Its glittering towers, tax-free wages and unbroken desert sunshine prove an irresistible lure for thousands of British expats every year.
But Dubai’s futuristic skylines and luxury shopping malls have also long been notorious for attracting an altogether shadier clientele.
For more than a decade, drug traffickers, money launderers, fugitives and sanctions-dodgers have called the city home – often sheltering there with the tacit support of the authorities, lending credence to the notion that it is a pariah state.
Numbered among them was a quartet of Scots said to operate at the ‘highest levels’ of UK and international organised crime. Steven Lyons, Ross McGill, Stephen Jamieson and Steven Larwood have been linked to a decades-old gangland feud which recently came to a head, with a wave of firebombings and shootings sweeping across Scotland and beyond.
For years, these supposedly ‘untouchable’ crime lords are said to have controlled their operations – and meted out bloody retribution – from Dubai, where they can go about their business with impunity thanks to widespread corruption.
Until the middle of last month that is. One day, without warning, they became the target of a series of dramatic early-morning raids by the Emirati authorities. News that four such high-profile kingpins had been arrested and thrown in prison before being released, with unambiguous instructions to gather up their families and belongings and leave the country, came as a major shock to them and their associates in the criminal underworld.
Dubai’s sudden decision to unceremoniously boot them out, however, raises many more questions than it answers. Not least: why them? And why now?
Portraying this as part of some wider ‘gangster crackdown’ may be hard to sustain, as many other serious players continue to operate out of the public eye. Experts believe the arrests of the four Scots came about because they had made the mistake of bringing too much unwelcome attention to Dubai.
Dubai’s futuristic skylines and luxury shopping malls have also long been notorious for attracting an altogether shadier clientele
Steven Lyons, pictured leaving the High Court in Glasgow, is the head of the Lyons family
The attractions of Dubai for gang bosses is obvious. Given that it has historically shunned judicial co-operation with Western authorities, they have been able to brazenly run their operations out of the city’s skyscrapers and luxury villas without fear of extradition.
Europol has described the city as a ‘remote co-ordination hub’ for Europe’s drugs trade, with traffickers living openly and laundering their money through luxury goods and real estate. And Dubai’s low crime rate is – ironically – a key attraction for members of the criminal underworld as it reduces the risk that they themselves will face attacks or theft despite wielding extreme violence against rivals in Europe.
For the rulers of Dubai – one of the UAE’s seven emirates – the flow of dirty money had obvious attractions as it helped prop up its growing economy and property market.
But even their patience has been tested after the mayhem unleashed McGill, former head of the Rangers Football Club’s ultras fan group, the Union Bears.
The UAE is trying to keep their jurisdiction as open as possible because that’s their USP
The rash of provocative attacks he triggered not only inflamed a long-standing feud between two bitterly opposed Glasgow drugs gangs (the Lyons and the Daniels), but brought unwelcome international scrutiny to bear on Dubai.
Sources claim the gangsters were plucked from their luxury homes, blindfolded and transported to a so-called ‘black site’ prison in the middle of the desert, which doesn’t appear on any official maps.
They were held in cells without mattresses along with 40 other inmates, none of whom spoke English. Treated like terrorists, they were grilled for days by officers from the specialist Signals Intelligence Agency.
A source said: ‘The jail was filthy. The lights were kept on all day so they couldn’t sleep and between interrogations they were only fed once a day. They weren’t allowed a knife or fork and had to eat on the floor with their hands. They also weren’t allowed toilet paper.’
Finally freed after 12 days, they were ordered to meet their families at the airport and leave the country. ‘They all went their separate ways on flights to different countries but nobody knows where,’ said the source.
According to Dr Andreas Krieg, an associate professor at King’s College London and an expert in the Middle East, the UAE has been keen to repair its tarnished international reputation after the Financial Action Task Force, which monitors the enforcement of anti-money laundering regulations worldwide, placed the emirates on its grey list in 2022.
As a result, it has recently adopted a ‘soft power’ strategy to portray itself as a responsible member of the global community, taking limited actions against money laundering, extraditing a small number of criminals and deploying police officers to assist investigations in Europe.
In May, the UAE took the unprecedented decision to extradite Sean McGovern – a key member of Ireland’s powerful Kinahan cartel – to his homeland on charges of murder and participating in a criminal organisation.
‘The UAE is trying to keep their jurisdiction as open as possible because that’s their USP [unique selling point] – they won’t judge people based on who they are or how they made their money,’ Dr Krieg told the Daily Mail.
‘They also welcome networks that are useful for statecraft – like some of the drug cartels they can use to generate influence in South America. But if groups are not useful, and the reputational cost of hosting them is too big, they’ll clamp down.’
Ross McGill (centre) was a member of the Lyons family’s Dubai ring as well as the leader of a Rangers FC ultra group known as the Union Bears
Stephen Jamieson is another of the four men linked to the decades-old gangland feud
The current whereabouts of the four Scots is unknown. South America is a likely destination given the Lyons family’s connections to the continent’s powerful drugs cartels.
But some say Lyons family associate Larwood, who has a conviction for supplying cocaine, may have flown to Turkey.
Meanwhile, Steven Lyons, 44, head of the Lyons family, may have fled back to Spain where he lived for some years before moving to Dubai.
Such a move may not be without risk, however, as his brother Eddie and close friend Ross Monaghan were gunned down in a brutal execution in May as they watched the Champions League final in an Irish bar owned by Monaghan in Costa del Sol’s Fuengirola.
A 44-year-old man from Liverpool, Michael Riley, has since been arrested on an international arrest warrant in connection with the killings and is fighting a bid to extradite him to Spain to face charges, claiming he ‘fears for his life’ if he is sent to a Spanish prison.
In the wake of the shootings, Police Scotland chief constable Jo Farrell issued a message to anyone directing violence in Scotland from a foreign country, saying: ‘We’ll be coming after you.’
Asked what could be done if someone was based in Dubai, Ms Farrell said officers were working closely with the Crown Office and the National Crime Agency ‘to see if we can get those people back from those countries’.
So far, the Dubai four have escaped extradition. But then, Steven Lyons always did lead something of a charmed life amid the vicious turf war between his family and the infamous Daniel clan. For almost a quarter-century, the sink estates of Possil, Milton, and Lambhill, lying just to the north of Glasgow’s smartest postcodes, have been at the centre of this ongoing battle between two lethally violent factions: each said to preside over criminal empires founded on drugs, counterfeiting, car theft and racketeering, each as entrenched, as cold-hearted and as destructive as the Mafia, with tentacles that reach far beyond their own communities.
The feud is said to date back to 2001 and the theft of a £20,000 stash of cocaine from a safe house run by the Daniel family, but in December 2006 it became headline news when Michael Lyons, 21, was shot dead after two masked gunmen walked into his uncle’s MoT garage in Lambhill.
Steven Lyons and an associate, Robert Pickett, were injured in the ambush, which was later described in court as ‘like a scene out of The Godfather’. In May 2008, Daniel gang members Raymond Anderson and James McDonald were convicted of the attack and each sentenced to 35 years in jail, which was later reduced on appeal.
A series of tit-for-tat attacks followed, ranging from shootings to kidnappings, but it wouldn’t be until January 2010 that a second major victim died in the feud, when Daniel clan enforcer Kevin ‘Gerbil’ Carroll, 29, was ambushed in an Asda store car park in Glasgow’s Robroyston and shot 13 times in front of horrified lunchtime shoppers. In May 2015, William Paterson was convicted of murder and ordered to serve a minimum of 22 years in jail.
In recent times, however, the balance of power has lurched decisively towards the Lyons family. In 2015, the death of patriarch Jamie Daniel from cancer sparked a savage campaign of violence against his associates, included his successor and nephew, Steven ‘Bonzo’ Daniel, who was left with horrific facial injuries after a high-speed car chase through Glasgow in May 2017.
Steven Lyons fled to Spain in 2006 after the Lambhill garage attack, where he formed a powerful friendship with Daniel Kinahan, heir to one of the world’s biggest drug cartels. The pair later moved to Dubai, which became the nerve centre of their joint plan to wrest control of the Edinburgh drugs scene from Daniels-backed organised crime groups led by cocaine kingpin Mark Richardson.
The battle intensified when Ross McGill, previously known to police as the leader of a Rangers FC ultra group known as the Union Bears, moved to the desert state three years ago amid fears he would be arrested after French cops cracked an encrypted criminal phone network, EncroChat.
Accepted into the Lyons’ Dubai fold, McGill was vouched for by another Glasgow organised crime figure, 47-year-old James White – known as the Don – a former right-hand man of two drug-dealing brothers James and Barry Gillespie from Rutherglen near Glasgow.
The Gillespies operated under the radar for years before their role as lynchpins of an international drug smuggling operation was exposed. By then, they had relocated to the town of Fortaleza in Brazil with White but vanished around 2019.
Police believe the brothers have been murdered, a grisly reminder that those who live by the sword sometimes die by it.
White was later extradited. In 2023, he was sentenced at the High Court in Glasgow to nine years and ten months for his involvement in serious and organised crime.
The Dubai arrests also have a link to the case of Jamie ‘Iceman’ Stevenson, who was jailed last year for masterminding a £100million plot to smuggle cocaine from South America in boxes of bananas.
Once firm friends – Stevenson was best man at Jamieson’s lavish Dubai wedding five years ago – but they, too, had fallen out. During his trial, Stevenson lodged a special defence of incrimination against three men, including Stephen Jamieson.
Meanwhile, McGill was keen to seize his chance to settle a vendetta with Mark Richardson, currently in prison, whose cronies had paid for £500,000 of cocaine with counterfeit money.
A wave of reprisal attacks were carried out by a shadowy group calling themselves Tamo Junto, or TMJ, made up mainly of young men in their teens and early 20s, which McGill is said to have set up.
In a sinister development, the group posted numerous videos online of them throwing petrol bombs through the windows of properties and setting cars alight. The violence erupted in Edinburgh on March 6 after a masked thug firebombed a beauty salon in Leith, followed by a similar attack on a property in the city’s Niddrie area.
Other attacks on Daniel-linked businesses included the torching of a carpet and flooring unit and a machete attack on garage staff in East Kilbride, Lanarkshire.
Among the most shocking incidents, an Edinburgh businessman, said to be a Richardson ally, was targeted three times by the gang, with his house set alight in April while children were believed to be asleep inside and him being set upon by machete-wielding thugs before his security guard came to his rescue.
Steven Lyons is thought to have provided McGill’s TMJ mob with information about the movements of Richardson’s gang and the Daniel family, but pulled back from the war when his brother and Monaghan were gunned down in Fuengirola. In the weeks that followed McGill’s onslaught, officers have made 57 arrests in Scotland under Operation Portaledge.
By then, tensions were boiling over between McGill and Jamieson, who left Scotland for Dubai in 2013 after being released halfway into an eight-year sentence for dealing cocaine. He was reportedly lying low in Dubai, running a lucrative business selling designer puppies, but was rumoured to be involved in a furious confrontation with McGill in a Dubai gym in July over his high-profile antics.
Not long after, the pair were arrested, along with Lyons and Larwood. As one source pointed out: ‘Scottish gangsters hiding out in Dubai should know you have to live the quiet life to not come to the attention of authorities.
‘So McGill orchestrating a high-profile war and sharing videos of his antics online has really messed it up for him. Lyons and Jamieson have lived in Dubai for years without any problem, but they’ve been associating with McGill since he arrived and must really regret that now.’
As the sun sets on their gangster’s paradise, how soon before regret turn to thoughts of revenge?
Wherever the Dubai four wash up next, they will be looking over their shoulders.
