Heather Bellamy heard John Lawson's story.

I compartmentalised my life. I was married with children whom I love very much. I could read them a bedtime story, kiss them goodnight and then completely detach and go and meet my men. I would put on a balaclava, take a shotgun and go and hold somebody hostage and hurt them and make them pay the money. I would come away feeling justified that we did the right thing and then I would treat my family to a holiday somewhere.

It was ridiculous. It was like a dual personality. I always considered at work, I cut off and became a family man then believing I was a good man, but let's face it what kind of good man for goodness sake raises kids, reads them a bedtime story and then goes to take a gun and take somebody hostage? That's the man that I became.

I had a coldness in my heart. I'm sorry to say, but even when we planned on having to shoot this guy, my plan would be to kill him, bury him and then later on that day we would act like tourists cause it was abroad, and then we would go and have a nice big slap-up meal and then head home knowing we were going to get 10% of this 13 million.

That is as cold as I can portray the kind of person I was and yet unbelievably still thinking I was a decent man and a good guy.

Heather: Did you ever experience remorse?

John: No, I think it was a false sense of remorse. We had this old fashioned mentality that you don't do anything with women or children. If we were ever taking a guy hostage and we did weeks of surveillance to do that and then children turned up on the scene, we would stop. We wouldn't go in, we would call the job off and do it another time. We were therefore empowering ourselves to say, "We are the good guys. We won't go in there and hold anyone hostage when there's children there. We will only deal with the criminals.

I guess in everything we do in life, we try to justify it. If we do something wrong there's always some kind of trying to justify why we did it. I would try to justify my stupid actions, even though they were extreme, by using that type of attitude. Also, I did try to convince myself that I wasn't a bad guy.

When I was on bail I rescued all these people from a burning building in Edinburgh and I got awarded bravery awards from the police. Even in court, when I'm facing charges of extortion, I'm saying to the judge, look I'm not that bad, I just won bravery awards for saving nine people from a burning building. The judge said, "Well Mr Lawson that just shows that you act without thinking of the consequences. You went into a burning building, put your life at risk where other people would have simply phoned the fire brigade; so you're a danger to society, because you don't think about the consequences of your actions." He was right really, I never thought of the ultimate consequence of my actions.

Heather: You went to prison three times. How did prison effect you?

John: The first two times never affected me at all. It made more criminal connections for me and I found prison quite easy. I was only in a short time for four months the first time and then only a little time for eight weeks the second time. The third time I got sentenced to four years for attempted extortion and then after a month they rounded up the rest of the gang and they tried to make me a compellable witness against them. I was quite rude to the judge at court, telling him where he can put his evidence. He thanked me by giving me a year and a half extra for contempt of court.

I was now serving five years and three months in prison. The Government seized all of my assets through the Proceeds of Crime Act and rightly so. Now the consequences began to come into place. We had to sell our family home to repay the Government and my wife and children had to go into temporary accommodation. There I was in prison feeling like an idiot, that all this chasing money had resulted in this.

All those assets were stripped, the big Range Rover and my motorcycle and the home all had to be sold, yet in prison I just became more arrogant. I could only think about more crime. I also got divorced in prison. My wife had had enough. She was unaware about most of what had gone on. I put them in a terrible situation, but all I thought about was more crime. I thought that when I get out of jail I'm gonna go back and rob these people and take all their money and keep all the money for myself. That's all I was thinking about in prison.