He spent 18 months on the run until Britain’s version of the FBI, the National Crime Agency (NCA), tracked him down in the Netherlands.
Dutch national police grabbed Stevenson while he was out jogging with another Scottish fugitive, convicted killer Dean Ferguson.
Stevenson had thought he was safe and was said to be shocked to find himself back in custody, this time with no chance of escape.
Now he has been jailed for 20 years for masterminding an international cocaine smuggling operation where the drugs were hidden in a shipment of bananas, and setting up a drugs factory in England.
There are parts of this story which read like a darkly satirical crime thriller but Stevenson was very much the real deal – a top-level gangster who made a fortune from trafficking drugs linked to hundreds of deaths.
The man dubbed a real-life Tony Soprano tried to flood Scotland with a tonne of cocaine estimated to be worth £100m and millions of deadly Etizolam tablets. This happened in 2020, the year the country suffered its worst ever drugs death toll.
In 2019, Etizolam, better known as street valium, had been implicated in 756 deaths, half that year’s total. By the end of 2020, it had been linked to 814.
Police are convinced that had Stevenson succeeded, many more people would have lost their lives while he raked in millions of pounds.
