COURT TELLS DRUGS BARON TO HAND OVER JUST UKP32,000

THE confiscation of the assets of drug barons as a deterrent to others was
in doubt yesterday after the mastermind of a UKP6 million-a-year heroin ring
was ordered to hand over just UKP32,000.

James Hamill, 32, smiled and made an obscene gesture as he was led from the
High Court in Edinburgh to resume his 18-year sentence for heroin
trafficking, imposed last year.

His lawyers did not oppose the size of a confiscation order suggested by the
Crown Office after a one-year investigation into his assets. He was given
three months to pay.

Last night the Crown Office was unable to say how much its investigation
into Mr Hamill's financial affairs had cost.

In the three years since the courts gained the powers to confiscate the
profits of crime from offenders, under the 1995 Proceeds of Crime (Scotland)
Act, just UKP31.5 million has been collected at an estimated cost to the
Crown Office and police forces of about UKP500,000.

Lyndsay McIntosh, the deputy law and order spokesman for the Scottish
Conservatives, said of the UKP32,000 collected: "It certainly disappoints me
that after a year of investigations for deals worth UKP6 million, that was
the best that they could come up with.

"It seems incredible that with a person in charge of an operation of that
size they should only recover A332,000. It's pocket money, a drop in the
ocean of the deal that went down."

The idea of deterring drug dealers by confiscating their assets was
supported by both the Conservatives and Labour at the last general election.

Henry McLeish, then the Scottish home affairs minister, said he hoped to
extend the power of the courts to allow them to confiscate assets from
dealers who had not been convicted but were only suspected of selling drugs,
forcing them to prove their houses and cars were legitimately acquired.

Confiscation has been a successful, if controversial, strand of anti-drugs
policy in North America, with considerable sums seized and ploughed back
into funding the work of drugs agencies. The Canadian government once seized
an entire ski resort owned by criminals.

The policy was put into practice in the Republic of Ireland with initial
success. However, several of the suspected dealers who have had assets
seized on suspicion are now bringing cases against the Irish government at
the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

Last night a spokesman for Angus McKay, the drugs minister, said: "The
executive is still actively considering the way that confiscation powers can
be improved or extended. It is something which the government wishes to see
as part ofthe remit of the Scottish drug enforcement agency."

John Scott, the chairman of the Scottish Human RightsCentre, said that
seizing assets on suspicion was unlikely to pass human rights scrutiny, and
urged the government to instead improve the use of existing powers.

"The idea sounds great, but the government will have a real difficulty with
the right to the presumption of innocence," he said.

"I am not sure that the work done at the moment in tracking these assets
down is good enough."

As the gangster who controlled the lucrative heroin trade in Aberdeen in a
two-year reign of terror, Hamill enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle, running two
homes and driving a top-of-the-range Mercedes car.

Hamill and his principal lieutenant, James Gemmill, moved in on Aberdeen in
1996 after drugs squad detectives had smashed a previous network being
controlled by Liverpool-based drugs gangs.

The Glasgow gangster had already made a fortune selling bootleg alcohol and
smuggled cigarettes. Senior detectives at Grampian Police are convinced that
Hamill and his gang were responsible for the upsurge in heroin abuse in
Aberdeen between 1996 and his arrest in September 1997.

The city gained the reputation as the heroin capital of Scotland, with the
highest number of addicts per head of population in the country. There were
suspicions that Hamill's associates deliberately sold higher than usual
strength heroin to ensure that affluent oil workers taking the drug would
quickly become addicted.

Detectives also suspect that the drugs flooding into Aberdeen though
Hamill's network were responsible for a spate of 68 heroin-related overdoses
throughout the north-east over two years.

After Hamill's arrest, there was a noticeable shortage of heroin in
circulation in Aberdeen - a void which was again quickly filled by rival
drug gangs.