Mobsters’ drug link to Aberdeen
The organised crime syndicate where John Donovan worked ruled London’s East End underworld back in 2001.
The family-run mob ran a “large and ruthless criminal empire” with contacts across the UK, Europe and the Far East.
It was one of eight crime gangs named in Operation Tiberius as having associations with corrupt serving and former Metropolitan police officers and staff. Tiberius was a top-secret operation launched in October 2001 “to determine the extent of police corruption and its links with organised crime within East and North East London”.
The 189-page dossier was published in 2002, and caused huge shockwaves when it was leaked first to newspapers and then online. It detailed how the gangsters linked to Donovan ran a boxing gym in East London. But they were also involved in largescale drug importation, high-value lorry hijacking and money laundering.
The head of the clan was said to have well established links with drugs networks in Aberdeen and Glasgow, as well as the north and east of England.
The gang employed three men – John Donovan, Christopher Pearman and an unnamed man who was their “main enforcer” – to deliver drugs to Scotland. Just six weeks after Donovan’s death, the violent enforcer was lucky to survive being shot outside his house in Tower Hamlets. Two .32 calibre bullets hit him in the face and neck, lodging in the roof of his mouth and against his spine.
Pearman was jailed for life in 2007 for a gangland assassination where a man was shot dead in front of his children.