IT ALL started with a tin of beans. If young Rodney Jones, 11, had not been overcome by hunger and broken into a corner shop, he would not have been challenged by a policeman at an ungodly hour in the morning; making off across Newcastle's High Level Bridge, with stolen tins of beans spilling out of his jacket pockets.

It was to have been a big adventure.

Rod and two pals had been caught playing truant from lessons at Ayresome Street School, Middlesbrough. Rather than face the cane from the despised woodworker teacher, the trio decided to leg it.

They climbed on to a lorry parked in neighbouring Southfield Road and hid under the tarpaulin, believing, as all little boys do, that all lorries travel to London. It was when the truck came to a halt and his pal Dougie stuck his head out of the tarpaulin to spy out the land, that the driver spotted them.

All three took to their heels, only to find they were not in the capital - but in Newcastle.

And it was only ten years ago that Rod stopped running. The episode with the stolen tins of beans landed Rod in the first of a succession of remand homes, assessment centres, Borstals and prisons.

He was always running away. In an escape from Northallerton Prison, an inmate escaping with him could not resist whacking a warder over the head with a hammer. Rod was appalled, but that did not make any difference when he was sent to Durham Prison. There, he claims, prison officers formed a reception committee. He was bundled into a laundry basket which was turned upside down and kicked from one end of the jail to the other.

Trussed up, Rod had a fire hose turned on him at point blank range and was left in the basket, in a cell on his own, overnight.

Years before he had been recaptured after escaping from the "horrendous'' Castle Howard detention centre and forced to stand on his toes, hands on his head, dressed only in his underpants in four inches of snow.

After a while, the authorities got fed up of Rod always doing a runner and that is how he ended up as the youngest prisoner ever in Armley jail, Leeds.

He even escaped from Wormwood Scrubs twice: once in the back of a lorry, and once sneaking through the main gates.

He was unable to understand why on one escape from the Scrubs, his pursuers gave up the chase when they got to a railway line.

"I went over the lines but they did not want to chase me, because the lines were electric. I did know they were electric at the time,'' said Rod, now aged 52.

A big lad, keen to gain the respect of the other prisoners and not to be seen as a doormat, he used his fists; and the more prison guards sent to quieten him, the better; the higher he rose in the estimation of the other lags.

He freely admits he was a nasty piece of work. He worked as a protection racket enforcer for underworld "firms" in London, and developed a speciality as an armed robber, with a preference for payroll hold ups.

The police also suspected him of being a hit man for hire and he was arrested after an underworld figure was lured into an armed ambush on Teesside.

On that occasion, as the door of a taxi carrying the quarry swung open, a mystery gunman opened fire. The shotgun blast caught a woman travelling with the target in the legs, as she attempted to escape. Rod was arrested, but police had no evidence to hold him.

On another occasion, Rod was arrested in Liverpool for resisting arrest with a shotgun. An expert on sleep argued in court on Rod's behalf that he would not have heard the admonitory word "Police!" as the armed officers burst into his bedroom on Merseyside, so rudely interrupting his slumbers.

Strange then, this sinner turning into a saint. But for Rod Jones there was no sudden heavenly stream of light on the road to Damascus. His son, also called Rodney, died following an horrific car smash.

Sifting through his son's personal effects, Rod found a letter accepting his son's offer of help to take humanitarian aid to Romania.

Rod offered to take his place, the charity declined, presumably after running a police check. So Rod got a wagon, a road map of Europe and "turned left at South Bank, and kept going''.

He ended up at Iash, near the Romanian border with Russia. "I went in memory of my son, to atone for not thinking more about him,'' he says. "It was certainly not done on humanitarian grounds. There was nothing humanitarian in it. "It was a one off for my lad. When I got there I was not prepared for what I saw.''

That was in 1990 and the reason why Rod founded the charity Convoy Aid, which has seen him hauling essential living supplies and medicines to orphanages and villages ever since.

"It's good for character building and for everyone to see terrible poverty and terrible suffering. It makes you put everything in perspective,'' Rod says. "Over ten years I have found it practically impossible to walk away from it.''

Rod says his total of 30 years behind bars was an apprenticeship for the last ten years of going to and from Romania; braving bandit roadblocks and seeing through corrupt officials.

"If I had not gone through all this I could not have done what I have done for these kids,'' he says, referring to how he smuggled a baby boy back to Britain for a life-saving brain operation.

While taking aid to Bosnia, he saw off roadside gipsy bandits who forced others to hand over their personal effects and cargoes.

"I have seen all these do gooders, church people, handing over everything because they are not the right people - not out-and-out villains. It takes one to know one,'' he says.

His days of villainy are over. He fell off a roof at Winchester Prison during a riot, badly injuring his back. He has angina, a bowel condition and suffers from rheumatoid fever which he traces back to his half-naked punishments in the snow.

He plans one last trip into the past, to look up old underworld contacts - some of them still active - on Tyneside and Merseyside to help confirm incidents and dates for an autobiography he plans. The money will go to Convoy Aid.

And, ever able, he has had special "Wanted" posters printed for himself, appealing for information, wryly referring to himself as the Rod Father.