James "Jaimba" McLean was one of the most feared enforcers in Glasgow in his prime, and a close friend of Paul Ferris. When he died at 53, the Daily Record ran his boasts. This film reads them and says which ones it doesn't believe.
The boasts
According to the paper, McLean claimed ties to the Irish Republican Army, and claimed he had killed for them and tortured many more. He said he was paid 25,000 for a hit on a drugs associate in London, shot the man in the back of the head and put him in a furnace at a scrapyard.
The film does not buy it. It says the London hit did not happen, and there is no way it did. Its guess is that the paper printed it to juice up the story. A source quoted in the same article said McLean had become a bit delusional, and the stories about killing for the Irish Republican Army should be taken with a pinch of salt.
What was real
The same source said he did a lot of damage locally in Cranhill, and people were genuinely terrified of him. He had a coldness in his eyes and a fearlessness that took things further than most. He was once shot in the stomach, the film says, in what looked like a gang war.
He grew up in Springburn and claimed to have learned to drive stolen cars at seven. He was jailed in 1987 for six years for an armed robbery. He went to London with Ferris for a Christmas drink with some of the capital's best-known faces, and when a bar fight broke out in an Irish pub, it was Jaimba who pulled Ferris out.
He died in a Glasgow hospital after years of illness. In his last interview he said he was sure he was going straight to heaven, because he had done nothing wrong. Which, the film points out, doesn't sit easily with the rest.