Paul Ferris

Paul Ferris died at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow on 6 October 2026, aged 62, after a short illness. For more than forty years his name had been attached to the hardest edge of the city’s underworld: as a teenage offender in Blackhill, as an enforcer for Arthur Thompson, the man the press called Glasgow’s Godfather, as the accused in the longest and most expensive criminal trial Scotland had seen up to that time, and finally as a convicted gun-runner who turned to writing books about the life he said he had left behind.

This page sets out what the courts decided and what is on the public record. That matters more than usual here. Ferris was acquitted of the murder that made him famous, nobody has ever been convicted of it, and two further killings connected to the case remain unsolved. The families of the dead men are part of this story too, and their losses were real whatever the legends say.

Blackhill beginnings

Ferris was born on 10 November 1963 in Blackhill, in the north-east of the city, the youngest of six children. Blackhill was one of the inter-war housing schemes built to rehouse families from the old slums, and by the 1970s it had a reputation for poverty and for the hard families who dominated parts of it. By his own account, published years later, he was bullied for a long time as a boy by members of one of those families, and his first violence was revenge for it.

He was in trouble with the law from his teens. Charged with assault and robbery at seventeen, he was held at Longriggend remand centre and later served time at Glenochil, the young offenders’ institution in Clackmannanshire. The pattern of the next decade was set early: charges, remands, acquittals and short sentences, with violence never far away. It was this reputation that brought him to the attention of Arthur Thompson, whose Provanmill home, nicknamed the Ponderosa, stood only a short distance from Blackhill.

Working for Arthur Thompson

From the early 1980s Ferris worked as an enforcer for the Thompson organisation, collecting debts for Thompson’s moneylending business and using or threatening violence when people could not pay. He was later open about this in print, and the police regarded him as one of the most dangerous young men in the city. In the mid-1980s he was tried over a shooting in which shots were fired at a family travelling home from a pub; the jury found the attempted murder charges not proven. Soon afterwards he served a sentence of eighteen months for possession of offensive weapons.

The relationship with the Thompsons soured. Ferris came to believe that Arthur Thompson junior, the Godfather’s eldest son, known throughout the city as Fat Boy, had set him up on one of his convictions. By the late 1980s he had stepped away from the family and, alongside a legitimate double glazing business, kept his own connections in the underworld. The rivalry between the two young men became part of the background to everything that followed.

August 1991: the killing at the Ponderosa

In August 1991 Arthur Thompson junior was serving an eleven-year sentence for possessing heroin with intent to supply. On 18 August, while home on weekend leave from prison, he was shot three times as he walked the short distance from his own house to his parents’ home on Provanmill Road. He died of his wounds. He was 31.

Ferris was arrested and charged with the murder, and was remanded in Barlinnie. Two of his friends, Robert Glover and Joe Hanlon, were also suspected by police of involvement. They never stood trial. On the day of Thompson junior’s funeral their bodies were found in a car outside the Cottage Bar in Shettleston, on the route of the funeral procession. Both had been shot. Their murders have never been solved, and nobody has ever been charged with them.

The trial of 1992

The trial opened at the High Court in Glasgow in March 1992. Ferris faced a long indictment: the murder of Arthur Thompson junior, an alleged attempt to murder Arthur Thompson senior by driving a car at him in 1990, and further charges involving assault, firearms and drugs. He was defended by Donald Findlay, the advocate who later described it as the most memorable case of his career. More than 300 witnesses were called over 54 days, and the cost of the proceedings was estimated at around £4 million. No criminal trial in Scotland had ever lasted so long.

Arthur Thompson senior gave evidence, describing himself as unemployed and on sickness benefit, and bristled when the defence suggested he might have arranged the deaths of Glover and Hanlon in revenge for his son; he reminded the court that he was the witness, not the accused. The central plank of the prosecution case was the evidence of a fellow prisoner who claimed that Ferris had confessed to the killing while both men were held in separate cells in the segregation unit at Barlinnie. The defence attacked that evidence as fundamentally unreliable, pointing out that the two men could not even see each other.

In June 1992, after deliberating for more than a day, the jury acquitted Ferris of murder and of every other charge. He left the court declaring himself vindicated. The crime writer Douglas Skelton later argued that the real scandal of the case was how weak the Crown’s evidence had been after so long and so expensive a prosecution. Nobody has ever been convicted of the murder of Arthur Thompson junior. His father died of a heart attack nine months after the verdict.

Gun-running and prison

After the trial Ferris spent time in the north of England and London, and his name continued to appear in police intelligence and newspaper reports. In 1997 he was arrested in London after a long surveillance operation involving MI5 and Special Branch. At the Old Bailey in July 1998 he was convicted of conspiring to sell or transfer prohibited weapons, conspiring to deal in firearms and possessing explosives. The ten-year sentence was reduced to seven years on appeal.

He served his sentence in English prisons, ending at Frankland in County Durham, and was released in January 2002, saying he intended to give up crime. Within months he was briefly returned to custody for breaching the conditions of his licence, before being released again in June 2002.

Author, businessman and screen subject

While still in prison Ferris had written his life story with the journalist Reg McKay. The Ferris Conspiracy, published in 2001, sold strongly, and McKay and Ferris followed it with the novel Deadly Divisions and the books Vendetta and Villains. His story became the film The Wee Man in 2013, with Martin Compston playing Ferris and John Hannah as his rival Tam McGraw. Permission problems meant the film was shot mainly in London rather than Glasgow.

His public career was never free of controversy. In 2004 there was anger when a security company linked to him was found to be guarding sites that included a nursing home and a sheriff court, and police officers complained openly that television programmes and books were turning a career criminal into a celebrity. In 2007 the Scottish Government announced plans to stop convicted criminals profiting from their memoirs, a debate in which his books were often cited. Ferris himself said repeatedly that he had turned his back on crime.

Death and how to remember him

When news of his death broke in October 2026, the reactions captured the divided view of the man. A photographer who had known him for a quarter of a century described a polite and funny friend. Graeme Pearson, the former director general of the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency, who had first met Ferris as a teenager, said he had been a very dangerous man in his active years who seemed to take pleasure in his reputation for violence, but that in later life he appeared to have put that profile behind him.

His place in Glasgow’s history rests less on his own deeds than on what his case exposed. The 1992 trial showed how far the city’s organised crime of the period ran on fear and silence, how heavily a prosecution could come to depend on a single prison informant, and how readily violent lives were turned into books and films. It also left three deaths without justice: Arthur Thompson junior, Robert Glover and Joe Hanlon. Those names belong at the centre of any honest account of the case, alongside the families who lived with the consequences long after the cameras moved on. The wider story of the gangs, the Ice Cream Wars of the same decade and the work that later brought violence in the city down is told elsewhere in this section.

Timeline