Ian McDonald, known as Blink, spent more than five decades in the Glasgow underworld and over ten years of that inside the toughest prisons in Scotland and England. The film describes him as a man of charisma and humour, old school in his approach to crime. In 2009, at 48, he became the target of a crime boss of the new school, one who, the narrator says, does not live by the old values and is happy to go after families and homes. Days after an explosive device was left under his car, McDonald was attacked in the street. This film reads his own account, from the chapter Slashed and Arrested in his book Scotland's Wildest Bank Robbery.
The warning
Friends were warning him that a contract had been taken out on his life, and urging him to leave his flat. A friend told him it was an assassin's paradise. McDonald knew the unwritten code: you did not attack a man at his home, where women and children might get hurt. He was not going to their homes, he said, and it was out of order for them to come to his. If they wanted him, they could do it in the street. So he kept to his routine.
Police had watched his home for three days. On the fourth, Tuesday 12 May 2009, he noticed they had gone as he walked his dog around Hogganfield Loch. He thought of Bobby Glover. Nearly 20 years earlier, the police had been watching Glover too, and on the day they withdrew he was murdered along with Joe Hanlon.
Broad daylight
It was a beautiful afternoon. McDonald was eating an ice lolly when a car passed with three young men inside, staring at him. He thought nothing of it, went home, and then set off to visit his mother, who was due back from a holiday. He saw the car again and put it down to coincidence. He passed the house that had been home to Arthur Thompson, and the spot where Artie had been gunned down, and then a blow to the back of his head sent him flying.
He calls it an amateurish attack. He got up in the middle of the road and faced three men. He had no weapon, not even a dog lead, but he was not scared: he had been in situations like this for 30 years. He could have run and got away. Instead he fell for one of the oldest tricks there is, a challenge to his pride. "Don't run," one of them called. "You're supposed to be a gangster."
They circled him, then they were fighting, rolling down a slope until they came up against the gates of St Paul's Church, at the corner of his mother's road. One sat on his legs. Another asked who was going to do it. McDonald heard a voice say "here, take this," and they were trying to cut his throat. He got his hands up and felt his face being cut. Then they were up and running to their getaway car.
Stobhill
He was holding his face, bleeding heavily, and shouting after them. A woman driving past, with a child in the back, stopped and offered him her description of the men and the registration of their car. He told her he had seen them himself, and she drove on. Neighbours came out; someone handed him a towel. At his mother's door his niece opened it and began screaming. A neighbour drove him to Stobhill Hospital, where he found he had also been cut on the back of his head.
Officers from the unit dealing with the car explosive came to see him and asked if he was going to say nothing. He told them he was not. He was never questioned, which he found strange, and no one took his blood-soaked T-shirt to test for his attackers' DNA. Their attitude, he says, seemed to be that he deserved what he got. He was of the same opinion.
That night he was moved to the plastic surgery unit at the Royal Infirmary. The next day he had 36 stitches in a wound that ran from his eye to his ear.
What goes around
He was calm by then. He told visitors not to feel sorry for him: he had given it out, and now he had got it back. The only surprise was that he had reached 48 before it happened. He had always thought slashing was something that happened to younger men.
The three attackers, he says, were in their late twenties and Glaswegian, and that is as far as he will go, because he has an idea who they were. They were paid, and the explosive and the slashing were connected, both paid for by the same individual. Knowing who that was, and what kind of man he was, meant he was not afraid. They were lucky, he adds: if he had been carrying a knife that day, he would have done at least one of them.
The narrator, who has spoken to McDonald at length, says there are many rumours about the attack. McDonald has kept quiet about the reasons, as an old-school face would be expected to. What goes around, he says, comes around.