The Scottish Crime Campus celebrates a decade in existence after being founded in 2014 in Gartcosh, North Lanarkshire and is viewed as being the best of the best when it comes to fighting Serious Organised Crime.
There are 18 organisations represented on the Serious Organised Crime Taskforce (SOCT) and they combat gangs who look to prey on the local community through drug dealing, people trafficking, money laundering and Crypto crime.
They’ve had a lot of high profile wins over the last 10 years since Princess Anne officially opened it but what actually is the Campus and what have they been successful in doing over the past 10 years?
What is the Scottish Crime Campus?
The Scottish Crime Campus is a state-of-the-art facility set up in 2014 that centralises Scotland’s attempts to tackle serious organised crime.
It supports the work of the Serious Organised Crime Taskforce (SOCT) which drives four identifiable strands to tackle serious organised crime, which are detect, disrupt, divert and deter.
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Where is the Scottish Crime Campus?
The building cost £73million and was built on the site of the former Gartcost steelworks in North Lanarkshire. It was opened by Princess Anne and is across four floors, occupying 22,500 square feet to be home to around 1,100 workers.
Early success
Within the first two years of being in existence, the multi-agency intelligence and strategic approach resulted in the capture of more than 300 of Scotland’s most wanted criminals.
Many of those were returned on international arrest warrants from outside the UK from as far afield as Jamica, Spain, Portugal and Thailand and showed the campus’ commitment to working with foreign jurisdictions to show that you can’t flee Scottish justice by moving to other countries.
Cold cases
In 2016, a new forensics lab was added to the campus and that was hailed as the most advanced DNA profiling facility in Europe. It has since proved pivotal in examining ‘cold cases’ and bringing new evidence to light.
One of those was crucial in helping prosecutors secure the conviction of Graham McGill, who was sentenced to 14 years in jail for murder after four previous DNA reviews had failed to connect him to his victim.
The eventual breakthrough was made possible by the new profiling facility and he was jailed 35 years after his crime.
Forensic success
As well as cold cases, the cutting edge techniques have also helped bring one of Britain’s most sophisticated crime gangs to justice when DNA was found on a Beretta 9000 pistol that connected gang members to a cocaine-trafficking operation that generated an estimated £100m a year and had links in Britain and across Europe.
More high profile wins
In 2022, the Campus worked with their European colleagues to ensure the extradition of Christopher Hughes, who was jailed for life for the killing of dutch crime writer Martin Kok. Hughes was a major figure in Scotland’s organised crime network.
In the same year, a joint investigation with HMRC and NCA (National Crime Agency) led to the convictions of a former HMRC VAT inspector and a group of associates due to their involvement in a £171,000 tax fraud. James McGee, of Troon, used a hijacted identity to make bogus VAT repayment claims. They were laundered through accounts controlled by McGee and others and he was eventually jailed.
In 2023, James White was also convicted and jailed for nine years for serious organised crime and firearms offences with credit going to the Campus. It followed an investigation coordinated at the Campus and revealed the scale of his criminal empire which had links in Italy, Netherlands, UAE, Russia and Brazil where he was extradited back from as part of Operation Escalade.
Three men were also jailed in Scotland’s first came of ‘cuckoo smurfing’, an international fraud on a vast scale. Cuckoo smurfing is a method of money laundering and the Scottish Crime Campus, the Crown Office, Police Scotland and the NCA worked together to secure convictions of three men orchestrating illegal money movements between Scotland, Pakistan, UAE and Iran.
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