His nicknames included King Coke, The Professor and El Jock
Mild-mannered and wearing horn-rimmed glasses, Brian Doran looked every inch the former schoolteacher he was.
He used his language skills and travel expertise to become a major player in the global trade of illegal drugs. Married with five children, he moved into the travel trade and became managing director of Blue Sky Holidays in Glasgow in the late 1970s. By now he was the owner of a luxury home in Terregles Avenue, Pollokshields and a familiar figure in the city's most exclusive nightspots like Charlie Parker's in Royal Exchange Square.
Soon he was mixing with the heavies of British crime, the Ronnie Knights and the Freddie Foremans who had fled justice for a Costa safe haven.However, the champagne lifestyle could not protect him from personal pain.But their son Michael, then six, who had been born disabled, had to go back to Scotland for hospital treatment.The grieving father, faced with drug-smuggling charges if he returned, stayed in Spain.
But choosing Holland had been a big mistake. Doran walked straight into a surveillance operation run by Dutch cops. His name was passed to Interpol who informed Strathclyde police. Defending himself, Doran exercised his powers of persuasion in a tearful but vain plea to the jury to acquit him and let him go home to his wife and family after his years on the run.He also insisted that, although he and his friends had used cocaine, he had never been a dealer.Doran completed his backdated sentence at Saughton Prison in Edinburgh in July 1990.
There they found £10,000, a Cartier watch, and photographed personal documents, including bank transfers to Colombia involving false names. Two years later, both men were found guilty of trafficking £57million worth of cocaine at Bristol Crown Court Two heavyweight London gangsters Tony White and John Short were convicted alongside the Scottish pair.
"This arises out of the undoubted commission of a crime which is as socially corrosive and destructive as the importation of a massive quantity of high-purity cocaine, and which will, in effect, now go unpunished."
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