BRAD Welsh knew what made him the man he was. And he did not like it.
Just a few months before he was gunned down on his Edinburgh doorstep, the 48-year-old gym owner matter-of-factly rehearsed both his history of violence and crime and how he had left that life behind.
Speaking to podcaster James English, Mr Welsh described a youth spread between serious international boxing, football casual violence and gangsterism.
“I am quite fortunate,” he told Mr English. “I have the experience of being brought up with something that is real, as opposed to kids today who have got social media. We were brought up in a generation in the 1980s when you went to the football, living.”
The trouble? “It was born out of frustration, out of Thatchers’ society.”
Mr Welsh was young, just 13, when he got in to football violence following Hibs. But he used is boxing training. “I gained a bit of a reputation around Scotland,” he explained.” I am not proud of the levels of violence. And then came the real crime.
“At seventeen-eighteen I was involved in clubs and protection rackets and firearms and extortion and stuff like that,” he said. “I am not proud of that, of course I am not.” His criminal career, he said, ended after a High Court conviction and a spell in jail.
The reputation has haunted him ever since, even as he focused on community work. “For 20 years, for 25 years, I’ve been doing nothing but good,” he said, making quotation signs with his fingers as he name-checked himself. “All my life I have been blighted with ‘Brad Welsh’, ‘Brad Welsh’, ‘Brad Welsh’, because I was a young boy who was predacious.”
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here