Arthur Thompson
Arthur Thompson was the man the papers called Glasgow's godfather, and for years he ruled parts of the city from the Ponderosa, the family's homes on Provanmill Road in Blackhill. He started as a strong-arm for moneylenders and went into the business himself as he left his teens. He served 18 months for extortion, decided prison was not for him, and put his money into dance halls and pubs through nominees. One of them was the Provanmill Inn on Royston Road.
He never liked the title. "Nobody called him the Godfather apart from solicitors," Paul Ferris said. "Even his own solicitor, Joe Beltrami, said Arthur was embarrassed by it."
His wars started early. In 1966 a bomb under his car killed his mother-in-law, and two men from a rival family died when Thompson's car forced their van off the road. At the High Court that November he was cleared of culpable homicide, and three men from the other family were cleared of killing his mother-in-law.
By the late 1970s his name carried as far as London. In Lenny McLean's account, Thompson flew him up to Glasgow to watch Jim Watt fight, then put him in a no-rules bare-knuckle fight in a pub yard against a man Thompson had in his corner, and afterwards sent him home to London in one of his Jaguars at a hundred miles an hour. Several people have told us McLean did fight in Glasgow, at a private event put on by Arthur Thompson.
Paul Ferris grew up 300 yards from the Ponderosa, and at 19 he went to work for Thompson as a debt collector and enforcer. By 1990 he had walked away from the firm, and the two became enemies. In his book The Ferris Conspiracy, Ferris tells of the day it nearly ended for Thompson. Thompson's son Billy set fire to the Caravel, Tam McGraw's pub, and the words McGraw is a grass were painted on the road outside. A meeting was called to head off a war. Thompson offered to pay for the damage and McGraw accepted at once. It was never paid. As they came out into the daylight, a car screeched up with a rival team. The old man pulled a gun, pressed it to the leader's head and cracked him on the skull, and was then beaten with fists and boots until he lay unconscious on the pavement. "Don't kill him," McGraw pleaded, and the man walked away. McGraw had saved his life. Thompson believed McGraw had set him up.
In August 1991 his son Arthur Jr, home on weekend leave from an 11-year sentence for drug dealing, was shot dead outside the family home. Ferris was charged with the murder. On the day of the funeral, Ferris's friends Bobby Glover and Joe Hanlon were found shot dead in a car. At the trial in 1992 Arthur Thompson gave evidence for the Crown, and in June the jury found Ferris not guilty of every charge. A story went round that Thompson had asked Lenny McLean to come north and hurt Ferris; our film looks at it and doubts it ever happened. Thompson certainly wanted Ferris hurt.
The family paid a heavy price for the life. They lost two sons and a daughter to murder and overdoses. Arthur Thompson died of a heart attack in Glasgow Royal Infirmary on 13 March 1993, nine months after the verdict. He was 61. These are the films about him, and the ones where he turns up in someone else's story.