Bookies at ease as gambling fraudster is behind bars

The nation's turf accountants breathed a sigh of relief yesterday after police revealed that a smooth-talking Liverpudlian known as Pencil Man had been arrested and placed under lock and key.

John Bailey, Britain's most feared gambling fraudster, strikes such fear into bookies that an emergency satellite alert was sent to more than 10,000 of them when he failed to materialise at Grimsby Crown Court in January to receive an expected jail term.

His nickname comes from his method of scribbling complicated phoney wagers with a pencil after distracting shop staff, and the Association of British Bookmakers feared he would be up to his old tricks while on the run.

But on Monday night his luck ran out. Bailey, 32, whose passport had already been seized by the court, was arrested in Liverpool and hauled back to Grimsby where he was remanded in custody to await sentencing in the next four weeks.

Bailey, of Tyndall Avenue, Liverpool, has already been jailed twice before during a six-year career which is estimated to have netted him more than £1m. After a four-day trial last November, he was found guilty of conning two Humberside bookmakers out of £40,000 in 48 hours of frenetic betting.

At the Stroud bookmakers in Hull he claimed to have won big money after staking £1.50 on an Irish Lottery game at odds of 6,561-1.

His trial jury heard about the 6ft 3in shaven-headed conman's method of preying on small independent betting shops by placing a bet at the counter and distracting staff so that he could steal the bookmaker's copy of the slip after it had been stamped and approved.

Once he knew the winners, he added a further, more complicated bet to both copies and slipped the carbon copy back across the counter, returning later for his winnings.