A Scots supergang member caged for serious organised crime offences was a close ally of Kevin “Gerbil” Carroll – and even drove the feared hood to his death.
John Bonner was caged last week along with mobsters Christopher Laycock and David Kelly over their role in the most sophisticated organised crime gang in the country.
The mob – headed by fugitive-feared-dead brothers James and Barry Gillespie, and later James White – flooded Scotland with drugs and firearms and used serious violence against rivals.
And we can now reveal Bonner was a close pal of feared drug mob enforcer Kevin “Gerbil” Carroll, who died in a hail of bullets at a supermarket car park in 2010.
Bonner was Gerbil’s driver, ferrying him to his execution on the day of the assassination, and was named by police as a suspect in the gangland hit.
The 37-year-old was remanded in custody at the High Court in Glasgow on Friday for his role in the Gillespies’ gang, and is due to be sentenced next month.
At the same court in 2012, during the trial of Gerbil murder suspect Ross Monaghan, who was later cleared, Bonner gave evidence about his role in the death of his friend.
Gerbil was shot dead in the car park of the ASDA in Robroyston, Glasgow, on January 13, 2010, by two masked gunmen, who escaped in a getaway car.
During the 2012 trial, Bonner said he had picked up his 29-year-old associate and drove him to the supermarket, when he saw a Volkswagen Golf pulling up in front of them and two masked men leave the vehicle.
He explained: “I tried to get out of the motor as fast as I could. Something wasn’t right. I fell out of the motor. I was scared. I just heard the bangs and I was on the ground.”
Bonner, who was 25 at the time, said he ran away and hid behind another vehicle in the car park until he heard the getaway car carrying the murderers “screeching away”.
He said that, when he returned to the car he’d been driving, he found Gerbil lying dead in the back seat of the car and that the door was locked.
He claimed he was holding his car keys as he fled the vehicle and must have locked it accidentally as he fell on the ground, trapping Gerbil in the car, with no means of escape.
The court heard that Bonner was one of 99 potential suspects identified in the murder, with another man thought to have been involved in the killing being Paul Fleming.
And in the latest case, the court heard that Bonner is a close associate of 40-year-old Fleming, who is known as “The Captain” and was the right-hand man of acting gang boss White, who is known as “The Don”.
The court was told Bonner helped ship huge amounts of the gang’s dirty cash around required locations. The mob operated in Europe and the UK, the United Arab Emirates and Mexico, among other countries.
White was arrested in Brazil, where the Gillespie brothers are missing presumed dead, and Bonner, Laycock and Kelly were snared as part of Operation Buggy, a probe into drug trafficking between Spain and Scotland between 2020 and 2022.
Ross Monaghan, 42, denied shooting Gerbil to death and wasacquitted of murdering him after a judge ruled that there was insufficient evidence to convict him.
William Paterson, 45, fled to Spain following the killing but was later arrested and jailed for 22 years after being convicted of the murder in 2015.
The killers had fled the scene in their stolen VW Golf, which they torched in the Lanarkshire village of Glenmavis, dumping the weapons in the nearby town of Coatbridge.
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