Acid Attack by Russell Findlay

Author:Russell Findlay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Birlinn

Following his freedom, Ferris became involved in the security industry, just as it was descending into a battleground between gangsters. I wrote a spate of stories – perhaps a subconscious seeking of penance for creating the Ferris and McKay double act – about Ferris’s involvement. These stories included one about his recruitment of a thug with 666 tattooed on his neck whose role was to cover the Dundee end of the expanding Ferris operation. Another told how a dormant feud had reignited due to a turf-dispute and another dusted down his nickname of ‘The Ferret’, acquired due to his sneakiness, and told how he had been kicked off a site by a bigger, badder criminal who did not sing to newspapers. Yet another revealed that his company was providing security for a new court being built in Dumbarton, all paid for, of course, with taxpayers’ money. All of this was set against McKay parroting the line that Ferris was going straight; that he had turned his back on crime.

In 2003 I suggested that the BBC should take a look at security sharks. This resulted in Sam Poling’s BAFTA-winning documentary Security Wars, which investigated Ferris and others. Poling proved that Ferris was the true owner of a security firm, which he had long attempted to deny.

McKay was now using the sobriquet ‘Gutter Sniper’ to write a column in The Big Issue, whose bosses didn’t see the irony in a publication serving the homeless, many the victims of the drugs trade, and giving a platform to an apologist for those involved in organised crime. Beneath a moody photo of himself wreathed in cigarette smoke, McKay described the BBC investigation as ‘shabby journalism’.

Beyond his obligatory references to ‘street players’, ‘heavy merchants’ and ‘faces’, McKay expanded on his criticism, which amounted to how terribly unfair Poling’s documentary was. McKay also made a few veiled digs at my exposures of rogue security firms in the Sunday Mail, which prompted the paper’s assistant editor Jim Wilson to write to The Big Issue:

Good crime writing is not easy and I have always tried to defend Mr McKay against persistent criticism that he is merely a ‘useful idiot’ for a number of gangland figures, most notably Paul Ferris.

However, his posturing as the smoke-wreathed chronicler of the underworld, which has always been faintly risible, is fast becoming offensive. And for the Big Issue to allow him space to defend the reputation of Ferris and his cohorts in the security industry is lamentable.

Unlike Mr McKay’s books and columns, our reports are written by professional investigative journalists prepared to risk their own safety to expose violent and dangerous criminals.

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