Retired TV chief in hitman trial ‘ begged neighbours for cash to lavish on escort’

A RETIRED TV producer accused of asking hitmen to murder his partner begged neighbours for money to spend on his prostitute lover, a court heard yesterday.

David Harris allegedly asked one pensioner for £40,000 to spend on the call girl he was ‘besotted’ with.

The Old Bailey also heard how he had scoured a 20-mile radius from his home for prostitutes and also had an affair with a nurse. Details of the 68-year-old’s love life emerged at the Old Bailey, where he is on trial accused of offering three hitmen up to £250,000 to murder his long-term partner Hazel Allinson, 68.

Harris, who worked as location manager on ITV show The Bill, is said to have wanted to inherit her money so he could spend it on Lithuanian call girl Ugne Cekaviciute, who he met in a brothel.

Jurors were told he spent more than £50,000 on the 28-year-old, even borrowing from neighbours to buy her gifts.

He ‘became besotted’ with her, he said and ‘ thought she too young, too nice, to be in a brothel’.

But his debts mounted up as the affair continued.

The pensioner worked his way through £50,000 Miss Allinson gave him, his £300 monthly allowance from her, a £16,000 loan from a neighbour and credit cards with Saga and John Lewis.

Harris is also alleged to have approached an elderly neighbour days after her mother died, and asked to borrow £40,000 – but she declined.

Harris told jurors he and Miss Allinson were ‘100 per cent, fabulous’ together – but he visited brothels because he had an ‘active libido’ and the pair of them were not ‘sexually compatible’. Harris said: ‘I’m afraid to say, to my shame, I attended prostitutes, within a ten to 20 mile radius. I met Ugne around October 2011 in a brothel in Worthing.

‘I had become besotted with her. I thought that she was too young and too nice to be in a brothel and over the time we developed our friendship, our relationship, I discovered she wanted to go back to uni and study.

Harris said she was also working as a carer for adults with special needs and she left the brothel on his request. He added: ‘It started to get very expensive having dinner, lunch, hotels and I just couldn’t afford it so I started drawing out that capital that Hazel had given me.’

By the time of his arrest, the money was ‘long gone’, he said.

The Old Bailey heard how Miss Allinson was angry when she dis- covered an affair Harris had with a nurse some years ago, and in 2014 she learnt of his relationship with Miss Cekaviciute after seeing a bank statement.

But she forgave him, said Harris, because ‘the bond was too great for us just to separate after 27 years, so we decided to stay together and work on our relationship’.

‘She wasn’t happy, but didn’t want to end the relationship,’ he said. ‘She was angry at first, then she calmed down and realised it wasn’t very important and that what we had was more important than that.’ The court also heard that Harris met hitmen as part of a plan to pen a Frederick Forsythstyle thriller.

He said he had been emulating the working methods of the author, who penned classic assassin novel The Day of the Jackal.

Jurors were told that book sales – and film rights – would give an easier life to his ‘soulmate’ Miss Allinson, who also worked on The Bill as a script supervisor.

Novels found on a Kindle device at the £800,000 house he shared with her in Amberley, West Sussex, included Assassin by Tom Cain, along with thrillers by Robert Ludlum and Stieg Larsson. Harris had plans to base his own book on his life, in which a marketing executive in his 50s fell in love with a young woman and decided to kill his older wife.

But he said he needed to get a realistic storyline. Harris told the court: ‘The hitman was crucial to the plot, and I wanted to contact a hitman because I’d read something of Frederick Forsyth when he was writing a novel.

‘The character in that novel wanted to infiltrate the IRA as a gun smuggler, and arms dealer – and Frederick Forsyth arranged to meet a guy who did just this, dealt arms. The first thing this guy said to him was, “Why did you want to meet me? You’re writing a novel, you can make it up”.

‘Forsyth’s words were, “authenticity, believability”. Harris denies three counts of conspiracy to murder. The case continues.

‘Authenticity and believability’