Edinburgh mob boss Mark Richardson's associates 'plotted Spanish hit' at secret gang summit

Edinburgh Live

02-06-2025

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The murders of Ross Monaghan and Eddie Lyons Jnr were 'plotted during a secret summit', according to new reports.
The shooting happened in Costa Del Sol in Spain, after a masked gunman leapt out of a car outside an Irish pub on the beachfront in Fuengirola. Monaghan, 43, and Lyons, 46, were two of the leading members of the Lyons gang, reports the Scottish Daily Express.
The planning is said to have taken plane in Kirkintilloch, nine miles north-east of Glasgow, where Daniel clan members 'gathered for a council of war'.
The Scottish Sun reports that top-ranking members of the Daniel clan are said to have gathered at a "secret location" in Kirkintilloch with high-ranking associates of jailed Edinburgh drugs baron Mark Richardson. In recent months, members of this east coast-west coast criminal alliance have suffered in silence in the face of a relentless onslaught from their hated rivals, the Lyons, along with a relatively new face on the scene - Ross 'Miami' McGill.
Firebombings on cars, homes and businesses, drive-by shootings that left bullet holes in doors and windows, a violent home invasion in Glasgow that left a young boy and an older woman - both related to the Daniel family - bloodied and battered, and a number of machete attacks. In one, an Edinburgh businessman who just happens to be an old friend of Richardson's, was hospitalised; in another, workers at a Daniel-linked garage East Kilbride were injured by blade-wielding thugs.
But nobody had been killed. And the word was starting to go out that the Daniels were defenceless in the onslaught of this violence. Not only that, they were being mocked by McGill and his crew, known as Tamo Junto (a Portugeuse phrase meaning 'we are together'), thanks to a blizzard of TikTok videos.
The former Rangers football ultra now lives in Dubai, alongside Steven Lyons, 44 - acknowledged as the head of the gang - and members of the Irish Kinahan cartel. And it is the backing of the Kinahans which is seen as crucial to the recent rise of the Lyons.
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But to imagine that the Daniels were finished is to ignore the longer-term history of this bloody rivalry, which sparked into life with the bloody Applerow Motors shooting in north Glasgow in December 2006. In events later likened by Donald Findlay KC to "a scene from The Godfather", two gunmen in trenchcoats burst in and opened fire on David Lyons.
He dived for cover but his 21-year-old nephew Michael Lyons was shot dead, while Steven Lyons and Robert Pickett were gravely injured. Now, it appears that the Daniels may have pulled off another 'spectacular' that will once again change the face of Scotland's underworld for years to come.
The two rival gangs have their roots in the tower blocks and run-down council estates of north-east Glasgow - the Daniels in Possil and the Lyons in Milton. Even today, this turf is jealously guarded; as recently as April, an ageing Daniel gang member was jailed for life for the shotgun murder of a Lyons footsoldier in Milton.
Malcom McNee, 63, was told he would die in prison for blasting to death John McGregor, 44. Prosecutor John Macpherson told Stirling Sheriff Court: "The background to this case is an ongoing feud between the Lyons and the Daniels organised crime groups. Westray Street is a regular meeting point for youths associated with the Lyons family, while members of the Daniel family live in adjoining streets."
But while the rank and file still live here in some of Britain's poorest neighbourhoods, the bosses have fled to the suburbs and housing estates in the countryside. And here, too, the turf appears to be clearly marked with the Daniels putting down roots in East Dunbartonshire and the Lyons based around Cumbernauld.
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At one stage, Eddie Lyons Sr and other family members all lived in one street - dubbed, inevitably, the 'Lyons Den' - in an upmarket development off the M80, in new-build homes fitted with bullet-proof glass in the windows. Kevin 'Gerbil' Carroll, the feared Daniel enforcer who was shot dead in 2010, moved to Lennoxtown and his right-hand man Francis 'Fraggle' Green swapped the mean streets of north Glasgow for rural Milton of Campsie (once described by the Glasgow Herald as a 'gangland village', much to the embarrassment of the locals).
The late Jamie Daniel - who died of cancer in 2016 - lived in a mansion in Glasgow's West End but he too had links to Kirky. In 2012, after a taxi nearly clipped one of his lovers outside the town's Tesco supermarket, the scrap metal dealer turned millionaire crime boss was accused of exacting personal revenge.
The taxi driver was summoned to his office, where a man emerged from a BMW with blacked out windows and delivered a savage beating; so savage, in fact, that the driver couldn't recall what happened when the case ended up in court. All the other witnesses developed a similar amnesia and Daniel walked free. Such memory lapses were also common among victims of Carroll's 'alien abduction' crew, rival Lyons dealers who were kidnapped, tortured and 'taxed' of their drugs and earnings, before being dumped in the street.
One individual was left wandering in the leafy village of Lenzie, causing net curtains to twitch. When the sadistic Gerbil was lured out of hiding and ruthlessly taken out by the Lyons crew in a sophisticated operation, the hit took place in the most mundane of surroundings - an Asda car park in Robroyston, surrounded by busy, harassed mums and other weekday shoppers.
Monaghan had been cleared of Gerbil's murder and he is said to have been a 'marked man' ever since, although it could be argued that the leading members of both gangs have lived their entire adult lives with a target on their backs. Some in Glasgow - including members of law enforcement - are sceptical that the Daniels and Richardson mob had the "wherewithal" to organise the shooting in the Costa del Sol.