Early in 2004, Tam "The Licensee" McGraw hit the floor of the Royal Oak bar in Nitshill as a gunman opened fire on the two men beside him. This film reads the story as Paul Ferris told it in his book Vendetta, written while McGraw was still alive.
A throne going spare
The year before, the top man on the South Side, Stuart "Specky" Boyd, had died in a car crash in Spain. Two women and a young girl died with him. His family, friends and many on the street never believed it was an accident.
Boyd's territory was up for grabs. His deputy, John McCartney, known as the world's richest dustbin man because he kept working as a binman for years, was going to buy the Royal Oak, Boyd's headquarters. With him was a newcomer, Craig Devlin. McGraw wanted a share and drove them there himself.
Firing low
The gunman knew McCartney and Devlin would be at the pub. He walked straight up and fired low, because he knew they would be wearing bulletproof vests. The police first knew about it when they stopped McGraw's jeep speeding through the city, the two wounded men bleeding in the back. Both survived. McCartney had been shot several times in the genitals.
Weeks later the Royal Oak was torched, then razed to the ground. It looked, Ferris writes, like the time McGraw's own pub, the Caravel, vanished overnight before the police could examine it.
A man coming apart
Why was McGraw driving himself? Because in the space of a year his three main henchmen, Trevor Lawson, Gordon Ross and Billy McPhee, had all died violently, and nobody wanted the job. Another of his top men, Fast Eddie McCready, had been jailed for a huge drugs haul; from prison he told Ferris that he believed his boss had stitched him up.
By 2005 McGraw had lost his driving licence in court after being caught drunk in his jeep, and his marriage was over. He was seen drinking alone in an East End pub, large vodkas, staring into the glass. He had lost his wife, his licence and his influence, Ferris writes. But not the other licence, the one to commit crime. He was just playing by different rules.