Armed with a machete and an iron bar, this is the moment a father and son attacked an arsonist who torched his car and rammed it into their home in a suspected organised crime feud in the North East.

CCTV shows crime boss John Henry Sayers, 62, and his son John Henry Sayers Junior, 29, unleashing a furious attack on Walter Patterson, 38, in Newcastle last year.

The father and son rushed outside after the Range Rover was reversed twice into Lou’s Diner – a Sayers family restaurant underneath their home – before Patterson set the car ablaze. 

Sayers Snr struck Patterson twice with a machete, while his son hit him 14 times with the iron bar.

But this was no random attack. For years, the Sayers family had come under sustained attack by their rivals, the Freeman organised crime gang.

The Freemans and Sayers are two feared criminal gangs, whose rivalry in the North East was laid bare during an Old Bailey trial over the ramming and arson incident in July. 

At the end of the trial, which was held outside of the North East amid fears of ‘jury nobbling’, Sayers Snr and Jnr were cleared of causing grievous bodily harm after claiming self-defence. Patterson, used as a ‘foot soldier’ for the Freemans, was jailed for four years along with four other gang members.

It is feared that the violence gripping Middlesbrough is linked to wider organised crime groups (OCGs), with policing experts warning how gangs are recruiting ‘expendable’ and ‘vulnerable’ children through county lines.

CCTV shows John Henry Sayers, 62, and his son John Henry Sayers Junior, 29, unleashing a furious attack on Walter Patterson, 38, in Newcastle last year

It came after Patterson, a ‘foot soldier’ for the Freemans, torched the Range Rover after it reversed twice into the Sayers’ home

Michael Cahill was one of the five young men who died in the A66 wrong way crash. He had links to the Freeman organised crime group

Michael Cahill, one of the young men killed in last Saturday’s fatal A66 crash, was pictured with a group of masked men at a trial for John Freeman, believed to be the head of the gang. 

Freeman was jailed for three years in 2019 after setting up a fake drug deal and beating a rival in a gang turf war. ‘I am John Freeman, you have been selling drugs in my area,’ he warned the victim as he rained down ‘blow after blow’ with two others before stealing half a kilogram of cocaine worth up to £22,000.

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Nathan Freeman, understood to be a relative, posted a series of photos with Mr Cahill and Jakub Matusiak, another of the A66 crash gang. ‘Rest in peace my brothers love yours,’ he wrote. ‘The realist’.

And a man believed to be linked to Freeman published social media posts from a vigil for Mr Cahill in Haswell, County Durham, where mobs of youths torched cars and let off flares and fireworks last Friday.

Amid febrile social media commentary, there are rumours John Freeman is also covering the funeral costs of the five men who died after they smashed into a marked police car while driving the wrong way down the A66, killing two officers.

The Old Bailey heard that there had been several attacks on the Sayers family in the lead-up to the Range Rover ramming.

Jurors were told that a ‘number of individuals are known to be associated with the Freeman organised crime group’. Prosecutors explained that the OCG was someone named John Freeman controlling the attacks on the Sayers.

According to ChronicleLive, in September 2022, a van owned by Sayers Jnr was set on fire by masked men on an off-road bike in Newcastle.

In May 2023, a truck was rammed into Sayers Snr’s brother’s property while he and his partner were at home. The vehicle was reversed into the gas and electricity pipes, sparking a fire in the property.

In October 2024, Sayers Snr told police his mother’s grave had been vandalised with spray paint. And on January 31 last year, Sayers Jnr’s Volkswagen Golf was set on fire outside their home.

Jurors also heard that Sayers Snr was given an official threat notice by police, known as an Osman warning, that his life was in danger. 

Makai Saddington, one of the five killed in the VW, had posted videos on TikTok of him being chased by police and was awaiting trial for racially abusing and assaulting officers

Cole Worthy (right) with his friend Theo Rae, who also died in the crash on Saturday

Jakub Matusiak, another occupant of the car which hit the officers’ patrol vehicle, also posted videos of himself driving recklessly

The former paratrooper grew up in Newcastle’s tough west End and was first convicted and jailed for armed robbery for 15 years in 1990 after stealing £350,000 in wages from a security firm in Gateshead.

He was cleared in 2002 of masterminding the gangland murder of Freddie Knights, who was shot in the head on his mum’s doorstep in Longbenton as he called to collect birthday presents for his two children.

In 2009, the Tyneside ‘hardman’ was arrested and charged with plotting to nobble the jury in that murder trial at Leeds Crown Court after a juror received a threatening phone call the night before Sayers Snr was acquitted.

But the jury nobbling case collapsed after key information was not disclosed to the defence by bungling prosecutors.

In 2008, Sayers Snr was jailed for four years over a £350,000 tax fiddle after failing to declare secret earnings from his empire of up to 30 pubs which meant he swerved VAT and business rates.

Five years later he was charged with rape – an allegation he denied and called a ‘character assassination’. The case was dropped due to a lack of evidence.

In 2018 Sayers Snr was cleared again of conspiracy to murder over a drive-by shooting outside the Tup Tup Palace nightclub in Newcastle in 2015.

But he was jailed for three-and-half years for perverting the course of justice after getting a man he met in prison to take the rap for the shooting.

His brother, Stephen Sayers, previously told the Chronicle: ‘We got treated like movie stars with muscle in the city centre and we still are today. In the criminal fraternity the Sayers name is the creme-de-la-creme.

‘We are respected throughout this country and abroad. There’s no getting away from it, we set the bar.’

After Sayers Snr’s release in April 2019, it was said that attacks on the Sayers’ family homes and businesses began. Sayers Snr denies being the leader of a serious OCG. 

Nick Edgar, senior lecturer in policing at Teesside University, told the Daily Mail Cleveland Police, one of Britain’s smallest forces, was facing an ‘unprecedented’ level of crime.

He said it is possible gangs from nearby areas, including Newcastle, and other areas of the country could be coming into communities such as South Bank and Grangetown. 

He said there are ‘a number of OCG’s vying for access to networks’, which causes ‘underlying tensions’ in the communities.

He added: ‘The worlds of organised crime networks are not territorial in the sense that they will stick to a particular postcode or place. They will migrate and move around different areas of the region, if not the country.

‘It is a complicated network that sits underground. The connections and links are deep-rooted and extensive. They will go to other areas of the country, for instance the North West in Manchester, Liverpool and Sheffield. They are all interlinked.

‘If you did spider diagram, you’d find that lots of areas of the UK are probably connected in some way, shape, or form.

Mr Edgar continued: ‘There will also be OCGs who operate and reside in Liverpool and Manchester and have also come up to Cleveland to commit crime. 

‘There is no doubt that there are tensions between OCGs… because it’s very much kind of Darwinian. It’s about the strongest prevail, the weakest will always fall.’

Five thugs who were convicted after an organised crime investigation in East Middlesbrough. The three young men on the bottom row – Curtis Cremin, Louie Leadbeater and Laiton Hopkins – are said to be linked to the A66 crash gang

Curtis Cremin, pictured holding a huge machete, was jailed for running an organised county drugs line, in TS6 and TS3. It is understood he has links to the A66 gang

Louie Leadbeater (right), who was jailed for three years for his involvement in a county lines gang in Middlesbrough, is pictured with Cole Worthy (left), one of the five who died in the A66 crash

He added: ‘I think people are very concerned about what happens next. It’s the uncertainty and the unpredictability.

‘It creates that sense of fear and trepidation that something bad is going to happen, and it’s really difficult to change that mindset once people have been in it and they’ve lived it.’

Cleveland Police has faced an eruption of violence since the crash. There have been a series of car rammings, a seven-year-old girl and her aunt were killed in a house fire and a 39-year-old man was stabbed. 

Police said they are not linking the fire to the A66 collision, although they have not ruled out connections to wider organised crime. 

But for locals, gangs have been terrorising the town long before the A66 crash, running county lines operations, grooming young children and fighting battles over the town’s drugs trade. 

‘It’s gang warfare,’ one terrified local told the Daily Mail. ‘This has been going on for years and years and now it’s escalated.’

Valentina Foster, seven, and her aunt Natalie McDonald, 34, died in a house fire on Wednesday

A house in the South Bank area of Middlesbrough was rammed by a car last week

Crime boss John Henry Sayers, 62. The Old Bailey heard that the there had been several attacks on the Sayers family in the lead up to the Range Rover ramming

A house in Acklam, Middlesbrough, linked to the father of Cole Worthy, one of the young men who died in the A66 crash, was rammed hours before Saturday’s collision

South Bank, Grangetown and Eston, are all within the TS6 postcode of Middlesbrough, which has long been a hotspot for criminal activity.

Thugs in the area are understood to have a long-running rivalry with the neighbouring TS3 postcode, which covers estates such as Thorntree, Brambles Farm, Park End and Berwick Hills.

Members of the A66 crash gang – four of whom had previous convictions – are also believed to be linked to criminals convicted of being part of organised county line gangs in the TS3 and TS6 postcodes. 

Curtis Cremin, 19, was jailed for four and a half years in November after admitting to running a county drugs line that exploited teenage boys. 

After the crash, Cremin, who often goads police and has shared pictures of him waving a machete, shared an appeal to attend a balloon release vigil for Saddington, Rae and Worthy. ‘Everyone be there to give them the best send of [sic] they can have,’ he wrote.

Louie Leadbeater, 18, who was jailed for three years for conspiracy to supply crack cocaine, has posted photos with Worthy. And Laiton Hopkins, 19, who was handed a suspended sentence for supplying cocaine, also paid tribute to the five, writing: ‘rest in peace lads youse will be missed big love.’

Cremin, Leadbeater and Hopkins were all part of a criminal group dismantled through  an organised crime operation. Cleveland Police said the masked youths would recruit children in playgrounds or outside schools.

Mr Edgar said county lines was the most prevalent way in which organised crime groups are targeting vulnerable teenagers.

‘It’s absolutely shocking. Some kids in Cleveland are 13 or 14 years old, really good people with a bright career ahead of them. They have just got involved with the wrong company at the wrong time in the wrong location, and now they are in this cycle of literally being intrinsically involved in in criminality.

‘Unfortunately, they’re the small people in the OCG network. They are the ones that are more likely to be caught by the police and prosecuted. They’re seen as expendable.’

He added: ‘County lines is an insipid, horrible thing where young people are impressionable and vulnerable.’

Mr Edgar said what starts off as something ‘completely inconspicuous’ can end up in them being ‘in the pocket of the OCGs’. 

He explained how they might be preyed upon to look after a package for £50. But when they return it, the ‘recruiter’ will pretend something is missing and tell them they now owe £500. 

‘They’re then in the pocket of the OCGs because they are then liable to them. 

‘When they see the world of drugs and cash and firearms, it creates a world which seems quite attractive to some people – a good way of making money quite quickly. ‘

John Freeman, believed to be the head of the Freedman gang, pictured in a mugshot from 2019

Armed police on the scene of the suspected knife attack in Eston last week

Ben Houchen, mayor for Tees Valley, told The Times: ‘It’s pretty widely accepted in the community, and everybody knows that it’s all organised crime, and everything that you’re seeing as a result, post the death of the two police officers, is retaliation between feuding families and gangs.’

He said local gangs fought over lucrative ‘drugs pipelines’ in other parts of the country such as Liverpool and South Yorkshire down to London.

A surge in violence followed the deaths of five young men on the A66.

Seven-year-old Valentina Foster and her aunt Natalie McDonald, 34, were killed on Wednesday in a house fire in Grangetown. A 23-year-old man has appeared in court charged with murder.

A house on Steele Crescent, South Bank, was rammed into by a car and a 39-year-old man was stabbed on Sedgemoor Road, Eston. Police have ruled out a link between the house fire and the A66 crash, and are probing whether the other incidents are connected.

It has also emerged both Worthy’s father and Rae’s mother had their homes rammed before the crash. 

This has fuelled the theory that the Volkswagen Passat the five were driving may have been looking for a rival group responsible for a series of ram attacks. 

Mr Edgar added: ‘What we’re seeing in Cleveland is vehicles being used to ram others because it’s a way of creating intimidation at its worst.

‘The gangs that have particular issues with other organised crime groups or gangs will use vehicles to intimidate and harass and cause damage for other members of the OCG’s family. 

‘If one OCG has a problem with another OCG, the best way to intimidate and harass them and to really get to them is to target their extended family and friends.’

Mr Edgar said it has reached a point where locals in TS6 are scared to speak out over ‘fear of reprisals or retribution’ from organised crime gangs.

Last week, Andy McDonald, the MP for Middlesbrough and Thornaby East, said: ‘People are saying that they are going to their shops and not feeling safe to do so and feeling trapped in their own homes. 

‘That is just unacceptable. This is terrorism and we’ve got to have an appropriate response to deal with the people who are causing such mayhem in our communities and to allow people to lead their peaceful lives.’

Cleveland Police said a total of 27 people have been arrested since the A66 crash, which killed two officers and five youths. An investigation has been launched into organised crime in Middlesbrough.