How police snared Scottish 'Tony Soprano' behind £100m cocaine banana smuggling plot: The Valentine's Day Costa Blanca meeting with fruit seller that finally nailed drug kingpin known as 'The Iceman By Annie Brown and Martin Robinson and Rory Tingle Published: 09:42, 3 October 2024 | Updated: 10:24, 3 October 2024 e-mail View comments A notorious gangster dubbed Scotland's Tony Soprano was posing as a British tourist in Spain when he was unwittingly caught up in a police surveillance operation that led to his downfall. Officers were watching the bar of Alicante's four-star Melia Hotel as part of Operation Pepperoni after tracking a dodgy Glaswegian fruit seller there following his 11th hour decision to fly to Spain on Valentine's Day 2020. Spanish officers tipped off by their British counterparts sent surveillance images of the meeting back to Scotland.
But when photographs from the Alicante bar arrived in Scotland, investigators were stunned to see the man Bisland had been meeting was Jamie Stevenson, one of the UK's most wanted criminals and a murder suspect nicknamed the 'The Iceman'. In a T-shirt and jeans the gangster, once the key suspect in a murder case involving his own best man, was confident he passed off as just another British tourist - and completely unaware he was under surveillance. Jamie Stevenson pictured Alicante's four-star Melia Hotel after being caught in a surveillance sting targeting another criminal The cocaine Stevenson tried to import was hidden in.