Robert McDowall, 48, a driver for a Lisburn-based flower importer, and Frank Gallagher, 39, a career criminal from Springburn, Glasgow, appeared at the High Court in Kilmarnock to admit being concerned in the supply of drugs. SCDEA officers had trailed the lorry from Holland and tracked it 400 miles north after it was driven through Customs at the Harwich ferry terminal in Essex. They had been watching as McDowall met Gallagher at a Little Chef restaurant on the M74 at Dumfries. They were watching as Gallagher drove to the deserted Lochside Industrial Estate, with McDowall's truck following. And they were watching as Gallagher reversed up to the lorry trailer and the men started moving boxes to the car. Only then did they swoop, arresting both men. On December 17, the pair were back in court for sentencing. Gallagher, who had a previous drug dealing conviction, got 12 years and McDowall, an Irishman living in Ballantrae, Ayrshire, 10. Jailing the pair, Lord Hardie told Gallagher: "I take into account you are not at the top of the chain and I reserve a life sentence for those who are if they are ever brought to justice."
The judge was half right. Gallagher was not the top man but he was at his right hand. For the first time, the police had got close to Stevenson. They had picked off one of his key lieutenants, a fixer feared for his capacity for violence.
Their sights were now fixed squarely on his boss - and they had an ace in the hole. Stevenson had blundered. He usually arranged business by remote control but for once, he had got too close. He had met McDowall face-to-face before recruiting him to smuggle drugs. That meeting had taken place a few months earlier, over burgers and chips around a table in the garden of the Queen's Hotel. McDowall then ran the small, white-painted hotel with his wife Carol. It was on the main road running through the south Ayrshire village of Colmonell. Much later, Carol would tell the police: "It was a nice day. I was working at the hotel and Robert was there with me when the two guys arrived. "Robert and the two guys sat at a table out the back of the hotel talking. I remember Robert saying to me, 'Can you make Frank and the other guy a couple of chicken burgers?' "I'm not sure what Robert called the other guy but I'm sure it was Jay or a name beginning with the letter J." McDowall and his new acquaintances had a lot to discuss. Within months, Gallagher would be arrested alongside McDowall in Dumfries after taking delivery of two boxes each containing 20 kilos of heroin. The other man visiting Ayrshire that day was Jamie Stevenson. The three men had met just once before, when they'd had a conversation in a car parked by a Tesco supermarket next to Ayr Racecourse, just before Christmas.
A mutual associate from Northern Ireland had introduced them.
The men discussed the possibility of McDowall earning extra money by adding drugs to his lorry's loads as he drove across the continent to Britain.
They suggested he might find a job with a Northern Ireland-based flower importer. They told him there would be good money in it. He agreed.
Money had been tight since the McDowalls had taken over the hotel in the scenic village 14 miles south of Girvan, four years earlier.
Stevenson was usually too careful to be anywhere near the drugs he was pouring into Scotland. He was usually too cautious to discuss those drugs with anyone apart from his tight and loyal inner circle.
So why had he taken the risk of meeting a man he hardly knew to discuss, in incriminating detail, how he was regularly bringing class A drugs into Scotland with the help of complicit HGV drivers and their trucks?
One associate remembers: "Stevenson had a few men whose judgement and abilities he trusted completely and they would usually do any face-to-face stuff. But he had to meet McDowall.
"The guy was potentially going to be a big, big part of what they were doing - a keystone. Stevenson had to see him for himself - satisfy himself."
And it was almost the biggest mistake he ever made.
Stevenson and his henchmen now believe McDowall was already working for the authorities when they enjoyed their burgers al fresco.
They suspect he had already been busted by Customs at Dover as he brought in a load of drugs in January 2003.
They believe he had been allowed to drive away after agreeing to help the authorities land the biggest fish in Scotland.
They believed it enough to take out a £10,000 contract on the life of the suspected informer after he was jailed, along with Gallagher, following a court case that was notable for being the first time the SCDEA's Operation Folklore had ever been mentioned in public. What is not in doubt is that, within a year of the Colmonell meeting, McDowall had been stabbed in jail and told there was a price on his head.
He had also asked for urgent talks with detectives from the elite crime-fighting agency.
In a series of recorded interviews, he would lay bare the scope of Stevenson's drug-smuggling operation. He explained how the flower markets of Rijnsburg, Holland, were being used as cover for some of the huge consignments of heroin, cocaine, speed and Ecstasy being driven into Scotland by HGV drivers on the gang's payroll.
He told how the man he claimed to know only as Jamie from Glasgow was said to be a killer who was armed at all times. He also revealed how this man was the undisputed leader of a gang that had been bringing huge consignments of drugs into Scotland for years, of how his drugs money underwrote a £36million property spree on the Costa del Sol, and of how guns - hard plastic pistols undetectable on Customs' X-ray machines - were another profitable sideline for Stevenson's mob. And he explained how the operation did not depend on individual drivers because Stevenson had his own Scots-based haulage firms.
He told the police everything and, for the first time, they had found a witness to Stevenson's absolute immersion in the drugs trade. And, incredibly, the witness indicated that he could - and would - identify the Folklore team's number one target.
