A book by an award-winning former regional journalist about a notorious gangland killing has been published three years after his death.

Patrick Lavelle’s book, King of the North, tells the story of the shooting of Angus Sibbet in County Durham in 1967 which inspired the Michael Caine film Get Carter.

Patrick first became interested in the case while working at the Northern Echo and Sunderland Echo in the 1980s.

He wrote the book King of the North before he died from cancer at the age of 50 in March 2010 but it was unable to be published for legal reasons until one of the individuals named in the book had died.

Patrick, who also taught at Sunderland University, began researching the gangland killing of Angus Sibbet in a bid to uncover the truth about the case, because the two men who were jailed for it always protested their innocence.

Sibbet worked collecting money from fruit machines across the North East and he was said to have skimmed £1,000 of takings a week for himself.

Patrick’s widow Maureen has now arranged for the book to be published and there are also plans for it to be turned into a movie.

The book is available from Amazon.

Patrick was best known for his pursuit of Yorkshire Ripper hoaxer Wearside Jack and his constant badgering of police led them to reopening the case of John Humble, who sent fake tape recordings in the late-1970s to officers investigating the murders.

He was crowned investigative journalist of the year three times at the North East Press Awards and chronicled his five-year investigation into Wearside Jack in the book ‘Shadow of the Ripper’, which was published in 2003.