Box office billing for criminals who are making a real killing

THERE is a moment in t he new film about t he Kray t wins when t he detective trying to bring the gangsters to justice confronts one of them in a nightclub.

Leonard ‘Nipper’ Read is desperate to dismantle their criminal empire after months of fruitless surveillance work.

But he allows his temper to get the better of him and a tense confrontation ensues with dinner-jacketed Reggie Kray, the club’s owner and business ‘brains’ of the outfit.

Moments later, Ronnie, Reggie’s schizophrenic brother, appears from nowhere and Nipper finds himself sandwiched between the pair as a Kray flunkey materialises with a camera – and takes a snap which makes it appear the detective is part of a jolly night out with the Krays.

Nipper’s superiors receive a copy of the photograph and, fearful of the negative publicity if it appears i n the Press, shut down the Kray probe.

The film – Legend – also explains how the Krays drew Lord Boothby, the ‘ pervert peer’, i nto their criminal network, sparking a political scandal.

As a story, it has it all – and, of course, it feeds our continuing fascination with the underworld.

We may condemn their activities, but gangster movies such as The Godfather trilogy and TV series from The Sopranos to Narcos, about Colombian drugs baron Pablo Escobar, are hugely successful.

In Scotland, gangland lore also seeks to lionise thugs such as Arthur Thompson, the ‘Godfather’ of Glasgow crime, and his one-time henchman Paul Ferris.

Sadistic

Admittedly, victims in the Scottish stories do not so much sleep with the fishes as choke on their fish supper – in one Glasgow gangland yarn, a victim is dispatched by means of a battered cod forced down his throat.

Vicariously, we may privately love the way the gangsters – such as the Krays – appear able to play the system and beat authority, even if we acknowledge at the same time that they are sadistic thugs.

Many also naively believe that if gangsters in real life leave ‘civilians’ alone – merely killing each other – we can all simply ‘live with’ the underworld.

Goodfellas director Martin Scorsese observed that gangster movies are similar to Westerns, because the bad guys get their comeuppance in the end.

In real life, this is not always the case, and our complicity in the glamorisation of gangsters may have inured us to the violence and misery caused by organised crime.

Three weeks ago, children fled in terror after a gangland shooting near a primary school in Bishopbriggs, near Glasgow. The target, named locally as Ross Sherlock, survived but the culprit is still on the loose.

Sherlock is a former associate of gangster Kevin ‘Gerbil’ Carroll, who was shot dead in an Asda car park in Robroyston, Glasgow, in 2010 – less than a mile from where the Bishopbriggs attack happened.

At moments like these, the underworld erupts into the mundane routine of everyday life and undermines our glib assumptions about its modus operandi.

The rhetoric from police, prosecutors and ministers suggests a war on organised crime has claimed significant scalps and is wrenching ill- gotten gains from the clutches of Mr Bigs on a daily basis. Drawing on the lexicon of gangster movies, former Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill vowed in 2008 to crack down on the ‘criminal kingpins as well as their lieu- tenants and the footsoldiers who do their dirty work’.

In 2010, Italian- style laws created a ‘package of offences’ targeting the ‘top of the criminal networks right down to the street drug dealer and the professionals who facilitate such crime or turn a blind eye to it’.

But figures in 2013 showed that despite prosecutors receiving reports of 368 serious organised crime offences from police since 2010, only one person had been convicted, in 2011-12.

Separately, the story of gangster Russell Stirton illustrates the gap – indeed the chasm – between some of the grand promises and the bleak reality.

The 54- year- old has been handed nearly £1million of taxpayer-funded legal aid to help him protect his fortune from prosecutors. He is likely to receive more money from the public purse than the Crown Office will seize from his assets. Yet three years ago, a judge said Stirton, with a now-dead associate, was i nvolved in protection rackets, moneylaundering, fraud and drug dealing, although Stirton has no criminal convictions.

Judge Lady Stacey’s remarkable ruling at the Court of Session on Stirton’s business activities laid bare a world more commonly associated with the activities of the Ital- ian Mafia. But so far Stirton has received £932,273 in legal aid to help him fight the bid to strip him of his assets.

Proceeds of crime cash is ploughed into laudable community endeavours such as children’s playparks, but the sum raised has fallen.

Turnover

In 2014-2015, assets worth £8.6million were recovered by the Crown Office, made up of £4million recovered through the courts from criminals’ illegal profits and money seized by ‘civil recovery measures from those who could not justify how their assets were obtained’.

The sum of £8.6million – down from £12million two years ago – equates to less than one per cent of the estimated ‘turnover’ of organised crime of around £1billion a year.

When other costs are factored in, including the economic and social fallout from crime and fighting criminal gangs, the cost to the Scottish economy of serious gang crime is about £2billion a year.

In 2013, Assistant Chief Constable Ruaraidh Nicolson of Police Scotland said criminal gangs were well-organised corporations with their own chairmen and accountants.

In Scotland, about 3,400 gangsters have f ormed an astonishing 227 criminal syndicates. The business ethos of the main players has developed and some have even ‘merged’ to ‘ strengthen their footprint within a selected market’, according to police.

Gangsters are indeed being caught and locked up, but others soon take their place. In 2013, a Police Scotland report said the number of gangs had ‘remained constant’, despite the crackdown launched by Mr MacAskill f i ve years previously.

Scottish Government figures in 2009 showed there were also about 240 ‘specialists’, such as crooked lawyers and accountants, helping the gangsters, making the threat of organised crime all the more insidious.

Its tentacles – as in the days of the Kray twins – stretch further and wider than many of us appreciate.

The cost is also human. Drug deaths i n Scotland have reached a record high – the number of drug fatalities registered in 2014 was 613, up from 527 in 2013. There are now about 60,000 ‘ problem drug users’, mainly heroin addicts.

Appallingly, this is the ‘client base’ for organised crime – and business is booming.

Police on the front line are doing admirable work bringing some of the ‘ kingpins’ to justice. But surely the true measure of victory in the war on organised crime would be a reduction in the number of drug deaths.

These statistics represent a slow-motion social catastrophe spanning the decades – and one that has been largely perpetrated by thugs who do not deserve to be remembered as ‘legends’.