ORGANISED CRIME IN EDINBURGH: HOW MUCH FICTION IS FACT?

Films, novels and TV dramas all depict a very criminal Capital. Have they
got it right? Martin Hannan checks out the underworld

THE imminent arrival of teams of beautiful, slim prostitutes from Chechnya
has created understandable panic in Edinburgh's sleazy saunas.

In the concrete enclaves of "outer Edinburgh", the drug dealing "Home Team"
has beaten off the unwanted attentions of incomers from Paisley.

Outside a Leith pub, a man who started a fight was beaten to a pulp by the
pub's bouncers. The baseball bats were found in the bouncers' den.

Of the above three scenarios, only the last is "real life" and the others
are most definitely fiction, plucked from the pages of recent crime writing
set in Edinburgh.

There has never been as much crime writing set in the Capital, but how much
of it merges with observable fact? How realistic are the portrayals of the
criminal underbelly of this outwardly prosperous place? Does the fact
measure up to the fiction in Janus City?

The fiction certainly involves variety. In just one recent book, Ian
Rankin's The Hanging Garden, Edinburgh was invaded by Yakuza gangsters from
Japan, a Nazi war criminal, and very nasty heavies from the drugs trade in
Paisley, including one Mr Big muscling in on another Mr Big's patch with
blood-spattered results.

The fiction writers suggest that organised crime - pimping, drug dealing
and protection rackets - are rampant in the city. The reality is somewhat
more prosaic, according to a senior detective in Lothian and Borders CID
who says bluntly: "There is no real organised crime in Edinburgh."

Some years ago the police in Edinburgh deliberately switched resources into
intelligence-gathering, and it has paid handsome rewards. Surveillance
operations and a whole host of informants across the city keep the police
in the know, and now no-one is allowed to get too big for their boots. Nor
is there any noticeable Mafia or other external influence in the city.

As for anyone moving into the city," says the detective, "we'd know about
it very shortly afterwards. Edinburgh's criminals protect their patch."

With the police and city councils relaxed views of prostitution as
practised in the citys numerous saunas, there is little scope for gross
exploitation of prostitutes. The Mr Big of that world apparently owns just
three saunas.

Rumours of "security firms" engaging in a war over protection rackets are
just that - "rumours, and dodgy at that" according to the detective. Even
the soccer casuals' activities are waning.

The crime statistics, too, show that in Edinburgh, as in the UK as a whole,
violent and sexual crimes are still a very small proportion of total crime.

By far the biggest number of reported crimes in Edinburgh concern acts of
vandalism. But even here, the Capital comes out well when compared with
other cities.

While the drugs trade remains a worry, the police and Customs and Excise
have had one major success recently. The man who was Edinburgh's undisputed
"Mr Big" is now in prison with 27 years of his 28 year sentence still to
serve. At the age of 53, Roderick McLean lived a life of opulent luxury
with a smart town house in Inverleith Row, a mansion overlooking Granton
Harbour and luxury cars aplenty.

But his fortune had been built on drugs.

It was rumoured that he was protected because he was a police informer, a
charge strenuously denied by both him and the police. He went too far,
however, when he linked up with the Octopus, the Dutch Mafia, in an attempt
to smuggle three tonnes of cannabis worth #10 million into Scotland.

The smugglers' boat was intercepted at sea and McLean tried to burn the
evidence with tragic results - customs officer Alastair Soutar was killed
as he tried to board McLean's boat.

Roderick McLean, whose neighbours had no idea of his evil trade, was
arrested and his criminal gang smashed. Legal moves to recover his
ill-gotten gains are under way.

McLean's greed brought him jail but showed the possible extent of
Edinburgh's real crime problem. Because crime in Edinburgh is massively and
overwhelmingly related to drugs.

Curiously it is on screen and not in novels that drugs are seen to be
Edinburgh's "theme". Trainspotting and Looking After Jo Jo, which both star
Robert Carlyle, have portrayed a drug-ridden milieu unimaginable to a
Morningside matron, but a daily reality to the residents of parts of
Sighthill, where much of Jo Jo was filmed.

They are not the first films to chronicle the Edinburgh drugs scene. Writer
Peter MacDougall's powerful Shoot for the Sun starring Brian Cox and Jimmy
Nail was the first film to do so in the mid-Eighties. It depicted Nail,
then a new star, selling drugs to children, and caused a minor sensation.
Outraged residents of the schemes in which it was shot were falling over
themselves to criticise its vivid portrayal of junkie life in Edinburgh.

MacDougall says: "People did not believe that such things were happening,
or perhaps they didn't want to." Now Jo Jo is covering much the same ground
as MacDougall's earlier work and is being lauded for its authenticity.
MacDougall commented: "I have not seen Looking After Jo Jo. I don't need
to. I wrote it many years ago."

Sighthill was the background for most of the exterior shots for
Edinburgh-born director John Mackenzie's series, and in the rain and cold
northerly wind, the bleak angular concrete flats look even less
prepossessing than on television.

The series is a major hit in these parts, and not just because local people
were in it, but everyone around Sighthill emphasises that it is a piece of
history and has no relation to present day reality.

Kerry McCutcheon and Brian Nicholson live near to the locations for
filming. Their verdict was a "brilliant" chorused in unison. McCutcheon,
18, says: "It's very realistic. That must have been what it was like back
in the early Eighties. But the drugs scene is different now."

Nicholson adds: "The area's cleaned up now. There's no much hard stuff
here. If you want smack (heroin) then Aberdeen's the place."

Donna Kinsey, 19, lives in Hermiston Court, which overlooks the place where
Jo Jo McCann is supposed to have lived. She says: "Everybody around here
has been talking about it. The area is no longer like that, they say. When
I first came here I was warned about the crime rate, but I have never been
bothered and have good neighbours."

Asked if it is realistic, another woman resident comments with a dig at
Robert Carlyle's accent: Na, we don't talk like that.

Some people are sensitive, however. The run-down and slightly shabby
Sighthill Hotel, familiar to many journalists who trained at nearby Napier
College, shows the door to reporters.

High in the flats overlooking Sighthill, however, are individual houses and
rooms which are known to be places where drugs can be obtained. Often with
several locks, these houses are the homes of known dealers, but so discreet
are they that neighbours have no clue as to what is going on behind those
closed doors.

Frank Deasy admits that he wrote Looking After Jo Jo as a "period piece",
but he warns that the ingrained drug culture of many areas has bred a new
generation of offenders. "Jo Jo's generation had children, children who
grew up in drug-addicted households, accustomed to violence and
manipulation. They will be a generation with an awesome capacity for crime
and violence. For them, the economic and chemical imperative of drug
addiction mean that social taboos on violence have broken down."

Although Dublin-born Deasey set his drama in Edinburgh, the same problems
could be found in any city, he says: "It could be Glasgow, Dublin or any
British city. That it was set in Edinburgh was pure fluke."

That will come as no relief to the city's tourist board, which is not
commenting but is known to be less than happy at such a depiction of
Edinburgh.

Back in the mid-Eighties, drugs were so openly available that a Channel 4
reporter once filmed a binman selling dope off the back of his van to
children outside council flats in north Edinburgh.

Heroin was plentiful and relatively cheap, but the modern generation has
switched to softer drugs, especially E - Ecstasy - and prescription drugs
which are easy to obtain.

A senior member of the drugs squad says: "There are now different trends
from the Eighties. Back then, the outbreak of HIV had a real effect on drug
usage in the Lothians. Users stopped injecting smack and a lot of good work
was done through the methadone (heroin replacement) programme. People
involved with drugs also keep to their own areas and we have seen no
evidence of any mass organised syndicate working throughout the city."

Criminal lawyer John Scott agrees: "There's no evidence of a drugs boss or
a cartel, but drugs and drink are involved in 95 per cent of the crime I
deal with. Drug users undoubtedly have switched from heroin to prescription
medication like Temazepam and Diazepam, but there are still some hard drugs
about, especially, funnily enough, in the better-off areas."

Violence follows drug usage almost automatically, yet Scott maintains that
most violence is still domestic, committed against someone known to the
assailant.

"They maybe have a disagreement with their partner or friend and it gets
fuelled by drink and drugs and the next thing you have a fight," he
explains.

The man in charge of policing the city centre is Superintendent Alex Brown,
whose fictional counterpart in The Hanging Garden is neither as young, fit
or slim as this former stand-off for Lismore Rugby Club.

He confesses: "I've not even read the book yet."

Again, fiction and fact diverge. Supt Brown is more likely to be dealing
with recalcitrant drunks than heavyweight gangsters. "The chief current
issues are street disorder associated with late night drinking. I'm not
sure that's very much of a story for a writer."

As to the Mr Big who allegedly plagues his patch in The Hanging Garden, he
is not known to the real police at St Leonard's. "There is no-one of such
status that we could class him in that category. There is also not any
sense of organisation and structure in Edinburgh's crime."

So have the writers just made it up? Yes, says Quintin Jardine, author of
the acclaimed Skinner novels featuring an Edinburgh detective.

Jardine's next publication - Skinner's Ghost - is the seventh in the
series. He says: "My books are about cops and robbers, about Skinner
chasing the murderer.

"I go out of my way to make them accurate but not to the point where the
reader gets bored. Yes, I make up the crimes, and use Edinburgh as a
backdrop because it is the place I know best.

"The police in Edinburgh are doing a very good job and crime is falling,
but I like to think that Ian Rankin and I are helping to improve their
image."

Rankin, whose novels feature Inspector John Rebus, says his "baddies" are
based more on Glasgow characters such as the dead "drugs godfather" Arthur
Thomson.

He adds: "I don't pore over the newspaper looking for real-life cases, but
I do sometimes use real incidents, like the Yakuza (Japanese Mafia) coming
to Britain, and extrapolate them, give them an Edinburgh setting."

Rankin also has a cautionary tale for those who blend fact and fiction. He
says: "My previous book Black and Blue rested on the theory that Bible John
was alive and well. The week before the book was due to come out,
Strathclyde Police started digging up a suspect's grave in Lanarkshire. I
was on to them for months waiting for the investigation to end. If it had
been Bible John in the grave, my book was sunk.

"My mates joked that I should change his name to Testament Tam, but it
wasn't funny - you have to be very careful when you are dealing with real
life."

* Additional material by James Kirkup.