Episode 432: Glasgow Ice Cream Wars | Morbid

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Hey, weirdos, I'm Ash.

And I'm Alayna. And this is Morbid.

We're back. We're back, and we're better than ever.

That's right, and I'm not snarfing and coughing as much as I was.

We love that. So this is new, and Ash is back.

She was only gone for one, but that's fine.

Yeah, did you miss me?

Did you miss her? Oh, no, I was asking you.

Oh, I did, of course.

Did you miss me? Good.

But I had Caleb to talk about cryptids with.

I know. That's why I asked if you missed me, because it's hard when you replace me with somebody so wonderful.

He is pretty wonderful.

I love that man. But you know what?

You're both wonderful in your own ways.

Thank you. Thank you so much. I know me and Drew were talking about Caleb last night and he was like, I miss Caleb.

I was like, you could probably tell him that and he would just get on a plane or start driving.

Truthfully. I believe that wholeheartedly.

That Caleb would just jump in some form of transportation and be here with him.

And be like, I'm on my way.

The correct amount of hours that it would take.

Honestly, I wouldn't be able to host him right now because my spare bedroom is literally filled to the brim with laundry.

And then this weekend we were like, Oh, we're going to do that laundry.

Let's start it. Oh, no, we did.

We started to. And then my wash machine made this noise.

It said, And we figured it's probably broken.

I think it might be.

Also, don't make me laugh too hard because I have gunkus.

Oh, you got the same thing I got.

I'm still in that. This is going to be pretty funny, actually, because if we make each other laugh, we're going to sound like we are actively dying.

Yeah. I sound like I have a disease.

Yeah, me too. If I laugh, I sound like I have, like, destroyed my lungs for years.

Yeah, absolutely. You know?

Yeah, well, it kind of goes along with the story.

I feel like you need to have, like, a hard way about you.

Like, gunk in the throat, crazy chain smoker laugh.

All right, cool. It just, like, fits for the story.

You gotta be like Pauly from Peaky Blinders.

Okay, so it's funny that you just said Peaky Blinders.

I have never watched Peaky Blinders.

Although you should.

I've seen, I know I should.

It's hard because Drew doesn't like a period piece.

but you know what he considers anything like that is not now in the past a period piece it's so good like I think succession was a period because it was like a couple years ago literally yeah no Peaky Blinders is so good though and it's got Cillian Murphy in it like I know my BFF Kaylee and her boyfriend are obsessed with it Thomas Shelby I know for life and he is really no matter what he does you can do the worst shit ever and I'm like I forgive him it's okay he's a good man well I'm worried about how you're gonna react to this story then because there's actually a Tommy in this oh and he's like

one of the main culprits um today we're gonna talk about the glasgow ice cream wars which is bonkers like you hear ice cream and you're like oh like ice cream yeah love that who doesn't love ice cream you scream we all scream for ice cream everybody does but we're really all screaming over like this case because it's fucking bonkers and it's like i said the ice cream wars but not like food network holiday or like cake wars i was gonna say because Because this sounds delightful.

It does. It sounds like a holiday special on the Food Network.

Sure does. It's anything but that, essentially.

We're talking arson.

We're talking drugs.

We're talking guns.

We're talking murder and straight up war.

So not Food Network -y.

Not completely. No, not really.

A few little errant differences there.

Yeah, you know what?

You're right. But it all started with Andrew, quote unquote, Fatboy Doyle.

And that was like a term of endearment.

So I'm not calling him that.

That's what his family called him.

And it was like a loving term.

So I'm going to stick with it.

It was a nickname. It was a nickname.

So this is Andrew Fatboy Doyle.

He took over the lucrative ice cream van route in Glasgow's Rucasey.

I believe I'm saying that right.

I looked it up and it sounded like that when I heard it to my ear.

But then I just realized I think I'm saying Glasgow.

It's Glasgow. Glasgow.

God, so much stress for telling names.

I know, it's hard. Yeah, it's hard. And there's a lot of names in this that I looked up and I like wrote my own phonetic spelling.

So I hope I'm doing it right.

You are. Just yell at me if not, you will anyway.

I'll yell at you. Not you.

The internet will yell.

No, the internet will yell at me.

It's fine. Yeah, it's your fault.

Exactly. Well, anyway, so he took over the lucrative ice cream van route in the Rucchese housing estate in the early 1980s.

He knew that he was kind of encroaching on the territory of established van drivers who were not going to let their roots go without a fight like many ice cream van drivers in the late 70s and 80s Glasgow in Glasgow go fuck it's throwing me off go to Glasgow there you go but like many of those drivers he knew that there was more money to be made selling illegal goods on ban routes than there was in more respectable trades and he kind of hoped to get in on the action yeah from what I've read it doesn't necessarily seem like he he didn't want to sell like drugs or anything like that because that's

what was happening on these van routes they were selling toilet paper cigarettes beer wine and drugs contraband yeah contraband it was illegal to sell like you know the toilet paper and stuff like that you weren't supposed to do that yeah um very illegal to sell drugs very he wasn't into like the whole drug thing of it he didn't want to do that but he wanted a route of his own to sell what he wanted to sell yeah so his rivals though were not going to let their territory go without out a fight.

They were very intent on holding down their businesses.

They didn't want to let newcomers in and they would stop at absolutely fucking nothing to make that clear.

They started attacking van drivers.

They started attacking customers at certain points.

Now this war, quote unquote war, would conclude in April 1984.

But it didn't end with like somebody waving a white flag and being like, you know, this is so silly.

Why don't you have this route?

I'll take take this route.

Yeah. Kumbaya, baby.

No, no, no. It literally ended with a fiery blaze and with six members of the Doyle family being brutally, brutally murdered.

Damn. All over an ice cream van route.

Holy shit. Yeah. The Glasgow, I did that right now.

You did it right. Yeah, you got it.

The Glasgow ice cream wars and the murder of the Doyle family really obviously outraged the Scottish public and they demanded that the authorities do whatever was necessary to bring an end to this whole gang war that kind of started.

And at this point, it was just overrunning the streets.

But the police, obviously wanting all this activity to end, they quickly arrested six men for the murders.

And as we know, it's, like, never really good when there's a quick arrest. It's, like, sometimes you're, like, oh, wow.

Sometimes it works out.

But, like, you never, I never really want to hear the word, like, quickly arrested.

Yeah. Which sounds crazy.

No, because I know what you mean, though, because it's, like, whenever you hear that the public was in this outrage and everybody was freaking out and it's like, there was all this pressure.

Yeah. And then, they just quickly arrested some guys.

They just got this whole chunk of suspects that they know did it.

It's like, I understand what might be happening here.

Yeah, exactly. But I don't know.

I don't know anything about this case, actually.

Neither do I. So this is brand new to me.

Neither do I. Well, two of those six men were sent to prison for life for the mass murders of the Doyle family.

And after nearly two decades, though, information came to light that seriously casted doubt on the guilt of those men and the extent to which the Strathclyde police and potentially even the entire Scottish legal system were willing to go in order to make that problem go away.

Damn. So it's kind of one of those things where they were feeling the pressure.

It seems like, anyway, they were feeling the pressure and they needed to put some amount of people in prison.

But let's head back to the 70s for the sake of the story.

Let's do it. So throughout the 1970s, the Scottish government government started clearing out what were known, it's not a nice thing to say, but what were known back then as the slums of Glasgow.

And they were relocating the residents to newly constructed high -rise housing estates like the Rukezi housing estate.

Now, a lot of times the rents were kind of subsidized for low -income families, that whole deal.

And for the most part, the housing estates were built and managed by local government agencies trying to solve a problem, but at the the same time, they were sort of just adding to it.

That makes sense. That's usually what happens.

When you, like, dislocate and then relocate people, there's going to be some problems that go along with that.

Because many of the poorer residents were, like I just said, completely dislocated, which added to the desperation and then led to an increase of crime.

The new low income homes were usually located on the outskirts of the city, which meant that there wasn't easy access to resources and even just, like, essential items like grocery stores and social services, it.

Stuff like that. Especially for those that didn't have a car.

And back then, not everybody was tooting along in a brand new whip.

No, of course not. You know?

Now, the government at the time couldn't really get together a sustainable solution.

I know that's like so crazy to think about.

Yeah, that's wild. Yeah.

So, people took it upon themselves because they really had no other option.

And this is when informal businesses and services like the ice cream vans in Glasgow, Rucchese's estate, came into play.

So, the ice cream vans were said to have sold everything, quote, from fish to cigarettes.

And they were really like, quote unquote, general stores on wheels.

I love that. It's really cool to think about.

It is kind of cool.

Because there weren't local markets or even bus lines in these areas.

Yeah, so this is just rolling general stores.

Exactly. The ice cream vans became lifelines to the residents in these estates if they needed to get stuff.

Now at first, the ice cream vans were pretty much how they are here in America like today.

They were just vans filled with all kinds of treats rolling around the little areas is in town playing music selling said treats but the summer season in the uk is one pretty short and two pretty unpredictable so when it wasn't chilly and rainy people weren't necessarily looking for ice cream but they were looking for snacks and daily use items and from time to time some drugs yeah just time to you know think uber eats or doordash before it's time but uh with less big business ties there you go the people driving these vans weren't going through through background checks.

They weren't having to like provide a license.

Nothing like that really.

You could pretty much just get a van, get into it and start your little business.

It was like a startup.

Yeah. After you got your van, you'd have to set up some kind of like buying some kind of stock from a local distributor or a dealer if that was part of your business model and you were ready to go.

But for those that couldn't afford to buy a van outright, they could actually lease lease a van either weekly or monthly.

Oh, okay. There was like organizations where you could go to.

This was far more common because, as I've made it clear, these areas were not like flushed with cash.

Sorry, John Ralfio.

Don't want to take your flow.

Sorry. But in this model, the leasing firm was responsible for the maintenance of the van, getting it insured, and any other fees that were associated with operating it.

And the driver had to cover the cost of gas and the stock of his his or her products because back then like women were driving these vans too.

Yeah. Now the trade off with this way of doing it was that the driver was paid about 50 or 60 pounds a week and the rest of the profits went to the leasing company.

So that's how they made their money.

Yeah. It didn't bring in as much money for the drivers as it did for drivers who could buy their own van, but it was more affordable and there was still a profit to be made for drivers that could find find and keep a good route.

But that was kind of the crux of the issue.

Finding the route was one thing that was like lucky in and of itself, but then keeping the route was even more intense.

This is when the territory stuff probably comes into play.

Yeah, exactly. Now, because unemployment rates were really, really high right after the end of World War II and there wasn't as much opportunity for formal employment, the competition for van routes began instantly.

According to Douglas Skelton, who co -authored the book Frighteners with a fellow journalist, Lisa Brownlie, I believe is how you say it.

Back in those days, quote, the dirty tricks had been limited to schoolboyish acts like squirting windscreens with the raspberry liquid used to flavor the vanilla ice cream and double stopping.

Now, double stopping was when one driver followed a rival driver to their route and like cut ahead of them to steal their business.

So it was pretty...

This is like, that's like little kid shit.

It was pretty innocent when it first started.

Like, just squirting raspberry shit on the windshield, that's, like, funny.

Yeah, exactly. Like, annoying but funny.

Yeah. You know, turn your windshield wipers on.

Yeah, yeah. It was when it got, like, later into things that it wasn't really just, like, raspberry coming out your windshield.

It was, like, sledgehammers.

Oh, okay. Literally.

That's different. A little bit.

That hits a little – that literally hits a little different.

Quite literally. Like, quite literally.

Raspberry liquid versus sledgehammer.

To the face. one is just turning on your windshield wiper maybe getting some new windshield wiper fluid because you used a little bit too much yeah the other one is getting an entirely new windshield so and face and face you're right you know that yep yeah and maybe like a plastic surgery appointment yeah that would hurt yeah damn they were like a bunch of shade queens that escalated so quickly it did so by the late 1970s when unemployment in glasgow's northeast estates like rucasey was between 40 and 50 a legit ice cream van operator could make upwards of 200 euros i think it's euros yeah per

week selling ice cream wow and as much as 800 a week wow all right so this is like a desirable oh yeah if you can make it you can make it right and the people that were making closer to like 800 a week that was quote if the operator was willing to sell stolen cigarettes going to go to bat for these roots because they desperately needed that kind of money yeah but now the quote -unquote schoolboyish pranks and silly tactics had escalated that's no fun i really like the just spraying with the raspberry raspberry shit like that was just good wholesome some fun yeah it's like a clown you know like

with a little flower but you know what desperation now drivers in this new period of time like i said would vandalize other vans sabotage them threaten the other drivers pretty much every time it became physical and this was all so that a driver could keep the best route what a toxic work environment the most toxic work imagine coming in every day to work no and you have to deal with like you're like i don't know what's gonna happen happen today like you know what i mean and not in a good way like oh no they had to make like literal alliances and like hire people to watch out for them and hire

people and we'll get into all that it's so much work but the increase in violence was particularly alarming in the poor and working class neighborhoods but it also wasn't just confined to those neighborhoods it was alarming there because it was scary but it wasn't just those neighborhoods in the early 1980s london drivers were also engaging in a myriad of tactics to protect those more lucrative routes and also resorting to violence.

In December of 1981, three men from the Piccadilly Whip Ice Cream Company were put in jail for an intimidation campaign on another driver that escalated to a really violent point.

These men had attempted to scare this driver, his name was Anthony Sherburn, from his site outside of a Harrods department store, but their tactics weren't working.

They were kind of just threatening him verbally.

So when they realized that wasn't working, they drove a truck into his van and then beat him to the point that he, quote, lost his two front teeth and had two broken ribs.

Oh my god. Yeah. So that's where it all started.

Holy shit. Now at the start of the 1980s, there were three leasing firms behind the ice cream van industry.

They were the Viking Ice Cream Company, Capaldi, and the Mark...

I'm going to to look this up.

Hold on. I didn't know if it was Marchetti or Marchetti, but according to pronouncenames .com, it's Marchetti.

Marchetti. So yeah, we had all those companies just leasing out their vans for the ice cream people.

Now, until the early 1980s, all three of these companies were regularly profiting from leasing out their vans and selling products to the self -employed drivers.

But by 1982, all three companies were reporting annual losses.

And they attributed these losses to quote loss of sales repairs to vans yeah i was gonna say and all the difficulties of starting new drivers because who the fuck wants to join this business now that it's become this yeah exactly like you gotta there's a very specific person that will weigh the the risk the cost and cost and reward here yeah a little pro and con list well yeah like somebody just got beaten so badly that their front two their two front teeth are gone and they broke two ribs and broke two ribs and you're like is it worth it and they also drove a fucking truck into the side of his van what if he

had been in the van it's a liability man it is so by the final quarter of 1983 vans were constantly being turned to the marchetti brothers garage with smashed windows broken headlights just any kind of vandalism you could think about it these vans were suffering it yeah and it was all meant to encourage drivers to give up their roots In 1920, a broke immigrant in Boston became one of America's richest, most infamous men practically overnight.

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so now we really get into the beginning of the ice cream wars because this was bringing in so much money and because there really wasn't a lot of law enforcement around the estates where the van schemes were were they were kind of now attracting a more criminal element these dudes who wanted an easy way to quickly and easily offload stolen cigarettes and other goods that could be sold on the ice cream vans.

They had their perfect ticket.

Oh yeah this is like the ideal thing now.

Yeah. Now while there had been clearly a lot of conflict among drivers from the very beginning the trouble reached new heights actually now we're gonna go back a second to 1978 between drivers from the Marchetti brothers and 50 ices.

This is kind of like where the main tensions lie from the late 70s all the way to like the mid -1980s.

And these are all names of like ice cream things yeah it's yeah it's um like the the leasing companies who own them so like the marchetti brothers have their own vans that run around 50 ices has theirs exactly okay it's like how there's um different taxi services yeah that makes sense yeah and 50 ices was a little bit of a smaller leasing firm but that's where a lot of the tensions were between these two this was primarily taking place in glasgow's barlinark neighborhood for the most part flare -ups between the groups were minimal quote as long as they stuck to their respective sides of the scheme

so it was like marchetti brothers could have this route 50 ices drivers had this route you do not cross yes never the two shall meet exactly but every now and then a member of one group would infringe upon the territory of another causing yet another outbreak of violence and vandalism and what also complicated things was that there were a lot of the working class people in this area, they had ties or like some kind of connection to the Ulster Defense Association, which is the UDA.

They were a Protestant paramilitary group that terrorized Northern Ireland and also parts of Scotland.

And this meant that sometimes the religious affiliations between drivers led to even more violence.

Oh my God, the layers.

It's crazy. Doesn't it?

From what I know of Peaky Blinders, it sounds like that.

This is very Peaky Blinders.

Yeah. And just wait, I feel like it only only got...

Like I said, never seen it.

The vibes are here.

But the vibes feel there.

Yeah. And it only vibeyers to that.

Oh, yeah. Now, this was the case in October of 1978.

Tensions were already super high between drivers working for Marchetti Brothers and 50 Ices and things escalated when one of the drivers attacked the van of a driver from the rival company.

So we have two rival drivers fighting with each other.

Okay. Now, some members within that rival company also had ties to the UDA and the police were starting to hear word that there was going to be some kind of retaliation for this fight between them oh shit and they were hearing that the UDA affiliated members were getting ready and starting to arm themselves for some kind of big retaliation my god this is so peaky blinders it's crazy now the police knew some of the more notorious uh key players if you will and they were able to get involved before anything escalated to the point of like what What they thought was going to be a very bloody battle

in the East End. But it only kind of put like a temporary band -aid on the overall problem.

Throughout the rest of the year, there were regular small fights between the rivals.

But those were kind of just hints at what was to come.

When two van drivers from Glasgow suburbs, Dennistown and Easterhouse, started encroaching on routes in the Barlinark in early October, four Marchetti drivers began a campaign of intimidation, threats, and vandalism.

And by the end of that month, it resulted in a serious assault on one of the suburban drivers.

The Marchetti drivers ended up being arrested and charged.

But the charges were dismissed for all but one of them.

Only one of them got the charges.

And that man ended up being sentenced to serve five years in prison.

Damn. Now, despite the one prison sentence, the campaign of intimidation and violence successfully did drive the suburban drivers out of the area.

which like along with the lack of consequences showed that the violence was the answer when it came to protecting your route i'd say that was a pretty bad move if you get dismissed on all these charges and only one person gets in trouble you're like okay so what are my odds of getting i was just gonna say i'll play those odds why not exactly now because the criminal activity among the east end drivers had gotten so fucking crazy there were another group of people who saw this as an opportunity those people formed a protection racket whoa yeah this meant that drivers who wanted extra protection had

to pay a fee to these hooligans willing to provide it for them and for those that didn't they were off they were on their own yeah like that's all you buddy damn now this was the case for a female driver sadie campbell she had started driving back in 1982 and in the beginning she was actually paying a protection fee because she was like you know know what i'm not fucking with all this but then she found out that the people requiring this fee were doing so by means of extortion and at the time she was losing her profit because she's paying for this fee and it's really like ridiculous you know of course

they're extorting her and at this point she was finding it difficult to pay her bills so she stops paying it she's in a no -win situation now almost immediately her van is vandalized the windows were smashed in and and somebody also slashed her tires.

Now, when her brother Tommy found out what was going on, Tommy.

He went into, he's like the main kind of guy in this.

He went into full -blown protective brother mode.

He tracked down the driver responsible and, quote, kicked his arse up and down the street.

This does sound like Tommy, Thomas Shelby, sorry.

I didn't think of the name.

I was like, Tommy. So this is Tommy Campbell, otherwise known as TC.

All right. But he was kicking people's arses up and down the street.

Hell yeah, he was. And, like, kicking arse all while two police officers who decided not to intervene just watched from their car nearby.

That is funny shit.

The fight was incredibly intense.

If you read about it, just know that there is, like, some animal cruelty involved.

Oh. Whoever he was fighting, like, stuck dogs on him, like, sent them to hurt him.

And one of them ended up being killed.

Oh. Really sad. That's sad.

But, so he thinks he's taking care of this.

He's like, you know what?

I took care of this.

I fought the guy responsible.

responsible. A few weeks later, Sadie's van explodes.

Holy shit. Luckily, she's not in it.

Like a car bomb? But she was like, literal car bomb.

Oh my god. She's not in it, but that fully ended her career as an ice cream van driver.

Wow. She's like, I'm done.

Yeah, I'd be good with that.

Now, even though he had just seen how fucking insane life could be in the ice cream trade, Tommy T .C.

Campbell was like, you know what?

I think I got the street smarts for this, let me join.

And he started in the fall of 1983.

No. Isn't that fucking crazy?

Why would you do that?

So instead of leasing a van from one of the firms, he actually bought his own.

He described it as a clapped out banger.

That's right. Yeah.

That's how I would describe it as well.

A clapped out banger.

That's how I describe all my cars.

Clapped out banger.

Don't make me laugh.

I'll start snorting.

Sorry. Now when TC there got his clapped out banger.

Hell yeah. All set.

His wife if Liz also got a license to operate around that same time and she was going to be operating as a street vendor.

So she started her route in a neighborhood known as Haggle.

And at the time, she was the only van on that particular route.

At the time. Wow, that's great.

I'm going to have so much success here.

And she did. And she made a lot of money for the time being.

I'm worried for her.

And that's the thing.

You wanted to get a successful route that nobody else had.

But it was also dangerous to get a successful route that nobody else did because uh someone would come along and start fucking with you and your van and try to take that over yeah that's not good and that was exactly the case with liz oh liz once people heard that she had a successful route she became a target and she started getting threatened now apparently tommy was also able to track down the guys who were messing with liz he just of course he was he's a bloodhound yeah i think you don't mess with the women in his life you sure don't apparently no and this time he didn't even have to throw

hands because he had a reputation I mean, look what he had done with his little sis there.

Yeah. He pretty much cemented that right there.

Yeah. So, he just kind of took care of it.

And that was that. He just gives a stern face.

Oh, yeah. He just, like, growls.

Yeah. He just goes, ooh.

Yeah. Gives a little eyeball and everyone's like, oh.

You can, like, smell him coming.

You, like, close your doors, hide your wife, hide your kids.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. One of those.

I keep picturing him as Thomas Shelby.

That would mean that he would just always smell.

Like, he would always smell cigarettes coming.

Because Thomas Shelby is a chain smoker.

They all are. Like, literally that entire show is just cigarettes.

Like, all the show.

I wonder what they smoke.

Like, they must smoke something different, right?

Yeah, they have to.

I'm like, you would all be in dire straits if you were smoking that much. You know, it's funny that you said that.

I was thinking that yesterday because I was watching Girls Next Door, obviously.

Obviously. And it was the shoot where Kendra dresses as Mae West. Oh, yeah.

So, she has, like, a cigarette holder.

And she's smoking, like, what looks like a real cigarette.

yeah i was like shit like like what is that really just but they must do something different for like a peaky i would think where they're literally i mean they are that's 99 .9 of the show is them lighting up cigarettes i thought you were about to say 99 .7 and i was like 99 .76 of the show smoking ciggies is them lighting and smoking cigarettes the smell of cigarette i like used to smoke cigarettes which is a really embarrassing fact about me the smell of them now yeah i really really don't like the smell of cigarettes so yuckas so yuckas i would forgive it for thomas shelby but but not ashkel but not ashkel

elena got so mad at me i did yeah but it all worked out i'm i'm uh not a smoky it was for if it was for the best yeah 100 okay okay i wasn't bullying her elena's always bullying me i am it's you know that's why she's my maid of honor and everything absolutely but you know anyways back to tc tommy campbell back to it so he just had to look at them this time he was like fuck you guys fuck you guys except like scottish yeah i can't do that it's a hard the broke it's hard it's difficult now he didn't only have street cred with the van drivers and as the leader of the gaucho razor gang of course but he

also was very well known to police i'm sure you're shocked to hear with them he had a reputation of being a quote -unquote vicious cruel man who was usually and frequently involved in mindless violence this is a quote fighting for territory.

Mindless violence. Yeah.

Just violence for violence sake.

Literally TC's life.

In the early 80s he was running multiple small time petty schemes.

He was selling stolen goods.

He was extorting money from various groups of people.

He was essentially born to be an ice cream van driver.

Yeah 100 percent. This is the life made for him.

Yeah exactly. Like he didn't choose the ice cream van life.

It chose him. It like sought him out.

Truly. Truly. Now Now, by the end of 1983, there were rumors circulating in Glasgow's East End about Marchetti drivers being run out of neighborhoods or followed on their runs by suspicious cars.

And Haggill, Reed Robertson, who was actually the man that sold Tommy Campbell his first van, started getting threats that if he didn't abandon his lucrative Haggill route, then his van would be blown up.

Oh, just that. Yeah.

Okay. According to Skeleton, the worst that happened, quote, was a brick being thrown through his rear window.

oh that's the worst that and isn't that crazy when you're like well the worst thing yeah like oh it was nothing all they did was throw a brick through his window he was all worried and then he just got a brick launched through his back window that was no big deal potatoes small potatoes but it didn't matter to read skeleton skeleton yeah because it just makes me think of skeleton yeah as soon as you said i was like skeleton oh i miss skeleton i do too i haven't seen him in a while yeah of course his family yeah he wouldn't see he went and saw his family family yeah Yeah.

I'll be back though.

So he must have had a good time with his family.

He's looking at us like.

Scouton. Yeah. If you don't know that.

We've definitely told that story.

That's what your youngest. Her like a little imaginary.

That was her. Perhaps real.

That was her guy. Her man.

You just sit there posing on the bookshelf.

Just living. Just living.

Yeah. You know. Then he would just go visit his family.

Family. Yeah. Well the skeleton just said like it's just a just a brick in your window.

Scouton is different.

He's different. I was just about to laugh and then I was gonna die.

We gave Elena some time to die.

I had to have a second.

Yeah, but she's okay now.

I'm okay. She's okay.

I'm back. It's really funny.

I just got a notification from Uber Eats and that just feels like fitting for this case.

Wow. What do they want for me?

I don't know. What do you want from me, Uber Eats?

They want me to order.

They want you to lease a van.

No. Never. A clapped out banger van.

I mean twist my arm.

Alright. Okay. Now, so Reed.

He has this this whole thing thrown through his windshield yeah he does skeleton's like yeah no big deal reed's like big deal uh i'm not gonna sit around and wait for things to get worse uh everybody take my route here you go reed for the win that's what i would do i'd be like yeah no that's as bad as that gets yeah he gave up his route and it also wasn't just the marchetti drivers being targeted at the end of september a 50s uh ice drive ices driver was just wrapping up the end of his run and he was going to be calling it a night as he was finishing up he saw a dark colored Ford Escort pull up

behind his van. And then two men wearing masks came out from the car, both holding shotguns.

The driver, John Brady, immediately threw his van into gear, put the pedal to the fucking metal, and sped away.

And as he sped away, these masked men banged on the sides of the van, smashed one of the windows in, and just the whole time were like screaming threats to Brady.

This is a lot. This is terrifying.

One might say this is the the most. Also, the fact that this happened and I have never, ever, ever heard of it.

Me neither. Fucking bonkers.

This is really wild.

It is. Now, when he made it to safety, Brady told the van's owner, who was Samuel McBride, about his ordeal and McBride took the information to the police in Easter House to make a formal complaint.

It's unclear if the police actually followed up on this complaint.

It doesn't seem like they followed up on a lot of these complaints.

It doesn't seem like it.

They were like, yeah, that's like your business.

They were like, this is annoying.

Yeah, exactly. But either way, McBride made the decision pretty quickly after all of this to sell that van to Tommy Campbell and leave the ice cream business for good.

And that's why that van was a clapped up banger.

Yep. There you go. I was like, there you go.

There you go. There you go.

So, like, we've been in 1983 for a while.

We have. 1983. The year of John.

The year of John. What a year.

And of escalation in the ice cream world.

You know, same thing.

And now, it wasn't just the - I see no difference.

I don't really see any difference at all.

That's what I said, right?

Quit making yourself laugh.

Now, it wasn't only the van drivers who were receiving threats of violence and actual harassment.

It was anyone even associated with the business at all.

This was the case in late October for Marchetti Brothers supervisor, James Mitchell.

He just finished his shift and he left the Marchetti garage a little bit after midnight.

night. Now as he's driving home, a dark colored sedan drives up behind him real fast with the high beams on.

So he slows down. He assumes the car behind him wants to pass.

But the other driver came up next to him and ends up keeping pace with him.

What's that fucking movie with Jared Leto that we just we watched it recently again?

Oh, The Little Things.

The Little Things when he does that.

Oh, so creepy. Yeah.

So he keeps pace. He's just driving along right next to him for a few hundred feet and then mitchell notices somebody in the back seat roll down the window and point what he believed was a gun in his direction no so he banged a hard turn down the next street available and the other car ended up speeding away but had he not had a street available he very well could have been shot uh yeah i'd say so from haggs hill to car time to rukasi someone had their sights on taking over the ice cream van runs in glasgow's east end and they were doing it one neighborhood at a time.

Also, if you see a dark -colored sedan in these neighborhoods...

Get the fuck out of there.

Run. There was dark -colored sedans everywhere.

Yeah. I'm like, you know, not a lot of people had access to cars.

All of a sudden, they just find access to cars.

All of a sudden, there's just dark -colored sedans coming out of their ears.

Yeah. Seriously. They lurk in.

They have so many. It's fucking crazy.

In late October, drivers in...

This is gonna be an attempt.

It's called Gartham Walk, I believe.

Ooh, I love that. It was a suburban neighborhood in Northeastern in a northeastern part of Glasgow.

Gartham Lock. But drivers there had become so terrorized that finally the police intervened.

Finally. It took this long.

I just can't get over the name of that.

I just keep thinking of like Wayne and Gartham Lock.

Right? It's wild. Rock on.

I'm trying. Party on, Wayne and Gartham Lock.

Now remember, this is 1983.

At this point, this had been going on since 1978 and the police are just getting involved now.

Yeah, I mean like now at this point, they're like, maybe we should do something about this.

They're like, you know what, this doesn't seem to be going away on its own, so, like, I guess we'll attempt something.

It's like an infection.

They're like, you know, it's weird. It seems like it's getting worse when we're not remedying it.

It's insane. So the police added increased patrols, and they actually even put plainclothes officers in decoy vans in an effort to catch the main perpetrators of this whole thing.

Now, the increased police presence, it definitely helped keep the violence and the intimidation to a minimum, but it also just chased the crime out of that specific neighborhood and into others that were less patrolled on october 27 1983 three vans in cartine were attacked in a span of just two hours jeez one driver what'd you say efficient i know and that's the thing like it really was kind of organized crime yes very much you know one driver told police he was working with his usual run at about 8 15 when quote Quote, four hooded men jumped out of a red Triumph and smashed the van using pickaxe handles

and other weapons. Fucking crazy.

Okay. Now the next morning, Marchetti's company secretary, who at the time was Archibald McDougal.

Yeah, it was. Fucking rad.

At the time and forever in our hearts.

He received an anonymous call from a quote -unquote gruff individual.

Yep. I would like to be described.

I love this. Henceforth as a gruff individual.

A gruff individual.

individual who told him quote i wish i could have a brogue for this but i'll try to be gruff scottish brogues are just so hard they are and i love them they're so they're so like pure in and close to my heart that i don't want to fuck with one no i know yeah i know i'm just going to be gruff if we can't attack your vans in the north gotham lock area because of the heavy police activity then we will attack your vans everywhere else and that's what we done last night if you that was what we done last night I love it there you go if you don't get your vans out of the Gotham lock area then we'll do

it again I love it that was pretty gruff that was that was gruff as fuck thank you I did get a little English I would describe you as a gruff individual thank you if I heard you say that thank you like that's what we done last night I know oh there you go there it is that's all I can do though okay okay that's all I got that's what we done last night that's what we done last night it's very boondock saints yeah except they're Irish oh shit but yeah I think we sounded a little more Irish.

We probably did. Well, anyway, all I can think of is don't care.

That's all I can think of too.

That's what we done last night.

That's what we done last night, don't care.

There you go. Now, the van runs, as we know at this point, definitely provided a profitable income for those willing to drive the routes, but the increasingly criminal nature of the business started offering even more financial opportunities.

For drivers who didn't want to get directly involved in vandalism or intimidation there are plenty of teenagers in and around the council estates willing to do it for them for just a small price i love like the like entry level positions it's like for those who don't want to get directly involved in the violence and intimidation you can hire a teenager yeah it's like you can you can have your own run yeah you can be one of the people who sells the illegal goods yep you can be one of the people who extorts the drivers for protection just for For their lives.

Or you can be a teenager who's going to vandalize some vans for the drivers.

It's kind of a pyramid scheme.

Yeah, there's a lot of different like little tendrils to this business and I appreciate that.

Yeah. So the teenagers, they were getting in on this now.

It's fucking crazy.

And it's sad too. Like we're lolling, but it's really sad that it came to this.

Well, that's – and the thing is when you really – because you can like laugh about just like how outrageous it got.

Well, and it sounds fictional.

That's the thing, because you think of it as like Peaky Blinders.

But like then when you really lay it down and you kind of like peel away all of this, it's out of pure desperation.

Exactly. All of this.

All of it. So it's like when you really look at the origin of it, you're like, oh, well, that sucks.

Yeah. Like that sucks.

That desperation causes this, you know?

It really is like a case study on society.

Yeah, it's really sad.

It is. So the teenagers.

The teens. In April 1984, 17 -year -old William Hamilton and a group of his friends in the Cowdenbeath estates were paid 70 pounds by a man named Thomas Lafferty, which I just like Lafferty.

Lafferty. Yeah. Thomas Lafferty told this William and his friends to smash up the van of a female driver whose route ran through the neighborhood.

Now, Lafferty worked for Tommy Campbell at the time, and they were also brother -in -laws.

And while later William Hamilton refused to say what Lafferty had given him the money for, he did admit to taking the money and a little over an hour after he took that money, he and his friends were arrested for donating Celtic Tammies, which I think those are like the hats, like the golf hats, kind of, with the tartans on them.

Oh, yeah. And like the fluffy ball on top.

Ah. Wearing those, and attacking a van with pickaxe sandals and a sledgehammer.

This is like very violent.

It's the most violent.

very aggressive and it's just like a group of 17 year olds with sledgehammers and pickaxes like a woman's a woman's van yeah i hopefully she wasn't in it at the time i know but they were arrested good now at this point the ice cream van trade had evolved into a small -time gang war for dominance in glasgow's east end but thanks to the occasional police intervention incidents of violence had been relatively minor but all of that would change in about four short months and everything would come to a head in a shocking act of destruction.

And it would forever rank Glasgow's ice cream wars as among the worst acts of mass murder that the country had ever seen.

Holy shit. This is, like, it gets to a point, like, of just insanity.

Like, you think that this is insanity, and it very much is.

When we reach what actually happens, you're like, what the fuck did you think was gonna happen?

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Hey, weirdos. We need to tell you about something that has completely blown our minds collectively.

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So, back to Andrew.

Andrew Fatboy Doyle.

Our guy. Our guy. The efforts to run Marchetti vans out of the Gartham Lock area had been largely successful.

successful. And by November, there were only two Marchetti vans operating in the neighborhood.

One of those was driven by James Mitchell Sr., who was the father of the Marchetti supervisor who was run off the road.

Okay. And I lost my place a little bit.

And the other driver was Mitchell's 16 -year -old daughter.

Oh, wow. Yeah. And that's the thing.

I said women were obviously driving too, but young people were driving, like 16 -year -olds.

If you had a license, since you had an opportunity.

Holy shit. Now, the obviously limited competition appealed to Tommy Campbell's sister, Agnes Lafferty, who was driving a van for 50 ices at the time.

According to her, the two Marchetti vans, quote, had a monopoly in the scheme and were charging the earth for their stuff.

And she wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to bring some competition to the neighborhood.

So she sees an opportunity here.

Okay, Agnes. Now in the Marchetti...

Okay, Agnes. Okay, Agnes, I'm here with you, I guess.

Yeah. I'm worried for you.

Yeah. When the Marchetti's company secretary, our boy Archibald MacDougall, our boy forever.

Forever and always.

When he heard about Lafferty's decision to begin operating in Gartham Lock, he knew he would need to add additional drivers in order to lock Lafferty and 50 Ices out of the neighborhood.

So they're all coming up with, like, schemes to get the other one out.

Scheme -y scheme schemes.

Now, other Marchetti drivers had expressed interest in this run, but the recent flurry of threats and vandalism were still fresh in archibald's mind yeah and he knew whoever he put on the route was gonna have to be somebody who wasn't gonna be easily intimidated yeah and that is where andrew doyle comes in and oh andrew fat boy is the one that's not is not easily intimidated 18 years old imagine that's your that's your rep like they they're like we need someone who will not be intimidated we pick you i'd be like i'd be like like oh my god okay i would pick you you would pick me you're not easily

intimidated at all that is true yeah you know that that feels good yeah no problem that feels right i'd pick you fat boy yeah i wouldn't do this though no this would intimidate me i would not pick you for this particular thing if it was like a different thing where i didn't want you to be intimidated thanks but i appreciate i would never send you into these streets yeah i wouldn't do this i would be intimidated as fuck but archibald did pick andrew doyle for him he's a good choice he called And he offered him a van to operate rent -free, which was huge.

Like, that's a massive opportunity, in order to, quote, freeze out any competition from rival firms. Now, like we just said, this is a big deal.

It wasn't like people were just throwing free vans at people who needed money left and right.

And at the time, Andrew Doyle likely thought this was a great opportunity.

His family lived in, like, the newer housing estates.

There was a lot of them living in one little apartment.

Like, this was a huge opportunity.

Yeah, absolutely. He had grown up in a large, well -known family, and they were a really liked family.

They grew up in Rukesi.

He was over six feet tall with a, quote, bulky, excuse me, big, bulky build.

And that's why his friends and family had taken to calling him Fat Boy.

It was a term of endearment.

When McDougal approached him with an offer to drive for Marchetti, Andrew at the time was actually working as a part -time bouncer at a local bar and sharing an apartment with his family in that rucasia state he obviously being a bouncer was no stranger to violence and he also wasn't really somebody to shy away from a fight if one came his way but at the same time most accounts say that he was very nice very reliable just a good dude yeah you just didn't fuck with him yeah exactly even tommy campbell doyle's competition for van runs described him as a quote nice big boy he wasn't a troublemaker

and he wasn't any sort of threat to anyone one.

Wow. Yeah. Now, McDougal instructed Doyle to run the same route as Tommy's sister, Agnes, staying either in front of or behind her the entire time.

Wow. So they're trying to intimidate her off this route.

Yeah. Andrew starts driving in November, and it didn't take long for the intimidation and threats to begin.

One night in November, he was actually at home, or not by himself, but at home, like you think you're safe there.

Yeah. You would think.

Watching television with his brother, Steven, and they hear a car outside.

So Andrew looks out the window and he recognizes the driver.

So he leaves the apartment and he goes out to talk to the man, but he doesn't get any further than the stairs and he's attacked from behind.

Whoa. Yeah. The man knocked Andrew to the ground and then he and four other men proceeded to kick and punch him for several minutes.

Oh my God. The attack was the first of a string of what they called back then frighteners, which were were intimidation tactics used to deter the Marchetti driver from continuing his Gartham lock run.

Damn. Yeah. Now, a neighbor testified in court later that she had seen the fight outside the apartment and actually identified Tommy Campbell, Thomas Gray, Gary Moore, and Joe Steele as the attackers.

Andrew actually didn't report the attack to the police, but when he informed his supervisor about it, McDougal, he called the Easter House police and did report the attack.

The Easter House police went to look for Andrew to kind of take a statement from him.

And they ended up having a hard time finding him along his route.

And when they did eventually track him down, he was like, no, I'm not talking about that.

No, I'm good. He's like, nope.

And he basically just told them it had nothing to do with them and to mind their own business.

So he knows what he's doing.

That's the thing. He's not easily intimidated.

He just got the shit kicked out of him and he's like, I'm not going to police.

Yeah. Like, I got this.

He's definitely very deeply entrenched.

Exactly. So the attacks continued through the rest of the year, with Marchetti and 50 Ice's vans taking heavy damage from rocks, bricks, hammers, you name it.

Just before Christmas, Tony Capuano, a driver for Agnes Lafferty, was on his way home after finishing his shift when four men in a, quote, wee red Fiesta.

A wee red Fiesta. Pulled at it, and you would think that's not that scary.

No. No. But they pull out in front of him and they throw a mallet through his windshield.

Imagine a wee red Fiesta causing that kind of fucking damage.

No. That's like sending a little toddler in with like a machine gun.

Like that's the same kind of vibe there.

That's the exact vibe.

Through a fucking mallet through his windshield.

Damn. Nearly hitting Tommy Campbell's sister, other sister, Liz, who was sitting in the passenger seat.

Jesus. you don't want to fuck with tommy campbell's family no you do not so capuano tried to get away but the men in the fiesta pursued them quote -unquote aggressively until they reached agnes lafferty's house and when they reached that house obviously nobody's gonna fuck with tommy's like family so the car disappeared down a side street now a month later near the end of january irene mitchell's van was parked in the garthom lock when she spotted william hamilton that guy from earlier, and a small group of boys headed her way.

The Mitchells had run -ins with Hamilton a few times before.

I was talking about one earlier.

And usually, this was at the urging of Thomas Lafferty.

So, she started the engine and started to pull away, and a hammer came flying through her back window.

What is with like hammers, sledgehammers, mallets?

Like that's like very, that's like brutality.

Like, you know what I mean?

Like this is so different the way this is being handled yeah you're just throwing hammers like throwing like hammers and mallets and shit at people like that's just so down and dirty this kind of shit is so you know it's so down and dirty it really is and that causes so much damage like you are throwing something to cause like maximum damage and like potentially death exactly you get hit in the back of the head with a fucking skull easy easy and with like the force that it takes yeah continue like like gripping through the air like that's insane it is so as the attacks increased in both frequency

and intensity so did the violence and threats from both sides rumors started circulating about one driver threatening to kill the other but up until this point everybody just kind of thought that was drunk shit talking yeah like everybody's oh i'm gonna kill him i'm gonna kill her yeah but that all changed one night in february when somebody fired a shotgun at andrew doyle's van van while he was parked on a street in Gartham Walk.

Holy shit. He later did tell the police, I was parked outside of Balvenie Street.

I went to pick up some bottles which had fallen over.

I heard a bang and then saw a hole the size of a football in the windscreen.

Jesus. So had he been in that van, he absolutely would have been killed.

100%. Ann Wilson, a teenager who had actually been helping Andrew on his run, told the police that she saw men wearing balaclavas and she didn't see their faces but she did see that they were driving a dark colored volvo oh and they were wearing like those masks yeah i was like i had to look up the pronunciation of that and like the picture came up math kind of thing literally like you just see the eyes oh that's so creepy fucking terrifying and that's it's like all over roots for ice cream ice cream technically it's like this all the all roads lead back to ice cream yeah that's why you're never

gonna eat ice cream the same after this yeah even though i'm gonna eat it though they were barely even selling ice cream at this point.

I was going to say, honestly, at the end of this, like, ice cream is a very loose term when it comes to what this is.

Yeah, precisely. So, the day after the shooting, Andrew flagged down a patrol officer to report that four men in a Ford transit van had been following him that day around Gartham Lock all afternoon.

Now, a few weeks later on March 18th, two men in a Ford transit van threw a brick through the back of his van, the back windshield now despite the escalation of the attacks and the stress that these attacks were probably causing andrew he refused to give up his route and he rarely reported the attacks to anybody he just kind of wanted to handle things his own way wow now a few months later his brother stephen told a jury um of an incident in late february in which quote andy was in the house and anthony asked him about the business of being shot at yeah andy told him not to say anything and just

leave it he obviously did not want to talk about it my mother asked him what it was about as well but he wouldn't say andy was just like that so he's like literally just he's like he's don't worry about it like i've got it under control yeah now andrew was only slightly more cooperative when it came to the local police telling him he didn't telling them he didn't really know of any reason why somebody would want to shoot him yeah in fact he told them all of the the trouble that started only recently when quote the 50s ice ices van came into the area the one with wait for agnes on the side now

it seemed to the police that andrew interpreted the escalating gang war as kind of just little fights between businesses and even though he had already been physically assaulted himself he never thought that he was personally in any real danger yeah whether this was really how he felt or just an act tensions were running particularly high by February of 1984, and it seemed that the violence was only going to escalate from here.

On February 1st, a supervisor with the Marchetti brothers, he arrived at the garage in the morning to find that at some point in the night, somebody had broken into the building and tried to start a fire with a crude gas bomb.

So, at this point, we are, what is the word, intensifying or whatever.

Yeah, this is escalating to a, I couldn't think of the word either.

I was like, Like, I'm going to talk until it comes to me and it just went whoop.

I was trying that too.

Yeah, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

But escalating to arson, straight up flames.

Crazy. So the petrol in a bottle approach wasn't effective at setting the garage on fire, but the arsonist did succeed in destroying one of the vans.

One of the vans did catch fire.

Damn. Now, when the attempted arson was discovered to have failed later that day, the arsonist actually returned in the early morning hours of the next day and tried to burn the building again.

This time they dumped gasoline through a hole in the ceiling, but the flames were immediately spotted by patrol officers in the area and it was able to be extinguished by the police department.

Wow. That's so scary.

But now we're trying to literally blow up businesses.

Yeah. Not just, I mean, trying to blow up a van in and of itself is pretty fucking terrifying, but now you're trying to destroy a whole building.

Crazy. This is one of those things where it's like, does everyone see where this is going?

oh yeah the writing anyone want to step in and be like this is going to get so much worse that's the thing like the writing was very much on the wall with this first of all the fact that when the fire wasn't successful they came back yeah it's like come on like these people are intent on destroying what they want to destroy and it's only going to get worse and it only did oh the night of april 16th 1984 there was a full house at the doyle's apartment in ruqueze andrew doyle's parents james and lillian doyle were home as well as himself and his siblings Daniel, Stephen, and Anthony.

They also had three guests staying with them, their other son, James Jr., their daughter, Christine Halloran, and Christine's 18 -month -old son, Mark.

Now a little before midnight, Lillian Doyle said goodnight to her husband and her sons, James Jr. and Anthony, and then she went to bed for the evening.

At some point in the hour that followed, the rest of the Doyle family members also went to bed and the house was dark.

Now at At some point between 1 and 2 a .m., somebody climbed the stairs to the Doyle apartment and poured gasoline on the door next to their front door.

This door was used to access an old coal cellar.

And then they tossed a match at the door and the old dry wood immediately ignited.

Oh my god. These are like housing, like little apartments.

They are going to catch fire quickly.

There's an 18 -month -old in there.

Yeah. Oh. Oh. So Lillian Doyle, Andrew's mom, woke up to the sound of her daughter screaming in the night, and she woke up to see what she was screaming about.

Now, Christine's baby actually had been sick with a cold in the last couple of days.

So she kind of thought, oh, she just needs help with the baby.

So she opens the bedroom into the hallway, and she's overwhelmed by thick black smoke and scorching heat that immediately forced her to close the door and stay back in the the bedroom she's fucking terrified so she goes to the window and she threw it open uh maybe for like fresh air because she had just basically like who's gonna say like walked into a fire essentially or for a potential escape escape by then the neighbors had already begun to gather outside 40 feet below my god and they were shouting telling her that the fire brigade was on its way now a short distance away another crowd had

gathered and this one had gathered around 22 year old Steven Doyle.

Like his mom, he had been woken up by the commotion and he got up to investigate.

And when he opened his bedroom door, he was also pushed back inside by the smoke and the searing heat of the fire.

So in a panic, he ran to the window, didn't think too much, just punched through the glass, cut his hand and arm in the process.

He breathed a deep lungful of fresh air, went back to the door and tried to make his way into the hallway to help any family members that he could but he only made it a few steps before he had to go back into the bedroom but he was able to grab dixie the family dog oh before once again closing the door he literally had no other option at this point so he went to the window sat on the ledge for a minute and jumped three stories to the ground below holy shit badly badly injuring himself in the process but he saved him and dixie's life oh lives so local firefighters received the call about the fire

at the doyle residence a little before 2 30 in the morning and they responded immediately their first priority was to get anybody inside to safety but the flames were still burning like way too hot for them to even get to the door they couldn't even get to the door so they had to work to extinguish the fire from outside now once they were able to access the apartment firefighter gerald lafferty so many lafferty's i know he entered the apartment wearing a breathing apparatus apparatus and he was carrying a small extinguisher to kind of clear his way.

The first member of the family found was Lillian.

She was hanging half in and half out of the window.

And as he moved toward her, she screamed at him to help the children first. She was like, don't bother with me, you go get them first. Oh my God.

So in the next bedroom, he found Andrew and Daniel kneeling in front of the windows and James Jr. lying on the bed beside them.

Whether out of confusion or just a desire not out to abandon their brother they both refused to leave and they actually had to be dragged from the apartment by firefighters oh my god if you google it there's a picture of andrew doyle being taken out of the apartment by the firefighters and he just looks like in a daze obviously so when lafferty reached the third bedroom he discovered james senior lying on the floor next to his daughter's bed this is really really really sad christine was still in bed and she seemed to be using her body to shield the baby from harm like she laid on top of the baby she

was severely burned she there were no signs that she was conscious but baby mark appeared to be breathing holy shit so the firefighters removed mother and child from the apartment and they attempted to perform cpr on christine but she was gone oh my god that's so sad 25 years old holy shit 14 year old anthony was the last one of the doyle family to be found he'd actually been sleeping on the the couch in the living room so he was the most vulnerable one to the flames he was badly burned across most of his body and like his father and brother james he was laid outside while the emergency responders

used a resuscitator to keep him alive oh my god now the extent of the damage to the doyle's lives and property was massive and shocking christine died at the scene anthony died on the way to the hospital baby mark unfortunately died the following afternoon he was transferred to the icu at the sick children's hospital in york hill but oh it was just too much for his body oh my god james senior and james junior were both both placed in the infirmary burns unit for extensive injuries and listed in critical condition my god daniel and andrew were also placed in the burns unit and their situations

were considered serious.

Stephen had suffered serious back injuries and shattered his left leg when he jumped from that window.

He had to get multiple pins in his leg among various other treatments.

Lillian was treated for smoke inhalation and shock actually, but was actually discharged later that day.

So she survived. Several of the Doyle's neighbors including those who attempted to rescue the family were also treated for smoke inhalation.

And these are all innocent people.

Yeah. You know, like these are innocent people.

I mean, Andrew Doyle was just running a fucking van route.

That's it. He was hired to do this.

And everybody was intimidating him.

And he was just going about his business.

And the saddest thing, I think, is that he was sought out to do this.

He didn't even apply for this job.

Like, he was sought out.

And it's like, this is his family.

They didn't have anything.

An 18 -month -old doesn't have anything to do with this bullshit ice cream war.

And they weren't even supposed to be there that night.

Like, they just happened to be there.

Yeah. Yeah. So his father, Andrew's father, James, or excuse me, his brother, James Jr., died the following day from his burns and smoke inhalation.

And within a week, his father, James Sr., and Andrew Doyle also died.

The former of bronchopneumonia and severe burns and the latter, Andrew, of bronchopneumonia and lung damage from inhaling toxic gases during the fire.

So literally almost this entire family gone.

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So as fire officials sifted through the wreckage of the apartment, they couldn't identify the origin point of the fire because, I mean, it had been just like ravaged.

Yeah, just demolished.

The best they could tell was that the fire had started around the door going into the old coal cellar.

However, it appeared as though an accelerant had accidentally or intentionally been poured under the front door, which provided the flames a direct path into the main apartment.

So it's likely that whoever set the fire didn't know that the Doyles had been using the old coal cellar as storage, and behind that door were a ton of highly flammable items like tires, dry wood, stuff like that, Yeah, which when held under pressure, created a way larger and way deadlier explosion than hopefully was intended.

Than maybe was intended, yeah.

Right. Now, given Andrew's conflict with the drivers from 50 Isis and the recent escalation in violence, investigators were immediately sus and assumed that the fire was arson and murder.

Yeah. With no time to waste, they set up an incident room at the nearby Easterhouse station and they were ready to go.

Holy shit. it. So this case was assigned to Detective Superintendent Norman Walker.

He was a veteran of the police force.

He'd been on the job more than 30 years.

Now, despite having been told about the feud between the ice cream van drivers, he didn't really have any concrete leads.

He didn't really have any evidence because everything was burned in the fire.

So he was just didn't really have much to go on.

He's just going off of what people are saying.

Yeah, so he's going door to door in Rukazi.

And a few neighbors in Rukazi reported seeing three or four boys in the the area shortly before the fire and another had seen three teenagers buying a can of gasoline a little after midnight on the night of the fire so walker finally got his first concrete lead when he interviewed a neighbor by the name of reginald rankin now the fact that he didn't just run with this is insane because this man tells him everything he needs but the detective is like okay sounds good like and why would you listen to a man named reginald rankin it's your it's you You have to.

I'd be like, tell me everything.

It's an unwritten rule that if your name is Reginald Rankin, everyone has to do what you say, and you're going to tell the truth.

Tell me my, prophesize to me.

Tell me my future. Please.

I'll believe you, Mr. Rankin.

100. Let's go. So that lead, like I just said, would be ignored for years.

That's good. This lead that I'm about to tell you.

According to Rankin, he and a friend had been driving, and I literally can't believe this has been ignored.

Wait, you're going to get so mad.

He and a friend had been driving back to his apartment in Rukazi in the early morning hours of April 16th.

And he said as he turned the corner into the apartment complex, he was hit on the front corner of his car by a red Ford Escort seemingly racing away from the estate.

That's pretty damning.

Only gets worse. he described the other driver as a man in his late 20s early 30s with quote fair streaked shoulder shoulder length hair of a slim build and wearing blue denims a denim jacket and a yellowish t -shirt rankin also told the interviewing officers that the man was short about five six and had a scar on his cheek quote just to the right of his nose like literally gives him everything this is like a really detailed description now when rankin got out of the car to confront the driver who had just style hit him.

Two other men got out of the car and all three of them ran off and just left the car.

Okay, guys. So he checks inside the car.

He's like, what the fuck is going on here?

And notices a gas can in the back seat along with a strong smell of gas.

We're just ignoring this?

No, he didn't report the incident initially or the accident because he didn't have a license or insurance.

And he was like, you know what?

I think we're just going to let this go.

I'm going to re -up that and then I'll Let them know.

He didn't know about the fire yet either.

Yeah. But he came forward once he knew of the fire and the deaths of the Doyle family.

So after telling this story to the officers who were literally going door to door for leads, he expected to hear from them sooner or later.

Yeah. No one ever contacted him to follow this up.

Guys. Like, y 'all. How does this shit happen?

That's what I want to know.

Like, shitty detective work.

Yeah. You've been on the force 30 years, and this tip was just literally like neatly wrapped in a bow and tossed onto your lap.

Under a fancy cloche, and they were just like, voila.

Here it is. Here you go, sir.

Nah. And they were like, no, I don't want that.

I'm going to make my own.

Why would I do that?

Why? So searching for any lead in the case, or maybe not.

Or maybe not. Maybe not.

Perhaps not. and detective superintendent walker started interviewing the men being held at barliny prison sea hall which was a holding area for prisoners awaiting trial now it was in this sea hall that they encountered a man named billy love he was a thief and he was awaiting trial for armed robbery yeah he was yeah billy love was absolutely and he was there along with his accomplices ronald carlton and john campbell so love told walker that he had information about the Doyle family murders but if he was gonna give that information he wanted to be let out of prison of course he has something

to gain he's gonna give you what of course I don't know if he's gonna give it up for free uh in my personal opinion nothing that he told them is real yeah I mean he's he's got every reason to lie about it exactly and you know who doesn't fucking Reginald Reginald was just going about his business Reginald has every reason to lie exactly he was He was like, I know I was going to get in trouble here, but people died.

So I found that out, and I was like, I got to say something.

Okay, I got to say something.

And they were like, no, not interested.

Believe Reginald Rankin, okay?

That's what I'm saying.

Justice for Reginald Rankin.

No, none of it. None of it.

So Walker returns on May 8th with a promise of bail for Love, and Love gives a short version of this story that he says he has.

Cool. We're going with the criminal instead of the random witness.

Yep, yep. So according to Billy Love, he had been the driver of the red Volvo spotted on the night of Andrew Doyle's van, the night that it had been shot up.

He claimed that it was his accomplice, Thomas Tambie Gray, who pulled the trigger.

Now, Love claimed that the two had been paid by Tommy Campbell's brother -in -law, Thomas Lafferty, to destroy Doyle's van.

That very well could have been the truth.

Because Thomas Lafferty was always giving people money to do bad shit.

Of course. And Billy Love was like, you know Billy Love.

Yeah. He was all about that.

I believe maybe Billy Love was there that night and like shot at the van.

Yeah. I don't know about the rest. Yeah.

So he adds that a few weeks later he was in the Netherfield bar and he overheard Tommy Campbell, Thomas Gray, Joseph Steele and a few other men that he didn't know talking about setting fire to the Doyle's front door, quote, just to give him a fright.

Okay. I don't know if you're like really big on organized crime that you're going to be talking about it where people can hear you talk about it.

Yeah, where people can go warn the person that you're talking about, setting their door on fire.

Just like in a random bar.

Yeah. I don't know.

Maybe, who knows. His story seemed a little too easy.

Almost too good to be true.

But it fit a narrative that had begun to take shape in the local press.

Oh, yeah. It's always good when you come up with the story before you have any evidence.

That's fine work. Oh, just wait.

Fine investigatory work right there.

Just wait. So the press, they were chasing down and publishing any and all information they could on the Doyle family murders.

regardless of fact or accuracy they didn't give a shit according to douglas skeleton it's skeleton i don't know why i'm saying it weird the tabloids quote we're talking about the infiltration of the ice cream trade by gangsters often citing unnamed sources i mean there you go just running amok amok amok amok so not only did billy love's story fit the narrative quite nicely it also implicated a number of local petty thugs, quote unquote, like Tommy Campbell and Thomas Lafferty who were well known to be involved in the feud between the Marchetti and 50s ice drivers and the police wanted them off

the street. Of course.

It fits for everyone.

Yeah. Now the information from Love led Walker to 23 -year -old criminal Joseph Granger who was an occasional associate of Tommy Campbell.

Now on April 23rd so this is before Detective Walker gets the information from love okay but before he gets this whole story granger gave police a detailed nine -page statement in which he confirms his association with tommy campbell and acknowledges campbell's role in the ice cream van feud but explicitly denied having been in the netherfield bar having participated in any conversations about setting fire to the doyle's front door or knowing anything about the murder of the doyle family now his statement was critically important because, among other things, he denied having participated in the conversation at the Netherfield

bar more than a week before Walker supposedly got that tip from Billy Love.

Huh. Which raises the question, why would the police ask Joseph Granger about his presence in a bar and participation in a conversation that they didn't even know about yet?

Yeah, that's strange.

How did that work? How did that work?

Or was the paperwork just dated incorrectly because you were lying?

Mm, I don't know. I don't know.

I don't know. I don't know.

So based on the information provided by Billy Love and their suspicions of Joseph Granger, the police arrested Tommy Campbell, Joseph Steele, Thomas Gray, and Gary Moore on May 12th for the arson murders of the Doyle family.

And nearly two weeks later, detectives re -interviewed Granger, during which they claimed he broke down and started to sing like a canary.

I bet. I'm sure. Now, according to detectives, he admitted to his involvement in the fire at the Marchetti brothers garage which he was driven to by campbell and gray he said okay now granger's statement claimed that they cut a hole through the roof and poured gasoline from a small from small bottles into the garage and then dropped lit matches and pieces of paper in to catch the gas but interestingly his statement made no mention of the gas can that was found by investigators outside which at the time was identified as the can from which the gas was poured.

Huh. They're like, oh, you forgot something.

Yeah. Can you go back in that story real quick and add that in?

Exactly. It's like the Jesse Meskelli thing.

Took the words right out of my mouth.

That's exactly what I was about to say.

Whenever he would slip up on a detail that they had already created.

They'd be like, oh, did you mean this entirely opposite thing of what you just said happened?

Oh, did you forget that you also did that?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, okay. Just go back and say what we said.

Now you said that this person tied the rope.

Did you mean that you actually tied it?

Yeah, you did, right?

That's it. So what you meant was that like you said you poured it from small bottles, but what you meant is like the one that we found outside, right?

That big one? And he's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.

Yeah, that one. They're like, yeah, absolutely.

It was that one, yeah.

But the best part is they didn't even go – they didn't even like fix it.

They were just like – Yeah, you're admitting it.

Yeah, whatever. Like, okay.

There was a can out there.

Who gives a – We'll just throw that somewhere.

So finally, Granger's supposed statement got around to the night that he and the other men planned to burn Doyle's front door and a week later he recalled the men dropping him off at home before they left to set the fire.

So the statements from Granger and Love appeared to be tying up a number of loose ends of unsolved crimes in the east end.

Huh, who knew? Wow, what luck.

And it also helped the police deal with a few troublesome characters from the neighborhood.

Oh my goodness. And their case was only strengthened by statements made from a number of local teenagers, including William Hamilton, who I would literally bet $0 on.

I was just going to say, wow, what a worthy source of information.

Yeah. He confirmed the accused man's participation in the ice cream van feud and the attacks on vans and drivers.

He maybe left out the part where he was completely involved.

I was going to say, hello, Mr. Hamilton.

Exactly. Do you have something else to say?

Always. So the detectives also managed to get Joseph Reynolds, whose sister was dating Gary Moore at the time of the fire to identify Campbell and Moore as having shown up outside his sister's window shortly after the fire had been set.

So they're putting them all in like the right places.

Of course. So the ice cream wars in Glasgow's East End, they were violent, disruptive, destructive.

But for the most part, they were confined to a certain area and within a certain social group.

And they rarely affected those outside of the Marchetti and 50s firms. The murder of the Doyle family, on the the other hand, really represented a vaguely defined epidemic of crime that outraged the public and the public demanded that something be done.

So pressure is being put on the police.

And then the tabloids and press only complicate things further because they're just sensationalizing all these stories.

It's leading to an increase in social anxiety, panic.

The residents want something to be done.

But in reality, this was a feud between petty criminals that played out in in a poor area of the city.

And people outside of the East End rarely ever thought of this area or visited it.

That's so wild. Yeah.

It's like such an isolated area.

But it sounds like this is just so massive and so everywhere and leeching into every part of everything.

Yeah. But when you really think about it, I'm sure there were most people around that were like, what?

Yeah, I know nothing about that.

It didn't affect them.

That's confined there and we don't talk about that.

That's not for us. Wow.

It's a class thing.

Yeah. And it's fucked that other people didn't want to get involved, you know, and stop it, not get involved and continue it.

Let's get involved.

Let's do this. So in the wake of the fire, though, the feud between petty criminals was blown way out of proportion and dramatized.

I don't even think, is that how you say that?

Dramatized. Yeah, I like it.

Dramatized. Dramatized.

Dramatized. I think it's dramatized.

I think it is dramatized.

Dramatized, as though it were a complicated mafia conspiracy.

But under these circumstances, the arrest of Campbell and his supposed accomplices served not only to neatly close this high profile case, but also as a demonstration of supposed action from law enforcement to address the growing crime wave. Now, between the negative public sentiment and basically like hysteria tabloid reporting, there was little chance of anybody getting a fair trial when the case finally made its way to court.

And that was on September 3rd, 1984.

1984. Tommy Campbell, Joseph Steele, Thomas Gray, and Gary Moore, all of them had maintained their innocence since their arrests.

But in a case involving the murder of a family, which also included a baby, it's really unlikely that anybody gave a shit about what they were saying.

Now, also charged at the same time were George Reed, because Tommy Campbell had purchased his first van from him.

Oh, yeah. And John Campbell.

Those charges actually would be dismissed not not long after the trial started, but it's worth mentioning that they were players in the beginning of this.

Now, in total, there were 16 charges ranging from intent to intimidate and disorderly conduct to arson and murder.

The trial was six weeks long, and the Crown's lead prosecutor, Michael Bruce, painted a picture of basically a mafia -style campaign of intimidation against Andrew Doyle and all the other Marchetti drivers, which was led by Tommy Campbell.

He's the frontman. Now, through the testimony from literally hundreds of witnesses, Bruce presented a condensed timeline that started with Agnes Lafferty and Andrew Doyle's beginning the Gartham Lock run in the fall of 1983.

It set off a pattern escalating violence against Marchetti drivers, but Doyle in particular, which then led to the murder of those six members of his family on April 16, 1984.

So, on paper, the case against all these men definitely seemed like a slam dunk.

Yeah. Thanks to the press, the public had already formed opinions of all these guys and their guilt or their innocence.

Guilt. Guilt. So, all Bruce really had to do was reinforce what they thought they already knew, support the narrative with evidence and statements to the police.

But the problem was that a lot of the prosecution's case was built on criminals and other unsavory characters making accusations and claims against other criminals and unsavory characters.

That's the thing. It's a he said, she said.

Yeah. Yeah. For instance, during an interview with detectives, Agnes Lafferty's daughter, Carol, she told the police that she had seen Joe Steele, quote, quote, carrying a big gun about two feet long in the days before Andrew Doyle's van was shot up.

Now, she said that like before the trial started.

She said as much on the stand when she was called by Bruce to testify.

But then she was cross -examined by Steele's lawyer, Donald Findlay.

And she admitted, quote, she did not know very much at all because she was always full of drugs.

Oh, all right. Like she literally said that.

Yeah, I'm just always full of drugs.

She was like, I don't actually know if I saw that because I'm always full of drugs.

So, I probably didn't see that.

Just the wording of that is pretty iconic.

Now similarly, another witness for the Crown, Gordon Ness, testified that he, Steele, and John Campbell were paid to harass the Marchetti vans in the fall of 1983, and that the three of them frequently traveled together in Rukezi looking for their targets.

Now like Carol Lafferty, Ness also struggled with addiction, and he later said that he'd been using heavily at the time and actually had trouble remembering the specifics of his previous statement.

So not great witnesses.

Not great. Now, a few days into the trial, the prosecution's case took several more hits.

When key witnesses changed their stories, flat out rejected their previous statements to the police, all of the above.

Tony Capuano, who the police claimed had admitted to being present during the first attack on Irene Mitchell's van, he testified that he had actually never admitted to such things, that the police were lying.

Straight up lying. He said he was never present for the attacks.

He was set up by the investigating officers.

Oh. Yeah, same thing.

The plot thickens. Same thing in the case of Joseph Granger, who like was singing like a canary about everything and had a story that made no sense because things hadn't even happened yet that he was talking about.

His statement was the one that all of these arrests were really largely based on, but he denied ever admitting anything to the police.

He told the jury, I swear by my mother's life that I had fuck all to do with that fire.

Wow. Yeah. All right.

What a statement. Squish.

I swear on my mother's life that I had fuck all to do with that fire.

Or that fire, excuse me.

Damn. Now, like Hamilton had done on the stand before him, Granger testified that he'd never given the incriminating statements to the police.

All he did was sign them after having been threatened and bullied.

And in addition to those threats, he claimed that the officers, quote, pulled his hair, jostled him, kicked him in the shins and assaulted him even more prior to him agreeing to sign statements.

Damn. Which, like, I believe.

I believe. I definitely believe that.

So the prosecution really wasn't, like, living their best life.

No, definitely not.

And then they were dealt another blow on the seventh day of trial when another key witness, Billy Love.

Billy Love. He took the stand to testify for the Crown.

Now, Detective Superintendent Walker's case had been built pretty largely also on statements from Love, who told a similar story when he was questioned by Bruce under oath.

But then he was questioned by Lafferty's attorney, John Smith, and his story started to change.

He had testified that there had been no inducements or promises made by the prosecution or investigators in exchange for his testimony.

But when Smith pushed back, Love replied, I was told I probably would not be charged.

Wow. Hello. Wow. So he literally told them everything they wanted to hear just so he could get out of jail.

and then he was like no that's not what happened and then he gets a little pushback and he's like yeah that's exactly what happened yeah that's actually exactly it so the more and more they pushed him the more his story unraveled and his truthfulness ended up being called into question but since all and since all these men were being tried together love was subjected to cross -examination from every defense attorney damn yeah one was poking additional holes in his story the other was poking more holes oh man kept going until tommy campbell's attorney donald mcauley finally suggested that billy

love had been lying all along and had simply gone along with the information that he was being fed by the detectives in order to get himself out of jail boom so in their closing arguments the defense attorneys for the accused men rested their cases reminded the jury that the case against their clients was basically all on speculation and supposed pose statements from people who under oath fully denied giving those yeah like come on it was a compelling argument and it was backed up by the seriously limited physical evidence and testimony given on stand during the trial but it was also an argument

that was easily undermined by the by the prosecution who told the jury quote it is only if you accept the evidence of the accused that you could agree with the defense's submission so the judge in the case lord can craig i just love i'm I'm loving all of this.

Lord King Craig. All these names.

He had similar closing remarks for the jury.

He said of the defense's argument that the jury would have to accept, quote, Not one or two or four, but a large number of detectives had deliberately come here to perjure themselves to build up a false case against an accused person.

Whoa. Yeah. Wild. Lawd.

So what do you think is going to happen here?

Do you think they're going to get off or do you think they're going to get convicted?

I'm not looking. I'm covering anyway.

She's covering the screen.

Okay. I still think they're going to get convicted.

You do? Yeah. Okay.

Because I think there's a greater play at work here.

Correct. Oh, I am. On October 9th, 1984, the jury retired to begin with their deliberations, and that spilled over into the following day.

And then the following day, they finally come back with their verdict.

Thomas Campbell found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment with the possibility, excuse me, with the recommendation that he served 20 years.

he was also found guilty of the shotgun attack on Andrew Doyle prior to the fire and sentenced to years in prison to be served concurrently with his previous sentence Joseph Steele was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment also found guilty of conspiracy to assault a van driver and of vandalizing the Marchetti vans and he was sentenced to six years and one year respectively to be served concurrently I feel like they should all be charged with conspiracy to commit an act of violence against a van driver.

One hundred percent.

Shouldn't they all just get slapped with that immediately?

Like all of them across the board?

You would think. Yeah.

But not all of them were.

Thomas Gray was found guilty of the attempted murder of Andrew Doyle in the shotgun attack and he was sentenced to 14 years in prison.

Thomas Lafferty was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder for the shotgun attack on Andrew Doyle, sentenced to three years imprisonment.

George Reed was convicted on a lot of lesser charges including a knife assault on a driver vandalism stuff like that he was sentenced to three years and john campbell was convicted of vandalism conspiracy to commit murder for the shotgun attack and he received a sentence of one and three years respectively to be served concurrently damn yeah so all in all thomas campbell and joseph steel and really thomas gray got like the heaviest sentences, but definitely Thomas Campbell and Joseph Steele.

Wow. Got like really intense sentences.

So in the end, the verdicts really had little to do with evidence and testimony presented at trial, and really everything to do with the reputations of the accused and what they represented to society.

Each of the six accused in the case, all of them were violent men.

They had extensive criminal histories.

And they were young too.

So it was like really, it spoke to their character.

for Joseph Steele, criminality was just a way of life.

It was actually handed down to him by his older brothers and their father.

It was kind of just like the family's way of life, you know?

Now, Reg McKay, who wrote a book with Tommy Campbell, acknowledged the past. He actually referred to Joseph Steele as, quote, a low -life crook who would rob your granny's meter.

Damn. But he said he's always believed that the men were innocent victims of a police conspiracy to close a high -profile case.

I kind of believe that, too.

Yeah. I think, possibly some of them were involved in this, but I'm like, I don't know.

I don't think it all adds up to what they said.

Not all of it. So in simple terms, these were bad dudes who committed countless acts of violence and brutality, but a lot of people doubted whether or not they were responsible for the Doyle family murders.

Over the years, Thomas Campbell and Joseph Steele did their best to keep attention on the case and tried to get the ruling overturned.

Steele actually escaped from Berlini Prison multiple times.

to him one time he escaped he made it to buckingham palace and super glued himself to the gates i'm literally obsessed with that fact same that is the most unhinged shit i have ever heard certainly is super glued himself to the gates of buckingham palace but was ultimately returned to prison oh oh he was yeah that didn't work for him it was like he's not still there super glued to buckingham palace no sorry wow super glue i'm like where'd you get super glue and what did you do just like smear it all over and then you just stick yourself on there i know i wonder if he put it like on his clothes

first did he put it on the bars first what came first let's ask him the bar the clothes i don't know wow no the two of them also filed numerous appeals and they were actually allowed out on bail in december of 1996 while the appeals court reconsidered their case following Bill Love's 1992 confession that he had lied to the detectives in 1984.

Shocked. Yeah, he said he, quote, invented a conversation between Campbell and Steele and allowed them to take the blame for his own action in shooting out a Van Buen screen.

There you go. So he was the one who shot through it.

So he was actually the one and he's like, I just let somebody else get the ball.

Yeah, exactly. Nice, Billy Love.

So the Court of Criminal Appeals in Edinburgh, Edinburgh, they reviewed the case and they actually upheld the initial ruling saying there had been, quote, Quote, no reasonable explanation as to why a key witness who now claims he lied during the original trial has changed his mind.

Guilt? Yeah, I was gonna say.

But then the case was appealed again in 2004 after having been selected for review by Scotland's Criminal Cases Review Commission, which is, quote, a body set up to examine alleged miscarriages of justice, which I believe this was.

The case was chosen when Brian Clifford, who's a professor of psychology at the University of East London, he was chosen to review the evidence, and he discovered, quote, a statement said to have been made by Mr. Campbell to police after his arrest was written in the notebook of all notebooks of all four officers with a high degree of similarity.

Wow. So that meant four officers sat there and wrote a fake ass statement in their notebooks.

And they were like, we'll just say that this is Tommy Campbell's statement.

Why would you all write down his statement together?

That's so fucked up.

No. So Clifford concluded that it would have been highly unlikely that all four of them would have been able to recall that statement with the same level of detail, which led him to believe that at least in this one instance, a statement had been fabricated, which if one statement has been fabricated, there's more.

Exactly. Well, the string, the whole sweater will unravel.

Mm hmm. So he reviews the entire case and the commission determined that officers never had probable cause to arrest or sufficient evidence to convict campbell or steel damn and the conviction was overruled which allowed both of them to go free oh shit yeah in 2004 in 2004 he's overturned tommy campbell actually died from natural causes in june of 2019 though oh damn yeah and as of now the murder of the doyle family remains unsolved but it is considered an open matter wow and that is the case of glasgow's ice cream war war, ice cream van wars.

Wow. I did not see.

I did not foresee all of that.

No one did. I did not.

No one did. I didn't know what I foresaw, but I did not foresee that.

And how sad is it that like an entire family was brutally, brutally killed for an ice cream route?

Yeah. Like an ice cream route just so somebody else could make better money.

That's horrific. It's so sad.

And I I think whoever went there that day and did do that, I don't think they intended to kill that family.

It does sound like that is, like, that must be, like, a thing, like, you light the door on fire.

Right. Kind of thing, and it just seems like it was just bad luck.

And it was the door next to their front door, so I think it was supposed to be, like, a scare tactic.

Yeah, like, I'll light your door on fire.

Exactly. Don't fuck with me.

But, like, maybe don't light things and doors on fire.

Yeah, I was going to say, that's bad.

Don't intimidate people, because that's also against the law.

and it's like of course it's a fucking house if you light the door on fire the whole thing might go up you idiots but it's like I do from the sounds of all of it and I would hope this would be the case that that was all that was intended was intimidation and lighting that door on fire right but wow what a terrible tragedy that followed seriously and it's like who did it I know who the fuck did it I don't know and maybe they did do it yeah all of them did do it but it It was just that the police didn't go about the investigation in the right way.

Yeah, they didn't correctly gather the evidence to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.

Who's to say? Wow. But that's the case of the Glasgow ice cream wars.

What a tale. Not food networking at all.

Not at all. No. That's not what that is.

Yeah. But with all that being said, we do hope that you keep listening.

And we hope you keep it weird. But not so weird that ice cream vans do this because, no, thank you.

i just want the spongebob one with the eyeballs that are gum there you go yeah bye If you like Morbid, you can listen early and ad -free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.

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[The Glasgow Ice Cream Wars: A Deadly Turf Battle]-[Episode 432: Glasgow Ice Cream Wars]

📋 Summary

The Glasgow Ice Cream Wars: A Deadly Turf Battle

The Rise of the Ice Cream Van Economy

Escalation from Pranks to Violence

The Tragic Murder of the Doyle Family

Flawed Justice and Legal Controversy

A Legacy of Unresolved Truth

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript