How a high-ranking gangster was brought down by banana crates

In early summer 2020, Jamie Stevenson took advantage of the lifting of lockdown restrictions to meet with staff outside a four-star hotel in Glasgow.

They were sitting at a picnic table when they heard screaming and the screeching of tires.

Plainclothes men quickly approached them, and Stevenson, a notorious crime boss who was said to have been the target of numerous assassination attempts, made his way.

He ran 100 meters before stumbling down a steep grassy slope and falling onto a path where his pursuers stopped his escape.

An investigator who observed the scene said Stevenson believed he was being “taken out.”

“When we caught him, he was relieved that it was the police,” the investigator said.

Stevenson was brought to England and was no doubt relieved a second time when the authorities released him on bail.

Within a month, the veteran criminal nicknamed “Iceman” had fled abroad.

He spent 18 months on the run until the British version of the FBI, the National Crime Agency (NCA), tracked him down in the Netherlands.

Dutch National Police grabbed Stevenson as he jogged with another Scottish refugee, convicted murderer Dean Ferguson.

Stevenson had believed he was safe and was said to be shocked to find himself back in custody, this time with no chance of escape.

Now it was him sentenced to 20 years in prison for leading an international cocaine smuggling operation in which the drugs were hidden in a shipment of bananas and for setting up a drug factory in England.

There are parts of this story that read like a darkly satirical crime thriller, but Stevenson was exactly that – a high-profile gangster who made a fortune from the drug trade, which was linked to hundreds of deaths.

The man dubbed the real Tony Soprano attempted to flood Scotland with a tonne of cocaine worth an estimated £100 million and millions of deadly Etizolam tablets. This happened in 2020, the year the country suffered its worst drug death toll ever.

In 2019, etizolam, more commonly known as street valium, was involved in 756 deaths, half of the total that year. By the end of 2020 it was linked to 814.

Police believe that if Stevenson had succeeded, many more people would have lost their lives while he raised millions of pounds.

Det Ch Supt Dave Ferry of Police Scotland said: “Serious and organized crime ruins lives, kills people and leaves families devastated.”

“Did this operation save lives in Scotland? I think you can definitely say that.”

Stevenson, 59, and his gang were brought down by four years of intensive police work, international cooperation between law enforcement agencies, the infiltration of an encrypted intelligence service and an overwhelming amount of evidence presented in court by Crown Office prosecutors.

The public first heard Stevenson's name after he was accused of shooting his crime partner Tony McGovern outside a pub in Glasgow in September 2000.

Stevenson and McGovern were once so close that they were groomsmen at each other's weddings. The murder charge was later dropped due to lack of evidence.

In 2004, the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency launched Operation Folklore, a three-year investigation that targeted Stevenson using unprecedented electronic surveillance and forensic financial analysis.

Stevenson was backed into a legal corner and pleaded guilty to laundering £1m of drug money sentenced to 12 years and nine months in prison.

By 2018, Police Scotland and the National Crime Agency had established an organized crime partnership based at the Scottish Crime Campus at Gartcosh in North Lanarkshire.

The goal was to bring down high-ranking criminals. Stevenson was out of prison and on their list.

Their big break came when they learned that a Glasgow fruit merchant, David Bilsland, had links to organized crime and was trying to further his business interests in South America.

Operation Pepperoni was launched. There is no way to classify the strange name that was chosen at random.

Bilsland planned to import supplies of bananas from Ecuador, which is close to the cocaine-producing countries of Peru, Bolivia and Colombia.

Experts told the Pepperoni team it was a loss leader; Only supermarkets could make a profit by importing bananas from South America.

In February 2020, police and the NCA learned that Bilsland made an unusually short visit to Spain, departing on Valentine's Day and returning the next. He did not take any luggage with him and it was classified as a “criminal matter”.

They didn't know who Bilsland would meet, but at the request of the NCA, Spanish police secretly photographed the two men at the Melia Hotel in Alicante and sent the images back to Scotland.

Bilsland dated none other than Jamie Stevenson.

Asked how his team felt when they heard the news, Det Ch Supt Ferry said: “It was a relief that we knew who he was meeting. This took the investigation to another level.”

At this point, two different strands of this case began to converge.

Through conventional intelligence gathering, police learned that Stevenson was involved in setting up a pill factory that produced millions of Etizolam tablets in Rochester, Kent.

The factory was raided on June 12, 2020. On the same day, police arrested Stevenson as he escaped from the picnic table at the Sherbrooke Castle Hotel in Glasgow.

He was carrying a phone which was an Encrochat device.

Encrochat was a highly secure encrypted messaging platform used by criminals who felt they could communicate with each other without fear of being caught.

Each device had a randomly selected handle. Stevenson's were “elusiveale” and “bigtastey”.

He was so confident that it was safe that he sent someone a picture of his own driver's license using the platform.

In April 2020, French law enforcement authorities infiltrated the system. They collected huge amounts of incriminating data and shared it with colleagues across Europe.

On June 12 or 13, 2020, Encrochat administrators discovered that the system had been compromised and advised their customers to turn off and dispose of their devices. The warning came too late for Stevenson.

The Kent pill factory raid suggested it was an English case, so Stevenson was arrested south of the border. After being released on police bail, he fled the country.

Scottish investigators say there was insufficient evidence in the English system to justify his detention at this early stage of the investigation.

This summer, British Border Police officers closely monitored shipments of Ecuadorian bananas arriving in Dover and destined for David Bilsland's company in Glasgow.

They searched several without success until the 18th shipment was found to contain almost a tonne of cocaine, hidden in 119 foil wrappers.

Over the next few months, the Organized Crime Partnership analyzed 50,000 pieces of Encrochat data, a painstaking process dubbed Operation Dragonfire.

Stevenson's Encrochat conversations with his associates produced evidence proving their involvement with cocaine and etizolam.

The top tier of the group was trapped, as were people further down the ladder like Bilsland.

The decisions of the appeal courts in England had upheld the admissibility of the Encrochat evidence and it was not challenged in the High Court in Glasgow, where Stevenson and his colleagues eventually pleaded guilty.

The NCA's regional head of investigations in Scotland and Northern Ireland, Gerry McLean, said Stevenson was at the forefront of organized crime north of the border.

After his prison sentence in 2007, he was on an “upward trajectory” and re-established himself.

“This conviction, I think, shows that he really had a global reputation,” McLean said.

“He would not have been able to bring these quantities of medication into the UK if he did not have this network of contacts around the world.”

He said the Kent tablet factory produced “industrial quantities” of etizolam.

“The undertaking that Jamie Stevenson was involved in was on a scale that I don’t think we’ve ever seen before, certainly not in Scotland and really in the UK.”

Assistant Fiscal Prosecutor Sineidin Corrins heads the organized crime unit at the Crown Office, Scotland's Crown Prosecution Service.

“These convictions are monumental. “Jamie Stevenson and his criminal gang were involved in drug trafficking on an industrial and global scale,” she said.

“It is also a reflection of law enforcement and criminal justice in Scotland.

“Together, all preparations and efforts have resulted in this serious organized crime gang being brought to the dock in the Supreme Court. The evidence was presented in a way that was completely watertight.”

Det Ch Supt Ferry said Stevenson made tens of millions of pounds during his long criminal career.

The next step will be for the Crown to pursue Stevenson's assets under the Proceeds of Crime Act.

Success will depend on what can be found and proven in court.