Best, who scammed fortunes while simultaneously using the local press to portray himself as a business titan bringing hundreds of jobs to Cumbernauld. When I confronted him, he brazenly denied that the Andrew Best with a history of seven failed companies he was – despite the same name, date of birth and confirmation of his ID by numerous victims. A decade later, Best graduated from dodgy firms flogging vacuum cleaners and exterior house painting to drug-dealing, which did not end well. He finally ripped off the wrong people. Gangster David Hughes lured Best to meet him at a garden centre where he stabbed him 16 times. With his dying breath, Best named Hughes to police and the killer was caught.

  A particularly odd job was being dispatched to a small Fife village to visit what appeared to be a regular shop offering clothing alterations and repairs. Shoppers who explained what they were really looking for were ushered through a curtain into a secret back shop – a boutique for cross-dressing men with Polaroids of happy customers adorning one wall. I was joined by an older female photographer posing as my understanding girlfriend. She stifled giggles as I tottered dangerously out of the changing cubicle clad in a figure-hugging gold lamé miniskirt and size 11 patent leather slingbacks with six-inch heels. My unusual expenses claim for these purchases was approved. My only defence is that these were less enlightened times than today.

  Faxes were used daily but the Sunday Mail also had a thing called the internet. A veteran reporter, a self-styled Bill Gates, jealously guarded the only computer with online access. A few months later, his Russian bride arrived in Scotland.

  As grateful as I am to have caught the dying days of press hedonism and largesse, I am glad that the music stopped when it did. Far too many of the earlier generations of journalists could not get off the merry-go-round, and the music never stopped for them. They lived fast, drunk and chaotically. Their marriages were destroyed, their children neglected. After being forced out the door, bitter and broken, it was only a short shuffle to an early grave.

  The month after the Perot call, I joined the News of the World. The move was necessary for me to secure a mortgage as the News of the World offered a staff job instead of temporary contracts. The short hop across the river to Kinning Park felt like leaving a funfair for a high-security prison. The building was a red-brick, windowless Lubyanka where sightings of rats were not uncommon. Glasgow staff were flown to London to attend the Christmas party. The aloof London reporters – all stripy shirts and red braces – were like braying stockbrokers.

  One colleague b
ragged about having sex with prostitutes but was less candid about his rumoured financial stake in their business. His main contact, the biggest player in Glasgow’s vice scene, benefited from News of the World protection. This contact was connected to major drug-dealer Tam ‘The Licensee’ McGraw and, like him, was suspected of being a police informant. As well as trading in flesh, the vice king produced and sold porn videos under the counter from his chain of shops. Other newspapers were morally outraged over material which is now mainstream. More deserving of their ire was the criminal’s alleged blackmailing of people who were lured to take part in wife-swapping events through the pages of his swingers’ publication. These parties were stage-managed with prostitutes playing the roles of partners or wives. Participants, all respectable people, were warned to pay up or else – the ‘or else’ being that their sexual antics would end up in the News of the World.

  As I sat in the office late one Saturday night, the early edition of the Sunday Mail landed. My rogue colleague immediately turned to an exposé of the vice empire of his contact and proceeded to phone him. He duly provided a detailed description of the article and then, to my astonishment, told his contact that he knew which town the Sunday Mail journalist lived in and that he would find out his address. I was speechless. A colleague had brazenly provided personal information about a fellow journalist to a gangster, simply because he had written an entirely truthful story about the gangster’s illegal activities. I had no choice but to alert my former colleague, who was grateful and angry in equal measure. He phoned the News of the World man to tell him to back off, which was met with protestations of feigned innocence.

  Drugs buys were a staple exercise at the News of the World. Reporters ditched their shirt and tie, hooked up with a junkie and hit a door where drugs were sold. One such job saw me securing heroin and amphetamines from a family who had won a competition run by Coca-Cola to have their garden transformed into a dazzling Christmas light display. It produced the headline ‘COKE PAYS FOR LIGHTING . . . HEROIN AND SPEED FOOT REST OF THE BILLS’. Such dealers were deserving of exposure but they were really just desperate minions being used to peddle tenner-bags from their homes by the people who supplied them – the people who really needed press attention.

  I was relieved when the Sunday Mail asked me to return. I had lasted eight months at the News of the World. That it was later exposed as a den of ‘dark arts’, criminality and sleaze came as no surprise to me.

  9

  DOMESTIC OMERTÀ

  Bug-eyed and with his mouth twisted in hate, Frankie Donaldson feels the warm glow of familiar pleasure as his fist slams hard into human flesh. The snarling gangster looms over his cowed victim, whose garbled pleas for mercy are futile. If anything, they only sharpen his visceral lust for violence. His hand shoots out and snatches a clump of hair, twisting and yanking it so tightly in his grip that dark red soaks the roots. The victim switches to survival mode, becoming a limp rag doll while praying for it to end.

  The petrified victim is dragged outside by the hair across a gravel driveway and bundled into a car. If anyone hears the screams for help, they know better than to get involved. Donaldson’s finale to this short and brutal eruption is to repeatedly slam his victim’s face into the steering wheel, leaving it a bruised and bloody pulp. With a triumphant smirk, he savours the soaring high of pure gratification.

  The victim was not some underworld rival but Jane Clarke, his long-term partner and the mother of his son. Confident, well educated and outgoing from a loving family, she is a strong and independent businesswoman with a background in social work who built a successful chain of children’s nurseries. She still does not understand how she became a serial victim of extreme domestic violence at the hands of the man she loved. What’s even harder to understand is how it took her more than 20 years to escape.

  Jane met Donaldson in her mid twenties. He was a decade older, a swaggering wise guy rolling in cash and feared by many. Other gangsters shrank at the mention of his name, which opened every door in the city. Being Frankie’s girl was a thrill. No one messes with Frankie Donaldson.

  Like many domestic abusers, it was all about control. He burned with jealousy whenever she spoke to another man. His solution was a chaperone. When Jane left the house she was shadowed by a hulking nightclub bouncer, paid in cash by Donaldson to scare off men from sniffing about. It wasn’t long before the violence started. Over the course of their 22-year relationship, she lost count of the number of assaults but estimates that it was well over 100. It soon became ‘normal’, almost routine, like putting out the bin or brushing your teeth. He used his fists and feet but also reached for weapons – bottles, car keys, dumbbells, mobile phones, a TV remote control. She will always have an indention from where he brought a dumbbell crashing down on her skull. A car key taken to her face, which required six stitches, also caused scarring for life. The rules of engagement were unspoken but explicit. Following an assault, she was prohibited from seeking any medical treatment for her injuries – unless they were too serious to ignore. She was also banned from ever discussing any attack with him or anyone else – a weird domestic omertà, as if they never happened.

  Having stepped out of the shower in a rage, Donaldson once tightened a towel around her neck and watched her slowly turn purple. Frantic for air, Jane thought the last thing she would ever see would be his face, a venomous and spitting gargoyle of hate. He eventually eased the pressure and she filled her lungs with air, blinking back tears. She was aware of the rules – no doctors and no discussion.

  Jane’s sister Liz was another victim. She had the guts to stand up to Donaldson. This he could not tolerate and he responded the only way he knew. On one occasion, Donaldson seized Liz by the throat and pinned her against the window of her mother’s second-floor flat while threatening to throw her to the pavement below.

  It was in 2013 on the island of Majorca, after the sun had set on a beautiful July day, that Donaldson committed his final act of violence against Jane. He was in a vile mood and stormed out of a restaurant in Palma where he and Jane were dining with their son and two other young children. When she and the kids arrived back at the house, he was brooding and waiting. The violence was instant and sustained. Unusually, he did not observe his traditional nicety of waiting until they were alone. The terrified children witnessed all hell break loose. Fighting for her life and screaming for help, Jane was silenced with a bottle smashed over her head which knocked her out cold. The children thought she was dead. Her screams had been heard and the police arrived. The sickened Spanish officers dispensed some instant justice against Donaldson of the type rarely applied any more by British police.

  Paramedics urged Jane to go to hospital but she declined as she could not abandon the children to the Spanish authorities. They packed their suitcases and went straight to Palma airport, where they were told it was nine hours until the first plane back to Scotland. During the long wait, under the bright departure-lounge lights, thousands of travellers gawped at the black, blue and bloody-faced woman with three tired and confused kids. It was one of the only occasions where she took a photo of Donaldson’s handiwork. She later discovered that she should not have flown as the bottle blow had caused bleeding on the brain. As horrific as the Majorca attack was, it was not the worst that she had suffered, although it would make the all-time top ten.

  Back in Scotland, they were met by Liz, who issued a tough-love ultimatum. She told Jane that if she returned to Donaldson, then she would seek custody of their son. Returning would be to put her own life, as well as the boy’s life, at serious risk from a man who was clearly out of control and potentially capable of anything. Jane knew that her sister was right. There could be no away back – not this time. Before Donaldson returned from Majorca, she removed their belongings from the family home in the affluent Glasgow suburb of Bearsden and found a new place to live, a refuge from decades of domestic oppression.

  But if she thought that Donaldson, the ultimate control freak,
would simply shrug his shoulders, put it down to experience and leave it at that, she was mistaken. What followed was a campaign in which guilt and guile, terror and threats were deployed in an attempt to break her down, force her into submission and crawl back to him.

  Friends, well-meaning but oblivious to the truth, turned up at her door pleading, ‘Come on, Jane, you know Frankie loves you. Think of everything he’s done for you.’ No one expected contrition but Donaldson seemed to believe that he was really a good guy and that it was just a fuss over nothing. Some made excuses, saying that whisky and cocaine were responsible for Donaldson’s explosions of violence, but that was nonsense. Often he was stone-cold sober.

  This tone of approach lasted until October. That’s when Donaldson realised she was not coming back. He turned to tactics of terror. Anonymous rats from the underworld popped up mouthing threats before slipping away. Jane’s every move was tracked, confirmed by text messages which revealed where she had been morning, noon and night. She existed on a knife-edge, in a state of paranoia and anxious anticipation that something very bad could happen at any moment.

  One text message said that William ‘Basil’ Burns was going to shoot a child witness – the same Burns who later turned up at my door with a bottle of acid. Another text warned Jane that a woman had been paid to throw acid in her face while she was doing the school run. The threat was explicit, detailed and chilling. Another threat was made to shoot a child relative who is autistic. None of this could be readily dismissed. These people were deadly serious. The texts all came from throwaway pay-as-you-go mobiles, bought with cash, which meant they were untraceable. She, her friends, family and nursery colleagues were in the firing line of the unrelenting campaign of intimidation. They were bombarded for five months.