A Scots photographer has told how he faced down a death threat from the notorious drug-addict son of Glasgow crime boss Arthur Thompson after photographing him as a down and out.
Brian Anderson was working for a national newspaper when he was assigned to meet Billy Thompson two weeks after snapping him outside a homeless centre.
It was only when the pair came face to face for the first time in a cafe that Brian realised he had risked his life by taking Billy’s picture at his lowest ebb.
Brian said: “I was working on a crime feature for a national newspaper and was assigned to meet Billy and spend time with him in order to get some photographs.
“My first meeting with him was in an Italian cafe. Only two weeks earlier the newspaper had run an article based on information that led us to believe that Billy Thompson was homeless and he was living in a homeless unit in the city centre.
“It was myself who was on that assignment too and I got pictures from a rooftop of Billy hanging about the front door of the homeless unit.
“The newspaper ran with the story, Godfather’s Son Homeless. Wind forward a couple of weeks and I’m with Billy in the cafe.
“One of the things he said to me was, ‘You know, I would actually kill again.’ I’m thinking, again? That’s what he said. I asked him why he said it and he told me, ‘I wouldn’t think too long about killing that photographer who took photographs of me two weeks earlier.’
“Fortunately, he didn’t know it was me. At that point I’m thinking, change the subject, quick. I’d only been sitting beside the guy to take a photograph. It was a strange situation and an unpleasant moment.
“I just wasn’t expecting him to say I want to kill that photographer. I’m thinking, surely that should be the last thing on his mind with the kind of lifestyle he’s leading.
“I couldn’t believe that he would say he would kill again. It seemed like a strange comment.”
Billy Thompson was found dead in 2017, marking the end of an era for Scotland’s most feared crime clan.
Aged 50, he was the third of Arthur ‘Godfather’ Thompson’s four children to die in tragic circumstances.
Billy was the third of Thompson’s four children to die young and the last male heir to Arthur Thompson Sr’s crime dynasty. He had battled drug addiction for decades before his body was found.
It was a drug overdose that had killed Billy’s sister Margaret aged 26 in 1989.
His brother Arthur Jr, 31, known as Fat Boy, was shot dead outside the family home, which was nicknamed ‘The Ponderosa’, in 1991.
Gangland enforcer turned author Paul Ferris was charged with Arthur Jr’s murder at the time, but was found not guilty after a trial that lasted 54 days at a cost of £4 million, at the time, the longest and most expensive trial in Scottish legal history.
Billy was considered a weak link, leading to him being targeted by small-time crooks when his family’s empire crumbled in the wake of a brutal turf war.
He was slashed by a gang in 2000 and served time for having a harpoon gun. It is believed that his death was drugs-related.
His father, who had ruled Glasgow’s crime scene and was rumoured to have raked in £100,000 a week from protection rackets, died from a heart attack in 1993, aged 61, after surviving several assassination attempts.
Despite Billy’s efforts at living up to his father’s fearsome reputation, he failed to impress Brian.
“I didn’t really have much time for him because I just thought he came across as not a nice person,” Brian said. “I found him a bit of a bully. He was trying to boss me about and I told him to watch who he was talking to because I don’t like anybody telling me what to do.
“The brief was to get Billy in a suit and tie. I’d been given the money to get him smart for the photo shoot. We ended up in Slaters in the city centre and he tried on various suits on and ties and different shirts.
“Three or four suits in he suddenly got really angry. He ripped off his tie and said, ‘I’m just like a bloody monkey here’. You’re trying to dress me up as a money’. That was his attitude. I remember the sales assistant looking at me and saying, ’Is that Arthur Thomson’s son?’ By that time Billy had stormed out of Slaters.”
In the end, it cost Brian a football strip and a weapon to complete the assignment, though it could have cost him his life had Billy twigged that he was responsible for exposing the hood who had fallen on hard times.
“Later, I persuaded him we had to get him kitted out for the photo shoot,” Brian said. He said he would do it on two conditions, that we bought him a Rangers strip and a lock knife.
“We got him the Rangers strip but not the lock knife and got him suited and booted for the shoot. He bought the lock knife himself because he ended up with some money, cash in hand.”
Billy Thompson’s crime boss father Arthur Sr. had become known as ‘The Godfather’ after making his mark as the nation’s most notorious gangster in the 1950s after which he went on to take charge of organised crime for more than three decades.
He started out in life as a money lender, but the family quickly fell into the drug trade in the 1980s. By the 1990s, Thompson Sr. reportedly raked in a staggering £100,000 per week as a loan shark and ruled the streets of Glasgow and its surrounding areas with an iron fist.
He was said to crucify those who did not repay their debts, by nailing them to floors or doors, according to the number one bestselling book ‘The Last Godfather: The Life and Crimes of Arthur Thompson’ by Scottish journalist Reg McKay.
The patriarch just managed to escape death in 1966 after a bomb exploded under his car, an incident in which his mother-in-law lost her life.
He was shot in the groin in 1985.
In typical ‘tough guy’ style, and sticking to gangster code, Thompson Sr told the hospital and police that a drill bit snapped and pierced his groin.
Three years later, he was run over by a car and rammed up against a fence before being shot at several times.
He eventually succumbed to a heart attack in 1993 at the age of 61. Until then, many of his deals had been conducted in the city’s Provanmill Inn which played host for gang meetings, robbery planning and drug deals until it was destroyed in a suspected arson attack in 2004.
Brian added: “I was born and bred in the Blackhill area of Glasgow and my family were from there so everybody knew who Arthur Thompson was.
“He always featured in the press. Going back to the 70s it was well known that Arthur Thompson was a powerful Glasgow gangland figure who controlled the city right up until his death.
“Arthur’s pub, the Provanmill Inn, was infamous. As a youngster, I was a mascot with the Celtic supporters club bus that left from that pub. I did get a few glimpses of Arthur back then.
“I never spoke to him but I’ll never forget him.”
Read the full story in the latest issue of Eyes Magazine, a new source for “edgy crime, culture, and gritty stories” available as a free download from www.glasgoweyes.com
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