Читать книгу Gang Wars of the North - The Inside Story of the Deadly Battle Between Viv Graham and Lee Duffy - Stephen Richards - Страница 7

Lawrie and Brenda Duffy welcomed their newborn son, Lee Paul, later to be known as ‘the Duffer’, into the world on 11 June 1965. The boy was raised on a council estate in Middlesbrough’s South Bank. After his first school, Beech Grove Primary, he attended Stapylton School in nearby Eston.

As early as the age of six, Duffy was repeatedly assaulted by much older boys – if you can call lads of up to 19 ‘boys’.

And in 1979 a gang of older teenagers brutally attacked 14-year-old Duffy and knocked him unconscious. He was awarded £80 in compensation, but the taste of blood set him on the road to developing his skills as a boxer. Initially these were for self-defence but later, when he became a man mountain of six foot four and 16 stone, he dished out vengeance beatings to those involved in that assault.

West Indian Shandy Boyce is credited with teaching Duffy how to box, although many say that he never really took to boxing. But later Duffy would train at the gym and spar with any boxer. Every two or three weeks he would turn up on ‘senior nights’ and knock someone out.

Duffy often recalled the bullying he suffered as a child and during his formative years this clearly played a part in traumatising him so that he wanted to fight. Psychologists say that the bullied becomes the bully.

By his teens Duffy was indoctrinated in the rough-and-tumble outlook that estates like his breed into youngsters and in December 1980, not yet 16, he received convictions for burglary and car theft and was sent to a detention centre for three months.

Duffy left Stapylton School in 1981 with a CSE Grade Three in woodwork.

The following year violence landed him in a detention centre for six months. Then, in April 1983, he was given a youth custody order lasting two and a half years for attacking and robbing a nightclub doorman.

Charges of affray and assault against Duffy were dropped in 1984 when no one would give evidence at court. (Four similar charges were dropped on separate occasions for the same reason.) That year Duffy met a single mother of one, Carol ‘Bonnie’ Holmstrom, a South Bank girl three years older than him, and they began a turbulent five-year relationship.

Duffy was jailed in March 1988 for four years after pleading guilty to a vicious assault on a man in the Speakeasy nightclub (later the Havana) in Middlesbrough. The attack deprived his victim, Martin Clark, of an eye. While serving his sentence Duffy was moved to 18 different prisons. When strip-searched during these moves he became very aggressive. At each jail he wanted to take over and be ‘top man’.

In August 1988, while Duffy was behind bars, Bonnie gave birth to their second daughter, Michelle, and soon afterwards she told him that it was all over between them.

However, on being released from prison in May 1990, Duffy visited Bonnie in hospital, where she was being treated for stress. He broke down in tears and then went on holiday. On his return he broke the news to Bonnie that Lisa Stockell was pregnant with his child.

Duffy’s childhood hero was another of Teesside’s hard men, Kevin ‘Ducko’ Duckling. He idolised the man and wanted to be like him when he got older. Duffy modelled himself on Ducko and similar hard men and maybe this is what helped mould him into the man he eventually became, although, as a family man, he was undoubtedly compassionate and cared about the two daughters he had with Bonnie and his daughter born to Lisa, Kattieleigh.

In June 1988 Ducko was charged with manslaughter and given a four-year prison sentence. He had shoved a partially disabled man from Sheffield, causing him to hit his head on the ground and die. The death of 21-year-old Paul Dallaway occurred at a ‘blues party’. These unlicensed gatherings, often organised and frequented by black people, sold alcohol and usually took place in terraced houses or disused commercial premises that had been converted in a rough-and-ready way. Once the pubs and clubs closed, people wanted the fun to go on and that is how blues parties developed. At one time, some cans of booze and a few grams of white powder or cannabis would get things going, but then the parties became commercialised and people started to make money out of running events where hundreds of paying guests would pack in.

Curry and rice would be served and drugs would be on sale to keep the party in full swing, while reggae tunes would blast out at full power. Usually an open fire was kept going to quickly burn drugs if the police raided. There would be plenty of prostitutes and illegal gambling on offer in the quieter rooms either upstairs or at the back of the house.

Blues parties were very dangerous places where you could get stabbed or shot, but Duffy chose them as his hunting ground for rich pickings from drug dealers. Soon his reputation went before him and he was a force second to none in the Middlesbrough area. Just the mention of his name would make drug dealers run a mile.

A look at Duffy’s past will show that he was much more orientated towards violence than his Newcastle counterpart Viv Graham ever was, and because of this he would receive a series of threats to his life.

Back in the 1980s, when Duffy was in his early twenties, he thought he could use his boxing prowess to carve out a reasonable living from crime. For people who make a decision like this, crime becomes a normal, accepted way of life. Court appearances were an occupational hazard for Duffy and, by 1988, when he was sentenced to four years for affray by Teesside Crown Court, he had seen the inside of a court over a dozen times, and more than once in connection with charges of violent crime.

No sooner was Duffy released from prison than he was in trouble again. This time, though, it was different. He was usually the one to dish out the punishment, but now he was on the other end of violence.

The early hours of a December morning in 1990 saw the industrial district of Middlesbrough disturbed by the noise of a shotgun. In the typical underworld way, Duffy had been shot in the knee. A man was later charged with the shooting and, because the damage was not as serious as it might have been, Duffy started to believe he was invincible. Over time he was called many names because of his violent behaviour, ‘thug’ being one of the milder ones.

At the time of this assault on him, Duffy shared a home with his girlfriend, Lisa Stockell, in Eston. Gangsters of the old school tended to consider the home as a place of refuge, out of bounds for causing trouble, because innocent people could be hurt. The unwritten code of conduct that included this rule may have applied years ago, but it was certainly not observed by the two black men who came looking for Duffy.

The two men who broke into the home of Lisa Stockell on 31 January 1991 – she was nine months pregnant at the time – were clearly expecting to find Duffy at home, as they had come tooled up. As usual when cowards are given the job of real men, they had with them some equalisers in the form of a shotgun and a ‘leg breaker’, an iron bar.

Not finding Duffy, these two hairy gorillas vented their frustration on the four people in the house, three women and one man. The intruders ripped gold rings from Lisa’s fingers and threatened all sorts of things in their determination to know where her boyfriend was. Feeling full of themselves, they finally left in search of their intended victim.

In the early hours of the morning, a time that he loved, Duffy was attending a blues party in a former wedding boutique in Harrington Road, Middlesbrough, unaware that his girlfriend, her sister, her mother and another man had been the victims of two thugs earlier that night. When he heard what had happened, he was determined to seek out those responsible and got hold of photographs of the pair involved in the raid; rumours have it that a police source passed them on to him.

Soon afterwards the two men who were on Duffy’s trail turned up at the party and got into a fight with him. One of them pulled out a shotgun and leaned over the bar pointing it at Duffy, who snatched the weapon, making it go off and blast his foot into a gory mess. He had to have skin grafts taken from his thigh to close up the hole in his foot. As a party piece, Duffy would show the sole of his foot, which still had pellets visibly embedded in it.

In a similarly macabre stunt, when the gunman was on remand in prison, he came out of his cell during association, took a draw on a cigarette, blew the smoke into a trainer he had just taken off and asked people what it was. No one knew until he said, ‘Duffy’s foot, after it was shot!’

Duffy must have been getting used to being shot at. Just over a month before that incident he had been confronted by a gunman who made the first attempt to murder him. That night, 27 December 1990, Duffy was called out from a club in Middlesbrough’s Princes Road, only to be forced to dive over a car for cover when he realised he was in danger. He escaped death but was blasted in the knee with a shotgun. After spending four days in hospital he signed himself out.

From this first attack onwards it was clear that there was a violent campaign to take Duffy off the scene in Middlesbrough by killing him. Because of his stand against drugs on his territory, dealers were losing a lot of money. His situation mirrored Viv Graham’s in Newcastle, where his life too was under threat because he was stopping a lot of dealing going on.

In Duffy’s case, no fewer than ten men faced charges of attempting to murder him relating to three different incidents. All were acquitted, however, as we will see later on.

Nevertheless, the scale and persistence of the onslaught on Duffy indicates the chilling resolve of the drug barons to get him off what they saw as their domain.

It was in April 1991 that three men from Blyth, about ten miles north of Newcastle, were charged with the attempted murder of Duffy in relation to the shooting in January of that year. Raymond Palmer, Robert Charlton and Anthony Cole were from this Northumbrian town well known for the drug dealing among its small population and for the high number of deaths from illegal drugs. Charges against Palmer and Charlton were later dropped. Cole was acquitted in October 1992 of the attempted murder of Duffy in a trial that heard that there was no real chance of securing a conviction.

Birmingham has a connection with this story through the involvement of Marnon Clive Thomas and Leroy Vincent Fischer, both from that city, who were charged with robbing Duffy’s girlfriend of a large quantity of jewellery shortly before Duffy was shot in the foot. A third man from Birmingham, John Leroy Thomas, was charged, along with Marnon Thomas and Leroy Fischer, with conspiring to murder Duffy on that same occasion. All three were charged within a few weeks of the shooting.

John Leroy Thomas was given bail. The net was widening and four more people, all from Teesside, were pulled in and charged with conspiracy to murder: Shaun Thomas Harrison, Paul James Bryan, Kevin James ‘Beefy’ O’Keefe and Peter Corner.

Then, in April 1991, it was nearly a case of third time unlucky for Duffy when another attempt was made on his life. If shooting could not put paid to him, surely petrol would! In this incident, which had all the horror of a video nasty, Duffy was doused in petrol by a man who chased him with a lighter, according to underworld sources.

The Commercial pub, in South Bank, was the scene of this attack, in which Duffy reacted violently, breaking a man’s jaw. For this retaliation Duffy was charged with GBH (grievous bodily harm).

Only a week before the assault in the Commercial, in connection with another charge against Duffy, a judge in chambers had freed him on bail with conditions that barred him from entering any licensed premises in Middlesbrough. On this occasion Duffy had been remanded for GBH with intent on a man called Peter Wilson. It was alleged that he had offered Wilson £2,500 to drop the charges and he was consequently charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice. (A further charge of ABH, actual bodily harm, was brought against Duffy for an attack on Islam Guul, whom he had threatened to kill.)

There was a history of acquittals in cases involving attacks on Duffy. First, Patrick Tapping, who had been charged with attempting to murder him, was acquitted at his trial in May 1992.

All seven men charged with conspiracy to murder after the shooting of Duffy in January 1991 were eventually bailed. Conditions of bail were strict, but they had won their freedom. Subsequently, charges against all seven were revised, with the result that they faced, instead, a lesser charge of conspiracy to commit GBH. At their trial in October 1992 all of them were acquitted.

Meanwhile, the attacks on Duffy had gone on. In August 1991, on licensed premises in Middlesbrough, he was set upon by a group of men armed with baseball bats. With weapons ranging from iron bars and baseball bats to shotguns and petrol having been used against him, it can safely be assumed that Duffy was aware that people wanted to hurt him at the very least! And, in doing so, they were no less violent than people were claiming he himself was.

A small consolation perhaps, but Viv Graham suffered fewer armed attempts on his life than his Teesside counterpart. But one incident, in 1989, when Viv was working the doors of a Newcastle nightclub, was particularly troubling. Viv refused entry to a man, who decided to get even. To make things worse, at this time the super-tough doorman was becoming complacent with his own security. This allowed a sinister-looking black Nissan saloon to follow him unnoticed and later pull up and wait for him to get out of the car he was in.

The gunman in the Nissan shot at Viv out of a rear window, preferring to stay within the safe confines of this fast car. That is how frightened the hitman and his driver were of Viv. They feared that even the pump-action shotgun the gunman was toting might not be enough to slow their target down, so they were not taking any chances.

Rob Armstrong, who was with Viv, had his city wits about him and he could see what was going on. He shouted at Viv to move. Then he dived on his friend, who had his back to the masked gunman, and pulled him to the ground. For this heroic deed, Armstrong paid a price: he was shot in the back while making towards Viv and shot at again while lying protectively on top of him on the ground. A man emerging from a nightclub suffered slight facial injuries in the incident.

It was all over as fast as it had started, and the black Nissan sped off with its occupants tucked safely inside like sardines in a can. There was no chance these little fish were going to fall out of their protective tin into Viv’s hands. In time-honoured gangland fashion, the car was dumped and burned, with its number plates removed, a mile away from the shooting.

Viv survived this murder attempt bungled by a couple of losers, but it was a foretaste of what was still to come on New Year’s Eve 1993.

The problem was, Viv was not as aware of his surroundings as he needed to be. He took too much for granted, a habit which in part stemmed from his having grown up in the countryside, where things could be trusted to always go the same way, day in and day out. Compare the scenario of that shooting with how Duffy habitually reacted when facing such an attack. In this respect Duffy was streets ahead of his Tyneside rival.

To underline the point, when a huge man like Rob Armstrong moved fast to protect his friend, he was trading on the heightened instinct for survival that many if not most city dwellers come to possess. Such rapid reactions are honed by mundane, everyday actions like jumping out of the way of a speeding car or darting across a busy city road. They are a conditioned reflex.

It was clear, however, that anyone who was intending to kill Viv could not count entirely on his relatively slow responses to guarantee their own safety. Nor could they run the risk that he might be able to hit back at them with his raw physical power even after he had been shot. This is why his would-be killers carried out their attack from the safety of their sporty Nissan. For the same reason, a vehicle of some kind would always play a part in attempts on his life.

This happened during a spate of particularly vicious attacks on locals. One burglary of a 90-year-old man’s home involved the victim being tied up and the heating turned off. He was left for a day until he was found nearly dead. He died in hospital a short while after this sadistic attack.

In May 1998 31-year-old Gary Thompson was charged with the murder of the old man who was burgled, Thomas Hall, along with 11 others who faced various related charges.

In a subsequent murder trial Thompson was found guilty and is now serving a life sentence in prison. Charged alongside Thompson were George Luftus, 49; Geoffrey Smith, 39; David Clark, 28; John Douglas Trattels, 39; Christopher Dale, 35; Paul Dees, 28; William Renforth, 27; Allen Sidney, 29; Diane Hemmings, 43; and Lorraine Trattels, 40. The offences included conspiracy to rob and handling stolen goods. William Trory, 59, was charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice and assisting an offender. He had given Thompson shelter during the time the police had been looking for him.

Returning to Duffy, we have seen that there were a string of acquittals of people accused of crimes against him. One instance was the acquittal, in October 1992, of the seven men charged with conspiring to cause him grievous bodily harm. You may recall that the charge against the seven had been reduced from one of conspiracy to murder. Since it shines more light on Lee Duffy and the world that he moved in, let’s look more closely at the trial of these men: John Leroy Thomas, 36, Leroy Vincent Fischer, 31, Marnon Clive Thomas, 31, Peter Corner, 23, Shaun Thomas Harrison, 25, Paul James Bryan, 31, and Kevin James O’Keefe, 32.

The main prosecution witness, Ria Maria Nasir from Teesside. Nasir refused to give evidence against the seven accused and was advised that she did not have to answer questions that might incriminate her. The prosecution, led by Andrew Robertson, told the jury that he was ‘compelled to offer no evidence’ and that ‘Miss Nasir is the main prosecution witness, but her attitude shows her evidence isn’t going to be forthcoming’.

The people who attempted to kill Duffy are cold, callous people. They kicked in the door of a woman who was nine months pregnant and stuck the twin barrels of a sawn-off shotgun into her mouth in order to find out where Duffy was and then they robbed her and her sister of jewellery. But it was a pregnant woman, not Lee Duffy, the ‘Terminator of Teesside’. No one was ever convicted of these crimes.

Nasir gave an interview to the local press some four months later and said that she would persist with her lifestyle in spite of a series of alleged sinister attacks on her home.

They say that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Ria Nasir put a great deal of emphasis on her family having been threatened, yet, when Duffy’s family and unborn child were traumatised, the court process could not help. The Crown’s case was that a contract was put on Duffy because he was stepping on the toes of other people carrying out illegal acts.

Duffy, with some of his followers, allegedly broke up a blues party and the party organiser was told to give him the proceeds. This was the final straw that resulted in a contract on Duffy. In the event, the Prosecution reviewed the evidence and decided not to proceed. All the Defendant’s were found not guilty.

After the trial collapsed, Lisa Stockell asked the then MP for Redcar and Cleveland, the late Mo Mowlam, to intervene and all seemed well until about a week later, when Mowlam told Lisa that she could not get the paperwork released to her.

Criminal injuries payments are meagre, but every little helps. Such payments for the loss of Lee Duffy were not pursued, Lisa was told, because legal aid would not be forthcoming since Lee had a criminal record. After Viv Graham, a top underworld figure who had a criminal record comparable with Duffy’s, was gunned down and murdered on Tyneside, criminal injuries payments were made on his behalf to one of Viv’s three girlfriends, Anna Connelly. What was the difference?

One of the reasons given as to why the prosecution did not call Lisa was that, immediately after the robbery, she was asked if she would be able to recognise any of the men and she gave an emphatic ‘no’.

The other side of Duffy – the aggressor rather than the victim – is illustrated by the case brought against him for his attack on Peter Wilson in April 1991. The Wickers World pub in Middlesbrough was the scene for this violent assault on the doorman. Wilson, a kick boxer well able to look after himself, was hit so hard that his neck was broken. Many believed that Duffy had used a beer can to smash the man with, but a private investigation revealed that it was his unaided fist that had inflicted the damage.

The following is from a letter, dated Sunday, 2 June 1991, that Duffy wrote from HM Prison Durham:

‘Now then, I thought I would write and tell you the crack of late. They’ve let me out of the block and back on the wing, so that’s all right. I can get to the gym now and have a crack with the Boro lads. People thought I was on protection, all kinds of stories flying about. Well, I’m here now so anybody’s got a chance to see me, I’m ready and willing!! Everyone has been to my cell asking about me.

‘A million “alright, Lee mates”, half of them were slagging me off when I was down the block!! They make me sick, two-faced cunts … The idiot with the petrol is in here, I haven’t seen him yet, if I chin him, I’ll only end up in the block again, it can wait. Beefy, Paul and Nipper got bail. My Judge-in-Chambers was knocked back XXXXX!!! Bastards … I’m up at court on Wednesday 5th and Thursday 6th June.

‘The Wickers World assault is on Wednesday and that [the assault on Islam Guul] is on Thursday. I should get the Guul assault thrown out, which automatically gives me another shot at bail. And reading between the lines I think that Guul will sack it. We’ll see eh? I have just received the statements from the petrol assault charge, they aren’t too clever either, some woman says I punched the lad “ten” times!! And another one says I went over the top!! What about me soaking in petrol I hear you ask? Fucking right. How can you go over the top when someone’s trying to kill you? Let’s see what a judge and jury thinks. Not guilty.’

What sparked off the Wickers World incident was that Duffy spilled some lager over a man on the landing below. Doorman Peter Wilson came over and ‘started being funny with Lee’, who punched him once. A third party was asked to see if Wilson would take a few thousand pounds to drop the charges. Instead he went straight to the police.

(In a similar scenario, Newcastle club doorman Howard Mills was offered money to drop charges against a man who had stabbed him in Bentleys nightclub in 1987. The stabbing occurred after Mills intervened when someone threw an empty beer can at a fellow doorman. Mills turned down an offer of financial compensation from the person who stabbed him, and it has been suggested that this refusal was the reason why he later had his leg blown off in a shotgun attack.)

As a result of Duffy’s attack on Wilson, further charges of attempting to pervert the course of justice were fired off at him when he attempted to bribe his victim with £2,500. In all, Duffy had nine court convictions to his credit, varying from burglary and motorbike theft to GBH.

In April 1991 Duffy appeared in court for a bail application in relation to the Wickers World incident. Lisa went to lend him her support, but while she was walking up the stairs of the court building she was confronted by the men charged with conspiring to commit grievous bodily harm to Duffy, who were apparently either attending or leaving court in connection with a pre-trial hearing. They mimicked being shot in the foot and sang a hurtful song to her. Lisa was so distressed that the police let her see Duffy while he was in the holding cells.

And, while the trial of the seven men was waiting to go ahead, some of them were held on remand in the same prison as Duffy was held in for his attack on Peter Wilson. Duffy was put into solitary confinement while his alleged attackers were free to wander about the prison. It was in the interests of safety for all concerned, but for a man already imprisoned, isolation was a further punishment.

No one disputes the fact that Duffy taxed drug dealers and frightened the living daylights out of them, but, if you had the misfortune to have drug dealers living in your street and the police weren’t doing anything about it, wouldn’t you want an enforcer like him taxing them and keeping an eye on them?