AS one of Britain’s most feared criminal kingpins, Jamie Stevenson earned the nickname The Iceman – but a series of hasty moves led to his downfall.

Glaswegian Stevenson, who was behind a £100 million cocaine smuggling operation, was brought to justice after leaving an encrypted phone behind as he fled the cops, by meeting a banana salesman in a Spanish hotel and when a traceable credit card was used in a brothel.

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The 59-year-old gangster, who was suspected of ordering a hit on his former best man, has been likened to fictional mob boss Tony Soprano due to his ruthlessness.

As the head of a criminal enterprise which stretched not only the length of the United Kingdom, but as far abroad as Spain, Abu Dhabi and Ecuador, The Iceman oversaw a complex operation.

For that to work, he needed many lieutenants and to make deals with other criminals.

But like so many thieves, they fell out over money and power, bringing them down.  

Stevenson thought he could evade the detectives who had been hot on his heels for decades but they pounced on his slip-ups.

Stevenson was jailed for 20 years on Wednesday, with the other members of his gang receiving a total of 29 years behind bars.

Graeme Pearson, a former director of the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency, said: “Jamie Stevenson has, for many decades now, been a very senior figure in organised crime and would be counted amongst that very small group of people as being at the top of the pyramid and he ran his business much the way The Sopranos were shown to run their business on television.”

Life of crime

Stevenson grew up in the Red Road flats in the Barmulloch area of Glasgow, gaining a reputation as a petty criminal who was willing to use a knife.

Just before the turn of the century he started doing deals with Barry and James Gillespie, two of Scotland’s most wanted criminals.

He also became pally with Tony McGovern, part of a notorious crime family in the Scottish city.

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They were so close that Tony and Jamie were best men at each other’s weddings.

But when the friends fell out over lucrative drug deals and in September 2000, Stevenson was lured to a quiet spot in Lanarkshire where shots were fired at his head from close range.

He managed to escape alive.

Three months later, Tony was shot dead by masked gunmen.

The police charged Stevenson with the hit but the allegations were dropped due to a lack of evidence.

Ice cold reputation

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It was enough to turn The Iceman, who posed as a car valeter, into a feared mobster.

The authorities first caught up with him in 2007, when Stevenson was jailed for nearly 13 years for laundering £1 million worth of drugs cash.

The Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency had bugged the suspects homes and heard details of their plan to launder criminal proceeds using a bogus taxi firm. 

As a result Stevenson, whose stepson Gerard Carbin was convicted of his part in the illegal operation, was ordered to pay £750,000 to the treasury. 

He ran his business much the way The Sopranos were shown to run their business on television

Graeme Pearson

Police seized 48 watches, including 13 Rolexes and five Cartier ones, plus £13,445 of jewellery.

Stevenson was also forced to sell his four bedroom home in East Kilbride, which had giraffe prints on the floor and a jacuzzi bath.

A lengthy spell of incarceration did not deter the career criminal.

Following his release Stevenson set about reestablishing his drugs network.

He was a known associate of convicted drug dealer Stephen Jamieson.

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Banana plot

The police had their first breakthrough in 2019, when they learned that fruit trader David Bilsland, 67, from Glasgow, had suddenly started taking large consignments of bananas from Ecuador.

The South American nation has strong ties to cocaine trafficking due to its close proximity to Colombia, where the  deadly substance is grown.

The pieces of the puzzle fell into place when Bilsland met Stevenson in Alicante, Spain on in February 2020.

Suspicious that Bilsland was making the round trip in one day, they asked Spanish police to track him.

They then kept an eye on the importations, the first 17 of which had no drugs in them.

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Around the same time detectives also caught wind of a factory in Kent capable of churning out 250,000 street valium pills every hour.

That was raided in June 2020 and police set about arresting Stevenson for running the operation.

When plain clothes officers surrounded the Sherbrooke Castle Hotel in Glasgow on June 12, Stevenson believed they were gangsters about to assassinate him.

He fled the scene, jumping over a fence, before falling down an embankment where he was caught by the officers.

It was reminiscent of a scene in The Sopranos where Tony Soprano also stumbled down an embankment.

Remarkably, Stevenson was given bail in Carlisle, allowing him to flee to Holland.

His big mistake was to leave behind an encrypted mobile phone in his hasty flit.

That allowed detectives to uncover details of messages between Stevenson and many of his criminal associates, largely thanks to data shared by French officers.

Stevenson had been using the name “bigtasty” in secretly recorded phone calls.

For two years the drug boss was able to direct drug operations in the UK from a hideout in Holland.

The real-life Soprano

1999 – Stevenson starts working with criminal brothers Barry and James Gillespie 

2001 – Stevenson is accused of the murder of his best man Tony McGovern, but the case is dropped.

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2007 – Stevenson is jailed for 12 years for laundering £1 million worth of drugs money.

2014 – The prisoner is released from jail.

February 2020 – Stevenson meets banana importer David Bilsland in a hotel in Spain.

June 2020 – Stevenson is arrested in connection with a street valium factory in Kent.

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June 2020 – While on bail, the drug dealer flees to Holland.

September 2020 – £100 million worth of cocaine found in banana boxes in the port of Dover, Kent.

February 2022 – Stevenson is arrested while jogging in  Bergen op Zoom, Holland.

October 2022 – The drugs lord is jailed for 20 years, for smuggling cocaine and running the street valium factory.

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In September 2020 he sent a consignment of cocaine worth an estimated £100 million to Dover hidden in boxes of bananas.

The National Crime Agency knew it was coming, but it took them three days to find all 119 packages of the white powder.

Stevenson’s exact whereabouts were unknown until one of his friends used an emergency credit card while drinking heavily at a brothel in Amsterdam.

The authorities had a trace on that card and using CCTV footage where able to work out where Stevenson had been staying.

He was arrested while jogging in a park in the south of Holland in February 2022.

Gerry McLean, the NCA’s Regional Head of Investigation for Scotland, said: “It does not matter where fugitives go, we will work with partners like the Dutch National Police who’ve provided superb help, to trace and arrest them.”

Once Stevenson was in custody in the UK, he admitted orchestrating the drug operation.

His associates Gerry Carbin, 45, Ryan McPhee, 34, Paul Bowes, 53, David Bilsland, 67, and Lloyd Cross, 32, were also jailed.

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The chief executive of Anglo American on Thursday said it is not “inevitable” a new buyer for the group will emerge after it has sold off four major parts of its business following BHP’s failed £39bn takeover attempt.

Duncan Wanblad played down the prospects a suitor will make a bid after it accelerated plans to slim down the group following the hostile move by its Australian rival, which collapsed in May.

He intends to offload Anglo’s De Beers diamond arm, coal, nickel and platinum units, that will leave a copper, iron ore and fertiliser business at the end of the process.

Speaking at the Joburg Indaba mining conference, Wanblad said even though Anglo will earn 60 per cent of its revenue from copper, this would not necessarily make it irresistible for potential buyers, as some analysts had speculated.

“I don’t believe this is inevitable at all,” he said. “To the extent that we are valued in the context of the sum of our parts and fully valued, we will be a very viable, standalone company.”

Wanblad said the company is still on track to finalise the restructuring by next year, but cannot predict what will happen after that.

“I cannot say what other people are going to do from a corporate action point of view and I don’t really care about that — what I care about is delivering on the strategy,” he said.

This underscored the sentiment he expressed last week at the Financial Times Mining Summit in London, where he said that should Anglo become a takeover target, would-be buyers would need to “pay the right number” for the company.

Anglo’s stock price has fallen about 12 per cent since BHP made its takeover offer in April.

After the demerger, Anglo would be a much smaller operator, with a streamlined portfolio geared towards commodities that analysts say have much better prospects.

Wanblad said Anglo’s remaining businesses provide “a very compelling option on what the world is desperately going to need for decades to come”.

This view is shared by his rivals, such as BHP, that expect copper demand to surge in the coming years because it is a vital for the clean energy transition.

Anglo’s copper assets were central to BHP’s offer — and some experts expect it to make another bid for the company.

However, takeover rules specify a six-month cooling-off period, which means BHP cannot return with another offer until November 29.

M&G has appointed Kirsty Wright in the newly created role of director of PruFund proposition.

The appointment comes a month after M&G exited the platform market to focus on its life business.

Wright, who has over 17 years’ experience, joins from LV=, where she was head of wealth proposition.

She is tasked with developing M&G’s new propositions within its £62bn multi-asset PruFund range.

Wright said: “PruFund is a unique proposition in the market and has a fantastic reputation for delivering for customers.

“I look forward to the next stage of PruFund’s development as we seek to widen its distribution, providing more advisers with access to well-diversified, low-volatility investment solutions for their clients, which give them the confidence to invest and grow their savings over the long term.”

The fund, first launched in 2004, has over 450,000 customers advised by 5,000 advice firms.

It is designed to meet increasing customer demand for long-term savings solutions across major tax wrappers, including onshore and offshore bonds, Isas and pensions.

Most recently, clients have been able to access the range of funds via a platform for the first time.

M&G said it will now focus its strategy on making PruFund as accessible as possible by replicating this model across multiple platforms in order to drive growth.

The fund’s smoothing mechanism helps to reduce the impact of market fluctuations and has delivered an annualised return of 5.38% over the last 20 years.

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Botanists have grown a long-lost tree species from a 1,000-year-old seed found in a cave in the Judean Desert in the 1980s.

The researchers involved in the project say they believe the tree species, which is thought to be extinct today, could have been the source of a healing balm mentioned in the Bible and other ancient texts.

Unearthed during an archaeological dig in the lower Wadi el-Makkuk region north of Jerusalem, the ancient seed was determined to be in pristine condition. But the scientists conducting the new research weren’t able to identify the type of tree from the seed alone. The team, led by Dr. Sarah Sallon, a physician who founded the Louis L. Borick Natural Medicine Research Center at Hadassah University Medical Center in Jerusalem, planted the seed to further investigate more than a dozen years ago.

Sallon said it was possible that the tree could be the source of the biblical “tsori,” a medicinal plant extract associated with the historical region of Gilead north of the Dead Sea in the Jordan Rift Valley, a mountainous and forested area that was intensely cultivated and is now part of Jordan.

The team’s findings, described in a study published September 10 in the journal Communications Biology, unlock some of the secrets surrounding the origins of this enigmatic specimen, which Sallon nicknamed “Sheba.”

Genetic fingerprint without a match

To germinate the specimen, study coauthor Dr. Elaine Solowey, a researcher emerita at the Center for Sustainable Agriculture at The Arava Institute for Environmental Studies in Israel, used a process perfected during previous research led by Sallon on 2,000-year-old date palm seeds. The approach involved soaking the mysterious Judean Desert seed in water mixed with hormones and fertilizer before planting it in a pot of sterile soil.

“About five and a half weeks later, up jumps this nice little shoot,” Sallon said.
Protecting the shoot tip was a caplike feature called an operculum. Once it had shed, the team used radiocarbon dating on the organic matter to estimate the plant’s age and found the specimen dated to between AD 993 and 1202.

Not long after, the tree began to sprout leaves. Sallon shared images of the tree and its leaves with botanists around the world. One expert suggested it belonged to the genus Commiphora. The group includes around 200 species of tree primarily found in Africa, Madagascar and the Arabian Peninsula.

Sallon next shared a sample from the leaf with study coauthor Dr. Andrea Weeks, an associate professor in the department of biology at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Weeks sequenced the tree’s DNA, confirming the preliminary identification. However, the sample didn’t match any of the known Commiphora species in her database.

With its unique genetic fingerprint, the unknown Commiphora species most likely represented an extinct taxon once native to the region surrounding the Judean Desert, according to the study.

However, the tree, which is now more than 14 years old and almost 10 feet (3 meters) tall, has neither flowered nor borne fruit. Without these more easily identifiable features, it’s not possible to identify the cryptic species with certainty, the study added.

Biblical tree?

Based on historical research, Sallon had a hunch that the tree might be the source of what ancient texts from the region, including the Bible, describe as “Judean Balsam” or “Balm of Gilead” — a fragrant resin harvested to make a coveted perfume that was exported around the world at the time.

“We planted it in 2010 (and) it’s now 2024. Why did we wait so long (to publish the research)? Because I wanted to make sure that it wasn’t the Judean Balsam. And how would I definitively know that? By smelling it,” Sallon said.

Yet the tree, which is related to the myrrh tree that’s famed for its resin, never gave off any kind of scent. Once the plant was more mature at around 3 years old, the team conducted a phytochemical analysis on its resin, leaves and branches to test for aromatic compounds, such as those found in myrrh. However, there were none, Sallon said.

Instead, the team detected some compounds known for their medicinal use, including “guggulterols,” which have been identified from the resin of the related tree species Commiphora wightii as having potential cancer-fighting properties, the study noted.

“Based on all these things, it’s not the Judean balsam, it’s a close cousin of it, and one of the non-aromatic Commiphora that is a treasure chest of medicinal compounds,” she said.

Due to the presence of those healing compounds, Sallon and her colleagues concluded that the tree may have instead been the source of a medicinal balm known as tsori that is also mentioned in historical texts.

Seeds with such an incredible lifespan are rare, according to Dr. Louise Colville, senior research leader in seed and stress biology at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in London. Colville wasn’t involved in the research.

“What’s surprising in this story is it was just a single seed and to be able to have one chance for that to germinate is extremely lucky,” she said.

“Working in a seed bank, seeing the potential for that extreme longevity gives us hope that banking and storing seeds that some at least will survive for very long periods of time.”

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“Is that all there is?” Peggy Lee sang in the famous 1969 tune of the same name, one of the few American standards not to feature in Joker: Folie à Deux. It may still be what you end up whistling. Five years after the wildly popular Joker made a hoofer out of Joaquin Phoenix, the sequel is now here to keep everyone dancing.

Singing too. In the wake of that phenomenal success, it became apparent that the follow-up would be, of all things, a musical. Lady Gaga was to co-star. For director Todd Phillips, the idea was very on-brand. It could either land as creative audacity or mere giggly trolling, as if trying to give Joker’s stylised gloom the most jarring frame imaginable.

It has now been imagined. An opening pastiche Looney Tunes cartoon sets the tone for all that follows: less zany than it sounds, and still tethered to events in the first film. But where Joker flirted with clammy nihilism, the incels are at least now shaken off. The new movie is a romance, staged between Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck, the sad clown behind the Joker, and Gaga’s arsonist Harleen Quinzel, also stuck in Arkham Psychiatric Hospital. (The facility is harsh, though the movie’s own crude take on mental health may not be far from that of the guards.) 

Love kindles with a blaze in a screening of Fred Astaire musical The Band Wagon. Its set-piece number “That’s Entertainment!” is revived in the new film. So are many others. The movie is stuffed with showtunes: “If My Friends Could See Me Now”, “For Once In My Life”, and more, belted out by the stars in dreamlike reveries. 

In between, the plot grinds on with Arthur’s trial for crimes committed in the last film. Narratively, that is pretty much that. Phoenix hits his relevant notes, but even the soundtrack is drowned out by his face-pulling. And while Gaga works hard enough to bump up the star rating alone, the thinness of her role makes Phillips seem like the dog that caught the car. He wanted her in the movie, without a clue what to do next.

If the first Joker had a purpose beyond generating memes, it was letting Phoenix loose in a rathole New York Photoshopped from Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and King of Comedy. The result won its loudest fans among people who hadn’t seen either movie. (A cynic might say any movies.) Costumes and vibes stay rooted in the same time and place. That remains the film’s grandest flight of fancy. By contrast, the characters’ inner worlds, where the songs unfold, are naggingly flat. Opinions will differ if the lack of imagination is theirs, or down to the director.

Still, enough money has been spent promoting the project to mean you may have to go into space to avoid seeing it. Your ticket will buy some clever moments. Phillips makes witty use of a supposed TV movie about Fleck’s original crime spree. (Like his own work, it proves critically divisive.) Actor Leigh Gill brings actual gravity to a scene as Arthur’s broken former pal. And the film is less dislikeable than its forebear.

It can also be deeply boring. In line with Phillips’ fondness for open questions, the point may be that we live our lives in fantasy. Or in the end, perhaps there is no point at all.

★★★☆☆

In cinemas from October 4