Today, I want to follow on from my last blog. In my last piece we followed Edinburgh based criminal Roddy Mclean as he planned a drugs shipments into the UK. In one operation off the north-east coast of Scotland in July 1996, McLean, known as ‘Popeye’, was arrested when police and customs officers captured a gang of Uk & Dutch drug smugglers off the Caithness coast with Mclean leading the Scottish part of the smuggling plot. During the operation a customs officer, 47 year old father of three Alastair Souter,was killed when he fell and was crushed between a customs cutter and the Mclean’s boat. At the time there was three tonnes of cannabis on board Mclean’s converted lifeboat ‘Ocean Jubilee’ valued at £10 million if it had been sold on the streets at the time.
McLean was convicted in court and sentenced to 28 years in prison. A year later this was reduced to 21 years when the Court of Appeal ruled that the judge had been too severe in the sentence as he was punishing McLean for the death of Alastair Souter, even though Mclean faced no charges in connection with Alastair’s death.
In his book on Mclean – which you can find, along with all my sources in the notes at the bottom of this article – author Wayne Thallon, who as McLean’s nephew had access to diaries and documents written by McLean in prison. And from this it is clear that Mclean didn’t like prison one bit, saying:
“Prison….is shit. In fact, it’s appalling. It deprives you of everyone you love and of everything you own. It renders you a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs while the regimentation that you first despise soon becomes the very thing you rely on for sanity.”
What is certainly clear is that Mclean was an exemplary prisoner who started off in a Category A prison when sentenced in 1997. But by 1998 was in a category B prison then in March 1999 was in the Category C prison Shotts just outside Glasgow.
In March 2001 he moved south to the English prison system – the official records say for ‘compassionate reasons’ which is odd as his family and his wife Susan were all still in Scotland – to Bristol prison, then to HMP Erlestoke in Wiltshire before being transferred to the Category D ‘open’ prison at Leyhill near Bristol in September 2002. So in six years this man who was originally sentenced to 28 years in prison – a serious sentence for a serious criminal – was now in an open prison well known for its history of absconders.
As I wrote in my last blog, there were always rumours swirling around Mclean that he was an informer working for the police, Customs & Excise, MI5 and/or MI6. In fact, even on the smuggling operation which led to him going to prison, allegations were made that senior customs officials had sanctioned the drug run where Alastair Soutar was killed in return for McLean helping them to capture other major criminals. This is the story which Mclean always insisted was the truth but according to him, everything changed once Alastair Soutar died.
Customs and Excise denied this at the time but later refused to discuss whether McLean worked for them on other “sting” operations, saying that an inquiry into his dealings with them was still continuing. I don’t think this inquiry was ever made public for reasons which may become clearer by the end of this piece, so maybe let’s just leave that hanging for now.
It is for obvious reasons hard for us to ever know the truth or whether that was just rumours, but what is certain is that in prison Mclean knew exactly how to play the game – or maybe he was helped in this game by those authorities who he had helped in the past? It was certainly unusual for a prisoner to be moved down categories quite so quickly.
Joe Steele was wrongly convicted for the Ice Cream War killings in Glasgow in the 80s. If you know this case you will recall how several ice cream vendors also sold drugs and stolen goods along their routes, using the ice cream sales as fronts for the illegal business. This resulted in appalling violence as the different van operators attacked and intimidated one another in a fight for territory and supremacy. The peak of the violence occurred in April 1984, when six members of the Doyle family were killed in an arson attack, it was thought by a rival. But I digress and let’s come back to that case in another blog. Joe Steele was in prison with Mclean for a while and gave his thoughts on his remarkable progress through the categories saying:
“It’s too fast for anyone else to be downgraded like that, but not for Rod. He told me he had done the deal before he even walked into the jail to start his sentence. He had to go into segregation a few times because he was known as a grass but he knew his classification was going to go down. It was all arranged.” Let’s leave this point for now and get on with what happened to Mclean whilst he was in prison.
When we pick up the story at 10am on Saturday 8 November 2003, Mclean was walking out of Leyhill open prison to catch the bus into Bristol. This was his 21st day release visit to Bristol and these are totally standard and used to get prisoners eased back into life outside prison before their release. In fact, on this particular Saturday, at least another 50 prisoners from Leyhill were also doing the same thing. That Mclean was one of them is slightly odd in itself as Mclean still had five years left to serve behind bars before he was even eligible for parole, let alone release. Why was it necessary for him to adjust to life outside?
After getting a lift into the City, he followed his usual pattern of grabbing a cooked breakfast and reading the papers over coffee in the centre. He then wandered off to look at the shops for a bit as usual. But unlike the previous twenty occasions, Mclean didn’t make it back in time for the 6pm curfew. This was very unusual because as I said before he was a model prisoner.
At just before 6pm he called the prison to say he would be late, but by 8.10 pm when there was still no sign of Mclean, the staff at Leyhill prison called the police to report him as missing.
This might surprise you, but it wasn’t an unusual occurrence as Leyhill had a long track record of prisoners absconding and in the year before Mclean’s escape, 82 of Leyhill’s 400 inmates absconded. No, really! In fact, there was a great quote about this from one source who said:
“You can basically walk out. The fence is designed to keep the cows out rather than prisoners in.”
For reasons that are hard to grasp, it was not until December before the news of Mclean’s escape was released to the public. Why so long? Why indeed. When the news did finally break and Interpol was notified of an escaped international drugs smuggler, it resulted in considerable embarrassment to the Home Secretary of the day, David Blunkett, who ordered an urgent enquiry. But meanwhile the rumours about Mclean swirled.
The most common was that he had gone to South Africa where he loved to spend time and he had a home. And that his escape was due to his relationship with the security services. This was covered in many of the papers, including the Independent newspaper which carried the following quote:
“It’s rare for a prisoner sentenced for such a serious offence to be put in open prison this quickly. We think he was helped by those mysterious folk on the South Bank in London [MI6],” said a police source who continued, “It is believed that McLean was spirited away to Mozambique, where he had a number of business interests. Police sources think that MI6 might be using McLean to help monitor this turbulent part of Africa. McLean had worked on UN ships visiting Africa, taking aid to Mozambique and Tanzania.”
Alastair Soutar’s family were understandably not impressed at all with the escape of the man they held responsible for his death. His brother Brian said:
“The circumstances…I know nothing about but certainly what does not add up to me is the basic facts surrounding how he managed to be in this holiday camp down in Gloucester rather than a high security Scottish prison. I think it is appalling that he was allowed to be in an open prison, which I or my family were not aware of. I gather that when you are put in an open prison, you are put there on trust – if it wasn’t so serious, it would be laughable. What our extradition treaties with South Africa are, I don’t know but I would hope there are some.”
Mark Leech, editor of The Prisons Handbook, the annual guide to the penal system of England and Wales – yep, a first for me too, maybe not one for the Christmas gift list – hit out at prison bosses saying: “I make no bones about it, this is completely inexplicable. I cannot remember a single case where someone serving this kind of sentence, with the amount of money salted away that McLean is alleged to have, has found themselves transferred to an open prison with almost a decade of his sentence left to serve. It stinks.”
And the official prison authorities showed what some would argue is their unfortunately all too regular lack of competence and ability to state the obvious when official restricted documents were leaked which revealed the following words of wisdom:
“He was well established in the prison system as a mature, responsible and apparently remorseful first-time offender. What caused Mr McLean to choose to abscond when he did remains a mystery and will do so until he is recaptured. We simply do not know what changed in November 2003 to cause him to breach the trust placed in him and previously respected by him.”
Are you still not convinced that Mclean was helped to escape prison by the secret services? Well, it seems this wouldn’t have been the first time this happened.
You may recall the following name, Joe Wilkins. In the early 1970’s Joe was a big name in Soho working for escort firm Glamour International when he was shot twice in his office, but fortunately survived the attack. Forward wind to 1987 and Joe had moved into the drugs smuggling business when was jailed for 10 years having led a plot to smuggle drugs from Morocco in a boat named ‘Danny Boy’. In 1991, there was considerable surprise when he was placed into an open prison just three years into his sentence – the similarities to McLean are stark aren’t they.
Joe didn’t just escape from this establishment just once, but twice. And the second time he escaped in 1992, he headed to southern Spain where he popped up using his name and connections to head up an entrapment operation being run by MI6 and the British police to target money-laundering operations headquartered just across the Spanish border in Gibraltar. The work he was involved in got results, but on the legality of what had been done it went more than a bit pear shaped.
A key case arising from the sting against ten men was thrown out at Southwark Crown Court after 414 days in court, with the Judge denouncing the operation as massively illegal. You do wonder about why experienced lawyers for these organisations would let this go anywhere near a court, don’t you? It was strongly suspected in crime circles that Joe’s rapid progression to an open prison was because he was a police and MI6 informant. Incidentally, there are more remarkable reports about Joe, including that he played a role in the 1989 Death on the Rock incident when three IRA members were killed by the SAS. And that he informed on the M25 road-rage killer Kenneth Noye. Who knows how much is true? In this murky business lots is unclear, but Mclean, Joe Wilkins and others are believed to have been aided in their escape from prison by the secret services so they could use them for their own purposes.
Anyway, back to our story where the news emerged that Rod Mclean had been found dead. He was just 60 when he died. But this too raised more questions than were answered. On 12 February, a statement from the Metropolitan was released which said the following:
“At 10.35am on Wednesday 14 January, the body of a man was found in Streatham, south London. A post-mortem examination was held at Greenwich mortuary and the cause of death was ruled to be natural causes (heart failure).”
So, just why had it taken the Met police 29 days to release the details of Mclean’s death? And why had the police force responsible for looking for him following his escape, Avon & Somerset, not been informed? In Scotland, the Daily Record newspaper said:
“Roddy Mclean’s body was discovered four days after the Daily Record told of fears that Secret Service officers had helped him escape from jail…Some even believe he may have been murdered…A Scots police insider said, ‘This may even have been made to look like a natural death before the body was found’.”
It seemed that at the time of his death, millionaire Mclean had been working as a caretaker for the block of flats in which he was living in a less than salubrious part of south London. Basically, it was a hostel for the homeless. Even back then in the pre-social media days, when the public were more believing of the stories the authorities try to sometimes sell us as the truth, most people with any knowledge of the situation weren’t having this account of events. Even in parliament, questions were being asked and Annabelle Ewing, in charge of Home Affairs for the Scottish National Party at Westminster said:
“We really need a public inquiry, as the authorities must not be allowed to get away with a cover up”.
On 22 February, just ahead of Mclean’s funeral back in Scotland, Avon & Somerset police force, prompted it is now known by the Home Secretary, asked for another post-mortem to take place to see if the heart attack was truly a natural event or whether it was brought on by other substances that Mclean took willingly or unwillingly. But to quite a senior Scottish police officer at the time, this was a waste of time as according to him:
“If there had been a cover-up, it’s possible Mclean’s organs could have been swapped before his body left the coroners office in London – making the second post-mortem useless”.
So, just what did happen to Mclean after he escaped from prison? Our best bet to know the truth is probably the book written by Mclean’s nephew. According to this account, at 2pm on the day he absconded from Leyhill, he headed to the university district of Bristol where he found ‘The Firm’.
He was ushered into a blue van where a man from MI5 referred to only as an ‘old friend’ gave him a baseball cap, new clothes and a whole new set of documents for his new identity. By 2.45pm, Mclean was now John Nicholson. At the time of his curfew for the prison, 6pm, on the instructions of MI5 McLean was boarding the ferry at Holyhead bound for the Republic of Ireland and then by road south to Wexford on the south-east coast.
He was there to make contact with fellow drug smugglers, who, it is said, would help him to make the right connections with a notorious London-based crime family. The reason Mclean was so valuable to the authorities was his credibility. And our law enforcement outfits felt he could be the person to help them discover the smuggling routes currently being used by the Arif’s – a notorious Turkish-Cypriot crime clan reportedly smuggling huge amounts of heroin. Let’s call them ‘the clan’ from this point on.
And unbelievably, just 24 hours after escaping from Leyhill Prison, Mclean was in a boat off the south coast of Ireland picking up a consignment of cannabis from Spain and returning it to the Irish coast. In the coming days, he carried out more trips, sometimes going back to Wexford, other times to England and meeting another boat off the coast of Cornwall.
After four of the trips, McLean is thought to have followed the orders of his MI5 bosses and driven to London, to meet the crime family, who were one of the top targets for Customs and other law enforcement authorities.
But Mclean was a bright man and he was thinking of his own future. Sure, he was grateful to MI5 for helping him escape from jail, but he had no intention of betraying the clan. And he was well aware that the clan had smuggled Kenneth Noye out of the country when he was the most wanted man in the UK – and he wanted them to do the same for him. He planned to go to Africa where he had connections or maybe Northern Cyprus – where there was no extradition agreement with Britain. He was also plotting to buy a boat so that he could run his own drug runs to finance his life on the outside.
Whilst in London sorting out his plans, he knew that to avoid suspicion it was key to blend in and not be conspicuous. Signing on for benefits was not an option so he needed a job. And when when a part-time job came up in a hostel in Streatham that offered free board and a small salary, he immediately went for it.
Meanwhile, Mclean’s second meeting with the clan took place on 6 January 2004, and whilst Mclean told MI5 about the meeting, he didn’t tell them that this meeting was all in reality about Mclean’s own plans for leaving the UK. Things progressed with Mclean buying a boat at the request of MI5 for the trips they believed he would be making for the clan. And his next, and final meeting with the clan, took place on Tuesday 13 January 2004, where money changed hands and they agreed that his transport to Cyprus would take place the next day, 14 January 2004.
That evening before he left, he met again with the man referred to as his ‘old friend’ from MI5. Mclean had always been clear that he trusted this person although he certainly didn’t trust MI5 as an organisation – and that, it is said, is why Mclean himself had in fact reported his escape from prison to the media.
Why would he do this? Well, this made life more difficult for MI5 to keep him working for them and allowed him to pursue a new life in the warm climates of northern Cyprus. At the end of the meeting in the pub, the two men who had known each other for a long time, parted amicably as Mclean made his way back to the run-down hostel where he was staying, excited about his future.
But the next morning, he was found dead in bed by staff. It seemed that during the night he suffered a massive heart attack that ended the life of the man known as ‘popeye’ at just 60.
Roddy McLean’s final journey took place back in Scotland as his funeral was held in secret at an Edinburgh crematorium, attended by only a handful of relatives. But even the secrecy here was highly unusual. A number of burly minders sealed off a crematorium just outside Edinburgh, blocking the entry of mourners arriving for the funerals of their own loved ones being cremated on the same day. And even staff who worked there were not allowed to know who was being cremated. Does this sound standard to you?
Of course, Mclean’s death led to more recriminations. A spokesperson for the south London coroner’s service, said that McLean’s criminal background did not justify an inquest. She said:
“If the pathologist gives the cause of death as natural, the coroner has no further jurisdiction,” adding that no further information could be released about the death, unless by his family. And a senior Scottish police source said:
“The fact that McLean had bought a boat in Bristol days before he died and the failure to hold a coroner’s inquest only adds to the intrigue.” Indeed so.
For officers of Customs & Excise, Mclean’s involvement in the death of their highly popular colleague Alastair Soutar, meant that what had happened to Mclean felt very personal. Customs agents told The Times newspaper that they were appalled at allegations that MI5 organised the disappearance of McLean only five years into his 21-year sentence. His colleagues were also angry at the apparent reluctance of their own senior officers to demand a full, public investigation.
The Scottish National Party and the Conservatives backed the family of Alastair Soutar in demanding a public inquiry. They also wanted an investigation into what had happened to the millions of pounds that Mclean had made, with rumours of properties in Africa and Europe. The Assets Recovery Agency, set up by the Government of the time to seize the assets of criminals, said that no law enforcement agency has asked it to investigate Mclean’s assets.
The Times newspaper quotes one of his associates as explaining why none of these investigations were ever going to happen in reality: “If all is now revealed, a lot of officers will go to jail and there will be a drugs war with the men he double crossed.” A bit dramatic? Maybe. But let’s leave the last words with the family of Alastair Soutar. His son Justin, said: “For the sake of my father’s memory, this cover-up should stop now.”
I pondered about covering this story today as a part two to last weeks blog as a lot of the story cannot be substantiated and I also am not in the business of romanticising criminals like Roddy Mclean. But in the end, I found the story so interesting that I hoped you would too.
So, what really happened here? It seems pretty clear that Mclean had developed relationships with the security services from way back in his late teens when he was a mercenary in Congo. On arriving back in the UK, all those years ago, all the surviving men on reaching London were asked to call a number for MI6 and use the password ‘Dorian’. Mclean did this, and when he met up with an MI6 officer, he was given a few drinks and a few quid for his information and stayed in contact from then onwards. It is generally accepted he was an informer for the police but was he also an informer for Customs & Excise and MI5 later in his life.
Like so many parts of Mclean’s life, it is hard to say for certain, but it certainly seems likely.
Did he die of natural causes after suffering a heart attack? It seems highly unlikely doesn’t it that this happened the day before he left to start a new life in Cyprus. Some of his closest friends and associates certainly refused to believe this, claiming that one of his many enemies killed him. But when pressed they don’t openly say who they blame for his death. So maybe we can speculate a little. Was he killed by the secret services for double crossing them, or maybe even the clan who knew that he had been working with the secret services and feared the was in fact working against them? Or was it someone else that he had informed on or maybe let down in a deal in the past who finally caught up with him?
There were no toxicology tests taken, and his body was cremated at his funeral in Scotland, so further investigation into just what killed Robby Mclean is impossible.
His death, like most of his life, will remain a mystery to most of us. And for those who may know, well, they certainly aren’t telling.
This case was originally featured on episode 420 of the UK True Crime Podcast, ‘Dark & Murky Currents’. The sources used were as follows:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/feb/15/drugsandalcohol.ukcrime
https://costasdelcrimes.blogspot.com/2007/09/wilkins-was-spending-lot-of-his-time-on.html
https://www.thetimes.com/article/mi5-is-linked-to-death-of-drugs-baron-popeye-wbw3fvr60s5
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cut-Throat-Vicious-Mercenary-Gun-Runner-International/dp/1840189754