NOTORIOUS
The man they called Scotland’s most dangerous prisoner
FROM the moment Hugh Collins told his primary school class his father was a bank robber, he was set on a different path from most of them.
Two days after his 16th birthday, having avoided earlier trips to borstal on account of his youth, he was sentenced to be locked up for the first time.
Over the next 10 years, he spent more time locked up than free. Young Offenders Institutions followed borstal, then adult jails.
The regime was always one of brutality and he always tried to respond in kind.
Prison officers were stabbed, slashed and head-butted.
In return, he was beaten unconscious too many times to count, suffered broken ribs, shattered feet and a fractured skull.
By the time he was sentenced to life in prison, aged 26, for the murder of gangland rival Willie Mooney, he was, he admits, a monster, out of control, determined to kill prison officers for what they did to him.
In the first weeks of his life term, he managed to stab three, one of them in the neck with his hair-piece coming off in Collins’s hand, cementing his unofficial title as Scotland’s most dangerous prisoner.
He admits he revelled in it as it separated him from the rest of the jail population and made him feel special.
Now, aged 69, and in his 28th year of freedom since being released from his life term, his abiding memories of those early years in jail are of the kind of violence few could imagine.
Collins said: “It was a brutal world I fell into. All the razor gangs were forming, marking out territory, going out stealing and fighting.”
He grew up in the Roystonhill area of Glasgow, formerly known as Garngad, and by the time he was 15, he was a key member of the Shamrock and life revolved around fighting rival gangs, especially their main enemy, the black-clad Calton Tongs. He said: “The whole scene was macho and violent but certain people stood out because they never backed down. The Tongs never ran from a fight – and neither did we.
“There was a part of me that was excited by the violence, that savoured the anticipation, but what I’d never have admitted at the time was the fear I felt as well.
“When you’re fighting with knives and razors, you know you could end up dead, and anyone who says they have no fear is probably lying. But I think my fear made me ruthless.”
A meat cleaver that opened up Collins’s face from ear to neck in one fight, requiring 97 stitches, underlines the margins that determined whether people lived or died.
The scar still stands out among the many that tell the story of his young life but if the blow had been an inch lower, it would have gone throughg his jugular and no one outside his immediate circle wouldd ever have heard of him.
He served time in many ny of Scotland’s jails and was locked in cells, cages and underground rooms that were effectively dungeons.
Collins always tried to fight back and admits he would have killed a prison officer at the time me if the opportunity pp y and right weapon presented itself. But though he managed to stab and slash a few, his weapons were all makeshift, cobbled together from tape, string, razor blades and the odd potato-peeler stolen from the kitchens. Every time he managed to punch or head-butt a prison officer, retaliation would follow with anything from four to eight men with steel-capped boots dishing out punishment.
Pri s on of f i cers were nicknamed “Slasher”, “Square go” and “Undertaker” and used them among their mates, revelling in their notoriety.
For all that Scotland’s jail culture was so sickening at the time, one prison stands out for Collins – Perth, where he was taken regularly to an underground cell and visited daily for beatings. He said: “I think people might have difficulty believing how bad it was but I remember beatings where I was hit with truncheons so hard I woke with splinters in my head.
“I had my nose broken, ribs broken, my skull fractured.
“They had to take me to hospital with the fractured skull
and the medics wanted to know how it had happened but there were always officers with me and I was still conditioned not to grass.”
As a Glasgow gangster, Collins had been stabbed, slashed, smashed over the head with iron bars and generally well prepared for jail beatings but there is one thing that stays with him that he describes as “torture”.
He said: “You knew when you were in for a doing because they always made you take your shoes off at the door so it was harder for you to hurt them.
“I was often handcuffed face down, sometimes stripped naked and I remember a time they were threatening to humiliate me with a baton, so I was relieved they used it to knock me out. But the worst thing, which still causes me agony today, was being whacked repeatedly on the soles of my feet.
“They left me crippled for days at a time.
“Looking back, I know I was a monster. I felt like a monster. But how much of it was in me and how much they created is probably up for debate.”