Ian "Blink" McDonald
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. Our film describes a man of charisma and humour, old school in his approach to crime, and the author of a book called Scotland's Wildest Bank Robbery.
He lived by the old code: you did not attack a man at his home, where women and children might get hurt. In 2009, at 48, he became the target of a crime boss of the new school, one who does not live by those values and is happy to go after families and homes. Friends warned him that a contract had been taken out on his life and urged him to leave his flat. One told him it was an assassin's paradise. He was not going to their homes, McDonald 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. Days earlier, an explosive device had been left under his car.
Police 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.
It was a beautiful afternoon. McDonald was eating an ice lolly when a car passed with three young men inside, staring at him. He set off to visit his mother, 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 Thompson's son had been gunned down, and then a blow to the back of his head sent him flying.
He got up in the middle of the road and faced three men. He had no weapon, not even a dog lead, and he was not scared. He could have run. 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 fought, 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. A voice said "here, take this," and they were trying to cut his throat. He got his hands up and felt his face being cut. Then they ran for their car.
A neighbour drove him to Stobhill Hospital. That night he was moved to the plastic surgery unit at the Royal Infirmary, and the next day he had 36 stitches in a wound that ran from his eye to his ear. Officers came to see him and asked if he was going to say nothing. He told them he was not. He was never questioned, 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.
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. The three attackers, he says, were Glaswegian men in their late twenties, paid by the same man who paid for the explosive, and that is as far as he will go. He has kept quiet about the reasons, as an old-school face would be expected to. What goes around, he says, comes around.
This is the film about him.