Graeme Pearson, the new head of the UK's first institute for the study of organised crime, opens the door of his classic car and ushers me into a glamorous cigarette box on wheels. It's the kind of vehicle the gangster in an episode of The Sweeney might drive. Suffice to say it is not your average academic's car.
But Pearson, head of Glasgow University's Institute for the Study of Serious Organised Crime, is not your average academic. The former director of the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency (SCDEA), he quit his £130,000-a-year job in November at the age of 57, two years before his planned retirement date. He says he was frustrated that the agency's autonomy and ability to act were being compromised by bureaucracy and a turf war over the future of Scottish policing.
“There was a lack of understanding about the kind of challenges and pressures the agency faced,” he says over a sandwich in a Glasgow cafe. “We were dealing with criminals who could meet on a Friday to decide strategy, implement it by the Sunday and have the profit made and spent by the following Tuesday. Bureaucracy wants to have a meeting sometime in the spring and maybe set up a wee committee.”
The only son of a railway man and a nurse who imbued him with the public-service ethos, Pearson had been a policeman since the age of 19. Growing up in Partick in the 1960s, he saw the impact of gangs on the city's streets. It was his motivation to join the force. He had risen to become deputy chief constable of Strathclyde police before founding the SCDEA, the Scottish equivalent of the FBI.
“The biggest heartache was making the decision to go,” he says. “I'm much more comfortable now. I sleep easier.” I'm meeting him in the week that the SCDEA's English equivalent, the Serious Organised Crime Agency, is reported to have abandoned the hunt for criminal masterminds amid bureaucratic bungling, poor intelligence gathering and weak leadership.
Pearson believes intelligence and research are the keys to unlocking organised crime. The new job is “almost as important” as his old one, he says. In the 1970s, the FBI's breakthrough against mafia families came after Harvard University analysed its behaviour and trends.
“Organised crime has changed,” he says. “It's no longer domestic. It's no longer the local villain - the Arthur Thompson type - who lives in, and has an effect on, one area. It's transnational and multimillion[-pound] and deals in any commodity. It's actually a franchise. Organised crime operates in the same way that a multinational company works. If the risk factor is too high in one area, it goes somewhere else.”
He cites the 1990s American crackdown on cocaine that led Colombian drug barons to open up new markets in Europe. We should have seen it coming. The same is true for the Chinese-financed, Vietnamese-run cannabis factories springing up now in Scotland.
“The current official response is to meet the problem when it arrives,” he says. “We need to see where the next crimewave is coming from and make preparations for it.”
He wants to see the courts given the powers to seize all the assets of convicted crime bosses, not just the dirty money. Legitimate businessmen who give such criminals an opportunity to launder money should also lose their assets, he says. A small coterie of about 100 “lords” runs much of Scotland's organised crime, most of them with multiple interests here and abroad, and Pearson would like to see these known Mr Bigs, many of whom have no convictions, targeted.
“The career criminal gets involved in nightlife skirmishes, and at street level that's almost allowed,” he says. “The police treat it as just another minor incident. We should put additional officers onto it, gather forensics and build a case against him to get him into court. But there is no desire to implement that kind of career criminal programme in Scotland. It's one of the frustrations.”
Pearson believes the big mistake the authorities make is in assuming that organised crime is all about amassing profit.
“It's about power, influence and control,” he says. “These people seek to have a status in the community.”
He believes we should be less complacent about the possibility of Scottish public life being corrupted by organised crime, in the way it has been in Mexico, Italy and Colombia. It will be one of the main areas of the new institute's research, which will be led by Professor Neil McKeganey. He will run the institute on a day-to-day basis.
Just how easy it is for convicted criminals to get close to Scottish politicians was demonstrated in March 2002 when Jack McConnell, the former first minister, was at the centre of a controversy over a Labour fundraising dinner at the Dalziel Park Hotel in Motherwell. McConnell and John Reid, the former home secretary, sat alongside Justin McAlroy, a convicted drug dealer, who was under surveillance by the SCDEA and who was shot dead a week later.
“I think many politicians attended that event not knowing the company they were in, but that's exactly the way organised crime operates,” says Pearson. “You end up going to an event and you find yourself amid lovely people and they've got tickets to the cup final or the golf.
You get invited along, you are photographed with them, you've taken hospitality from them and a couple of months down the line, it is difficult to get out of it.”
The political row over the constitution is damaging the fight against drugs and crime, he believes. He is concerned that if it continues until the mooted referendum date of 2010, ground will be irretrievably lost.
“Of course it's a distraction,” he says. “If you are a 16-year-old on a housing scheme, do you really care whether we are devolved or independent? Solve their problems. We've got a real problem here which politicians should be putting their minds to. The only time politicians are interested in crime and drug issues is in the lead-up to an election. For the other four years it's put on the back burner. We're talking about our kids' future. If that's not worth the effort, I don't know what is.”
How does he think the Scottish National party and its justice minister, Kenny MacAskill, are performing on drugs and crime?
“The jury is out just now,” he says. “I think essentially Kenny is a decent man and would want to do the right thing.”
Pearson, who set up the highly acclaimed Choices for Life drugs education programme, believes drug abuse by the middle classes and their subsequent ambivalence is hindering the fight.
“Sweden has a very strident view on drugs,” he says. “The message is: ‘We will not tolerate drugs in our community.' We don't take that view in Scotland. We say: ‘We'll give you advice about taking drugs safely. We'll manage drugs in the community.' The political vision and statement for Scotland has to be: ‘No drugs here.' All the agencies that operate underneath that - social work, health, housing, benefits and the voluntary sector - need to work to that message.”
Why does he believe Scotland has been so reluctant to take that stand? Is it to do with the cocaine-sniffing middle classes and celebrity drug misuse?
“I hate to say it, but that is part of it,” he says. “If you are Kate Moss or Amy Winehouse, you can go to a five-star place and be brought back to normality. If you are a kid on a housing estate in Glasgow, you can't. Once you fall off the wagon, you can't get back on. Kate Moss and Amy Winehouse's notoriety has a cash value and that is very damaging.”
He believes our approach to drugs education in school is completely wrong. “It's mentioned at key points in the curriculum and then forgotten. We should be doing it every year from the age of nine or 10.”
He would like to see drugs education woven into all other subjects. An English teacher covering The Rime of the Ancient Mariner should be able to discuss Coleridge's drug addiction and relate it to what is happening in the pupil's own communities.
“It should be part of the culture, part of the vision of making Scotland drug-free,” he says. “We shouldn't be teaching kids what drugs look like. Kids already know what the damn stuff looks like. We should be showing them what it does to you. I don't think it is hopeless, but we need to put our mind to it.”
He knows from his own experience just what a difficult job bringing up teenagers can be. Married to Valerie, a headteacher in a special needs school in Glasgow, he has one daughter, Jennifer, a PE teacher who is now in her mid-twenties and of whom he is obviously proud.
“My daughter was a huge challenge to me,” he says. “Until she was 11 we were the best of pals and did everything together. Around that age she came in one evening and was a complete monster and she stayed a complete monster for a few years. Then she came in one evening and she was back to being my daughter. It was all about peer pressure and running with the crowd and it was difficult having a policeman for a dad.”
As a father, he took an uncompromising line on alcohol and drugs. He was, however, “enormously worried” about Jennifer during that period.
“The key to getting through it was always having the door open,” he says. “No matter which of us she had fallen out with that day, the other one had to always be on hand so she was never completely alienated from the family. She always had somebody she could turn to.”
Pearson is an old-fashioned policeman with a very modern attitude to fighting drugs and crime. He may have swapped action for academia, but the McMafia shouldn't break open the smuggled champagne just yet. Pearson is unlikely to leave them alone for long. He is bound to them by much more than a common love of fancy cars.
