With her formidable frame and sandpaper voice, “Big Mags” Haney was the crime clan matriarch who ruled over the troubled Raploch estate in Stirling.
The chain-smoking granny and mum-of-11 first attracted public attention for an anti-paedophile crusade in the 90s.
But behind the headlines and an appearance on a morning TV show, the community she claimed to be protecting from the scourge of sex abuse knew the truth.
Haney’s family were responsible for a crime wave which had left residents at their wits’ end.
And worse, she ruled over a vile empire peddling heroin and pocketing huge sums of cash while members of her clan did her bidding and sold death on the streets.
That all came crashing down when the brave people of Raploch stood up against her by first ensuring she was turfed out of the estate.
Later, locals turned to the Daily Record, passing key information to an undercover reporting team which gathered evidence on her drug dealing.
Crowds cheered as she was carted off in a police raid with defiant Haney, dressed in pink sweatshirt, leggings and slippers, raising a handcuffed fist and shouting: “Get it up you!”
Born in 1942 into a poor crofting family, Haney lived in a village just outside Stirling where her father was a miner.
After her parents split, seven-year-old Haney and two siblings were taken to live in an Edinburgh convent where she remained for six years.
Later, she made her home in the Raploch estate, a community which endured depravation throughout the 80s and 90s, wracked by unemployment and drug abuse.
The Haneys lived in the heart of the estate and gained notoriety for their criminal activities.
Haney’s own convictions stretched back to l975 and included assault, contempt of court, breach of the peace and fraud.
In 1995, Sheriff Norrie Stein branded them the “family from hell” and said they blighted lives in the area.
Two years later, Haney would freely concede her children had made hundreds of court appearances between them, adding: “My kids have been brought up in the jungle.”
Despite this reputation, Haney put herself forward as a self-styled vigilante against the threat of child abusers, leading a lynch mob after a paedophile was housed in the estate.
She even appeared on the Kilroy TV show to talk about protecting youngsters from sex beasts and revelled in her mini-celebrity status.
But residents who knew the real Big Mags were sick of the violence, thefts, and intimidation. They wanted the Haneys out and another mob, 400-strong, laid siege to their house this time.
After being hounded out of Raploch, neighbours waved banners in celebration while Haney claimed she was the victim of a vendetta.
She convinced Stirling Council to rehouse her in a good-quality homeless persons’ flat in the town’s Lower Bridge Street, where five of six flats would be occupied by her family members at one stage.
Their notoriety meant council chiefs couldn’t house them anywhere else and locals took to calling it “Hotel Haney”. The police would come to know it as “Fortress Haney”.
It was from here that Haney raked in piles of cash from the misery of others as a heroin dealer while sowing the seeds of her own downfall.
In 2000, the Record set up a Shop-A-Dealer hotline asking readers to identify drug pushers.
As the calls came in, Haney was named as Stirling’s No1 drug dealer and jumped to the top of the list to be targeted by a special investigation. Haney was selling up to 600 “tenner bags” of heroin every week while living off benefits of £1200 a month.
She used her council home as a supply base and even sold drugs in front of her eight-year-old grandchildren.
In her lair, Haney was seated in a big chair which was known to visitors as her “throne”.
The ill-gotten gains were stuffed into bags, with stashes of banknotes hidden under beds and other places at relatives’ homes.
The Record’s team managed to purchase two £10 heroin deals from Haney and passed a dossier of evidence to police.
At her trial in 2003, Haney admitted running a £250,000-a-year drugs operation using a network of delivery runners, including her own children, grandchildren and nieces.
Prosecutor Drew Mackenzie told how Haney was the controller of the operation. He said: “Haney sat in her house like a queen and she was money-motivated”.
At the High Court in Glasgow, Haney, who was 60 at the time and walking with a stick, admitted supplying heroin in Stirling over an 18-month period.
Alongside her in the dock were three other Haneys – her second-in-command, daughter Diane, then 35, son Hugh, then 31, and niece Rose-ann, then 40.
All four pled guilty midway through the trial.
Haney was jailed for 12 years, serving half that sentence at Cornton Vale prison, before being released in 2009.
But she didn’t return to Stirling and was instead housed in Alva, Clackmannanshire.
Haney suffered from a variety of health problems in her final years before dying from cancer in 2013 aged 70.
Before her death, while confined to a wheelchair, Haney was asked about a family member who had just been jailed for contempt of court in a murder trial. Big Mags answered: “She’s brought total shame on the whole of the family.”
