Jamie Stevenson, also known as the “Iceman”, has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for his role in an international cocaine smuggling plot and the setup of a drugs factory in England. Stevenson and his gang hid nearly a tonne of cocaine worth an estimated £100m in a shipment of bananas, ready to flood onto the streets of Scotland along with millions of deadly Etizolam tablets. If the plot had succeeded, Scottish police believe countless deaths would have resulted. Stevenson, who rose to power as a top-level gangster, had fled abroad and spent 18 months on the run before being tracked down in the Netherlands by Scotland’s answer to the FBI, the National Crime Agency (NCA).
Stevenson was caught jogging alongside Dean Ferguson, another Scottish fugitive and convicted murderer, by Dutch national police. The long criminal career of the man dubbed a real-life Tony Soprano finally came to an end after four years of intensive police work, international collaboration between law enforcement agencies, the infiltration of an encrypted messaging service, and an overwhelming body of evidence presented by Crown Office prosecutors in court. He had already served time in jail, having been accused of shooting his criminal associate Tony McGovern outside a Glasgow pub in September 2000, and was sentenced in 2007 for money laundering after pleading guilty to laundering £1m of drugs money.
The case was built up through conventional intelligence gathering, and police learned that Stevenson had been involved in setting up a pill factory that was churning out millions of Etizolam tablets in Rochester, Kent. The factory was raided on June 12, 2020, and Stevenson was arrested on the same day as he ran from the picnic table at the Sherbrooke Castle Hotel in Glasgow. The raid on the pill factory meant it was an English case, so Stevenson was taken south of the border after being released on police bail. But the investigation expanded to the drug smuggling operation with nearly a tonne of cocaine hidden in shipments of bananas being imported to Glasgow by a fruit merchant named David Bilsland.
Campaigners packed a Glasgow square threatened by a major drugs problem last year and demanded immediate action from the government. The number of drugs deaths in Scotland rose to a record high of 1,264 in 2019, with 1,339 people fatally overdosing in 2020. Stevenson’s terrorism-grade activities and his ruthless determination to prosper from organised crime led to catastrophic societal destruction. “Serious and organised crime ruins lives, kills people and leaves families devastated,” remarked Det Ch Supt Dave Ferry. Whether or not the seizure of Stevenson’s assets under proceeds of crime legislation will be successful depends on what is found and proven in court, according to the Crown
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