Fog on the Tyne

by Bernard O'Mahoney

  The Conroy and the Sayers families were not the only ones making their presence known on the streets of Newcastle at the time. As two men, Joseph Wood and Robert Dunwiddie, stood looking at clothing on a stall at the city’s famous Green Market one day, the Conroys’ old adversary Geoffrey Harrison walked up to them and carved their faces open with a large knife before stabbing them. Fearing for their lives, the men fought back, stabbed Harrison and beat him senseless. Witnesses described how terrified women and children who had been shopping in the market fled the scene in tears as blood literally ran down the street.

  The initial attack by Harrison and the counter-attack against him were caught on CCTV cameras, but the images were not clear enough to distinguish who dealt which knife blows. However, a female stallholder who witnessed the attack by Harrison said that he had walked up behind Wood and carved open his face with a knife before repeatedly stabbing both Wood and Dunwiddie. The stallholder told police that the incident had then turned into a grotesque stabbing frenzy as the tables were turned on Harrison. ‘The man being attacked looked to have been cut from ear to ear and across the chest. He was totally covered in blood. It was horrible,’ she said.

  Using CCTV cameras, the police were able to follow those involved in the violence as they made their escape, and they were arrested shortly afterwards. Speculation was rife on an underworld motive for the attack, including a long-standing vendetta between Harrison and Wood. The previous year, Wood had appeared at Newcastle Crown Court accused of shooting Harrison’s friend David Francis, who had been blasted in the chest and leg as he walked his dog. The hit man had fired several shots from a car that was then driven away before being found burned out in Gateshead six hours later. However, the case was dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service through lack of evidence.

  The shooting had sparked a spate of tit-for-tat gun attacks over several weeks. Among those incidents, two windows were blasted out at a terraced house where three people were sleeping, including a nine year old and a twelve-month-old baby. Then a gunman shot twice at the door of a terraced house in Rye Hill, in Newcastle’s West End. Twenty-seven-year-old Cheryl Carter was peppered with approximately thirty shotgun pellets when hooded gunmen turned up on her doorstep and opened fire. On the same day, shots were fired at a house in Kirkdale Green while a woman and her 19-year-old pregnant daughter were inside and a white Nissan Sunny was blasted with a shotgun near Newcastle College. Nobody was ever convicted of any of these offences. However, police believe that they were definitely linked to the bloodbath in Green Market involving Geoffrey Harrison. At his trial, Harrison denied cutting and stabbing Wood and Dunwiddie, but he was convicted and sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment. Following his release, Geoffrey Harrison was found dead at his home. He had suffered horrific head injuries after being repeatedly struck with a hammer. As one Tyneside villain faded into oblivion, another was unwittingly emerging back into the spotlight.

  John Henry Sayers had been cleared of any involvement in the attack on Conroy and the Knights murder, but some police officers, rightly or wrongly, believed that John Henry was not the reformed criminal struggling to make a living that he had portrayed himself to be. Rather than let John Henry go about his business, they decided to monitor him extremely closely. After losing his taxi business, John Henry had thrown himself into building up the chain of pubs that Alan Coe was running for him. According to Coe, Neptune Inns, the original company that he had fronted for John Henry, had run up massive tax debts, and so a decision had been made to fold it and launch an identical business using the name Pubs 4 Us. Coe was again registered as the company director.

  Coe has since alleged that, approximately 12 weeks after Freddie Knights’ murder, John Henry marched into the John Gilpin pub, where Coe was working, and ordered him into the cellar. ‘He demanded the Christmas takings and threatened to kill me if I even told my wife that the Sayers were involved in any of the pubs,’ Coe said. Pubs 4 Us expanded rapidly, taking over more than 30 premises in the north-east, but the company’s unpaid debts and taxes were also mounting rapidly, and Coe alone was the man who was responsible for them.

  Each week, Coe would deliver brown envelopes containing the pub’s takings to a member of the Sayers family. Coe claims that John Henry would ‘froth at the mouth’ at the very thought of having to pay taxes to the government, a policy he apparently adopted as payback for the trouble he and his family had suffered over his arrest for the murder of Freddie Knights. It was inevitable, therefore, that HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) eventually invited Coe to a meeting to explain the company’s unpaid tax. Coe lied to the HMRC officers, claiming that Pubs 4 Us Ltd was in fact a relatively new company. The HMRC appeared to accept Coe’s explanation, and he left the meeting on a high. When he got into his vehicle and telephoned John Henry’s mother, Yvonne, to tell her the good news, he was unaware that his vehicle had been fitted with a covert listening device. ‘I have done every one of them. Fucking unbelievable. There is nothing they can do now; we are protected. I tricked them all,’ Coe boasted.

  Yvonne replied, ‘Aye, thank you very much.’ Yvonne was then heard telling a third party in the room that Alan had ‘sorted the VAT thing out’.

  Coe and Yvonne Sayers may be forgiven for talking so openly on the telephone, as their world bore no resemblance whatsoever to that of John Henry. His criminal lifestyle had ensured that he was painfully aware of the lengths that the police would go to in order to gather evidence. It’s surprising, therefore, that John Henry does not appear to have learned valuable lessons from his experiences with Northumbria Police. Following his acquittal for Knights’ murder, John Henry had predicted that they would record his conversations. It seems, therefore, that John Henry had thrown caution to the wind and wrongly assumed that Northumbria Police were no longer interested in his activities, because his car had been bugged too. Although Coe thought that he had tricked the HMRC officers, he knew that, because John Henry was still refusing to set aside money for taxes, it was only a matter of time before they would return and ask awkward questions about the company. Coe knew that he would be the fall guy, and so he made a decision to refuse to sign any more important company documents and asked John Henry if he would hire an assistant to speak to officials and creditors on his behalf. Yvonne Sayers began to think that Coe was becoming secretive and trying to distance himself from the business, and this led to several angry exchanges between her and John Henry. In one row, which was recorded while John Henry was on the phone in his car, he had said to his mother, ‘What are you on about with Alan?’

  Yvonne Sayers replied, ‘Just what he’s on about. He wants a secretary and all this, and we can’t afford one anyway, and he doesn’t need one anyway. It’s bullshit.’

  John Henry was then heard saying, ‘Mother, you see for the sake of just asking that you’re making mountains out of molehills.’

  Yvonne Sayers replied, ‘Oh, shut up.’

  The conversation captured on the bug continued with Yvonne Sayers saying, ‘He hasn’t written one letter in the last four years. Now he’s wanting somebody, but he doesn’t want a little lassie. He wants somebody who can talk to the breweries. I can talk to the breweries.’

  John Henry replied, ‘OK then, so you’re finance director, personal assistant, any other titles?’

  Yvonne Sayers replied, ‘Fucking chief fucking bottle-washer. Bye bye.’

  John Henry then signed off by saying, ‘I love ya.’

  Mothers, as most men know but rarely care to admit, are always right. In March 2005, Alan Coe was declared bankrupt because of the huge debts Pubs 4 Us had run up. After effectively washing his hands of the business, he unwittingly became a liability to John Henry, because he no longer had a purpose and had enough information to send his former boss back to jail. The police, who were monitoring the conversations between the parties, contacted Coe and issued him with what is known as an Osman Warning. These are given to people when the police have credible evidence that others are plannin
g to take someone’s life. A series of James Bond-style bugs and cameras was immediately installed in Coe’s home. One camera and recording device was disguised as a washing machine and another as a spade in the garden. An immobilised car was parked on Coe’s drive, which was to prevent others driving up to his door. This too was fitted with covert cameras. Coe and his family were also given personal panic alarms to wear around their necks.

  Shortly after Coe had received his Osman Warning, police officers carried out a series of raids and arrested Coe, John Henry and Yvonne Sayers for tax evasion. The police found £50,000 in cash at John Henry’s home, and £49,000 stashed in two plastic bags was recovered from a bathroom cabinet at Yvonne Sayers’ address. Initially, Yvonne Sayers claimed that the money was part of her life savings. ‘My father was a builder and demolition contractor,’ she said. ‘There was always money in the house. He used to keep it in baby-food tins. I don’t think there is anything odd or unsafe about having money in the house.’

  Coe, on the other hand, told police a very different story about the origins of the money. He admitted his role in the fraud but said he had only been carrying out John Henry’s orders because he had been threatened by him. There did appear to be an element of truth about Coe’s version of events, because shortly after his arrest a Volvo owned by his wife was torched. Days earlier, a Nissan belonging to her parents had had its windows smashed and tyres slashed. Unfortunately for Coe, although the police accepted relations between him and the Sayers had now soured, they refused to believe that he had not been a willing participant in the fraud from the outset.

  John Henry and Alan Coe were both charged with a variety of offences relating to tax evasion and money laundering. Yvonne Sayers faced a single charge of money laundering. John Henry pleaded guilty and was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment. Yvonne Sayers also pleaded guilty and was given a nine-month suspended sentence. Alan Coe pleaded not guilty after offering a defence of duress, but after a four-week trial at Newcastle Crown Court he was convicted of all charges. Judge Michael Cartlidge sentenced him to two years and nine months for each offence, all to run concurrently. He told Coe, ‘You assisted John Henry Sayers and his criminal organisation to evade taxes and rates. You were a willing subordinate of Sayers. After becoming bankrupt, you became of little use to Sayers or his organisation, and so you were effectively discarded. The Sayers organisation became convinced, probably wrongly in my view, that you were taking money away from them. As a result of all this, you were informed that you were at risk of being killed. You have lost your family life, you have lost your home, you have lost everything. There has been no benefit from the fraud to you apart from the wages you received from the Sayers organisation. The man described as the evil genius behind this operation, John Henry Sayers, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to four years. It is apparent that John Henry Sayers is a ruthless and dangerous criminal.’

  When John Henry was led to the cells to begin his sentence, officers from Northumbria Police congratulated one another, but they were not quite finished with the ‘evil genius’ or his ‘organisation’ just yet.

  In May 2003, career criminal Errol Hay pistol-whipped a 26-year-old man named John Scott as he slept on a settee at his home in the East End of Newcastle. The prolonged attack left Scott fighting for his life. He did survive but suffered a fractured skull, deep lacerations to his face and permanent brain damage. In the days leading up to the attack, Hay had boasted that he wanted to fight Scott ‘man to man’ after hearing rumours that he had bullied a teenager. However, when Hay eventually tracked Scott down, he wasn’t confident that he could defeat him in an orthodox encounter. Instead, cowardly Hay repeatedly smashed the butt of a replica gun into the sleeping man’s head. After leaving his victim for dead, Hay threw the gun into the River Tyne and paid an associate £800 to wash the blood out of Scott’s carpet.

  When he learned that Scott had survived the attack, Hay convinced his friends to lend him £2,000 in an effort to buy his victim’s silence. When this failed, Hay fled Tyneside and washed up in Pattaya, one of Thailand’s seediest resorts. After marrying a local prostitute, Hay worked as a barman before immersing himself in the local drug trade. Pattaya is awash with ex-pat villains, and those who met Hay firmly believed that he was beyond reproach, a ‘proper man’ who would never grass on his associates. In reality, Hay was a devious, deceitful individual, one of the least trustworthy people anybody would wish to have around them. Hay had been a registered informant for almost 20 years, pocketing thousands of pounds from Northumbria Police in exchange for shopping his drug-dealing accomplices.

  When travelling Tyneside villains learned that Hay was working at a bar in Pattaya, they made their local counterparts aware of his treachery. People began to shun Hay, and it wasn’t long before he lost his bar job and his drug-dealing business dried up. Solely reliant upon his wife’s poorly paid horizontal performances, Hay turned to alcohol for solace. As there is no benefits system in Thailand, Hay knew that he would have to get additional income from somewhere to survive, and so, three years after fleeing Newcastle, he decided to make a late-night call to ‘Phil’, his former police handler. It had been almost a decade since Phil had heard from Hay, and so he scribbled notes of their conversation:

  Sounded extremely drunk. Hay claimed that he had consumed a few gins, but he knew exactly what he was doing. Hay is claiming that he left Newcastle because he feared that John Henry Sayers was going to put a bullet in his head. He stated: ‘I have evidence that could send Sayers and others to prison for a very long time.’

  When asked by Phil about the crime that John Henry had supposedly committed, Hay said that Sayers had ‘nobbled the jury’ at his trial for the murder of Freddie Knights. Phil was aware that a member of the jury named Robert Black had received a chilling phone call at his home on the night before the not-guilty verdict was reached, and so he suggested that officers from Northumbria Police fly out to Thailand to meet Hay. In a series of extraordinary interviews, Hay told detectives, ‘I had attended the Freddie Knights murder trial in Leeds in support of my associate John Henry. During the hearing, the name of juror Robert Black was mistakenly read out by the court clerk, despite the fact he was supposed to have complete anonymity. On 9 September 2002, the jury returned guilty verdicts on Dale Miller, Michael Dixon and Eddie Stewart. The jury had not yet concluded their deliberations concerning John Henry and Tony Leach, and so the court adjourned until the following morning. As people began to leave, John Henry leaned across the protective glass that surrounds the dock and told me to make a threatening phone call to Robert Black, the jury member. “Make sure my brother Stephen helps you sort this; it’s very important,” John Henry said.’

  According to Hay, after relaying the message to Stephen Sayers, he, Stephen and another man, named Mark Rowe, drove to Hetton-le-Hole, a small town on the outskirts of Sunderland. Upon their arrival, Hay was given a list of telephone numbers to ring and a script to read. At approximately 11 p.m. that night, Robert Black’s wife answered their home phone. ‘Is Robert there?’ a man with a Geordie accent asked.

  ‘Hello?’ Robert Black said as he took the handset from his wife.

  ‘Do you realise you have a big decision to make tomorrow? Ten thousand pounds and your family are safe,’ the caller said before hanging up.

  Hay’s story had more than the ring of truth about it, because Robert Black had immediately contacted the police, who traced the call to a phone box in Hetton-le-Hole. The morning after the call was made, the jury, which included Robert Black, found John Henry Sayers and Tony Leach not guilty of Freddie Knights’ murder. Hay told detectives that, following John Henry’s acquittal, Sayers had held an impromptu party at a Newcastle pub to celebrate his freedom. Hay claimed that during the party he was approached by John Henry, who simply said, ‘Thank you.’ Approximately two weeks later, Hay was allegedly taken out for a meal by John Henry, who asked questions about the call to Robert Black.

  The detectives listening to
Hay’s story could hardly contain their excitement. If found guilty of nobbling a jury member during a murder trial, the Sayers brothers and Rowe would go to prison for a very long time, if not for life.

  At the time Hay was briefing detectives about the alleged jury-nobbling plot, John Henry was still languishing in prison for tax evasion offences. He had no idea what was going on until police officers attended the prison on his birthday, 24 September 2009. John Henry may well have doubted that Northumbria Police had attended to wish him a happy birthday, but he was left in no doubt about the allegations that Errol Hay had made, because he was charged with perverting the course of justice, an offence that carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. Therefore, if 46-year-old John Henry were to be found guilty, it was likely that he would be spending every birthday thereafter in custody.

  Back in Newcastle, John Henry’s brother Stephen and family friend Mark Rowe were also arrested and charged with perverting the course of justice. It’s fair to say that many on Tyneside believed that this was the bitter end for the Sayers firm. Paddy Conroy wrote on a social-networking website that a conviction for the Sayers would lead to further charges and further trials regarding other serious unsolved matters. He did not elaborate, but others added fuel to the fire by claiming that, now John Henry and Stephen were off the streets, fresh charges concerning the murders of Freddie Knights and Viv Graham would follow. What these people didn’t know was that Northumbria Police had built their entire case around the wholly uncorroborated evidence of Errol Hay. He had told detectives that he was racked with guilt over his part in the jury-nobbling plot and was desperate to cleanse his soul and give justice to Freddie Knights’ family. The evidence suggested otherwise. Down on his luck in a foreign land, Hay demanded assurance that, if he were to return to the UK to give evidence, he would not be imprisoned for any length of time for outstanding offences that he had committed, such as the attack on John Scott. He also wanted Northumbria Police to pay his Thai prostitute wife’s air fares to visit him in the UK, weekly benefits, his rent and school fees for his two children. The law, some may think surprisingly, allows for such deals to take place, and so Northumbria Police agreed.