Former PSNI Deputy Chief Constable Alan McQuillan OBE does not get due credit for normalising seizure of hundreds of millions from organised crime - delivered template used by National Crime Agency (NCA)
Former Deputy Chief Constable Alan McQuillan OBE - who passed away this week – does not get the credit he deserves for making the seizure of hundreds of millions from organised “almost standard fare” across the UK, a former colleague has said.
Jim Gamble, a former head of Special Branch in Belfast, now Chief Executive of Inque online safeguarding company, was speaking after the former PSNI Deputy Chief Constable passed away, aged 70, after a four-year battle with prostate cancer.
Mr McQuillan graduated from QUB with a degree in astrophysics in 1976 and was hailed by many admirers as being a man of outstanding intellect.
Head of policing in Belfast in the early noughties, he provided key stability during the transition of Sinn Fein buying into policing.
Widely seen as favourite to be the first Chief Constable appointed to the new PSNI, the Policing Board instead opted for an external candidate, Hugh Orde.
Instead, Alan went on to lead the Assets Recovery Agency (ARA), which operated across the UK, and also led its successor the Serious Organised Crime Agency, thus laying the foundations for today's National Crime Agency, which succeeded both.
Retiring from policing, he worked with third sector organisations and did consultancy for the EU, UK Foreign Office and International Monetary Fund.
He also served as Chairman of the Assembly Secretariat Audit and Risk Committee, and worked as a management and security consultant.
Mr Gamble told the News Letter that Mr McQuillan was someone who was “called to public service in the true, old fashioned sense.”
His three years serving as an Assistant Chief Constable in Wales gave him "a real insight" into normal community policing without the dominating security focus of NI, he said.
"I'll never forget when I would go into his office, after he came back to Northern Ireland. He'd have a camping grill set up in one of the rooms where he would cook sausages and baps.
"It was always quite a famous feast that you got for breakfast when you got a briefing with him. He was a larger than life character in so many ways, but super intelligent, and full of integrity, focused on doing what was best for people."
Mr Gamble noted “the impact he had - and he does not even get the credit for it – for the work he did setting up the Assets Recovery Agency”.
He added: "The amount of money that he took from organized crime syndicates runs into the hundreds of millions of pounds."
As a result of Alan's work, he said, those sorts of operations across the UK have now become "almost standard fare".
"He began that and delivered a template that's now used by the National Crime Agency."
"He was a forward thinker and in a different time and place, notwithstanding the politics of Northern Ireland, he would have ended up being one of our chief constables, but that wasn't to be.
"But he didn't drop his head. He moved on and continued to work for the public good in the Assets Recovery Agency, and also well beyond the criminal justice framework."
One example he gave was the work he did as a trustee for the SOS Bus service, which supports people in distress on the streets of NI at night.