A new BBC Scotland podcast series – The Ballad of Big Mags – will explore the life and times of a controversial Scottish figure who rose to prominence in the late 90s.
Margaret Haney from the Raploch estate in Stirling grabbed the headlines in 1997 as a self-styled anti-paedophile campaigner.
The media couldn’t get enough of her, and she revelled in the attention – but the high-profile coverage of ‘Big Mags’ as a protector of the community would eventually lead to her downfall.
Dark secrets lay behind the banner headlines because Margaret Haney was in fact the head of a notorious criminal gang while claiming she “just wanted to help folk” in the community.
Over 20 years later she still divides opinion, and, in this series, award-winning journalist Myles Bonnar reveals new insights as he speaks to people closely connected to her and intimately involved in the astonishing series of events that took place in the late 90s and early 2000s.
He also delves deep into the BBC archives to tell the definitive story of the woman known as ‘Big Mags’.
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Myles said: “Mags Haney’s rise to prominence and her dramatic fall after revelations of her criminal activities, was a story which played out in the media over years.
“The series not only examines her contradictory life but also wider issues of mob justice, community dynamics, poverty, and the creation of the so-called media personality.
“Many people only partially know the story of this controversial figure and this series will give a full account of how she rose to fame and became a source of fascination to the media and public before her criminal life was exposed.”
Haney was ordered to hand over £3,400 in profits from her lucrative heroin dealing empire by a Scottish court in 2003 and sentenced to a 12-year prison sentence.
Police seized a further £10,000 in cash in June 2001 when Haney was arrested and that money was forfeited.
The judge told Haney at the time: “What was abundantly clear was that you were all involved in a heroin dealing business in the course of which vast quantities of heroin were being supplied to numerous users in the Stirling area and very substantial sums of money were being made.”
