Walter Norval was a man marked by destiny to be a career criminal in one of Britain's hardest cities. He has never denied he saw both men – who were also friends of a man we cannot name for legal reasons – shortly before they were gunned down. Police officers had to link arms and form a cordon to protect the young accused from the baying mob. The Blue Angels were reportedly involved in a biker war with the Tayside chapter of the Satans Slaves in 2011.

The Sun", "Sun", "Sun Online" are registered trademarks or trade names of News Group Newspapers Limited. A battalion of armed raiders were hitting hospital pay rolls, wages depots and banks with military precision all over Scotland. Norval, who had run with gangs from as early as the 40s, realised many former street teams had moved on to organised crime - and he wanted a part of it. In reality they were concrete wastelands, devoid of basic amenities and the perfect place for the old problems to again come bubbling back to the surface.

Founded in the Maryhill area of Glasgow by Allan Morrison and Billy "Stone" Gordon in 1963, the Blue Angels Motorcycle Club is the oldest outlaw biker club in Europe. He had done a great deal of the preparatory work to identify targets and the best method of carrying out specific robberies. Unlike most of his peers, however, Norval also happens to have been Glasgow’s first criminal Godfather, involved in robberies and protection rackets throughout the 1940s and 50s. His XYY gang – named because the crooks were only identified by letters in court when they were finally put on trial – carried out raids on banks, payroll deliveries, ­security vans and ­businesses. The next morning distraught Janette flew to Newcastle then took a taxi straight to Glasgow’s mortuary 150 miles away.

It’s alleged Thompson denied any involvement and offered to send Janette on a cruise with his wife Rita. Years later, in a letter from prison after his conviction, Phil toldme he had considered escaping during our day out. Ewing was arrested shortly afterwards in possession of a hammer and an item of clothing bearing the slogan: ""Blue Angels North East". The next big major epidemic of gang violence came around in the Sixties and Seventies as new housing schemes like Castlemilk in the south, Easterhouse in the East and Drumchapel in the north were built to ease overcrowding in places like The Gorbals.He kept his foot soldiers in line with threats of violence, organised various fighting factions in the city into a single gang, and pulled off a series of successful robberies, all of which he meticulously planned “with the attention to detail of military general. When the breakthrough came from an informant, many of the gang were found in Maryhill and in the south side of Glasgow, right under police noses, hundreds of yards from Orkney Street police station. Norval had run his large outfit with a mixture of discipline and determination - that's why they had survived so long.

Norval's daughter, Mrs Rita Gunn, was later cleared of the bombing and of intimidating witnesses but her husband William Gunn got five years.Robert Carlyle is to star as Ferris in The Ferris Conspiracy, based on the gangster’s book of the same name. So it was fitting that Walter Norval’s coffin should be carried into his funeral to the sound of ­Bankrobber by the Clash. Anderson and O’Mahoney start with the elder statesmen of the Glasgow scene and move through the main players of more than 70 years of crime, taking in the Arthur Thompson years, the notorious Ferris family, and the Glasgow ice-cream wars.