BRUTAL GANGLAND
JAMES McDonald became one of Scotland’s most notorious hitmen when he killed Michael Lyons in a ruthless gangland shooting in north Glasgow in December 2006.
The Applecross Motors attack shocked Scotland and led to McDonald and his cohort Raymond Anderson being handed the longest prison sentences in Scottish legal history – life sentences with minimum terms of 35 years.
Following a trial at the High Court in Glasgow in 2008, the pair were found guilty of murdering 21-year-old Lyons.
The victim’s cousin Steven Lyons, 21, and a friend Robert Pickett, 41, were also wounded in
the gun attack at the MOT garage in the Lambhill area.
The court heard that the garage’s owner David Lyons – the uncle of two of the victims – received a “ransom note” 10 days after the shooting, demanding £25,000 of unpaid drugs money.
Despite that, the jury heard the attack by Anderson, then 46, a car dealer, and his right-hand man McDonald, then 34, appeared to have no clear motive.
Steven Lyons, 27, said the shooting was “like a scene from a gangster movie”.
He added: “I got hit in the leg. It snapped my bone and I just fell.”
Both McDonald and Anderson had told gangland sources they were “untouchable”.
At their trial, Pickett, who was shot in the stomach and lost a kidney, claimed the wrong men were on trial. It was suggested he had been paid to say that.
Pickett was later sentenced to two years for contempt of court.
What sparked the carnage was the drive-by shooting three weeks earlier of Kevin ‘Gerbil’ Carroll in Auchinairn, Bishopbriggs. Carroll survived that hit but in 2010, he was shot dead in an Asda carpark in Robroyston, Glasgow.
The feud between the Miltonbased Lyons faction and the Daniels, from Possil, over control of drugs in the north of the city has raged for years.