Paul Ferris, Notorious Glasgow Gangland Figure Turned Author, Dies at 62

Paul Ferris, a one-time Glasgow gangland enforcer who reinvented himself as a best-selling author chronicling Scotland's criminal underworld, has died at the age of 62.

Ferris is understood to have passed away on Tuesday night at Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow following a short illness. News of his death was first shared publicly by photographer Brian Anderson, a longtime friend, who posted the announcement on his Naked City Facebook page.

Anderson described Ferris as a best-selling author and a "former notorious criminal," writing that word of his passing "will come as a shock to many who knew him throughout the different chapters of his life." Speaking afterwards to BBC Scotland News, Anderson reflected on a friendship that spanned a quarter of a century, saying the two had got on "really well" and that he found Ferris "polite, funny and kind." He added that it was "a shock to everyone" that the friendship had endured for 25 years, given the starkly different worlds the pair inhabited.

Ferris first came to national attention through one of the most expensive and lengthy criminal proceedings in Scottish legal history. He stood trial accused of murdering Arthur Thompson Jnr, the son of crime boss Arthur Thompson, who was shot dead outside the family's home in the Blackhill area of Glasgow in August 1991.

The trial opened the following year and became a landmark moment in the country's criminal justice system. More than 300 witnesses were called to give evidence across 54 days of proceedings, at an estimated cost of £4m. At the time, it was described as the longest and most expensive criminal case Scotland had ever seen.

The Crown's case rested heavily on the testimony of Dennis Woodman, a fellow inmate who claimed Ferris had confessed to the killing while the two men were both being held at Barlinnie Prison. Defence lawyers mounted a vigorous challenge to the reliability of that evidence, arguing that the case assembled against their client was deeply flawed.

After the jury deliberated for more than 24 hours, Ferris was acquitted of murder and of all other charges in 1992. To this day, no one has been convicted of Thompson Jnr's killing, a fact that has kept the case in the public consciousness for more than three decades.

Ferris was not, however, able to leave his criminal past entirely behind. In 1998 he was jailed for seven years after being convicted of gun-running, a sentence that underscored his continued involvement in serious organised crime even after his murder acquittal.

It was after his release that Ferris began to construct a very different public identity. In 2001 he published his first book, The Ferris Conspiracy, which offered readers an insider's account of Glasgow's underworld and the legal battle that had briefly made him a household name. The book proved successful and set the pattern for a series of titles that followed.

He went on to collaborate on a number of further books with the writer Reg McKay, who died in 2011. The partnership produced a body of work that gave Ferris a platform to narrate his own version of events and to comment on the criminal milieu he had once inhabited.

His life story reached an even wider audience in 2013, when The Ferris Conspiracy was adapted into the film The Wee Man. The movie starred Martin Compston, best known for his role in the television drama Line of Duty, as Ferris — a casting choice that helped bring the Glasgow hardman's tale to a new generation.

The transition from enforcer to author is a remarkable one, and it made Ferris an unusual and polarising figure in Scottish public life. For some, his books were a candid insight into a world rarely documented from the inside; for others, his notoriety was something he commercially capitalised on rather than genuinely left behind.

Anderson's tribute suggests a more complicated personal picture than the headlines alone convey. He recalled meeting Ferris for the first time in 2002 on a newspaper assignment, a professional encounter that unexpectedly grew into a lasting friendship.

His death at 62 brings to a close a life that intersected with some of the most notorious episodes in Glasgow's modern criminal history. It also leaves unresolved the killing of Arthur Thompson Jnr, a case that remains officially unsolved more than 30 years after it shocked the city.

Ferris's passing has prompted reflections across Scotland on the era of gangland violence he came to symbolise, and on the unlikely second act that turned a man once at the centre of a record-breaking murder trial into a published author whose work continues to shape popular understanding of organised crime in Glasgow.