The Downfall: Supergrass failed to identify Iceman in lineup

Jun 1 2008

EXACTLY a week after the Folklore busts in September 2006, Robert McDowall was hustled into the viewing room of the identity parade suite in Glasgow's highestsecurity police station.

The trucker-turned-informer had already detailed Jamie Stevenson's drug-smuggling empire in a series of prison interviews and told detectives he could - and would - identify the crime boss he says he knew only as "The J Fella".

At Helen Street police office in Govan, McDowall got the chance ...and his memory failed him.

Looking carefully at the seven men lined up with Stevenson on the other side of the one-way glass, McDowall picked No.3.

Stevenson stood at position No.5.

In the dismissal room, McDowall suggested he might have made a mistake - perhaps No.1 was a familiar face.

He told officers he had been trying to recognise another member of the gang, not Stevenson.

He said maybe No.5 looked like a man he remembered but it was all too late.

The one witness capable of placing the gang boss, known as The Iceman, at the very heart of Scotland's biggest drugs trafficking operation had failed to identify him.

One source reveals: "The police were in a stone-cold fury but what could they do?

"They had placed huge reliance on McDowall and then, after all those months, they get Stevenson into a line-up and their star witness suffers a memory lapse.

"It happens of course but it can't help when you and your wife are living in some safe house in Ireland in a state of abject terror.

"Your memory might falter when you've already been stabbed in jail and heard there's £10,000 on offer for your life."

The detectives who spent four years tracking Stevenson's business around the world will never confirm or deny the central role McDowall played in Operation Folklore.

What can be established is that, within 17 months of being sentenced to 10 years in prison for smuggling £6million of heroin into Scotland, McDowall was a free man.

It can be said that the police swoop to arrest McDowall and Stevenson lieutenant Frank Gallagher on the industrial estate on the outskirts of Dumfries in June 2003 was the first time Operation Folklore was ever mentioned in open court.

Certainly, Stevenson and his thuggish henchmen believe McDowall was a supergrass who was already secretly working with the police before being busted.

In January 2005, McDowall had his sentence cut from 10 years to five on appeal.

The following month, a bid to seize around £1million of his assets ended with the Crown recovering just £637.

At the High Court in Edinburgh the judge, Lord Penrose, Arrested: Gerry Carbin Jnr said the cost of McDowall's legal aid would have "far exceeded" what was recovered by the Crown.

And the SNP's then shadow justice minister, now Secretary for Justice Kenny MacAskill, voiced his disappointment saying: "The whole point of the Proceeds of Crime Act was to demonstrate that crime does not pay. This paltry figure does little to reinforce this message.

"I think the Crown should review what has taken place in this case to ensure it does not happen again."

But Stevenson's mob believe the Crown already knew what had taken place and that is why McDowall was freed early with a ludicrously light financial sanction.

One source said: "It is hard to see sense in it unless McDowall helped to set-up the Dumfries bust.

"The question remains - how did a drugs smuggler caught with 40kg of heroin and originally sentenced to 10 years, get out in 17 months? That's the big question but there will be no answers."