Free The Iceman: The Rise and Fall of a Crime Lord by Jim Wilson Page A

smaller than me and had a regular build. You really wouldn’t think he was involved in anything like this. I had no clue what he did other than have some candy trucks or something like that. My wife says to me that, in Scotland, you’re either a criminal or you’re poor. Everyone has a hard time making a living.
     
    Two years later when best man Tony was gunned down and Stevenson, the groom, emerged as the prime suspect, Strathclyde Police were to take an even keener interest in this 1998 wedding day. Detectives probing the murder of Tony in September 2000 obtained a copy of the video taken at the wedding. They watched happy faces full of life and the two best pals clowning with each other for the camera. Police trawled through the tape, identified all the guests, tracked them down and interviewed them.
    One police source said, ‘This illustrates better than words just what kind of people we are dealing with. Tony is dead and Jamie is the only real suspect yet, not so long ago, they were best men at each other’s weddings.’
    However, by the time of Jamie’s marriage, the seeds of destruction had been sown as simmering resentments and petty niggles over drugs had caused an irreparable split in the McGovern camp. Tony’s brother Tommy was not at Stevenson’s wedding – he had been frozen out. Increasingly, Tony and Stevenson were becoming more of ‘a gang within a gang’ as rows over territories and money took their toll. On that wedding day, Tony and Stevenson were happy to look into a future without what they saw as family baggage but that was before Tony had a very dramatic, and ultimately fatal, change of heart.
    Witnessing the ceremony, as Stevenson and his new bride tied the knot, were divorcée Caroline’s two children from her first marriage, son Gerry, then nineteen, and daughter Carrie, twenty. Her first husband, who she had divorced seven years earlier, was not there to see Caroline remarry although he had only very recently returned to Scotland after years spent on the Costa del Sol. Days before his former wife remarried, Gerry Carbin Snr had strolled through the arrivals hall of Edinburgh Airport wearing a T-shirt bearing the legend ‘Bad Boy’. As police in Scotland and Spain would testify, the logo across his chest was no understatement.

13
    Name of the Father
     
    He may have become Jamie Stevenson’s stepson but Gerry Carbin Jnr’s pursuit of a life of crime was in his genes. His father Gerry Snr was a career criminal. A small-time thief and thug, he had become an audacious international drug smuggler and suspected killer.
    Some said his Cyclops nickname stemmed from a bungled cataract operation that left him blind in one eye. Others blamed a gangland fight. Whatever the truth, wide boy Carbin’s good eye was always on the main chance. Emerging from the Castlemilk housing scheme which sprawls over the southern edge of Glasgow, he quickly realised the profits from drugs would far outstrip what could be made by robbery.
    He married Caroline Adam, a bottle blonde with a pretty face, in 1977. Two years later, the couple had a son, Gerry, named after his dad. In the years that followed, his father’s reputation for having a violent raging temper had enabled him to move to a higher level of drug dealing but this had strained his relationship with Caroline to breaking point. The couple split, divorcing in February 1991.
    One friend of the couple said:
    Carbin had not treated her well. Caroline is a real mixture. She’s as hard as nails and a bit of a waif at the same time. She’s a tiny wee thing, four foot ten or so, and I think guys wanted to protect her. I don’t know if she needs it. She’s a keep-fit fanatic now – runs for miles. Loves her sunbeds. Hates the police.
    She’s like a gangster’s moll out of central casting. It’s all she’s ever known – her family in the east end, Carbin and then Jamie Stevenson. They had known each other for a while before getting together. I think