4 days ago
Scots crime queen confronted top Tory with tin of MINCE
The events are charted in a new BBC Scotland podcast series - The Ballad of Big Mags
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NOTORIOUS crime matriarch Big Mags Haney confronted top Tory Michael Forsyth with a tin of European mince at a public meeting that would propel her into the public spotlight.
The astonishing moment helped Haney earn a reputation as a fearsome community campaigner in Stirling's troubled Raploch estate.
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Big Mags Haney was jailed for drug dealing after an astonishing rise and fall.
Credit: Alan MacGregor Ewing - The Sun Glasgow
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The new podcast explores the events that unfolded in Stirling's Raploch in the 1990s.
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Former Tory MP Michael Forsyth came face-face with Mags Haney at a Poll Tax demo
She went on to further infamy by rallying locals to a vigilante campaign aimed at ridding the estate of paedophiles - before she was hounded out herself as the head of a crime family from hell.
The events are charted in a new BBC Scotland podcast series - The Ballad of Big Mags - that explores her incredible rise and fall during a turbulent period in the late 1990s.
The first episode hears from witnesses who watched as Haney barked at the then Secretary of State for Scotland during an Anti-Poll Tax gathering.
Fearsome Haney took centre stage as Mr Forsyth was quizzed by locals who had gathered to protest against Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher's hated tax regime.
Raploch local Billy McChord who saw the confrontation said: 'He came to a very busy meeting at the Raploch Community Centre.
'I think it was the chief of police he came with.
'So we were in this meeting and it was getting chaotic with folk shouting at him.
'It was going well until Mags turned up with one of those wee blue bags that folk tend to get carry-outs in.
'The policemen started looking really, really nervous.
'She pulled out what was one of these European tins of mince that you were given at the time.
'The look on Michael Forsyth's face was hilarious. He was like, 'What's this about?'
'She went, 'You expect us to eat this? Well, I'll tell you, we feed our families better than this.
'You take your tin of mince up to your house and you can eat it'.
'The place just erupted in laughter.'
Billy added: 'She had a bit of a reputation as being a bit of a character, shall we say.
'And she brought a lot of energy to the place.
FAMILY FROM HELL
By Graham Mann
NEIGHBOUR Caroline Dunbar tells of her family's nightmare at living in a flat below Mags Haney whose daughter Kim ended up setting fire to their home.
She tells of her ordeal at the hands of the family from hell who made threats to ruin her wedding day and broke into her home.
Recalling the year she spent living beside Big Mags, she said: 'It was just unreal. My mum couldn't sleep at night with them banging down, banging the windows.
'You didn't have security doors at that time, they used to break them and everybody used to go up and down, up and down every night. Every night, seven days a week.
'They actually went into my room and stole my television.
'My window was open a bit and I must have been in the living room with my mum, my dad and my brother and a couple of my pals were in.
'They jumped in the windows and stole my television that my dad got me four months before for my birthday.'
She also tells how she was on the receiving end of threats including that they would throw eggs at her wedding car.
Matters reached a terrifying conclusion when Kim Haney torched their home with Big Mags, who went on to turn her daughter over to cops.
The girl, then 16, pleaded guilty at Stirling Sheriff Court in October 1994 to endangering the family's lives and the lives of other neighbours by starting the blaze.
She stood on a rubbish bin and leaned through an open window with a cigarette lighter.
Sheriff Norrie Stein noted at the hearing the Haneys had inflicted misery on the Raploch community with seven Haneys involved in hundreds of court appearances.
Reports from the time reveal Big Mags said she would meet her solicitor to consider referring the sheriff's comments to the Lord Advocate.
She said: ''He's branded us another family from hell.''
'But she was funny as well, I can't deny that, she was funny.'
But the documentary also shines a light on Haney's darker side that ended with her being jailed for 12 years in 2001 for heroin dealing.
In the years before she had been hailed in the media as a powerful community voice who even appeared on a prime time TV show.
She had become a self-appointed figurehead of a Raploch vigilante furious that convicted sex offenders were being housed on their estate.
One of her granddaughters tells how Mags even used a child's karaoke machine to rally locals at her anti-peado protests.
Recalling stories from those who watched her late gran in action Cassie Donald says: 'If I remember correctly one of them said that she had a child's karaoke machine, out with the mic kind of rallying the local community to get involved in the protest.'
Explaining what drove her gran's actions, she adds: 'I think there was something at her core that she really believed was wrong.
'Kicking a dog when it's down, the community was suffering enough without placing paedophiles in the community.
'It was a time when children roamed the streets.
'We knew everybody in the Raploch area so we were able to just run along to the park or go along to the shop and you were not going to meet anybody that you didn't know.
'So to put someone in that could potentially cause danger to her children or her grandchildren didn't sit right with her.
'She wasn't the only person who stood up, she just happened to shout the loudest.'
But Mags' status as a community champion was short-lived as locals grew increasingly angry over her rise of a woman who was up to her neck in crime.
Haney was herself on the receiving end of mob justice when a 400-strong band gathered outside her flat to make clear she and her family were no longer welcome.
Just a few years later in 2003 she was sentenced to 12 years in prison for her role at the top of a drug dealing family who had terrorised the area for years.
Journalist and host Myles Bonnar reveals new insights as he speaks to people closely connected to her and intimately involved in the astonishing events.
He said: 'Many people only partially know the story of this controversial figure and this series will give a full account of how she rose to fame and became a source of fascination to the media and public before her criminal life was exposed.'
Haney died, aged 70, in 2012, after a cancer battle.
The six-part series is available on BBC Sounds now.
