Fog on the Tyne

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  About the Author

  Bernard O’Mahoney is the bestselling author of Essex Boys, Bonded by Blood, Wannabe in My Gang? and numerous other acclaimed true-crime titles. He lives in Birmingham.

  FOG ON THE TYNE

  THE STORY OF BRITAIN'S

  BLOODIEST GANG WAR

  Bernard O’Mahoney

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licenced or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9781845968052

  Version 1.0

  www.mainstreampublishing.com

  Copyright © Bernard O’Mahoney, 2011

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  First published in Great Britain in 2011 by

  MAINSTREAM PUBLISHING COMPANY

  (EDINBURGH) LTD

  7 Albany Street

  Edinburgh EH1 3UG

  ISBN 9781845967642

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any other means without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for insertion in a magazine, newspaper or broadcast

  The author has made every effort to clear all copyright permissions, but where this has not been possible and amendments are required, the publisher will be pleased to make any necessary arrangements at the earliest opportunity

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  SINCE I BEGAN writing this book, I have married my girlfriend, Roshea, a Geordie lass with supermodel looks, the voice of an angel and a heart of gold. On 15 January 2010, my mother’s birthday, Roshea gave birth to our beautiful son, Paddy. My first name is Patrick, my father’s name was Patrick and Roshea’s grandfather was Patrick, and so naming our son did not demand much thought.

  Five days later, I spent the night at New Cross Hospital, in Wolverhampton. For 14 long, painful hours, I watched helplessly as my lifelong heroine fought the hardest fight of her life. At 8.31 a.m. on 20 January 2010, I held my dear mother’s hand and cuddled her as she gracefully conceded defeat and breathed her last.

  This book, as you can imagine, has been written while experiencing every possible human emotion. So many good people have helped me through the numerous highs and lows. You know who you are, so please forgive me for not mentioning you by name, but I am sure that you will understand. I can only dedicate this book to two very special people. The first is my son Paddy O’Mahoney, who has given me hope and belief in a bright future. The other is my mother, Anna O’Mahoney, who has given me a mind awash with beautiful memories and a heart overflowing with love. Thank you both for yesterday, today and tomorrow.

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTIONConroy

  CHAPTER ONEOnce Upon a Tyne

  CHAPTER TWOAnd Pigs Might Fly

  CHAPTER THREEFuck Roger Rabbit

  CHAPTER FOURIn the Name of His Father

  CHAPTER FIVEViv No More in ’94

  CHAPTER SIXThe Enemy Within

  CHAPTER SEVENY Viva España

  CHAPTER EIGHTJudas

  CHAPTER NINETrial and Retribution

  CHAPTER TENHomeward Bound

  CHAPTER ELEVENKnightmare on Ella’s Street

  CHAPTER TWELVEJudgement Day

  Introduction

  CONROY

  ON 11 AUGUST 2006, I received a late-night call on my mobile phone from a withheld number. ‘You murdered Tucker, Tate, Rolfe and Danny Marlow, the taxi driver,’ a man with a strong Geordie accent ranted.

  ‘Really?’ I replied. ‘You’d better go to the police and tell them that the wrong men are in jail then, hadn’t you?’

  ‘No,’ the Geordie sneered. ‘I want £10,000 in cash from you, or I’m going to go to the newspapers with tapes that prove you killed them all.’ I told the man, who was clearly intoxicated, that I would pay him the £10,000 he was demanding but that he would have to pop around to my house to pick up the cash. ‘Do you think I’m fucking stupid?’ he replied. ‘I will give you a time and a place to drop it off.’

  ‘Perhaps I can put it in a bag and leave it in my front garden for you?’ I joked. ‘Do yourself a favour, you maggot, and fuck off!’

  I replaced the receiver and thought that would be the end of the matter. It had been 11 years since my former associates Pat Tate, Tony Tucker and Craig Rolfe had been executed as they sat in their Range Rover. In the early ’90s, we had started out as a nightclub security company, which, fuelled by drugs, soon transformed itself into a ruthless gang that immersed itself in murder, extortion and drug importation and distribution. Following my associates’ executions in 1995, which made national headline news, the media began calling us the Essex Boys firm, and overnight a mythical monster had been born. Our gang’s rapid rise, and kamikaze fall, became the subject of numerous books, television documentaries and feature films. Blatant lies and exaggerated stories have been manufactured by hangers-on, wannabes and never-will-bes since our demise; most are told by people we never even met. As with the Kray gang before us, every chancer and loser in the UK seemed to want to be associated with the Essex Boys firm and its imaginary exploits.

  I did know the late Danny Marlow. He was a family man, a taxi driver from Leicestershire. He owed an associate of the Essex Boys firm a relatively small sum of money, which I had gone to collect from him just a few hours before he was murdered. The debt had nothing to do with crime. The guy he owed it to had a chain of video rental shops that had gone bust. I never bothered asking the details of how Danny’s debt came into being. The guy he owed was a friend of a friend, and so I agreed to help him retrieve his money. I was interviewed by the police about Danny’s death, but I honestly played no part in it. Two men were later convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for the killing. Two men were also convicted of the triple murders in the Essex Boys case, and they too are serving life imprisonment.

  Taking into consideration those facts, I failed to see how a drunken Geordie was going to convince the police that they had locked up the wrong men, although all four do claim that they are innocent. I knew, of course, that my late-night caller had no intention of contacting the police. I had been receiving regular phone calls for more than a decade from strangers or strange people who were either in awe of my deceased associates or who were abusive and issued death threats because I had quite rightly described their heroes as arseholes. It can be a tad annoying and frustrating, and occasionally depressing, but never have I felt threatened. If somebody did intend to cause me serious harm, I am in no doubt that they would not give me the courtesy of a warning. The drunken Geordie was not the first person to accuse me of being a murderer, but it was most certainly the first time that somebody had demanded money from me.

  I put the call down to the evils of drink, drugs or gangster rap and thought that I would hear no more once the sad wretch had sobered up. The following morning, I was awoken by the insistent ringing of my mobile phone. Still half asleep, I picked up the handset, but before I had a chance to speak the caller said, ‘Because of your fucking cheek, O’Mahoney, we now want 20 grand or we go to the police and the newspapers.’

  ‘Who the fuck is “we”?’ I replied.

  The man, whom I recognised as t
he Geordie who had called the night before, screamed, ‘I am one of the Conroys! CONROYS! CONROYS! Have you got that?’ I had no idea who the Conroys were or what business they thought they had with me, and so I asked the man to explain just what his problem was. ‘We have proof that you murdered Tucker, Tate, Rolfe and Marlow. We want 20 . . . no, fuck it, 50 grand off you, or you are going to jail. The people in prison didn’t kill them, O’Mahoney. You did.’

  Rather than debate my innocence or guilt with an obviously mentally challenged monkey, I switched my phone off and tried to get back to sleep. These nuisance calls continued for three weeks, and on each occasion the Geordie became more and more abusive. During the first week, he threatened to cut my eyes out, and the following week he promised an unsavoury death unless I met his increasing demands for more and more cash.

  A 26-year-old ‘man’ named Michael Strawbridge, from Pelton, in County Durham, was eventually traced and arrested by the police. He confessed that he was responsible for the calls, which he had made ‘for a laugh’, and was subsequently fined the princely sum of £80. When Strawbridge had claimed that he was ‘one of the Conroys’, I had researched the name on the Internet in the hope that I could find out who they were and how I could contact them. I must admit that the information that I did find available about the Conroy family made for very uncomfortable reading. In their ‘manor’, which is the north-east of England, they are as well known as Alan Shearer, Newcastle Brown Ale, doner kebabs and Newcastle United.

  After Strawbridge had been arrested and admitted that he had never even met the Conroys, my interest in the family naturally waned. That was until one evening when I was watching Donal MacIntyre’s television series MacIntyre’s Underworld. The programme examines the day-to-day lives of notorious criminals. Paddy Conroy, a snarling, spitting Geordie with serious anger-management issues and an eyepatch, growled at the camera and began ranting about destroying his rivals, the Sayers family, who he claimed were registered police informants. In 1995, Conroy had been sentenced to 11 years’ imprisonment for his part in the kidnapping and torture of a fellow criminal who was alleged to have desecrated the grave of Conroy’s father. The unfortunate fellow had had his teeth removed with a pair of unsterilised pliers. Although Conroy denied the work was his own, he did admit to dropping the patient off where the emergency dental work was performed. However, Conroy rather undermined his case by physically attacking the prosecution barrister in court and was subsequently found guilty. Towards the end of the show, Conroy went off on a terrifying four-minute rant against his perceived enemies, which culminated in him shouting, ‘Put that in ya fookin’ documentary!’

  At the time, I was working on a book entitled Faces with a rising star in photojournalism named Brian Anderson. Faces is a collection of classic black and white photographs of the most infamous villains in the UK. I knew immediately that Paddy Conroy, the man who was threatening to explode out of my television screen, would just have to be included in it. A week later, I had managed to contact Conroy, he had agreed to pose for photographs for the book and I had visited him at his home in the West End of Newcastle. Talking at length with Conroy, I learned that he has lived a life saturated with extreme violence and hardship but has somehow managed to lace it heavily with his own brand of morality and infectious humour. I am not saying Conroy is a saint. On the contrary, he would be the first to admit that he has been responsible for many of the crimes committed in Newcastle over the last three decades, although, in fairness to him, Conroy and his infamous family have been wrongly accused of so much more. A whole host of unsavoury allegations, including murder, has been laid at their door.

  Like the Conroy family, their rivals the Sayers clan have a mafia-type reputation in the north-east. Blackmail, robbery, drug dealing and allegations of murder are synonymous with their name. I had also contacted the Sayers family to request that they pose for photographs for inclusion in the book. At the time, John Henry Sayers was in prison and Michael Sayers was ‘out of town’ and therefore unavailable, but Stephen Sayers agreed to meet me. I found Stephen to be polite, intelligent and surprisingly honest. He conceded that he and his family had been involved in criminality in the past but said that it was not something that he or they were proud of. ‘I don’t mind helping you with your book,’ Stephen said. ‘You can take a few photographs of me while I talk to people here, but I don’t wish to pose for them. The last thing I want to be seen as is a gangster.’

  A few weeks after that meeting, Stephen was arrested for perverting the course of justice in a murder trial that had involved his brother John Henry. He had stood trial at Leeds Crown Court in September 2002 accused of the gangland execution of a small-time crook named Freddie Knights. While giving evidence, John Henry had stunned everybody by announcing that he was totally innocent and that the Conroys were not only responsible for ordering Knights’ murder but had also been the driving force behind the murder of Tyneside legend Viv Graham. John Henry was later cleared of any involvement in Knights’ murder. It’s hard to gauge just what the Conroys actually know, if anything, about either murder, because for many years they have been embroiled in a bitter war with members of the Sayers family. It has waged for so long now that I doubt either side can honestly say how it started.

  When I heard that Stephen Sayers had been arrested for perverting the course of justice in the Knights case, it did make me wonder if Stephen had deliberately tried to mislead me when we had met or if he was, at that time, genuinely trying to walk away from his past. Like the Conroys, the Sayers family has a long, bloody history that they have excused over the years by quoting their own code of morality. It is therefore hard to try to decipher who is and who is not telling the truth about the crimes each family accuses the other of committing. All I can do is repeat the stories that I have been told and let you, the reader, decide what the Conroys and the Sayers families may or may not be guilty of.

  Chapter One

  ONCE UPON A TYNE

  PADDY CONROY WAS born in the West End of Newcastle upon Tyne on 23 April 1960. Lee Majors, who played a former astronaut with bionic limbs in the popular television series The Six Million Dollar Man, shares his birthday. So, too, did the world’s most famous playwright, William Shakespeare. In some ways, the three men are linked. Like Shakespeare, Conroy’s time on earth has been spent immersed in one bloody drama after another, and like the Six Million Dollar Man, many of Conroy’s adversaries have ended up being rebuilt or having false limbs fitted.

  Conroy’s parents had eight children: Lenny, the eldest, Billy, Maureen, Denny (Denise), Paddy, Michael, Neil and Dawn, the youngest. In the summer of 1963, Conroy’s mother and father were involved in a bitter argument at Newcastle Central Station. Leonard Conroy was trying to board a train bound for London, and his long-suffering wife was begging him not to go. In desperation, Mrs Conroy grabbed Leonard’s jacket, pulled it off his back and ran out of the station. Without his jacket, which contained his money, train ticket and wallet, Leonard was unable to make his planned trip. Paddy Conroy, aged just three at the time, stood with his father on the platform and watched as the powerful locomotive huffed and puffed before gathering speed and disappearing from view, cloaked in its own steam and billowing smoke. The atmosphere between Mr and Mrs Conroy during their journey home was extremely uncomfortable. Leonard did not say one word to his triumphant wife; he just sat on the bus glancing at her occasionally and shaking his head.

  Several years later, it was revealed that Leonard had planned to travel to London to meet up with a gang of fifteen men who had gone on to commit one of the most infamous crimes in British history. They had halted a Glasgow to London mail train and stolen £2.6 million in used banknotes. Friends claim that when the enormity of the gang’s heist was broadcast on the radio Leonard Conroy couldn’t bring himself to be in the same room as his wife, because he was so upset. Stifling tears and screams, he would stare vacantly at the newspaper headlines about the robbery and mumble, ‘No, no, no.’ Five days later,
Mrs Conroy had the last laugh. The police discovered the train robbers’ hideout, which turned out to be an Aladdin’s cave of damning evidence. Just eight months after the crime had been committed, thirteen members of the Great Train Robbery gang, as they became known, were jailed for a total of three hundred years. Leonard Conroy lost count of the number of times he heard his wife say, ‘I told you so. Are you still upset that I stopped you going?’ Mothers always do know best.

  When Paddy Conroy was five years old, he was sent to a school in Cruddas Park. This area, in the West End of Newcastle, was named after George Cruddas, a director of the local Vickers-Armstrong armament factories. Cruddas Park attracted the weak and the poor simply because it was the cheapest area of Newcastle to live in, and this shaped the district’s abnormal social make-up. The suicide rate and the incidence of respiratory TB were both three times the average for the rest of the city, while cases of venereal disease were twelve times the average. The area became a gravitation point for many of Newcastle’s problem families. In fact, five times as many families deemed criminal or antisocial ended up living around Cruddas Park than were found in any other suburb.

  One of the biggest eyesores in this very deprived area was the Noble Street flats. Thomas Daniel Smith, the man responsible for building what was nothing more than a high-rise slum and much of the rest of the neighbourhood that Conroy was reared in, was the Labour leader of Newcastle City Council at the time. Smith believed strongly in the need to clear the almost derelict housing people lived in and so put a great deal of effort into his regeneration plans. At Smith’s suggestion, the city was nicknamed ‘The Brasilia of the North’. Smith clearly had a fertile imagination: war-torn Beirut maybe, Brasilia never.