Glasgow undercover cop reveals alter-ego life in 80s drug gang underworld

Walking into work meant complete separation from that part of his life, as he became not an undercover cop but a member of the criminal world.

Before retiring from the police force in 1995, the now 61-year-old embedded himself in Glasgow's criminal underbelly to bust up a growing drug scene in the 1980s.

"When you go into that environment you are not a police officer anymore," Simon said.

"You cannot afford to think like a police officer for one second - because they can smell it."

He described himself as part of the "ten percent" of the police force which would do "whatever it takes" to bring down criminals.

His upcoming memoir 'The Ten Percent' tells those very stories.

When Simon joined the Serious Crime Squad there were only two drug squad officers.

Simon McLean, at the CID Govan Drugs Unit in 1989

"And one of them wouldn't have known drugs if he found them in his tea," he joked. "It was a token thing - drugs."

But that changed in the 80's he recollects, as heroin became pervasive on the street of Glasgow, bringing a rise in crime in tow.

Simon was working in Govan when he decided more needed to be done to combat the drug trade in the area.

"I went to my boss at the time and said 'can I become a drug dealer?'," he said.

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The operation was set up from a house in Wine Alley, he added: "At one point we knew of at least eight smack dealers who were dealing in the Wine Alley."

Wine Alley was in a part of Govan which is "pretty much gone now but it was notorious," he described.

Knowing a house which was empty he pre-emptively sought approval from the council to use it as part of the operation.

He said: "So I had a house and I had a supply, because I knew someone who could get me smack. And we set up an operation to sell heroin."

Over the course of a few days, they had learned more about the drug operation than they would have learned in a year.

"It ended up with at least three or four dealers who were jailed for more than ten years."

In Simon's mind it wasn't about the small busts or locking up drug users it was about disrupting the market.

"If all you wanted to do is lock up people using drugs, you could do that all day long. And we did do that all day long."

Instead he was interested in the "level" above the dealer, he said: "The level up from that, it starts to get more interesting because it is someone who is not a junkie, it is someone who has got a business.

"And that business is what you are interested in - we need to interrupt the supply and demand."

Which is how he found himself burying nearly 200 tenner bags of heroin next to the former Govan police station in Orkney Street.

It started with busting a Govan dealer desperate to avoid being charged for the full amount of the stock.

Desperate enough to lead them to a major shipment containing "tonnes of heroin" coming into Greenock in the "mid-eighties".

"We let him off, that was the deal. Give us this information and we will only charge you with this, not all of the drugs we found in the safe house."

But it left them with heroin they could not charge him for.

He said: "We had all this smack so we kidnapped a junkie, threw him into the car, and took him out to Milngavie.

"He thought he was getting murdered I think. And we gave him magazines, scissors and heroin."

Simon and his colleague then waited, smoking cigarettes outside the car, while the man made up tenner bags for them.

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"It was 178 tenner bags that he made. We gave him some for his trouble and we told him not to tell a soul, knowing full well that the first thing he would do when we threw him out of the car in Govan that the first thing he would do is go out and tell everyone," he explained.

For weeks drug dealers and users believed Simon and his colleague had the drugs as he details the only way the information kept flowing was if they all believed they had it.

Others were, of course, unaware that the tenner bags were buried the very next night after they were buried.

The 61-year-old added: "There are nice new flats built there now. And we never went near it again, we weren't interested in it."

At the time what Simon was doing was totally "against the grain" as he explains that the force simply did not want to know about the drug problems in Scotland.

"And at that stage we still could have done something about the drug problem if police had taken it seriously, but they didn't."

"I have been involved in the war on drugs since 1978. And I have been an advocate since the first minute of 1978 to decriminalise drugs because our prisons are full of low level drug addicts who are as much victims as anyone."

Scottish Police College, Tulliallan in 1979 with Simon sitting on the far left, second row down from top

Simon left the police force to be able to spend time with his family who often knew very little about what it was he did.

And that time it meant he only really had access to two coping mechanisms - humour and drink.

He explains that in an era when mental health in the emergency services profession were rarely acknowledged, they found "safety valves" where they could.

"We would go to the pub and sometimes get plastered because you couldn't go home and talk about it," he added.

But now those days seem far away to Simon and he sees Glasgow in the eyes of an "old man" rather than of a undercover cop.

And the 61-year-old former cop stressed that the stories can only be told in his "own recollection of the truth". It is, after all, as his debut memoir promises "the truth, the whole truth" but more importantly "something like the truth".

The Ten Percent is available for pre-order now HERE.