Читать книгу Scottish Hard Bastards - Jimmy Holland & Stephen Richards - Страница 14

Andy McCann is another lifer, currently serving his sentence in Glenochil Prison, where he has been for the last eighteen months. Andy is no stranger to violence: he has dished out some nasty business to the screws in his time. He was a career criminal with a very tough reputation in his home town before he got sent down for murdering a rival gangster over a drug deal.

When Andy came to prison he wasn’t very well liked: some saw him as a bully, others simply as a threat. When Andy walked into Shotts Prison, he was lured into a cell thinking that he was going to catch up with a friend. Once he got there it was too late. He couldn’t leave and was savagely attacked by a group of cons.

The leader of the mob was Rab Leslie, who had had a run-in with Andy some years earlier. Andy stood his ground and went head to head with the four other prisoners, all of whom had homemade prison knives in their hands. He received a stab wound to his neck – it missed his jugular vein by millimetres – but, to give Andy his due, he stood on his own two feet and fought for his life. If he had fallen to the cell floor at any stage, there is no doubt that he would have been murdered.

Andy received some six stab wounds, three of them life threatening, before he managed to get back out of the cell. From there, he staggered to the screws’ office, where he collapsed. Andy was rushed to nearby Law Hospital in a prison van; they couldn’t wait for the ambulance… if they had, Andy wouldn’t be here today.

None of the boys who carried out the attempted murder were pulled out for the stabbings, as the screws on the flat at the time didn’t like Andy; he had taken some of their fellow comrades hostage and slashed one of them some years earlier.

Andy had emergency surgery before being moved into intensive care. All in all, he lay in hospital for seven weeks before he returned to Shotts Prison. The Shotts screws put Andy in the segregation unit for some eighteen months before he was moved to Perth Prison. During his time there, he was involved in a major incident where a prisoner was found with his throat cut.

After that, Andy got moved to Glenochil and that is where I first met him. On first appearances, he didn’t look like the madman that people were saying he was but, as you know, the truly dangerous ones never do look like your stereotypical movie hard men. Andy was rather fat around the middle, like quite a few of the other Scottish prison danger men. The bulk around their middle has, and there is no doubt in my mind, saved their lives when they have been involved in a knife fight.

Andy had only been in Glenochil for a matter of weeks before the jail’s first screw hostage took place. The morning before the hostage, Andy had been arguing with an old screw who used to work up at Peterhead when he had been there doing five years. The argument got out of hand, Andy left the office to get his knife, returned to the office and pulled the knife on the screw. When the screw saw what was happening, he lunged forward and grabbed Andy’s arm. A struggle then ensued.

It was so funny; I witnessed this with my own eyes. Andy and the screw were like two WWF wrestlers. The others prisoners and I were locked behind the grille gates cheering Andy on when the chants, sung to the tune of ‘Jingle Bells’ started. It went like this: ‘Stab a screw, stab a screw, stab a screw today, oh what fun it is to stab a screw on New Year’s Day’ – it was only 29 December.

Some five or six screws from another part of the prison came running into the hall. They all jumped on Andy and hit him with their riot batons before dragging him off down to the seg unit where he received a bad beating.

A couple of weeks after the screw hostage episode, Andy got his typewriter out. He used to remove the metal bar that held the little black wheel in place, go for his shower and sharpen the piece of steel on the concrete window frame. This took him some two or three months. He was planning on stabbing as many screws as he possibly could.

During this time, one of the boys that Andy had had a run-in with when he was in Shotts, Stevie Anderson (another lifer), was moved to the seg block in Glenochil. Andy set his plan in motion to stab him.

Andy and Stevie stood at their cell doors screaming at each other for some two weeks before Andy finally got his chance. The following just goes to show how cruel the screws are: when Stevie went for his shower, they didn’t lock him in (prison protocol dictates that every prisoner should be locked into the shower).

After Stevie had been in the shower for some five minutes, they opened Andy up so that he could use the phone. When he was walking by the shower, he noticed that the door wasn’t shut. He told the screw he had forgotten his phone book, ran back to his cell in the seg block, got his 7in piece of sharpened steel from under his mattress and ran along to the shower room, where he found Stevie standing naked with shampoo on his face.

Andy didn’t need a second invitation: he stabbed Stevie six times. Stevie fell to the shower room floor, blood everywhere. Andy calmly walked out, flung the piece of steel down to the screws who had gathered at the bottom of the stairs and then, cool as you like, walked back along to his cell and shut his door.

The screws never even got their balls felt for leaving the shower door unlocked. They said that Andy had kicked it open, bursting the lock in the process. You see, the screws hated both of them, so they played them against each other until one of them came off worse than the other.

Stevie never forgot what the screws did to him. I will tell you later in this book, but I can say that he got them back big time for their little game in Glenochil seg block – a game that cost Stevie half of his liver. By now, Andy was looked upon as more than a hard bastard – he was seen as a madman. He was sent to the state hospital for some two years before he managed to get back to the mainstream prison system where, the last I heard, he has been doing OK. I wish you all the best, Andy. Hope things turn out good for you, pal.