How £100m crime boss The Iceman built Soprano-style drug dynasty before being busted thanks to grotty Amsterdam brothel
AS one of Britain’s most feared criminal kingpins, Jamie Stevenson earned the nickname The Iceman – but a series of hasty moves led to his downfall.
Glaswegian Stevenson, who was behind a £100 million cocaine smuggling operation, was brought to justice after leaving an encrypted phone behind as he fled the cops, by meeting a banana salesman in a Spanish hotel and when a traceable credit card was used in a brothel.
The 59-year-old gangster, who was suspected of ordering a hit on his former best man, has been likened to fictional mob boss Tony Soprano due to his ruthlessness.
As the head of a criminal enterprise which stretched not only the length of the United Kingdom, but as far abroad as Spain, Abu Dhabi and Ecuador, The Iceman oversaw a complex operation.
For that to work, he needed many lieutenants and to make deals with other criminals.
But like so many thieves, they fell out over money and power, bringing them down.
Stevenson thought he could evade the detectives who had been hot on his heels for decades but they pounced on his slip-ups.
Stevenson was jailed for 20 years on Wednesday, with the other members of his gang receiving a total of 29 years behind bars.
Graeme Pearson, a former director of the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency, said: “Jamie Stevenson has, for many decades now, been a very senior figure in organised crime and would be counted amongst that very small group of people as being at the top of the pyramid and he ran his business much the way The Sopranos were shown to run their business on television.”
Life of crime
Stevenson grew up in the Red Road flats in the Barmulloch area of Glasgow, gaining a reputation as a petty criminal who was willing to use a knife.
Just before the turn of the century he started doing deals with Barry and James Gillespie, two of Scotland’s most wanted criminals.
He also became pally with Tony McGovern, part of a notorious crime family in the Scottish city.
They were so close that Tony and Jamie were best men at each other’s weddings.
But when the friends fell out over lucrative drug deals and in September 2000, Stevenson was lured to a quiet spot in Lanarkshire where shots were fired at his head from close range.
He managed to escape alive.
Three months later, Tony was shot dead by masked gunmen.
The police charged Stevenson with the hit but the allegations were dropped due to a lack of evidence.
Ice cold reputation
It was enough to turn The Iceman, who posed as a car valeter, into a feared mobster.
The authorities first caught up with him in 2007, when Stevenson was jailed for nearly 13 years for laundering £1 million worth of drugs cash.
The Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency had bugged the suspects homes and heard details of their plan to launder criminal proceeds using a bogus taxi firm.
As a result Stevenson, whose stepson Gerard Carbin was convicted of his part in the illegal operation, was ordered to pay £750,000 to the treasury.
He ran his business much the way The Sopranos were shown to run their business on television
Graeme Pearson
Police seized 48 watches, including 13 Rolexes and five Cartier ones, plus £13,445 of jewellery.
Stevenson was also forced to sell his four bedroom home in East Kilbride, which had giraffe prints on the floor and a jacuzzi bath.
A lengthy spell of incarceration did not deter the career criminal.
Following his release Stevenson set about reestablishing his drugs network.
He was a known associate of convicted drug dealer Stephen Jamieson.
Banana plot
The police had their first breakthrough in 2019, when they learned that fruit trader David Bilsland, 67, from Glasgow, had suddenly started taking large consignments of bananas from Ecuador.
The South American nation has strong ties to cocaine trafficking due to its close proximity to Colombia, where the deadly substance is grown.
The pieces of the puzzle fell into place when Bilsland met Stevenson in Alicante, Spain on in February 2020.
Suspicious that Bilsland was making the round trip in one day, they asked Spanish police to track him.
They then kept an eye on the importations, the first 17 of which had no drugs in them.
Around the same time detectives also caught wind of a factory in Kent capable of churning out 250,000 street valium pills every hour.
That was raided in June 2020 and police set about arresting Stevenson for running the operation.
When plain clothes officers surrounded the Sherbrooke Castle Hotel in Glasgow on June 12, Stevenson believed they were gangsters about to assassinate him.
He fled the scene, jumping over a fence, before falling down an embankment where he was caught by the officers.
It was reminiscent of a scene in The Sopranos where Tony Soprano also stumbled down an embankment.
Remarkably, Stevenson was given bail in Carlisle, allowing him to flee to Holland.
His big mistake was to leave behind an encrypted mobile phone in his hasty flit.
That allowed detectives to uncover details of messages between Stevenson and many of his criminal associates, largely thanks to data shared by French officers.
Stevenson had been using the name “bigtasty” in secretly recorded phone calls.
For two years the drug boss was able to direct drug operations in the UK from a hideout in Holland.
The real-life Soprano
1999 – Stevenson starts working with criminal brothers Barry and James Gillespie
2001 – Stevenson is accused of the murder of his best man Tony McGovern, but the case is dropped.
2007 – Stevenson is jailed for 12 years for laundering £1 million worth of drugs money.
2014 – The prisoner is released from jail.
February 2020 – Stevenson meets banana importer David Bilsland in a hotel in Spain.
June 2020 – Stevenson is arrested in connection with a street valium factory in Kent.
June 2020 – While on bail, the drug dealer flees to Holland.
September 2020 – £100 million worth of cocaine found in banana boxes in the port of Dover, Kent.
February 2022 – Stevenson is arrested while jogging in Bergen op Zoom, Holland.
October 2022 – The drugs lord is jailed for 20 years, for smuggling cocaine and running the street valium factory.
In September 2020 he sent a consignment of cocaine worth an estimated £100 million to Dover hidden in boxes of bananas.
The National Crime Agency knew it was coming, but it took them three days to find all 119 packages of the white powder.
Stevenson’s exact whereabouts were unknown until one of his friends used an emergency credit card while drinking heavily at a brothel in Amsterdam.
The authorities had a trace on that card and using CCTV footage where able to work out where Stevenson had been staying.
He was arrested while jogging in a park in the south of Holland in February 2022.
Gerry McLean, the NCA’s Regional Head of Investigation for Scotland, said: “It does not matter where fugitives go, we will work with partners like the Dutch National Police who’ve provided superb help, to trace and arrest them.”
Once Stevenson was in custody in the UK, he admitted orchestrating the drug operation.
His associates Gerry Carbin, 45, Ryan McPhee, 34, Paul Bowes, 53, David Bilsland, 67, and Lloyd Cross, 32, were also jailed.