Fall of Scottish drug kingpin Ross McGill

Stephen Jamieson

Four of Scotland’s highest profile gangsters were arrested in Dubai last week. Steven Lyons, Ross McGill, Stephen Jamieson and Steven Larwood were busted.

Steven Lyons and Ross McGill
Operation Portaledge was set up in response to a violent gang war of assaults, shootings and firebombings that resulted in 57 arrests. Steven Lyons is the head of the Lyons crime group, which has been involved in a bloody feud with the rival Daniel clan for more than 20 years. In May, Steven Lyons’ brother, Eddie Lyons Jnr, and Ross Monaghan were shot dead in a bar in Fuengirola on the Costa del Sol.

Cocaine dealer Ross McGill, 31, built up a large drug dealing network in Scotland over years, but fled to Marbella in 2022, fearing he would be arrested after French cops cracked the encrypted phone network EncroChat.

McGill soon ran out of cash in Spain and relocated to Dubai. He had access to cocaine at cheaper prices and purer quality than most of the drug dealers in the UK. McGill tapped back into his old contacts in Scotland and business was soon booming again.

For every kilo he sold, he was making at least £10,000 more than when he lived in Spain or Scotland. He was selling 300 kilos of cocaine every few weeks and raking in £1 million pounds a month. Everything changed after McGill was ripped off by a crook from Edinburgh gangster Mark Richardson’s crew, who paid for a £500,000 cocaine deal using fake bank notes.

McGill created the Tamo Junto (TMJ) gang and waged war against Richardson’s mob and their associates from the Daniel clan in Glasgow.

That brought cop heat and arrests in Dubai soon followed in a crackdown.

McGill made the error of a lifetime. He was making enough money to have lived in extreme luxury for the rest of his days. His gang war came to the attention of cops and he will now spend most of his remaining life in jail.