Joe Steele

The Glasgow Ice Cream Wars was a in the East End of Glasgow in Scotland in the 1980s between rival criminal organisations selling drugs and stolen goods from ice cream vans. Van operators were involved in frequent violence and intimidation tactics. A driver and his family were killed in an arson attack that resulted in a 20-year court battle. The conflicts generated widespread public outrage, and earned the Strathclyde Police the nickname the "serious chimes squad" (a pun on Serious Crime Squad) for its perceived failure to address them.

The violent conflicts, in which vendors raided one another's vans and fired shotguns into one another's windscreens, appeared superficially disproportionate, even farcical. However, more than just the sale of ice-cream was involved: several ice-cream vendors also sold drugs and stolen goods along their routes, using the ice cream sales as fronts, and much of the violence was either intimidation or competition relating to these.

The culmination of the violence came on 16 April 1984 with the murder by arson of six members of the Doyle family, in the Ruchazie housing estate. Eighteen-year-old Andrew Doyle, nicknamed "Fat Boy", a driver for the Marchetti firm, had resisted being intimidated into distributing drugs on his run, and attempts to take over his run – resistance that had already led to him being shot by an unidentified assailant through the windscreen of his van.

A further so-called frightener was planned against him. At 02:00, the door on the landing outside the top-floor flat in Ruchazie where he lived with his family was doused with petrol and set alight. The members of the Doyle family, and three additional guests who were staying the night in the flat that night, were asleep at the time. The resulting blaze killed five people, with a sixth dying later in hospital: James Doyle, aged 53; his daughter Christina Halleron, aged 25; her 18-month-old son Mark; and three of Mr Doyle’s sons, James, Andrew (the target of the intimidation), and Tony, aged 23, 18, and 14 respectively.

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