Fog on the Tyne

by Bernard O'Mahoney

  Law-abiding members of the community were outraged that somebody such as David Glover had been permitted to follow a life of criminal brutality while acting as a registered police informant. Although there is a strong element of truth in the old adage of setting a thief to catch a thief, the fact that Northumbria Police had knowingly recruited a man capable of such violence as David Glover should have given rise to concern.

  In recent years, there has been increasing anecdotal evidence and rumour about the striking of deals in which a blind eye is turned to some crimes in order to gather information on so-called major criminals and their activities. On 6 June 2007, DC Alan Jones of Northumbria Police was arrested by his colleagues. At a gym that he frequented, he had forged a friendship with a man named Allan Foster, who had just been released from an 11-year prison sentence for violence, drug dealing and possession of a sawn-off shotgun and ammunition. Before long, Jones had recruited Foster as an informant, and he dutifully gave the policeman information about his criminal associates.

  But Foster was soon demanding sensitive material from the police national computer in return, and the crooked policeman complied. In order to exploit his relationship with Jones further, Foster treated him to a weekend in London. The pair were chauffeur driven from bar to bar before returning to Foster’s ‘weekend apartment’, where three £250-a-time escort girls were hired. The quality of information that Foster was giving to Jones about his fellow criminals soon saw him promoted from a source of local interest to what the police these days call ‘a covert human intelligence source’.

  Foster began working directly with the Serious and Organised Crime Agency. His status was not known by the average bobby on the beat, and so when they raided his home looking for an £80,000 ring that he had stolen from the MetroCentre, in Gateshead, he was outraged and told his masters in Northumbria Police that he no longer wished to work for them. A week later, he lured a friend and father of seven named Noddy Rice to the car park of a South Shields beauty spot and shot him nine times. Foster immediately fled the country after the murder and is currently listed as one of the top ten most wanted men in Britain. For passing on information to Foster, DC Jones was convicted of misconduct in a public office and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment.

  It cannot be disputed that informants are useful if they can maintain credibility amongst their criminal associates. This, of necessity, often involves them being closely involved in the whole business of crime. But it is a very dangerous path to tread, because, as in Glover’s case, there is a risk that criminal informants will attempt to take advantage of their position and step up their criminal activities while promising a result to their police handlers. Glover has admitted that while he was supposedly helping the police to combat crime he was responsible for beating, torturing and shooting people. It is not known, however, if his admission concerning the murder of Viv Graham is true.

  Paddy Conroy found it hard being away from Maureen and their children. The very thought of spending so many years of his life in jail ate away at Paddy, and so he tried to distance himself from life outside the wall. Life inside the wall was best described as extremely dangerous, chaotic and brutal.

  Lifers and other prisoners considered to be a security risk are accommodated in what is known as the dispersal system, which was created following the deliberations of a committee chaired by Sir Leon Radzinowicz. Lord Mountbatten had previously recommended housing high-risk prisoners in a single institution, which was to be known as HMP Vectis. This prison was going to be situated on the Isle of Wight, but Sir Radzinowicz opposed this in favour of several maximum-security prisons between which Category A prisoners could be dispersed. This, he believed, would dilute their influence in the system and make it easier to transfer them in the event of trouble.

  It can be argued that Sir Radzinowicz was responsible for introducing every major criminal from every major city to his counterparts in cities throughout the UK, which has led to an explosion in organised crime. For instance, if Mr A from Manchester had not been forced to serve his sentence in an exclusive prison for criminals of his own calibre, he would never have met Mr B who operated in London, Birmingham, Bristol or Leeds. Friendships are forged in the dispersal system, because the inmates are all there long term, and those friends become business partners when they are released. From the point of view of the authorities, it would have been much wiser to keep criminals in local prisons, as they did years ago. There are currently eight dispersal prisons in England: HMPs Belmarsh, Frankland, Full Sutton, Long Lartin, Manchester, Wakefield, Whitemoor and Woodhill. Paddy Conroy ended up spending time in them all.

  During his time in the dispersal system, Paddy witnessed at first hand one of the worst prison disturbances this country has ever known. HMP Full Sutton, near York, was renamed ‘Half Sutton’ because of the damage caused by rioting inmates. The unrest had started after the prison staff union, the Prison Officers’ Association (POA), threatened to strike for better working conditions. A tidal wave of tension rippled throughout the penal system after a work-to-rule by the officers resulted in delayed mail, cancelled visits and inmates being locked in their cells for 23 hours a day.

  Paddy had sensed what was going to happen, and so he said to one of the officers, ‘There is going to be a major riot in here if this work-to-rule nonsense continues. This is no ordinary jail. A lot of men in here are serving life sentences and have nothing to lose. If it does kick off, it will be a bloodbath.’ The officer paused to think for a moment before smiling at Paddy and saying that if there was a riot then maybe the government would sit up and listen to the POA. For three weeks, Paddy pleaded with his fellow inmates on the wing not to create any kind of disorder. ‘It’s what the screws want,’ he said. ‘If you do riot, then you will be playing right into their hands.’ Paddy’s advice fell on deaf ears. A large number of men on the wing had given up hope the day that they were sentenced. They no longer had families, friends, freedom or expectation, and rioting would almost be a welcome change to their day-to-day mundane existence.

  When the inmates’ cells were opened on the morning of 20 January 1997, Paddy went to the communal kitchen and put several pieces of prime steak in the oven, setting the timer so that they would be slowly cooked and ready for lunchtime. Paddy was then locked up again until around the time he had calculated that his steaks would be done to perfection. As soon as Paddy was unlocked, he went directly downstairs to the kitchen area to ensure that his meal had not been burned. As Paddy did so, he saw that an inmate named Dessie Cunningham was in the process of being dragged to the segregation unit for committing some sort of misdemeanour. Several bystanders had gone to his aid, and this had resulted in a tense stand-off with the prison staff. Cunningham began to shout, swear and struggle, and those inmates who had been facing up to the officers began fighting with them and throwing furniture. As more and more inmates became involved, the prison officers conceded defeat and beat a hasty retreat from the wing. As they did so, they locked every door they passed through in order to contain the inmates and prevent others joining in with the melee.

  Paddy had no intention of getting involved, and so he found himself locked in the kitchen with his perfectly cooked steak lunch. His only complaint was that he had to make do without the pepper sauce that he had made and left in his cell. At the rear of the kitchen was a stairway that led up to one of the landings. At the top of the stairs, there was a security gate, which had been locked. Paddy could see out onto the landing, but there was no way that he could reach his pepper sauce. As Paddy settled down to tuck into his lunch, the sounds of men screaming and shouting and the destruction of property reverberated throughout the wing. Years of built-up tension was being unleashed in an orgy of hysterical violence.

  Expecting a counter-attack from the riot squad, the inmates began to erect barricades using tables, chairs and doors that they had torn from their hinges. When the riot squad failed to materialise, the prisoners decided to render the wing unfit for human habit
ation. Water pipes were ripped from the walls, and electrical switches and fuse boxes were smashed. Fires were started, heavy steel cell doors were removed and anything that could be damaged or destroyed was. Access to the exercise yard was gained by battering down a steel gate with a cell door. An impromptu barbecue party was staged by the marauding mob, using files, documents, inmates’ records and furniture to feed the flames. An attempt by the fire brigade to extinguish the fire was met with a salvo of missiles. The firemen, fearing for their lives, soon abandoned their equipment and ran for the safety of the main gate, where police had set up a cordon to prevent inmates escaping.

  After finishing his meal, Paddy looked out of the barred window and saw that smoke was billowing out of several cells and missiles were raining down on the exercise yard. There was nothing he could do to either deter or incite the other inmates, and so he made himself a cup of tea and settled down into a chair to watch the chaos unfold all around him. Above the sound of the rioting inmates, Paddy could hear somebody shouting from a window that an informant had been murdered. The inmates took a break from their destructive spree and began to cheer and stamp their feet in celebration. Paddy later learned that the victim had not in fact been murdered but had been stabbed and slashed and received a total of 49 stitches to his wounds.

  As Paddy sat sipping his tea, he saw one young lad from Newcastle run and push over a pool table. ‘Stop what you’re doing now, and come over here, you soft bastard,’ Paddy shouted at him.

  ‘What’s wrong with you, Paddy?’ he replied. ‘I’m only doing what everybody else is doing.’

  Paddy advised the lad to look over to his left and explained that the inmate who was watching him was the wing grass. ‘Go and pick up the pool table, walk slowly back to your cell and slam the door behind you,’ Paddy advised.

  Thankfully, Paddy’s words of wisdom were absorbed, and the lad was spared the ordeal of facing the serious charge of rioting, for which several inmates were later sentenced to an additional five years’ imprisonment.

  A small fire that had been started in the TV room on the landing above Paddy’s location was by now raging out of control. Several foam-filled chairs were ablaze, and thick black smoke had begun to gather like a toxic cloud on the wing ceiling. Adjacent to the TV room, a 60-year-old Dutchman who was serving a lengthy sentence for importing drugs into the UK was locked in his cell. Twelve months earlier he had undergone open-heart surgery, and he was still suffering from poor health. Frail and weak, he had shut himself in his cell as soon as the riot had started. The black cloud from the burning foam seats had begun to descend from the ceiling, and the open windows in people’s cells were creating a chimney-like effect, drawing the acrid smoke under their cell doors. Fearing for his life, the Dutchman had lain on the floor and covered his face with a wet cloth in an effort to minimise smoke inhalation.

  Paddy began shouting to a group of prison officers who had gathered on the other side of the security gate that the old Dutch guy who was locked in his cell was going to die if they didn’t get him out. Paddy believed that the officers thought he was trying to lure them into a trap, because for the first ten or fifteen minutes they refused to acknowledge him. As Paddy’s concern for this elderly man grew, he became increasingly irate and vocal. Eventually, the officers began shouting, ‘Stand back, Conroy. Stand away from the gate. We are coming in.’ Paddy did as they asked, and moments later several apprehensive-looking officers came running onto the wing. As the officers dragged the semi-conscious Dutchman from his smoke-filled cell, the wing governor switched the powerful extractor fans on and within minutes all the deadly smoke had been blown outside.

  Some time after midnight, the prisoners ran out of property to burn or wreck and so decided to retire to their beds. Fearing repercussions from the prison officers, they decided to share cells rather than face the possibility of retribution alone. The following morning, the cell doors remained closed as a mass of RoboCop-lookalike officers carrying riot shields advanced across the landings chanting, ‘One, two, advance, one, two, advance.’ Later in the afternoon, inmates identified as key members of the rioting faction were moved to other prisons, and several others, including Paddy Conroy, were escorted to the segregation unit.

  Dessie Cunningham, whose initial confrontation with the officers had sparked the riot, was also being held in solitary confinement, and he was told by another inmate that Paddy had assisted and encouraged the prison officers to come onto the wing. This was, of course, true, but Cunningham interpreted it as if Paddy had asked the screws to come onto the wing to quell the riot rather than to save the Dutchman’s life. Rather foolishly, Cunningham began referring to Paddy as a lackey and a grass. When Paddy was told what Cunningham had been calling him, he sent word that he wished to speak to him urgently. Cunningham was a violent career criminal serving 20 years for committing armed robberies, and so he was certainly no mug, but, then again, neither is Paddy Conroy.

  Before Paddy was released from the segregation unit and was able to confront Cunningham, Cunningham had been shipped out to HMP Whitemoor, in Cambridgeshire, where he became friends with John Henry Sayers.

  Sayers had recently been moved to HMP Whitemoor following a government decision to abolish SSUs. This downgrading, which was seen by many as a means of securing an IRA ceasefire in Northern Ireland, led to the reclassification of 13 IRA prisoners from exceptional-risk Category A to high-risk Category A. The only other prisoner in the UK with the same status at that time had been Sayers. He had been held at the SSU in HMP Full Sutton, but when that was mothballed he and others had been transferred.

  On one occasion, Sayers was transferred to HMP Frankland, in Durham, for his accumulated visits, but instead of being placed in a normal location he was allocated a cell in the segregation unit, next door to David Glover, who had recently arrived from HMP Winson Green. The week Sayers arrived in HMP Frankland, the visiting room that is used by high-risk prisoners was being decorated. It was decided by the powers that be that visits should therefore be held in the rooms normally allocated to solicitors for legal visits with their clients. It is standard practice for all high-risk prisoners to be accompanied by at least one prison officer whenever they are outside their cells. This includes visiting times, when officers sit at the same table as prisoners and their visitors.

  It has since been alleged that, for reasons known only to the prison staff, John Henry Sayers and Glover were permitted to have totally unsupervised visits with their partners in the solicitors’ offices. A few months later, the Sunday Sun newspaper published a story on its front page with the headline ‘Our Jail Baby Joy’. It was claimed that ‘one of the North’s toughest gangsters’ was set to become a dad again after he fathered a child behind bars at a top-security jail. In an exclusive interview, John Henry’s wife, Yvonne, told a reporter that she had spent the last six years travelling Britain to visit her man and always looked forward to Christmas, when he was allowed to spend a month at HMP Frankland for family visits. ‘I didn’t go there that day expecting to have sex with my husband,’ she said. ‘It just happened. To be honest I think that prison officers turn a blind eye to this sort of thing.’

  Hazel Banks, the deputy governor at HMP Frankland, told the newspaper that she did not believe the baby had been conceived behind bars. She added that she was not aware of the ‘incident’ and that all visits were strictly monitored: ‘And when it comes to Category A prisoners, there are always several officers around at any time. It would be very difficult – if not impossible – for this to take place.’ Yvonne Sayers responded to these comments by saying that she knew people would think she had been having an affair and that it was not John Henry’s baby but that she would never do such a thing.

  When John Henry Sayers became acquainted with Dessie Cunningham at HMP Whitemoor, fuel was poured onto an already volatile situation. John Henry repeated the story that his brother Michael had told him concerning the time DC Perky had allegedly claimed that Paddy was a grass. Initiall
y, Paddy was unsure what motive John Henry had for trying to incite trouble, but word soon reached him via the prison grapevine that the Sayers family were upset because he had been repeating the allegation that their father had enjoyed an unhealthy relationship with the police. When Paddy was told a few months later that he was being transferred to HMP Whitemoor, he just knew that his arrival would spark trouble. Paddy assumed that the trouble would be with John Henry, but, unbeknown to him, Dessie Cunningham had pre-paid an inmate nicknamed ‘Jesus’ to murder him.

  Shortly after arriving at Whitemoor, Paddy was sitting at a table in his cell writing a letter when the door burst open. Before Paddy had a chance to react, the inappropriately nicknamed Jesus had plunged a long metal spike into the top of his head. The spade-shaped weapon tore through Paddy’s flesh and partially penetrated his skull, but instead of piercing it and killing him instantly it deflected and chipped a fragment of bone. As Paddy tried to turn to face his attacker, Jesus pulled the spike out of his head and attempted to stab him in the face, but Paddy managed to throw himself forward. The spike glanced off the back of Paddy’s head and tore a long, deep furrow down his back. With blood pouring from his wounds, Paddy knew that he had to get to his feet and fight Jesus off or die at his hands in that cell. Mustering all his diminishing strength, Paddy hit Jesus as hard as he could, and when he fell back Paddy pounded his face and body until he collapsed at his feet.

  The sound of the fracas had attracted the attention of the prison staff, who raced en masse to the cell. When they burst through the door, Paddy was still hammering Jesus, and so it was Paddy who was dragged off to the security block. When the seriousness of Paddy’s injuries became apparent, he was rushed to a local hospital, where a doctor described his survival as miraculous. Back at the prison, Jesus was treated as the victim of a vicious assault and Paddy was charged with being the perpetrator. Paddy knew that the prison staff were not that naive. He had two gaping holes in him that would indicate to the most sceptical of men that he was in fact the victim.