Former international drug smuggler Andrew Pritchard, once dubbed Britain’s Pablo Ecobar, says feared Glasgow gangster Jamie Daniel was the ‘go to guy’ in Scotland for one major London crime gang.
04:30, 06 Jul 2026
Former drug smuggler Andrew Pritchard(Image: James Linsell Clark / SWNS)
A man once dubbed Britain’s Pablo Escobar has revealed how Glasgow crime boss Jamie Daniel was called in to sort out a £200,000 drugs debt owed to a firm of ruthless London criminals
Over a period of almost 30 years Londoner Andrew “The Joker” Pritchard smuggled millions of pounds’ worth of drugs including cocaine and hash into the UK hidden inside everything from coconuts and coffins, to crates of fruit and vegetables.
Pritchard went straight after his release from prison and has brought out a book about his life of crime titled ‘Empire of Dirt.’
He also helps ex cons and kids stay out of trouble through his charity the AP Foundation.
In an exclusive interview with the Daily Record Pritchard revealed how a London crime gang used Jamie Daniel and one of their own enforcers dubbed Psycho Nick to recover the £200,000 due on a consignment of hash.
The 59 year old from Hackney in London said:”A Scottish bloke known as Brave Alan relieved one of his criminal associates of the best part of £200,000 and vanished without a trace.
“Word soon filtered back that he’d returned to the Scottish Highlands, convinced he’d pulled off the perfect exit and would never be seen again.
“He couldn’t have been more mistaken.
“Once every other avenue had been exhausted, there was only one man left to call – Psycho Nick who was also known as Nick the Greek
“Armed with nothing more than Alan’s mobile number Nick boarded an evening British Airways flight from Heathrow.”
When he arrived in Glasgow the enforcer was met by Jamie Daniel who Pritchard says bore an “uncanny resemblance” to Harold Shand, the formidable London gangster portrayed by Bob Hoskins in 1979 crime classic The Long Good Friday.
Until his death in 2016 Daniel was head of Glasgow’s notorious Daniel crime clan who have been involved in a long running murderous feud with the city’s Lyons family dating back more than 25 years.
Jamie Daniel then took Psycho Nick for dinner to a Glasgow city-centre Chinese restaurant where he phoned Brave Alan. He told the man that he owed some money and he would send a driver to collect him.
Pritchard added:”Less than an hour later the restaurant doors swung open. “Jamie’s driver walked in, with Alan following a few steps behind.
“Standing around 6ft 3in, he was an imposing figure, but you could see the fear etched across his face.
“His complexion had turned ghostly pale and his hands trembled as he approached the table and lowered himself into a chair.
“Jamie barely acknowledged his arrival. His eyes locked onto Alan’s whose face seemed to lose what little colour it had left.
“He told a terrified Alan that his driver would take him wherever he needed to go and that he had to bring back every penny of the £200,000 that night.
“That was the end of the conversation. Alan stood up and left with the driver.”
Pritchard says the two men finished their meal and then drove back to Jamie’s house in the west end of Glasgow were they played pool and had a few drinks.
Later that night Brave Alan arrived carrying a rucksack containing the money and handed it to Nick.
He then told Daniel: When I heard your voice on the phone, Jamie
“I thought I was dead.”
The following morning, Psycho Nick boarded the first flight back to London with the £200,000 drugs debt.
Pritchard says the incident in 1996 forged a friendship between Psycho Nick and Jamie Daniel that lasted up until his death.
He added:”Jamie was a big guy in Glasgow.
“He was a very serious man but you knew what strength he had.
“Jamie Daniel came in through our network.
“One of the local firms in London was connected to him. When they had an issue up in Scotland he was their man to go to.
“Nick was a close business associate of mine, he was like a brother to me.”
At one stage Pritchard, who never met Jamie Daniel, was importing 500,000 ecstasy tablets a month into the UK, along with tons of cannabis and cocaine.
He also organised some of the largest illegal warehouse raves in the country during the house party craze of the late 1980’s.
The Londoner spent much of his time in Jamaica from where he operated his drugs shipments and even married a Miss World contestant.
He was arrested in 2004, after the largest drug bust in UK history.
More than £100 million worth of cocaine was seized at Spitalfields Market in East London, concealed in coconuts but he was acquitted after two trials
Pritchard was then held again in 2013 and jailed for drug trafficking and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. He was classified as a Category A prisoner.
Following his release from prison in 2019 he decided to turn his back on crime and launched his AP Foundation.
He said:”We run and deliver education courses for people who are stuck in the criminal justice system and we help them get back into a normal life after they leave prison.
“We also work with young people in the community who are at risk of getting involved in gangs and crime.
“We make them aware of the seriousness of carrying knives and getting involved in gangs.
“I talk about my lifestyle but I use it a cautionary tale.”
The former drug smuggler added:”I encourage a lot of people who are ex criminals like myself who have decided now is time to give back.
“We have taken so much over the years. It may look very glamorous from the outside, which it does. But it does lead to death and misery nine times out of ten or a very long prison sentence”
Pritchard says his eureka moment came when he was in HMP Belmarsh in London and saw the numbers of young people coming into the jail who were doing long sentences.
He added:” I knew their parents, their relatives and I just knew it made no sense what they were doing to each other. They were killing each other.
“When I left prison I set up the Foundation and now we work in prisons across the country.”
At the time of his death Jamie Daniel was one of Scotland’s most powerful and wealthy underworld figures with criminal connections across the UK and further afield.
His underworld dominance had remained secret until January 2003 when our sister paper the Sunday Mail publicly named him for the first time as the number one criminal in Scotland in their award winning Crime Inc series.
Then his criminal empire was said to be worth £16 million a year.
Apart from a four-year sentence for heroin dealing in 1983, and 12 months for a road rage attack in 2010, Daniel was always one step ahead of the law.
In a 2019 Channel Five documentary former detective David Moran said of Jamie Daniel:”He had the reputation of being one or two steps ahead of the police and pretty much untouchable”
Pablo Escobar was a Colombian drug lord and leader of the notorious Medellín Cartel who flooded the USA with billions of pounds worth of cocaine before he was shot dead by police in 1993.
*Empire Of Dirt’ is available in all bookstores and on Amazon. There is also an audio version out shortly. For more information on Andrew Pritchard go to: https://nakedcitymagazine.substack.com/
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