Investigators have lifted the lid on a Scottish gangster’s gory death – claiming he was the Russian mob’s top money launderer in the UK.
Scot Young, from Dundee, was impaled on railings after he fell from a fourth-floor window at his luxury London home in 2014.
At the time, police said the death of the 52-year-old was not suspicious, while a coroner cited “conflicting evidence” over his death.
The expert said there was no proof of foul play and recorded a narrative verdict, effectively leaving Scot’s death unexplained.
But friends and family – including his ex-wife Michelle – feared the property tycoon was murdered by Russian hitmen in an echo of the BBC’s organised crime drama McMafia.
Now a team of UK journalists have shed new light on Scot’s death and his murky background.
Heidi Blake, global investigations editor of Buzzfeed, told how Scot had close ties to billionaire Boris Berezovsky – a former friend turned arch-critic of Russian president Vladimir Putin – who was found hanged at home in 2013.
In a BBC radio interview she said: “Scot eventually made his way to London and fell in with a major organised crime group and began laundering money for them.
“He became the go-to fixer for Berezovsky and his associates as they sought ways to stash their ill-gotten cash in an extraordinary array of luxury British properties, vehicles, private jets and helicopters.
“He really helped Berezovsky splash his cash in the UK and pursued a whole range of highly risky property deals for Berezovsky in Russia itself.
"So he exposed himself to huge danger as part of that role and ultimately he plunged from a window from his fourth-floor apartment in Marylebone, in London and was impaled on the spikes of a wrought iron fence underneath.
"This after warning police and his friends and family for years that he was being targeted by Russian hitmen.”
Scot was one of a group of friends, known as the Cipriani Five, all of whom died between 2010 and 2014.
Of the group, Berezovsky was found hanged in his bathroom in Berkshire in March 2013.
Property tycoons Robbie Curtis and Paul Castle jumped in front of trains in 2012 and 2010, while Johnny Elichaoff, ex-husband of TV star Trinny Woodall, leapt from the roof of a shopping centre in Bayswater, London, in 2014.
Heidi explained the tax loophole Scot used to launder money for the Russians.
She said: “The way the law worked at the time was that any declarations he made voluntarily to the tax authorities, he did so with immunity. So the tax authorities weren’t able to notify the police that this money was stolen.
“So this was what Scott did, he moved money into the UK and put it in a UK bank account, declared that was how he made it and the taxman let him get on with spending it.”
