Tough Nuts: Nov 25

Episode Six of Tough Nuts: Australia’s Hardest Criminals profiles one of Australia’s biggest gangsters and punters, Mick Sayers ‘The Gambler’.

Michael ‘Mick’ Sayers was a career crook that got in too deep with some of the Tough Nuts in Sydney’s organised crime scene. An associate and friend of Chris Flannery (episode one), Sayers moved to Sydney and discovered that to survive on the mean streets, he had to turn his hand at drug dealing, extortion, race rigging and murder.

Sayers is believed to have been behind Australia’s most notorious race fix, ‘The Fine Cotton Ring In’. A plodder racehorse, earned infamy in August 1984, when a better performing horse was switched with a picnic meeting nag who could not have won the race in a million years.

A huge betting plunge for the horse named Fine Cotton before the race had already aroused stewards’ suspicions, which were only enflamed when the horse returned to the scales after winning the race with dye running down its legs. The horse was subsequently disqualified and Sayers lost a fortune.

Desperate for money, Sayers ripped off Sydney’s biggest heroin dealer, Barry McCann, stealing a briefcase full of drugs. McCann told him what would happen if the drugs were not returned, but Sayers didn’t listen and found out the hard way what happened to those who challenge the powers that be.

Tough Nuts traces the criminal career of Mick Sayers from his young days as Pentridge Prison’s bookmaker, his association with Chris Flannery that saw Sayers commit murder for money and points to the ‘Fine Cotton Ring In’ as the event that would ultimately lead to Sayers’ death.

Presented by bestselling crime author Tara Moss, Tough Nuts is an eight-part series that blows the lid off Australia’s criminal underworld and reveals the real story behind what made and shaped the most notorious figures in Australian criminal history.

The series profiles a different criminal in each episode and features, in order: Christopher Dale Flannery, Chow Hayes, Alphonse Gangitano, Dennis Allen, Russell Cox, Michael Sayers, Raymond Bennett and Lenny McPherson.

It premieres on Thursday, November 25 at 7.30pm on Crime and Investigation.