The Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency has ended the careers of the key specialists propping up the country’s most dangerous organised crime groups.

In what the elite crime-fighting unit says is a major victory in the war on the underworld, all 12 are either facing prosecution or investigation by their professional bodies and none are able to operate.

News of the investigations came as police intelligence obtained by The Herald show there are 291 white-collar specialists, including lawyers and accountants, working for gangs.

The SCDEA’s director general, Deputy Chief Constable Gordon Meldrum, last night stressed the 12 taken out had been key players acting as lynchpins for the top 20% of Scotland’s 360 organised crime groups.

He said: "We found out that these 12 undoubtedly operated on behalf of a number of gangs.

"By taking out one of the specialists, you can impact on, say, eight groups because they all draw a particular type of advice from one of the individuals.

"We know for a fact that a number of specialists sit as nexus points in a number of groups.

"We have got to a position where we have undertaken investigations in to all of them and we have undertaken some kind of action against all of them."

Mr Meldrum is unable to name any of the 12, because of ongoing proceedings against them involving the Crown Office, the Law Society of Scotland and the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland.

The investigation into the dirty dozen began two years ago when the SCDEA produced its first ever map of organised crime. That revealed there were 241 "specialists" -- hauliers, financiers, bureau de change operators, security experts as well as lawyers and accountants -- working for the underworld.

The latest "data sweep" for the map -- published exclusively in yesterday’s Sunday Herald -- found there were 291 such individuals. The new map also plotted 360 gangs, 200 of them based in Strathclyde, and 4472 members, including the specialists.

The data also established that 93 organised crime groups are now adopting corruption tactics against the public and private sectors -- including financial institutions and legal and accounting firms.

Mr Meldrum last night stressed that his SCDEA crime map was no "academic exercise" but had allowed his team to pinpoint exactly why white-collar professionals posed the greatest risk.

Detectives are now plotting their next move against corrupt professionals. Mr Meldrum stressed that taking such people out would have a far bigger effect than jailing a foot soldier.

He said: "Without their advice, organised crime cannot function. It has legitimate and illegitimate sides and sitting in the middle of that are the kind of professionals we are talking about, the people you or I need when we are buying a property, or applying for a mortgage.

"Without somebody on the books who is doing that for them, their business model crashes."

Gangsters, in particular, need to find lawyers and accountants who will fail to ask them basic questions required to satisfy money-laundering regulations. Some professionals are coerced by blackmail or threats. Others are simply greedy.

Mr Meldrum has little time for the latter. He said: "If they have the knowledge that they are doing this on behalf of organised crime, then in my opinion they are every bit as harmful to communities as the individual criminals who will pump the drugs out on to the street.

"In their own way, they cause as much harm as the organised criminals who deal the drugs or traffic the firearms.

"The harm can be very human, very individual and very local. It can be those people who die in the streets of Scotland.

"But the harm can also be a lot more nationalised than that, the economic impact on the country. The best assessment of the size of organised crime in the UK is somewhere between £20bn and £40bn a year."