A FORMER North-East hard man wants to sell his story for charity.

Ex-category A prisoner Rod Jones has spent about 30 years behind bars, for offences ranging from robbery to grievous bodily harm.

For ten years now, the sinner-turned-saint has been running mercy missions to Romania, taking medical items, food and clothes over mountain roads in the grip of winters.

He is hoping his planned autobiography will raise money for Convoy Aid, the charity he founded after his son Rod's death, in 1990, in a car smash.

He plans to visit Tyneside, armed with "wanted" handbills, looking for old underworld contacts to verify dates and incidents for the book.

Middlesbrough's Convoy Aid is "struggling" financially, so Rod hopes his book will bring in money for the charity.

He said: "There are two or three reasons for the book. Hopefully, somebody may pick the book up and read it and they may, perhaps, realise the futility of spending most of their life in prison.

"When people talk of something being unacceptable, of being on the breadline, they have no perception of what being on the breadline is like until they have been to somewhere like Romania. Any revenue the book brings in will go into Convoy Aid."

Rod came out of prison in 1984, but wants to trace people he met in remand homes and borstals he was sent to as a youngster, to confirm his accounts of the brutal regimes which led to the closure of a couple of the centres.