A FORMER lap dancing club manager was today (Friday May 24) warned to expect a long prison sentence over his “chilling” attempts to lure young girls into his car.

Lewis John Lamb was said to have “cruised” round County Durham villages in his new Volkswagen Passat trying to engage passing girls in conversation by supposedly innocently asking for directions.

But, Durham Crown Court heard he followed by making determined efforts to entice them into joining him in his car.

The incidents took place last summer, when Lamb was manager of Diamonds gentlemen’s club, in Newcastle, but as his heavily pregnant wife was just weeks from giving birth to their child.

Lamb succeeded in persuading one 13-year-old girl to go for a ride with him after stopping to ask directions in Ferryhill on June 30.

The balding 39-year-old told her he was Danny Lee White, a 24-year-old IT technician from Essex, paying her compliments and giving her his mobile phone number.

Although she asked to get out, he touched her on the leg and tried to kiss her.

Two days later he pulled up at the roadside in a residential area of nearby Chilton and asked a 12-year-old girl for directions.

When she walked on he persisted in trying to engage her in conversation, before fleeing at speed when she told him she lived nearby.

A few days later police rang the number Lamb had given the first girl and he answered as ‘Danny’.

Once he was informed it was the police who wanted to speak to him, he rang off and discarded the phone at a fast food restaurant in his native Essex.

He was arrested two days later on returning to his home in Ramsay Street, Tursdale, near Durham.

Lamb, now a trainee district manager for an amusement company, denied child abduction, sexual activity with a child and attempted child abduction.

But, having been convicted of all three charges on unanimous guilty verdicts on the fifth day of his trial, Judge Christopher Prince told him: “You know abducting young children off the streets is a very grave offence and you can’t expect to be released from custody now for a very long time.”

He adjourned to allow preparation of a report by the Probation Service and remanded Lamb in custody to be brought back for sentence on June 20.

Lamb, who served a 10-month jail sentence for possessing an imitation firearm, an air pistol, in a ‘road rage’ incident, in 2004, will now be subject to registration as a sex offender.