Two decades after Glasgow was named Europe’s murder capital, the city is burning.
A vicious gangland revenge plot between three rival gangs is being waged on the streets that has left even some of the most feared mob bosses scuttling away to safe houses abroad.
Now, innocent Glaswegians are seeing masked gangsters bring terror to their suburban communities with homes and shops firebombed because they were supposedly associated with the Daniel and Richardson crime families.
The attacks are thought to have started when thugs belonging to the Richardson gang allegedly stole a £500k shipment of cocaine owned by another gangster, nicknamed Mr Big – a top-level Irish criminal based in Dubai who has been flooding Scotland with cocaine.
Although MailOnline and others in law enforcement and the media know his identity, he has not been named so as not to hinder current police investigations.
His enforcers, a group called Tamo Junto, have released videos of their terrifying attacks in Glasgow and also Edinburgh with a sinister message: ‘It’s time to remove this vermin from our streets… every associate, every business will be targeted. Leave Scotland immediately.’
And so despite murder rates falling since 2005, in part owing to a crackdown by the government and Police Scotland, once again the city is in the grip of a terrifying crime wave.
A source close to Richardson allies, the Daniel crime family, told MailOnline: ‘I don’t f****** know about crime figures. It’s the same… it’ll never change.’
Meanwhile, former undercover police officer Simon McLean, 66, who infiltrated the Glasgow mobs, told MailOnline that ‘organised crime has taken over’ the city.
Former undercover police officer Simon McLean, 66, (pictured) told MailOnline ‘organised crime has taken over’
A series of firebombs across the country has rocked a relative peace within some of Scotland’s largest cities. Pictured: A gangster throws a firebomb into a house
Glasgow, which was Europe’s murder capital in 2005, has been plagued with torchings (pictured)
Edinburgh-based mob boss Mark Richardson (pictured) is thought to be on Mr Big’s hit list
Fellow gangster Steven ‘Bonzo’ Daniel (pictured), who is thought to be the head of the Daniel crime family, has also reportedly been targeted
The Richardsons, from Edinburgh, and the Daniel gang from Glasgow, are major players in Scotland’s drugs underworld.
Alongside bitter Daniel rivals the Lyons gang, associates of the infamous Irish Kinahan Cartel, the crews have fought to keep their turf in north Glasgow.
Ex-undercover cop McLean, who runs the Crime Time Inc podcast, was part of a group of elite detectives in the murder and drugs squads during a 40-year career in the police.
He belives the recent gang war attacks are a result of the Scottish government going ‘soft on crime’.
McLean told MailOnline: ‘When we go soft on crime, which we are now because there are no policemen, crime moves in and fills the vacuum. Right now, the organised crime has taken over.’
When you disrespect someone, they have no choice but to kill you.
He added: ‘We’re throwing fuel on the fire and we call it a success. Every time we have a “success”, what we actually do is make the problem worse.
‘What we do is create a vacuum where there are funds to be made. There’s a lot of turf wars going on. That’s the real consequences of enforcement.
‘There’s money to be made. It’s a marketplace. And there are two or three similar organisations more than ready, not just to take over the patch, but to fight for the patch.
‘In the 80s, crime was through the roof because of drugs. Murders and violence were fairly prominent.
‘Glasgow has always been like that. Gangs aren’t a new thing. There were the razor gangs [of the 1920s and 30s], the sectarianism has always been there as well.
This beauty salon in Glasgow was targeted by a firebomb in April. Police discovered a cannabis farm in an unconnected neighbouring house
Innocent Glaswegians have been forced to watch their city burn because of the gangland revenge plot
Pictured: The charred remains of a carpet shop owned by an associate of the Daniel family
Mr Big’s enforcers in Scotland have filmed themselves setting homes on fire in their campaign of violence
Messages from Mr Big’s enforces Tamo Junto said the Daniels and Richardsons should ‘leave Scotland immediately’
‘Afghan heroin hit the streets in the early 80s in Edinburgh, Glasgow and every other major city in the UK and that changed everything.
‘That got us to where we are today, not because of those changes but because of the way we handled them with enforcement and prohibition, thinking we could snub out the drug problem by locking people up.
‘Drugs are a gift for [organised crime groups].’
Mark Dempster, 60, is a former international drug smuggler who grew up with and was friends with well-known gangsters including Paul Ferris.
After spells in prisons in Spain and the UK, he turned his life around and is now 28 years sober and a Harley Street addiction counsellor.
He told MailOnline: ‘Cocaine use is off the scale in terms of what it was 15 to 20 years ago. It’s everywhere.
‘In every social pocket, cocaine is normalised. Every pub you go into will probably have a cocaine dealer or someone who knows one.
Glasgow has been rocked by a number of suspected gangland attacks after a shipment of cocaine was allegedly stolen
The city’s murder rate has dropped from its high levels in 2005 but Glasgow remains plagued by violence
A source close to the Daniel crime family told MailOnline: ‘I don’t f***ing know about crime figures. It’s the same… it’ll never change.’ Pictured: A street in north Glasgow
Pictured: The Possilpark area of north Glasgow where some of the city’s most notorious gangsters have their base
‘The police have no way of controlling it. That went years ago. Not to mention the corruption within the police.
‘I used to work with people who paid off police officers left, right and centre.
‘No matter how much any [crime] family gets, they want more. It’s the same process of expanding their empire. They have got to commit violence.
‘There’s always been Mr Bigs, those overlords.
‘In 2011, my friend Thomas Sharkey’s house was firebombed. His two kids got killed in that. One was eight, one was 21.
‘That was a cocaine debt. That what happens when you have that greed for money.
‘You get people whose egos are fragile. It’s no different to when you have mafia – when you disrespect someone, they have no choice but to kill you.
‘It’s all about feeding the egos for the people in power.’
Another former Glasgow police detective, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said: ‘It’s a vicious circle. The gangs are capable of anything. They don’t make idle threats. There will be action.
‘Murders, robberies – everything links in to serious and organised crime.
‘If a vacuum is created when someone is put away, there could be a power struggle.
‘You can never eradicate the problem. All you can do it try to keep a lid on it. It’s a very difficult one to manage.
‘If it all goes horribly wrong with [the Daniels and Richardsons] and there’s a vacuum, someone is going to fill it.
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‘Where there’s money to be made, there will be serious and organised crime. Drugs are probably the main driver. That’s where the big money is.’
He said ‘nail bars and Turkish barbers’ were often used as ‘washing machines’ to clean dirty money and make it seem like legally-made cash.
The ex-detective added: ‘What goes on in the real world is murky and horrible. These people just don’t care.
‘People are just collateral damage if you get in the way. That’s just how cold and callous they are.’
At at least one site of a firebomb that MailOnline visited there appeared to be a person sitting in a blacked-out Range Rover just metres from the crime scene.
At another, two men appeared to exit a damaged building just a few minutes after our team arrived.
Former drug smuggler Dempster told MailOnline they could have been gangsters tasked with watching the site.
He said: ‘I imagine there would certainly be [someone watching]. If people are involved in violence, then they are monitoring. Criminal networks want to monitor the area or patch or whatever it may be.
‘They have scouts who sit around. Who specifically that [was] I don’t know. I don’t want to be involved in that.’
Former undercover cop McLean, who also founded Scotland’s Law Enforcement Action Partnership (LEAP) that is aimed at bringing about drug law reform, said the gangs’ power could be diminished by ending the enforcement of the prohibition on drugs.
He said decriminalising, regulating and taxing drugs in the way alcohol and cigarettes are, as well as then helping addicts directly, could lead to less crime, fewer deaths and more money for the public.
He said murder rates may have dropped for a number of reasons including the introduction of Scotland’s Violence Reduction Unit that aimed to prevent crime by going to the source of the trouble, as well as stricter firearms laws and a propensity for killers to plea murder charges down to manslaughter.
During his time in Glasgow’s Govan area, McLean pioneered a weeklong operation to rid the area of drugs.
Although no drugs were sold for the entire week, McLean said the operation was actually a failure that highlighted how police had and are sometimes still taking the wrong approach.
He said: ‘We closed Govan. You could not buy smack, you couldn’t get drugs anywhere.
‘I was getting phone calls from detectives from the Gorbals and Possilpark and Easterhouse and all these parts of Glasgow, saying, ”Are you Simon McLean? Have you got this f***ing operation going? We’re getting inundated with all your junkies up here.”
‘Because all we did was change the shape. The demand was still the same. They couldn’t get it in Govan, so they went elsewhere.
‘So nobody went without, although we were hugely successful [in Govan]. It’s the same now. No matter how much drugs you take off the streets, nobody is going without.’
Speaking about the firebombs ravaging Glasgow, he said: ‘The methods criminals use to intimidate and murder people goes through phases.
‘It’s the same with crime in general. Things become fashionable for the neds [Scottish slang for lowlifes and petty criminals] to do. They copy each other and they probably discuss it in jail.
‘It might be bogus workmen. When you look at the figures, it’s incredible how they peak and trough.
‘And it’s the same with murder. Now you’ve got less cops on the street [and] it’s picking up again.’
Simon McLean infiltrated Glasgow’s gangs and helped dismantle criminals’ operations
He told MailOnline reporter Chris Matthews (left) there were a number of times he thought he would be killed while undercover
![Former international drug smuggler Mark Dempster (pictured) said: 'No matter how much any [crime] family gets, they want more. It's the same process of expanding their empire. They have got to commit violence'](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2025/04/27/13/97693539-14514829-Former_international_drug_smuggler_Mark_Dempster_pictured_said_N-a-93_1745757416201.jpg)
Former international drug smuggler Mark Dempster (pictured) said: ‘No matter how much any [crime] family gets, they want more. It’s the same process of expanding their empire. They have got to commit violence’
According to the Scottish government, in the latest year on record, 2023/24, Glasgow had 10 murders, the highest number in Scotland.
Despite having just 12 per cent of the Scottish population, murders in Glasgow accounted for 18 per cent of the national total.
However, Glasgow has seen a fall in murders over the last 20 years. In the latest five-year period from 2019/20 to 2023/24, there have been 47 homicides in Glasgow, a 71 per cent reduction compared to 162 for the five-year period from 2004/05 to 2008/09.
In comparison, Scotland nationally had a 49 per cent reduction during the same time frame.
Alistair Fraser is a Scottish gangs expert. He is a Professor of Criminology at the University of Glasgow, and part of the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research.
Prof Fraser told MailOnline: ‘Between the years 2005 and 2015, Scotland in general – and Glasgow in particular – saw a sustained reduction in rates of recorded violent crime, and research suggests that this was attributable to a reduction in violence involving young people in public space.
‘More recently these rates have started to increase but remain at a comparable level to similar jurisdictions in North and Western Europe.
‘The role of Scotland’s Violence Reduction Unit was central to both the change in national conversation and growth in targeted interventions in Glasgow but there were many other important changes, including funding for grassroots organisations, the dedicated work of high-quality youth work, changes to youth justice and policies that aimed to centre the experiences of young people.’
According to the Scottish government, in the latest year on record, 2023/24, Glasgow had 10 murders, the highest number in Scotland
Despite having just 12 per cent of the Scottish population, murders in Glasgow accounted for 18 per cent of the national total
In the latest five-year period from 2019/20 to 2023/24, there have been 47 homicides in Glasgow, a 71 per cent reduction compared to 162 for the five-year period from 2004/05 to 2008/09
Yet despite the reduced murder rate, the city has continued to struggle with gangland turf wars
The latest figure show Glasgow has a population of just 635,000 people. Pictured: The Bridgeton area in the East End of Glasgow
A Scottish Government spokesman told MailOnline: ‘Whilst of no comfort to victims, the latest statistics published in December 2024 show that overall recorded crime in Scotland is at one of the lowest levels since 1974 and down 40 per cent since 2006/07’
McLean believes the only way to end the war on gangs is to control how the public consumes drugs like cocaine.
He added: ‘In high-level gangs like the Lyons in Glasgow, they’ve been on the go since I was a boy.
‘Thompson, Ferris, they’re all the same. They dominate the headlines. You don’t have a hierarchy, what you have is an all-encompassing spread. Because of the lengths of time they’ve been in business, they’ve got tentacles all over the country.
‘Every time we make something illegal, we create an opportunity for these guys.
‘They have no boundaries because there is no regulation. The big thing is the drugs market feeds [organised crime groups] because it’s a cash business. And what does it give them when we give them all that money? Power and corruption.
‘A big part of my job latterly in the police was dealing with cops and lawyers and judges and politicians and councillors who these guys were buying.
‘They find a weakness and they fill it with cash.
‘Our whole society is being undermined right now by organised crime because we’ve got no tools to fight it because we underpin it with drugs. We give them all that power.
‘When we waged the war on drugs, nobody said we were going to win the war. There’s plenty of people making money from [rehabilitation]. Chemists, private prisons, lawyers, the courts, the police.
The support of our communities is vital when it comes to tackling serious organised crime. Your information really can make a difference.
‘So the war on drugs isn’t bad for everyone, just for the victims who are dying in the streets.
‘Rehabilitation is the third part of a strategy but you can rehabilitate all the people all you want but because of the underlying causes, they keep coming back at the other end.
‘A controversial reason why murders might be less than 20 years ago is this: the most commonly abused drug I’m aware of now is cocaine.
‘Cocaine has flourished in the last 20 years. It’s become the normal social drug alongside cannabis.
‘If you go into A&E on a Friday night, you won’t see anybody sitting there having smoked too many joints and they’re in there because of violence.
‘They’re raiding their fridge at home, generally chilled out, amongst like-minded [people] creating music or whatever they think they’re creating.
‘Coke is similar to that. Drink’s not. The nightlife in Glasgow is decimated. Nightclubs and pubs are really struggling because people aren’t using them anymore. They’re using coke and they’re sitting at home, out of their head and happy.
‘We’re becoming more isolated from one another. There’s not the same social environments that there were 20 years ago for people to meet and fall out.
‘If we’re not socialising the same, there are not the same opportunities [to kill].
‘People aren’t out meeting and falling out and having relationships and all the daily stuff that goes on where you end up with a murder.
‘It’s a positive thing about drugs. [Imagine] if we controlled that. We talk about safe consumption rooms. We’ve already got hundreds in Glasgow alone, but we call them pubs.
‘We regulate alcohol. You have to be a certain age, you can only get in at certain times. You can only buy things that we say you can buy and we’re going to tax it as well. And if you get drunk in here, you’ll get arrested and thrown out.’
Police Scotland have arrested at least 20 people in connection with the recent spate of fire bombings throughout Glasgow and Edinburgh.
Detective Chief Superintendent David Ferry said: ‘The arrests over the past week highlight the ongoing work that officers have been doing to target those responsible for these attacks.
‘While we believe these incidents are linked to rival groups who are targeting each other, I want to make it clear this violence will not be tolerated.
‘As well as carrying out these days of action and disruption activities, there is a lot of work going on behind the scenes, including exploring forensic opportunities and analysis of digital devices.
‘While this may not be as visible, please be assured we are working tirelessly to build cases and are following a number of significant lines of enquiry.
Police Scotland have arrested at least 20 people in connection with the recent spate of fire bombings throughout Glasgow and Edinburgh
Detective Chief Superintendent David Ferry said: ‘The arrests over the past week highlight the ongoing work that officers have been doing to target those responsible for these attacks’
He added: ‘While we believe these incidents are linked to rival groups who are targeting each other, I want to make it clear this violence will not be tolerated’
‘We have had a good response to our appeals and I want to thank the public for their help and information so far.
‘The support of our communities is absolutely vital when it comes to tackling serious organised crime, preventing violence and getting justice for victims. Your information really can make a difference.
‘If you know anything about who is responsible for these dangerous and abhorrent acts, please do the right thing and speak to us.’
Anyone who can assist their enquiries is asked to contact Police Scotland via 101 quoting incident number 0562 of Friday, 21 March, 2025.
Alternatively, you can call Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111 where information can be given anonymously.
Policing and justice are devolved matters under control of the Scottish rather than the UK Government.
A Scottish Government spokesman told MailOnline: ‘Whilst of no comfort to victims, the latest statistics published in December 2024 show that overall recorded crime in Scotland is at one of the lowest levels since 1974 and down 40 per cent since 2006/07.
‘We are investing a record £1.62billion for policing in 2025/26 – an increase of £70million on 2024/25, and Police Scotland took on more recruits last financial year than at any time since 2013, with further intakes planned throughout 2025.
‘The reported incidents in Glasgow and Edinburgh are an operational matter for Police Scotland, and it would not be appropriate to comment on a live investigation.
‘We strongly encourage anyone who has information to report it to Police Scotland or anonymously through Crimestoppers.’
