Читать книгу Scottish Hard Bastards - Jimmy Holland & Stephen Richards - Страница 10

Which leads me on to James ‘Dingus’ McGhee. He received a life sentence with a twenty-year recommendation for his part in a cash-and-carry robbery that went horribly wrong and resulted in him blowing a guard’s brains out. The three other hardened criminals who carried out the robbery with Dingus turned Queen’s Evidence against him at their High Court trial. In return, they all got four, six and nine years respectively for their parts in the robbery.

Dingus was a quiet man in prison. He didn’t bother anyone and everyone liked him. He was in his early forties when he arrived at Shotts Prison and got camped up with some of the older cons he had done time with when he had been jailed in Peterhead for an earlier offence, before the jail turned into a perverts’ prison. He didn’t raise his voice in anger once at any warden or con and always went to work every day, from Monday to Friday. Most people that knew him would agree that Dingus is a total gentleman, though not someone to catch in a bad mood.

When the infamous Shotts riot of 1993 kicked off, Dingus was in the hall. However, he took no part in it whatsoever; he just sat in one of his friend’s cells, smoked hash and waited for the riot to end. He had seen all the crazy shit before; he had been in Peterhead some years earlier when Malkie and Sammo had taken the hostage.

He didn’t know it at the time, but two prison wardens had been badly stabbed, one of them in the lower back and legs, and couldn’t walk. When the other prison warden saw that his friend had fallen to the ground, he went back in among a heavily armed masked gang of prisoners and tried to pull his friend to safety. He got stabbed in the arm and back for his trouble. Once the wardens had managed to seal the rampant cons in the hall, they went back to help their wounded colleague. The warden that had tried to save his friend didn’t even know that he had been stabbed. Fair play to him: how many men do you know who would put their own life in danger to help pull a colleague to safety from a baying mob of hardened criminals? Not very many, is the answer. The screw in question got a bravery award for his actions.

The Shotts screws were used to this kind of occurrence, as there had been one major incident or another every year since the showplace jail opened back in 1978.

The screws were very pissed off by the fact that one of the cons had stabbed two of their pals and they promised revenge. When they finally got the hall back under control, some forty-three hours after it had started, they didn’t waste any time in dishing out their own summary brand of justice. At first, every con was placed in his cell; some had two to a cell, others had three.

The first cell door to be opened after everybody had been locked up was Dingus’. They dragged him out and kicked and punched his face and body. After he had fallen to the floor, one nameless screw kicked him so hard between his legs that one of his balls became lodged in his belly, the other swelled to some six or seven times its normal size.

The riot screws did not stop there: they then dragged him down the corridor, where ten other nameless screws repeatedly coshed him over the head, face and body. Dingus was out cold by now, having received the injuries equivalent to someone who had been involved in a car crash. He received even more torture at the hands of the screws after he had been transferred to Barlinnie’s tough segregation unit. I know their names, but for legal reasons I cannot name them; no one knew that Dingus had received a punctured lung during the beating and that his lung was filling up with his own blood – he was basically drowning in his own blood. He also had three fractures to his skull, two broken ribs and a smashed eye socket. He was dragged bodily into a silent cell, where he was stripped naked and left.

If you want to look to the medical profession for a true hard bastard, then, in my opinion, there is none ‘harder’ than the following man. I mean 99.9 per cent of doctors would want to protect their pension and keep in with the in-crowd. Not, however, this man among men. The star witness against the screws from Barlinnie was Dr Simon Danson; he also featured in a documentary about the brutality that prisoners had received during his three years of working in Barlinnie.

After Dr Danson had spoken out on a 1996 BBC television documentary about the violence used by prison officers against cons, the SPS subjected him to formal disciplinary charges for gross misconduct for having given the interview without permission. Dr Danson had made a series of claims about violent assaults on three prisoners by staff at Barlinnie and, as a result, three prison officers subsequently appeared in court charged with having assaulted inmates.

Although the SPS were trying to get back at Dr Danson, the British Medical Association (BMA) supported him and promised to provide him with a vigorous defence of the gross misconduct charge. The BMA said: ‘A doctor’s first duty is to his patients and, although a prisoner loses liberty, he does not lose the right to a proper standard of medical and ethical care.’

After some wrangling, the SPS dropped all its charges against Dr Danson after he accepted an offer of voluntary severance.

Fair play to you, Doctor: you did the right thing, as the screws think they are a law unto themselves. In January 2005, Dr Danson wrote a paper for the Society of Prison Psychiatrists and raised some pretty poignant matters when he wrote:

About fifteen years ago, I was working as a medical officer in a Scottish prison. I was learning the job and one of my duties was to attend when someone had hanged himself and to certify him dead.

Of all the things I had to learn about prisons, the most distressing was the reaction of people to death. On one occasion, I was greeted with glee: ‘One off the numbers, sir!’ On another, I found a nurse standing with his foot on the dead man’s chest and the ligature around his neck not completely removed. I regularly discussed problems with the other medical officers and mentioned my reaction to this. One of them answered: ‘That’s nothing – the screws used to put their cigarettes out in their ears!’

It was very distressing to have to deal with a series of assaults by staff upon inmates and I chose a method that eventually led to my leaving and moving to Wales, where I did not have this particular problem.

When Dr Danson encountered Dingus after his beating at Barlinnie, he turned away in disgust: he could not believe the state that Dingus had been left to lie in. He refused to treat him where he lay because he knew that Dingus’s injuries were life threatening and told the top warden that Dingus would need to be rushed to Glasgow Royal Infirmary for emergency surgery. However, the screws in the seg block refused to listen to him; they pushed and manhandled their own doctor out of Dingus’s cell and threatened him with a severe beating if he disclosed the cause of Dingus’s injuries.

The doctor was having none of the screws’ shit. He went straight up to see Barlinnie’s top governor and told him about Dingus McGhee and his life-threatening condition. Upon hearing the doctor’s side of the story, the governor instructed him to phone for an ambulance. Dingus was rushed by ambulance to Glasgow Royal Infirmary where he had life-saving surgery. If he had been left to lie in the cell for a couple of hours longer, he would almost certainly have died of his horrendous injuries.

Once the seg screws found out what Dr Danson had done, he was threatened and then shunned by all or most of the Barlinnie prison wardens. Wherever you are, Dr Danson, shine on.

The worst part of this story is that Dingus McGhee hadn’t even been involved in the Shotts riot of 1993: the screws mixed up his name with that of Frank McPhee and it was he, rather than Dingus, who ‘should’ have received the injuries. What’s more, Frank was well known in the prison system for being someone who caused as much trouble as he possibly could.

Frank was one of the gypsies; he was a tough man who had many years of violence behind him. In and out of prison, he had arranged the riot after the visit screws had strip-searched his boy’s mother. Frank’s boy was in the prison at the same time, although not many people knew that a man called Mark McClymont was Frank’s son.

Anyway, Mark’s mother was strip-searched for drugs while visiting, and that sent Frank into a wild frenzy. He was very pally with little Paul Sheenan from Paisley and little Rab Leslie from Port Glasgow. They may well have been small in stature, but these two young men were very dangerous in Shotts Prison at that time.

Frank, Paul and Rab are now dead: they were murdered after their release from prison. Frank was shot in the head by an IRA sniper outside his own front door in 2000. One shot was all that was needed; the killer was hiding away in a nearby tenement building – he left his rifle there after the shooting. It was a tit-for-tat killing; it was said that, after he had knifed a big face’s son, McPhee had a bounty of £20,000 put on his head.

Rab had his throat cut: the boy who did it received five years. Paul was stabbed in the heart as he lay sleeping in his girlfriend’s bed. The boy who did that received a life sentence.

These three men were responsible for the stabbing of the two screws during the riot. However, they all fell out with each other afterwards, as they all wanted the credit for the stabbings. In actual fact it was Paul who had performed the act and not Frank or Rab, as some people thought.

Some years after the riot, Frank and Dingus laughed about the incident; it wasn’t a laughing matter at the time. Frank, Paul and Rab will feature more in this book in later chapters.

Dingus was held in total solitary for some three years after his return from hospital. I am glad to say that he pursued an action against the screws and the system and was awarded £20,000 in damages. The screws who had dished out the beatings stood in court charged with serious assault but, as always, the case against them collapsed.

Dingus is currently serving the rest of his twenty years down in Greenock’s Christwell House. Hope you are plodding on, pal. Keep your chin up. Lots of respect mate. Yours, Jimmy Boy.