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RETIRED safebreaker Albert Hattersley adds a postscript to the Diary's story about tailor Wilfred Lyons whose old workshop is in the bowels of a former Star building in York Street.

"He grassed me up," says Albert who did a seven year stretch because of him.

In the early Fifties, Albert, now 85, from High Green, had blown the safe of a Leicester post office and made off with 1,000 ("worth 25 times that today"). He gave the National Insurance stamps and licences to a sidekick called Zeph.

He made the mistake of accompanying Zeph to his tailors, the same Wilfred Lyons, with premises then in Bank Street, and was talked into having a fitting for a suit.

When Albert dropped by to check on its progress the tailor gave him a package containing the stamps which Zeph had passed on. They were too hot to handle and he wanted Albert to give them back to Zeph.

He then phoned the police who arrested Albert when he got to his car with the stolen stamps on him.

"When I went into the police station I managed to palm the stamps and they missed them in the search.''

But then he made a big mistake. Confident he wouldn't be searched again he stuffed them down a sock instead of throwing them on an open fire.

"They stood round me and I had to strip. The sock was the last thing I took off," he says. Albert went down for seven years.

There's a twist to the story. Zeph was caught in possession of five pills used to drug guard dogs and when he was fingered took the pills himself.

The cops thought he had died. On his 'deathbed' Zeph muttered something about Albert dropping a body down a mine shaft.

Albert had a devil of a job convincing them it was a dead horse.