He has left his violent past behind him to found a charity for drug addicts, but how much has he changed? Nick Morrison meets former hard man and career criminal Ceorge Craig.

IF you're expecting him to be full of remorse, then you'll be disappointed. George Craig may have turned his back on his days of violence and crime, he may have founded a charity, he may count nuns and monks among his friends, but that doesn't mean he's ashamed of what he's done.

"It is the past. I don't regret my past, everything I have done, but in my mind it is past. I think about the past all the time, but the past is gone. I have just got to get on with my life. I have never been ashamed of my past," he says.

George wants to escape from his past, but knows he can't just leave it behind, and, in some ways, nor does he want to, for without that past, he wouldn't be where he is now.

Now he is the driving force of the Lazarus Foundation, a rehabilitation centre for drug and alcohol addicts he founded in his home city of Sunderland.

But his past is that of a violent man, one who seamlessly progressed up the criminal ladder from approved school to borstal to maximum security prison. He had a reputation as one of the hardest men - "There is nobody ever beat me in my life, and I f***ed those who thought they could", he says - and was a brutally effective debt collector. As he puts it: "Everybody paid up."

He's been a changed man for the last ten years or so, and while not exactly renouncing his previous life, he's at least tried to start a new one. But it's an ongoing struggle: his record has made him a high-profile target and the foundation has been investigated by both the Charity Commission and the Department of Work and Pensions. He has also been arrested over allegations of fraud, but he was cleared and the investigations found no evidence of any crime.

George clearly feels there's a conspiracy against him, perhaps by those unable to accept he's no longer a crook, perhaps by those who feel he's somehow got away with it, and he hints at a Masonic involvement in his persecution. He's called his autobiography Mud Sticks, in recognition of the difficulties he's had in trying to shake off his reputation.

"Apparently it was said in one of the funny handshake lodges that they were going to pull George Craig off his pedestal," he says. "It is labelling, but what have you got to do to change?

'NOW I turn around and say I don't give a f*** what they think. They have tried it once when I have done f*** all. They can't do you for nowt. I have never been in this position before - it feels good, actually."

George, now 58, was born a shipbuilder's son in Sunderland's East End, the sixth child out of a total of 11. He started shoplifting when he was just ten, he says out of boredom, although he was the only one in the family.

"I've tried to fathom out why I was different to the rest of the family, but I just don't know," he says. He reckons his parents were probably relieved when he was sent to an approved school - "They were sick of us; I was running them ragged" - but it was through a succession of institutions that the young George learned to look after himself, in what was very much an environment of defend yourself or else. It also gave him the determination not to fail, which sustained him through the two years of investigations.

But there was another side to these approved school boys who were trying to prove themselves, and that is they were just boys missing home.

"I saw young boys cuddling each other. They weren't poofs, they were just missing affection. I could never understand cuddling, but I missed my ma more than owt else. To this day I think of my ma," he says.

From petty thieving he graduated to burglary, robbery and swindles, but he admits that his biggest buzz was from violence, building himself a reputation as someone not to be messed with.

"I used to walk in restaurants, nightclubs, and it was 'You're alright, don't pay for anything,'. I was thinking I was Jack-the-Lad," he says.

Then something happened. George puts it down to a combination of discovering a neighbour living in squalor and coming into contact with George Aitken, a preacher who worked with the homeless and drug addicts in Glasgow, not to mention the fact that, as he puts it, "I was quite comfortably off then, I didn't need to do any more villainy".

He also recounts a story of coming back from Newcastle with a safe in his van and seeing firefighters risking their lives putting out a fire, realising he was "a scumbag", but he acknowledges there must be more to it than that, although ultimately he can't explain it fully. "It is something inside you that rings your bell, but why did I change? I don't know," he confesses.

Despite his involvement with Aitken, his subsequent friendship with the nuns of the Sisters of Mercy convent in Sunderland and turning to a religious retreat, Ministeracres near Consett, during the height of the Charity Commission investigation, he says it wasn't a religious conversion.

"I just care about people. I'm not a religious person. This head is really weird," he says, shaking his head.

ONE of his daughters had got mixed up with drugs, and this, and his work with George Aitken, led him to found the Lazarus Foundation, buying and renovating Doxford House, an 18th century Grade II listed mansion on the outskirts of the city.

During the conversion work, there was no shortage of tradesmen willing to donate time and materials for free, and the building, bought for £250,000 and restored with the help of the Northern Rock Foundation and the Lloyds TSB Foundation, provides places for 24 addicts.

"If you get one person walks out this unit and says 'You gave me my life back', that is fantastic. When people say things like that it is just great. That is a better buzz than setting about somebody and beating them to sh*te.

"The people who admire me now, I prefer them to admire me than the people in the past, and now I have got nobody knocking on my door at five or six o'clock in the morning," he says.

He hasn't forsaken his old life completely. He still sees his old pals - "I don't ignore them, I just let them get on with it" - but says he is determined to stay an ex-villain. There are signs of his old ways, though. If he hadn't had the support of his friends and the foundation's donors during the investigation, and if he hadn't had the retreat to escape to, he says he "would have come over more f***ing heavy than I ever was in my life".

But people had faith in him, particularly Joe Mills, a former trade union leader, who urged him to go straight back to work, and he was determined not to let them down.

"That stopped me. I could have said, 'I will show you what a villain is', but that and Ministeracres stopped me. It would have been a reflection on other people, some other villain who wanted to open a charity up."

But there is one part of his past which still catches up with him. His dad died without them becoming reconciled, and the deaths of his mother and sister Patsy clearly still trouble him.

"It was a battle of wills between me and my da. I used to try and outdo him and I couldn't and I never realised all he ever cared about was me. I would do anything to have my ma and da here now.

"There are a lot of unresolved things, but there is nobody I can resolve them with. They would know too much about me and I don't want to be in that position. I just live with what I have got by being good to people.

"I do carry things around with me, and one day it will all come pouring out. I'm a very complex man."

"I'm carrying a lot of hurt but I cannot get it out of us because I don't trust anybody with my hurt. I feel I would be vulnerable if people knew about it. I couldn't handle my feelings."

Mud Sticks: The story of George Craig (Ghostwriters £9.99) is available from Ottakar's and Hills in Sunderland, or from the Lazarus Foundation office on (0191) 5200285.