Читать книгу Gang Wars of the North - The Inside Story of the Deadly Battle Between Viv Graham and Lee Duffy - Stephen Richards - Страница 11

You can take the boy out of the city but you cannot take the city out of the boy. This old piece of wisdom underlines the difference between Lee Duffy and Viv Graham. Viv was from a little village and, even though he tried to make inroads into the underworld scene on Tyneside, he still had a bit of the country boy in him.

As for Duffy, by contrast, his streetwise instinct helped him to survive whatever situation he found himself in. He was a chameleon, adaptable to whatever life threw at him, even if still a fatally flawed character!

In one of the many stories told about Duffy, a large van pulled up outside the Empire pub in Middlesbrough with about 30 mountain bikes in it and the driver got out and asked him if he or his mate knew where Bobby’s Cycles was. Duffy told the driver that they didn’t but said, “They’ll know in there,” and pointed to the pub. When the driver, leaving the engine running, went into the pub, two men hanging about nearby who had nothing to do with Duffy and his mate jumped smartly into the van and drove off at high speed. At that time a good mountain bike would fetch about £500.

That very night, Duffy’s friend went to see his mother, who said to him, ‘Have you heard about your mate Duffy? A man pulls up from the handicapped kids’ place with a load of bikes asking for directions, Lee Duffy knocked him out, broke his cheekbone and took all the bikes off him that were for the kids.’ Tales like this helped build the wrong kind of reputation for Duffy, but then powerful characters always attract exaggeration.

But many believe it is no exaggeration to say that Duffy had such a presence that he could go into a nightclub containing a thousand people and within ten minutes there would only be a hundred left in the place. He would not need to hit anyone with his fists: his fearsome aura was enough.

When Duffy was in jail, his girlfriend and his friend visited him, and when they eventually got in to see him he was walking around alone in a big caged yard. Why, you might wonder. The answer: 18 people in that prison wanted to murder him. To the prison authorities it was easier to ensure his safety by locking him up in secure surroundings rather than putting him in with a mob of would-be assassins.

Another story of Duffy’s time behind bars also shows his forceful character. As he was brought out of a door from a little tunnel, he had one joint in his mouth and another one tucked behind his ear. Puffing vigorously on the joint, he seemed oblivious to the prison officer on either side of him. The screws escorted him into a little room hastily assembled as a makeshift visiting area.

‘Fuck off!’ he said to them.

‘Lee, on a visit we’ve got to stand over you,’ they explained.

To this he shot back, ‘Look, you’ve got me out of the cell, but you’ve got to get me back in the cell. Fuck off!’

The two screws walked briskly out of the room, in no mood to argue with this particular prisoner.

Another time, Duffy’s friend Neil Booth decided to climb on to the roof of the Havana nightclub. Off his head with drink, he started to throw roofing tiles on to the street below. Duffy, unaware of this, was in a house around the corner and the police went there to ask him to get Booth down off the roof.

‘Now then, now then, now then’ was Duffy’s way of saying, ‘I’m here.’ Sure, he had no need to make such grand entrances, but that is how Duffy was. When it came to being involved in running things on Teesside, he could not be bothered with menial issues, but making a grand entrance was always important to him.

Duffy was forever being discriminated against, from the age of six right up until the day he died. He knew he was not going to see the other side of 30, so what did he have to lose by being himself? In time the very mention of his name would bring terror to people around Teesside, but only to those with good reason to be scared of him. Everyone who suffered at his hands had some connection to the underworld, either directly or indirectly. The people who tried to kill Duffy on a string of occasions did not know him personally; they were contract killers working for others.

After Duffy was shot the second time and was hospitalised for a few days, he would smoke dope to help him overcome the pain. ‘Come here. Do you want a go of this?’ he would say to his armed police guard as he held out a joint mockingly.

Yet Duffy was also a sensitive man, and an extract from a letter he wrote to Lisa Stockell reveals this side of him. Here was a man who had had half his foot shot off in an assassination attempt and his skull beaten with a crowbar. And yet all he speaks of in this letter, written on one side of a greetings card, is the pain and suffering his girlfriend must have gone through when she went into hospital to have their daughter Kattieleigh, obviously without his being able to witness the birth. Not once does he fall into self-pity for his own predicament.

The neat handwriting points to someone who is methodical and artistic. Some of the text slopes down from right to left, an indication he was depressed. The neatness of the hand leads me to believe he was a bit of a perfectionist, and it’s well known that perfectionists can become frustrated. Maybe this helps explain why Duffy would sometimes fly off the handle. But, despite these outbursts, he was also someone who thought a lot.

It’s clear that his chosen lifestyle also brought with it a degree of paranoia, though maybe this was just a state of heightened vigilance. Anyway, one day Duffy was on his way to a blues party and became paranoid, thinking the people that had previously shot him were there. He drove to a house in Stockton, went in and within minutes returned to the car carrying three guns. To one of his associates he said, ‘Here, get one of them.’

‘Fuck you with your “get one of them”,’ the man replied. ‘I don’t mind having a fight with someone, but if I get caught with this and you shoot someone, the frame of mind you’re in, I’m getting 15 years here.’

As they were leaving Stockton, their car was nearly hit by a police van that raced through traffic lights.

‘He goes through and misses the car, a Sierra, doing about 60mph,’ recalls an associate of Duffy’s. ‘I said to Duffy, “Go for it, go for it, and let’s get out of here. He’s got to turn around, he’s in a transit van, let’s offski.”

‘Duffy says to me, “Let’s fucking offski.”

‘He pulls up, and at that time he’s got three loaded guns and ammunition in the car. I’m wiping the guns and the door handles of the car down.

‘Duffy jumps out of the car, goes straight over to the bobby’s van and says, “What the fucking hell do you think you’re doing, you?”

‘Martin Shallows [the police driver] says, “All right, Lee, what’s the matter?”

‘Duffy says, “I’ll tell you what the fuck’s the matter with me: you’ve just nearly crashed into me, you daft cunt.”

‘The reply was: “Lee, howway, just get yourself out of Stockton, mate, no problem, no problem.”

‘Another time, someone had a load of cannabis resin in the car and the coppers pulled Lee for a routine check because it was Duffy. He went off his head like he was a loony and they brought a squad car out to give the car a full checkover. They never found the cannabis that was hidden underneath the seat. Instead of him keeping his mouth shut he couldn’t.

‘Duffy and his friends – one of them was Lee Harrison – were in a place on Normanby Road and someone went in to tip Duffy off that there was a large police presence outside. An inspector wearing a flat cap and uniform with all the buttons on walked in and he said, “All right, Lee?”

‘Duffy says, “Yeah.”

‘The inspector says, “We want to have a word with Lee Harrison over fines.”

‘Duffy says, “Fuck off out of here now, before I give you it!”

‘The inspector said, “I can come back …”

‘“Come back with who you want,” intervened Duffy.

‘The man who owned the pub came in and said, “There’s fucking loads of them outside.”

‘Duffy and his friends knew if they went out and drove away that they would get pulled over, so they got a taxi. On their way along Normanby Road, all of a sudden, an unmarked squad car pulls in front of the taxi and stops and, out of the side of the road, armed police ambush them, shouting, “Get on the floor face down! Get on the floor!”

‘Everyone except Duffy gets down on the floor. He walks around saying, “Fuck getting on the floor, I’m getting on no floor. Fuck you telling me to get on the floor.”

‘One of the police officers said to the officer in charge that Duffy wouldn’t get on the floor and he was told Lee was “all right”. This was an indicator of Duffy being considered too lethal to push about.’

Many people have taken what has been said or written about Duffy as gospel. I’ve spoken to the hardest of hard throughout the UK and, up until now, all of these people, with just one exception, has turned out to be a likeable character. Why should Duffy have been any different?

Usually it is fear of something that brings out the worst in a man. Duffy had a fear of being bullied, so he got in first. If you were not a threat to him, fine. If you were not a lowlife drug dealer, fine. If you were not one of those who had bullied him from the age of six, fine. It seems that the only people who had anything to fear from him were the evil ones. Some say Duffy was evil, but they are all people who never met him.

Tommy Harrison, one of the elder statesmen of the Teesside underworld, has many memories of Duffy. ‘Lee once knocked on my door and said, “I’ve been shot. I want the bullet taken out.”

‘I said, “That’s not a bullet, it’s a shotgun wound. It’s lead shot. I can’t do it. You’ll have to go to hospital because it’ll get poisoned.” It did poison because part of his jeans had gone into his leg along with the lead shot.

‘He’d sometimes go missing for days on end up to Newcastle, at a pub called the Bay Horse. I used to have to go up and get him.

‘When the petrol was thrown over him, he just whacked the geezer before the geezer had a chance to pull a lighter out When they had the gun pointed at his belly, he just wrestled it to the floor. He was fearless, he didn’t fear anyone. How many people in Middlesbrough walk around with guns and knives? The people trying to kill him were out of the area and were paid to do him in. I couldn’t have seen anybody enticing him into a blues party so he could be killed. They’d have had to do him in. They couldn’t have just whacked him, because he’d have come back at them.

‘When I lived in North Ormesby, he used to go running every day and this day he’d been running and training. He used to run up the hills, pulling a log up with him. He came to my house and said, “Have you got anything to eat?” Eggs, sausage, bacon, liver, tomato, the lot, then he’d be off.

‘He gets round the corner and someone wants to have a pop at him. Lee smashed his jaw, clipped his cheekbone with two right-handers. How do you go and train, have a nice meal and go round the corner and see somebody that wants to have a pop at you? I don’t know how you can define that.

‘When he got into trouble at the Speakeasy, he was in there just having a drink when it was a firm from Leeds causing trouble and he was asked for a hand and they all blamed him. The others never got charged and he did. It wasn’t in his nature to be used, but it was in his nature to help you. If you were in a bit of bother he’d help you.

‘I had a bit of bother with someone and he said to me, “Where are you going?”

‘I said, “I’m going to go and fight somebody.”

‘“I’m coming too,” he replied.

‘He was barred from the town while he was on this particular condition of bail. But he’d help you straight away; he wouldn’t say, “How much are you paying me?”

‘Lee used to love going out with me. He loved it. He didn’t swear or anything like that when he was mixing with proper people. Towards the end, he started to mix with the wrong sorts of people.

‘He was going to fight Lenny [‘The Guv’nor’] McLean until he got shot. I went down to London. I had a few well known faces putting money up for all this. He was fit, he was bouncing, then he got shot in the knee! I think Lee would have had the upper hand with Lenny McLean because Lee was young and, don’t forget, he was nearly 18 stone and he could hit hard. I mean, I knew McLean and Frank Warren.

‘I was going to have a go with McLean in 1978 in the Empire Rooms, Tottenham Court Road, London. Lenny came in with young Frank Warren when they were associated with backstreet boxing. I’ve known Frank from being a kid and Ritchie Anderson. I just thought, if I were four years younger I’d have just been on the boil. Lenny wasn’t as big as that in the seventies. He was on the gear. He wasn’t as big as he was when he died.

‘I said to Frank, “If ever you want anything, then there’s my phone number,” and I said, “You’ll never spend that,” and I gave it to him on a £10 note.

‘He replied, “I’m not as bad as you. There’s my phone number,” and he gave it to me on a £20 note!

‘And Lenny McLean just sat there and we were eyeing each other up, but I don’t think McLean would have beaten Lee. I don’t think anyone could have beaten him.

‘Everybody knew Lee because every nick he went to, he battered the top man. He’d say, “Who’s the guv’nor in here?” Wallop, wallop, wallop, and he’d give him it. He just made sure they knew who he was.

‘Lee did a bit of boxing, but it’s what’s in you that counts, but boxing does help you. You have to train; a Rolls-Royce won’t run without petrol. He was powerful and he was a big hitter; if he hit you, then something would break. I said to Lee, “When you’re fighting, surprise them.” He had power and he had speed. It’s not how heavy you are, it’s the speed.

‘You could rib him and have a bit of crack with him; if he knew you, he wasn’t a bully. I loaned him and our Lee £5,000 one day and they dodged me with the repayment money. They were upstairs in the Speakeasy and they were saying, “Oh, the old man’s here!”

‘I said, “Hey, get here, I want you and I want you,” pointing at the two Lees. “Where’s that money? I want paying, you bastards, and I want the money now.”

‘They said, “We’ll get you it.”

‘I replied, “Well, I want it and don’t dodge me.”

‘We were all laughing. He could have said to me, “Shut up, you’re getting nothing.”

‘You’d have to get to know him. Outsiders couldn’t get close to him, but if he took to you he took to you and you’d get a million per cent back off him. He was no fool, you know; he was very careful whom he befriended.

‘If he was going anywhere, he’d make sure it was safe; he’d get dropped off a few streets before or be driven around the place. If he was in a taxi, he’d have somebody sitting in front of him. There was a time the police were looking for him, he was out of the back bathroom window and he was off … naked – he ripped all his leg open, but he was off like a shot.

‘There was a time he got a dodgy passport and flight tickets to go off to Spain to stay out of the road for a bit when he had some trouble. He went to Charrington’s [Brian Charrington of Teesside] garage and they blocked the garage off. Lee would take a car off you, “I’ll borrow that car off you.”

‘When mobile phones were first around in the early nineties, they were the size of building bricks. Lee would drive around in a soft-top car and have one held up to his ear and it wasn’t even switched on! I gave our Lee a mobile phone. The bill in the first month was £1,100. I said, “Give me it here.” They thought it was a trend, the pair of them.

‘There were never enough hours in the day for him, cars here and there, going all over. They went to the Hacienda club [in Manchester] and knocked the doors open.

‘They were all running around looking for him in Manchester. He was hid in the boot of a car. He goes up to the doormen. BOOM! BOOM! He knocked them out. Lee wasn’t bothered about doormen; it was like going for the title, you go through the ranks. BANG! BANG! BANG! Just knocking them out!

‘Lee was a good conversationalist but, if he were going to be involved in a fight, then he wouldn’t talk his way out of it, no, no! There’s a story about Lee holding a gun to a taxi driver’s head in a game of Russian roulette. He never held it up to the man’s head; it was a lie, whoever said it. He just shot a hole in the roof of the taxi before he got out and the man said, “What have you done to my taxi?”

‘Lee could drive, but he was lethal! Straight through traffic lights! We lost count of the amount of wing mirrors he broke. He once asked, “Can I have a drive of your Rolls-Royce?”

‘I said, “No, you cannot! Sit in the back.”

‘He should have had one of those little DAF cars where you put the stick forward to go forward and back to go back.

‘Lee went to Tenerife with our Lee and they also went to Ibiza. Lee Duffy was like a volcano. He needed a rest.

‘When Lee was with Lisa, he was a different Lee Duffy altogether, sitting having a beer, watching telly and having a laugh and then he’d say, “Right, I’m off to bed now.”

‘When Lee was in company, though, he could take four or five on and, when you’re young, you’re buzzing.

‘I was in Johannesburg and was having a meet with a princess from Kuala Lumpur and there’s a big bodyguard about six foot five, Greco wrestling champ, the lot, and even he asked me if I knew Lee Duffy!’