Paul Ferris
Paul Ferris was born on 10 November 1963 in Blackhill, in the north-east of Glasgow, the youngest of six children. He grew up 300 yards from the Ponderosa, the Provanmill Road home of Arthur Thompson, the man the papers called Glasgow's godfather. Crime ran in the family. He said his father was a bank robber, and his older brother Billy was twice convicted of murder.
His childhood was hard. From the age of nine he was bullied and beaten by a family of brothers on the scheme, and he said the stress brought on the psoriasis he lived with for the rest of his life. In his book The Ferris Conspiracy he tells how, as a teenager, he turned the tables: an open razor at a bus stop on Royston Road, then a fight with two knives outside a party. For the first time in years, he wrote, he had self-respect, and Blackhill began to see him as a contender. A botched robbery in Airdrie got him arrested at 17. He was remanded to Longriggend, skipped bail and became a wanted man, and his teenage years ended in Glenochil.
At 19 he went to work for Arthur Thompson Sr as a debt collector and enforcer. His cold, precise way with violence earned him the name The Robot. In 1984 he walked free from a shooting charge. In the mid-1980s he was jailed for carrying weapons, and he came to believe that one of the Thompsons had tipped off the police. He set up a conservatory business, and by 1990 he had walked away from the Thompson firm for good.
In August 1991 Arthur Thompson Jr, the old man's son, was shot dead outside the family home. Within weeks Ferris was charged with his murder and held in Barlinnie. On the morning of the funeral his friends Bobby Glover and Joe Hanlon were found shot dead in a car near the Cottage Bar in Shettleston. Nobody has ever been convicted of their murders.
His trial at the High Court in Glasgow in 1992 ran for 54 days, heard more than 300 witnesses and cost about £4 million, then the longest and most expensive trial in Scottish legal history. Arthur Thompson Sr gave evidence for the Crown. The prosecution leaned on a prison informer who claimed Ferris had confessed to him in Barlinnie, and that evidence fell apart. In June 1992 the jury unanimously found Ferris not guilty of every charge. The picture of him on the court steps, arms spread wide, became one of the best-known images in Scottish crime. Arthur Thompson Sr died in March 1993.
The trouble did not stop. By his account Tam McGraw, the man they called the Licensee, put a price on his head. Then MI5 came for him, in a joint operation with Special Branch and Strathclyde Police, and he was said to be the first gangster the Security Service had ever pursued. In May 1997 police pulled him from a car in Marylebone, central London. In a sweet box in another car were three MAC-10 submachine guns, silencers, ammunition and detonators. In July 1998 the Old Bailey jailed him for ten years for conspiracy to sell prohibited weapons, conspiracy to deal in firearms and possessing explosives. The Court of Appeal cut it to seven in 1999. Reading the MI5 file in Belmarsh, he said, was when the penny dropped to go straight.
As a Category A prisoner in HMP Frankland he wrote The Ferris Conspiracy with Reg McKay. It came out in 2001 and sold 20,000 copies while he was still inside. He was released on 21 January 2002 and kept writing: a novel, Deadly Divisions, then Vendetta, Villains and Unfinished Business. In January 2013 his story reached cinemas as The Wee Man, with Martin Compston playing him. It won the audience award at the BAFTA Scotland awards.
He spent the rest of his life in security, then books, film and podcasts, and he said he had been crime free since his release. "I have either been an absolute criminal genius for the last 25 years or I have done nothing wrong," he said in July 2026. "Take your pick." He was proudest that his sons never followed his path. "They broke the link," he said. After his brother Billy died in prison in September 2025, he spoke out about what he believed was a wrongful conviction.
Paul Ferris died on Tuesday 6 October 2026 at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow, after a short illness. He was 62. His funeral was on Monday 19 October. He helped us with our films and was a good friend to Gangland. These are the films about him, and the ones where he turns up in someone else's story.
Films about Paul Ferris
- Lenny McLean v Paul Ferris: Fact or Fiction?
- Paul Ferris: Revenge on a Welsh Clan
- The Ferris Conspiracy: A Crime Lord Bashed by His Old Enforcer