IT'S a story that should belong in the favelas of South America or the slums of the far east. Children as young as 12, turned into violent criminals, dealing and trafficking drugs, stealing to order and meting out brutal punishments for illegal money lenders.

But this is Glasgow, and this is the stark reality for far too many children in Scotland's most deprived schemes.

At first, the lure of the life is irresistible, in communities where there is little hope. The children have power – they are feared and can do almost anything they like – and money, earning as much as £500 a day for their trouble. It's what they do – for many it's the norm.

But one group of people is not prepared to let these children be lost to a life of crime, or worse. The Serious Organised Crime Early Intervention Service is fighting to help dozens of young people escape the clutches of the city's gangsters.

The initiative pioneered by the Scottish director of charity Action for Children, Paul Carberry, sees specially trained mentors – some of them former criminals – win the trust of young people aged 12 to 18, then support them as they go through employability training and eventually leave their old life behind.

“Criminals look for good material – young people who are not grasses, who may be violent, and they may be entrepreneurial, but ultimately expendable," Carberry explained.

"These kids can be smart. In one area there was a group of kids running counterfeit money, so going out to villages and spending bills, but a couple of kids worked out how to print their own bills. If they had a different direction they could do really well.

“For us, it’s about how we stop kids getting involved in the first place and when they are in it’s about how we get them out. There is a risk involved. If some of these kids are seen to engage they will get battered.”

Children are often picked out by the gangsters as they leave primary school and groomed for a life of crime.

One, who has managed to escape from the gangs thanks to the work of Carberry and his team, spoke to the Herald on Sunday on the condition he is not named.

He grew up surrounded by drugs and became a drug dealer, using his bike to courier Class A substances. The 18-year-old recently moved away from Glasgow to start a new life.

He said: “We hid drugs in stunt pegs (decorative metal tubes attached to bicycle wheels), that’s why we were never caught. At the beginning we were paid in cigarettes. Then you had the chance to make money."

He is slight in stature but was feared in his scheme because he had connections with organised crime figures, but his reasons for getting involved in crime betrays a depressingly familiar truth.

"When you live where I did you didn’t really have a choice,” he said. “Up and down the stairs in the flats I stayed in there were junkies injecting into their arms and tooting bags. I saw that from the age of five.”

But the brutality of their existence inevitably catches up.

Sitting with his mentor at Action for Children’s offices, a unit in an industrial estate in Glasgow’s south side, he explained: “I’ve seen it all. One of my friends had their eye taken out with a Buckfast bottle. They were hit over the head with it and stabbed in the eye with the broken glass. I still remember the scream. We were only about 15 or 16. It was a gang fight, that’s what happens.

“He was taken away in an ambulance and the fight carried on.”

When the Herald on Sunday first asked the teenager about the crimes he had committed, he was at first evasive and struggled to maintain eye contact as he shifted about on his seat, fidgeting with a mobile phone. “I didn’t do anything,” he said. But when reassured that he won’t be identified the teenager opened up.

He said: “I was involved with gangs, violence, battering people, stealing cars, joyriding, selling drugs.

He came to the attention of organised crime gangs when he was just out of primary school and given drugs to sell.

He said: “You were passed drugs by the older ones. You think they’re doing you a favour. Then you need to pay your bill.

“It started with cannabis, then it was Valium, crack, and smack. If people didn’t pay us we were sent to their door. I got caught [by police] for battering somebody. It was a bit serious. This boy ended up in a bad way. Luckily, I didn’t get done for it, but it put the fear into me, so I started to pull away.”

The boy’s mentor, who is from a similar background, said the teenager was at a point in his life when he was “ready for change”.

“He realised how serious that incident was and the potential to be jailed for it,” said the youth worker, who also asked not to be named. “He wanted to get his act together. He was clever enough to recognise that he could either learn employability skills or stay with what he was doing, and it wouldn’t be long before he would be in prison, or dead.”

At the age of 16 he began to go on fishing and camping trips with his mentor to take him away from his criminal contacts. Then he met his girlfriend, who lives several miles from where he grew up, and later moved in with her. He is now hoping to study social care and “put a wee bit back, try to help people like myself, because I’m alright now”.

His mentor said he has “strived” to reduce his offending. “He should be proud of what he’s achieved,” the mentor addded. “It’s not easy to be the boy who stands up to people and tells them he’s going to walk a different path.”

He is one of 50 young people who have benefitted from the scheme so far. This has delivered an estimated saving to the public purse of half a million pounds. The saving was made because fewer young people are in secure care, or prison.

The young people are first referred to Action for Children by the One Glasgow Reducing Offending Partnership, a project set up to help “people involved, or at risk of becoming involved, in the justice system”.

They are offered an alternative – the opportunity to take courses, even learn a trade from professionals. Some are given paid work. They are supported through the process by Action for Children staff.

But a criminal lifestyle is a big draw for young people from deprived communities with little hope. Some children can make up to £500 a day by carrying out criminal activities such a dealing and delivering drugs, stealing to order, and even meting out violent retribution for money lenders when impoverished borrowers can’t pay back cash.

The director of the initiative, Paul Carberry, a former social worker who now sits on the Scottish Government’s Serious and Organised Crime Task Force, said: “We were working with a young person and they were saying it was exactly like The Wire [A US TV series about organised crime]. She had twenty wee dealers all running about for her on bikes. She oversaw the whole thing and she was connected to a tough family. She had them all behind her. In certain schemes that’s what it’s like. It’s organised.”

Many of Carberry’s specially trained staff have left behind a life of crime and can us their experiences to relate to the young people they are tasked with supporting.

One Action for Children youth worker, who asked not to be named, said: “I have to convince them that I’m not there to gather information, grill them or interrogate them, and, no matter what happens I will support them, even if they make a wrong decision…once I’ve established that, I will start challenging offending behaviour and negative attitudes.”

The youth worker turned his own life around in his early 20s when a member of his organised crime gang was brutally murdered.

He said: “I got involved with a group of boys and because our families were well known we were feared. We did what we wanted, and nobody could do anything about it. Gang fights, drug dealing, theft. I was personally involved in acts of serious violence, where me and my mates assaulted people very badly. I was lucky I didn’t get caught.

“The turning point for me was when conflict in the group led to a falling out between families and someone got murdered.”

He gradually backed away from the criminals he once considered friends, went to college and studied social sciences, before working in residential units for young people, which led to a job with the Serious Organised Crime Early Intervention Service.

Action for Children Scottish director Paul Carberry said: “Some of these guys are just three or four years ahead of the kids they’re working with and they become a role model.

“One of kids we were working with, his role model had been a notorious Glasgow gangster – who I can’t name because it will identify the kid – and despite this person having a bad ending [he was murdered] that was his role model.

“But his role model changed and became our mentor because the kid believed it was possible to change. These mentors are hand picked so that they can operate in this environment.”

Carberry’s project was recently extended for three years – at a cost of £1m – with the aim of working with 250 young people from 80 families.

Carberry said some children who are at primary school are now caught up in organised crime and suggested his scheme could be rolled out to under 12s.

“What we want to do is do it at scale,” said Carberry. “We’re in a good place in Scotland but we can do better, and I think we can do more. We need to start working with kids when they’re in primary school. The longer kids are involved in organised crime the harder it is to get them to change, so if we’re working with kids in primary schools where there’s issues and problems, and bits of drug dealing going on, that’s when we need to get in and support them and turn their lives around.

“If you can turn around two or three kids you can turn around a whole class and maybe a whole community.”

PIONEERING SCOTTISH PROJECT COULD BE ROLLED OUT IN ENGLAND

Action for Children’s Serious Organised Crime Early Intervention Service could be replicated in London where a record number of young people have been murdered in a spate of violent incidents.

Director Paul Carberry is to host a UK Government delegation in October when he will set out how early intervention by youth workers can break the link between underworld figures and disadvantaged children desperate to make a few pounds.

Carberry said: “We’ve been in discussion with the Home Office about organised crime in London. The entire Prevent department [a division of the UK's Counter Terrorism Strategy] is coming up in October to look at our service. It will be a high-level meeting to see what we’re doing in Scotland.”

The number of knife and gun crimes is rising in London with 82 people suspected to have been deliberately killed since the beginning of the year.

Carberry said there has been similar issues in Glasgow, with young people considered by criminals to be “expendable” caught up in organised crime.

But the Serious Organised Crime Early Intervention Service is already diverting dozens away from a life of a crime, with a further 250 young people to be supported over the next three years.

The Herald on Sunday contacted the Home Office and a spokesman declined to comment on the planned visit to Scotland.