Protection racket woman is jailed

Jun 19 2008

A HAMILTON security firm employee who threatened construction company staff to obtain contracts was this week jailed for 15 months.

Last month, a jury found Marion Lang (51), who worked for Lochwood Security, guilty of attempting to extort contracts from Russell Construction in Hillhouse Industrial Estate, Hamilton, a building site in Denny and a George Wimpey site in Cambuslang.

Passing sentence on Lang on Tuesday, Sheriff Marie Smart said the part Lang played at Lochwood Security was significant.

“As an employee, you could have left at any time but you chose to stay and do what you did, “ she added.

“These are serious charges including threatening to kill and threatening to damage property.”

Earlier, Sheriff Smart and depute fiscal Jim Leck discussed the circumstances of former co-accused Jason Dickson’s conviction while considering Lang’s punishment.

Dickson - a thug who used to manage Lochwood Security under the name JD Services - was fined £110,000 last year for attempted extortions.

The fine was later reduced to £75,000 at the Court of Appeal.

Sheriff Smart also recounted the circumstances of the incident in 2005 when Lang telephoned Elizabeth Chisholm at Russell Construction in Hillhouse Estate in an attempt to obtain a security contract for Lochwood Security.

“There was a query about an invoice,” recounted the Sheriff. “Ms Lang then threatened Ms Chisholm down the phone, stating ‘I’m f*****g going to get you’ and ‘I know where you live an I am going to kill you’.”

Furthermore, Sheriff Smart noted how Lang told a worker at a building site in Denny ‘you better take on our f*****g security or else’.

David Brookens, defending, told the court his client was bankrupt, was the head of a stable family unit and her father’s carer.

Mr Brookens added: “Ms Lang appreciates that the security industry, indeed like our own (law), does not have a good public image.”

The sentence of Marion Lang brings an end to a long-running case which initially started in the High Court in Glasgow in 2005.

Last month, her co-accused in the trial - Wilson Bowman (36), of Blair Atholl Grove, Burnbank - was found not guilty of two charges of attempted extortion.

Following the verdict, the jury were escorted from the building by police after two of them asked for protection.

A journalist was also threatened inside the court building after friends and family of Bowman prevented a photographer from taking his picture.

Originally, Lang — who defended herself throughout the trial — had faced 14 charges of extortion and attempted extortion across the West of Scotland. These included: extorting a security contract at Hamilton Racecourse, a Persimmon Homes site in Hamilton’s Ewart Crescent, and attempting to extort a security contract at High Blantyre Primary School.

Bowman was originally charged with eight offences, including assault, extortion and attempted extortion.

However, Mr Leck had pointed out that the Crown decided to drop many of the charges during the course of the trial as witnesses could no longer be contacted.

And two weeks ago, William Russell Junior (34), a former world champion yachtsman from Blantyre, was fined £1500 after he was found guilty of contempt of court during Lang and Bowman’s trial.

Russell’s apparent ‘memory lapse’ while in the dock as a witness resulted in one of the charges against the duo being dropped.